Abstract
In The Servant Class City: Urban Revitalization versus the Working Poor in San Diego, David Karjanen provides a comprehensive study of how urban economic development and policy create changes in the inner-city labor market, in both formal and informal workplaces, pointing out the need for more critical urban policy to examine the persistence of inequality in San Diego. Using urban revitalization as a primary example, Karjanen illustrates how neoliberal economic development that seeks to bring jobs to inner cities lacks the ability to decrease poverty and urban inequality and instead contributes to it. He draws on research conducted over a ten-year period using both quantitative and qualitative methods to understand San Diego’s tourist-driven urban economy, including the barriers to employment and occupational mobility. He cites primary and secondary sources and offers ethnographic portraits of the decision-making processes of families living in the city.
Contrary to the idea that more jobs bring more opportunities, Karjanen claims that servant-class jobs push the urban and working poor deeper into poverty, creating increased economic polarization in San Diego. The book combines the politics of the urban growth machine and redevelopment for economic purposes with actual portraits of families living in the inner city. This combination of context and lived experiences creates a rich and detailed picture of urban inequality. Economic development plans operate from a market-based trickle-down approach, which leads to the growth of the servant class and therefore a heavier reliance on the informal economy, filled with those who find themselves stuck in cycles of cumulative disadvantage with few options (p.20). A strength of the study is its intersectional analysis of race, class, gender, and immigrant status and its view of how intersectional disadvantages create more vulnerable experiences, affecting the level of risk people can take in order to become occupationally mobile.
In Chapter Two, Karjanen describes how urban revitalization efforts claim to increase economic development by providing jobs, but the quality of those jobs stands as an obstacle rather than the number of jobs available. Most of the jobs in San Diego’s popular industries, retail and hospitality, are not “good” jobs that serve as career ladders. As Karjanen points out, quantitatively, these jobs require little education, pay lower than the city’s self-sufficiency wage, and, like other jobs in tourism-related industry, are unstable as they boom and bust with seasonal visitors.
As discussed in Chapter Three, typically these jobs are within businesses that are constantly subject to cost-reduction opportunities like lean staffing, which has changed the culture of work in the industry. These jobs lead to a deeper reliance on the informal economy, which often works together with the formal economy subject to a “complex set of intersecting and often mutually reinforcing forces that structure and influence peoples’ life trajectories,” contrary to the often opposing ways they are framed (p.251). The formal and informal markets drive one another—a fluctuating, seasonal, tourism-driven economy leads to constant cost-cutting opportunities in hours and wages, which influence a fragmented social safety net and thus cause an increased reliance on the informal economy, which drives a larger division between formal and informal employment.
The interrogation of agency, of structure, and of the barriers that many urban and working poor face to not have to live paycheck to paycheck is particularly useful. In Chapter Eight, Karjanen presents Salvador’s story as an example of what’s wrong with oversimplifying our view of the combination of individual decision-making with social and economic structural forces. There is more to Salvador’s story than “just working harder.” Salvador desires to shift out of construction and work toward obtaining his HVAC certification, which would provide a wider variety of job options, including but not limited to being a service manager, dispatcher, technician, or air conditioning and refrigerator contractor, or providing preparation for green careers.
At a community college, this would cost Salvador around $6000, but due to his wife’s and children’s schedules, he would have to take classes at night over a three-year period. Salvador worries that this time investment in obtaining his certification is risky, due to the fact that after three years the economy will be different and it is possible that work in construction could boom. In this case, Salvador is “working hard” but has to weigh cost, affordability, family demands, and a changing economy in making a decision to attend school for occupational mobility. It is this kind of story that needs to be captured when analyzing the mobility of the urban and working poor. As Karjanen points out, investing in human capital for the working and urban poor is not that feasible due to the cycle of cumulative disadvantage they find themselves in—returns on long-term investments in human capital (school, training, etc.) are not immediately helpful when living paycheck to paycheck, which affects the overall economic and occupational mobility of these residents.
The combination of rich description, actual stories, and the social and economic context Karjanen presents adds tremendously to the study, but it makes for a long read. Parts I, II, and III could have been threaded together more strongly and succinctly. In a chapter called “Do-It-Yourself Safety Nets,” he details the networks that the urban and working poor use to survive given the increased reliance on the informal economy. Karjanen lays out several reasons why the urban poor turn to informal childcare and caregiving, but this explanation should have been more concise and more cohesively tied in with the original argument.
The Servant Class City argues for a more critical urban policy agenda aimed at challenging market forces that are looked at as reducing inequality. Karjanen finds the separation between neoliberal economic development and policy reform dysfunctional and shallow when applied to the situations of actual inner-city families. “These types of policy debates and prescriptions do not address the deeper, structural, and often mutually constitutive forces that batter the low-wage servant class worker in today’s inner cities” (p.248). He argues for a more robust and nuanced critical urban policy agenda that can create more opportunities for mobility using the everyday realities of low-income people. Karjanen’s work is an exemplary study that paves the way for future work in urban sociology.