Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412200015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANTHONY DOWNS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This pattern is mainly for the benefit of middle- and upper-income households, who are a majority in each metropolitan area. But it operates at the expense of low-income households, especially African-American households because of continued racial segregation in housing markets.
This penalizes the poor by requiring many of them to live together in concentrated-poverty areas, marked by negative conditions stemming from the dominance of poverty. This negative result is directly caused by a system designed to benefit the upper-income majority.
This separation of the poor, especially black poor, from new-growth areas creates both transportation and job-opportunities problems for them because of the shift of new job growth to the outer edges of each area. This problem is aggravated by the fiscal isolation of big-city governments from growing resources in outlying parts of each area. As jobs, retail centers and viable households move out, central cities are saddled with low tax bases and high-cost residents. This generates a self-aggravating downward spiral of the quality of inner-city life, with no cure in sight.
Key products of this spiral are social problems now spreading outward from inner-city areas to become national in scope: rising crime and violence, the rearing of children in poverty, poor-quality public education, and failure to integrate many workers into the mainstream work force.
These problems cannot be effectively attacked if they are conceived of primarily as "inner-city problems." Inner-city high-poverty areas contain only 10 percent of central-city populations, and less than 4 percent of the nation's total population. They are also concentrated in just a few huge metropolitan areas. Most Americans would not support much spending on programs aimed at so narrow a target.
But if these problems are seen as nationwide, then they might be attacked with more resources - and a disproportionately high share of those resources would end in inner-city neighborhoods.
At the same time, a set of growth-related problems has emerged from the dominant development pattern: excessive movement, traffic congestion, air pollution and other environmental degradation, inability to finance adequate infrastructures, excessive consumption of open space.
On the one hand, suburbs contribute to the concentration of poverty within central cities by exclusionary zoning that deliberately prevents low-cost housing from being created in outlying communities. Unlimited outward expansion of suburban growth also makes it easy for firms and households to depart from central cities. So suburbs are involved in the creation of the downward spiral in central cities' quality of life.
On the other hand, suburbs remain dependent economically on the viability of their central cities. Many suburban residents work in central cities. Many low-wage workers vital to suburban life reside in central cities. Cities provide facilities like hospitals, airports and universities that would be very costly to duplicate in suburbs. Key amenities in cities also attract firms and households to live in the metropolitan area as a whole, who would not do so if those amenities were not functioning well. Cities provide specialized services and markets used by many suburban firms.
Unfortunately, many suburban residents do not recognize this two-way linkage with their central cities. In fact, many have left those cities to escape problems there. Hence, they are hostile to helping solve those problems, either with money or by accepting residents from city neighborhoods in their own communities.
We should forget about trying to create metropolitan governments. There is no political support.
The Oregon approach of creating a statewide framework for regionalism that maintains local governments is politically most acceptable. The state establishes statewide planning goals and basic planning procedures for all communities. Then each community prepares its own comprehensive plan. But a statewide or regional agency is responsible for approving, coordinating and overseeing those plans.
A factor in the severe skepticism of Americans toward all government is that many of the underlying causes of key problems today lie in our own individual behavior patterns that are not susceptible to much change through government policies.
That is true of the generation of babies borne by unwed mothers in the slums. It is also true of suburban unwillingness to recognize interdependence with inner-city residents or with other suburban residents.
Just as it is largely up to the leaders of the African-American community to change the attitudes of many young people about bearing children out of wedlock, it is up to suburban leaders to change attitudes about mutual interdependence, and mutual membership and social solidarity, in a single metropolitan community.
Anthony Downs, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is author of "New Visions for Metropolitan America."
by CNB