SkyscraperPage Forum

SkyscraperPage Forum (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/index.php)
-   City Discussions (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=24)
-   -   American Poverty is Moving from the Cities to the Suburbs (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=240503)

LouisVanDerWright Oct 3, 2019 10:45 PM

American Poverty is Moving from the Cities to the Suburbs
 
Quote:

American poverty is moving from the cities to the suburbs


The suburban poor are increasingly likely to be white or Hispanic

or many, the stereotypical image of American poverty still resembles the infamous Cabrini-Green Homes, a housing estate completed in 1962 near the heart of Chicago. It became overrun by gangs, drugs and violence. City police, in effect, ceded control. This popular conception of poverty remains largely urban, black and ghettoised. But the stereotype is outdated. The Cabrini-Green estate, which once housed 15,000 people, is no more. The city finished demolishing it in 2011. The new neighbourhood is peaceful, with low-slung apartments, a new school, playgrounds and green space aplenty, alongside wine shops and cross-fit gymnasiums for the millennial crowd. In 1981 Jane Byrne, then the city’s mayor, moved into a Cabrini-Green building on 1160 North Sedgwick Street to draw attention to high crime rates—only to turn tail and flee a mere three weeks later. Today that address is an attractive brick building overlooking an upmarket bakery and a Starbucks coffee shop.

To see the changing geography of American poverty, go instead to Harvey, a small suburban town of 26,000 just 20 miles (32 km) south of Chicago. Despite its proximity to a large city, median household income is an abysmal $24,343. After mismanagement and missed bond payments, the city’s finances are in freefall. One in four flats now sits vacant. Nearly 36% of its residents are classified as poor, higher than in many of the poorest counties in eastern Kentucky and the rest of Appalachia. Though Harvey was never rich, that is a drastic increase from the 22% poverty rate in 2000. And as politicians, journalists and sociologists continue to focus attention on the well-known urban ghettos on the city’s south and west sides, few are taking note of the worsening plight of places like Harvey or nearby Dolton, where concentrated poverty is now just as bad...


More here: https://www.economist.com/special-re...to-the-suburbs

LosAngelesSportsFan Oct 3, 2019 10:55 PM

I can speak for the LA area and say that the poor are shifting from South LA and East LA to the desert communities 50 - 75 miles from the city. We're heading to a more European style of income distribution

LA21st Oct 3, 2019 11:08 PM

Its gonna be huge deal when Boyle Hts becomes gentrified. It's in the early stages and slower than expected...but it seems inevitable. Same goes for Westlake/Pico Union etc.

GreaterMontréal Oct 3, 2019 11:32 PM

Maybe that's the case in the US, but I think it may be related to transit, or rather, the lack of good transit for the suburbs. People want modern and fast transit. Commuter rail is not the pinnacle.

the urban politician Oct 3, 2019 11:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreaterMontréal (Post 8706537)
Maybe that's the case in the US, but I think it may be related to transit, or rather, the lack of good transit for the suburbs. People want modern and fast transit. Commuter rail is not the pinnacle.

That's not it at all

It has entirely to do with the people who live in these communities and the politicians who represent them. This has zero to do with infrastructure and how "we don't have access to X, Y, and Z". That old excuse is meaningless when you have easier access to good paying jobs than 99% of the globe's population.

It's tragic and it's true.

VivaLFuego Oct 4, 2019 2:35 PM

As a resident of the Chicago Southland, I'm glad that at least someone is writing about this and that someone posted it.

I now get angry when I hear about "disinvestment" in the south and west sides of the city, while millions pour in each year in transportation and education infrastructure and a well-funded police, fire, and sanitation force. Go to Robbins and Dolton. Harvey isn't even that bad, it has a growing Latino and Pakistani population and actually still has a modest commercial tax base including a major CN railroad facility, a steel mill, a regional hospital partnered with the University of Chicago, and some others.

I get angry and doubt the motives of people expressing concern about inequities within the city limits because anyone who would spend time in the areas that are actually in a spiral of disinvestment would know that the true Illinois fiscal justice issue is the lack of sales tax revenue sharing - unlike income tax collections, a portion of which are distributed to municipalities on a per capita population basis, sales tax stays entirely within the jurisdication of the sale. This creates absurd disparities and involuntary transfers between jurisdictions - when you witness the fact that Robbins (nearly 100% black) residents need to shop and work at the Wal-mart in Crestwood (90% White) and thus pay for Crestwood's government while their own town crumbles and has no retail other than 2 gas stations and a dollar store, you get a new perspective on entrenched and systemic racism and recognize that the Chicago city SJWs are at best, sheltered and ignorant and full of shit.

And anyone who spent time in these areas would see what happens when manufacturing folds up shop to move to Indiana (self-inflicted labor/enviro/tax regs by Chicago politicians), or often to Mexico or Asia - which is absolutely a thing that happened in dramatic fashion from roughly 2000 through 2012, and had nothing to do with the BS we're fed about how manufacturing job losses are only about automation, or something, and everything to do with trade policy. The whole "manufacturing job loss was just automation bro" is a stupid trope on it's face considering that the developed nations that have retained the most manufacturing employment (such as South Korea and Germany) have also invested the most in manufacturing automation... maybe the explanation held water for 1980s manufacturing job reductions but not for the past 20 years.

3rd&Brown Oct 4, 2019 2:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego (Post 8707029)
As a resident of the Chicago Southland, I'm glad that at least someone is writing about this and that someone posted it.

