Urban Woes, Ecological Blight Civil-Rights Activists, Conservationists Share Same Goals

By john a. powell

Published Sunday, April 2, 2000, The Miami Herald

Given Florida's exploding population, its severe housing shortage and its fragile ecosystem, the state has appropriately begun to wade into the issue of urban sprawl. However, the environmentally driven smart growth measures being explored by Floridians will not alone reverse the destructive environmental forces of sprawl. Addressing social justice must be taken on as a conservation measure as well.

By improving life in our cities, we may also be able to save our ecosystems.

Suburban sprawl, along with its counterpart metropolitan fragmentation, is the greatest obstacle to achieving social justice in our nation today.

As people and businesses with the economic means sprawl away from central cities, they settle into developing suburban jurisdictions divesting the cities of valuable resources, as well as needed tax bases. They leave behind low-income minorities in high-need, resource-depleted central cities, creating fragmented metropolitan regions with enormous inequities between central cities and developing suburbs. The resulting borders become barriers, walling off greater social needs in the central cities while enabling the developing suburbs to amass valuable resources.

Many are surprised to learn that the destructive and wasteful process of sprawl has been heavily subsidized by federal, state, and local governments. Since the early 1940s, our national policy has supported the proliferation of urban sprawl and the attendant flow of dollars from central cities.

Only recently have we begun to question the wisdom of spending billions to build new roads, schools, and infrastructure at the edge of our metropolitan regions while divesting from our cities. And only recently have we begun to appreciate that what is happening in our urban cores affects development at our regions' peripheries.

This relationship between suburban sprawl and the decline of our central cities and has gone largely unnoticed by those currently engaged in the anti-sprawl movement and as well as by social justice advocates. But this must change if both groups are to be successful in advancing their interests.

The epicenter of the sprawl debate is currently in the suburbs, where issues of racial and social justice are given little attention, if they are considered at all. Suburban concerns with sprawl, such as traffic congestion and conservation, are given priority at the expense of such concerns as racial segregation, lack of affordable housing, increases in urban concentrated poverty, and segregation of growing regional opportunities (like well-paying jobs) away from areas of racialized concentrated poverty.

Sprawl and regional fragmentation on the one hand, and concentrated poverty and social inequity on the other hand, are flip sides of the same dynamic.

The federal government defines concentrated poverty as a census tract with 40 percent or greater of its residents living below poverty level. It is important to note that research clearly demonstrates that this level of neighborhood poverty functions differently and much more destructively than individual poverty.

Concentrated poverty is also a racial issue. The vast majority of those living in concentrated poverty are either black or Latino. When the government first put its national purse behind sprawl, it was explicitly stated in racial terms. The suburbs were designated for whites and heavily subsidized by federal mortgage programs, while the cities, where minorities primarily lived, were redlined and excluded from participating in these federal programs. With the white middle-class -- and more recently the black and Hispanic middle-class -- driving sprawl, low-income blacks have been isolated in the declining core away from jobs and resources.

Southern Florida faces increasing social and economic disparities between its growing suburbs and its struggling cities and inner-ring suburbs. In Miami, concentrated poverty has more than doubled between 1980-90, the number of census tracts where the poverty level was 40% or higher increasing from 14 to 33. Of the 148,023 people living in Miami's high poverty census tracts in 1990, over 93% were either African American or Hispanic. Currently, the largest concentrations of non-Hispanic blacks in the region are located in the unincorporated areas and municipalities north of Miami. These areas are also experiencing the greatest levels of poverty.

Child poverty rates in the region, as measured by elementary school children eligible for free and reduced school meal programs, confirm these patterns with more recent figures. In 1996, of the 379 elementary schools in the South Florida region, 56 reported more than 88 percent of their students eligible for free and reduced meal programs. Forty-five of the 56 schools were located in the city of Miami and its inner suburbs.

Unfortunately, these trends are projected to intensify in the coming years, which will make Southern Florida one of the most racially and economically stratified areas in the country.

In Southern Florida, as in most of our nations' sprawling and fragmented regions, the social justice perspective is largely absent from the local anti-sprawl discussion despite these growing disparities. This omission must be corrected to improve both the health of Florida's ecosystem and the region, and to reverse the trends of concentrated poverty and isolation of people of color from the growing regional opportunities.

Currently, anti-sprawl and civil rights agendas overlap in peripheral ways, resulting in half-hearted gains on each front. To remedy this, regional actors driving the current anti-sprawl agenda must expand the discussion of sprawl to address issues of social justice and urban decay. Civil rights leaders must also put suburban sprawl and fragmentation on their agenda -- both to achieve their goals and to engage anti-sprawl activists in social justice. Neither camp can afford to ignore the other's concerns.

The Institute on Race & Poverty has initiated a Regional Equity Project to address civil rights issues by challenging sprawl and fragmentation trends on both national and local levels. One of our goals is to connect local civil rights activists with anti-sprawl activists to attend to their complementary concerns.

Success on both fronts requires increased understanding and a stronger relationship between social justice and anti-sprawl supporters. Anti-sprawl advocates cannot hope to curb sprawl without addressing regional inequities that are both causes and consequences of sprawl, while civil rights advocates cannot hope to achieve social justice and revitalization of urban cores without addressing the damaging effects of sprawl and fragmentation on low-income communities of color.

To paraphrase a statement made by Detroit Mayor, Dennis Archer, we cannot save our ecosystem unless we save our cities.

john a. powell, Executive Director, Institute on Race & Poverty and Marvin J. Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis, Minn. powell worked in Miami from 1981-1983 as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Miami Law School and as Executive Director of Legal Services of Greater Miami.