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Suburban Growth, Character, & Change
Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 08:06PM by NMcBeth
Note: Please use Wikipedia or a source of your choice should you come across a term/person/event you don’t understand or if you require more information.
Suburbanization and Sprawl in General
Generally, the character of sprawl indicates low-density, suburban style development patterns – the dominant mode of growth in the U.S. for the past 50 years (Carruthers and Ulfarsson, 2002). However, suburbanization in the U.S. began much earlier than 1950. The term sprawl has become synonymous with suburban patterns of growth. Of course, many metropolitan cities have their own share of sprawl blending straight into suburbia due to annexation of suburbs as well as the practice of emulating suburban growth to contain wealthier tax base development (i.e. San Antonio). Jackson defines suburbanization as a “residential place,…the site of scattered dwellings and businesses, outside city walls,…as old as civilization and an important part of the ancient, medieval and early modern urban traditions; [and], as a “process involving the systematic growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of the core cities,….[a process that] can be dated as early as 1815 (K. Jackson, 1985).” Current urban planning literature defines sprawl as “unplanned, uncontrolled, and uncoordinated single use development that does not provide for a functional mix of uses and/or is not functionally related to surrounding land uses and which variously appears as low-density, ribbon or strip, scattered, leapfrog, or isolated development (Nelson et al. 1995; Pendall 1999).” Another definition includes patterns of land use in an urbanized area that exhibit “low levels of some combination of eight distinct dimensions: density, continuity, concentration, compactness, centrality, nuclearity, diversity, and proximity (Galster et. al., 2000).” These definitions, in many ways, are indicative of most suburban development, but the definition does not go far enough. It should include disenfranchisement and gross segregation by ethnic, social, and economic class. Other characteristics include, patterns of growth that are dominated by automotive transportation, fragmented power relative to land use, and “fiscal disparity among individual communities (Burchell, 1998).” Additionally, the loss of open space, forestation and farmland fragmentation is apparent and leaves immeasurable environmental, forest and wildlife impacts (ecosystem). Cities suffering with environmental non-attainment areas for ground level ozone could lose millions in federal transportation funds, often caused by increased vehicle emissions from a suburban populace. MSNBC writer, Miguel Llanos reported that NASA satellite imagery indicates growth in Atlanta that is creating additional heat and thunderstorms. [1] Suburban sprawl is not new and is an extension of long-established patterns of suburbanization, decentralization and low-density development (Bullard, Johnson and Torres, 2000). Altogether, these patterns of growth and change express the predominantly horizontal expansion of metropolitan areas due to the creation of discontiguous land use patterns and overall low densities.
Historical Perspective: Suburbanization, the Working Class & the Poor
Chicago 1870As Kenneth Jackson indicates in Crabgrass Frontier, one of the more significant traits of suburbanization is its socioeconomic impact on social, ethnic and economic classes. Today, those in the middle and upper classes as well as some lower income brackets tend to live in the suburbs. Industrialization brought factory areas that were noisy, dirty, crowded, and dangerous. Residential areas close to factories were full of shoddy tenements. There were no sewers, piped water or trash collection and these tenements were overcrowded and had poor ventilation. Many families lived within single buildings and there were very high death rates. Those who could afford to, began to move away from the city center. Prior to early rail, trolley service and steam service, employment was generally within walkable distances from the home (Jackson, 1985). Many still lived and worked on farms and ranches in the rural parts of the country. Soon after the Civil War, rapid population growth demanded larger and bigger homes, which located along the edges of cities, creating a loss of population in city centers and increasing the length of journey to work up to 5 miles for the merchant classes (Jackson, 1985). According to Jackson, this “phenomenon was one of the most important in the history of society, for it represented the most fundamental realignment of urban structure [and therefore society itself] in the 4,500-year past of cities on this planet.”
Chicago 1920These new suburbs often had onsite housing for their servants. Settling just outside the railroad suburbs, there were significant poor populations who provided services to the merchant class and wealthy citizenry. Jackson points out that this early rendition of the suburb, centered around the elite and merchant class, rail lines and operations and green space separating the satellite poor and working class neighborhoods was the beginning of classified suburban communities until post-WWII suburbanization, the Cold War, civil defense and the expansive interstate highway system. Rail service was often too expensive for the working class and poor. Electric railways (streetcars) in the to late 1800s allowed an inexpensive transport opportunity for employment in other areas of a city and to suburbs. The electric rail service allowed ordinary citizens Further, the electric rail allowed business and industry to move diversify and distribute throughout the city and suburbs, but further away from the city center, and closer to transportation hubs. The automobile was the next change allowing populations that could afford it to move at will. In 1913, one in eight people owned a car and by 1927 it was a part of middle-class life (Jackson, 1985). This level of mobility was not something generally available to the poor and working classes, further separating them from the mainstream. At about this time, businesses were replacing the trolleycar, streetcar service began to be poor and declined and rapid rail systems were built to further outlying suburbs requiring subsidization. Eventually, all these systems failed, except the bus and the automobile. These changes affected the ability of the poor and working classes to get to gainful employment. By 1930, streetcar service was virtually history. The rail, highway and road systems also impacted the poor and working classes by isolating their neighborhoods and forcing them to live in less equitable surroundings.