I now get angry when I hear about "disinvestment" in the south and west sides of the city, while millions pour in each year in transportation and education infrastructure and a well-funded police, fire, and sanitation force. Go to Robbins and Dolton. Harvey isn't even that bad, it has a growing Latino and Pakistani population and actually still has a modest commercial tax base including a major CN railroad facility, a steel mill, a regional hospital partnered with the University of Chicago, and some others.

I get angry and doubt the motives of people expressing concern about inequities within the city limits because anyone who would spend time in the areas that are actually in a spiral of disinvestment would know that the true Illinois fiscal justice issue is the lack of sales tax revenue sharing - unlike income tax collections, a portion of which are distributed to municipalities on a per capita population basis, sales tax stays entirely within the jurisdication of the sale. This creates absurd disparities and involuntary transfers between jurisdictions - when you witness the fact that Robbins (nearly 100% black) residents need to shop and work at the Wal-mart in Crestwood (90% White) and thus pay for Crestwood's government while their own town crumbles and has no retail other than 2 gas stations and a dollar store, you get a new perspective on entrenched and systemic racism and recognize that the Chicago city SJWs are at best, sheltered and ignorant and full of shit.

And anyone who spent time in these areas would see what happens when manufacturing folds up shop to move to Indiana (self-inflicted labor/enviro/tax regs by Chicago politicians), or often to Mexico or Asia - which is absolutely a thing that happened in dramatic fashion from roughly 2000 through 2012, and had nothing to do with the BS we're fed about how manufacturing job losses are only about automation, or something, and everything to do with trade policy. Which is a stupid trope on it's face considering that the developed nations that have retained the most manufacturing employment (such as South Korea and Germany) have also invested the most in manufacturing automation...

Holy Cow that's f*cked up. Does anywhere else do that?

Crawford Oct 4, 2019 4:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego (Post 8707029)
I now get angry when I hear about "disinvestment" in the south and west sides of the city, while millions pour in each year in transportation and education infrastructure and a well-funded police, fire, and sanitation force. Go to Robbins and Dolton. Harvey isn't even that bad, it has a growing Latino and Pakistani population and actually still has a modest commercial tax base.

I don't know about Harvey, but Dolton is absolutely horrible. I did some work for Union Pacific there a few years ago, (they have a big facility there) and that area is a total mess. Same goes for Riverdale, Dixmoor, Posen. It's kind of incredible to think these communities are a few minutes away from very affluent and cosmopolitan communities.

dave8721 Oct 4, 2019 8:26 PM

The suburban poverty I think of looks more like this. Immigrant families living i 1 or 2 bedroom garden apartments in the burbs. Maybe the cheapest form of housing out there:
https://www.google.com/maps/@25.8830...7i13312!8i6656

LouisVanDerWright Oct 4, 2019 10:44 PM

The root cause of this is a reversion to the historical mean of how cities tend to organize themselves. It has never been the norm at any other point in human history for the center of the city to be the most impoverished and undervalued land. That is not logical for the obvious economies of agglomeration and other reasons that fundamentally make cities efficient. The only reason it occurred in the wake of WWII was the burst of capital made availble in the form of swords into plowshares suddenly making bulldozing whole neighborhoods or ramming freeways through urban cores possible.

Prior to WWII these feats were impossible unless you sent an army a la Rome's sacking of Carthage to erase a city from the map. Conversion of the massive military industrial complex ramped up for the production of mechanized warfare during the war to civilian uses unleashed an age of unparallled ability to modify cities. This resulted in everything from urban renewal to white flight to the suburbs themselves. What is happening now is that those wounds are closing and the areas built overnight with those bulldozers are approaching peak depreciation in exactly the same way as urban neighborhoods had during the depression and WWII. Naturally the same processes of decay and disinvestment take hold and before you know it you've got a Dolton or Harvey or Maywood.

This is just the beginning too, what happens to areas littered with boomer era McMansions that Millenials are not interested in and couldn't afford if they wanted to? The market for these white elephants has all but dried up in Chicagoland. You can't move a McMansion in Barrington for even what it was worth in the doldurms of the recession. The prices have continued to collapse with no signs of respite since 2008. There's a lot of wealth in a place like Barrington, but you have to ask yourself where is the tipping point when people start abandoning it in droves as empty mansions become the norm in exactly the same way the mansions lining LSD in Rogers Park/Edgewater or MLK or Michigan Ave in Kenwood were abandoned post war? At what point to people start chopping these 8,000 SF homes into apartments and renting them out to lower income folks as was the exact fate of prewar urban mansions after white flight?

And it's not just housing, the massive sucking sound of the CBD draining jobs out of the burbs gets louder every year. Office buildings and entire corporate campuses in the suburbs are being demolished. The jobs that made living in the next greenfield out desireable are going away, they are moving downtown. All that's replacing them are low income menial businesses like call centers which aren't going to attract the middle and high earners that corporate HQ's once did. This is a serious sea change on the scale of white flight and suburbanization in the 1950-2000 era. This could be a trend into the middle part of this century. Yet no one seems to be discussing it or trying to come up with a plan to chanel or divert these processes.

To make matters worse the suburbs are a series of totally disparate municipalities. Dolton or Harvey don't have a Lincoln Park or Loop to lean on like Englewood or Lawndale had when times get tough. Once shit hits the fan in these small municipalities, they are on their own. There is no golden goose or favored quarter to milk for tax revenue to backstop the bleeding. My prediction is that we will start seeing annexation come back into favor in the not too distant future as the fortunes and resources of the city grow while smaller suburbs fail. At some point it makes more sense for the city to absorb areas incapable of surving on their own if only for the economies of scale the city can achieve when dealing with problems it has many decades of expierience handling.

the urban politician Oct 5, 2019 3:39 AM

^ You are making lots of generalizations here. There is a struggle going on in suburban real estate, yes, but your ongoing prediction of some sort of death knell is starting to sound comical. You’ve obviously spent very little time exploring Chicago’s burbs and think of them in some theoretical way instead of the living, breathing mass of humanity that they are—and are nowhere within light years of dying.

