Exurbanization and Gentrification

Most conventional histories of postwar urban America focus on the decline of the central city, as neighborhoods emptied out, and the rise of the suburban periphery, as highways, factories, and subdivisions sprouted on the edges. Two other movements beginning in the 1970s - dubbed at that time “Back to the City” and, apparently in opposition to it, “Back to the Country” - have been ignored or relegated to mere footnotes in the conventional retelling of history. At the dawn of the 21st century, these two movements may do at least as much to explain metropolitan dynamics as the conventional city-suburb story.

By the 1970s, a significant trend toward gentrification was underway in a number of America’s central city neighborhoods. The term “Back to the City” reflected the hope that this movement was a harbinger of a larger trend in which the drive toward the suburbs would finally exhaust itself and families would move back to the central city, leading to major growth in jobs and population. From the Back Bay and South End in Boston to North Beach and the Western Addition in San Francisco, areas with an affordable and architecturally interesting housing stock witnessed a marked upswing in the socio-economic status of residents. The newcomers restored houses and patronized new restaurants, bars, and art galleries. The most visible of these “urban pioneers” were gay men, artists, and other Bohemian-types, many of whom had grown up in small villages and suburbs but were attracted to the city center’s cultural climate. 

Critics immediately assailed the idea of “Back to the City.” They demonstrated that most of the families involved in this gentrification were actually moving from other parts of the city - not from the suburbs - and that the gentrifying districts were not actually gaining in population because they were being reoccupied at lower densities. Some went so far as to claim that gentrification was a short-lived fad or that “Back to the City” was a complete myth.

In retrospect it seems clear that even if “Back to the City” was a poor description of what was happening, the observers of the 1970s who coined the term had identified an important trend. The most affluent residents of most American cities were no longer moving to the edge as they did in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Unless they had specific needs, like sizeable acre-age for raising horses, these families were increasingly remaining in already established affluent areas or even moving closer to city centers.

Gentrification of central neighborhoods has become a major and unmistakable part of urban development in the United States and elsewhere, and yet surprisingly little is known about the phenomenon. Social scientists are usually unable to define gentrification using standard statistical indicators like the figures for population, family income, or education levels. During the early phases of gentrification, population levels often decrease as large families are replaced by single people and childless couples. Many gentrifiers are in college or graduate school, and the income that these newcomers report to the IRS often approaches zero. Because the most important distinction between the old and new population is often a matter of social class, the best indicators are often small physical markers - the typography on the mailboxes, the kind of blinds or drapes in the windows, the kinds of cars on the street.

Still unclear is why gentrification only came to be noticed in the 1960s and 1970s and why its earlier history has never been traced. There has been a good deal of study on gentrification after World War II - the role of gay males in the creation of gentrified districts in San Francisco and elsewhere, for example. Similar processes, however, were underway in places like Greenwich Village in New York City, Tower Town in Chicago, and Nob Hill and Russian Hill in San Francisco well before World War II. Literature on this phenomenon has been extremely limited.

One could fairly describe the remaking of central Paris by Baron Haussmann in the second half of the 19th century as a conscious effort to induce massive gentrification there. John Archer, in his recent book Suburbia and Architecture, documents the gentrification of certain London suburbs in the 18th century; in doing so, he blazes a new trail in historiography. The history of gentrification likely extends even further back in time, to the earliest days of urban history.

In retrospect, “Back to the Country,” like “Back to the City,” initially represented a smaller movement than the name might imply. During the 1970s and 1980s, demographers studying U.S. Census data noted that many families were not moving to the suburban counties immediately surrounding large cities. Instead, they were moving farther out, to counties still classified as rural - hence the term. There was a good deal of talk about “counter-urbanization” and a rural revival. This was not, however, a movement of urban families to rural areas, as many academics at the time believed. Rather, this was simply a move beyond the regularly developed suburban subdivisions into the larger and looser “exurban” belt around them.

Although the term “exurban” was coined by journalists in the 1950s to describe a specific kind of low-density, upscale suburb at the farthest edge of the New York City area, the term is more usefully deployed to refer to settlements of urban families beyond urban areas and built-up suburbs. Using this definition, the exurban phenomenon, like that of gentrification, predated the 20th century. The widely scattered villas for wealthy Romans in the hills east of Rome and the great 18th century chateaux of the French aristocracy around Versailles are good examples of seasonal exurban living for a small urban elite. Taking a quite different form were the houses in the “Cocktail Belt” at the edge of established villages in Surrey or the Chilterns outside London at the turn of the 20th century, or the houses of wealthy New York City families along the northern shore of Long Island. Some of these were primary houses, but many were built for weekend or seasonal use. Over time, the amenities that attracted the first residents to exurban places pulled in additional population, increasing their density and turning them into year-round settlements.

Today according to some observers, as many as 60 million Americans are living seasonally or year-round in very low-density, apparently rural, places that could be called exurban (or in some commentators’ words “rurban” or “ruripolitan”). This would make exurbia the fastest growing part of the country. Fifty to a hundred miles outside large cities, in places like western Connecticut, the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, or the Gold Rush country of the Sierra Nevada foothills in California, large new “McMansions” line golf courses and automobile assembly plants appear in the midst of corn fields. Although the view out the window of many of the houses looks rural, these places are occupied by urbanites - families whose entire economic, political, and social orientation is toward the urban world dozens of miles away.

Perhaps the most tantalizing, but almost completely unexplored, aspect of these migration patterns is the connection between exurbanization at the edge and gentrification at the core. As the centrifugal forces work to decentralize cities and to create new suburban and exurban territories, centripetal forces begin to fill the resulting urban vacuum. The exodus of factories and workers from formerly industrial cities has cleared the way for newcomers. Gentrifiers are irresistibly drawn to the relatively low-cost, often architecturally distinguished buildings that have been left behind. The newcomers typically demand additional amenities, which in turn attracts more residents. The process of urban gentri-fication by this point is underway in earnest.

Certainly, the urban system is extremely complex and difficult to understand or describe. It appears to have required the vast increases in population and affluence in North America after World War II and other massive demographic changes before researchers finally took notice of the “Back to the City” and “Back to the Country” movements. Yet only with the more recent development of sophisticated analytical methods has a more detailed understanding begun to emerge. From the vantage point of the early-21st century, it appears that these two phenomena will be increasingly recognized for their importance in shaping the processes of development from the earliest cities to our own day.

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