Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom's Place Matters
Sclar, Elliott
HERE Is A simple but important fact: approximately three-quarters of Americans live in metropolitan areas. Of these, about one-third live in central cities and two-thirds live in the surrounding...
...Although the authors base a great deal of their moral urgency on the asserted increase in ghettoization of the poor, the data they marshal do not make a compelling argument for the case...
...The contemporary metropolitan social ecology described by Dreier et al...
...If progressives are to be politically effective we need to build political coalitions that unite the middle and working classes...
...In 1990, the comparable figure had risen to 52 percent...
...Dreier et al...
...To understand why, consider the other finding: the significantly increased concentration among those defined by Massey as "affluent...
...Many of the families in these outer communities are not made up of working dads and stay-at-home soccer moms who lovingly haul the kids from enrichment to enrichment...
...The debate is really about how much each is implicated...
...It is estimated, for example that metropolitan Atlanta alone loses fifty acres a day to this haphazard outward push...
...The authors imply that the drabness of working-class suburbs is often so severe as to be a cause of suicide among working-class suburban teenagers...
...Is it the political economy of our unique federal/state system of government...
...While these questions have motivated a longstanding debate among urban scholars, the answer is that all of them are implicated...
...It is noteworthy that in a work on metropolitan life the authors do not deal with the phenomenon of gentrification...
...The working classes and middle classes are now at the mercies of the regional land market...
...The only difference is the spatial compression in which the inequities are observed...
...But even this pattern would not be uniform...
...Wealth, poverty, and everything in between have sprawled out with America's metropolitan regions...
...Many families live in these places because of two wage earners working long hours...
...According to market economics, economic inequalities between geographical areas should have a natural tendency to correct themselves...
...Community activists in these neighborhoods understand that unless they gain some control over the development process and the Brownfield cleanup process in their communities, they will be displaced by gentrification and subject to environmental risks...
...is determined by a politics of exclusion...
...Of these, about one-third live in central cities and two-thirds live in the surrounding suburbs...
...For these authors central cities are inhabited by poor people...
...In their schema the political divide between center city and 120 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOO KS suburbs is a crucial social divide...
...Their kids do not hang out at the mall but are shepherded from one enrichment activity to another by harried soccer moms...
...Using William Julius Wilson's formulation of the problem, they contend that these areas are not only devoid of decent housing, adequate schools, and decent public services, but that they also lack social networks and successful role models to provide poor people with alternative pathways out of poverty...
...At the same time, the proportion of poor people living with the average poor person rose from 19 percent to 20 percent...
...Thus the increased uniformity of the middle class in some census tracts could be construed as the result of decreased economic opportunity and shrunken federal housing programs, not attempts by middle-class suburbanites to protect their turf from the poor...
...The least expensive land houses the neighborhoods of the lowest income populations and sits next to brownfields...
...As an area becomes poor, land prices and wages should fall until they entice entrepreneurs to come back in and take advantage of the differentials...
...They too would have a pattern of high to low density radiating from their centers...
...Rather it is to say that they are not primary...
...Dreier et al., on the other hand, argue that location itself is a primary cause of inequality...
...Is it our local land use policies...
...The problem with the authors' explanation is that lifestyle is about wealth, not location...
...If you flew over these metropolises at a sufficiently low level to see their physical character you would be hard pressed to discern a coherent social pattern to the residential settlements...
...It takes issue with the description I have just presented...
...Exclusive suburbs, usually located at the outer edges of metropolitan areas or in the best-defended, best-located parts of the inner suburbs, are at the other extreme...
...Within the older settled pattern, there would be small in-fill developments of contemporary condominium "townhouses...
...But for the vast majority of residential neighborhoods there would be no easy visual clues by which to classify them...
...These places are depressing because they lack "public spaces, universities, cultural institutions, nightlife and downtowns that make central cities exciting places, even when they house many poor people...
...The data used to support their argument are surprisingly weak...
...ror most contemporary urban experts the differentials in public services, health care, and adequate housing are largely a result of economic inequality rather than a cause of that inequality...
...Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twentyfirst Century is the latest entry in this debate...
...They lay the political blame for bad regional planning and urban policy at the feet of an intransigent, politically powerful, suburban "middle class" that is intent on avoiding paying its fair share to support the metropolitan regions in which its members live...
