Regionalism: The Creation of Urban Dysfunction
& Strategies for Recreating Metropolitan
Communities
When we try to think of a metropolitan area as a unified whole rather than as a series of loosely connected and often competing parts, we must often stretch our imaginations. The parts seem so different from one another that there's no apparent commonality tying them together. If we live in the outer ring suburbs, these differences are especially noticeable during our morning commute to work. The preferred areas to live have large, well-kept houses, attractive schools and shopping areas, and little evidence of crime and vandalism; the undesirable areas have crowded, run-down houses, eroding schools and stores, and visible signs of blight.
If we live within the city boundaries, we see similar discrepancies between neighborhoods--even between city blocks. The people who live in these areas also differ from one another in matters of taste, clothing and language, even in how they interact with each other. Most of the neighborhoods have been in place long enough to seem natural. They are social arrangements that appear to be completely voluntary.
Nationwide, newer suburban areas have such a different atmosphere
and look than older, inner ring suburbs and central cities that
many of their residents don't identify with their city and very
rarely visit it. They are quick to say that they live in
Fox Chapel, PA or Wayzata, MN, not in Pittsburgh or Minneapolis.
What has happened to American metropolitan areas that makes them
so fragmented and their parts so dissimilar? More importantly,
why are our inner ring suburbs and cities increasingly populated
by people of color and the poor, while our suburbs are White and
affluent? Are these neighborhoods really voluntary associations?
The Institute on Race and Poverty works proactively with issues
of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. Washington
is only too willing to say that poverty has stabilized nationally
due to a strong economy. However, while this is true on
a general level, there is a growing problem at the metropolitan
core known as concentrated poverty which disproportionately affects
minority communities. Concentrated poverty communities are
defined as those where over 40% of residents live at or below
the poverty line. The experience of concentrated poverty,
however, involves a matrix of adverse socio-economic conditions
that affects approximately 5% of urban populations.
It defines the chronic living conditions of over 25% of America’s
Black and Latino populations.
The face of poverty is increasingly dark-skinned. Whole neighborhoods of people of color live in severe poverty. Their containment within the core city and older suburbs (places many fearful metropolitan residents don't visit), helps to perpetuate the myth of a healthy economy. Because of its narrow confinement, concentrated poverty is often conveniently invisible. Because of its affects upon discrete demographic groups, when it is noticed it is often quickly dismissed as cultural or behavioral. In reality, America’s older cities and inner ring suburbs are dying and our economy is increasingly favorable for only a few whose skin color and location buffer them from overwhelming urban problems. But public policy cannot effectively tackle the crisis in our metropolitan core without addressing the interdependence between it and wealthier outer ring suburbs.
Poor neighborhoods are located in core city and surrounding areas because of institutional barriers to such quality of life enhancing opportunities as employment, transportation, education, and housing. Public policies that are written and implemented by balkanized municipal governments prevent the integration of minorities and the poor into the wealthier, opportunity laden suburbs. Government fragmentation not only masks the financial and social interdependence of the suburb and center city, but overtly and covertly supports segregationist policies. These policies prevent minorities from moving to neighborhoods of opportunity while segregationist attitudes enforced by the media and public policy inhibit Whites from moving to the center city. Such segregation not only isolates the very poor from opportunities for self-advancement outside of the city core but also isolates more mainstreamed citizens from their cultural center. Policies that fail to account for this intersection of poverty and race and its impact on the entire metropolitan area simply re-configure and re-apply old attempts at urban reform. Although early theorists of regionalism recognized the intimate connection between racial segregation and urban dysfunction, this connection is not being aggressively addressed in new regional initiatives.
The problem of concentrated poverty is also compounded by public opinion. America approaches the twenty-first century with a growing condemnation of its poor. Despite the common belief that the economy has improved, the average citizen, still in fear of downsizing and layoffs, underemployment coupled with rising prices, and compromised health care services, feels his or her personal security is threatened by money spent on social problems. As both white and blue-collar workers redefine the accessibility of the American Dream for themselves and their children, these groups are also redefining their social responsibility to the growing urban underclass. Those less fortunate are increasingly viewed as those most responsible for hard-working Americans' declining material benefits. Charitable contributions and popular support for Affirmative Action and federal and state social welfare programs have declined, while hate crimes and support for a stringent, often short-sighted, realignment of national priorities have increased.
The 1996 Personal Responsibilities Act (a.k.a. "welfare reform") is but one manifestation of this realignment that increasingly views poverty as the consequence of an individual pathological lifestyle. This lifestyle is marked in White public opinion by a single-parent household headed by a Black woman and an absentee Black father, both of whom refuse to work. To protect the common good, these race-wide characteristics of laziness and irresponsibility must not be rewarded. Policy makers argue that if the poor are forced to take fiscal responsibility for their lives, the logical outcome will be a transformation of the current inter-generational culture of poverty. But the Act is proving to be ill-conceived and complicated to implement. Such pieces of legislation are flawed due to their insistence upon personal solutions to increasingly metropolitan-wide, structural problems. It is essential for us to understand that the segregated social arrangements that isolate ghetto areas also insulate mainstream areas from the realities of concentrated poverty. Such isolation prevents many citizens from seeing the complicated and interacting social dynamics of concentrated poverty that are the result of insular policy-making and socioeconomic isolation, and not the result of so-called pathological individuals or cultures.
The Institute on Race and Poverty has and continues to research and promote regionalism because of its ability to accommodate the reality that poverty is racialized and systemic, not individual, in nature. The current emphasis on "personal responsibility" offers yet another political quick fix to channel middle and working-class fears over socioeconomic changes and absolve society of responsibility for persistent inequities. It is a catch phrase that precludes a deeper analysis into how poverty is created and sustained by a variety of identifiable and inter-related social forces. It permits the privileged members of our society to assume that their privilege is merit-based. It is based on the myth that the market rewards all those who work hard and only punishes the undeserving.
Applying individual solutions to a systemic problem, while benefiting certain people, further punishes those who can't rise above socially imposed circumstances. If one poor person can escape poverty through hard work, according to the logic of public opinion, why then can't another? We find that regionalism not only provides a comprehensive analysis of urban dysfunction, but also advocates creative solutions for restoring cities and older suburbs that merit thoughtful consideration.
However, regionalism is not immune to thoughtful criticism. Communities of color that have successfully undertaken grassroots initiatives to achieve political leverage and elect their leaders to positions of power view regionalism as a potential threat to their hard-won gains. Attempts to integrate a community can be viewed as attempts to dilute its power-base and destroy its political and/or cultural base. These fears have an historic precedence and are justified. However, it must be recognized that integration equals access to opportunity structures for these communities and not just the juxtaposition of one racial group next to another. Access to opportunity will increase the power-base of these groups, not deplete it as feared.
Regionalism can also be superficially misunderstood as a wealth-redistribution policy that asks deserving suburban areas to subsidize the undeserving city core. However, a deeper analysis reveals not only how much the wealthier suburbs benefit from and drain the center city and older suburbs, but highlights the interdependence of all metropolitan sub-regions. A regional analysis points out that many working- and middle-class gains occur at the expense of the poor who increasingly subsidize urban sprawl and the good life of their suburban counterparts. Regionalism examines the flip-side of personal responsibility and asks the non-poor to consider how their desired and achieved lifestyles compromise the well being of others and jeopardize metropolitan stability.
Historically, metropolitan areas have been segregated socio-economically with laborers and most immigrants living close to factories and other work areas. More educated, middle-class citizens demanded housing away from industry and closer to more exclusive residential areas settled by the wealthy. As families attained more education, English proficiency, and wages, their resettlement in incrementally more affluent areas not only advanced new home construction past the city limits into surrounding towns and farmlands, but created housing vacancies within the older center city. These vacancies provided dense and often crowded housing to new immigrants, Blacks migrating from the southern states, and poor Whites.
