Blowing In The Wind: Why Do So Many Cities Have Poor East Ends?

[M II A II R II K]

Blowing In The Wind: Why Do So Many Cities Have Poor East Ends?


12 May 2017

Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...poor-east-ends

PDF Study: http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/te...sercdp0208.pdf

.....

A British-biased list of cities with poor eastern districts would include: London, Paris, New York, Toronto, Bristol, Manchester, Brighton and Hove, Oxford, Glasgow, Helsinki and Casablanca. No doubt there are some cities where poverty clusters in the west, but they seem harder to find; perhaps Delhi and Sydney?

- One theory is that it’s all about air pollution. In the middle latitudes where most of the world’s cities can be found, the prevailing winds are westerlies, which means they blow to the east. Crudely, it has long been thought that they might take smoke and odours with them, and now a new study by Stephan Heblich, Alex Trew and Yanos Zylberberg for the Spatial Economics Research Centre suggests this theory might be right. --- “This anecdotal discussion about pollution in the centre of cities and smoke drifting to the east is something that we have been documenting very precisely,” Zylberberg tells me. “Basically what we’ve been seeing in the past, because of pollution and wind patterns, is rich people escaping the eastern parts of town, because they were very polluted.”

- For their research, published last November, Zylberberg and his colleagues built simulations of 70 British cities, including the sites of 5,000 industrial chimneys, as they would have been in 1880. Using mathematical models they claim to have been able to reconstruct the movement of air within the given topography and work out where the pollution would end up. They concluded that areas of high pollution were indeed more likely to become deprived areas, and found that they were generally in the east. --- “Past pollution explains up to 20% of the observed neighbourhood segregation whether captured by the shares of blue collar workers and employees, house prices or official deprivation indices,” the paper says. It concluded that no British cities have wind patterns which ought to create a polluted west.

- They also discovered that the deprivation of an area faded when the pollution did. “You can see this difference at the end of the 19th century,” says Zylberberg. “All neighbourhoods would converge back to the mean after that. The poor districts are not very poor. The rich districts are not very rich, and once pollution disappears, then everything comes back to normal.” --- If pollution was severely concentrated to start with, however, segregation persisted even after it had gone, as the perception of schools, public amenities, infrastructure and reputation made the pattern hard to shift. Gentrification has begun to change this, but only in big, wealthy cities like Paris and London – and only recently.

- The eastward drift is not the only pattern of deprivation. Big cities that grow rapidly often develop rings of poverty around a more affluent core, as poor people arrive from rural areas looking for work and have to live in the cheapest place they can find, which tends to be far away. At any rate, by the time these people arrive, it is the only place left to build new homes. Moscow and Paris, again, are good examples, as are most Chinese cities. Although, some of the new urban centres being built from scratch by the authorities may turn out differently. One country is a famous exception to this rule. In the US, the suburban ring is generally a place of greater peace and affluence, while the inner cities are often associated with deprivation.

- In the old world – mostly Europe and Asia – cities were already large and well established when industrialisation came. This meant the flood of poor workers had to go and live on the outskirts, and many of the factories went there, too, leaving the centre – especially its western section – looking old, clean and civilised. --- New world cities, on the other hand, were often built around industrial centres. This made people wealthy, upon which they escaped to the suburbs by car – and defended them vigorously against intruders. Indeed, British cities with their leafy commuter belts and partially reclaimed centres are often quite American, by European standards. Perhaps we have our own strain of national distrust as well.

.....

[Crawford]

The wealthiest district in NYC is the eastern upper half of the core (the UES). And if you move further out, you have generally middle class Queens.

So why is NYC included in having "poor east ends"?

[Steely Dan]

chicago doesn't really have an east side because of lake michigan (though there is a neighborhood called "east side" down on the far southeast side).

however, the conventional wisdom around here says that most heavy industry (steel mills, refineries, etc.) was moved south to the calumet river and into NW Indiana in the early 20th century to get the worst pollution out of the central part of the city. the fact that those places were also a little bit further east due to the bottom of lake michigan curving eastward was just gravy, i suppose.

[Centropolis]

yes, so, *almost* any u.s. city worth its 19th century industrial salt has an (originally) poor east end due to prevailing winds, with exception of cities located on a coast with no east end. cities that were less reliant on industry probably not so much.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

chicago doesn't really have an east side because of lake michigan (though there is a neighborhood called "east side" down on the far southeast side).

however, the conventional wisdom around here says that most heavy industry (steel mills, refineries, etc.) was moved south to the calumet river and into NW Indiana in the early 20th century to get the worst pollution out of the central part of the city. the fact that those places were also a little bit further east was just gravy, i suppose.

yeah, i was going to say...northwest indiana is this east side.

