In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests.And Canada gets a star turn here as well.
A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today.
The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C.This seems to be the opposite of what has been happening to large metropolitan cities in recent memory.
What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center.
Anybody remember, for instance, Buffalo in the eighties?
An interesting development.
**********
RELATED: Of course, there's the obvious benefits
-- VANCOUVER -- When a guy dressed in a beaver suit can arrive on a Vancouver street corner and score some heroin within minutes, it highlights a serious problem in the city. So says the program director of a local radio station whose morning show performed the bit live on the air.**********
FROM THE COMMENTS:
"It's not just a demographic shift, it's a family/non-family shift. Very dangerous for the future of liberal western democracies."Curiouser and curiouser.
*
