cover image The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America

The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America

Alan Mallach. Island, $30 trade paper (344p) ISBN 978-1-61091-781-0

Mallach (Bringing Buildings Back) digs into the dark side of America’s urban revival in this uneven analysis of the forces reshaping “legacy” cities—the Clevelands, Milwaukees, and Buffalos of the heartland, formerly industrial cities hollowed out by suburbanization and white flight in the 1960s and ’70s—rather than the major coastal cities that have received the most attention from others investigating urban renewal. Mallach describes how gentrifying areas of legacy cities have attracted an influx of college graduates with the skills to thrive in the postindustrial knowledge economy, who draw trendy coffee shops and revamp neighborhoods around anchor institutions such as universities. At the same time, he argues, middle-class and poor neighborhoods in the same cities are sliding downhill, buffeted by the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s, structural economic changes, and the legacies of racial segregation. For every gentrifying neighborhood like Baltimore’s Fell’s Point or St. Louis’s Washington Avenue, Mallach writes, many more are falling into a cycle of physical deterioration, out-migration, and abandonment. Mallach points to localized infrastructure spending, job creation, and education as possible solutions to this urban crisis. While the book’s subject matter is timely, it relies heavily on synthesizing other authors’ arguments, resulting in an unfocused and somewhat derivative analysis of the issues confronting cities. (June)