A post diagnosing why, exactly, ethnic neighborhood retail streets are often so much more exciting than equivalent yuppie neighborhood retail, even after controlling for factors like residential density. In the end, I’m just channeling Jane Jacobs — although she, not having the luxury of writing after the flowering of postindustrial economic hyper-stratification, possibly mis-diagnosed “the need for old buildings.”

Perhaps my original post was a little shortsighted, but one thing I’ll still cling to is that ethnic neighbourhoods are much more resistant to the kind of negative gentrification that guts a lot of thriving neighbourhoods.

okay, so I’m thinking along the lines of something I just posted in another thread, but maybe this is because of social-class heterogeneity? that is to say, income and wealth diversity may be more important than ethnic or sexual or whatever diversity in terms of making “interesting” neighborhoods. many ethnic neighborhoods are cool because they’re entrepots: there are rich and poor, still intermingling because of language barriers or whatnot. (many immigrant neighborhoods have much higher household incomes than one might think at first glance; about 40% of households in Little Village, a Southwest Side neighborhood usually described as “lower middle class Mexican,” earn more than Chicago’s median HH income — $38K in 2000. yes, the families are larger, too, but there is wealth there.)

the more interesting gay ghettoes, IMO, are those which are socially mixed: girls and boys, for instance, instead of being completely overrun with the Chelsea/WeHo/etc. guppie circuit clone-boy crowd. (“Aberzombie” sadly never caught on.) meanwhile, there are some very wealthy Chinese towns in Southern California — say, San Marino or Diamond Bar — and their strip malls are almost as boring as any in lily-white South O.C.: Starbucks, Sav-On Drugs, Charles Schwab, Cathay Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, a seafood dim sum restaurant, bubble tea, a bakery, an antiquities shop, and Ranch 99 Market (a local Chinese supermarket chain; mildly interesting, but nothing you haven’t seen before*). and time and again, you hear older African Americans saying that the community stuck together during segregation; there were rich and poor shopping on 47th Street or Pettigrew Street, but after integration anyone who could moved away and so did the businesses. 125th Street in Harlem is still really fascinating even though the chains have found it: yeah, there’s Starbucks, but also wig shops.

once a neighborhood is economically homogenous at any level — Southside Homes with its dirty liquor stores and check-cashing shops behind bars; middle-income Rolling Hills Acres with its Mall-Wart and Oldtyme Rural Buffet; or prosperous Society Hill with Crockery Shed and Farstucks — it gets predictable and boring.

I wonder how it would be possible to quantify this. income quintiles are easily accessible from the U.S. Census (Summary File 3), but how do we define neighborhoods or even trade areas — for neighborhoods whose businesses rely on tourists?

or, perhaps there’s a “sweet spot” in terms of neighborhood social capital. too much, as in a small town, and not only does everybody know your name, but everybody knows that you didn’t go to church last week and cluck-cluck, shame on you. that’s boring.

too little social capital, and everyone walks around alienated and ignorant of their fellow man, talking on their cellphones or listening to MP3s, all while compulsively shopping, drinking, and/or popping SSRIs to assuage their spiritual emptiness. that’s also boring.

but in between? that’s cool.
— pc

* Leonard, I know what you mean about how two Chinese supermarkets in two cities can look similar but have completely different products. part of this may be because the importing business is still so highly fragmented (you’re dealing with lots of tiny little suppliers, some of whom you only know because Auntie Grace lives next to so-and-so), so different retailers — because they have different supply chains — will have access to a vastly different array of goods. but once you have a real chain, like Ranch 99 Market, that has centralized buying, you can say goodbye to that variability. case in point: Safeway is the same from coast to coast, but local farmer’s markets all sell pretty much the same thing, right? of course not.

then again, maybe that’s a crucial distinction between interesting or boring neighborhoods: how much of the local business is really local.

** for those paying attention, I’ve covered the following chapters in “The Death and Life”:
Chapter 11, “The Need for {henceforth, TNF} Concentration” — in talking about residential density
Chapter 10, “TNF Aged Buildings” — principally because aged buildings provide for economic diversity, because “I mean not museum-piece old buildings” (p 187). little could she predict the still-to-come fashion of paying a lot to be in an old building.

elsewhere, I’ve mentioned a quirky street grid as one element that keeps an area interesting; that’s Chapter 9, “TNF Small Blocks.” and I think we all take for granted now Chapter 8, “TNF Mixed Primary Uses” — although that may also be a significant contributor. I was just in a party in Little Village, and my, there are a lot of factories left there. today’s gentrified neighborhoods are little more than commuter housing and shopping, just like the pre-Edge City suburbs.

A tad polemic and wistful for my tastes, but still spot-on:

Something stranger and even more disheartening to the lover of city life is becoming clear: the new in cities not only isn’t new, it isn’t very urban. Although we’ve resurrected the forms of our cities, we’ve animated them with a culture straight from the suburbs…

Today’s neighborhood is different from the older one that’s supposed to inspire it. For one thing, gentrifiers and loft-dwellers live much less of their lives in their neighborhoods than those who lived there 50 years ago… Like a postwar subdivision, today’s retro neighborhoods lack ethnic clubs, nearby in-laws or grandparents, and merchants who have watched a generation of youngsters grow up. They lack the culture that once provided city neighborhoods with a sense of continuity and identity, and forced people to develop ties over time, across generations, even across ethnic differences…

The car in itself is not suburban. But it is suburban to expect your very own parking space in the city…

By the 1950’s, American cities were losing the vitality that had made them such forceful and creative places for nearly a century. American society today, Marx might say, is about “the suburbanization of everything” — including our retro cities.

Michael Johns in today’s NYT

Speaking of retro cities, Sylvain Chomet, director of The Triplets of Belleville, has this to say about the ’50s in an interview:

From a design point of view, the ’50s were more inspiring. Town planning, cars, clothes were creative and interesting. Drawing and design were an important part of life, on posters, in schoolbooks. It was also a period when people relaxed after the trials of the Second World War. They were less cynical, keener on their freedoms.

(Well, yes, ’50s town planning was “creative,” but “interesting”?)

The film does a marvelous job at portraying both booming, de Gaulle-era Paris and the fantasy of Montr�al reimagined as New York. (Chomet points out that the bridge to Belleville is the Jacques Cartier, from Montr�al, “surrounded by typical Qu�bec architecture”: “we used many details from Qu�bec and Montr�al in trying to show how these cities might have turned into New Yorks.” The fat people, though, are American.)

The plot’s almost nonsense and the style transcends mere caricature, but particular visual moments — RER trains zooming by, a bicyclist dodging a “Mairie de XXIe” bus, meticulously computer-animated spokes whizzing by, ridiculous floats in the Tour de France, a parting shot of the basilica in Marseille, and of course a boy on a bicycle besting evildoers in their cars — make it well worthwhile.

One of the latest, most far-reaching school reform ideas that has reached the experimental stage is the small schools movement: breaking up large, urban public high schools into smaller, themed academies. In theory, smaller schools provide more individual attention to students and parents, while a theme connects the students to the wider world — opening up educational resources outside the classroom and making learning more relevant to students. The approach combines elements of magnet and charter schools, but is planned for a much more far-reaching rollout: 100,000 students in New York City alone.

The Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required) is keeping a diary of the New York Harbor School‘s first year. Halfway into the school year, parents and teachers have noticed that enthusiasm from the students is still strong, but that academic performance shows no signs of marked improvement.