Cities, surburbs, and the urban crisis - US

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Peter D. Salins

THE RETURN OF a Democrat to the White House has led the nation's big city mayors and other advocates of urban interests to hope that the national government will once again fund a large-scale "urban policy." The reigning assumption behind this hope, one validated by media coverage of the Los Angeles riots last year, is that America's cities, especially its bigger ones, are in the grip of an "urban crisis" stemming largely from the federal government's willful neglect of the cities during the twelve lean years of Republican presidential rule. For the time being the promotion of Clinton's urban policy must take a back seat to the grander projects of economic revitalization and health reform. But sooner or later Washington will get around to sending a lot more money to the cities to ease their collective and individual crises. If this happens without rethinking the true nature of the cities' problems, and without recasting the solutions, the new money will no more solve the cities' problems than did the billions spent on urban policies past.

Our urban squalor

What, exactly, constitutes the crisis of America's cities? The United States has long faced two very different urban dilemmas. One is the fact that all U.S. metropolitan areas have large numbers of very poor, usually disproportionately minority, households; households suffering not just from poverty, but from many attendant social problems. This has frequently been deplored, but rarely characterized as a crisis. The other dilemma is that the natural locational forces of U.S. metropolitan areas, in combination with the effects of their jurisdictional fragmentation, conspire to keep most poor households in the central cities. It is this geographic fact that is perceived as a crisis, and that is the focus of the various national and state efforts labeled as "urban policy." We have been preoccupied with the geography rather than the existence of poverty primarily because the central cities remain, in fact, the functional hearts of all metropolitan areas, the home base of American's media and opinion elite. Because the social problems of the metropolitan poor are concentrated in every urban region's core, they are highly visible to the leaders and visitors of metropolitan America, and they are disruptive of its image, enjoyment, and perhaps even its economic life.

The external face of these problems is revealed in a visit to any U.S. metropolitan area. Just outside any redeveloped central city downtown, with its new office towers, "festival markets," new museum and library additions, reclaimed waterfronts, and gentrified townhouse blocks, you will find a sea of urban squalor. Here you will see dozens to hundreds of blocks of deteriorated and abandoned residential structures amidst filthy and illmaintained streets, parks, schools, and public housing projects. Behind the wretched physical facade of the are lie the depressing statistics of unemployment, family breakdown, substance abuse, crime, and welfare dependency.

Fifty years of local experimentation have taught us that neither pervasive urban poverty nor its social correlates have municipal or metropolitan causes or cures. National economic and social factors are responsible for the problems and only national policies can correct them. But the concentration of these problems in the neighborhoods of the central cities and a few other unlucky municipalities, and the strain on the hapless host municipalities of funding and managing responses to them is a local issue; it is primarily a product of America's metropolitan policies. National, state, and local policies for metropolitan areas affect the way urban problems are spatially distributed; such policies allow most suburban communities to strategically keep urban problems outside their own gates, and they make these problems mainly the burden and responsibility of the places where they are situated.

A municipal concern

Under present arrangements dealing with poverty is mostly a municipal concern. In addition to the usual array of broad-based local services: education, infrastructure, and public safety, cities and suburbs are expected to offer critical health, housing, income assistance, and social services to their poor. The latter services are costly, difficult to administer, and often ineffective, and the resources they consume make it harder for affected places to provide high quality educational and other services for the rest of their residents. This subjects cities to a perverse and vicious cycle. Unlike many suburbs, cities cannot limit or determine their populations. The dynamics of each metropolitan system, present and past, acting through countless individual locational choices, capriciously deals each city its demographic hand. Because a city has to address the social as well as functional needs of its residents, the particular profile of households within its boundaries determines whether or not they city is a desirable place to live. If a city is perceived as an undesirable place to live, its complement of metropolitan households will become increasingly problematical, exacerbating its "urban crisis."