Geography As Destiny

David D. Troutt

14 November 2011

Originally published in Politico

If Occupy Wall Street protesters and tea partiers agree on anything, it’s the loss of a stable middle class. Yet while the public debate has focused on overarching federal policies, neither group has pointed to the threat right here on the ground: the inequity of place.

Real estate agents and home buyers have long known that location — where we live, learn, shop and join in community — determines most of the opportunities available to Americans. Opportunity is the touchstone to becoming a member of the middle class. As much as brains, pluck or work ethic, geography is destiny — for better or worse.

Unfortunately, destiny for most of us is looking worse these days because of two developments often viewed as unconnected: fiscal stress on cities and the demographic transformation of greater metropolitan America.

First, towns and cities are now often unable to pay for the services their residents need and expect because of declining revenues. Towns and cities are going broke. To avoid bankruptcy, many are firing teachers and firefighters. They are cutting services because federal and state aid has shrunk and property taxes are insufficient to make up the difference.

Local officials from Trevose, Pa., to Stockton, Calif., face the same deficits, according to my research. They worry about delivering the essentials of the American dream to residents — many of whom face unstable employment and risk foreclosure. This crisis facing local governments predated the Great Recession, but it’s growing worse because of it.

Compounding this is the fact that all do not feel the pain equally. Like the increase in income inequality, there’s a municipal wealth gap between smaller haves and the growing areas of have-nots.

A favored few cities or regions have managed to maintain a healthy tax base by keeping out expensive undesirables — such as special-needs kids and affordable housing — while attracting corporate parks. This leaves the others to shoulder the burdens of an economically diverse population with dwindling tax resources. The resulting inequity reduces opportunity in the very places that need it more.

These places are at the forefront of the second crisis factor: the demographic transformation of the inner suburbs, towns closest to the city border. These accidental laboratories of racial and ethnic diversity are America’s demographic future.

The non-whitening of the first suburbs has progressed rapidly, producing most of the past decade’s population growth and a majority of the schoolchildren in the greater metropolitan areas. While many non-Latino whites have moved to outer suburbs or back into cities, blacks, Latinos and Asians have taken their place on the close-in urban periphery.

This reversal of traditional migration patterns is also changing the meaning of suburbs. They were first created as upper-middle-class enclaves. But with their good schools and strong amenities, suburbs also nurture the continuous development of America’s vital middle class.

Now, at least in the inner ring, the suburbs are areas of higher density and crippling poverty. This is why, for example, parts of East Orange, N.J., and Compton, Calif., resemble the South Bronx of old — if far more car-dependent. They lack public transportation access to jobs.

Social shifts have economic consequences for all of us, wherever we live. As modest income groups move to older suburbs in search of affordable housing and the American dream, the tax base can’t keep up. What a city could provide in schools and services, a suburb can’t.

As nearby towns take note of their neighbors’ decline, those residents who are able to, move away. In the resulting chain reaction, the lack of opportunity once associated with tough urban neighborhoods spreads out to more places, which have even fewer resources.

The result is an unsustainable new map of opportunity with enclaves of gentrified urban neighborhoods and segregated townships sandwiched between diverse regions that are in decline.

The history of all this is as complicated as the myriad causes of our national recession, but you can be sure it involves all of our unresolved conflicts around race and class. Americans have collectively swept a lot of problems under the rug of geography. However, what’s new — and may be promising — about the inequity of place is that this crisis reaches all of us — either directly or indirectly — and cannot be ignored.

When the jobs come back, we urgently need these new metropolitan majorities, which now include the inner suburbs, to be more than working class. Working-class incomes, no matter how many, cannot pay teachers, cover Social Security or maintain U.S. global competitiveness. Only a dynamic middle class can do that. This is why the growing inequality must give way to new rules about opportunity.

The old rules of residential organization were a motley crew of law, politics and funding formulas. The new ones will be, too. Protest is understandable, healthy and overdue. After all, the re-segregation of our landscape, the sprawl of inequity and the reduction of opportunity offend basic American values. But we will soon have to dig into the hard work of policy change if we’re to make a difference.

We can begin at the local level — with policies of metropolitan equity. These include fair-share affordable housing in which resource-rich towns and communities willingly include affordable housing for poorer families — as New Jersey and Maryland have tried. It may involve empowering regional governance — as Minnesota has championed. Detroit and its suburbs, once a beacon of segregated school districts, are now opening district lines to “outsiders.”

Throughout the country, neighboring towns and cities are agreeing to share expensive police, fire and sanitation services, if not tax-base revenues. Of course, they need the support of state and federal government to overcome the parochialism of self-interested decision making.

These ideas follow the principle of interdependency. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed it eloquently 50 years ago, when he said that we are tied together by “inescapable networks of mutuality.” In other words — there really is a common good, connected not just by moral belief but by practical necessity.

Our fates are linked, like it or not. Getting the jobs back should be first on our agenda. But this should be second. We can do both.