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The New York metropolitan area is one of the oldest, largest, and perhaps most complex urban region in the United States (U.S.). Its 23.7 million residents live across four states, produce a GDP of more than $1.7 trillion, are governed by a fragmented political system, and experience persistently high degrees of geographic and racial/ethnic inequality and segregation. This chapter investigates the evolving spatial organization of occupation and race across the metropolitan area. While white professionals have traditionally lived in an outer ring of suburbs and blue-collar immigrant and minority groups have lived closer to the city center, our research shows that the forces of gentrification and minority and immigrant suburbanization have been turning the metropolitan area inside out. Specifically, young, usually white, professionals are increasingly located in and around the central city whereas many working-class minorities have shifted away from it. At the heart of this spatial reordering lie the diminishing plurality of native-born whites within the region and the increasing share of immigrant minority groups, especially for foreign-born Hispanics and Asians. This trend has lessened the share of white males in better occupations even as the region’s occupational structure slowly but inexorably tilts toward managerial and professional occupations. Technology is transforming white-collar work as blue-collar work continues to disappear. Dramatic shifts are thus afoot, yet inequality and segregation remain high. We argue that these changes in the spatial organization of the metropolitan area challenge us to see these inequalities from a new vantage point. As elites are now more likely to live among less advantaged groups, this may provide the social basis for new thinking.

The author's family history suggests a variety of ways in which European ethnicity, although less visible as cultural distinctiveness, still has a strong relationship with different forms of group behaviour and group self-understanding.

Inheriting the City presents the results of a major research project on the children of immigrants in New York City, focusing on eight groups, five of which are immigrant groups: Dominicans; South Americans from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru; English-speaking West Indians; the Chinese; and Russian Jews. The three comparison groups are native whites, native blacks, and Puerto Ricans. The symposium allowed three critics who have followed this project from its earliest phases to assess the results and the authors to respond to the issues raised by their commentaries.

Despite reasons to expect otherwise, immigrant political incorporation occurs more rapidly in the United States than in many Western European states. We provide evidence to support that contentious statement and reasons to explain it. Four features distinguish the United States in this context. First, both in terms of state formation and population growth, it was predicated on immigration, voluntary and otherwise, whereas European states came into being and grew mainly through consolidation of and natural increase among resident populations. That history shapes public attitudes toward immigration policy and immigrants. Second, unlike European states, the United States has a long history of domestic racial subordination and a recent history of efforts to overcome it, and this provides a template for incorporating new immigrant groups. Third, social welfare and school systems differ in ways that slightly facilitate incorporation for immigrants to the United States. Finally, the American electoral s...

Over the last five decades, immigration has profoundly transformed the population of metropolitan New York, long divided by race and class. The almost-forgotten ‘underclass’ debate established that New York was the nation's capital of concentrated poverty, which grew significantly worse during the 1970s and 1980s. Though more recent data show that New York has achieved a remarkable turnaround since 1990, most probably associated with immigration, it remains a city of economic extremes and stubbornly high poverty. Concern about where new immigrants—and their children—might fit into this matrix of urban inequality led several leading social scientists to hypothesise that some members of the second generation would be downwardly mobile. To investigate this possibility, in 1999 and 2000, the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York (ISGMNY) surveyed 3,415 young people aged 18 to 32 years, from five immigrant and three native-born racial and ethnic backgrounds, about their life trajectories. This p...

The example of individual cities can certainly provide important lessons for urban theory, but it is unwise for social scientists to think that any one city provides a controlling template for urban development in this (or any other) period. Instead, we need to base our theories on why patterns vary across cities. In this respect, New York offers a fruitful counterpoint to Los Angeles, with Chicago occupying an intermediate position on a number of critical dimensions.

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states – California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According to the 2000 census, the two largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and New York, accounted for one third of all immigrants ( http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/demoprofiles.html ). While immigrants moved into many new areas during the 1990s, making the challenge of incorporating their children a national issue, their concentration in our largest cities remained pronounced.

In recent decades two broad trends in American society have been well–documented: rising income inequality and rising segregation of economic classes across space in metropolitan areas. The thesis of this article is that rising economic segregation is both a cause of rising economic inequality and amplifies its effects in ways that do not showup in the income statistics. The article synthesizes the evidence on the contextual effects of economic segregation in three areas: 1) jobs and income; 2) public services; and 3) retail services. Economic segregation does not only undermine equal opportunity, it also damages American democracy. Although more research is needed on the effects of economic segregation, the evidence is more than sufficient to call for public action.

