Downtown housing affordability is an international problem.

Interesting article:  Alan Ehrenhalt argues in The New Republic that cities throughout North America are undergoing a "demographic inversion," in which the center city is once again becoming home to the well-off rather than the poor.

    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.


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