the life and death of the great american city

Banks often wouldn’t make mortgage loans for downtown houses, while a move to the ballooning ‘burbs was subsidized. In 1961, cities were depopulating as middle classes abandoned them, their old downtown districts portrayed as repellant accumulations of filth and crime that governments wanted replaced with public-housing projects or elevated highways. Sixty years ago, it was almost beyond imagination.

That vision, of the urban district as a living organism, morphing and evolving and improving on its own, is a familiar story today. For a while its streets are the liveliest place in town, until higher rents and middle-class stasis drive the young and creative into another run-down district a few blocks away, leaving the neighbourhood stable and prosperous, but more homogenous and somewhat boring. Some stick around, decide it’s an okay place to buy a home and raise children, and bring another level of services and businesses. The resulting street life attracts visitors with cash in their pockets. Immigrant families settle, buy cheap houses, open shops. First come the artists and students, drawn by low rents and gritty charms they bring galleries and bars and restaurants. The story begins in a tired corner of the city, maybe an old light-industrial district.

Log In Create Free Accountĭoug Saunders is The Globe and Mail’s international affairs columnist, and the author of books including Arrival City and Maximum Canada.

The life and death of the great american city