International audience

Prepared for Panel 30-3, “Group Mobilization, Partisanship, Ideas, and Leadership: The Los Angeles and New York Mayoral Elections of 2005,” September 2, 2006 at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia

Like other old blue collar cities of the Northeast and Midwest, New York City and its surrounding metropolitan area have faced some serious headwinds from deindustrialization, disinvestment, racial succession, white flight, social and cultural conflict, and many other adverse force. Like many other old industrial cities, New York went through a turbulent period of economic and social decline from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. In New York City’s case, this involved a public sector fiscal crisis and high levels of residential property abandonment and arson as well as a more generalized decline of population and employment. Yet unlike the many other once-proud cities that have had to adjust to a lesser status over time, New York has rebounded markedly from its low point in the mid-1970s. Today, it is hard to believe that broad swaths of the New York City terrain had essentially no market value only thirty years ago. Instead, “luxury loft buildings” are rising next to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and a high priced luxury hotel has been built next to the Gowanus Canal, erstwhile scene of dead bodies and raw sewage overflows during heavy rains. What accounts for this dramatic turn-around? How and why did New York City prove to be so resilient, when its 19 century rivals along the East Coast, Philadelphia and th Baltimore, have continued to lose population steadily, as have Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, and even Chicago? This paper considers some provisional answers to that question.

This article was presented at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April 2005, "Urban Dynamics in New York City." The goal of the conference was threefold: to examine the historical transformations of the engine-of-growth industries in New York and distill the main determinants of the city's historical dominance as well as the challenges to its continued success; to study the nature and evolution of immigration flows into New York; and to analyze recent trends in a range of socioeconomic outcomes, both for the general population and recent immigrants more specifically.

We believe the time has come to undertake a detailed study of the school experience, labor market outcomes, and social incorporation of the leading edge of the second generation as it enters adulthood. Specifically, we are now in the early stages of study which will include a) a large scale telephone survey, b) in-depth, open-ended, in-person follow-up interview with a subsample of survey respondents, and c) strategically positioned ethnographies.

We believe the time has come to undertake a detailed study of the school experience, labor market outcomes, and social incorporation of the leading edge of the second generation as it enters adulthood. Specifically, we are now in the early stages of study which will include a) a large scale telephone survey; b) in-depth, open-ended, in-person follow-up interview with a sub-sample of survey respondents; and c) strategically positioned ethnographies.

power and its structuralist critics has produced a rich literature over the last quarter of a century. Beginning in the early 1960s, pluralist political scientists conducted a highly successful attack on the earlier elite-oriented tradition practiced by sociologists, establishing their views as normal science, at least within their own discipline. From the mid-1970s onward, however, a younger generation mounted structuralist critiques that undermined the pluralist point of view without managing to supplant it, in part because their views, too, had defects. More recently, some students of urban politics have attempted to synthesize the strengths of both approaches. The late 1980s thus offer a vantage point for asking where this debate has brought our understanding of the relationship between the urban political order and the economic and social environments in which it operates, the degree of its autonomy from and influence on these environments, the proper way to conceptualize urban power relations, and the process of growth and decay with

Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb present some straightforward and convincing theses in their admirable work Protest Is Not Enough. Urban policy responsiveness to minority interests, they argue, depends not so much on the direct impact of protest as on the advent of a dominant liberal coalition in which blacks and Hispanics have some role. Where such coalitions have not succeeded, racial exclusion and policy resistance tend to hold sway. Where blacks or Hispanics have played a leading role in bringing such a coalition to power, or in Browning, Marshall and Tabb's terms where political incorporation has been greatest, then policy results favor minority interests. Political incorporation depends on protest and electoral mobilization among blacks and Hispanics combined with favorable white attitudes toward minority interests. The size of the minority community and its leadership capacity in turn explain minority political mobilization.By these propositions, New York City should be characterized by substantial black and Hispanic political incorporation and the resulting targeting of policy outputs on minority interests. In the 1980 Census, New York's population was 23.9% black and 19.9% Hispanic; these numbers may have been substantially undercounted. In any case, two-thirds of a decade later New York is clearly a majority minority city. Black political participation dates from Adam Clayton Powell and Benjamin Davis' election to the city council in 1941 and 1943. The first Puerto Rican assemblyman was elected on the Republican and American Labor Party lines in 1938. Subsequently, both groups have had a long and sophisticated history of political participation. From the 1960s onward, a new generation of leadership led both groups to assert their political demands more strongly. The Lindsay administration afforded a national model of how a new liberal coalition could experiment with new forms of political incorporation. Voting in state and national elections would suggest the city is on the liberal end of the urban political spectrum. In short, by Western lights New York should be a model of strong minority incorporation and the consequent targeting of city policies toward minority interests. The problem, however, is that New York City has not incorporated minorities and, depending on what indicators are chosen, has not produced policies that are especially aimed toward minorities.