...fail to recognize that their point about well-defended, close-in communities could as easily be made in a comparison of prosperous, well-defended, gentrified city neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side of Manhattan or Park Slope in Brooklyn with depressed and working-class neighborhoods adjacent to them...
...Massey's data show that in 1970 the average "affluent" person lived in a census tract in which 39 percent of the population was similarly endowed...
...Around this center are some affluent city dwellers and then "inner" suburbs, post—World War II Levittown-style tracts that are "quite depressing places...
...Based on studies of metropolitan Chicago, Parks and Burgess concluded that as a result of the urban land market, social classes sorted themselves out in rings in which real estate values were based on the convenience of the ring to the central business district...
...It is also noteworthy that in the period from 1950 to 1970, the height of postwar middleclass suburbanization, measured concentration and segregation of the poor actually decreased...
...Some of these developments would be very close to the center but they would increase in number on ever larger expanses of land as you moved out toward the metropolitan edge...
...Putting this finding together with the fact that economic segregation actually declined between 1950 and 1970, it is plausible to argue that we are not looking at place-driven inequality...
...Although that is high relative to the national median household income level for 2000 ($42,148), it is more accurate to call it a middle-class standard, not the standard of wealth we typically associate with affluent suburbs such as Scarsdale (median household income $178,821) and Bronxville (median household income $141,059), both in Westchester County, New York...
...Based largely on analyses of voting behavior, it claims to see a systematic geographic social pattern...
...Working-class suburbs may not have public universities and nightlife, but neither do the affluent ones...
...Their portrait of the suburban life of teenage affluence is also not entirely true...
...What then causes suicide among urban teenagers and affluent suburban ones...
...Is it our federal fiscal policies...
...The primary focus of a viable coalition is affordable housing, sustainable regions, and economically integrated communities...
...This is not to deny that such attempts did and do occur...
...Dreier et al...
...Political progressives support most policy initiatives that foster equitable resource distribution...
...At the same time, landuse regulation, which is the major tool of local political autonomy, did not change in any fundamental ways...
...see the demarcations of place as the crucial determinants of the life of the poor...
...Within the metropolitan suburbs they see a further demarcation between what they term older "inner ring" suburbs that they define as working class and poor and newer "outer ring" suburbs that they define as middle class...
...But the politics implicit in the analysis by Dreier et al...
...In the Reagan years America's public housing programs were gutted...
...Dreier et al...
...This is an important finding that they fail to pursue...
...The larger problem resides in the structure of the national economy and the distribution of wealth and power...
...It was in the 1970s that the nation went into economic stagnation and the corporate attack on unions, wages, living standards, and social services began in earnest...
...Environmentalists recognize that the solution to sprawl requires more intense development in the older central cities and close-in suburbs...
...The thesis of this book is that where we live has a powerful effect on the choices we have and our capacity to achieve a high quality of life...
...middle-class urbanites dismayed by the rapidly increasing density and inequality of their industrial cities, and frustrated by their inability to continue to dominate their politics, increasingly fled to the suburbs...
...And why are we waiting...
...The principal evidence for their assertion that concentrated poverty is on the rise comes from a study by Douglas Massey...
...For example Dreier et al...
...Where the earlier social ecologists explained their ordering schemes as the result of a wellfunctioning urban land market, these latter-day scholars trace the problem to the fact that in the intervening years there has been political tampering with the self-adjusting market: DISSENT / Spring 2002 .121 BOOKS These place-based inequalities would be less worrisome if places, like people, experienced more mobility, with poor places becoming rich, and vice versa...
...As with Wilson, they believe that, although race does matter, we are dealing with a problem of politically driven social-class isolation...
...The regions themselves are large and growing...
...We are looking at a 122 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS downgrading in life options for the middle class and the working class that was mainly shaped by national economic and political trends...
...Affluent suburban teenagers also hang out at malls...
...I do not think that the theoretical fight that these authors are picking is worth the engagement...
...Further complicating the panorama would be the fact that as metropolitan regions grew, many, especially in the northeast and midwest, came to envelop older and smaller industrial cities that are now in their midst...
...Moving to a slightly higher altitude, you would notice a pattern to the physical density of residential settlement...
...Because an intransigent suburban middle class successfully hijacked a more socially integrated and economically equitable region for the past eighty years...
