Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times; original article contains links.
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.
April 19, 2018
Image from article, with caption: The view from above in San Francisco.
The nation’s largest cities and metropolitan areas — home to a majority of Democratic voters — are at the forefront of the party’s most vexing racial, ethnic and class conflicts.
Last week, in an essay for CityLab, Richard Florida, a professor of urban planning at the University of Toronto, described how housing costs are driving the growing division between upwardly and downwardly mobile populations within Democratic ranks:
The rise in housing inequality brings us face to face with a central paradox of today’s increasingly urbanized form of capitalism. The clustering of talent, industry, investment, and other economic assets in small parts of cities and metropolitan areas is at once the main engine of economic growth and the biggest driver of inequality. The ability to buy and own housing, much more than income or any other source of wealth, is a significant factor in the growing divides between the economy’s winners and losers.
Allies on Election Day, the two wings of the Democratic Party are growing further estranged in other aspects of their lives, driven apart by the movement of advantaged and disadvantaged populations within and between cities. These demographic patterns exacerbate intraparty tensions.
Florida, writing with Benjamin Schneider of CityLab, expands on this point:
While the advantaged members of the knowledge, professional, and creative class have enough money left over even after paying the cost of housing in these cities, it’s the less-well-paid members of the service and working classes who get the short end of the stick, with not nearly enough left over to afford the basic necessities of life. They are either pushed to the periphery of these places or pushed out altogether.
The competition for housing between rich and poor has become a critically important and divisive issue in urban America.
“The state of housing affordability in the expensive coastal metros is driving a wedge between two factions of the American left,” Issi Romem, a fellow at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email to me.
In a paper published earlier this month, “Characteristics of Domestic Cross-Metropolitan Migrants,” Romem looked at the income and education levels of families moving in and out of 441 metropolitan areas. He found that
Domestic migration across U.S. metropolitan areas is selective: in-migrants to expensive metros tend to have higher incomes and educational attainment than out-migrants, while the opposite is true in the least expensive metros. This pattern contributes to the process of polarization across U.S. metros.
One of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the country, San Francisco, is also one of the most Democratic sections of the country, (San Francisco County: Clinton 84.5 percent, Trump 9.2 percent). According to Romem, between 2005 and 2016, those moving into the San Francisco area had median household incomes averaging $12,639 a year more than the households of the families moving out, $70,015 to $57,376.
Conversely, in the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent), families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 — $7,229 less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448.
Research that focuses on the way city neighborhoods are changing by income, race and ethnicity, while not specifically addressed to political consequences, helps us see the potential for conflict within the Democratic coalition.
Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, published a detailed study in 2015 for the St. Louis Federal Reserve of the economic composition of neighborhoods. Overall, he found, “middle-income neighborhoods are tenuous,” while neighborhoods at the top and bottom of the economic ladder have remained strikingly stable.
For example, as Sampson explained by email,
fully 80 percent of all U.S. neighborhoods in the top income quintile remained in place between 2000 and 2012. In Los Angeles, the persistence rate reached 87 percent among the highest income quintile neighborhoods. In Chicago 82 percent of the affluent neighborhoods in 2000 remained in place over the decade.
Chicago, Sampson wrote, is “experiencing a concentrated affluence shift,” in which
the black population has declined and Hispanics are now second largest after whites in population. The race/ethnic shift is something of a milestone given the history of the city.
Despite this shift, Chicago remains reliably Democratic. In 2016, Clinton beat Trump there 83.7 percent to 12.5 percent.
In firmly Democratic neighborhoods across the country, the economic status of those moving in and out began to shift radically starting at the beginning of this century.
Take, for example, “Accounting for Central Neighborhood Change, 1980-2010,” by Nathaniel Baum-Snow, an economist at the University of Toronto, and Daniel Hartley, an economist at the Federal Reserve in Chicago. They found that the core of the nation’s cities is being taken over by members of the affluent wing of the Democratic Party at the expense of the less affluent, disproportionately minority wing of the party:
Central neighborhoods of most U.S. metropolitan areas experienced population decline 1980-2000 and population growth 2000-2010. 1980-2000 departures of residents without a college degree accounted for most of the decline while the return of college educated whites and the stabilization of neighborhood choices by less educated whites drove most of the post-2000 rebound.