The distribution of industrial development made possible by rail and water services sometimes created company towns and brought in labor to live and work there – providing company homes and stores to the worker who was predominantly from the poor and working classes. According to Sam Bass Warner, during the 1870s skilled labor could become a millionaire with expansion and a small work crew due to using new pre-manufactured items that cut down on labor requirements. “The stricter discipline and growing size of shops and factories reversed the egalitarian trends of the early merchant-artisan city and instituted the deep class cleavages between hand workers and paper workers, between working class and middle class (Warner, 1995). During the second period of industrialization, fragmentation and segregation by physical, social, religious, race and ethnicity, affiliation, labor and economic class was readily apparent. Mechanization, specialization and labor came together to create the large-scale factory worker (generally the unskilled, poor and working classes). By 1920, job location and wages determined housing patterns and further defined social and political structure. Land patterns from 1870 to 1920 indicate cities with inner city poor to outer city affluence – a systematic pattern of socioeconomic segregation (Warner, 1995). Any social reforms were predominately directed to protecting the middle and upper classes in society or providing them with beautification of the environments, or toward religious endeavors. Labor gained more power in the 1920s. With Great Depression and up to the beginning of WWII, fights for any job during this period were difficult. Previous middle- and upper-class men worked alongside the poor and working classes digging ditches. With the war and armament provision by the U.S. to other countries, jobs once more came to the nation – building airplanes, ships, bombs, guns and provisions for war with 3 countries. Yet, this was also a time of continuing segregation by race and ethnicity due to appalling discrimination and violence. Very little land development occurred in the 1930s to 1940s other than housing for the poor and jobs programs under the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal.
Cold War, Disaster Scenarios, and the Fear Factor
Lifestyle choices, segregation, culture, fear and federal policy play a role in contributing to sprawl and suburbanization – a statement certainly true of the post World War II 1950s and the Cold War. According to Matthew Farrish, atomic bombing by the U.S. of Japan brought an era of “anxious urbanism … prompted by a diverse wave of lurid disaster scenarios, as well as scientific attempts to contain, control and reduce risk and danger.” Farrish contends that postwar social science contributed to urban decline and subsequently, provided a springboard toward suburbanization. This change rent the foundation of post World War II American cities. Winfield W. Riefler, Chair for the Committee on Social Aspects of Atomic Energy, Social Science Research Council, said in 1947 that, “the Atomic bomb has raised, in fact, the question of the survival of urban culture itself.”
Thus began the era of paranoid political projections evidenced by containment policies concerning the external threat to the U.S. by the outside world (specifically the U.S.S.R.) and threats internally by supposed Communistic citizenry. Neutralizing this “enemy” was the theme of U.S. policy, reinforced by the intellectual, scientific, military and media communities. The ‘Cold War’ fostered fear with the threat of parasitic Communism within the American culture – with unbridled ‘reproduction’ [2] , that only containment could abjure. Journalists, writers, religious leaders and scientists turned the devastation in Japan into “visions of American cities in smoldering ruins, inscribing concentric circles of destruction over various urban topographies (Farish, 2003).”
Groups of people were marked as susceptible to communist ideology – labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines, and publishing houses (Kennan, 1946). Postwar McCarthy rhetoric included typical public housing projects as breeding grounds for Communism. Marked Americans represented a direct internal threat to national security and lead to the notion that they could be contained geographically outside of America’s ‘heartland.’ Containment led to the isolation of particular sites and the spatial arrangement of military projects, industry and population. Writers of the time expressed a ‘geography of risk’ associated with cities (Farish, 2003). The changes associated with declining central cities and emerging suburbs produced characteristics of panic control and spatial containment. Sociologically, the pattern of cities radically altered – even without an Atomic attack. The poor and working classes were left with the inner city and the initial suburban ring.
The portent of an attack was one factor leading to the abandonment of central cities by the white middle class as well as manufacturers and corporations. The city became a ‘laboratory of conduct’ that led to plans for urban change and design. Kennan viewed the ‘hard city’ as a place of corruption and wickedness. Additionally, anti-city writers believed the city was a “declining site of social and technological alienation … ringed by expanding centerless suburbs” (Beauregard, 1993). In 1950, homogenous postwar suburbs embodying citadels of order, safety and consumerism replaced the pastoral family farm. Realtors advised city dwellers to move beyond the radiation zone to suburban developments – and, according to sociologists, became the model of American hope and aspiration. Cold War culture details the suburban nuclear family as the norm. Spatial independence of communities from cities wreaked the heightened urban transformation of the U.S. Nuclear fear was central to Cold War civil defense efforts. The Project East River Report, noted that national and urban environmental changes were motivated by technological progress and geopolitical circumstance – linking to cities by calling for a “reduction of urban vulnerability (bolstering trends toward urban dispersal) … [in order] to keep pace with weapons development.” William Borden concurred by pointing out that one problem with America’s largest cities is their spatial concentration. Further suggestions emerged that populations were excessive – atomic disasters therefore affecting too many people and industries. Which are all interesting suppositions considering the U.S. has always had the lowest density per person worldwide.
