“A new image of urban America is in the making”, according to Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey in a new population study: “What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into ‘bright flight’ to cities that hav…

With the White House at stake this year, the latest round of voter registration brought a fairly major shift in the party demographics in New York State: Several former Republican strongholds have seen increases in the ranks of Democrats, including in …

We already knew about more people doing the daily two-hour ride on the Metro-North trains into New York. But regularly commuting from south of Trenton?
That’s the size of it for some workers, as their residential migration is expanding the defi…

This may or may not explain why Mayor Mick Cornett has been making noises about consolidating some services with adjoining municipalities.

It’s not uniform in Florida, though. Jacksonville became a traditional county-city combo back in the ’70s (or thereabouts), which does little but pump up Jax and makes it look bigger than what it really is. Miami adopted a joint county-city structure in the late ’90s. That was a negative action — Miami was drowning in disfunction, so tying its governance to Dade County was basically a bailout of the city. The effect: A certain degree of deconsolidation, with villages and unincorporated areas rushing to incorporate into little cities.

In effect, the “first suburbs” phenomenon is the urbanization of formerly suburban zones. It’s just that the municipal motherships can’t extend their political reach (unless, say, NYC decides to start adding boroughs…)

But WWII seems to be the breakpoint regardless: prewar housing, at least on the city’s north side, gets historic or at least conservation protection. Fifties tract homes don’t rate. (My own neighborhood, three and a half miles from downtown, is atypical: it was built in the late 40s, but it’s under conservation zoning, mostly because the neighborhood, before I moved there, petitioned for it.) This has kept housing prices perhaps higher than they might have been otherwise, though I haven’t noticed much of a difference in ethnic distribution.

There is, though, an age gap: by and large, I’m surrounded by young couples and empty-nesters, and not much in between. I attribute this to distrust of the city school district, even though the neighborhood school is highly regarded and competitive with schools in the ‘burbs; real-estate agents, if they see you have school-age children, tend to send you farther from the core unless you assure them that you’re doing the private-school thing.