Baum-Snow and Hartley cite what they call “a shifting balance between departures of low SES (socioeconomic status) minorities and inflows of high SES whites” and point out that neighborhoods surrounding cities’ central business districts have experienced a turnaround
driven by the return of college-graduate and high-income whites to these neighborhoods, coupled with a halt in the outflows of other white demographic groups. At the same time, the departures of minorities without college degrees continued unabated.
In Chicago, Baum-Snow and Hartley point out, the largely minority census tracts that gained whites the fastest from 1980 to 2010 were “almost exclusively within 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of the central business district.”
A similar pattern has emerged in the urban West. “Gentrification in the Bay Area, Portland and Seattle,” Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, told me in an email, “is definitely pushing disadvantaged populations out of old neighborhoods and into far-flung exurbs.”
Within major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Cain continued,
the sorting is also between neighborhoods, with large nonwhite populations surrounded by white/Asian suburbs, and certain Latinos and Asians displacing blacks.
Upscale liberal whites “who consider themselves committed to racial justice” tend to be “NIMBYists when it comes to their neighborhoods,” Cain wrote, “not living up to their affordable housing commitments and resisting apartment density around mass transportation stops.”
“One of the key problems of the information/digital economy,” according to Cain,
is that it thrives under conditions of amassing large concentrations of human and financial capital, which results in these homogeneous bubbles. It doesn’t help that many of the tech workers are not as inclined to be good neighbors.
The trends Cain cites are part of a nationwide shift.
From the 1960s and 1970s to 2000, Florida pointed out by email, the basic pattern was
blacks were moving into and staying in cities, and whites were moving out. But in the period since 2000, and earlier than that for very successful cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington D.C., and Seattle, affluent white highly educated people begin to move in, and less educated whites and particularly less educated and less affluent blacks begin moving out.
As intraparty economic and racial divisions have increased within the Democratic coalition, the political power of the well-to-do has grown at the expense of racial and ethnic minorities.
Right now, a heated conflict has erupted within Democratic ranks in California over pending legislation (SB 827) that would override local zoning laws to allow developers to exceed height and density limits in return for an agreement to include more affordable housing units near transit hubs.
In very liberal Marin County (Clinton 77.3 percent, Trump 15.5 percent, median household income $100,310), elected officials of at least seven local municipalities have voted to oppose the legislation.
Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine on Wednesday, pointed out that the housing issue in California and elsewhere,
is ultimately a question of whether the most prosperous parts of blue America can be opened up to new entrants, or whether they will remain closed off and increasingly unaffordable. It is also a political test for whether progressives will be manipulated by knee-jerk suspicions, or be able to think clearly about using the market to serve human needs.
After overwhelmingly Democratic City Councils along the California coast voted to oppose the legislation, the Democratic State Senate answered Chait’s question and killed the bill.
The maneuvers in California are a reflection of a larger problem for Democrats: their inability to reconcile the conflicts inherent in the party’s economic and racial bifurcation.
Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard, addressed the Democrats’ dilemma in a recent essay for Project Syndicate:
In principle, greater inequality produces a demand for more redistribution. Democratic politicians should respond by imposing higher taxes on the wealthy and spending the proceeds on the less well off.
In practice, Rodrik writes
democracies have moved in the opposite direction. The progressivity of income taxes has decreased, reliance on regressive consumption taxes has increased, and the taxation of capital has followed a global race to the bottom. Instead of boosting infrastructure investment, governments have pursued austerity policies that are particularly harmful to low-skill workers. Big banks and corporations have been bailed out, but households have not. In the United States, the minimum wage has not been adjusted sufficiently, allowing it to erode in real terms.
Why?
