After years of revival and resurgence, the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are now being squeezed by external threats and an internal eruption along their deepest fault line—one that could fracture their political influence in the years to come.
America’s cities have already faced almost four years of persistent hostility from President Donald Trump, who has reviled them as dirty, chaotic, and dangerous and pursued many policies contrary to their interests. Then this winter, the COVID-19 pandemic hit hardest within dense population centers, including not only central cities, but also their inner suburbs.
Now the nationwide protests and disorder following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have clearly exposed the crack in the foundation of cities’ new prosperity: the persistence of racial inequality and segregation amid that economic revival.
The past quarter century has brought “a steady hyper-concentration of business activity in a short list of big, dense, often coastal hubs,” says Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. But those same economic forces, he adds, have “been widening the disparities within those same hubs—and now we’re seeing some of the impacts of that.”
These challenges to cities from without and within create inimical political pressures. The Trump threat has driven central cities and their inner suburbs closer together, solidifying a Democratic alliance that has reshaped the 21st-century political landscape. His unambiguous hostility to racial diversity and social tolerance helped drive the GOP’s big 2018 losses in the white-collar suburbs of major metropolitan areas. And polls have shown that both urban and suburban voters are much more critical of his handling of the coronavirus outbreak than Americans in rural parts of the country.
But the looting that has repeatedly accompanied the huge, peaceful protests over Floyd’s death could strain the bonds of the new Democratic coalition, which depends on strong performances among low-income minority voters mostly living in central cities and the largely white professionals in suburbs adjacent to those urban cores. While college-educated suburbanites, including white voters, express more concern about racial discrimination now than they did in earlier decades, fear of upheaval on the streets of major cities could begin to erode those sympathies, political observers in both parties agree. That’s certainly Trump’s hope as he has amplified his calls for a crackdown on demonstrators and declared himself “your president of law and order.”
After decades of decline, many of the nation’s largest cities have been rejuvenated in this century as the information economy has encouraged the geographic concentration of highly digital jobs that require deep pools of well-educated workers. As of 2018, the nation’s 100 largest counties (out of roughly 3,100 overall) generated 55 percent of America’s total economic output and 48 percent of its jobs, according to a new MPP analysis. The nation’s 25 largest counties alone account for nearly 30 percent of the output and 25 percent of the jobs. All of those numbers have increased since 2010.
This economic surge has produced familiar changes: the revival of cities’ downtown areas and widespread gentrification, with young professionals moving in to fill multiplying jobs in software, finance, medical services, higher education, and other Information Age industries.
But almost everywhere, these new opportunities have failed to break the entrenched generational poverty entrapping many minority communities. The flow of young professionals back into cities “is masking the underlying issues of poverty, deep poverty, [the] affordable-housing crisis, [the] health-care crisis—all of the things that are now being brought to light in every system,” former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter told me.
In even the most prosperous major cities, the economic gaps between white and minority communities remain enormous—and are only becoming more so. The Oakland, California–based advocacy group PolicyLink tracks economic outcomes in the nation’s major metropolitan areas by race in an online tool called the National Equity Atlas. Its results paint a daunting picture.
I looked at the trends in a representative range of leading cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. From 1980 to 2015, the gap between the median hourly wage earned by white workers and workers of color widened in all of them. In each of those cities (except Atlanta), the share of native-born African Americans holding a two-year college degree or more is at least 18 percentage points lower than the share of native-born white Americans. The poverty rate for people of color in each of those cities is at least double the rate of white residents. In Denver, Philadelphia, New York, Houston, and Dallas, it’s triple. In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a police officer, it’s four times that of white people.
While big cities “have seen some progress on reducing racial gaps in employment, many of the service jobs they’ve created pay low wages and offer few benefits or pathways into the middle class,” says Sarah Treuhaft, who directs PolicyLink’s work on economic inequity. “So in large metros, income gaps by race are continuing to grow.” (Other studies have found even wider gaps in assets between white and black families in metro areas, she notes.)
Research offers conflicting answers on whether residential segregation in big cities between black and white Americans is increasing. But evidence suggests it clearly is rising between white and black families with children. School segregation along lines of race and class remains endemic, even as kids of color have become a majority of the nation’s K-12 public-school students. In a study last year commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that desegregation peaked for African-American schoolchildren in 1988 and has receded since.
“Black students are more segregated now than they were 50 years ago,” says Gary Orfield, the UCLA project’s co-director. “For Latinos, there has never been any effort to desegregate and they are, in some of our measures, more segregated than black students.”
Cities haven’t all been indifferent to these problems, especially as they have consistently elected liberal mayors in recent years. They’ve raised the minimum wage, improved benefits for hourly workers, and elected progressive prosecutors, among other reforms. The steady job growth that held from the 2008 crash until the coronavirus outbreak reduced unemployment rates for African Americans and Latinos to historic lows.
Yet none of these factors have overcome the underlying disparities or the tendency of the modern economy to compound income inequality. “Previously, [being] in a thriving metro area meant you were generating a lot of [middle-class] jobs,” says Manuel Pastor, the director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity at the University of Southern California. But now, “what you are seeing is a set of jobs that pay super-high wages [and] professional middle-class wages, then the jobs rising up around them, which are low-wage service jobs.
“Baked into the very nature of these thriving metro economies is an underlying economic inequality in the employment that is being generated,” Pastor adds.
