Movers & Shakers - immigrants revive dying neighborhoods

Reason, Dec, 2000 by Joel Kotkin

If unchecked, a broader ghettoization looms as a distinct possibility, particularly in some of the older areas filled with smaller houses and more mundane apartment buildings. These areas could become--as have some suburbs of Paris--dysfunctional, balkanized losers in the new digital geography. "It's a different place now. We can go either way," says Robert Scott, a former L.A. planning commissioner and leader of the San Fernando Valley's drive to secede from Los Angeles.

Scott grew up in the once all-white, now predominantly Latino community of Van Nuys. "The valley can become a storehouse of poverty and disenchantment," he says, "or it can become a series of neighborhoods with a sense of uniqueness and an investment in its future." As Scott suggests, for these new melting pots, the best course may be not so much to try clinging to their demographic past as to find a way to seize the advantages of their more diverse roles, both economically and demographically. No longer "lily white" enclaves, such communities increasingly must draw their strength, as the great cities before them did, from the energies, skills, and cultural offerings of their increasingly diverse populations.

Joel Kotkin (jkotkin@pacbell.net) is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine University Institute for Public Policy and a research fellow of the Reason Public Policy Institute. Excerpted from the book The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape by Joel Kotkin. Copyright [c]2000 by Joel Kotkin. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House Trade Publishing, a division of Random House Inc.