You should stop by some of the numerous urban burbs on your way up to Wisconsin for a change. There is a hell of a lot to see here, and probably more and better prewar as well as dense urban infill building stock than you give it credit for.

I do agree with your point about towns like Dolton not benefiting from sharing with Chicago’s tax base.

But it’s a fat chance in hell that Chicago would annex these places. Chicago has enough deteriorating, crime infested neighborhoods as it is. There is absolutely nothing in it for Chicago.

memph Oct 5, 2019 4:48 PM

Looking at Toronto, there's a few different things going on.

First of all, the downtown core is where most of the growth in white collar jobs is happening.

There is still some job growth in the outer suburbs, especially since they're growing very fast, but a lot of that is construction/trades, warehousing, retail, schools and other public services. There is some office space being built in the suburbs, but much less than in downtown. And Toronto is still retaining a lot of manufacturing jobs, but it's not really gaining any new ones.

The inner city is largely quite gentrified, with just a few low income pockets (much of them public housing). Once you get to around 6-7 miles from downtown though, you start getting more low income areas, mainly in the unfavored quadrants (NE and NW), with the highest proportion of low income areas around 10-13 miles, and continuing to about 15 miles. The residents increasingly work in the suburbs as you get to the 12-15 mile mark or so. They're still not uniformly low income like it can be in the US though, the SFH housing is still pretty blue-collar middle class and retirees, but there's a fair bit of housing projects and old highrises that are low income. In the favored quadrants though, it's still pretty upper-middle class (Bayview Village, Port Credit).

Then you get the outer suburbs with 80s-10s housing stock. They're more SFH dominated, with some condos, but not much public housing or rental apartments. Commuter rail service is often better than in the inner-middle ring suburbs, or at least comparable, and because there's fewer low income households, they're quite desirable among white collar families that work downtown but can't afford a 3-5 bedroom home there. For the professionals that work in the suburbs, they're also most likely going to live there. There are some lower-middle class pockets though, where large household sizes, renting out basements, etc can make the homes more affordable, mainly in Milliken and Brampton, but also to a lesser extent Ajax, Maple, Erin Mills, East Credit and Uptown Mississauga.

Commuter rail is only useful if you work in the CBD, the retail jobs in the inner city that are a few miles from downtown aren't really accessible from the outer suburbs, so the lower-middle class households living in the suburbs are unlikely to work downtown, they mostly work in the suburbs, much of them in the service sector supporting the white collar suburbanites.

I think the situation in Toronto is actually relatively stable now. The core is still getting lots of job growth and condos, so it'll continue to need lower wage workers to support that, and they'll most likely be living in those areas around 6-10 miles from downtown. Commuter rail is also being improved/expanded, since there's not enough housing in central Toronto for all the job growth, so there will continue to be professionals working in the outer suburbs to make up for the fact that there's not as much office space being built in the outer suburbs as 10-20 years ago. And the low-wage workers who support the upper-middle class suburbanites will find homes in condos or neighbourhoods like NE Brampton that are further from commuter rail or suburban office parks.

You aren't going to see a complete segregation though imo, because the outer suburbs of Toronto are too far to commute to central Toronto jobs more than 1-2 miles from Union Station (especially with congestion), and high income areas still need low income workers to serve them.

Docere Oct 5, 2019 5:35 PM

What boundaries are you using for these "quadrants"?

memph Oct 5, 2019 8:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8708132)
What boundaries are you using for these "quadrants"?

I think using the prevalence of crowded housing is a pretty good measure.
https://i.imgur.com/dNHWEDT.jpg

NW quadrant would include York, SW North York, Emery, Jane-Finch, Rexdale, Dixon, Malton. NE quadrant would include Crescent Town, Flemingdon, Thorncliffe, Eglinton East, West Hill, Malvern, Morningside, Dorset Park.

Brampton is like the suburban extension of the NW quadrant, more middle class but with ties to the NW quadrant. For the NE quadrant, Milliken and especially North Ajax are both kind of like more middle class suburban extensions of it. Burnhamthorpe and Cooksville in Mississauga, and the Bathurst St corridor of North York are also fairly poor but smaller more isolated clusters.

Using income measures, Milliken would be the poorest part of the Toronto area, but I think there's enough Chinese immigrants there relying on overseas income or savings that they aren't quite as poorly off as the Canadian tax records would suggest. It's still not a wealthy area, and there are still lower income families there, the truly wealthy Chinese with overseas wealth are more likely to live in places like Bayview Village, Richmond Hill, maybe even SE Oakville and the Bridle Path, as well as parts of downtown, but I'd say Milliken is still not quite as poor as Jane-Finch, Rexdale, West Hill, Crescent Town, Jane-Lawrence, etc.

Docere Oct 5, 2019 9:24 PM

Chinese - and I suspect Iranians and maybe Koreans as well - are wealthier than Census income figures suggest. But yes there are lots of working class Chinese in north Scarborough.

Using income as a proxy for class is problematic for immigrants in Toronto (and Vancouver). First generation Chinese immigrants actually have poverty rates similar to Black immigrants but they're pretty much at par with Canadian average in the second generation. In Toronto Black immigrant communities (both Caribbean and East African) are overwhelmingly working class. Poverty rates are the same regardless of generations in Canada.

Capsicum Oct 6, 2019 12:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8708314)
Chinese - and I suspect Iranians and maybe Koreans as well - are wealthier than Census income figures suggest. But yes there are lots of working class Chinese in north Scarborough.