Rodrik cites the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty, who argues that political parties on the left have been taken over, here and in Europe, “by the well-educated elite” — what Piketty calls the “Brahmin Left.” The Brahmin Left, writes Rodrik,
is not friendly to redistribution, because it believes in meritocracy — a world in which effort gets rewarded and low incomes are more likely to be the result of insufficient effort than poor luck.
Michael Lind, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in a prescient 2014 essay, “The Coming Realignment: Cities, Class, and Ideology After Social Conservatism,” that “high-density downtowns and suburban villages are coming to have an hourglass-shaped social structure.”
“Wealthy individuals” are at the top, according to Lind, with a “large luxury-service proletariat at the bottom.” Democrats, in this scheme, have become the party of
the downtown and edge city elites and their supporting staff of disproportionately foreign-born, low-wage service workers.
Lind’s point raises a fundamental question for the Democratic Party: Can it find a way to hold its “hourglass-shaped” political coalition together?
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, predicted the potential political developments of this situation in an article in March 2016:
Over the next decade or so, the Republicans will split between their growing nationalist-populist wing and their business establishment wing, a split that the nationalist-populist wing will eventually win. The Democrats will face a similar split between the increasingly pro-corporate but socially liberal Clinton wing and a more economically progressive Sanders wing, a split that the Clinton wing will eventually win.
The outcome?
The Democrats will become the party of urban cosmopolitan business liberalism, and the Republicans will become the party of suburban and rural nationalist populism.
Clearly, the 2016 election demonstrated the fragility of the Democratic coalition and its vulnerability to challenge from the populist right.
Dani Rodrik picks up this point in his Project Syndicate essay:
Why were democratic political systems not responsive early enough to the grievances that autocratic populists have successfully exploited — inequality and economic anxiety, decline of perceived social status, the chasm between elites and ordinary citizens? Had political parties, particularly of the center left, pursued a bolder agenda, perhaps the rise of right-wing, nativist political movements might have been averted.
The forces behind the conversion of the Democratic Party into “the party of urban cosmopolitan business liberalism,” as described by Drutman, may be inexorable. If so, Rodrik’s call on the center-left to adopt a “bolder agenda” may be beyond reach.
Taking it a step further, a Democratic Party based on urban cosmopolitan business liberalism runs the risk not only of leading to the continued marginalization of the minority poor, but also — as the policies of the Trump administration demonstrate — to the continued neglect of the white working-class electorate that put Trump in the White House.
In other words, Democratic strategists looking to piece together a 21st century political alliance have to consider the unintended consequences of taking the easy route: constructing a coalition explicitly dominated by elites.
I say easy because — compared to the average resident of the United States — the affluent are “vastly more engaged politically,” as Douglas S. Massey and Jacob S. Rugh, sociologists at Princeton and Brigham Young University, write in a forthcoming paper, “Isolation at the Extremes”:
Whereas 99 percent of the wealthy voted in the 2012 presidential election and 60 percent gave money to a political candidate, the corresponding figures were just 78 percent and 18 percent for Americans in general. As a result, the affluent are far more likely to have their political preferences reflected in public policies than other Americans.
The force that had historically pushed policy to the economic left — organized labor — has for the most part been marginalized. African-American and Hispanic voters have shown little willingness to join Democratic reform movements led by upper middle class whites, as shown in their lack of enthusiasm for Bill Bradley running against Al Gore in 2000 or Sanders running against Clinton in 2016.
The hurdle facing those seeking to democratize elite domination of the Democratic Party is finding voters and donors who have a sustained interest in redistributive policies — and the minimum wage is only a small piece of this. Achieving that goal requires an economically coherent center-left political coalition. It also requires the ability to overcome the seemingly insuperable political divisions between the white working class and the African-American and Hispanic working classes — that elusive but essential multiracial — and now multiethnic — majority. Establishing that majority in a coherent political coalition is the only way in which the economic interests of those in the bottom half of the income distribution will be effectively addressed.
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