The increasing numbers of poor Blacks and other minorities in city center housing fueled new housing construction for increasing numbers of fleeing Whites. But wages and other sources of income were not the only determinants of who lived where. While government policies made homeownership increasingly available to middle- and low-income Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and other minority groups found their access to better housing severely restricted by these same policies.
In 1933, the federal government established the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to bail out homeowners that had defaulted on their mortgages as a result of the Great Depression. HOLC also provided low-interest loans to those who had lost their homes to foreclosure. The administers of HOLC introduced the practice of redlining; neighborhoods with even minimal minority populations were systematically deemed too risky for investment. Thus minorities were by definition too risky to receive loans and Whites seeking loans were only successful if they settled in segregated neighborhoods.
The impact of HOLC's redlining was greatly increased by its influence on the practices of other government agencies and the private mortgage industry. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1933, guaranteed home mortgage in an effort to spur the economy. The FHA explicitly adopted the practice of redlining in its underwriting manual and by 1972 had followed this policy in guaranteeing eleven million home purchase mortgage loans and twenty-two million home improvement loans. The FHA also encouraged White municipalities to enact exclusionary zoning ordinances and racially restrictive covenants.
After World War II, the G.I. Bill and FHA initiatives encouraged White families to settle in areas called suburbs which offered single-family houses on large lots. New, available tax bases allowed for school and facilities construction that incrementally added to an improved quality of life for those Whites who could afford to live outside the city core. Government-induced redlining resulted in segregated housing markets that, when coupled with higher property values, effectively shut out racial minorities from new housing. As a result minority residential choice was severely circumscribed, and the metropolitan area was polarized into a dark-skinned core surrounded by concentric rings of increasing white-skinned affluence. Institutional policies promoting segregation were--and continue to be--supplemented by and enforced with intimidation and violence.
The amount of economic polarization between the core city and its expansion areas depended upon the core city’s annexation powers. A city that was either legally allowed to annex surrounding areas into its city boundaries or was fortunate enough to have its surrounding areas vote for annexation, expanded its jurisdiction. This ability to expand and protect its tax base marks a city as being either elastic or non-elastic, according to scholar and former mayor of Albuquerque David Rusk. For example, the city of Brooklyn, NY, was able to annex the nearby city of Williamsburgh in 1854 until it, in turn, was annexed along with four other large boroughs by New York City in 1898 as a strategy to avoid jurisdictional fragmentation and keep revenues within city limits. Even though disparities existed between and among neighborhoods, a strong tax base protected city incomes from dropping significantly below suburban incomes and successfully prevented the mass flight of the middle-class. When New York City, like most older northeastern cities, could no longer expand, it began to lose the necessary economic ground that ensured viability. Theorists now point to New York City as a dying city unable to provide for its residents. To fully appreciate the impact of urban dysfunction on core city residents, we will focus in Part I on the social development and economic decline of non-elastic cities.
As a non-elastic city matures, its center city declines into tangential neighborhoods of increasing poverty and racial segregation. We now designate an area to be in concentrated poverty if 40% of its residents live at or below the federal poverty level. The development of these high poverty areas drives poor and modest income Whites and middle-income and professional minorities into older suburban areas that need to fill their own housing vacancies and have little commercial zoning to pad their tax base. Because of shrinking revenues, these older suburbs are forced to become more inclusive although patterns of segregation found in the central cities are often recreated within them. Surrounding concentrated poverty areas are the central city and inner-ring suburban transitional poverty neighborhoods which contain 20-40% of households at or below the federal poverty level. These areas are considered to be at risk of attaining concentrated poverty status. As the range of concentrated and transitional poverty areas extends into autonomous jurisdictions, new waves of white flight flow towards exclusive suburbs, increasing the demand for suburban expansion.
A city that has failed to extend its powers of jurisdiction over its suburbs has to compete with them for resources. A fragmented metropolitan area is characterized by many autonomous sub-regions whose leaders advocate for insular policies that benefit their own territories and residents. A larger, shared vision of metropolitan stability is difficult to achieve as such a framework heightens the significance of constructed municipal boundaries creating an us versus them mentality nor rewarded. Over 190 million people live in metropolitan areas, almost 80% of the national population. The majority of these people have been politically conditioned since birth to think and act in terms of what benefits themselves and their immediate communities.
Although individual poverty rates have been declining recently for most demographic groups, levels of concentrated poverty have been increasing rapidly. From 1980 to 1990, the number of Americans living in concentrated poverty nearly doubled. Over three-fourths of these people live in central city neighborhoods. The number of these neighborhoods has more than doubled since 1970; nationally, there were 1,177 census tracts with 40% or more residents living below the poverty line in 1970 (4,149,000 people). By 1990 that number had grown to 2,726 census tracts (7,973,000 people).
By 1990, of the 4.18 % of Americans living in concentrated poverty, 47 % were Black, 22% were Hispanic, and 26% were non-Hispanic White. As of 1997, approximately 27% of the American population is composed of racial minorities, and approximately 80% of racial minorities (close to 57.5 million people) are estimated to live in metropolitan areas. Concentrated poverty describes the living conditions of nearly 5% of all metropolitan residents but over 30% of all minority residents.
Segregation, not personal choice, concentrates minority residents in the resource-depleted neighborhoods of central cities and older, tax-poor suburbs. When the city per capita income is at or drops below 70% of suburban per capita income, the center city can no longer attract investors, create new jobs, or retain many modest income or middle-class residents. Low per capita income compounded with an increase in poor minority residents and a decrease in mainly white middle-class residents signals a dramatic decline in a city’s ability to provide a decent quality of life. Low incomes also mean less consumer consumption, less tax revenues, and less available funds for property care and renovation. Attempts to gentrify neighborhoods and promote existing urban attractions such as the arts, museums, and theaters cannot mask the overall property deterioration, increased crime statistics, and inferior school outcomes that stigmatize the city as a high-risk area. Furthermore, those poor that are able to leave the central city and dying suburbs are almost always White.
As urban sprawl and outward development causes deterioration at the center, central cities an inner ring suburbs suffer from both a diminished tax base due to population and business losses and a financial drain from a burgeoning social services infrastructure attempting to provide for the increasing needs of poor residents. The demise of older metropolitan areas continues to spread to inner ring suburbs as the forces of sprawl seek new land for development with fewer poor residents. Increasingly, areas in decline depend upon moneys from state and federal governments to provide fiscal triage. At the same time, however, national urban programs are being gutted. Between 1980 and 1992, subsidized housing funds declined by 82%, economic development assistance by 78%, and job training by 63%. In an attempt to meet their increasing needs, central cities and inner ring suburbs are forced to levy disproportionately high taxes upon those least able to afford them, their residents.
Concentrated poverty also produces its own urban culture that divides the core city and older suburbs even further from middle- and upper-class areas. Distinctive dress, music, speech patterns, and behaviors, most often distinct from white, middle-class values and aesthetics, characterize poor sub-cultures, especially its youth. And because institutions, such as schools and government, reflect, if not enforce, predominately white, middle-class values and aesthetics, advancement for many core city residents is complicated by either an inability or a refusal to juggle competing cultural ideologies. Although much of urban culture is appropriated and then reproduced commercially for middle-class, white consumption and experimentation, core city residents are the ones handicapped by stereotypes resulting from pronounced cultural difference. A White teenager, for example, who affects Hip-Hop dress that has been mass marketed by mainstream manufacturers does not suffer the same social discrimination as a Black teenager. When urban culture is perceived to be at cross-purposes with the dominant social norms of fiscal self-sufficiency and Judeo-Christian ethics, it becomes easier to pathologize these poor minorities and ignore the institutional controls that create adversarial relationships between sub-cultures and perpetuate urban dysfunction.
Just as those living in or near areas of concentrated poverty are isolated from their mainstream counterparts, mainstream residents are isolated from poor people of color. Economic and racial segregation invites stereotyping; groups base their knowledge of one another on what they read and on what they see on the news. A competitive media and entertainment industry, whose decision-making is influenced by market shares and ratings, is more susceptible to playing to the public's fears and vulnerabilities and less invested in examining its own role in enforcing stereotypic anti-social images of the poor and people of color.