...From the middle distance to the periphery, the single-family homes would become more prevalent, larger, and stand on lots of increasing size...
...In this category, the authors advocate a national policy of supporting only mixed-income housing and linking community development to regional economic development...
...If Jackson is correct, and I think he is, the question is, why did we do it...
...By the 1920s...
...Progressives also support policies that lessen residential social segregation...
...we are still waiting...
...Is it our culture...
...While there are elements of that in contemporary metropolitan politics, it is a marginal factor...
...All the way to the edge the mixed patterns of residential communities repeat themselves in no easily generalizable order...
...A politics based on attacking the middle class guarantees progressive irrelevance...
...SURROUNDING these pools of suburban working-class drabness are "outer" suburbs containing more affluent middleand upper-class families...
...In many cases the radius from center to periphery can be upward of a hundred miles...
...How does this lifestyle pattern differ for affluent urban kids...
...CONSIDER AN alternative politics not discussed by Dreier et al...
...There are usually few apartment buildings and those that do exist are luxury apartments or condominium complexes with swimming pools and tennis courts...
...Massey measured the percent of poor people living in the neighborhoods of the average poor person and the percent of "affluent people" (defined as four times poverty level income) living with the average "affluent" person...
...These descriptions are stereotypes of contemporary suburban life and not the more complex reality...
...Nor do they explain why giving the urban poor proximity to universities and cultural institutions is a sufficient substitute for giving them real access...
...Finally, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, the welfare state received its final coup de grace...
...Under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the national social welfare and urban assistance programs set in place from the 1930s forward began to be dismantled...
...Indeed the edge itself is a moving target...
...They never say...
...The quote above raises an important point: not all exclusive places are at the exurban border...
...could be counterproductive and divisive...
...The language of metropolitan rings that they employ derives from the 1920s social ecology work of the University of Chicago sociologists Robert Parks and Ernest Burgess...
...advocate improving incomes for low-income workers through such actions as raising the minimum wage, expanding the earned income tax credit and improving health insurance...
...There would be a higher concentration of multifamily and highrise buildings closer to the center...
...Houses in these suburbs cost half a million dollars or more, and they are situated on large lots with winding roads and plenty of trees...
...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 123...
...Hence, what Massey is describing is not place-driven changes in opportunities but a structural change in the national economy and a concomitant shift in federal domestic policy...
...How do poor and working-class suburban kids differ from poor and working-class urban kids...
...From the late 1800s through the early 1970s, the time when American suburbanization took off and the American economy grew at an unprecedented rate, American business paid the world's highest real wages, workers organized effective unions, and political progressives created a welfare state...
...Their concern is that concentrated poverty is on the rise, in large part because a spatially based politics contrives to force this increasing segregation of the poor in the most deprived circumstances...
...Dreier et al...
...Teenagers of all classes are often obsessed with clothes and makeup, if not SAT scores...
...Few progressives would take issue with any of these regardless of whether they believe that spatial isolation generates social inequality or that the larger capitalist system is the cause...
...The urban historian Kenneth Jackson described America as the world's first, and last, suburban nation...
...Teenagers know that they are headed for college and good job prospects, and they are often obsessed with clothes, makeup and SAT scores...
...Ewan SCLAR is the director of graduate programs in urban planning at Columbia University and the author of You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization...
...As you moved out you would see combinations of row houses and single-family homes on small, tightly packed lots interspersed with smaller apartment buildings...
...believe that poor people are becoming more concentrated in ghetto neighborhoods, forced increasingly to live in areas in which the proportion of poor people is rising...
...In both cities and suburban towns there are extremes and expanses of workingclass to middle-class residential life...
...By applying the Massey definition of affluence (400 percent of poverty income) to the year 2000, we find that affluence for a family of four starts at an income of $70,412...
...Once they established themselves as suburbanites, they persuaded state legislatures to pass laws hindering cities from further annexation...
...Instead of Chevy Novas and Hyundais, the residents drive Mercedes and Lexuses...
...I can't imagine a more suicidal strategy than the one the authors propose...
...conclude from this that the percentage of poverty concentration in the poorer census tracts "increased steadily" Most statisticians would conclude that such a slight movement, about 1 percent over two decades, was meaningless...
...There would be a few small areas of unambiguous affluence and a handful of physically devastated poverty areas...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
