Cluster Evolution

The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What It All Means About Who We Are
by Michael J. Weiss

(Page 5 of 9)

With sixty-two lifestyle types, the expanded cluster system allows a more detailed portrait of the nation's diversity. The stereotype of the suburbs as a vast, homogeneous wasteland has become outdated. Fourteen different tribes now occupy the suburban landscape, some congregating outside second-tier cities like Schaumburg, Illinois, and Annapolis, Maryland, others living in new subdivisions. New data has also picked up on the continued outmigration of city dwellers to the rural landscape. The expanding suburban sprawl has created what journalist Joel Garreau calls "edge cities," with their megamalls and high-rise monoliths, and exurban boomtowns, with their enclaves of retirees and telecommuters. To capture these hybrid lifestyles, the new cluster system added a "second city" designation, a unique grouping of twelve lifestyle types that are city living but not urban living. For instance, Dallas has a central downtown area and a number of urban clusters, while Fort Worth, with very little urban core, falls into the second-city category. Similarly, an inner-city dweller from Chicago has a very different lifestyle than a resident of smaller Nashville. Second-city dwellers are more apt to buy American cars, for example, while urbanites with similar demographics tend to purchase imports. In a cluster called Second City Elite, affluent, college-educated couples tend to read Shape, listen to adult contemporary radio, and watch Melrose Place. In urban Money & Brains, demographically similar people read Town & Country, listen to jazz, and watch Wall Street Week.

Cluster evolution during the 1980s saw five lifestyles disappear as a result of the dwindling manufacturing base and downsized blue-collar workforce. One cluster, Rank & File, vanished entirely because of declining union membership. Even new standards of political correctness worked changes into the system. The former Tobacco Roads, a downscale African American cluster whose nickname was based on Erskine Caldwell's Depression-era book, was dropped because it sounded pejorative in the 1990s. Instead, the Southern-based cluster picked up some neighborhoods from the predominantly white Share Croppers cluster and now goes by the more benign label Scrub Pine Flats. The second-wealthiest lifestyle, called Furs & Station Wagons in the 1980s, lost its moniker because animal rights groups had bullied the rich into forsaking their fur coats (or at least putting them into cold storage). Claritas staffers spent weeks debating a replacement name for these new-money suburbs, considering suggestions like Jeeps & Jewels and Spandex & Minivans. The winning name: Winner's Circle.

Behind the changing cluster names, the fragmenting of America has not been a smooth process. When communities that have been accustomed for generations to a certain way of life are invaded by newcomers or surrounded by distinctly different life-styles, friction is bound to occur. Longtime residents often jealously protect their familiar ways, shunning other clusters that don't share their values - a finding that has broad cultural and commercial implications. When giant Arkansas-based retailer Wal-Mart set its sights in 1990 on Vermont - then the only state in the union without one of its megastores - the company encountered surprising resistance. Residents in the state's small towns simply didn't want discount palaces like "Sprawl-Mart" with their oversized shopping carts, computerized inventory control, and other trappings of outlet culture. It turns out Vermont is home to the country's largest concentration of residents classified as New Eco-topia, a cluster typified by consumers with above-average educations and a fondness for civic activism. With its population of small-town consultants, merchants, and telecommuters, New Eco-topia's consumer patterns are more typical of city dwellers' than those of their country neighbors. Residents tend to surf the Internet to stay in touch with mainstream news via web sites for CNN or ABC-TV. They're more likely than average Americans to own stock, buy health food, and write letters to editors. In Westminster, Vermont, town council meetings can go on for two days as residents debate everything from school budgets to buying the fire department volunteers new jackets. Whereas New Eco-topians make up 1 percent of the U.S. population, in Vermont they represent fully 20 percent. These are the exurban Americans - "granolas," the natives call them - who fled the city and don't want their adopted rural state to become what they left behind: a clutter of superstores and seven-acre parking lots. After years of fending off the incursion, state activists relented in 1994 and Wal-Mart got its store, but only after agreeing to build a scaled-back outlet near the downtown of Saint Johnsbury (population 8,000 New Eco-topians).

Across the nation, cluster residents announce their distinct lifestyles to the rest of the world through their purchasing power. They demand products - from cheese to jeans to minivans - tailored to reflect their changing tastes and attitudes. In the opulent 1980s, the yuppies of Young Influentials bought gold jewelry as a status symbol. Now, in a less ostentatious age, the hot new status symbol is a good job that allows time for exercise. With affluent tastes now running more toward utilitarianism and self-fulfillment, the onetime owners of BMW sedans tool around in Range Rovers with racks toting skis and bikes. In the Young Influentials community of Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft and Nintendo, workaholic techies routinely put in long days on the job and then head for the surrounding mountains on the weekends to go hiking or biking. Arleen Hiuga, a store manager of REI, a recreational equipment company, sees a steady parade of Young Influentials who come in to be outfitted for "adrenaline sport" activities that are both physically and psychically challenging. "When your reality is sitting in front of a computer screen for eighty hours a week, you require a balance and pursue a sport for decompressing," she says. "The ultimate experience is a challenging climb uninterrupted by the sight of other nature lovers." Of course, these Young Influentials still meet those challenges with a few creature comforts. Among REI's best-selling products are global guidance systems that provide latitude and longitude lines anywhere in the wilderness and espresso makers designed to work over a campfire.

But yuppie tastes aren't just changing; America's yuppies are disappearing altogether. The Young Influentials cluster has shrunk - from 2.9 percent of U.S. households to 1.1 percent - as baby boomers have aged, married, left the city for the 'burbs, and begun shopping at Price Club rather than Sharper Image. Taking over their city apartments are the Generation Xers of the Bohemian Mix cluster, those twenty-something singles who never seem to leave their local coffee bars, which offer them retro music and obscure 'zines. In fact, children are becoming an endangered species in many Bohemian Mix neighborhoods. Karyn Robinson, a thirty-three-year-old writer from Dupont Circle, a Bohemian Mix section of Washington, D.C., observes that she's more likely to see a gay couple than a family with children on neighborhood streets. "The breeder culture is nonexistent around here," she says.

Copyright © 2000 by Michael J. Weiss

About the Author

Michael J. Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and marketing consultant. A contributing editor to the Washingtonian and Ladies' Home Journal, he has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the Newport Times, Redbook, and People. His first book, The Clustering of America, was named one of the best business books of 1988. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.