Using income as a proxy for class is problematic for immigrants in Toronto (and Vancouver). First generation Chinese immigrants actually have poverty rates similar to Black immigrants but they're pretty much at par with Canadian average in the second generation. In Toronto Black immigrant communities (both Caribbean and East African) are overwhelmingly working class. Poverty rates are the same regardless of generations in Canada.

Is this like in NYC?

Crawford Oct 6, 2019 12:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8708409)
Is this like in NYC?

Asians in Queens are significantly poorer than African Americans in Queens. Not sure if this is true citywide, but they're probably pretty close. NYC is a bit of an outlier in the U.S. in that A. There's a huge lower income Asian population and B. That population is concentrated in traditional, still-expanding urban ethnic enclaves. Not just the Brooklyn-Queens Chinatowns and the Queens Koreatowns but very working class Bangladeshi, Pakistani and SE Asian areas.

Of course there are some higher-income, professional, Asian ethnoburbs in NJ and LI, but the region's Asian population is still pretty concentrated in the regional core. And a lot of the "suburban" Asian population is in urban working or middle class suburbs like Jersey City, Edison, Fort Lee and Palisades Park. Really only Central Jersey around Princeton has heavily Asian McMansion suburbia.

memph Oct 6, 2019 4:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8708314)
Chinese - and I suspect Iranians and maybe Koreans as well - are wealthier than Census income figures suggest. But yes there are lots of working class Chinese in north Scarborough.

Using income as a proxy for class is problematic for immigrants in Toronto (and Vancouver). First generation Chinese immigrants actually have poverty rates similar to Black immigrants but they're pretty much at par with Canadian average in the second generation. In Toronto Black immigrant communities (both Caribbean and East African) are overwhelmingly working class. Poverty rates are the same regardless of generations in Canada.

Yeah, that's why I used housing crowding instead of income for the map, which is based on whether bedrooms are shared by members of households in ways that exceed Canadian/American norms, like adults over 18 (non-couple) sharing bedrooms or children over 5 sharing bedrooms with opposite gender children, or children sharing bedrooms with parents.

North Scarborough and the adjacent parts of Markham (around Denison St) have a few characteristics that hint at them being disadvantaged though.

1. Low rates of post-secondary education (Age 25-64), even lower than South/Central Scarborough, Malvern and Malton. Only South Oshawa and NW Toronto are comparable. Unlike with South Oshawa and NW Toronto, many of these don't even have high school diplomas.
2. Very low knowledge of official languages, around 30% speak neither English nor French, the worst in the GTA by far.
3. Very high rates of carpooling (highest in the GTA). This could suggest either inability to get a drivers license or to afford a car combined with mediocre transit.
4. Low workforce participation rates (among the lowest in the GTA). Not surprising since lack of language fluency, degrees or diplomas makes you rather unemployable.
5. Low average individual income, partly due to low participation rates but even for those that are employed full-time, they're quite low, comparable to Malton.

Characteristics that make them less disadvantaged
1. Moderate rate of single-parent families. There's more than in upper-middle class areas, but not as many as in South-Central Scarborough, NW Toronto, Brampton or South Oshawa.
2. Low rates of housing in need of repair. Probably in part because the housing is still relatively new, since this is a problem facing many pre-1970 neighbourhoods, including relatively well to do areas.

Docere Oct 6, 2019 5:02 AM

I would guess Willowdale and Richmond Hill are where incomes are most out of sync with other indicators (housing values, educational attainment, professional occupations etc.)

uaarkson Oct 6, 2019 7:18 AM

This has been happening to Detroit's inner burbs for decades.

Crawford Oct 6, 2019 12:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by uaarkson (Post 8708593)
This has been happening to Detroit's inner burbs for decades.

Some of Detroit's inner burbs are wealthier/more desirable than 20 years ago Certainly everywhere along/around the Woodward corridor.

But, yeah, speaking generally, the inner suburbs have gotten poorer.

Crawford Oct 6, 2019 12:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by memph (Post 8708536)
Yeah, that's why I used housing crowding instead of income for the map,

At least in U.S., Census-derived housing crowding isn't heavily correlated with income. It's basically a demographic proxy, as certain communities, like South Asians, tend to have multiple generations living with them, so are technically "crowded" whether we're talking Queens tenements or Texas McMansions.

I believe that NE Queens has the highest level of crowding in NYC, and NE Queens is generally middle-to-upper-class (though very heavily Asian these days). Public housing has some of the lowest levels of crowding, as they skew older, with tons of grannies living alone in big apartment units, which is horribly inefficient, and the city is trying to incentive these grannies to move to smaller units. But there's probably some non-reporting here, as many of these grannies have off-the-books boarders.

Docere Oct 6, 2019 4:04 PM

Seattle is one of the most "inverted" metros in the US in terms of the city proper being especially affluent and professional relative to the metro. Kinda has a "Canadian" pattern going on.

memph Oct 6, 2019 4:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crawford (Post 8708648)
At least in U.S., Census-derived housing crowding isn't heavily correlated with income. It's basically a demographic proxy, as certain communities, like South Asians, tend to have multiple generations living with them, so are technically "crowded" whether we're talking Queens tenements or Texas McMansions.

I believe that NE Queens has the highest level of crowding in NYC, and NE Queens is generally middle-to-upper-class (though very heavily Asian these days). Public housing has some of the lowest levels of crowding, as they skew older, with tons of grannies living alone in big apartment units, which is horribly inefficient, and the city is trying to incentive these grannies to move to smaller units. But there's probably some non-reporting here, as many of these grannies have off-the-books boarders.