The solution was decentralization and urban dispersal (Borden, 1969). Forms of limited dispersal did occur such as, remote locations for bomb production, placement of war contracts in small towns, creation of new satellite cities, increased highway construction, and control of inner-city building – policies that are in effect to date (Monson, 1950/51). Urban studies such as Norbert Wiener’s 1950 plan for radial “life belts” envisioned transportation lines and essential services, separated from downtowns by safety zones of agricultural or empty space as protection from nuclear fallout. Cities were seen as the communications node or nerve center. “The metropolis of classical modernity, the centered city of immediately recognizable and recognized spaces,” came to an end with the decentralized geography of highways and suburban sprawl (Edward Dimendberg,City of Fear) . In 1958, Lewis Mumford criticized the effects of highway construction at the time by likening it to having “the same result upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb (From Farish, 2003).”
According to Farish, “it was precisely the domestic geography of Cold War risks that led to the scientific planning schemes … designed to order and manage urban spaces while concurrently maintaining the various symbolic distinctions between central city and suburb.” By 1960, the Cold War-based inclination toward decentralization and highway sprawl began to fade, as did calls for dispersal and evacuation as strategists determined that military targets would be the first strike in the case of nuclear war (Farish, 2003). Farish indicates that “in subtle yet pervasive ways [geopolitical schemes and social science] contributed to the prominent discourses of urban decline and suburbanization, and thus to the changing material fabric of postwar American cities.”
The Census Today, the Working Poor and the Suburbs
Returns from the 2000 U.S. Census indicate, “the changes in our population are fundamentally redefining America’s notion of cities and suburbs (Katz and Lang, 2003).” Suburbs, in their increasing diversity and role as major employment centers, play roles originally associated with central cities. Some of these suburbs have emerged as ‘Boomburbs’, low density, fast-growing suburban cities with populations greater than 100,000 (Katz and Lang, 2003). Many metropolitan cities have lost population as well as business opportunity, while suburbs grew rapidly in population, business and employment. Suburbs also gained the headaches of metropolitan cities and the infrastructure financing subsidizing new development. This trend has been mushrooming for over five decades to the point that, of the total U.S. population, one-quarter lives in rural areas, whereas two-thirds of the remaining three-quarters population lives in the suburbs (U.S. Census). According to Kenneth Jackson there are several “distinguishing elements of metropolitan areas in the nation” which may explain these trends. These elements may define the trend of suburbs in the past fifty years in due to low-density residential development, a lack of definition between the city and the countryside, the high quantity of homeownership, “socioeconomic distinction between the center and periphery [of metropolitan areas],” and the journey from home to the workplace (K. Jackson, 1985).” However, both the number and proportion of the poor living in suburbs has increased steadily. In 1970, only 20.5 percent of the nation’s poor lived in suburbs. By 2000, that had grown to 35.9 percent. A growing number of blacks, Latinos and Asians now live in suburbia, although suburbs are still racially segregated. Similarly, the poor are not randomly scattered across the suburban landscape; they are concentrated in inner-ring suburbs close to cities, as well as in the suburban fringe, formerly rural towns swept up by suburban sprawl. The suburbs are becoming more and more polarized by income. During the past two decades, the number of “poor” suburbs – those whose income is less than three-quarters of the metropolitan area’s – has spiraled upward. Most of these residents are not poor, yet their incomes are marginal. At the same time, the number of wealthy suburbs (those with incomes above 125 percent of the regions) has also increased. Wealthy suburbs use ‘snob zoning’ to exclude the poor and working classes (and, increasingly, middle-class families) by zoning out apartments and requiring minimum-lot sizes for large, single-family houses. Meanwhile, the number of middle-class suburbs has declined.
Post World War II and Cold War America acted as a springboard toward metropolitan fragmentation by promoting suburbanization and sprawl. Central cities, surrounded by suburban development and affected by sprawl, are in an urban crisis. Public policy pushed people out of the city while pulling them into the suburbs.
Scholars and activists have cautioned that our cities are “ticking time bombs, waiting to explode” (Dreier, 1996). Although the Los Angeles Riots of the 1960’s and 1992 are not isolated incidents, they are indicative of the pressure that can provoke a community to violent disorder. Many believed the 1992 civil disorder would create a change in the nation’s commitment to city revitalization. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed the end of Cold War Communism would also readjust national priorities toward a domestic agenda that needed serious attention. Although, these events were topical at the time, they fueled little if any national action or our collective social conscience.