[Centropolis]

it's very obvious in many cities in the u.s. that have large refining clusters where the heaviest industry has historically been located. infrequently the wind will come from the east or northeast and the entire region is frought with #MYSTERYSMELL hashtags and frantic news segments.

[dubu]

In Oregon all the cities were build on the east side of a river and it's older then on the west side. For bend and Portland at least.

[Centropolis]

wikipedia.com

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by dubu

In Oregon all the cities were build on the east side of a river and it's older then on the west side. For bend and Portland at least.

huh? downtown portland is on the west bank of the wilamette. how is the eastern bank older than downtown portland?

[Crawford]

Detroit's industrial belt and worst air quality tends to be SW, along the river. This is also probably the least desirable directional.

That said, Detroit's East Side and eastern suburbs are blue collar, and there is significant industrial base. The "favored quarter" is North/Northwest.

[dubu]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

huh? downtown portland is on the west bank of the wilamette. how is the eastern bank older than downtown portland?

Oregon city was building houses in the 1840's. The east side is a lot older in general

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

That said, Detroit's East Side and eastern suburbs are blue collar, and there is significant industrial base. The "favored quarter" is North/Northwest.

the pointes kind of muck up that whole dynamic a bit, don't they?

[dave8721]

Maybe Miami's east end would be Miami Beach? So no, its not poor. Our prevailing winds tend to blow east to west anyway (we are in the yellow band below)

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

the pointes kind of muck up that whole dynamic a bit, don't they?

Yeah, but they're a small exception to the rule. There are almost 900k people in Macomb County, and it's definitely blue collar overall. And East Side of Detroit, with few exceptions, is poor.

Very generally speaking, wealth in Metro Detroit is in Oakland County, especially along Woodward Ave. corridor and some points west.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

yes, so, *almost* any u.s. city worth its 19th century industrial salt has an (originally) poor east end due to prevailing winds, with exception of cities located on a coast with no east end. cities that were less reliant on industry probably not so much.

Pittsburgh -- non-coastal and a global giant of industry -- has long had its wealthiest, most vibrant neighborhoods in its East End.

Same for Cleveland.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Detroit's industrial belt and worst air quality tends to be SW, along the river. This is also probably the least desirable directional.

That said, Detroit's East Side and eastern suburbs are blue collar, and there is significant industrial base. The "favored quarter" is North/Northwest.

Southwest Detroit is technically east and would fit the pattern of being "east." It just happens to be west of the arbitrary east/west dividing line due to the curvature of Michigan's east coast. Southwest Detroit is literally as far east as you can go without falling into a body of water.

[Sun Belt]

Manhattan and Brooklyn are downwind from heavy industry in New Jersey.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by pj3000

Pittsburgh -- non-coastal and a global giant of industry -- has long had its wealthiest, most vibrant neighborhoods in its East End.

Same for Cleveland.

man i really stuck it out there i guess but i guess i think of industrial cities that were sizable in the 1880s...cleveland was a straggler even for the midwest, as was detroit. at some point perhaps transportation tech overpowered the older victorian considerations. i think of coal soot and endless mud splattered brick rows.

pittsburgh i think of as the wealthier living above and poor below, like cincinnati, sort of a vertical version of the west end dynamic.

[cabasse]

atlanta's east side is arguably its second most favored quarter (after the suburban northside that is buckhead) and probably contains its most best/most interesting 'historic urban' neighborhoods.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

man i really stuck it out there i guess but i guess i think of industrial cities that were sizable in the 1880s...cleveland was a straggler even for the midwest, as was detroit. at some point perhaps transportation tech overpowered the older victorian considerations. i think of coal soot and endless mud splattered brick rows.

pittsburgh i think of as the wealthier living above and poor below, like cincinnati, sort of a vertical version of the west end dynamic.

Not sure what you really mean, but that's ok. I think all US cities were pretty much "industrial" in the 1880s. And I imagine that both Cleveland and Pittsburgh were considered sizable cities back then... they still had to be at least among the nation's larger cities, no? Maybe not right in the top 10 nationally prior to immigration at the turn of the century, but they were still pretty big.

Pittsburgh really wasn't a wealthy above/poor below situation though. More of a flat/hilly situation. The opposite could be somewhat true, really, considering that much of the poorest mill/mine/factory/wharf worker housing in the whoel region was haphazardly built above "town" on the steep hillsides, while wealthier housing existed in neighborhoods with commercial districts on flat land. At the turn of the century and into the early 1900s, Pittsburgh's East End neighborhoods became the most fashionable for the upper crust of society... this broad area is also relatively flat, and the hilly areas contained within were populated with more modest housing and workers.