I'm not looking at people per room or per sf though, which would make areas with large households seem poorer than they actually are. Multiple generations under a roof wouldn't make a house crowded under the Statscan definition, as long as there's an adequate number of bedrooms, like a couple shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with anyone, and a child over age 5 shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with an opposite gender child, and a single adult shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with anyone.

But if you have parents, grandparents, 3 kids and an uncle in a 3 bedroom unit, then yeah, that would be considered crowded, and I doubt South Asians would consider that desirable even if they're used to having big families under a single roof. They'd probably prefer a 5 bedroom house for that and if they can only afford a 3 bedroom unit despite being able to pool resources from 5 adults, then they're probably on the poor end of things. Maybe the head of the household has a good salary, but if everyone else is not in the workforce or minimum wage, then that's a lot of people relying on one person's salary and still a financially vulnerable/strained household.

A granny living in a big unit would be considered "not crowded" just the same as a couple living in a 1 bedroom apartment. The statscan measure only looks at the % of households that are crowded, not the average.

In Toronto for example, the biggest households are in the heavily South Asian new subdivisions of NE Brampton, and although there is above average crowding, it's still not as bad as in the neighbourhoods with a lot 60s-70s apartment towers where households might be barely half as big but the units are much smaller. The public housing in Toronto also has relatively high levels of crowding.

memph Oct 6, 2019 4:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crawford (Post 8708647)
Some of Detroit's inner burbs are wealthier/more desirable than 20 years ago Certainly everywhere along/around the Woodward corridor.

But, yeah, speaking generally, the inner suburbs have gotten poorer.

Like where? I think most of them have at best maintained their high desirability as other suburbs declined, which has meant that new homes get built/old ones renovated/rebuilt to compensate for the rest of the housing stock that's aging.

Docere Oct 6, 2019 4:32 PM

Educational attainment in three low income/working class zones of outer Toronto.

NW Toronto (Etobicoke North, Humber River-Black Creek and York South-Weston electoral districts):

Less than high school 21.4%
University degree 20.5%

North Scarborough (Scarborough-Agincourt and Scarborough North electoral districts):

Less than high school 17.8%
University degree 31.1%

South/Central/East Scarborough (all other Scarborough districts):

Less than high school 12.6%
University degree 30.5%

uaarkson Oct 6, 2019 4:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by memph (Post 8708740)
Like where? I think most of them have at best maintained their high desirability as other suburbs declined, which has meant that new homes get built/old ones renovated/rebuilt to compensate for the rest of the housing stock that's aging.

Yeah, all of Detroit's favored inner suburbs have been favored all along. Dearborn is probably the only one I can think of that has made the transition (back) to desirable since an initial decline.

iheartthed Oct 6, 2019 5:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by uaarkson (Post 8708768)
Yeah, all of Detroit's favored inner suburbs have been favored all along. Dearborn is probably the only one I can think of that has made the transition (back) to desirable since an initial decline.

I would add Ferndale.

Overall, though, Detroit's suburbs have declined over the past 20 years relative to their suburban counterparts in other parts of the country.

memph Oct 6, 2019 5:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by iheartthed (Post 8708778)
I would add Ferndale.

Overall, though, Detroit's suburbs have declined over the past 20 years relative to their suburban counterparts in other parts of the country.

Looking at this, both Dearborn and Ferndale have had an increase in the low-income population though (although it seems it was actually smaller in Ferndale).
https://myottetm.github.io/USMapBoxI...wDispConc.html

iheartthed Oct 6, 2019 6:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by memph (Post 8708806)
Looking at this, both Dearborn and Ferndale have had an increase in the low-income population though (although it seems it was actually smaller in Ferndale).
https://myottetm.github.io/USMapBoxI...wDispConc.html

That doesn't really surprise me. The city was mostly working class up through the early 00s, but over the last decade has become a little bit of a yuppie enclave. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the yuppie gains aren't enough to offset the working class losses.

Detroit's decline gets all of the attention, but Detroit's suburbs have also declined, especially when compared to their counterparts in other large metro areas. Some have managed to decline less than others, and for a 'burb that directly borders Detroit, Ferndale has likely done better than almost all of the others in that category.

Capsicum Oct 6, 2019 9:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crawford (Post 8708424)
Asians in Queens are significantly poorer than African Americans in Queens. Not sure if this is true citywide, but they're probably pretty close. NYC is a bit of an outlier in the U.S. in that A. There's a huge lower income Asian population and B. That population is concentrated in traditional, still-expanding urban ethnic enclaves. Not just the Brooklyn-Queens Chinatowns and the Queens Koreatowns but very working class Bangladeshi, Pakistani and SE Asian areas.

Of course there are some higher-income, professional, Asian ethnoburbs in NJ and LI, but the region's Asian population is still pretty concentrated in the regional core. And a lot of the "suburban" Asian population is in urban working or middle class suburbs like Jersey City, Edison, Fort Lee and Palisades Park. Really only Central Jersey around Princeton has heavily Asian McMansion suburbia.

What's different about NYC that makes its population lower income in terms of Asian Americans than other big cities in the US?

If it's merely about mass immigration of the working class, why would NYC have it more than any other immigration gateway like say LA, California cities or any other bicoastal city (besides simply being the biggest city). Higher density of people in the restaurant/service industry?

The North One Oct 6, 2019 9:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by memph (Post 8708740)
Like where? I think most of them have at best maintained their high desirability as other suburbs declined, which has meant that new homes get built/old ones renovated/rebuilt to compensate for the rest of the housing stock that's aging.