Poverty and discrimination are the greatest fundamental issues facing our cities. Most of America’s poor live in concentrated areas of U.S. cities due to both unemployment and low-wage work. Concentrations of race live in segregated neighborhoods. Many cities are forced to reduce services by closing schools, hospitals, health and social services, and police and fire stations, which in turn reduce good paying employment from the public sector. Downsizing of government creates difficulty for residents competing for even fewer resources, and causing more social and racial tension, while making it harder for local officials to govern effectively. (Harrison, 2002; Goodno, 2002; Bullard, et.al., 2000)
Federal policies have included the proliferation of interstate highways and transportation corridors to the suburbs which opened up speculation and development; housing and tax policies offered subsidies to white suburban single-family homeowners; and, bull-dozer urban renewal programs destroyed working class neighborhoods which pushed residents to blue-collar suburbs in order make the way clear for downtown business development. Federal funding for social programs, dramatically decreased during the Reagan administration, compounded city poverty and homelessness, even emptying our public mental institutions. Republican political agendas have increased the isolation of cities by cutting even more programs, such as the 1994-funding cut for low-income housing of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (Goodno, 2002)
Politically, the suburban voter has been the constituency most legislators have been patronizing since the 1992 election as the quantity of representatives has increased with populations in the suburbs. Increasingly the political trend is for inner cities to house Democratic minority districts and for outer-ring suburbs, predominately wealthy and white, to house Republican majority districts. Marshalling a Congressional majority for urban agendas is even tougher now. While Gingrich was Speaker of the House, one of his first priorities was to eliminate funds for Black and Hispanic causes – predominately affecting inner-city groups.
America ’s cities face a shrinking tax base and financial trauma – some large metropolitan cities filing bankruptcy. Incomes of cities, which in the past were the richer population bases, are now in the suburbs. The economic disparity between city and suburb is wide. Inner ring suburbs, where the working classes tend to live, are facing many of the same problems as central cities – such as crime and violence, infant mortality, health-care issues, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate housing, and chronic financial crisis – often these places turn into slums. Even though 30 percent of suburban populations are composed of a diverse racial profile, the majority of Black, Asian and Latino populations live in segregated neighborhoods. Most American’s consider housing funds (typically Community Development Block Grants) as programs aimed at the inner-city poor. Suburban NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) attitudes are prevalent in this respect when subsidized housing of any kind ‘threatens’ their neighborhood environment.
Most suburbanites commute to work in other suburbs, not central cities – but they still use the central city for the services they provide as well as work, culture, entertainment, sporting events, health care, and university education. Use of these central cities by suburban populations is a free meal to the suburban taxpayer, as they do not have to expend their tax dollar to pay for these activities or services.
Another complicating dilemma is that businesses can move, but not cities. Cities primarily rely on local revenues and when they are too aggressive in taxation or restrictive in development regulation, businesses can threaten to move. This also creates a loss of jobs. Development is also able to use the media to garner support for alleged unfair treatment to economic development and the business community – often using scare tactics to get their way. This environment of free market development leaves everyone in a bad position, as cities often subsidize business development by offering them development incentives and tax deferrals. Many corporations and businesses will not promise to stay in an area anymore for a certain length of time, even though they may be guaranteed a 10-year deferral of property taxes. Businesses can play this footloose game since localities set the conditions for development, as they search for the best business climate – enacting bidding wars, not unlike the Toyota plant being built in San Antonio – putting all participating cities in a weaker bargaining position that undermines the economic and fiscal health of all communities. The abandonment of big-box mega stores in our throwaway society has become the new paper towel of development and is also problematic in scaring the landscape, reducing jobs, increasing the poor and losing tax revenues. Building investment for longevity and reuse have become rare with the advent of building techniques that can raise a structure in a short amount of time and for a small fraction of the cost in previous decades for planned tear-down or a lifespan of 5 to 30 years.
Land use is also problematic as cities utilize fiscal zoning as a tool to create socioeconomic segregation and by extension racial segregation (on average Black and Hispanic populations have lower incomes than Caucasian populations). Large lot, low density neighborhoods also create fragmentation and limit the supply of diverse housing choices (Carruthers and Ulfarsson, 2002).
In the 1970s and 80s, there was a sort of Renaissance for downtown redevelopment with new office buildings, medical and educational facilities, hotels, urban shopping malls, convention centers, theatres and sports facilities (Nunn, et.al., 1997). Many of these cities became entrepreneurs, competing with other cities for corporate investment – seeking out this business development, similar to a local Chamber of Commerce. New York, for example, gave tax breaks and subsidies at about $100 million for Trump Tower. Without these subsidies, it is most likely that private investment would have happened anyway. Publications such asNewsweek and The New York Times have featured major stories on the consequences of corporate greed, sweatshops, CEO pay and bonuses, corporate profits and pension plans. This type of publicity has brought forth public outrage for a counter-trend on corporate irresponsibility, corporate downsizing, and government funded corporate welfare.
Interconnected Governmental Policy Factors
Interconnected policy factors have contributed to urban sprawl/ suburbanization. These policies and issues include:
- The Cold War, the atomic bomb, and national defense of post World War II America.
- National investment policies relative to highways and tax deductions for interest and property tax on home mortgages, and the proliferation and encouragement of low-density development by providing rapid access to outlying areas, thereby subsidizing single-family housing.
