What Urbanism Lost When Wokism Was Defeated, Part 1

This is going to seem like navel-gazing for a moment, but ultimately the point emerges. Please bear with me.

Remember Raj Chetty? Of course you do. He is the professor of economics at Harvard University who rose to fame in the 2010s articulating his research on economic equity and mobility in America. This paragraph on his Wikipedia page sums up his work well:

“Chetty’s contribution to economic mobility started with his 2014 paper, “Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” In this paper, Chetty discussed the effects of geography on economic mobility. He used information from deidentified federal income tax records, which gave him records from 1996 to 2012. The research’s main focus was on intergenerational mobility in the United States as a whole. Chetty used the parent’s income between the years of 1996-2000 when the participants were between the ages of 15–20. Chetty concluded that 5 significant variables strongly correlated with intergenerational mobility. Those variables are residential segregation, income inequality, school quality, social capital, and family structure. The authors concluded that intergenerational mobility is primarily a local problem. Meaning that place-based policies are better fitting for each city. This allows for each city to be able to make a plan and policy that will best help the people in that city that is affected by the constrictions of intergenerational mobility.”

I’m not an economist, but an urbanist who wants to make cities into better places. My non-academic perspective has led me to a position very similar to Chetty. My takeaway from Chetty’s work has always been that the five variables he highlights are the critical missing pieces in the revitalization of the cities I care for most in this country, the cities of the Rust Belt, Great Lakes, and broader Midwest. I don’t know what his views are on this, but I’ve always believed these kinds of findings would result in greater attention being given to these issues, and better policies to improve cities.

Chetty was a hot commodity in the 2010s. In 2019, Chetty was a keynote speaker at a Cleveland Fed conference called “Connecting People and Places to Opportunity.” I presented a session at the same conference on segregation and declining economic mobility in Chicago’s south suburbs. I remember his presentation. I thought it was great, and I thought the five variables he highlighted were going to move into the forefront of urbanism discourse.

I started the Corner Side Yard on the Blogger platform in 2012. Running that blog was a lot of fun. I think I was able to produce some pretty good urbanism insights from a Black and Rust Belt perspective. I think it was especially useful in providing a countering view to the prevailing perspectives around cities in the 2010s.

However, it only recently dawned on me how closely linked my blog’s success was tied to the popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the later, broader woke movement (or DEI if you like; I was never a fan of the misappropriation of the Black slang term “woke” anyway).

The first real surge in traffic with the first iteration of the blog happened in 2013, coinciding with the Trayvon Martin shooting by George Zimmerman. I first wrote about that sad event shortly after it occurred in 2012, but reposted this post a year later, after Zimmerman’s acquittal. From that point on the blog took off, reaching a peak in the summer of 2015. Afterwards the blog slipped some before reaching a lower peak in 2017. Then there was a steady decline from 2017 until 2019, and another lower peak in 2020, immediately following the murder of George Floyd.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: protests against police brutality in 2016, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.