Black single mothers are an example of a group that has been condemned by the courts of public opinion. Most Americans know that despite a growing economy, there personal economic well-being has stalled or declined. The anger and anxiety caused by this increasing economic stratification, however, is most often misdirected at those at the who are worst off rather than those that are best off and benefiting from this growth. Thus Black single mothers have been held responsible for the poor school outcomes of Black children and the current increase in crime. Welfare mothers and their children reportedly place such a drain on federal and state resources that middle-class entitlements must be cut as a result. Mass media images of "welfare queens" focus on single Black women and their children more so than on their White counterparts. However, as of 1991, America is either behind or parallel to many western countries in its percentage of children born to unmarried women (30%). Furthermore, this vilification of the Black single mother distorts the true demographics of public assistance and ignores the structural causes of racial segregation and concentrated poverty that are largely responsible for the state of the inner-city.
This failure to appreciate the systemic causes of concentrated poverty and racial segregation results in policies that appear neutral but, in reality, exacerbate urban problems. For example, American standards for new housing are so unrealistically high that unsubsidized new housing is not affordable to low-income people, forcing them to remain in the core city. Furthermore, exclusionary zoning requirements are portrayed as necessary to maintain a legitimate neighborhood aesthetic, when in reality that aesthetic is White and non-poor. Because the majority of social problems are perceived to stem from areas of concentrated poverty, and because of the current focus on individual pathologies instead of institutional barriers, core city residents are considered to be a disposable, non-productive human surplus.
But exclusionary zoning and other systemic forces do not entirely explain why poor Blacks and Latinos are isolated from job-rich suburbs. Poor Whites are much more likely to live in these areas than those victimized by racial discrimination. The differential treatment of poor Whites and poor people of color has been well-documented. Data obtained under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reveals that people of color are two to three times more likely to be rejected for home loans than similarly situated Whites.
Regionalism forces policy makers to acknowledge that unwise land management policies that, for example, mandate large new-construction lot sizes that not only endanger wetlands and groundwater but prevent the construction of lower and low-income housing are also serious social problems. Substandard schools that tacitly serve as holding tanks for the majority of urban students who are poor and/or minority in exchange for increased state aid are also regional problems, as are metropolitan transit and housing policies that spatially separate people who need jobs from jobs that need workers.
A brief examination of four indicators that are used to assess a person's quality of life,, employment, education, and access (for our purposes we will define access in terms of transportation)illustrates the limited individual control people who live in concentrated poverty have over their circumstances. Limited opportunity results in limited productivity. However, because people who live in concentrated poverty are not productive, they are viewed as less deserving as people who can afford to live in the wealthier suburbs.
The institutional segregation of poor racial minorities from
mainstream society is policy-driven. Despite polls that
tell us most Americans desire integrated neighborhoods and schools,
procedures and policies that were set in place long ago continue
to separate whole groups of people. Historically, government
policies and real estate practices have been designed to stratify
residential areas along class and race lines. Underlying
these policies is the tacit assumption that all Whites want only
to live among other Whites of the same social class, an
assumption promoted by Realtors who then profit from inflated
housing values. Those minorities who manage to buy into
White residential areas are subjected to threats, verbal abuse,
beatings, and destruction of their property. Besides threats
of retaliation to those who defied the color line, zoning codes,
restrictive covenants, redlining, and public housing construction
have ensured the development and maintenance of concentrated poverty
in primarily core city areas:
This cursory list of discriminatory policies and legal attempts at reform underscores not only the hotly contested notion of segregation as a normal and acceptable living arrangement, but it also points to how important housing is to people's financial well-being. Denial of home ownership and its benefits of financial stability and increased opportunities places low and moderate income residents at the mercy of whatever affordable housing they can find. Persistent discrimination also keeps those discriminated against ignorant of their options due to cumulative inexperience as consumers.
Most subsidized public housing projects concentrate large numbers of poor and minority residents in artificial communities located within areas of concentrated poverty that already lack necessary neighborhood resources. Although projects suffer from high vacancy rates, they are still population-dense and create more competition for, and drain upon, available resources. Better schools and most entry-level jobs exist away from central cities, but the refusal of independent suburbs to build their fair share of low-to-moderate income housing precludes those living in concentrated poverty from accessing these means to self-sufficiency. Tax-poor areas are not in a financial position to refuse additional subsidized housing construction; tax-rich areas are and do.
Besides a balkanized government, most cities also suffer from rigid school district boundaries that reinforce racial and socio-economic segregation. Even mobility within districts or a periodic redrawing of district lines to slow down the exodus of White and middle-class families still leaves the majority of poor students, and especially poor students of color, outside of wealthier districts whose resources are not compromised by the social service needs of their residents. Despite the 1954 decision handed down in Brown v. Board of Education, in which our Supreme Court spoke to the unconstitutionality of segregated education because it was "inherently unequal," many urban schools today are segregated. These common-place violations of the spirit of Brown have had disastrous results. Approximately 25% of non-Asian minority students born in the late 1960s have failed to graduate from high school compared to less than 10% of their White and Asian cohorts.
While the gap between Black and White attainment has closed since the 1960s (the number of Blacks earning diplomas has gone from 70% to 90% of those earned by Whites), these figures mask attainment percentages for those Black students living in concentrated poverty. Drop-out rates of over 50% in these neighborhoods show that attainment measurements of broad categories of people can be misleading. Even though the educational picture has slightly improved for Black Americans as a whole (although measures for the 1990s are somewhat below those for the 1980s), it is not improving for urban Blacks living in concentrated poverty.
Furthermore, while Blacks as a group have begun to progress educationally, the gaps between Whites and Hispanics and between Whites and Native Americans have widened. The lack of a high school diploma disqualifies these young adults from most entry-level jobs that pay above the minimum wage.
Despite Brown, inequities between and among schools districts persist because, in part, the relationship between racial segregation and poverty was legally ruled to be random and not causal. In 1973, the Supreme Court reversed the federal district court of San Antonio's 1971 ruling in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that San Antonio, Texas was in violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Demetrio Rodriguez and other parents of students in poor districts had protested uneven per-pupil expenditures across districts. Wealthy districts were spending three times more per pupil than the poorest districts despite in-place equalizing measures. The federal district court agreed that the poorer districts were not being funded fairly to ensure equal educational opportunities for poor children. However, the majority opinion of the Supreme Court stated, among other things, that there was no demonstrable correlation between the amount of money spent on education and the quality of education. Nor was there a proven correlation between poor districts and the families in those districts being either poor or racial minorities. Therefore, the Court held that no class of people had been treated unjustly.
The Supreme Court also overruled Detroit's metropolitan desegregation plan set in place by the 1975 Milliken v. Bradley decision. Finding Detroit's schools separate and unequal, a U.S. district court ordered the integration of students in center city districts with those students in 53 suburban districts. Upon appeal of the lower court's ruling, the Supreme Court decided that the actions of the White suburbs had not contributed to the segregation of core city students and ordered a desegregation plan that exempted the predominantly White suburbs and "integrated" schools within the predominantly minority school district of Detroit. The Court knew that this made true integration an impossibility and assured Whites still in the central city that if they could make it to the suburbs, de jure segregation would maintain their privilege. The Court chose to ignore the strong relationship between segregated housing and segregated schools to the detriment of minorities.
These rulings not only show a lack of support from the federal courts for attempts to equalize access to quality education, but they underscore the judicial separation of a core city from its suburbs, each mandated to act only in its best interests. This enforced isolation of city centers and its implicit denial of the inter-relatedness of metropolitan areas has greatly contributed to the deterioration of urban schools and to the poor educational outcomes of children living in concentrated poverty.
