City and Regional Planning Chair John Landis on Neighborhoods in Decline

From Penn IUR's Publication Library:

City living is back. After half a century of relentless population decline and several false starts at revitalization, residential investment in America’s urban centers began to pick up in the mid- 1990s. In the ten years between the 2000 and 2010 decennial censuses, the housing stock in America’s 50 largest central cities grew by 1.5 million dwelling units, or 8.3 percent.

Multiple factors underlie this boomlet. Members of the millennial generation (those born between 1982 and 2004) proved themselves less interested than prior generations in getting married, having children, and moving to the suburbs. Urban crime rates fell significantly. Suburban highways became as congested as their urban counterparts.

As the urban population has grown over the past 25 years, the media has focused on the dangers of gentrification, particularly the displacement of long-time and usually poorer residents. However, behind the newspaper headlines large numbers of urban and suburban residents continued living in neighborhoods where public and private investment had failed to keep pace with the ravages of time, depopulation, or economic decline.

In "Tracking and Explaining Neighborhood Socio-Economic Change in U.S. Metropolitan Areas between 1990 and 2010," a Penn IUR Policy Brief published in conjunction with this article, I use the 1990, 2000, and 2010 censuses to identify the extent and spatial incidence of gentrification and other forms of neighborhood change in large U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2010.

Read the story in the November issue of Penn IUR's Urban Link.