If Occupy Wall Street protesters and tea partiers agree on anything, it?s the loss of a stable middle class. Yet while the public debate has focused on overarching federal policies, neither group has pointed to the threat right here on the ground: the inequity of place.
Real estate agents and home buyers have long known that location ? where we live, learn, shop and join in community ? determines most of the opportunities available to Americans. Opportunity is the touchstone to becoming a member of the middle class. As much as brains, pluck or work ethic, geography is destiny ? for better or worse.
Continue ReadingUnfortunately, destiny for most of us is looking worse these days because of two developments often viewed as unconnected: fiscal stress on cities and the demographic transformation of greater metropolitan America.
First, towns and cities are now often unable to pay for the services their residents need and expect because of declining revenues. Towns and cities are going broke. To avoid bankruptcy, many are firing teachers and firefighters. They are cutting services because federal and state aid has shrunk and property taxes are insufficient to make up the difference.
Local officials from Trevose, Pa., to Stockton, Calif., face the same deficits, according to my research. They worry about delivering the essentials of the American dream to residents ? many of whom face unstable employment and risk foreclosure. This crisis facing local governments predated the Great Recession, but it?s growing worse because of it.
Compounding this is the fact that all do not feel the pain equally. Like the increase in income inequality, there?s a municipal wealth gap between smaller haves and the growing areas of have-nots.
A favored few cities or regions have managed to maintain a healthy tax base by keeping out expensive undesirables ? such as special-needs kids and affordable housing ? while attracting corporate parks. This leaves the others to shoulder the burdens of an economically diverse population with dwindling tax resources. The resulting inequity reduces opportunity in the very places that need it more.
These places are at the forefront of the second crisis factor: the demographic transformation of the inner suburbs, towns closest to the city border. These accidental laboratories of racial and ethnic diversity are America?s demographic future.
The non-whitening of the first suburbs has progressed rapidly, producing most of the past decade?s population growth and a majority of the schoolchildren in the greater metropolitan areas. While many non-Latino whites have moved to outer suburbs or back into cities, blacks, Latinos and Asians have taken their place on the close-in urban periphery.
This reversal of traditional migration patterns is also changing the meaning of suburbs. They were first created as upper-middle-class enclaves. But with their good schools and strong amenities, suburbs also nurture the continuous development of America?s vital middle class.
Now, at least in the inner ring, the suburbs are areas of higher density and crippling poverty. This is why, for example, parts of East Orange, N.J., and Compton, Calif., resemble the South Bronx of old ? if far more car-dependent. They lack public transportation access to jobs.
Social shifts have economic consequences for all of us, wherever we live. As modest income groups move to older suburbs in search of affordable housing and the American dream, the tax base can?t keep up. What a city could provide in schools and services, a suburb can?t.
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