Suburbanization rose from a nuclear defense strategy. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower began the construction of a national network of highways — not for the sake of transportation, but primarily to allow for the free transport of mobile nuclear missile launchers. While there never was any occasion to send missiles along I-40, this system had significant but unforeseen consequences. At the same time that Washington was enabling itself to drive missiles from North Carolina to Illinois, Americans were enjoying a post-war economic boom. With this increase in capital came increases in spending power, and for the first time, members of the middle and working classes were able to move out of industrial zones and central cities into suburban developments like Levittown, N.Y., near New York City.
Living in the suburbs meant large lots, more green space, homogenous communities and tranquility. Cars and highways allowed residents to work in the cities by day and retreat to their peaceful suburbs at night. Suburbs afforded the middle class a chance at realizing the American dream — of owning a white picket fence, a Cadillac, a fresh-mown lawn and, most of all, a house. For the average of 2.5 kids that came along with the house, suburbs provided an opportunity to grow up in a clean environment, with plenty of room to run and play. With suburbs came newer and better schools, making better jobs and higher education increasingly attainable.
While suburbs were for their residents the urban realization of the American dream, they have been a nightmare for city governments. The problem stems from a loss of tax revenue and community vitality, placing the future of many cities in jeopardy. Before suburbs, middle-class residents lived, at least in part, in varied, more income-diverse urban neighborhoods. The middle-class residents paid taxes to the city, and maintained community organizations and services. They served as the glue or safety net that kept inner-city neighborhoods alive and manageable.
However, with suburbanization, those residents moved out of the cities' jurisdiction into new, suburban municipalities. Their large tax revenues now went to these new municipal governments, ironically enough, to provide ample services and great public schools to communities that do not need high levels of services and that can afford private schools.
Those who stayed were those who couldn't leave — the poorer residents. The inner-city urban neighborhoods became concentrations of poverty, filled with people needing public health, education and housing services. The problem: just as the concentration of people needing services increased, the capacity of these cities to provide services decreased as the tax revenue of all the suburbanizing middle-class residents was lost to these new small suburban municipalities.
While suburban residents live in their isolated, homogenous, "perfect" communities, cities struggle with all of the problems left behind. St. Louis is a prime example of this phenomenon in which the city itself has been shrinking dramatically while its suburbs have been growing. Cities are left trying to struggle to either attract new residents or to draw back those who have moved to the suburbs.
And when cities do attempt to revitalize their downtowns, these projects often create gentrified neighborhoods that are nice and attractive, but end up forcing out the only residents who have been sticking with their communities. And, actual revitalization projects are highly costly, made much less tenable in light of the financial crisis.
So what can cities do, faced with shrinking populations, neighborhoods in crisis fraught with gangs, drugs, violence, poor education and housing, with highly limited resources? How can these cities both bring in and bring back middle- and upper-class residents and at the same time help the poor residents already in the downtown and inner-city neighborhoods?
The solutions needed are neither simple nor eloquent, but then, the problems cities face aren't exactly pretty. Cities can, in theory, extend their municipal boundaries to encompass suburbs in the hope of recapturing lost economic well-being. This, however, is highly unlikely; aside from prompting massive legal fights, and ignoring the fact that city governments lack the infrastructure needed to make these expansions viable, to constantly extend the boundaries of a city is a wildly unsustainable practice.
Another solution is one of sustained, targeted investment. Under New York City Mayor Ed Koch, the South Bronx underwent a long period of revitalization from the 1970s through the 1990s. Community-based redevelopment organizations were strategically empowered to rebuild their own neighborhoods, allowing residents to take their futures into their own hands. As Paul Grogan observed in his book, "Comeback Cities" (2001), "people who are determined to save their homes and their neighborhood will do so, given the political and financial resources and the regulatory latitude to proceed." In the South Bronx, the key progress was not making the community richer, but making it a neighborhood where "people want to live, shop, run businesses and go to school."
Both the South Bronx model of community based revitalization (helping current residents make their neighborhoods more tenable) and the gentrification model can help cities revitalize failing downtown neighborhoods, and bring revenue back into the city. However, the South Bronx project took two decades and billions of dollars -- luxuries of time and money that many, if not most, cities don't have in our current financial situation — and gentrifying neighborhoods fails to help current residents.
Perhaps the solution lies in somehow changing the economic calculus of living in suburbs versus cities, which mixed with the creation of better services and more attractive neighborhoods in cities can lead the middle class back into the cities, allowing once again for strong, diverse city communities.
The complexity of these issues — equity, economic vitality and crisis, crime, education and others — deserves more debate and discussion. Luckily, that opportunity exists here at Tufts in the upcoming Institute for Global Leadership's EPIIC symposium entitled Cities: Forging an Urban Future. The symposium will run from today through Sunday and will include panels and discussions on urban crime, social equity in cities, urban sustainability and the attempts to revitalize declining industrial cities of the North, looking at examples such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis and others. Tickets will be on sale next week in the campus center and dining halls.
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Ian Hainline and Bruce Ratain are sophomores majoring in political science. They are both members of this year's EPIIC class – Hainline is moderating the symposium's panel on urban crime and violence and Ratain is moderating the panel on decline and revitalization.