Core city schools are forced to use lesser funding to address disproportionately high levels of special need students. Higher percentages of children requiring special services live in poorer districts. Schools in these districts must address the additional, unique needs of immigrant children with limited English proficiency (LEP), and the special needs of children who are learning disabled (LD) and emotionally/behaviorally disturbed (EBD). Exacerbating these impediments to quality education is the fact that some teachers new to the job market will choose a non-teaching job over an available teaching job in a core city school. If a school becomes a site for crime and violence, mainstreamed educators believe its students either can't learn or refuse to learn. Teachers want to teach motivated students. Increased police presence and a high percentage of subsidized lunches mark troubled schools whose staff members must often subordinate teaching to various forms of social triage.
When school outcomes are measured against school budgets, the disproportionate drain on these budgets by special programs is often ignored, leading taxpayers to believe that additional revenues for poor districts is throwing good money after bad. Because schools are increasingly expected to provide more services than educating children, their failure to ameliorate a wide variety of interconnected problems proves to critics both the ineffectiveness of teachers and the pathology of the poor. Broader institutional constraints remain invisible.
Due to a shortage of affordable housing and less stable incomes, poor children and their parents move more often, resulting in a pattern of uneven attendance in a series of schools. Socio-economic factors play an all-important part in student outcomes, including how they impact parent's involvement in their Children's education. High parent involvement leads to higher student achievement. Parents living in concentrated poverty, many holding multiple jobs, are not as available to their children for help and emotional support as are parents living in more stable, less compromised environments. A high percentage of uninvolved parents lessens the collective pool of available adults who can supplement and reinforce teachers. A lack of educated residents in poor neighborhoods who could serve as role models further limits the ambitions of core city children who fail to see the direct application and benefit of educational achievement.
Few minority and male teachers, distressed schools, and the low status of the teaching profession also contribute to poor educational outcomes. The recruitment, training, and certification of minority teachers has become a heated topic among educators sensitive to both the need to raise the status of the profession through higher certification standards and problems in certifying minority teachers due to racially-biased criteria. The low status and wages of elementary and secondary teachers has feminized the profession and further alienated at-risk male students who have few if any male role models. In severely dysfunctional cities, school buildings operate below standard safety codes and teachers and students try to conduct classes without adequate supplies. While the inequities between core city and suburban schools have been substantially documented by educators and policy makers, only small gains have resulted.
Through the first decade of the next century, much of the total job growth will be in service or blue collar occupations that don't require more than a high school education. Low income people are vitally needed by communities to fill their low-wage and entry-level jobs. This is problematic, because new industry and businesses have followed the exodus of middle-class and White residents out of the core city and into the suburbs due, in part, to lower taxes and greater land availability. Many of the resultant new jobs from this exodus require the very workers who are unable to find affordable housing adjacent to these jobs that match their skills level. Due to the poor educational outcomes of students who live in concentrated poverty, minorities and poor whites with minimal job skills are clustered in core city and inner ring suburban neighborhoods.
The lack of a competitive education is only one factor that keeps minorities in areas of concentrated poverty. Socially engineered barriers to employment have historically prevented racial minorities from achieving economic equality. Violence, a segregated labor force and two-tiered pay scale, and denied access to labor unions conspired to force people of color into the pool of exploitable unskilled labor. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment by private companies; in 1972 it outlawed racial discrimination in employment by state and local government agencies. However, discriminatory recruitment and testing procedures, and job assignment, promotion, and seniority practices have persisted despite (and at times because of) the enforcement efforts of agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The courts' insistence upon voluntary compliance with Title VII, as opposed to its implementation of affirmative hiring measures such as quota hiring or promotion, has proven to be ineffectual. Testing procedures as a form of employee screening are often set in place by White employers in defiance of Title VII. These procedures place the blame for the inability of many racial minorities to secure work onto the minorities themselves and clear employers of charges of discrimination. More insidiously, such practices "confirm" mainstream White Americans' suspicions that minorities are not intellectually capable.
Unemployment figures for people living in concentrated poverty do not parallel national trends. Upturns in the economy and low overall unemployment figures do not necessarily reflect conditions within areas of concentrated poverty or impact the employment available for the poor or people of color. Black and Native American men, for example, suffer a high rate of unemployment, and employment figures for the decade between 1980 and 1990 showed Black, Hispanic, and Native American men less able to compete with White men for jobs. Employment discrimination based upon race and socio-economic markers, such as speech, dress, or place of residence, is difficult to prove and thus difficult to prosecute. Furthermore, many of the best entry-level jobs are filled by the friends and relatives of existing employees with seniority whose recommendations are valued and who are disproportionately White and male. Generalized economic indicators give a skewed picture of opportunity and reinforce negative stereotypes of core city residents.
The jobs available to unskilled or minimally skilled workers are low-paying, and are often without the benefits or stability secured by unionized labor or the career ladders for advancement like those found in local, state, or federal government jobs. More often than not, younger workers living in concentrated poverty do not have stable work histories; they hold a series of jobs marked by shorter lengths of employment, layoffs, and intermittent periods of unemployment. Modern employment trends are such that people can no longer expect to work decades for the same employer. Today's minimally skilled or unskilled workers have a more tenuous and temporary relationship with their employers than those of the past.
These new employment trends cause concern because employment stability is considered to be the single most important indicator of wealth accumulation. Not only are the wages of stable workers higher, but their over-all net worth is significantly higher as well. While it remains true that Black workers in stable work situations do not make gains in net worth equal to Whites, these workers are still much better off than workers who live in concentrated poverty. Even modest gains in net worth open up educational, housing, and additional employment opportunities. Most Americans, including poorly educated workers holding low-paying jobs, measure their net worth almost exclusively in terms of housing and vehicle equity. Those unable to qualify for a mortgage or unable to finance a car cannot accrue equity and have little if any net worth.
Core city residents do not usually profit from the flourishing business and financial districts adjacent to their neighborhoods because of the skills and education required by these employers. As neighborhoods deteriorate, local small-scale businesses move away, taking with them the more accessible jobs they provided and their contribution to the core city tax base. Increased crime and decreased demand for goods and services force these businesses to relocate in safer areas that can provide more financially secure customers.
Because available jobs are located in the outer ring suburbs, reliable access to jobs miles away is critical for these low-skilled workers and their potential employers. Excessive spending on highway expansion and neglect of mass transportation needs further this spatial divide and discriminate against low-income workers who are unable to afford cars. Both increased mass transportation and special employer-sponsored shuttles are favored initiatives to solve this access problem. But policy makers warn that creating artificial job access only perpetuates racial and socio-economic segregation and is harmful to the environment.
The out-migration of core residents to job wealthy suburbs and the in-migration of suburban residents to central city jobs congests the freeways and adds to metropolitan-wide pollution and blight. Although suburban residents may sometimes cut back on their transportation needs by working at home and transmitting data to their employers via electronic technology, this individual solution to a metropolitan-wide problem is not an option for most workers, especially unskilled and computer-illiterate workers.
Increased commute time not only places additional stress on the highway infrastructure, it also increases day care costs and reduces the free time working parents have to spend with their families. Working parents rely upon accessible and affordable child care for their pre-school children. While 100% of mortgage interest is deductible on a family's home, child care expenses are not. In 1994, taxpayer credit for child care averaged under $500, yet the cost of keeping two children in full-time daycare often exceeds a household's mortgage payment or rent. The parents of school-age children must often rely upon before- and after-school care due to a mismatch of school and work hours and due to increased travel time to and from distant job sites. Parents who are without those facilities or who are unable to meet the expense of them are often forced to leave their children at home unattended. As of 1990, over one-and-a-half million children under 14 years old were left alone without adult supervision during some portion of the work day.