It's not really just about desirability. The overall health of almost all inner burbs have significantly improved since 20 something years, they're not on shaky ground as was once believed. Obviously the most desirable burbs maintain their positions but there was a time somewhere like Ferndale was considered icky and too close to the city proper and people wouldn't dare touch it. That attitude has completely reversed now.

The big changed in desirability is the city itself, a neighborhood in the city proper like Brush Park will soon surpass peak Birmingham property values.

Capsicum Oct 6, 2019 9:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by memph (Post 8708737)
I'm not looking at people per room or per sf though, which would make areas with large households seem poorer than they actually are. Multiple generations under a roof wouldn't make a house crowded under the Statscan definition, as long as there's an adequate number of bedrooms, like a couple shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with anyone, and a child over age 5 shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with an opposite gender child, and a single adult shouldn't be sharing a bedroom with anyone.

But if you have parents, grandparents, 3 kids and an uncle in a 3 bedroom unit, then yeah, that would be considered crowded, and I doubt South Asians would consider that desirable even if they're used to having big families under a single roof. They'd probably prefer a 5 bedroom house for that and if they can only afford a 3 bedroom unit despite being able to pool resources from 5 adults, then they're probably on the poor end of things. Maybe the head of the household has a good salary, but if everyone else is not in the workforce or minimum wage, then that's a lot of people relying on one person's salary and still a financially vulnerable/strained household.

A granny living in a big unit would be considered "not crowded" just the same as a couple living in a 1 bedroom apartment. The statscan measure only looks at the % of households that are crowded, not the average.

In Toronto for example, the biggest households are in the heavily South Asian new subdivisions of NE Brampton, and although there is above average crowding, it's still not as bad as in the neighbourhoods with a lot 60s-70s apartment towers where households might be barely half as big but the units are much smaller. The public housing in Toronto also has relatively high levels of crowding.

What about multiple young adults (20 or 30 somethings) crowded in small rental apartments to save money through roommate arrangements? Some may still receive help from parents/families even at that age. They may be "poor" short term but are often still better off than those who live with parents/families out of necessity.

Perhaps it's not that large a statistic relative to actual families, but I wonder how much that affects the stats.

memph Oct 6, 2019 11:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8708941)
What about multiple young adults (20 or 30 somethings) crowded in small rental apartments to save money through roommate arrangements? Some may still receive help from parents/families even at that age. They may be "poor" short term but are often still better off than those who live with parents/families out of necessity.

Perhaps it's not that large a statistic relative to actual families, but I wonder how much that affects the stats.

Sharing an apartment but with each young adult having their own bedroom is indeed not that unusual for single people from middle class backgrounds, but since they have their own bedroom, it still wouldn't be considered crowded.

Even if you have two couples sharing a 2 bedroom apartment, it still wouldn't be considered crowded by StatsCan since they only consider it crowded when non-coupled adults share a bedroom.

montréaliste Oct 6, 2019 11:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The North One (Post 8708925)
It's not really just about desirability. The overall health of almost all inner burbs have significantly improved since 20 something years, they're not on shaky ground as was once believed. Obviously the most desirable burbs maintain their positions but there was a time somewhere like Ferndale was considered icky and too close to the city proper and people wouldn't dare touch it. That attitude has completely reversed now.

The big changed in desirability is the city itself, a neighborhood in the city proper like Brush Park will soon surpass peak Birmingham property values.



Yes. There is a lot of the tragicomic in this assessment; your last sentence about Brush Park reads like a snake oil sales pitch if you look at what is left of that neighborhood. Detroit's municipal goverment still green lights destruction of important buildings downtown for surface parking lots.

I don't see an end to the motion that has eroded this once great metropolis because like the auto industry, it bends to the cycles of boom and bust. Detroiters have a throw away mentality, a planned obsolescence stance as regards the realm of architecture, up to this day. Brush Park may be on the Up and Up now, but it is as fragile as the ton of decrepit buildings, and brownfields that dot the city.

Crawford Oct 6, 2019 11:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by memph (Post 8708740)
Like where? I think most of them have at best maintained their high desirability as other suburbs declined, which has meant that new homes get built/old ones renovated/rebuilt to compensate for the rest of the housing stock that's aging.

Ferndale, Berkley, Huntington Woods, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak, Clawson and Birmingham are objectively better off than 20-30 years ago.
Back then, they were considered aging, stagnant suburbia, though still generally nice.

Some, like Ferndale, Berkley and Clawson, were considered borderline declined/semi-sketchy. Huntington Woods, Royal Oak, Pleasant Ridge were all still good, but cheaper than new sprawl, though no longer. I remember kids in high school calling Royal Oak "Royal Joke", and saying it had hillbillies. Birmingham was always upscale, but is now the most expensive town in Michigan; before it was adjacent (newer, sprawlier) Bloomfield Hills.

But almost every other inner suburb of Detroit is somewhat less desirable than 20-30 years ago.

Crawford Oct 6, 2019 11:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8708919)
What's different about NYC that makes its population lower income in terms of Asian Americans than other big cities in the US?

Most recent Asian newcomers are skilled immigrants who come via H-1B visas and the like. They tend to be doctors and engineers in McMansions.

NYC and California are really the only places with mass Asian migration, from all income cohorts. I'm not sure it's accurate to say NY (and LA and SF) are "poorer" Asian populations, but rather that they get the same H-1B visa crowd plus a lot of family migration.

Also, Asian immigrants to U.S. are typically Chinese or Indian. NYC has a lot of Asian immigrants from really poor countries. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the like.

Docere Oct 6, 2019 11:45 PM

Chinese New Yorkers seem to be mostly working class/non-professional. The ethnoburbs are mostly Indian American.

