The Getty is showing the 1972 video “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” tonight. Although I won’t be able to make it, I thought it’d be appropriate to post a draft of this essay that I’ve written on Banham and Los Angeles. Footnotes not included. This is a teaser. For the notes””?and much more””?you’ll need to buy Pat Morton’s edited book on Taste, which should be out in 2006 and promises to be well worth the money.
cities
Inner Cities Still Failing
Has the Network City solved the problem of America’s declining inner cites? No, and neither has government aid.
A new study by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner Citysuggests not. Defining Inner Cities as “U.S. census tracts having at least a 20 percent poverty rate or two of these factors ”“ a poverty or unemployment rate one-and-a-half times or higher than their surrounding metropolitan area or median household income one-half or less that of the surrounding metropolitan area,” the study concludes that neither tax incentives nor aid programs have helped stem the loss of jobs.
Moreover, the study found that nearly half of the country’s 82 largest municipalities lost jobs from 1995 to 2003 while only one of the surrounding metropolitan areas shed jobs during that period.
See the AP story.