As mentioned earlier, most segregated poor and minority workers cannot find jobs adjacent to their neighborhoods due to a lack of skills. Low-skill or entry level-jobs are usually concentrated in areas of new growth away from the city center. Cost effective, safe, and reliable transportation often presents a barrier to applying for these jobs. Access barriers to employment, coupled with discriminatory hiring practices, increase poor and minority resident's dependence on the social welfare apparatus of the inner city. Often these would-be-workers are blamed for their own unemployment by critics who fault the poor for lacking a strong work ethic and the necessary initiative to climb out of poverty.
Creating new bus routes or mini-van services that provide round-trip job access has been one solution that pleases both employers unable to find local entry-level workers and core city workers willing to work for low wages. Increased demand for better access to new growth areas results in congested highways, however, and eats away at available highway improvement funds. The resultant skewed distribution of these funds shortchanges the needs of older areas for vital repairs. Construction subsidies mask the real dollar-and-cents cost of low-density urban sprawl; metropolitan dependence upon automobiles, fuel sources, road maintenance equipment, and available land not only threatens the environment but creates an underused, and under-invested in, public transit system.
The metro-wide problem of congested highways robs people of time and money. Peak-hour usage tolls, gas taxes, increased parking fees, and loss of free employee-parking incentives for employers compound daily transportation costs. Hoping that monetary penalties will discourage individual car use, planners have also put into place rewards for commuters who use the public transit system or who participate in ride-share programs. However, commuting parents operate within child-care and deadlines. Time away from work for Children's needs, health care appointments, and errands also leave many commuters dependent upon their own cars and unable to comply with city officials' appeals for decreased motor vehicle use.
Finally, transporting large numbers of central city workers to jobs located in the suburbs, although allaying suburban fears about having poor and minority neighbors, does not solve the problems of concentrated poverty. At best, this form provides a short term solution to a long term problem -- immediate job accessibility for chronically unemployed or under-employed workers. The pressing need for work access can not be underestimated; however, an increased, if not stressed, transportation infrastructure allows large neighborhoods of low-income minorities, hence segregation, to persist. This type of migrant worker solution has invited both critique and censure.
Housing, education, employment, and dependable transportation form the infrastructure of our everyday lives. They are interrelated and co-dependent. These four factors act in tandem to ensure or preclude a good quality of life in large metropolitan areas. As noted above, segregated housing adversely impacts the quality of education and limits work opportunities. Sub-standard educational opportunities prevent upward mobility and enforce patterns of segregation. A concentration of low-skill and entry-level jobs in suburbs without affordable housing burdens the transportation infrastructure and the environment.
The more fragile the quality of life, the more apparent this interdependence becomes. People who live in concentrated poverty need all four variables to work in their favor. However, this rarely happens. The way cities grow, the balkanization of metropolitan governments, an increased hostility to the poor and to remedial programs, and persistent racial segregation leave many of America’s minorities with an inadequate, if not shamefully compromised, quality of life. Held responsible for their own circumstances, central city residents remain cut off from even those opportunities that could provide some individual gains.
The needs of poor communities of color have been subordinated to the needs of more affluent White suburbs. Regionalism offers an analysis of metropolitan dynamics that recognizes the link between concentrated poverty and institutional policies that have created and perpetuated this subordination. Due to the interdependence of all metropolitan jurisdictions, a dysfunctional center city harms the region as a whole. Such regions will be unsuccessful competitors in the new global economy as they are unable to attract economic opportunities. Theorists contend that metropolitan areas with strong regional policies will have the jurisdictional authority and resources to avoid urban dysfunction. These cities will have less concentrated poverty, and thus less segregation, stronger schools, affordable housing available in most areas, and environment-friendly natural resource policies.
Many cities, especially those in the Northeast, can no longer expand. They are dying as they grow. Whole neighborhoods live in extreme poverty. Urban poverty and its associated social ills call for more and more federal and state subsidies due to the intense competition among the various municipalities for decreasing resources. The failure of expensive corrective initiatives such as public housing turns public opinion against the poor and the decision makers who waste valuable tax dollars on their behalf. Meanwhile, the poor move from state to state hoping to find a better quality of life in other areas. How can American cities, especially those cities with large concentrations of poor minorities, begin to recapture stability? What new initiatives are working?
As a method of analysis and intervention, regionalism offers policy makers a way to re-conceptualize metropolitan areas for the common good of all their residents. Successful initiatives like the Metro government of Portland, OR and the Gautreaux Project in Chicago, IL (a small, but much studied, mobility project) have offered some relief to advancing urban dysfunction. However, regionalism requires the cooperation of most metropolitan jurisdictions and this cooperation is hard won partly because we have few role models for successful collaboration.
Perhaps what is most conceptually difficult about regionalism is that it goes against how we have been trained to conceive of the "good life." Most of us have been conditioned to believe that the American dream of the 1950s still represents the common good. Educational attainment and hard work are rewarded by a career that provides us with an income level sufficient to buy our families a comfortable home set on a spacious lot unspoiled by urban decay. Automobiles are considered an essential asset, and a lengthy commute to and from work is the price we pay for providing our families with a safe environment and good schools. Discipline and sacrifice are individual virtues we teach to our children because they have served us well. As responsible citizens, we elect officials who will represent our best interests and work for our communities. As we struggle to achieve and maintain this ideal lifestyle, we come to believe that if everyone did as we do most social ills would not exist.
Proponents of regionalism strongly suggest that our idealized lifestyle is self-serving and works against the common good. Suburban expansion and the competing interests of a growing number of balkanized local governments create a powerful metropolitan caste system. Economically secure suburbs populated by skilled White workers take most of the available resources, while the impoverished core city populated by unemployed or under-employed racial minorities surrenders resources. If we believe that common resources are the just rewards for those individuals who practice the virtues of discipline, hard work, and sacrifice, we create dangerous levels of urban dysfunction through a lopsided allocation of these resources. Theorists suggest that we fail to conceptualize our metropolitan areas as an organic system of interdependent parts, where one part's inability to function compromises the entire system’s ability to function. Instead, we believe that if each part takes responsibility for itself, the whole will prosper. Such logic, strongly rooted in our historical belief in the ability of the individual to control his or her life, allows us to fault another community when it fails to thrive.
Such logic also allows us to blame whole groups of people for failing to achieve what we have achieved. The trajectory of this logic can be summarized as follows: If the residents of a community do not practice a lifestyle that values discipline, hard work, and sacrifice, those residents will destroy their community. And if those residents belong primarily to one racial or ethnic group, then the shared ideology of that group must be at fault. Hispanics drop out of school, so their culture must not value education; Blacks are unemployed, so their culture must not value hard work. Members of these groups voluntarily live in the same neighborhood because they share the same dysfunctional ideology and conditions will not improve for them until their ideology changes. The failure of expensive interventions like subsidized housing and school busing are due to the failure of such groups to change their behavior. Therefore, because of their poor decisions and behavioral patterns, the consequences of their dysfunction are no one's responsibility but their own.
This logic seems so commonsensical that further analysis appears
unwarranted. The normalcy of this logic is reinforced by
the entertainment industry, the media, and the popular press whose
betrayals of our American minority poor feed into middle-class
White prejudices. As mentioned earlier, this logic also
serves to absolve the non-poor of any responsibility for institutional
racism. Success remains meritocratic.
Proponents of regionalism actively question the logic of these
assumptions by advocating policies and programs that redirect
our focus away from non-poor, non-White residents and onto the
interaction between a core city and its suburbs. Their research
shows that this interaction is competitive and biased because
metropolitan policy makers favor the White suburbs whose successful
residents can provide a wealthier tax base and attract new businesses.
It is in the financial interest of these suburbs to vote for policies
that allow them to remain economically and racially homogenous
and resource-rich.
Theorists argue that it is the collective ideology of the suburbs that must change because it is self-serving, inherently racist, and environmentally dangerous. It is also self-deceiving because much of the suburban "good life" is possible only because this lifestyle does not pay for--but adds to--the financial burdens incurred by a metropolitan location. If this ideology were to be supplanted by a re-conceptualization of the common good, then cities could begin to recover. But people do not want to hear that their discipline, hard work, and sacrifice have been misguided and are not the sole reasons for their stature. And they become infuriated when they are asked to financially support initiatives that seemingly reward other groups for what they judge to be anti-social behaviors.
