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Sociologists also, however, acknowledge that residents of some suburban communities have social bonds that are very tightly knit — perhaps even too tightly knit. Whyte’s study of a growing suburban community in The Organization Man shows how many residents were kept almost dizzyingly busy with schedules of card games, church meetings, and other social functions. Residents were able to rely on one another for everything from child care to a stick of butter to emotional support. Far from being isolating, the suburbs were intensely social. The suburbs’ relative homogeneity was both a cause and an effect of that aspect of suburban life.
At first, sociologists like Gans were concerned at the “white flight” represented by suburban growth, with relatively wealthy — often white — city dwellers abandoning urban neighborhoods for the shiny, safe suburbs. As those mid-century suburbs have aged, though, they’ve become less desirable and more diverse. Many well-to-do families have left older suburbs like Levittown; some heading for the newer, shiner “exurbs” that lie beyond the suburbs and others heading back into the city, where they contribute to the process of gentrification (see the section “Gentrification and the new creative class” later in this chapter).
Many post-war American suburbs are now populated by a diverse mix of longtime residents and new arrivals priced out of their inner-city neighborhoods. Some are home to thriving enclaves of immigrants from places like Africa and East Asia. Though the houses may still be “cookie-cutter,” their residents are anything but.
Life in the City: Perils and Promise
As they have always been, cities are places of great hope, great promise, and — like any place — real dangers. Some people live in cities because they’ve always dreamed of being there, others find city life to be a nightmare from which they can’t escape. In this section, I address the conflicts and tensions inherent in city life.
The upper class, the lower class, and the underclass
Diversity of all sorts is among the essential features of big-city life, but not all urban neighborhoods are particularly diverse. Some neighborhoods are primarily occupied by wealthy people who own lavish homes or high-rise condominiums, some are primarily occupied by working-class people who
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live in modest homes or rent decent but not luxurious apartments, and others are downright rough, occupied by people who wish they could afford to live elsewhere.
As I note earlier in the section “Changing Neighborhoods,” an essential insight of urban sociology is that your neighborhood isn’t just a place where you live, it’s a place that affects your life. Residents of expensive neighborhoods don’t just get the nice, expensive house or apartment they’re paying for; they also get everything that goes with living in that neighborhood:
Good schools
Well-kept public spaces and parks
Well-maintained roads and sidewalks
Good police protection
A thriving business community, with multiple shopping and dining options
Those things make easier the lives of people who already live in relative comfort. In theory, these things should all be available to all residents of a city — but in reality, poorer neighborhoods tend to lack those amenities. Residents of a poor neighborhood are likely relatively poor to begin with; in addition to having to get by with limited money, they suffer the disadvantages of living in a poor neighborhood:
Overcrowded, understaffed schools
Public spaces and parks that are not as accessible or well-maintained as those in wealthier areas of town, and that may sometimes play host to dangerous or criminal activities
Roads and sidewalks that are poorly maintained
A police presence that may be inadequate, hostile, or so overwhelmed with serious crimes that isn’t very responsive to ordinary residents’ concerns
A depressed business community, with few job opportunities and limited shopping options
To find jobs, good schools, and reasonably priced consumer goods, residents of poor neighborhoods are often forced to travel long distances by car — or, if they can’t afford a car, by public transportation. At home, they may face physical danger and other challenges. Plus, they likely find it relatively difficult to make the social connections that will help them get up and out of poverty.
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To describe these exceptionally challenging circumstances, sociologists sometimes use the term underclass. Sociologist William Julius Wilson, in his 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged, argued that members of the urban underclass are those left behind when people who could afford to fled the city for the suburbs. As manufacturing jobs dried up in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, members of the urban underclass were especially vulnerable and had a hard time maintaining steady employment, sometimes turning to crime, drug use, and other destructive activities.
Though a disproportionate share of the underclass are minorities, Wilson believes that the challenges of the underclass have less to do with racism than with simple economic realities. “White flight,” says Wilson, wasn’t just white flight — it was the flight of people of all races who could afford to leave the troubled inner cities. The disappearance of middle-class blacks might,
in some ways, have created much more of a challenge for inner-city AfricanAmerican communities than did the disappearance of middle-class whites.
Gentrification and the new creative class
Elijah Anderson’s 1990 book Streetwise tells the stories of two neighboring inner-city communities: “Northton,” a predominantly black neighborhood plagued with low employment, high crime rates, poor health, and other problems; and “the Village,” a diverse neighborhood that’s on the upswing.
Many Northton residents could be described as members of the underclass, and Anderson notes that the community is home to fewer and fewer role models as the guru-like “old heads” of the neighborhood die, move out, or are simply marginalized as young people in the community fall under the sway of less constructive influences. By contrast, Anderson’s Village neighborhood is steadily becoming wealthier — and whiter. The challenge faced by the Village is the challenge of gentrification.
The word “gentrification” is derived from the word “gentry,” which describes wealthy landowners in traditional European society. Gentrification is the process by which neighborhoods become steadily wealthier, especially innercity neighborhoods that have long been relatively affordable.
If you live in a city, you’ve seen gentrification happening, even in you haven’t heard the process called by that name. Think about a neighborhood in your city where the “creative types” have been moving — the artists, the single professionals, the people who enjoy living where “the action” is. It may be a working-class neighborhood, it may be a “tough” neighborhood downtown. The new residents move there because it’s affordable and
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conveniently located, but as more and more well-educated people with relatively high incomes move into the neighborhood, you start to see the signs of gentrification:
“Hip” bars and coffee shops
Art galleries and theaters
New construction, including housing renovations and expansions
These things all serve to, over time, increase the desirability of the neighborhood — which makes houses and apartments there more valuable, which makes them more expensive to buy or rent. This can create tension between the new residents and the longtime residents, who not only see the character of their neighborhood changed, but also find themselves increasingly priced out of their own communities.