- Housing policy (FHA and VA) that opened the market to millions, with low-interest loans making home ownership affordable and which encouraged ethnic, social and economic segregation. Resulting suburbanization has contributed to both racial and income inequality (Pastor, 2000).
- Combined federal policies that have overall encouraged regional fragmentation and urban sprawl through suburbanization.
- The suburbanization of employment centers and retail services.
- Grants provided to local governments to fund sewerage plants and hospitals, subsidizing suburbanization and sprawl.
- Local governments’ investments extending infrastructure and services into rural areas, allowing leapfrog development, and enabling speculator’s and landowner’s inexpensive private development.
- Service average-cost pricing enabling residents in low-density areas to pay the same rate for services as residents in areas that are less expensive to serve and subsidizing new growth that does not pay its way.
- Housing, zoning and development policies, which disenfranchise and segregate/isolate the poor and working class.
- Ease of annexation laws that further sprawl in most cases as well as service costs.
All of these policies and practices, have endeavored to support and create suburbanization of America – a vast sprawling megalopolis of unending, nameless, faceless town after town after town, with little if any sense of place or differentiation, providing enclaves of predictability for the white middle class and upper class, in an attempt at a utopia, juxtaposed against the reality of sameness, monotony and cultural death.
Transportation and Land Use Factors
According to Sam Bass Warner, Jr., “the 1916 [Federal Aid Roads Act] set the administrative framework for American road building in the twentieth century.” In 1944, the Federal Highway Act pledged 25 percent of funds to cities to for transportation infrastructure. In 1956, the National Defense Highway Act passed, preparing the way for a national highway network to allow for efficient and speedy transport of military personnel and materiel during the Cold War. Federal funding provided a 90 percent allocation to fund the cost of highway construction as well as implement Cold War urban dispersal policies (Ross and Levine, 2001; Farish, 2003).
Federal funding of highways was instrumental in opening up metropolitan areas for extensive suburbanization. Highways built through cities were destructive, as they isolated, split or destroyed neighborhoods, and were used to remove ghettos and ethnic neighborhoods. The suburbanization that followed this transportation access to the outskirts of cities facilitated decentralization of manufacturing, warehousing, distribution facilities, and retail commercial uses. Highway transportation allowed commuting, both to the city and to the suburb for employment by automobile. Those left behind in the city, the poor and working classes, found less and less accessible and advantageous employment.
The new city or suburb eventually created a new typology of community including elite bedroom communities, working class towns, declining inner-ring suburbs, disaster suburbs, industrial enclaves, technoburbs, privatopias, minority suburbs, far-flung exurbs, edge cities, and boomburgs (Ross and Levine, 2001; Katz and Lang, 2003). Long-range planning did not include the suburb. The results are water and air pollution, transportation nightmares, long commute times over relatively short distances, decimation of agricultural, forest lands, and animal habitats, power failures, water shortages, crowded and underfinanced schools, disenfranchisement, segregation by race and belief, class and income, and overtaxed central cities are some of the problems arising from rapid suburban growth coupled with the abandonment of older areas within established municipalities.
The movement toward large lot residential use as well as other density reductions have gobbled up land faster than anytime in American history, adding to the urban land explosion of the past 50 years. Cities without vast amounts of open space available for development lose to suburban sites where cheap land is available. No longer is it the American ideal for a car and home for a nuclear family. Lifestyles now include an automobile for every person or family member who can afford one and separate living environments for married families, divorced couples with or without families, single individuals, those who are unrelated sharing space and other household arrangements, requiring more living spaces, parking lots, roads and services. The population boom of the 1950s was also an impact. Suburbs often depend on cities for services including upper education, hospital and health care, entertainment and culture, and the infrastructure to get from one end of the metropolis to the other. Federal policy subsidizing the oil industry and automobile manufacturing continue to exacerbate these dilemmas by funding more and larger threshold highway systems and connectivity from suburb to suburb while concurrently ignoring destructive global warming and associated pollution and environmental effects. This subsidization of nonrenewable resources and outmoded transportation systems virtually ignore better and safer solutions to energy, transportation and ecological issues.
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 or ISTEA was brought into effect under the Clinton-Gore Administration. This act was touted as a policy that may have the most profound effect on how cities grow, where they grow, transportation choices offered and the quality of the environment. This act also paved the way for the President’s Council on Livable Cities for the 21st Century (a SMARTGrowth Agenda), headed by then Vice President Al Gore. More recently (November 2003), the Safe and Affordable Transportation and Efficiency Act of 2003 (SAFETEA or TEA-3), basically the planning and research sections of the Transportation Equity Act for the Twenty-First Century (TEA-21), was reauthorized (Smart Growth America, 2003). ISTEA provided a framework for the beginning of federally directed multi-jurisdictional (regional) cooperation. It is suggested that ISTEA could be the model for other federal policy relative to regional intergovernmental cooperation and collaboration. ISTEA and TEA-21 slate Metropolitan Planning Organizations as the locus and control for regional planning and funding under these bills.