Given this strong resistance, why do policy makers focus on the relationship between a core city and its suburbs as the main cause of urban dysfunction? And what viable agenda could this examination produce? A poor and racially segregated urban core degrades the reputation of the metropolitan region as a whole and makes it less inviting to international, national, and local businesses as well as individuals and families looking for homes. Efforts to reeducate citizens about the interdependence of regional neighborhoods and communities can counteract the incomplete picture of the economy provided by the media.
Innovative attempts to involve citizens in regional reform efforts are paying off because they are dispelling two myths: the belief that regional conversations are or ought to be limited to elected officials, and the belief that such conversations, by nature, must be confrontational and competitive. The Internet explosion has given opportunities for citizen education to those regions willing to take advantage of this technology. The Sustainable Seattle website provides updated information on 40 current indicators of regional health to interested residents. The database includes yearly measures of that region’s sustainability process beginning with the original report of 1993 on 20 indicators. This initiative is supported by the Mayor's office, businesses, foundations, and various agencies like the YMCA. Indicators such as the "Ethnic Diversity of Teachers" are written in accessible language and not only provide current data but also function as teaching tools for citizens who are not familiar with the professional conversations surrounding this topic.
In 1976, a much-documented and highly successful program began to relocate primarily Black single mothers living in the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) projects outside of impoverished central city neighborhoods. Found guilty of racial discrimination, the CHA was ordered by the federal courts to move project residents out of bad neighborhoods and into private rental housing in the suburbs and city. Two thirds of these families were relocated to suburban areas and one-third to other city neighborhoods. The suburban and city groups were then compared on certain pivotal markers, such as high school completion, post-secondary training, and employment. While the suburban families made significantly more quality of life gains, the Gautreaux Project families as a whole showed better employment and schooling outcomes than those families who remained in the housing projects. Close to 5,000 families have since participated in the program.
The Gautreaux Project is often cited by theorists of regionalism because of its innovative solution to the problems associated with concentrated poverty. Relocating impoverished families to suburbs rich with good schools, quality housing. and access to jobs dramatically changes these families' ability to succeed. Not only did this program change the lives of individual participants, it also recognized the need to de-concentrate poverty in the core city and make metropolitan resources available to more people. However, initiatives like the Gautreaux Project are met with intense suburban resistance. The Gautreaux Project was court-ordered, other initiatives that seek the voluntary cooperation of local governments and their residents must often be resolved in political arenas after considerable delay and dilution. Such resistance to voluntary residential integration and fair share housing initiatives points to the intractability of segregation in our country.
Also in 1976, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that, because zoning is a power delegated to the state by the state constitution, it must meet two requirements: its application must benefit all the residents of a metro area, and its application must promote the general welfare of all affected (metropolitan) residents. When zoning is delegated to balkanized municipal governments, exclusionary zoning practices become common place and the majority of low- and moderate-income housing is built in core cities. As an artificial community forced onto an existing neighborhood, a low-income housing projects create demand for more goods and social services than low-income neighborhoods can supply, causing deprivation for all residents. The concentration of low-income housing in the core city was found to be in violation of both zoning requirements. The court ordered the developing suburbs to zone for the construction of low-income housing.
In 1983, the New Jersey Supreme Court expanded its ruling. It imposed a constitutional duty on each municipality in state-designated growth areas to meet its fair share of the state’s low-and moderate-income housing needs. Law suits were then filed against 68 New Jersey suburbs with many of these suits resulting in inclusionary zoning rulings. As a result of these rulings, and the intense controversy that the Mount Laurel decisions created, the New Jersey legislature enacted the Fair Housing Act of 1985. Since then, approximately 25,000 units of economically accessible housing have been made available through new construction and rehabilitation initiatives without significant federal subsidies.
While this has been a successful effort to alleviate the needs of the elderly or the temporary poverty of groups like the recently divorced or students, the Act failed to account for the intersection of poverty with race as the Gautreaux Project did. Consequently, the demographics of new housing continues to reflect old patterns of racial segregation with people of color still living primarily in the center city areas. However, what is most compelling about Mount Laurel and the Gautreaux Project is that the courts chose to view suburb and city as part of an interdependent metropolitan whole and not as discrete entities with no accountability to one another.
Suburban planners and residents resist fair share housing programs in part because they wish to retain their building codes and standards. There is also a desire to maintain the low tax rates that come with low density developments. However, suburban homes tend to use too much land and resources. Critics believe that many of the current codes are in great excess of prudent global standards for healthy and productive family life. The American Planning Association (APA) in their June, 1997, "Draft Policy on Manufactured Homes" endorses the purchase of manufactured homes for young families and others with limited incomes. The APA, as part of HUD's National Homeownership Partnership, wants to increase public acceptance of what they feel is a vital, cost-effective alternative to more expensive site-built housing. Due to the improved design and overall durability of these houses since their initial conception as mobile homes (pre-1976 HUD Code), such constructions constituted one third of all new single-family homes during 1995. Their new image has prompted some communities to revise their zoning codes and to reconsider sub-division standards. However, the task ahead remains one of ensuring all new affordable housing initiatives are made available to citizens of color.
The data for 1996 mortgage rejection rates released by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council for 9,300 banks, savings institutions, credit unions & mortgage companies show 50.2 % of mortgage applications submitted by Native Americans, 48.8% of those submitted by Blacks, 34.4% of those submitted by Hispanics, 24.1% of those submitted by Whites, and 13.8% of those submitted by Asians were denied. For 1996, there were 14.8 million home-loan applications but record amounts of consumer debt and bankruptcy. When those applicants who were rejected received consumer counseling, the percentages decreased, due in part to lenders' aggressive outreach to low-income groups who historically haven't attempted home ownership.
The gap in rejection rates between White and minority applicants
at 80% or less of the median income level is closing: Blacks 44.5%,
Hispanics 37.5%, Native Americans (no data available), Asians
17%, and Whites 32.1% (refer to Figure 2). More lower-income
Blacks and Hispanics are accessing loans and buying houses.
However, the gap in rejection rates between White and minority
applicants at 120% or more of the median income level is significantly
wider; Blacks 20.4%, Hispanics 16.7%, Native Americans 16.6%,
Asians 10.6%, and Whites 8.6% (refer to Figure 3).
The ratio of Black to White loan denials at 120% of the median
income is nearly 2.5 to 1. Although overall lower-income
minorities are rejected at higher rates than higher-income minorities,
the greater racial disparity at 120% of the median income suggests
that race may play a more important role in mortgage decisions
made outside of the central city where minorities of all economic
classes are less welcome. Certainly home ownership is an
important step in mediating poverty for minorities and lessening
crime and neighborhood blight. But initiatives that do not
directly and aggressively address metropolitan-wide racial integration
reinforce established, segregated residential patterns.
Without residential integration, school integration is difficult
in communities that enforce district boundaries.
Educational performance is intricately tied to residence.
Poor students of color confined within poor schools by rigid district
boundaries have less chance for educational success.
The Supreme court's 1975 Milliken v. Bradley decision had a great
impact on how urban school could desegregate. The creation
of magnet schools and special programs was an attempt to integrate
schools within the same district. However, these strategies
to remedy intradistrict desegregation often replaced it with intraschool
segregation. Whites and Asians populated the gifted and
talented and international baccalaureate programs, while Blacks
and Latinos populated Chapter 1 and other remedial or alternative
programs. Therefore, attempts to curb white flight placed
White children in elite schools within schools that sharply curtailed
meaningful contact with students of color. Furthermore,
intradistrict desegregation remedies within heavily segregated
districts led to legally desegregated schools that were nevertheless
predominantly minority and predominantly poor (e.g. if a school
district if 70% minority overall, then intradistrict desegregation
will lead to "integrated" schools that are approximately
70% minority).
