What is behind this? Families are mostly not moving in; rather people are moving to suburbs less once they become parents. Eric Johnson, a software engineer who grew up in Elgin, an outer suburb of Chicago, now has a ten- month-old baby in hipstery Logan Square. “We love the farmers market…I like not having to drive,” he says. Sara Weston-Shea, a social worker, grew up in suburban New Jersey and now has two children in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “We can just easily access the wonderful resources that a city has, the arts, music, whenever,” she says. She likes that her kids are growing up in a multicultural neighbourhood, and that she can cart them around on a cargo bike. Such families are typically having children older, says Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia. That means that they tend to have higher incomes when they do get around to it, and in turn can afford to stay in cities. For a subset of the wealthiest, being able to afford to raise children in a city—especially lots of children—has become a financial flex, says Mr Sandoval. “To say, ‘I have the money to have eight children and live in the city’…It’s showing off your wealth.” On a macro scale, this change in urban demography may not seem transformational. The growth of the relatively rich is hardly enough to counteract collapsing working-class populations, or to reverse the shrinking
of school enrolment. With immigration down, urban populations will still start falling soon. Yet the growing up of what Richard Florida, an influential urban-studies theorist, once called “the creative class” nonetheless matters. Take politics. The urbanist parent is left wing. Last year Zohran Mamdani won the neighbourhoods colonised by wealthier families comfortably, while losing outer parts of the city. Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s mayor, won office thanks to white liberal voters who backed him in the first round of the two- round election. New York City used to elect Republican mayors. That seems vanishingly unlikely now. They also affect cities directly. In principle this class of people loves the idea of public schools. In practice they love highly selective public schools full of kids like their own. That leads to cut-throat competition for places at the most desired schools. Similarly, more wealthy residents tends to mean pricier homes. Many contend that is why non-white families are leaving cities, though the data do not definitively prove this: the number of non- white children is shrinking in ungentrified neighbourhoods too. High house prices may, however, be hitting the next generation of young professionals, who cannot move into the homes no longer being vacated by people moving to the suburbs. Will the rise of upscale urban parenting continue? The appeal of cities shrank during the pandemic, as professionals went in search of green space and home offices. As the virus receded violent crime soared. But crime is now down again, and working from home is going out of fashion. The better bet is that the yuppification continues. Not long ago “inner city” was a synonym for desperate and poor. In 2016 Donald Trump claimed that people in “inner cities…are living in hell because it’s so dangerous”. That is less and less true. Outside, a new day is dawning. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/06/city-parenting-has-become-a- financial-flex
The Democratic approach to AI is not all about bans Rahm Emanuel charts a centrist path for AI May 7th 2026 IN ALMOST EVERY interview he does, Rahm Emanuel, a fixture at the top of Democratic politics for four decades, plays coy when asked about whether he plans to run for the presidency in 2028. What he is rarely asked is where he stands on what is likely to be one of the gnarliest issues of that race, artificial intelligence (AI). Call him a pillar of the party’s centrist old guard, his ideas on AI are up to the minute. “AI keeps me up at night,” he says. In an interview for our Insider show, Mr Emanuel calls for a high-speed regulatory approach to AI. That contrasts with what the progressive wing of his party, led by Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont, wants—which is
to jam on the brakes. Yet, like those to his left, Mr Emanuel is open to some sort of guaranteed income for those whose livelihoods are affected by the technology. Though he supports providing “a floor that people don’t fall below”, he worries that a guaranteed income could sap “meaning” from people’s lives. He doesn’t elaborate on ways to restore purpose. The former ambassador, mayor and White House Mr Fix-it is struck by the widespread fears of inequality caused by AI. “The American people believe that there’s going to be five tech bros who will walk out like bandits,” he says, leaving everyone else in the lurch. “On one side, you can’t concede [AI] to China. On the other side, you can’t have the Wild West.” He is also worried that the scale of disruption AI causes will be more than that of other technological upheavals, such as railways, electricity and the internet. Mr Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman, say AI is moving so fast Congress cannot keep up. They have proposed legislation to slap a temporary ban on the building of data centres used to train and run models. Mr Emanuel takes a different approach. Given the speed with which AI is evolving, he suggests creating a bipartisan regulatory task force that makes decisions in real time about its safety. He mentions Mythos, a new model from Anthropic, an AI lab, whose software capabilities pose staggering cyber-security risks. His ideas bear some resemblance to those of the Trump administration, which in response to Mythos has started to shift from a laissez-faire treatment of AI to considering ways to oversee the latest model releases. The childhood ballet dancer pirouettes when discussing AI bosses. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk are “pissing on each other”, but he respects some of their ideas. He hails what he calls Mr Altman’s “New Deal,” a proposal from OpenAI whose most radical idea is a sovereign- wealth-style investment fund. Seeded by the AI industry, it would give everyone a stake in faster economic growth by distributing returns from investments made in producers and users of the technology. He also lauds Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, for standing up to the Pentagon in a fight over the use of its AI models for autonomous weaponry and mass surveillance.
