Rule Five: Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages

Abstract

In the developed world we take for granted that the city is separated into functional zones organized by land use law: a commercial zone here, a residential district there, and over there, as far away as possible, an industrial zone. We tend to forget that the “rationalization” of land use is a largely 20th-century phenomenon and one that is largely confined to the so-called Industrial West. This radical segregation of the landscape of work from the landscape of shopping or home is being rapidly undercut by global shifts in the nature of work and who derives the economic benefits of these labors. As intelligent and semi-intelligent computer-aided tools eliminate middle-level skill occupations, we are left with a stratified workforce of highly specialized and highly paid workers in finance, technology, medicine, and engineering on one hand and a much larger cohort of low-skill, poorly paid service workers on the other. We now find that a new generation of wage earners, the Millennials, face a job market where stagnant salaries are the norm, secure employment increasingly rare, large student loan obligations common, and elevated housing costs nearly universal.