A lot of cities are struggling with unbalanced growth: some sections are getting intense gentrification and densification. This unfortunately, is inevitable. I happen to live in Seattle, so I'll use it as an example.
The symbol of Seattle densification is Amazon.com, which has built an urban campus in an area called South Lake Union--because it is south of a small lake called Lake Union. The area used to be part of what was called "The Denny Regrade." In the 1920s a steep hill named for city founder Arthur Denny, a little north of downtown, was sluiced down and the area leveled using hydraulic mining techniques. It became an area of small industry and commercial buildings, cheap apartments, dive bars and other relatively low cost business. The Seattle Center, site of the 1962 Worlds Fair, was built on one part of it, and the largest freeway off and on ramps in the city passed through it, in a convoluted group of roads that came to be called "The Mercer Mess" after the biggest of the streets involved. In the 1990s, a group led by Paul Allen began buying up properties with the goal of revitalizing one part of the Regrade and fixing the Mercer Mess.
The timing and location turned out to be perfect for Amazon, which moved its headquarters into SLU, and began to grow. And grow. And grow. Tens of thousands of young professionals came to Seattle to work at Amazon. City life suited them and they very quickly changed the dynamic of the area. Where it had been a semi-suburban part of the city, where coming and going was all about the automobile, it suddenly became nearly impossible to find parking and very difficult to even get your car from one side to the other. The Mercer Mess is symbolic: where it had been nominally 4 lanes in each direction with only a few traffic lights and pretty good access to the rest of the city, now it's 3 lanes in each direction with a traffic light every block and during rush hour, traffic is so dense it often takes more half an hour to get on to Mercer from a side street. The Amazon workers resorted to moving within walking distance of work, and consequently there are dozens of new, expensive high rises within walking distance.
The people who were already here were screwed. Thousands of people were kicked out of low rent housing, unable to find affordable housing within 20 miles or more of the area, which for most had also been where they worked. Seattle is very much a car-focused region and city. There are some symbolic transit systems, which do work, but their capacity is very low and the better ones cover very, very little of the region. The bus system has better coverage, but it is terribly limited. For example, the place I used to live in Redmond had service once an hour, from 6am to 7pm. It was a half mile walk. Heaven help a cripple, or someone carrying something big. It had even shorter hours on weekends.
The Seattle City Council wants to impose a "Head Tax" to employers over some threshold size. I think there's the germ of a good idea in this, but the goal is mistaken. They're trying to discourage big businesses from building downtown. I think the right thing to do is to tax businesses to build transit. Grade separated transit, so it can reduce congestion. Long distance transit, so the people who want to work downtown can get to housing where it's affordable, and people who want to live downtown can get to businesses that are located where it's affordable.
