Rx for Suburbia
(Page 3 of 7)
March / April 2003
By Jay Walljasper, The Nation
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“Essentially,” he says, “people in central cities and inner suburbs are subsidizing their own decline.”
Orfield backs up these assertions with an avalanche of statistical data that he’s organized into the brightly colored maps that are the centerpiece of his new book, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Brookings Institution).
In studying the nation’s 25 largest metropolitan areas, which account for 43 percent of America’s population, he’s identified five basic types of suburban communities in terms of economic and social factors, only one of which fits most people’s stereotype of comfortable suburban prosperity. City residents make up about a quarter of the metropolitan population, with everyone else loosely distributed into the following community categories:
- At-risk segregated (8 percent). This encompasses places like Harvey, Illinois, and Ecorse, Michigan, where black urban ghettos have formed outside the city limits.
- At-risk older (8–9 percent). These are lower-income communities, with growing minority populations but also a large number of older white people.
- At-risk developing (25 percent). While the first two groups include mostly inner-ring suburbs, these lower-income communities include many new subdivisions, trailer parks, and existing towns at the exurban fringes of a metropolitan area. This is the central battleground of American politics, Orfield notes. Democrats who can reach these voters usually win.
- Bedroom developing (25 percent). These are generally new communities, home to many middle-class families, that are stressed not by poverty but by growth. They are struggling to keep up with the demand for sewers, public services, and, most of all, schools.
- Affluent job centers (7 percent). This is the suburban American dream, yet not all is happy here. Orfield relates, “People who live there are starting to go nuts because of the congestion. Traffic crawls along at rush hour and even on Saturdays because everyone from everywhere else drives there to work or shop. Residents are afraid of losing the natural open space and clean air that drew them there in the first place.”
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