And so Cleveland Heights sits on a fragile fault line of demographic inversion. It has its location, its shady streets, and big, comfortable houses that almost anyone would want to live in. And it is afflicted by painfully high taxes, obsolete working-class bungalows, a violence-prone transient population, and schools with a troubled reputation. Right now, the burdens seem to outweigh the advantages.
Of course, if the city of Cleveland itself could stage a twenty-first-century comeback, things would be different in Cleveland Heights. But that is another story.
THIS OTHER STORY can be told, at least in part, by exploring a different inner suburb in another part of the country, one that went through a similar period of uncertainty and came out on the positive side of demographic inversion—the side that attracts rather than repels affluent newcomers. Arlington, Virginia, is an inner suburb of Washington, D.C., just across the Potomac River, one that resembles Cleveland Heights in some ways and is distinct from it in others. Governmentally, it is a different creature; Arlington is a county unto itself, not part of a behemoth like Cuyahoga. It has more than four times as many people as Cleveland Heights, but it is still a small place—at twenty-six square miles, the geographically smallest county in the entire United States. It, too, came into existence a little more than eighty years ago, underwent massive demographic changes in the 1970s and 1980s, and has a significant minority population. It includes a substantial number of modest-size brick bungalows and ramblers built in the years after World War II. But, unlike Cleveland Heights, Arlington has emerged as a thriving twenty-first-century exemplar of inner-suburban revival.
For most of the past century, Arlington’s economic life has been centered in Clarendon, in a commercial corridor along Wilson Boulevard, a couple of miles west of the Potomac. Like Cleveland Heights, Clarendon was suburbia, vintage 1925. Crowded with clanging streetcars and lined with small stores packed in close to the sidewalk, it always felt more like a neighborhood retail district in a big city than it did like a modern suburb. People got off the streetcar and stopped at the bank, the shoe store, the dime store, the cleaners. It was a downtown scaled to pedestrians rather than automobiles.
Even with the arrival of the car culture in the postwar years, Clarendon and central Arlington hung on reasonably well. Most of the leading retailers were still doing business as late as 1970. Then came the Metro. The idea behind the immense subway project was to save old commercial corridors, but its initial effect was to destroy this one. The dirt and noise and sheer inconvenience that accompanied nearly five years of Metro construction drove away virtually all the businesses that had not already fallen victim to the coming of the large suburban malls farther out from the city. By 1980, Clarendon (and much of Arlington) was a commercial wasteland, offering little that anyone wanted to buy and attracting virtually no customers from outside its borders. Scarcely anyone from the rest of the metropolitan area showed much interest in moving there.
But Clarendon in particular did have an unnoticed asset that ultimately saved the day. It had dozens of small, empty stores, vacated during the Metro construction, that landlords were willing to rent dirt-cheap. And to everyone’s surprise, there were people who wanted them: Vietnamese merchants, mostly refugees from the collapse of Saigon in the mid-1970s, had resettled in the Washington area. One by one, Wilson Boulevard acquired Vietnamese restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and dress shops. People began to call the Clarendon corridor “Little Saigon.”
For the first few years, most of the customers as well as the proprietors were Asian. But the restaurants began to attract patrons of all nationalities, and soon there were new restaurants of all kinds—Cuban, Indian, Moroccan, Iranian, Cajun, Tex-Mex—opening up so fast it was hard to keep track of them. Restaurant reviewers began doing weekend guides to the Clarendon dining scene. Trend-spotting Washingtonians began taking out-of-town guests to see this interesting little cluster of cafés just across the river.
The restaurants brought forth coffeehouses, gourmet grocery shopping, and nightclubs, with a thriving entertainment scene. On a Friday evening in Clarendon, sidewalks that were empty in 1990 were packed a few years later with people eating at outdoor cafés, waiting in line for homemade ice cream, or checking out the live music choices for later that night. The only thing they had trouble finding was a parking space.
The press couldn’t seem to write enough about this comeback. “It’s the combination of trendy nightspots and prime real estate,” The Washington Post explained a few years ago, “that has made Clarendon among the most chic places to live in the Washington area.” Washingtonian magazine reported that the “bar scene has become so hot, it’s even luring city-dwellers.”
The revival of Clarendon was critical to a revival of the county as a whole. Thousands of young professionals decided they wanted to live near the big city, if not necessarily in the middle of it. Developers responded to that demand with an open-air “lifestyle” shopping center, seeking to emulate some of the qualities of the old walkable Clarendon shopping district, and with dozens of new condominium buildings lining the transit corridor that ran straight through Clarendon to the western end of the county.
Arlington’s Clarendon neighborhood, a commercial district near Washington, D.C., which thrived in the 1950s and then went into decline, has attracted new residents and visitors and become a model for successful inner-suburban revival. (photo credit 5.2)
While Cleveland Heights was losing population, Arlington was gaining it. In 2008 and 2009, Arlington was one of the ten fastest-growing places in the country with populations greater than 100,000. By the time of the 2010 census, it was up to 207,627 people, an increase of nearly 10 percent during a period when Cleveland Heights was losing 8 percent. Most of the newcomers found work to do as well. In January 2011, as unemployment in the nation hovered around 9 percent, unemployment in Arlington County stood at 4.1 percent. Three-bedroom brick Colonials in Clarendon and in other parts of the county were selling for nearly a million dollars. And the school system, which in the 1970s seemed poised to resegregate the way some of those in suburban Cleveland have, was split almost evenly between white and minority students.
