In the winter of 1979 I stood on the Armitage El platform as train after train whizzed by. I recall the scene and the people waiting with me vividly. The opening of Alan Ehrenreich’s New Republic article gets it dead wrong, describing trains “from the northwest side filled up with middle-class white riders near the far end of the line, leaving no room for poorer people trying to board on inner-city platforms.” Ehrenreich contends:
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be “demographic inversion.” Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.
Is the article’s central thesis any more accurate than its opening? What’s your take?