A friend recently referred us to “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City” by Alan Ehrenhalt, published in 2012.
According to Ehrenhalt:
“Demographic inversion is … the rearrangement of living patterns across an entire metropolitan area, all taking place at roughly the same time.”
“…demographic inversion is not a proxy for population growth; it can occur in cities that are growing, those whose numbers are flat, and even in those undergoing a modest decline in size.”
“Since nothing much is manufactured downtown anymore (or anywhere near it), the noise and grime that prevailed through most of the twentieth century have gone away…Middle-class people of all colors began to feel safe on the streets of urban American in the 1990s, and they still feel that way.”
“In the peak baby boom period after World War II, roughly half of American households were engaged in the process of raising children. In 2020,… the number will be closer to 25 precedent… The percentage of Americans over age sixty-five was 13 percent in 2010; in 2030 it will by 19 percent, an increase of roughly half.”
“When one thinks of the larger demographic changes that have taken place I America over the past generation – the increased number of people who remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the later age of first marriage, the smaller size of families, and at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their later years – is hard to escape the notion that we have managed to combine virtually all of the significant elements that make a demographic inversion not only possible but likely.”
“It seems likely…that more of the social life of the next adult cohort, compared to that the previous one, will be lived in a public realm, not a closed-off private one, in a more active and vibrant streetscape and in parks and other public spaces.”
During his re-election campaign, Mayor Rick Gray took credit for the few more stores and restaurants in downtown Lancaster. In fact, the major impact of Gray and his City Planner Randy Patterson has been to stymie downtown growth.
The location of the Convention Center on the first block of South Queen Street across from the Lancaster Newspaper offices created a block empty of pedestrian traffic during most evenings, thus thwarting any natural ‘gentrification’ southward. A result is the offer of large government subsidies for housing improvements in the 100 block of South Queen Street where otherwise private developers would have been eager to invest their own money.
Lancaster Square East – the former Brunswick hotel and Brunswick Annex and Bulova Building – provides the greatest opportunity for redevelopment as upscale condominiums since the Watt & Shand site. Instead Gray and Patterson are misguidedly directing $15 million of CRIZ money into turning the former Brunswick Hotel into a direct competitor for the Marriott … thus poisoning the well of downtown business for the city own Marriott.
Moreover, the most pathetic structure perhaps ever conceived for a downtown area – the former windowless Hess Department Store and later Bulova Building – is to be converted to another use rather than razed to make room for appropriate development of the site.
Lancaster city government seems more committed to creating feeding troughs for special interests than addressing and facilitating the trend back to city living.
If the Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. wasn’t trapped by its investment in the Marriott Hotel / Convention Center folly, it would likely be beating the same drums as NewsLanc. Sadly, the departed Steinmans must be turning over in their graves