But the NYC area has a sizeable South Asian working class too - it's probably the only metro in the US where the South Asian population is not dominated by affluent Indian professionals.

Docere Oct 7, 2019 12:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8708751)
Educational attainment in three low income/working class zones of outer Toronto.

NW Toronto (Etobicoke North, Humber River-Black Creek and York South-Weston electoral districts):

Less than high school 21.4%
University degree 20.5%

North Scarborough (Scarborough-Agincourt and Scarborough North electoral districts):

Less than high school 17.8%
University degree 31.1%

South/Central/East Scarborough (all other Scarborough districts):

Less than high school 12.6%
University degree 30.5%

Basically NW Toronto is the largest concentration of Black Torontonians but also has sizeable South Asian and Latin American populations. Some spillover into Brampton.

North Scarborough is "Chinese Scarborough" with some Sri Lankan Tamil presence around the edges. Spillover into Markham.

South/central/east Scarborough is largely south of the 401 and is basically polyglot (non-Chinese) Scarborough. South Asians are the largest minority, Black is second. Ajax/Pickering is the middle income extension of it.

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 12:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crawford (Post 8709044)
Most recent Asian newcomers are skilled immigrants who come via H-1B visas and the like. They tend to be doctors and engineers in McMansions.

NYC and California are really the only places with mass Asian migration, from all income cohorts. I'm not sure it's accurate to say NY (and LA and SF) are "poorer" Asian populations, but rather that they get the same H-1B visa crowd plus a lot of family migration.

Also, Asian immigrants to U.S. are typically Chinese or Indian. NYC has a lot of Asian immigrants from really poor countries. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the like.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8709051)
Chinese New Yorkers seem to be mostly working class/non-professional. The ethnoburbs are mostly Indian American.

But the NYC area has a sizeable South Asian working class too - it's probably the only metro in the US where the South Asian population is not dominated by affluent Indian professionals.

But why is the difference so much bigger in NYC? If everywhere stateside has the professional (educated) waves of immigration, plus working class, why does NYC have the working class in higher proportion?

If it was family migration, why wouldn't California have more than its fair share of working class (not just H-1B visa crowd) since California has a longer history of Asian immigrants and thus (potentially) more families to bring through family re-unification. And if so, why hasn't family reunification outweighed educated workers in lots of cities like LA, Chicago etc. Are Asian New Yorkers that much more family-oriented that they bring so much more families over from overseas than Chicagoans, people from LA, San Francisco, etc. I know NYC is bigger than the rest, but why would it make a difference in income/socio-economic status per capita in terms of family reunification, unless NY'ers are more likely to bring less well-off/less educated family members from overseas than other cities.

I'm wondering if it has to do with lots of Asian immigrants in service/restaurant industries in NYC, and lots of "mom and pop" family business there?

Crawford Oct 7, 2019 12:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8709081)
If it was family migration, why wouldn't California have more than its fair share of working class (not just H-1B visa crowd) since California has a longer history of Asian immigrants and thus (potentially) more families to bring through family re-unification.

I'm not sure if I agree with this. CA seems to have tons of working class Asians. I mean, half of northern OC and much of the IE is working-middle class Asian, usually mixed in with Mexican areas. Also, heavily Asian places in the Bay Area (East Bay, particularly) are an Asian-Hispanic working class mix.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8709081)
I'm wondering if it has to do with lots of Asian immigrants in service/restaurant industries in NYC, and lots of "mom and pop" family business there?

NYC Asians may have slightly lower educational attainment/income because a higher proportion of NYC Asians are first generation immigrant. But comparing immigrant-to-immigrant I doubt there's a difference. NYC has a ton of first generation Asian immigrants, even compared to LA.

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 12:32 AM

The Torontonians-to-New Yorkers comparison has got me wondering -- who's ethnic minorities are socioeconomically better off -- the diverse parts of the GTA or NYC metro?

If you were someone from a poor country (Pakistan, Guyana, Jamaica), I'm wondering if you're more likely better off joining your relatives in Queens, the Bronx, even parts of New Jersey in the US, or Scarborough, Brampton, Markham in Canada.

On the one hand the US is clearly often the first choice for immigrants, but on the other hand, NYC is a pretty competitive place and probably more hardscrabble than the economically smaller (but still obviously diverse) GTA.

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 12:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crawford (Post 8709088)
I'm not sure if I agree with this. CA seems to have tons of working class Asians. I mean, half of northern OC and much of the IE is working-middle class Asian.



NYC Asians may have slightly lower educational attainment/income because a higher proportion of NYC Asians are first generation immigrant. But comparing immigrant-to-immigrant I doubt there's a difference. NYC has a ton of first generation Asian immigrants, even compared to LA.

But you previously mentioned that parts of NYC (like Queens) are an outlier so much so that Asian-Americans are poorer than other minorities like African Americans and Hispanics. I can't imagine that scenario to be the case in many Californian cities.

How does the non-immigrant Asian-American socio-economic status compare between the NY'ers and Californians (second generation and later)?

Crawford Oct 7, 2019 12:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8709091)
But you previously mentioned that parts of NYC (like Queens) are an outlier so much so that Asian-Americans are poorer than other minorities like African Americans and Hispanics. I can't imagine that scenario to be the case in many Californian cities.

The black population in Queens is fairly prosperous. Queens doesn't have a big AA population, and it tends to be Caribbean second-third generation civil servants. They're homeowners living in semi-suburban surroundings. City and transit jobs in NYC pay very well. I don't think CA has a West Indian population, anywhere.

Also, there are some black areas of LA that have pretty high incomes, probably higher than Asian parts of the SGV and places in Northern OC. Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights and the like.

