than half of all house holds plummeted from 59 percent to 12 percent and in central cities from 12 percent to 3 percent. By 2000, the great majority of suburbanites—including those in the Sun Belt as well as the Rust Belt—lived where married couples with children made up a small share of all families. Single mothers replaced many of these traditional families in both suburbs and cities. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of the suburban population living in census tracts where single-mother families made up at least 25 percent of all house holds leaped an amazing 440 percent—from 5 to 27 percent. In cities, it rose 84 percent—from 32 to 59 percent. As suburban populations aged, empty-nest house holds became more common. In suburbs, the share of the population aged sixty-five or older rose from 11 to 16 percent, a 45 percent increase—while it remained virtually the same, 18 percent compared to 17 percent, in central cities. The share of the suburban population living in census tracts where empty-nest house holds comprised more than 45 percent of all house holds shot up from 14 percent to 25 percent, while in central cities it dropped from 30 percent to 21 percent. In central cities, immigration combined with the increase in nonfamily and single- mother house holds to dampen the influence of population aging. Nonfamily households—young, unmarried people between eighteen and thirty-five living alone or without relatives—replaced traditional families in both cities and suburbs. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of the population living in census tracts where nonfamily house holds comprised at least 30 percent of all house holds rocketed from 8 to 35 percent in suburbs and from 28 to 57 percent in cities.
Figures 1.1 through 1.8 illustrate how these trends remapped domestic space. These maps show the change in the distribution of married-couple-with- children house holds and nonfamily house holds in metropolitan Atlanta and Boston between 1970 and 2000. Despite the differences between these Sun Belt and Rust Belt regions, trends were amazingly similar, showing the near disappearance of suburbs dominated by traditional families and the prominence everywhere of unrelated individuals living together.
A new domestic landscape emerged from these remapped house hold types. The concentration of young adults and empty nesters redefined urban economic zones. “Gentrification,” in fact, is shorthand for the impact of changing family and house hold forms on urban space. Increased numbers of single mothers living in poverty shaped new districts of concentrated poverty in central cities and fueled a rise in suburban poverty, especially in suburbs that bordered on cities. At the same time, by bringing young, working-class families back to several cities, immigration slowed the disappearance of traditional families and moderated the gulf separating gentrified neighborhoods from vast areas of concentrated poverty. Waves of immigration and industrial change had repeatedly rearranged the social geographies of cities. But the new domestic landscape demanded nothing less than a redefinition of suburban character and purpose. As the distinctions between city and suburb receded, the question “What is an American suburb?” emerged as the flip side of the question “What is an American city?”
Figure 1 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 1970.
Figure 2 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 2000.
Figure 3 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 1970.
Figure 4 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.
Figure 5 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 1970.
Figure 6 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 2000.
Figure 7 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 1970.
Figure 8 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.
Racial segregation also transformed urban space. Racial segregation was much higher in late than in early twentieth-century American cities. In 1930, the average African American lived in a neighborhood that was 31.7 percent black; by 1970, the percentage had jumped to 73.5. These were numbers never before experienced by any group, including the immigrants who poured into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described the situation, without exaggeration, as “American apartheid.” Affluent as well as poor African Americans experienced extreme racial segregation. In northern metropolitan areas in 1980, Massey and Denton revealed, measures of segregation for African Americans with incomes of $50,000 remained as high as for those with incomes of $2,500. In sixteen metropolitan areas, one of three African Americans lived in conditions of such high segregation that Massey and Denton labeled them “hypersegregation.”37
In the 1990s, although segregation in cities declined by an average of 5.5 percentage points, the average African American still lived in a census tract that was 51 percent black, while affluent African Americans were more likely to live near African Americans with modest incomes than near comparably well-off whites, and as Shorty’s neighborhood underlined, many thousands of African Americans still lived in districts marked by the toxic combination of poverty and segregation.38 Nonetheless, in the last third of the twentieth century, Massey and his colleagues show, a “new regime of residential segregation” began to emerge. Despite mass immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, overall levels of ethnic segregation did not rise. Measures of immigrant segregation remained “low to moderate” while, after 1970, “black segregation declined.” As racial segregation lessened, “socioeconomic segregation rose, as indicated by rising levels of dissimilarity between the poor and the affluent and between the college educated and high school graduates, yielding spatial isolation among people at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale.”39
Geography reflected income. After the mid-1970s, income and wealth inequality, as Chapter 2 explains in more detail, increased to levels not experienced for perhaps a century, and real wages declined despite rising productivity. “The fundamental reality,” write urban scholars Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, “is one of growing economic segregation in the context of overall rising inequality. People of different income classes are moving away from each other not just in how much income they have but also in where they live. America is breaking down into economically homogeneous enclaves.” Growing economic as well as racial inequality registered on urban space as economic segregation among whites grew notably after the 1970s. Growing economic inequality marked suburbs as well as cities as inner-ring and older suburbs experienced the poverty, population decline, job loss, and infrastructure decay usually associated with inner cities. In the early twenty- first century,