Mobility is an issue partially addressed by ISTEA and TEA-21 with funding for rail and for high-density residential and employment centers at transportation hubs. Linking employment, housing and transportation to mobility are necessary to distribute opportunity and disperse the impacts of suburbanization and decentralized employment centers. Environmental issues relative to the reauthorization of ISTEA are under discussion due to fights over environmental streamlining and air quality issues. Conversely, Smart Growth America recommends that the bill be environmentally weakened in order to accelerate road building (Smart Growth America, 2003)! This stance is contrary to the Clinton-Gore policies of ISTEA and environmental efforts.
Planning, Housing, Discrimination, Segregation and Policy
In 1791, Pierre L’Enfant created the baroque inspired plan of Washington, D.C. The plan provided for a variety of diagonal axis and radial streets, superimposed with a traditional gridiron pattern. The plan included concerns for the treatment of building masses and open spaces, sweeping avenues, and use of monumentation at terminal vistas. The architectural language of the time is based on France’s measurement system of 16-inch intervals, so in essence a lot with was 16 feet wide and multiple lots could be purchased to combine for one structure. Massing and scale, internal and vertical multi-uses were common internally to a structure. Architectural detail was thematic. However, as early as 1803, departures from the L’Enfant plan were made that eroded the purity of the plan, allowing buildings within designated open spaces, docks and wharves along river frontage that was to be strictly controlled, and the number and direction of some streets had been changed. The reason city plans such as these are important is in our ability to understand the further effects of economics and suburbanization on cities – especially those with grand plans. Not only did highway systems affect people by displacement and sociological levels, but cities that had the potential for historic greatness were destroyed in most ways with the exception of central downtowns, which were almost abandoned. Parking lots and high-rise highway systems, entrance and exit ramps, and the mass production of concrete architecture of the 1950s to 1980s – creating a concrete jungle far worse than was ever apparent in the past – a true ‘hard city.’ Highway spokes spread and spread, eventually interconnecting Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. as if they were all one large homogenous mass centered around the federal government’s center in D.C. Crossing the Potomac was merely a bridge away and Dulles International Airport, located over 30 miles from D.C.’s epicenter. Land development to the airport is now continuous to it and has surpassed that point to the small town of Leesburg, Virginia, physically 60 or more miles from D.C. Even the Federal Government has decentralized their departments physically – the Central Intelligence Agency Headquarters are now located along this same corridor to the airport.
In the building of new suburbia, racial covenants required by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veteran’s Administration (VA) were placed upon this housing until they were legally struck down. FHA and VA policies promoted the building of new homes versus old. They practiced redlining, indicating areas where loans would not be approved – a practice stopped by the courts in 1950. Low down payments and easy terms made home buying a reality for many Americans who would never have been able to afford a home ownership prior to these programs. These programs subsidized the suburbanization of America by requiring new home ownership, with an influence to building outside the ‘hard city.’ Policies of racially segregated neighborhoods were part-and-parcel with these programs in their early days. The working and middle classes fled the city in order to realize the American Dream, among other factors. FHA and VA loans are still available today and continue to subsidize suburbanization. Millions of Americans receive mortgage loans more cheaply than they would otherwise. Due to this, two-thirds of American households own their own home
The Federal Tax Code is another subsidy that influences the suburbanization of the U.S. The tax code allows individual homeowner’s to deduct mortgage interest, points, some closing costs, and property taxes from income tax statements. These types of policies created a loss of revenue to the government and influenced the loss of the middle class tax base from cities with this tax-subsidized flight to the suburbs.
One of the more far-reaching issues of suburbanization is the lack of affordable housing. With approximately 20 percent of the American populace categorized as poor (U.S. Census Bureau), this issue continues to multiply with little being done since the federal commitment to affordable housing declined during the Reagan Administration. Funding for these programs to date has still not surpassed the monetary commitment of the pre-Reagan administration. Advocates of a national housing trust fund would like to get the federal government back into the business of seriously financing affordable housing construction and rehabilitation. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) voices the same need for spending on affordable housing. Additionally, it will require expansion of rental housing. Year 2000 estimates indicate that it would require an annual production of 250,000 units (slated for extremely low-income populations) for more than 20 years to close the gap of housing needs (Goodno, 2002). Public fear of the creation of more ghettos from the poor public housing policies of the past are still prevalent today – and should be heeded. The continuation of placing the poor in specific and certain areas of a city, cut off from support and opportunity, decent employment, healthcare and education among other things will continue to facilitate the problems we have had in the past and today.
Additionally, the discriminatory distribution of environmental hazards in low-income, poor and ethnic neighborhoods has created unhealthy physical environments, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These environmental hazards include toxic sites with the worst air and water pollution and the highest levels of lead and pesticide poisoning. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently came to the fore with some help to combat environmental injustice. The EPA has prepared a guidance program on how to process civil rights complaints by citizens and neighborhoods. However, the programs consequences brought complaints of those hazards relative to hurting economic development from state government and industry, ending with the guidance as purely a discretionary tool during the current Bush administration. These criticisms from states and industry have a historical past, all the way back to the1860s opposing the abolishment of slavery to the 1960s civil rights protections as economic issues – positions then and now that are inexcusable and indefensible, regardless of economics. Further, a July 2003 report by the National Academy of Public Administration reported, “historical and current land-use and zoning policies are a root enabling cause of disproportionate burdens and environmental injustice.”
