Are Cities Dying?
...L. Glaeser
Is the city dying? Professional seers, such as Richard Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler,
have argued that information technology is rapidly making the need for faceto-
face contact juid cities obsolete. Experts on the inner city see inevitable
urban decay when they note that 16.7 percent of families in cities with greater than
one million inhabitants live below the poverty line (compsired to 10 percent of
families across the entire United States) and that the probability of being victimized
by crime within a six-month period is 21.7 percent in a city with more thjui one
million inhabitants (compared to 9.4 percent among cities with less than 10,000
people).'
Are they right? Will the 21st century see a decline in urbanization as rapid as
the rise in urbanization over the 19th and 20th centuries? Or will breakthroughs
in information technology and law enforcement transform the blighted inner city
of today into the gentrified polis of tomorrow?
Recent trends are not nearly as pessimistic as the prognosticators. Over the
past century the rise in U.S. urbanization has been dramatic, from 39 percent in
1890 to 53 percent in 1940 to 73 percent in 1970 to 75 percent in 1990. The share
of the population living in the ten largest metropolitan areas has indeed declined
from 23 percent to 21 percent since 1970, but the share of the population living in
' The relative poverty figures are taken from the 1994 City and County Data Book; Glaeser and Sacerdote
(1996) provide the victimization figures.
• Edward L. Glaeser is Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University,
and Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research, both in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
140 Joumal of Economic Perspectives
metropolitan areas with a population of more than 1 million rose from 41 percent
in 1970 to 48,1 percent in 1990. (In...
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