THE EMERGENCE OF A CONCEPT.

I first became aware of a line of argument we now understand as Strong Towns in the wake of a police stop that went wrong in Ferguson, Missouri.  One component of that argument is in the decline and fall of formerly vibrant suburbs as creative destruction overtakes the housing stock and commercial infrastructure.  "[O]nce-promising bedroom suburbs have become obsolete and the strip malls and tract houses have trickled down to people less capable of taking care of what they have."

The next step in emergence is its circulation by an academician in one of the Journals of Highbrow Opinion.  "Left-behind suburbs such as Brooklyn Center [a Minneapolis suburb] and Ferguson [the St. Louis suburb] are perfectly tailored to produce inequality, discrimination, and conflict."

I don't know how much time author Will Stancil, a Minnesota legal scholar, spends in the weeds of urban planning or location and land use.  Read the article, dear reader, and note the pure Strong Towns flavor of his claims.

U.S. Census Bureau data indicate that Brooklyn Center is the most rapidly segregating community in Minnesota. In 1990, the city was 90 percent white; its poverty rate was low, at 5 percent. Three decades later, the city is 38 percent white and its poverty rate has tripled, to 15 percent. It is now the poorest major suburb in the Twin Cities region, and it has a higher percentage of residents of color than any other major municipality in the area. Ferguson underwent nearly identical changes in the years before a police officer shot Michael Brown to death in 2014; the city transitioned from 85 percent white in 1980 to 29 percent white in 2010. Over the same period, its poverty rate almost quadrupled.

Might be an interesting conversation to have amongst Strong Towns wonks, New Urbanism wonks (there are differences) and civil rights wonks, which appears to be Mr Stancil's area of concentration.

Like many resegregating suburbs, Brooklyn Center was once a hub of opportunity, where middle- and working-class residents lived side by side. These places have proved attractive to economically successful families of color seeking better schools and an escape from the discrimination and disinvestment that are endemic in segregated central-city neighborhoods. Black Americans especially are migrating to the suburbs in record numbers. Just since 2000, the urban Black population in major metropolitan areas has fallen by about 5 percent, while the suburban Black population has grown by more than 40 percent, according to my calculations.

In wealthy new suburbs and exurbs, where McMansions line endless cul-de-sacs, housing that working-class families of color can afford is scarce. Inner-ring suburbs typically have an older housing stock, including small postwar houses, more rental units, and cheap high-density housing. Families migrating from the central cities of a metro area tend to cluster in these more affordable communities; so do immigrants. (Brooklyn Center has the highest share of foreign-born residents in the Twin Cities area.) Other, more nefarious forces also funnel nonwhite families toward the inner suburbs—such as the practice of discriminatory racial “steering,” wherein real-estate agents are more likely to show families of color homes in already-diverse neighborhoods. As a result, the demographics of many older suburbs are shifting fast.

Some of what he's calling attention to might be driven by a mix of snob zoning and mass-production of homogeneous new houses.  There's something else at work.  "School changes have a major impact on city demographics, because many affluent residents with children will leave if they feel that the percentage of minority students and poor students is too high."  But don't you dare call attention to the toxic culture that sometimes comes with diversity, or to the cultural collapse more generally, at least not in the pages of The Atlantic.  At best you get, "Tragically, the residents of resegregated suburbs face the same obstacles that many had attempted to escape by leaving major cities: struggling schools, unemployment, poverty, and police violence."  Suggest any correlations, let alone causation, between those two phenomena noted in those quotes, at your peril.