Overcoming Fragmentation Due to Suburbanization& Empowering the Poor and Working Class
Lately, a symbiotic relationship exists between cities and the suburbs. In the past decade, economic and social destinies of high growth suburbs are linked with the success of their central city (Ledebur and Barnes, 1993; Rusk, 1993; Savitch et.al., 1993). With the emergence of international economies and businesses, advanced communication and the increasing ability to work at home, the social and functional fabric of society is changing (Hamilton, 2000).
Cities play at least three critical functions in our regional and national economies: 1) they are the location of most metropolitan area jobs, including the best paying jobs and the nucleus of key industries; 2) these city-based firms and industries spin off jobs that are located in the suburbs but depend on the central city for their sustenance; and, 3) cities remain the hub of the metropolitan regions civic life, where the major cultural, educational, medical, governmental, media, and other institutions are located.
Strategies that are useful in urban politics and to effect change include community organizing, labor organizing, and electoral politics. Community organizing efforts have incorporated the formation of tenant unions, community development corporations, reduction of redlining, fighting against environmental health and justice issues, and mobilizing against plant closings and layoffs. Social action groups help with these issues by providing leaders, campaign mobilization and by winning local victories. Many community activists have also build electoral coalitions to win a stronger voice in local government decision-making by bridging community, union, environmental, civil rights and other organizations. Often community activists end up as elected or appointed officials.
Cities, where most poor and disenfranchised people live, lack the political power to make a difference on the national agenda. Frankly, the best means for change in federal policy is a change in the majority in Congress to those who support domestic programs, rather than defense spending and corporate welfare. Some mobilizing reforms that could help cities include: 1) campaign finance reform to reduce big money politics such as PACs and corporate contributors thereby reducing legal bribery; 2) expanding the urban electorate with voter registration and participation of city constituencies with a plan for mobilization on city issues; and, 3) labor law reform that would increase the incomes of the growing sector of working poor concentrated in cities and inner-ring suburbs, level the playing field between working people and business, and improve the political influence and standard of living.
As previously discussed, regional governance and cooperation, combined with social policy (including redistributive policies), and growth management principles for SMARTGrowth related policies are a means to relieve fragmentation. Nevertheless, without the political will and social agenda to create policy and funding, these efforts, will at best be minimal in achieving relief for fragmented metropolitan cities and regions. (Gainsborough, 2001; Orfield, 2003; Pastor, 2000; Carlino and Chatterjee, 2002; Wassmer, 2002)
The web of government is more entangled and confusing now than ever before in the United States. It is marked by the ever-changing redefinition of working relationships between governmental jurisdictions and the courts. The lack of any real regional consensus is an elemental impediment faced in coping with intergovernmental issues – particularly fragmentation and the plight of the cities. All governmental jurisdictions find themselves working within new levels of involvement and activity. A multi-layered jurisdictional topography of agencies, responsibilities, power, and law affect cities, and therefore, people. In regions, the layer of this complex topography may include local governments, special districts (such as water and drainage), metropolitan planning organizations, housing and urban development agencies, or environmental protection agencies. There are plethoras of possibilities.
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act after a four year quest for a more cooperative and creative Federal system. The purpose behind the legislation was to strengthen and streamline the Federal system of intergovernmental action – with dependence for success between Washington, states, and local governments. The vision behind the legislation was to create:
- Simplified and more flexible administration of hundreds of Federal grants to the states;
- Better information to Governors and State legislators concerning these grants;
- Improved regional and local planning; and,
- New ways for Federal agencies to share their special skills and knowledge with State and local governments (Johnson, 1968).
Predominantly intergovernmental cooperation is voluntary with federal and state mandates for regional cooperation occurring sporadically. Specifically, those mandates include environmental, transportation, drainage and educational programs.
More recently, ‘new regionalism’ has come to the fore due to the growing differences in economic performance by urban areas. The U.S. has been characterized as a “common market of economic regions, each with distinctive business clusters and growth patterns” (Barnes and Ledbetter, 1998). In theory, internationalization has rendered federal policies as ineffective and brought economic action to the regional level because these areas can achieve economies of scale but can also bring government, business and others together for consensus on growth. New regionalism stresses the importance of linking city to suburb creating a metropolitan economy. Accordingly, Alvin Toffler’sThird Wave predicted in 1980 that:
“Regions will gain greater power as … markets and economies fracture into pieces, some of which are already larger than the national markets and economies of the past. New alliances may spring up based less on geographical nearness than on common cultural, ecological, religious, or economic affinities. Tying this all together … will be a dense network of new … organizations … where the [citistate] assume more significance.”