Mr Emanuel, who served both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the White House, has a broader domestic agenda that is classic centrist stuff. He has plans for school reform, opposes tariffs, is nuanced on free trade and wants tax reform to make the system less generous to inherited wealth. He is dismissive of the redistributive agenda of the left of his party. As for running for president, he remains non-committal. “We’ll see,” he says. But his enthusiasm appears to be rising. “One thing I do know is that candour, authenticity and strength are going to have a really high value. Nobody is going to [look at me] and say ‘there goes weak and woke’.” ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/05/07/the-democratic-approach-to-ai- is-not-all-about-bans
The Supreme Court has unleashed the gerrymanderers Louisiana v Callais is baleful for democracy May 7th 2026 Small southern states are rarely the focus of American politics. But this week Tennessee took centre stage. On April 29th the Supreme Court delivered its third big blow to the Voting Rights Act. By a 6-3 vote in Louisiana v. Callais, the justices declared that electoral maps can no longer be challenged on the grounds of race—say, by arguing that district lines unfairly dilute black votes—as long as the mapmakers claim to have drawn them strictly for partisan gain. The decision unleashed a scramble: on May 6th Tennessee politicians released a map that carves up Memphis, the state’s second city, into three other ruby-red congressional districts. “This is a moral outrage as well as a political one,” says Rachel Campbell, the head of
Tennessee’s Democrats. “Martin Luther King died there in pursuit of civil rights.” The ruling lands in the middle of a sordid bout of mid-decade redistricting. The race for politicians to pick their voters began when Texas gave in to Donald Trump’s push to redraw the state’s congressional map to add five more Republican seats. Democrats retaliated in California, where voters blessed new district lines to neutralise the Texas grab. The frenzy then spread to Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Since Callais dropped, Republicans have called for doing away with all Democratic districts in the South. Lawmakers in Louisiana are meeting to pass a map that cuts New Orleans up like Memphis. Courts are weighing a plan signed by Ron DeSantis that would give Republicans 24 of 28 seats in Florida, where 30% of voters are Democrats. The Economist’s election model predicts that Democrats will gain more than 20 seats in the House, which means these Callais-inspired gerrymanders will probably not be enough for Republicans to hold the chamber in November. But the outcome of closer elections in the future could well depend on which party is willing to rig the maps more ruthlessly. To catch up, Democrats would need to match Republicans blow for blow. Until recently, they have trodden carefully. In many of the states they control lawmakers are bound by self-imposed constraints—legal, constitutional and ethical. Democratic trifectas in Colorado, Washington and New York are boxed in by independent commissions that prevent politicians from redrawing maps; New Jersey’s constitution allows redistricting only once a decade. Changing those rules usually requires voter approval, which took months of campaigning to get in California and heaps of money in Virginia. For a party that has denounced gerrymandering as “cheating” and “undemocratic”, Democrats will have to persuade voters that when Republicans go low, they should too. Democrats may also face awkward trade-offs. The easiest way for the party to draw more winnable seats is to move reliably Democratic black voters into whiter districts. Last year, when Illinois tried to wring another Democratic district out of East St Louis at the national party’s urging, the legislature’s black caucus pushed back, fearing that black incumbents would