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 12:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crawford (Post 8709095)
The black population in Queens is fairly prosperous. Queens doesn't have a big AA population, and it tends to be Caribbean second-third generation civil servants. They're homeowners living in semi-suburban surroundings. City and transit jobs in NYC pay very well. I don't think CA has a West Indian population, anywhere.

Black Californians seem to be much more domestic migrants (African Americans from the US South from the past generations) than immigrants. It seems like black immigrants seem to prefer the East coast (eg. NYC, Miami) over the West (maybe with the East Africans in Seattle an exception). Though California is a big immigration magnet still for many groups of Asians and Hispanics, Africans/Caribbeans don't choose it as much. Even places like Texas are known for African immigrants like Nigerians more than CA.

I wonder if that's just a geography thing (NYC and Miami on the East coast closer to the West Indies, Caribbean, even west Africa), while California traditionally had more Asians (east across the Pacific) and Hispanics (the Mexican connection south of the border).

For some reason, whites and blacks moving to California seem to be "rooted in other parts of the US" through domestic migration (eg. African Americans from the Great Migrations, Midwestern Protestants to LA), with few black or white immigrants (both recently and comparatively in the past few generations) relative to the East coast. I know California historically had many people with Irish pride, but from my perception (maybe I'm wrong) most white and black Californians seem like they don't identify with an ethnicity the way east coasters do (eg. "I'm Italian", "I'm Greek" for white Chicagoans or NY'ers, or "I'm Haitian", "Jamaican" etc. for black NY'ers).

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 1:01 AM

Does a working class Asian American community exist in southern/sunbelt cities? From what I've heard, Houston, Atlanta, even places like Las Vegas, Phoenix etc. are growing in Asian population (though obviously in some of these cases, Asians aren't the largest racial/ethnic minority in raw numbers). Small towns in those areas don't seem to have a large Asian presence but some are growing in bigger cities in the areas and in college towns (and if we're talking immigrants, some are refugees like Vietnamese in Houston, Louisiana historically the past few decades, and even farther back the Mississippi Delta Chinese etc.)

But I have no idea if it's well off Asian Americans or Asian immigrants directly moving to the sunbelt or not relative to those like NY or CA, perhaps Asian Americans already in expensive areas like those states moving away domestically to the Sunbelt could be a factor.

Docere Oct 7, 2019 1:01 AM

San Francisco had sizeable Irish and Italian populations, but European ethnicity is not all visible there in the way you'll find in the Northeast. L.A. whites were never that "ethnic", historically it had a lot of Midwestern Protestants who dominated the city for years.

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 1:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8709121)
San Francisco had sizeable Irish and Italian populations, but European ethnicity is not all visible there in the way you'll find in the Northeast or Great Lakes cities. L.A. whites were never that "ethnic", historically it had a lot of Midwestern Protestants who dominated the city for years.

Why is that? Colonial stock (Anglo) white Americans were the ones who were more frontiers-oriented (relative to immigrants who settled closer to their gateway cities), making it to California?

But other parts of the American West clearly had more direct European influence like Germans in Texas, Scandinavians in the Upper Midwest/Plains, Dakotas, even Mormon converts from across the Atlantic in Utah. Even in the PNW, you got Scandinavian influence.

Why'd the 19th/20th century immigrant European influence skip out SoCal?

Docere Oct 7, 2019 1:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capsicum (Post 8709120)
Does a working class Asian American community exist in southern/sunbelt cities? From what I've heard, Houston, Atlanta, even places like Las Vegas, Phoenix etc. are growing in Asian population (though obviously in some of these cases, Asians aren't the largest racial/ethnic minority in raw numbers). Small towns in those areas don't seem to have a large Asian presence but some are growing in bigger cities in the areas and in college towns (and if we're talking immigrants, some are refugees like Vietnamese in Houston, Louisiana historically the past few decades, and even farther back the Mississippi Delta Chinese etc.)

But I have no idea if it's well off Asian Americans or Asian immigrants directly moving to the sunbelt or not relative to those like NY or CA, perhaps Asian Americans already in expensive areas like those states moving away domestically to the Sunbelt could be a factor.

There is great variation among Asian immigrants. Generally Chinese and Indians are professional class, Filipinos and Southeast Asians are more working class. In other words the class composition of the aggregate Asian category depends on the makeup of the wider Asian American population.

Capsicum Oct 7, 2019 1:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Docere (Post 8709130)
There is great variation among Asian immigrants. Generally Chinese and Indians are professional class, Filipinos and Southeast Asians are more working class. In other words the class composition of the aggregate Asian category depends on the makeup of the wider Asian American population.

Seems like country of origin explains a lot of socio-economic difference for the Asian American aggregate category.

But not as much in Canada, right? In Canada, Chinese or South Asian alike could be working class or professional class in Toronto or Vancouver.

For Asian Canadians, they make up such a large share of the big metros that there isn't only one socioeconomic stereotype associated with even one place of origin -- you can have the nouveau-riche McMansion owned by a mainland Chinese immigrant or a poor "towers-in-the-park" rented by a Chinese immigrant. You can have the professional South Asian doctor or engineer or the South Asian grocery store clerk or mall security guard.

I feel like relative to the US, Torontonians and Vancouverites have a much reduced "model minority" stereotype (it's still there, no doubt but weaker), since they're much more likely to encounter some Asian guy driving the bus, or cleaning the windows or something to stereotype them as "all" professional. It's something I've noticed comparing the two countries' Asian population. Maybe NY'ers are like Torontonians and Vancouverites in being used to both rich and poor Asians alike.


All times are GMT. The time now is 11:55 AM.

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.