19 September 2021

District 6 Inner-and-Outer Loops + Ex-Urban Fringes Are Creating A Sub-Culture of Re-Segregated Bedroom-Communites

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Social media recoils as Bloomberg praises Amazon’s warehouse-based exurban ‘factory towns’ as ‘the future of working class’

17 Sep, 2021 23:40                                
 
RT International | 11:42 GMT, Sep 19, 2021    
 
17 Sep, 2021 23:40 While many are aghast at the idea, fellow billionaires are praising it.
Insert Amazon's massive new distribution centers, soon to be surrounded by infrastructure built to serve workers, are being compared to Gilded Age 'company towns'. 

The e-commerce empire founded by Jeff Bezos will offer the American working class a better option than scraping to get by in increasingly expensive cities, investment adviser Conor Sen wrote in a Friday op-ed for Bloomberg, the financial news outlet whose namesake is billionaire former New York mayor and failed presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg.

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Fast-forward to update the moving visual we get this stunning infographic derived from the American Community Survey that shows where the growth moved from 2013-2017 >
The ACS data indicates that 89.8% of major metropolitan growth since the 2010 Census has occurred in the suburbs and exurbs that include metrics for City Sector Model categories - and the Earlier Suburbs and Later Suburbs and Exurbs.
[Here in Mesa, the usual reference is to "The Outer Loops" and "The Inner Loops" and west-east "Tech Corridors"] 
Suburban and Exurban expansion essentially follows the earlier car-driven commuter-culture and pre-existing patterns, which was were detailed in the four previous annual analyses.
The study provides a mid-decade snapshot (2015) of US demography.
Link: SuburbanAlliance.com 17 Dec 2018
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Generally, urban core growth was the exception, as only 16 of the 53 major metropolitan areas had population gains in their urban cores.
The predominant trend continues. At least since World War II, most population growth has been concentrated in the suburbs and exurbs.
Despite all the blather and pronouncement about a “back to the city” wave, things have not changed very much overall several decades.

Only 10.2 percent of the major metropolitan growth throughout the United States was in the urban core, which includes the City Sector Model CBD (central business district) and its adjacent Inner Ring.

The Tech Economy’s Untold Story

Job growth is shifting from media-favored “superstar” cities to more sprawling metro regions and the suburban periphery.
Joel Kotkin  January 20, 2019

The decisions by Amazon and Google to expand into the New York area have led some pundits to claim that the nation’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas.
“Big cities won Amazon and everything else,” proclaimed Neil Irwin of the New York Times. “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”
Yet the trends in job creation, particularly in technology, are not nearly as favorable to the “superstars” as some urbanists imagine.
If one looks at data, not press releases, a more nuanced picture emerges, with much of the fastest growth—including in tech—shifting dramatically not to the elite, dense urban centers but to more sprawling regions and the suburban periphery. . .
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That comes with some cautious take-aways however:
SUMMARY:
Increasingly, then, the job market embodies two basic models:
one based on middle-class, middle-income jobs, and another that lives off youthful energy and produces both high-end and lower-end employment.
The media celebrate superstar-city economies but ignore how the vast majority of new employment occurs in lower-cost cities and suburbs, which now generate roughly 80 percent all jobs and most population growth. Suburbs also are seeing a strong influx of the educated, those earning over $75,000, and those between the ages of 30 and 44
About the "Innovation Economy""
Cities may not want to assume the super-high prices, congestion, “woke” politics, and massive inequality that attend the arrival of thousands of temporary, temperamental, young creative types working on the more glamourous—but also more fleeting—side of the innovation economy..
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“Let’s call them ‘factory towns,’” Sen suggests, apparently in an effort to avoid the baggage that accompanies the concept of “company towns.” Popular in the late 19th century among the new breed of mega-corporations – railroads, steel mills, and the like – many of these dormitory communities held workers as veritable prisoners, paying them in scrip that was only redeemable at the company-run store and retaining groups of thuggish Pinkerton “detectives” to stamp out any attempts to unionize.

Amazon’s “factory towns,” however – Sen writes – are supposedly marked by rising wages, massive job creation and the potential for a “higher likelihood of success” in “solving inequality” than “high-cost metropolitan areas.” He believes that those should be encouraged, at one point even calling these ‘Bezosvilles’ the "future of a large segment of the working class.”

The writer waits until the conclusion to acknowledge the “new issues” that will “need addressing,” little details like “adequate amounts of housing, schools and healthcare facilities.”

Sen is known for his ruling-class-friendly takes, which recently included a call for Americans to embrace the idea of “build-to-rent” communities rather than strive to attain the once-commonplace ideal of homeownership. However, many on social media couldn’t help but notice that it took a financier writing for a news outlet belonging to a fellow billionaire to say anything nice at all about Amazon’s silent conquest of the sprawling spaces between American cities – and the populations that call those spaces home.

“Two out of two billionaires agree…” cracked one tweeter.

Others had to control their gag reflex at the idea that Amazon, which made billions of dollars off the Covid-19 pandemic that saw millions lose their livelihoods and is legendary for tight schedules forcing workers to relieve themselves in plastic bottles, was capable of being a friend to the working class.

Some saw the company inching ever closer to ‘The Warehouse,’ a dystopian yet increasingly realistic send-up of modern American mega-capitalism as practiced by an Amazonesque firm called “Cloud,” while others drew their cultural references from the era of the original “company towns.”

Amazon has trumpeted a recent starting wage increase – from $17 per hour to about $18 per hour – in an effort to attract workers who sat out the pandemic collecting unemployment and now need jobs. The company reportedly plans to hire another 125,000 workers in the US and is deploying unusually generous benefits, like hefty sign-on bonuses and tuition assistance, to convince job-searchers it’s a better bet than Wal-Mart or other mega-retailers.

However, Amazon's reputation for union-busting – which in one memorable case reportedly extended to changing the timing of traffic lights outside a warehouse in order to prevent workers from discussing organization efforts – along with eerie micromanaging of employees’ appearance and sloppy attempts to refute workers’ stories of ‘peeing in bottles’ have made it a decidedly unsympathetic character in the class war."

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