In 1976, a federal judge for the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Wisconsin ruled that the Milwaukee public schools were unlawfully segregated. The state was mandated to develop a desegregation plan. A few months later the Wisconsin legislature enacted Chapter 220, a voluntary interdistrict student transfer program between city and suburban school districts. Other desegregation measures included the creation of intradistrict specialty or magnet schools and programs, and school closings and forced transfers.
By 1979, an intradistrict settlement agreement stated that three out of four students must be educated in racially integrated schools (20-60% Black), and while some schools could remain nearly all or all-Black, no school could remain all-White. Prior to 1976, only 14 of 158 schools had been integrated. By 1988, 112 of the remaining 138 schools had been integrated by busing students. Chapter 220 received national attention as a successful desegregation strategy.
However, desegregation results weakened during the 80s as the
city continued to lose its white population, and meeting the racial
balance ratios determined by the settlement agreement grew difficult.
In 1984, Milwaukee filed a lawsuit against the state of Wisconsin
and the city’s surrounding suburban school districts (Board
of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee v. Thompson (84-C-877)).
The suit charged the defendants with repeated failure to act on
minority housing and education opportunities resulting in Black
racial isolation in the core city. A new settlement agreement
promised pro-integration housing initiatives and better use of
Chapter 220 through, among other initiatives, an increased number
of minority students attending suburban schools, $30 million dollars
for city remedial education, and an increase of minority staff
in suburban schools.
A 1991 study completed by the National School Board Association
ranked Wisconsin seventh for the largest percentage (75.3 ) of
Blacks attending schools with 50-100% minority enrollment.
During the current decade, Milwaukee is still struggling with
what they believe to be the competing demands of desegregation
and quality education.
Raleigh, North Carolina experienced a similar out-migration of Whites to its suburbs and increasing concentration of racial minorities in its inner-city schools. In response, the city dissolved all city/suburban school district boundaries in 1975 to ensure educational equity. Aided by busing and magnet school initiatives, the city was able to sustain a racial mix and stabilize its neighborhoods. Such measures resulted in improved educational outcomes for those students living in concentrated poverty. Raleigh’s sister city, Durham, experiencing the same out-migration/segregation dynamic, chose to retain district boundaries. During the 1980s, Durham’s inner-city schools were 90% Black and chiefly impoverished and its educational outcomes were eroding.
A program in Albuquerque, New Mexico, similar to the Gautreaux Project in Chicago, showed that students benefit when relocated from housing projects to scatter-site housing units in middle-class neighborhoods within the same school district. Third and fifth grade test scores climbed by 13 percentile points for such students. To the detriment of poor, minority students, many mobility programs meet with resistance from their relocation neighborhoods. The Moving to Opportunity Fair Housing Demonstration Program, started by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for implementation in several large cities, lost its second year of funding partially due to such resistance.
Measures like dissolving school district boundaries and desegregation efforts like the Gautreaux Project show that student success is dependent upon strong schools. A school whose student body is chiefly comprised of minorities living in concentrated poverty almost always fails in its educational mission. Mandated efforts to integrate suburban White neighborhoods and their school districts more often than not panic the residents. They are afraid any influx of racial minorities will contaminate the suburban schools with a so-called urban ghetto culture of crime and violence. Their resistance to integration is a resistance to what they perceive to be an inevitable threat to their children and property.
Recent 1997 media coverage of gang activity in the wealthy, racially segregated suburb of Edina, Minnesota reported the outrage of White parents who were convinced that their children were not real gang members but must have been led astray by "outside influences." Their refusal to believe their own children capable of vandalism and violent behavior is a common form of racial stereotyping based upon denial: all socially reprehensible behaviors must originate in the ghetto among people of color. This stereotyping and refusal to accept responsibility for their own behavior convinces suburbanites to keep their communities exclusive. Legislation that facilitates exclusivity also facilitates the perpetuation of such stereotypes.
If, during the 1980s, only 5% of new suburban residential construction in our largest forty-four cities had been designated for the poor, close to 13% of the poor in 31 of these cities and over 30% of the poor in the remaining 13 cities could have been relocated. No individual suburb would have experienced anything close to a radical change in demographics. Voluntary participation by all communities in fair share housing initiatives protects as well as enriches each community.
Maryland's new Smart Growth metropolitan planning strategy cites the educational costs associated with urban sprawl. Since 1970, Maryland's Montgomery County has closed 63 old schools and opened 67 new schools primarily in newly constructed neighborhoods. These 67 schools serve approximately 10,000 fewer students. The cost for the abandonment of the old schools is 500 million dollars.
A promising litigation strategy that has proliferated recently is the educational adequacy lawsuit. Based on the right to an adequate education found in most state constitutions, this type of suit has many benefits over traditional desegregation suits. The primary advantage is that educational adequacy suits avoid the narrowness of desegregation suits. Because they are in the state court system, they avoid the narrow circumscription of remedies caused by Milliken. Under Milliken, desegregation can only be ordered in those districts that have been proven to be intentionally segregating students. Because states have an affirmative duty to provide an adequate education, however, there is no analogous need to prove intent in an adequacy suit. It must only be proven that, for whatever reason, some students are not being adequately educated; the focus is on effect, not cause.
There is much greater flexibility in defining what constitutes
an "adequate" education than there is in defining what
constitutes a "desegregated" education. Given
Brown v. Board of Education's charge that "separate is inherently
unequal," adequacy suits assert that a desegregated education
is an indispensable component of an adequate education.
Furthermore, an adequate education can be argued to require equitable
funding for all school districts or even greater funding in those
districts with disproportionate numbers of students who are poor,
learning disabled, limited-English proficient and otherwise possessing
special educational needs. The Connecticut Supreme Court,
in its recently decided Sheff v. O'Neil case, went so far as to
make explicit mention of the link between school and residential
segregation laying the groundwork for a remedy that incorporated
education and housing.
Theorists ask if America’s current low rate of unemployment is a true indicator of a strong economy? If it is, why are we besieged by so many social problems? Why are our prisons overflowing? Why do we have a national drug problem and a crime rate that threatens even our tourism industry? It is more constructive to ask if the work available pays enough to provide an adequate living for families.
Workers without necessary skills present a problem to potential employers as well as to local governments. This vulnerable group of mostly core-city residents is increasingly the product of dysfunctional, racially segregated schools that fail to educate their students for either gainful employment or participatory citizenship despite federal, state, and local interventions. Their inability to compete for even minimum-wage jobs is exacerbated by their lack of role models who are in the workforce. These workers also cite the exploitative working conditions that accompany many low-wage jobs as yet another major deterrent.
Public works programs designed to enable full employment are a potential remedy that is also being discussed. European countries have such programs in place and many unemployed people, especially immigrants, help to clean and beautify their cities for the benefit of residents, tourists, and potential investors. Theorists suggest that in America the chronically unemployed could be recruited and trained for even more jobs such as assistant workers in child care, gerontology, disabilities, or policing fields. The major problem with such ideas is that they help to maintain--if not create--a racialized two-tiered labor force where a disproportionate percentage of people of color are delegated to the "scut" work nobody wants. Also, such solutions denigrate the already socially-devalued, so-called caretaking professions that focus on children, the aged, and the disabled. Such jobs take years of training and the minimal salaries and benefits these professionals have gained have been hard won. The threat to the gains of marginalized workers with the needs of the unemployed is currently one of the greatest impediments in the welfare-to-workfare initiative.
Linking qualified inner-city and inner ring suburban workers to lower-wage jobs in outer ring suburbs becomes complicated when the workers do not own cars. Initiatives like that begun by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) during the late 80s provided employer-subsidized reverse commute bus lines to and from business parks. Core-city residents and suburban employers were pleased with this low-cost solution. While the success of this initiative was both applauded and duplicated in other cities, it is at best a temporary solution to the greater problem of regional disparities. The suburbs produce jobs; the core-city produces difficult-to-employ people of color. Neither addresses the issue of livable wages nor the problems of persistent residential segregation.