Neighborhoods have always gone up and down in value over time, but gentrification has particularly been a concern among sociologists and urban planners over the past few decades, as inner-city neighborhoods have become more desirable to what Richard Florida, a scholar of urban life, calls “the creative class.”
According to Florida, members of the “creative class” are becoming increasingly central to economic life in developed countries. As manufacturing jobs move overseas, life in countries like Germany, the United States, and Australia is increasingly dominated by people who essentially think for a living. They may be software engineers, businesspeople, artists, or filmmakers. What they have in common is that they thrive in diverse, dense communities that give them many opportunities for intellectual and social stimulation. Where do they find these communities? Often, in inner cities.
Are those inner cities ready for the creative class? Ready or not, here they come.
Order and disorder on the streets
Chances are that today, your city looks a lot like mine, Minneapolis.
There’s a central city that’s home to important economic, political, and cultural institutions; within that city there are pricey residential neighborhoods, hip “up and coming” neighborhoods, sturdy working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, neighborhoods home to large (and growing) immigrant populations, and “tough” neighborhoods where you don’t want to spend too much time after dark.
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There are affordable inner-ring suburbs where life is often still regarded as “nice,” but not as nice as it was in the 1950s, when they were the place to be. They’re still a place to be, but not the place to be.
There are exurbs, where young families and older retirees move when they want the space and comfortable safety that the inner-ring suburbs once offered. Much of the city’s new-home construction is happening here.
People often move to the exurbs and suburbs because they seem safe, and in some ways they are: Though suburbanites have their share of problems, crime rates are generally lower in the suburbs. Most importantly, though, the suburbs feel safer.
What is it that makes a neighborhood feel safe? What is it that makes a community feel like a place you want to live, or don’t want to live? Why are crimes so much more frequent in some neighborhoods than in others?
In Chapter 2, as an example of a sociological study that’s helped policymakers find out what “really matters,” I cite a study by Robert J. Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush that surprisingly challenged the idea that small signs of seeming disorder in a neighborhood — for example, broken windows in houses — cause people to think those are lawless places where anything goes. It is true, found Sampson and Raudenbush, that people are more likely to commit crimes in places they perceive to be “disordered,” but they judge urban disorder not by the condition of windows and walls but by the people they see there. Specifically — and unfortunately — they tend to associate a significant minority presence in a neighborhood with “disorder.” (In fact, this holds true even for observers who are themselves members of minority groups.)
Of course, all cities are disordered to some extent; that’s part of their appeal. In his book The Geography of Nowhere, social critic James Howard Kunstler observes that what makes cities exciting for some — and scary for others — is that, unlike in a suburban community, when you walk down a city street you have no idea who you’re going to run into. If you live in the city, you’re going to have at least glancing interactions every day with a lot of people who are quite different from you and whom you may see only once in your life.
What should a city look like? Kunstler is a proponent of a philosophy called “New Urbanism.” He and other New Urbanists believe that cities worked best before they were so sharply divided into commercial and residential zones, when urban areas had a mix of uses. They tend to favor:
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Affordable housing integrated with more expensive, luxurious housing.
Housing integrated with commercial establishments — for example, apartments above stores.
Pedestrian-friendly public plazas.
Accessible, affordable public transportation.
Can New Urbanism bring diverse, lively environments to the inner city? In some cases it’s worked, but in other cases — for example, a Disneysponsored New Urbanist city called Celebration — it’s fallen flat.
New Urbanism may be a useful way of thinking about successful city spaces, but whether or not the Chicago School sociologists were 100 percent right in thinking of cities as “ecosystems,” it’s clear that successful neighborhoods are like successful natural ecosystems: They’re hard to build from scratch, they’re tremendously valuable, and they’re surprisingly fragile.
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Part V
Sociology and
Your Life
In this part . . .
Enough about the whole wide world — what about you? What does sociology have to do with your life?
As it turns out, quite a lot. In this part, I explain how your life is influenced by your society — from birth to death, and at all points along the way.
Chapter 15
Get Born, Get a Job, Get a Kid, Get Out of Here: The Family and the Life Course
In This Chapter
Understanding the social construction of age
Running the course of life
Taking care of health over the life course
Looking at family life past and present
In a recent production of J. B. Priestley’s play When We Are Married at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, audience members enjoyed the story
of three couples who were married on the same date in 1883 meeting to celebrate their shared 25th anniversary. The actors were, or were made to appear to be, in their 60s. No one except me seemed to find that peculiar — but they should have! Why? Because in 1883, the average age of marriage for women was under 21. The actors should have been in their 40s!
As with all other social norms, it’s easy to assume that the way things are in your society is the way they’ve always been, or the way they are everywhere else. That’s rarely true, though; and it’s especially not true with respect to the timing and progression of steps through the life course. Different people, at different times and in different places, have had widely varying ideas about what makes “a good life.”
In this chapter, I explain how the life course itself is socially constructed. First, I discuss the social construction of age (at both ends of the spectrum, childhood and old age); then, I explain how demographers study the life course. Finally, I explain how sociologists study the always-timely issue of health care, and how family life has changed over time.