ABSTRACT
Metropolitan areas that attract large numbers of foreign-born people, such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, have tended to have the most ethnically diverse suburbs. As late as the mid-1980s it seems that "deindustrialization" did not affect Sunbelt cities such as Los Angeles and Houston. Garreau predicted that "edge cities" would be the centers of the post-industrial, information- and service-oriented future. Los Angeles benefitted from the rapid growth of trans-Pacific trade, which boosted its financial sector and the sprawling port facilities of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the two largest ports in the United States. The defeat of Carter's urban policy in Congress marked the end of an era of significant federal spending earmarked for cities and the beginning of collective urban belt-tightening. The decline in urban crime made people feel more comfortable moving into neighborhoods that had been notoriously dangerous in the 1970s and 1980s, and thus it contributed to the success of revitalization and gentrification projects.
