SUBURBS' NEW ANATOMY: WHAT 25 REGIONS SHOW
Neal Peirce
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WASHINGTON--In a 1993 column, I featured the breakthrough inspiration of Myron Orfield, a then-barely 30 Minnesota legislator getting ready to upset the apple cart of how Americans think about suburbia.
Exhibiting brightly colored maps he'd generated on his desktop computer, this brash young politico was using the Twin Cities example to show how profoundly different U.S. suburbs were becoming.
On the one hand, he noted, old blue-collar suburbs close to the major cities were in peril of serious decline after losing 38 percent of their manufacturing jobs in the `80s. By contrast, a "fertile crescent" of fast-growth suburbs on the Twin Cities' southwest flank was attracting a flood of wealthy taxpayers, businesses and investment--even while using exclusionary zoning practices to bar affordable housing.
Nine years later, Myron Orfield has become the most influential social demographer in America's burgeoning regional movement. Major national foundations, regional activist organizations, universities, business groups, local governments and Catholic archdioceses have commissioned studies on their regions from the Metropolitan Area Research Corp. (www.metroresearch.org) that Orfield founded and heads.
Now the Brookings Institution has published Orfield's second book--"American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality"--analyzing the disparities among the suburbs that surround America's 25 largest metropolitan areas.
The new analysis shatters any notion of a monolithic "suburban America." Forty percent of the big regions' people live in the "at-risk" suburbs--places suffering the same social stress and often the same racial tensions familiar to center cities. Some are inner-ring places like close-in Long Island or Chicago's south and west sides. Others are regions' low-density suburbs with relatively high poverty rates. All tend of be even worse off than urban centers because they lack typical big-city resources--strong center business districts, university and medical campuses, high-end housing areas, handsome parks, expert social services.
Racial segregation, Orfield's studies indicate, often expands rapidly in "at-risk" suburbs. He cites the NBC "Dateline" report on Matteson, Ill., a community of large, attractive suburban homes and good schools 20 miles south of the Chicago Loop where middle-class black families started to arrive in the early '90s.
By education and income, the arriving blacks were at least the equal of Matteson's whites. But the fear mill ground fast. A sudden home sell-off occurred among whites who sensed school decline and rising crime--though neither, objectively, was true. Yet eventually, there weren't enough black middle-class families to sustain market demand for Matteson residences. Net result: the schools turned overwhelmingly black. "White flight," writes Orfield, "invariably means poverty"--an alarming deprivation of opportunity for arriving minorities.
"At-risk" suburbs, Orfield notes, can hardly compete: "Why choose a place with high taxes, less services, more crime?"
"Bedroom developing suburbs" come next in his typology--25 percent of the major regions' population, they're experiencing fast growth. This group triggers faster-than-expected expenditures for school building and new roads. And residents suffer troublesomely long commutes.
Last come the affluent job centers--7 percent of metropolitan America. They seem to "have it all"--unless endless big box retailers, new commercial centers and loss of green and open space end up violating the pristine exurban image that drew residents in the first place. Small wonder such places are seeing four times more petitions than other suburbs to limit or slow growth.
In short, Orfield is saying, no one's really happy. The only way to a better future: rules to foster less fearsome competition for businesses that bolster tax base, more metropolitan-wide tax-base sharing, constantly increasing state assistance, and restraints on profligate and environmentally destructive sprawl development.
Orfield does suggest a political combine--the less fortunate suburban groups teaming up with city populations to fight for more equitable sharing of metropolitan areas' wealth. But what's really more fascinating about his book is a mellowing, a broader search for alliances, than what we saw in the Myron Orfield of a decade ago.
The early State Rep. Orfield fought like a tiger to force affordable housing across all suburbs (and penalize resisting communities). He tried repeatedly to expand the reach of Minnesota's generation-old tax-base sharing system. He fought for popular election instead of gubernatorial appointment of members of the powerful Twin Cities Metropolitan Council.
Many of his initiatives ran into vetoes by a Republican governor. He backed a 1995 compromise, the "Livable Communities Act," because it raised prospects for building more affordable housing. He did succeed with a bill to transform the Metropolitan Council into a true regional government, gaining responsibility for regional transit and sewer services plus beefed-up land-use planning powers.
Today Myron Orfield takes pains to cite Republican leaders, as well as his fellow Democrats, who've worked for more rational growth patterns and more social equity. He's going to leave the legislature next winter, focusing on his research corporation and his growing kids.
It has been a good run. Regional coherence, our new American agenda, needs more such champions.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
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