LAUSR

The Divided City by Alan Mallach “is a story of what has really been going on in America’s older industrial cities since the turn of the millennium, why it is happening, [and] what that means for the future” (p. 10). Mallach is not writing about the coastal cities like New York City that have received the most attention, but rather “the much larger number of cities in the American heartland, the former industrial cities that people are now calling “legacy cities,” places like Buffalo or Cleveland...” (p. xiii). Mallach is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Community Progress in Washington, DC, teaches in the graduate city planning program at Pratt Institute (Brooklyn), and formerly was Director of Housing and Economic Development in Trenton, New Jersey. Divided City benefits from Mallach’s site visits to community development agencies in legacy cities across America, but the book’s main strength is the author’s willingness to challenge liberal orthodoxies: “To varying degrees, some of these [anti-poverty] models make good liberals—and some who are not liberals—cringe” (p. 234). Challenging conventional liberal thinking is necessary to meaningfully address the damages imposed on the poor who live in concentrated poverty and who experience daily discrimination. After a short introduction, Mallach sets the stage for the rest of the book by highlighting the rise and fall of the industrial city and the emergence of the post-industrial city. The federal government abandoned “the pretense of having an urban policy” around 1990 (p. 28) and the decline of these cities during the 1990s was made worse by the arrival of the crack cocaine epidemic. Turnaround began in the late 1990s, with changes in three population characteristics playing particularly important roles in urban revitalization: the rise of the millennial generation; the decline in the traditional married couple family; and widespread immigration from Latin America, Asia and Africa. Major universities and major medical centers (“eds” and “meds”) replaced heavy industries as job generators and became anchor institutions in urban revitalization efforts. Nevertheless, ghetto poverty has remained “the inescapable elephant in the room of American society” (p. 75) and the boundaries of America’s ghettos have shifted outward to include many inner suburbs. The Divided City makes important contributions towards understanding both gentrification and neighborhood decline. Although gentrification in legacy cities is important, it pales in significance in relation to neighborhood decline. Contrary to what one reads in many journal and newspaper articles “predominantly African American neighborhoods are less, not more, likely to experience gentrification than largely white, working-class neighborhoods” (p. 111). Another unexpected finding is that direct displacement (families forced to move because of rent rises) is relatively rare and the larger problem is longterm loss of affordability. While some of the causes of neighborhood decline are fairly obvious, that is, the decline of the middle class, the decrease in the number of childrearing married couples (which reduces demand for single family homes), and the disappearance of blue collar jobs, another cause – the Great Recession of 2008 – is not. “The insanity that possessed mortgage lending beginning near the end of the last century” (p. 134) led to a sharp rise