The ultimate desirability of Arlington’s trendiness is a question on which reasonable people may differ. Most longtime Clarendon residents, having lived through some discouraging days in the past, generally seem pleased, if a little puzzled, by what has happened to them. Some are worried that the increased traffic and congestion will prove too high a price to pay for popularity. But that’s not the issue that I’m posing at the moment. The question is: Why do some inner suburbs make it over the hump while others struggle and some fail utterly?
Nobody in local government predicted Clarendon’s comeback as a restaurant, nightclub, and condominium district. That would have seemed ludicrous as late as the mid-1990s. But even had someone on the county planning staff conceived such an idea, it’s difficult to see what they could have done to bring it about. The recent history of urban planning is dotted with examples of places that have created formal “entertainment districts,” and sometimes backed that decision up with generous subsidies to entrepreneurs. The number of proven long-term successes remains small.
Clarendon, on the other hand, didn’t declare itself to be anything in particular. It became an entertainment district without really trying, and certainly without spending a fortune in public money to become one.
That’s not to say that government doesn’t play a significant role in these situations. Arlington County did several important things. It helped to create a public-private partnership, the Clarendon Alliance, that recruited small businesses to the area and helped them succeed once they arrived. County zoning was flexible enough to allow for sidewalk cafés and other small-scale experiments, and to permit businesses located near the subway stop to dispense with parking-space requirements they would have been hard-pressed to meet. In general, the county had the good sense to stay loose and let the whole process unfold.
One thing that didn’t save Clarendon was quaintness or architectural distinction. It doesn’t have any. In contrast to the Colonial-style grace and symmetry that mark such Washington tourist enclaves as Georgetown and Alexandria (or the elegance of Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights, for that matter), Clarendon is a jumble of building styles from different eras that have little to say to one another. The polite word to use is “eclectic,” but “mishmash” wouldn’t be too far from the truth.
Nor was Arlington rescued by the formal implementation of a civic or governmental master plan. Such a plan does exist—it has existed for the past twenty-five years, ever since the county government and citizen activists drew up a detailed blueprint envisioning Clarendon as a pedestrian-oriented “urban village” of the twenty-first century. The framers of that document saw the grubby old prewar storefronts being torn down and replaced by brand-new mixed-use developments of much greater density, building to a high-rise crescendo at the subway station in the center of the community. In the past few years, that has begun to happen. But in the beginning, it was the old buildings, the walkability and human scale of the neighborhood, that were the ingredients of revival.
It was immigration that brought those old buildings to life. And that’s a reminder of one crucial difference: Cleveland Heights has never attracted immigrants in any significant numbers. Arlington has been a magnet for them, from the influx of Vietnamese store owners and restaurateurs in the 1970s to the flood of Hispanic newcomers in the decade of the 1980s. Over the years, this has brought its share of tensions, especially in the school system, which had to cope with a large cohort of pupils whose English-language skills were limited or nonexistent. But in the long run, the immigrants were a boon to a community whose future once seemed as precarious as that of Cleveland Heights does now. The vacant storefronts brought the Vietnamese in and set the whole process in motion. It may seem a bit ironic that the way to bring in more affluent white newcomers is to lay down a base of poorer people from other countries. But that is exactly what happened in Arlington.
More important than immigration, though, was transportation. Cleveland Heights isn’t bad in this respect; it has decent bus connections to downtown Cleveland. But Arlington has a subway line, and its entire central corridor is dotted with stations, some of them less than a mile apart. Long before the revival began, Arlington County made the most fateful decision of all: It put a subway stop smack in the middle of Clarendon. Metro construction killed off the Clarendon that had existed for more than fifty years, but without the subway, the new Clarendon almost certainly would never have been born. That’s not because the vast majority of neighborhood residents do all their traveling by means of mass transit. As in virtually all suburbs, old and new alike, most trips to work or shopping continue to be made by car. But one county survey a few years ago found that a quarter of the residents of the central corridor that includes Clarendon did not own a car at all. That is an exceptionally high number for an inner suburb anywhere in the country except the environs of New York City.
As an increasing number of cities and suburbs are finding out, a transit line is frequently a developmental magnet with powers of attraction far beyond its daily commuting numbers. In the words of Tom Downs, the veteran transportation planner, spoken many years ago, “It isn’t the train that matters; it’s the tracks.” Once the infrastructure is in place, established businesses suddenly find themselves willing to take a chance on an older neighborhood, confident that its future is based on something more permanent than speeches and architectural drawings. That was what happened in Arlington.
