CityLab Daily: America's Vanishing City Accents

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What We’re Following

Long time coming: President Donald Trump’s hostility to welfare dates back at least as far back as 1973, when the Justice Department sued him and his father over alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act. Writing a decade after the racial discrimination suit, the future president explained, “What we didn’t do was rent to welfare cases, white or black.”

Trump’s hostility toward welfare culminated on Tuesday when he signed an executive order to force recipients of benefits for housing, food, and healthcare to demonstrate their employment to be eligible for aid. CityLab’s Kriston Capps writes that the move represents a significant change to the social safety net: A Brief History of Trump's One-Man War on Welfare.

• Also: ProPublica’s “Trump, Inc” podcast looks at how the Trump Organization is suing towns across the country to get tax breaks.

Born to youse: The classic Chicago accent, with its elongated vowels and its tendency to substitute “dese, dem, and dose” for “these, them, and those,” was once the voice of the city’s white working class. But this distinct dialect has disappeared, and Chicago isn’t alone. On CityLab, Edward McClelland explains why the Midwest’s city accents are fading away.

—Andrew Small

More on CityLab

Chart of the Day

Mark 2016 as the year that Millennials took over. Pew Research Center’s Fact Tank reports more than one-in-three labor force participants (35 percent) are now Millennials. The workers between the ages of 21 and 36 in 2017 have swelled their ranks to 56 million, surpassing the 53 million workers from Generation X (people between the ages of 37 and 52 in 2017) for the biggest share of the labor force pie. Prepare for the avocado toast shortages to come accordingly. CityLab context: The geography of Millennial talent.

What We’re Reading

Cities need to band together on self-driving cars (Slate)

Can localism restore sanity to U.S. politics? (New York Times)

Philadelphia ICE office is the nation’s most aggressive (ProPublica)

Uber CEO: Getting people to share rides is a “battle” against “societal norms” (Quartz)

How fast food chains are using design to go local (Curbed)

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