For employment to be a means of self-sufficiency for families, there must be adequate day care facilities. An estimated 31 million children require adult supervision while their parents work. This year, 62% of mothers with pre-schoolers are working outside of the home. The American Planning Association (APA) has taken a position on child care that recognizes the essential role paid care plays in our modern economy. Their 1997 policy position on child care endorses the amendment of local zoning codes to provide for accessible, safe, affordable care facilities for six or fewer children. Citing research that shows the majority of families want small day care facilities in private residences close to their own homes, the APA supports zoning and building code reforms that authorize, by right, an adequate number of child care facilities.
Because the APA is clear in its insistence that families want
neighborhood care, the underlying premise of what constitutes
a neighborhood must be interrogated. While the APA's position
links successful employment to available child care, it does not
address the issue of residential segregation. If current
policies facilitate job access but do nothing to change racial
residential patterns, available neighborhood child care will segregate
our newest generation of citizens and impede child care as an
enriching form of socialization.
Regional planning for transportation funding is required by the national government. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991 has required every urban area with a population in excess of 50,000 to establish a metropolitan group to plan transportation policy. Such plans must take into account land use and environmental issues, and address immediate traffic congestion. They must be in compliance of other Acts like the federal Clean Air Act as traffic congestion is a major cause of air pollution. However, as with many regional initiatives, citizen compliance is mostly voluntary.
Because commuter lives are complicated by child care and often multiple family work obligations, car pooling is often inconvenient if not unfeasible. Toll roads and increased gas taxes have not proven to be effective deterrents to long commutes. In response to this persistent demand for more and better highways, many new initiatives center on finding more environment-friendly fuel sources to power personal cars. Bicycle use planning is being written into several new regional transportation plans in an attempt to cut back on urban traffic congestion.
Regional initiatives also address the imbalance between highway and mass transit funding. The road congestion caused by commuters due to suburban sprawl has demanded the lion's share of funding at the expense of developing mass transit alternatives. Light rail developments, the re-emergence of the commuter train for long, 20+ mile connections to the city core, and more heavily subsidized port authority developments are all competing for available moneys.
However, ISTEA was created to establish efficient links between sites of production and sites of consumption. It is based on the economic realities brought about by an increasingly global economy. Its primary thrust is to facilitate the efficient movement of goods and people, and in keeping with democratic principles, all citizens and their elected officials are encouraged to participate in transportation planning. What is left out of this equation is any recognition of an important root of the transportation problem: how much of this efficient movement is unnecessarily based in segregationist practices.
Without an alliance between regional housing and transportation
initiatives, models like ISTEA are doomed to reinforce racial
and economic segregation by accommodating the infrastructure needs
of favored suburbs. More highways and the implementation
of mass transit programs only facilitate the abandonment of the
core city by the middle class and employers. These initiatives
legitimize our current patterns of urban sprawl and decaying urban
centers. They do nothing to create a better fit between
residence and employment--a fit that would necessarily decrease
infrastructure stress and pollution.
There are many opportunities for community leaders and officials who wish to promote regional policy making. Current regional leadership programs provide a pool of expertise that can be drawn from to staff established and emerging initiatives. The Leadership Miami Valley program, sponsored by the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce in Dayton, Ohio, and the Triad Leadership Network program sponsored by the Piedmont Triad Partnership of the Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point region of North Carolina serve as two examples.
However, there is an important omission in these new initiatives: How is the average metropolitan resident going to be retrained in his or her conceptualization of citizenship? How does a person be both a neighborhood and regional citizen and what are the benefits and obligations of both roles? What would a curriculum in shared responsibility and stewardship include that would educate metropolitan residents about racial and economic disparities? Programs like Passport to the Atlanta Region and St. Louis Kids Place have begun to educate our newest generation in regional citizenship.
Most importantly, will such initiatives pave the way for the eradication of concentrated poverty and racial segregation? Or will the newest generation also resist attempts at desegregating neighborhoods and schools? The difficulty of enforcing regional initiatives suggests that our constitution is an unfinished document. As a case in point, our national investment in a global economy habitually overlooks the increasing independence of metropolitan regions as competitors for trade and commerce. These regions or city-states function as a unified whole when making economic deals, yet they have no have no officially recognized position within our American system.
We have traditionally organized our laws and policies around the jurisdictions of federal, state, and local governments. Certain theorists suggest that this organization is outmoded and more relevant jurisdictions would be global, regional, and neighborhood. Not only have there been shifts to a global economy, but problems like global warming and the destruction of world resources are world-wide problems that have the potential to impact everyone. Regional transportation, infrastructure, and educational systems are the realities that gauge the daily quality of life for metro residents, whereas neighborhoods are the real arenas where social problems that compromise this collective quality of life are played out.
If a core city has been left to deteriorate to the point where it can't compete in the world's new global economic configuration, then all of its metropolitan residents suffer the loss of economic prosperity. Yet regional planning initiatives that try to limit suburban sprawl in favor of infill, a reinvestment in already developed areas, constantly have to battle the interests of real estate brokers, builders, and rural county governments hoping to cash in on continued expansion.
In 1973, Portland, Oregon established no-growth zones around Portland’s metro area and out-state smaller cities to try to achieve a balance between development and conservation efforts. Every Portland municipality is charged with writing a comprehensive growth plan that establishes an Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) around itself in compliance with state guidelines. Portland has been able to increase its population density from 4.2 people per acre to 5.1 per acre (the typical American suburban "McMansion" sits on 1-5 acres of land). Enforcement of these UGBs has depended upon numerous lawsuits as opposition to the boundaries increased and organizations as well as private citizens have been given the right to sue local municipalities for non-compliance.
Seven counties within Minnesota’s Twin Cities area are currently under the jurisdiction of a Metropolitan Council. In 1984 the Council established a Metropolitan Urban Service Area (MUSA) intended to direct suburban expansion rather than limit it. Population density increased from 3.5 people per acre to 3.8 people per acre. However, the sites of rapid new growth occurred in rural areas adjacent to MUSA, extending the Twin City metropolitan area to 14 counties. Three of these counties are located in neighboring Wisconsin. Developers complained that the boundaries had prohibitively increased the price of available land. This year, Minnesota put in place a voluntary land planning system for local governments hoping to stop such development in the rural areas between municipal boundaries. Like their counterparts in Oregon, Minnesota’s smaller municipalities view rural development as being in their best interest. A doubtful farm economy has convinced many of these planners that urban growth is essential to their well being.
Maryland, unlike land-rich Oregon and Minnesota, has recently adopted its Smart Growth plan to curb suburban expansion. Smart Growth does not limit new construction through legislation or voluntary compliance to established guidelines; rather, the plan emphasizes infill. Investment will be redirected to older, more dense core city neighborhoods and suburbs. Developers can build where they wish, but after October 1, 1998, the state will no longer pay for the accompanying infrastructure such development demand's new roads and schools and sewage systems. Those costs must be absorbed by the municipalities unless the development occurs in designated Smart Growth areas.
In Maryland's case, Smart Growth areas are within established municipal boundaries or in areas with existing infrastructures. Suburban sprawl has already threatened the ecology of Chesapeake Bay. Because Maryland is an historic state, there is an established precedent for preserving historical districts. This makes it easier to invest in mixed-use developments that integrate businesses and various types of residential units to achieve higher population density per acre. However, such initiatives only make it more expensive to abandon the core city; it does not stop the abandonment of racial minorities living in concentrated poverty. Maryland planners, however, acknowledge the racial dynamics that impede infill initiatives but have decided to proceed anyhow because, like Portland and the Twin Cities, Smart Growth has provided a good lesson in the power of coalition building.
The necessity for individuals and groups with a shared vested interest to build political alliances might serve as a way to reeducate people in productive citizenship for the next millennium by serving as a role model for successful collaboration.