new interstate highway system.21 However, aggressive and often unscrupulous realtors, fanning fears of racial change, played a role as well.22 In the North and Midwest, the number of African American newcomers often did not equal the number of whites who left. As a result, city populations and density went down, returning swaths of inner cities to empty lots and weed-filled fields where once working-class housing and factories had stood—a process vividly captured by the great photographer Camilo José Vergara, who has documented the emergence of the “green ghetto” in Rust Belt America, where urban agriculture has emerged as a growth industry.23 In the Sun Belt, in cities such as Los Angeles, population trends went in the opposite direction. Between 1957 and 1990, the Sun Belt’s urban population, lured by economic opportunity and an appealing climate and boosted by annexation as well as in-migration, climbed from 8.5 to 23 million.
Massive immigration following changes to federal law in 1965 also transformed urban demography. Immigration was the human face of the economic globalization transforming cities around the world.24 More immigrants entered the United States in the 1990s than in any other decade in its history. Three facts about this immigration stand out as especially important. First, it was diverse. Mostly from Asia and Latin America, immigrants altered the ethnic mix of America’s population, most notably of its cities. They fueled most of the urban population growth that occurred during the 1990s.25
Four of five immigrants settled in metropolitan areas, clustering in “gateway” cities: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and to some extent, Chicago. By 2000, although still clustered, they had begun to spread out across the nation, transforming suburbs and small as well as large cities. In 1910, 84 percent of the foreign-born in Greater Philadelphia lived in the central city. By 2006, the number had plummeted to 35 percent. Similar trends occurred everywhere. Across the nation, the suburbanization of immigration had become a major factor reshaping metropolitan geography. This suburbanization of immigration is the second important fact. Thanks to labor market networks in agricultural work, construction, landscaping, low-end manufacturing, and domestic service, Hispanics, in fact, spread out faster than any other ethnic group in American history.26
The third fact about the new immigration is that it is essential. In New York City, immigration accounted for all of the population growth in the 1990s. In his testimony before New York’s City Council Committees on Small Business and Immigration, Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, reported on research which “concluded that immigrant entrepreneurs have become an increasingly powerful economic engine for New York City . . . foreign-born entrepreneurs are starting a greater share of new businesses than native-born residents, stimulating growth in sectors from food manufacturing to health care, creating loads of new jobs and transforming once-sleepy neighborhoods into thriving commercial centers.”27 Immigration also fueled growth and economic revitalization in small cities such as Chelsea and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Two officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that between 1990 and 2000, immigrants accounted for almost half of New England’s population growth, and more in some states, such as Connecticut, where it was responsible for 76 percent of growth. “Overall, the region’s population grew only 5.4 percent over the decade, but without foreign immigration, it would have been virtually stagnant.”28 The New Jersey Urban Revitalization Research Project reported, “Immigration is reshaping many of New Jersey’s older communities, and accounts for the greater part of the population growth of most cities experienced during the 1990s.”29 In metropolitan Philadelphia, immigration was the source of 75 percent of labor force growth between 2000 and 2006.30
Immigration, Mike Davis observes in Magical Urbanism, redefined urban space. “As emergent Latino pluralities and majorities outgrow the classic barrio,” he writes, “they are remaking urban space in novel ways that cannot be assimilated to the earlier experiences of either African Americans or European immigrants.” These Latino metropolises differ from one another in their “geometries,” which Davis classifies with a provisional typology whose newest and unprecedented category, “city-within-a-city,” represented by late twentieth-century Los Angeles, results from the intersection of immigration with the location of low-wage jobs.31
Immigration, suburbanization, and racial segregation transformed urban space. Suburban growth, which had begun much earlier, exploded in the years after World War II, with suburbs growing ten times faster than cities in the 1950s. Population, retailing, services, and industry all suburbanized. Suburbs remained predominantly white until late in the twentieth century, when African American suburbanization became an important trend, although even in the suburbs African Americans often clustered in segregated neighborhoods or dominated some suburban towns.32
The image evoked by the term “suburb” was never accurate. Constructed at various points in history, from the transportation revolution of the nineteenth century to the communications revolution of the late twentieth century, and reconstructed repeatedly by demographic, economic, social, and political change, places labelled “suburb” have always, in fact, varied. Long before World War II, suburbs were industrial as well as residential; they housed working-class as well as middle-class families; and they were home to many African Americans. In the post–World War II era, the massive building of new suburbs like Levittown, highway construction, cheap mortgages, and especially the GI Bill reinforced the popular meaning of “suburb” as a bedroom community populated mainly by families with children. By the last decades of the twentieth century, whatever uniformity had existed among suburbs shattered. A variety of suburban forms dotted metropolitan landscapes as social scientists and regional policy advocates scrambled to create new typologies that would capture the components of the new geography that had rendered the binary of city/suburb obsolete.33
Both gentrification and dramatic shifts in the balance among family types resulted in new domestic landscapes, further collapsing differences between city and suburb. Gentrification played modest counterpoint to urban renewal. Gentrification refers to rehabilitating working-class housing for use by a wealthier class. Movement into gentrified neighborhoods was not great enough to reverse overall population decline outside of select neighborhoods, but it did transform visible components of cityscapes as it attracted young white professionals with above-average incomes and empty nesters who demanded new services and amenities.
Young professionals and affluent empty nesters repopulating center cities signified transformations of family and life course that undermined old assumptions about urbanism by undermining distinctions between cities and suburbs through the creation of new domestic landscapes. Consider the revolutionary rebalancing of family types between 1900 and 2000. In both years, most people lived in one of four combinations of family and house hold type: married couples with children; female-headed house holds with children; empty-nest couples; and non-family house holds (unmarried young people living together). Over the course of the twentieth century, the relative proportions living in each house hold type changed dramatically. In 1900, married couples with children comprised 55 percent of all house holds, single-mother families 28 percent, empty-nest house holds 6 percent, and nonfamily house holds 10 percent, with a small remainder in different arrangements. By 2000, the proportions had changed: married couple house holds comprised 25 percent of all house holds, single-mother families 30 percent, empty- nest house holds 16 percent, and nonfamily house holds 25 percent.34 (The relatively small increase in single- mother families masks an enormous change. Earlier in the century they mainly consisted of widows; late in the century they were mostly never married, separated, or divorced.)
This new balance among house hold types had accelerated with astonishing speed after 1970. One of its results was a new domestic landscape that changed the meaning of “suburbs.” By 1970, more Americans lived in suburbs than in cities or rural areas. In these early years—captured brilliantly by Herbert Gans in The Levittowners—the suburbs’ primary function was to provide housing for families with children.35 During the last three decades of the twentieth century, suburban demography and function changed, with the result that cities and suburbs grew more alike.36 Between 1970 and 2000, the proportion of suburban census