Immigration brought Clarendon to life. Transportation gave it concentrated residential development. But behind all of Clarendon’s (and Arlington’s) good fortune was a metropolitan area dominated by an industry that everyone realized was never going to move out: the federal government. Washington, D.C., has been a troubled city for the past half century, with high crime rates, underperforming schools, and, until recently, a steadily declining population. But the presence of the federal government has kept the metropolitan area healthy in both good economic times and bad. Even though the size of the federal workforce as a whole decreased during the past decade, the regional job base held its own. This not only benefited the District of Columbia itself (which actually registered a gain in population between 2000 and 2010), but brought in young professionals, government employees and private-sector workers alike, for whom inner suburbia seemed like a convenient and appealing residential choice.
America’s inner suburbs come in all shapes and sizes. But the keys to their success at this point in history are immigration, transportation, and a surrounding metropolitan area healthy enough to attract a steady supply of newcomers. Those that have all of these are going to do fine. Those that don’t have any of them are going to be in trouble. Those in the middle, like Cleveland Heights, possess opportunities but are also destined to struggle.
CHAPTER SIX
UNEASY COEXISTENCE
TWO NOTABLE EVENTS TOOK PLACE in Philadelphia in late February 2009. They had nothing to do with each other, but taken together, they suggest why Philadelphia offers many hints about the American city of the future—and presents so many obstacles to its realization.
One of the events was the opening of a spectacular new Cézanne exhibit at the city’s major art museum. In honor of the exhibit, three gourmet restaurants in or near Center City announced that they were creating special menus that featured dishes from the artist’s native Provence. One of the restaurants, Zinc, offered squid flash-seared with Pernod, and apple pastry in lavender caramel sauce for dessert.
On the night those dishes were being introduced at Zinc, a somber ritual was being enacted eight miles north on Broad Street. Some three hundred police were marching in columns four abreast from Archbishop Ryan High School to the Givnish Funeral Home on Academy Road in northeast Philadelphia. They were marching to honor fellow policeman John Pawlowski, murdered six days earlier by a thief who had accosted a taxi driver. Pawlowski was the fifth police officer in the city to be killed in the line of duty in just one year.
It is hard to know exactly what to make of such a place. There are cities in America, such as Boston, Chicago, and New York, that are, despite serious problems, glamorous and exciting and a magnet for tourists from all over the world. Others, such as Detroit, are so badly blighted that it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to visit them. Somehow, Philadelphia manages to be both those things at once. Its residents sometimes refer to it jokingly as Bostroit—a city that is healthy on the inside and decaying badly on the periphery.
To say that Center City is healthy may actually be to understate the case a little bit. A four-block walk down Walnut Street, from the Bellevue hotel at Broad Street to Rittenhouse Square at Eighteenth, is a stroll past amenities comparable to those of Michigan Avenue or Fifth Avenue, but on a much less intimidating scale. Walnut Street is not a canyon. It’s a collection of low-slung century-old buildings with ground-floor retail that oozes wealth: Tiffany, Burberry, Godiva, Ralph Lauren; a sprinkling of spas and luxury salons; and an assortment of restaurants offering haute cuisine. One can take in the shops, stop to sip a Bacardi mojito at the sidewalk café outside Alma de Cuba, then order truffle-stuffed lamb loin with sweetbread tempura at Le Bec-Fin, the most elegant restaurant in town and one of the most famous on the East Coast.
Virtually all the storefronts are occupied: 90 percent of them even in the trough of recession at the end of the last decade. And Walnut Street is not only plush, it is thronged with people throughout the daytime and the evening as well. A 2009 survey found that 2,468 people walked by the corner of Walnut and Sixteenth during the average lunch hour. Precise comparisons to downtown neighborhoods of other cities are difficult to make, but this is an impressive number by almost any standard. Many of the passersby couldn’t afford to buy the items in the shopwindows, but many could. A significant number of Center City pedestrians are conventioneers or foreign tourists
. In 2010, they frequented 305 Center City restaurants classified as “fine dining” establishments and watched the passing parade from an array of 213 sidewalk cafés with seating for 3,556.
Walnut Street in Center City Philadelphia is an elegant thoroughfare with high-end restaurants and expensive shopping, and a lunchtime pedestrian count of more than two thousand a day. (photo credit 6.1)
Philadelphia’s downtown is not only an interesting place to visit, it is a place where increasing numbers of affluent people want to live. More than twelve thousand new condominium and luxury apartment units were built or retrofitted in Center City in the last decade, and while the recession forced a pause in the construction of new ones, it didn’t cause the population to drop. There were exactly eight residential foreclosures in Center City in 2008; the apartment vacancy rate was 4.4 percent. By one measure, Center City had a full-time residential population of ninety-two thousand. Allowing for variation in geographical definitions of city centers, this is a number that places Philadelphia behind only New York and Chicago in the size of its downtown residential cohort.
Urban scholars sometimes define a successfully renewed central city as one in which at least one downtown census tract has a median income higher than the average for its entire metropolitan region. In 2010, the census tract including the blocks on Walnut Street closest to Rittenhouse Square had a median income that stood at 183 percent of the regional average.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 14