Regionalism can be effective when there is public buy-in and local government authorities perceive advantages to regional cooperation - having a sense of shared destiny about the challenges affecting the entire region and the creation of a regional identity. The key seems to be finding the ingredients that share a common denominator and the ways in which cooperation can be developed and sustained are critical components of any strategies to affect longstanding urban problems (Nunn, et. al., 1997). Interjurisdictional cooperation may bring economic development outcomes, municipal services outcomes, physical environment outcomes and socio-political outcomes. More specifically, some of these issues that bring together governments, officials and social organizations include environmental issues and justice, SMARTGrowth, growth management, open space and farmland preservation, housing, affordability, transportation and transit, livability, economic development, jobs and education, discrimination, and many other hot topics – “that transcend local political borders” (Ross and Levine, 2001). The President’s Council on Livable Cities in the 21st Century also promoted regionalism as a means of supporting SMARTGrowth measures. This measure brought forward coalitions for SMARTGrowth, such as the Smart Growth Network and others.
Collaborative and coalition approaches to regionalism stress the changing character of metropolitan areas as well as the importance of regional economic policies. Community building efforts work toward rebuilding community fabric to encourage development through regional networks. Linkages between communities are critical relative to environmental justice for the poor, where exposure brings together people from across the region and from many backgrounds. Compact growth or New Urbanism coalitions tend to reduce sprawl and compel more concentrated and infill development. Even HUD is developing a regionalist agenda (Pastor, 2001).
The extent to which states facilitate local government support for regionalism is important since the states set the rules for local governments’ land use planning power, zoning power and intergovernmental agreements. States legislation can ultimately shape the framework and perspective within which regional cooperation occurs. Annexation laws and the elasticity of cities is associated with “less segregation, lower poverty concentration and greater overall economic progress” (Gainsborough, 2001). States also have the ability to impact regional cooperation by providing incentives and disincentives. They can require the formation of regional entities, as well as empower them with planning authority and further, require local governments to conform with plans before they can receive funding. Promising additional funds is an additional incentive if they participate in the regional planning process. State governments may also enhance the power of existing regional entities by assigning them new roles – such as the planning and funding of ISTEA projects. ISTEA opens the possibility of even more comprehensive approach to regional functions, particularly to transportation related issues such as, rapid transit, drainage, pollution, and growth management.
Regional governance is one compelling way for metropolitan areas to merge fragmentation in their regions. According to Cashin (2000), the federal government has an important role to play in promoting regionalism. Cashin indicates that some of the more practical and non-controversial steps the federal government could take to ensure regional equity are: 1) mandating systematic, geographically coded disclosure to the public of the annual allocations of federal transportation funds and other forms of intergovernmental aid; and, 2) undertaking stronger monitoring and enforcement of existing regional planning and sustainable development requirements embodied in federal transportation legislation. She further indicates that through “examination of the power dynamics in metropolitan regions, … localist strategies that depend completely on voluntary cooperation … fail to address regional inequities.” James Madison said that, “the smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party, … and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.” He continued his prediction with, “in the absence of an external check provided by a national government … smaller units of government would dominate.” His intuition and forethought further express the need for federal interaction to mandate regional levels of cooperation.
A comprehensive perspective on governance is necessary to succeed in regional planning efforts so as not to simply represent the limited viewpoints of various agencies. Regional policies will be hard to accomplish and implement as long as organizations are composed of members from local governments who do not embody a regional community. When planning functions are accompanied by power over the distribution of funds, the degree of regional cooperation increases. However, when there is a lack of strong political will within metropolitan areas and politicians do not have the incentive to build strong political support for regionalism, cooperation will be difficult to achieve except in areas of overwhelming consensus or by mandate (Gainsborough, 2001). Perhaps a trend toward a national regionalist policy would empower the cause of the working class and poor, as well as those populations that are disenfranchised and segregated.
Alvin Toffler’s idealism summarizes the extent of our transgressions as a society and perhaps provides another means to mend the breach (Future Shock, 1970):
“A sensitive system of indicators geared to measuring the achievement of social and cultural goals, and integrated with economic indicators, is part of the technical equipment that any society needs before it can successfully reach the next stage of eco-technological development. This humanization of planning, moreover, must be reflected in our political structures as well. To connect … social intelligence … with the decisional centers of society, we must institutionalize a concern for the quality of life. Reliable, useful data about our social condition … would begin to influence planning … making it more sensitive to social costs and benefits, less coldly technocratic and econocentric. [Establishing this system] would not eliminate politics from political life. But it would lend recognition – and political force – to the idea that the aims of progress reach beyond economics. Agencies to watch over the change in the quality of life would carry us a long way toward that humanization of the planner which is the essential first stage of the strategy of social futurism.”[1] According to NASA, loss of vegetation and dark asphalt surfaces add to a heat islands effect. Trapped heat creates a low-pressure system, which in turn creates thunderclouds. Higher temperature heat islands double the occurrence of the chemical reaction causing ozone, a major contributor to smog.
[2] Note the female intonation used for the susceptibility of Communistic infiltration used in these times.
Bibliography (Parts I & II)
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