MARC


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The Pattern of Social Separation and Sprawl
Underlying MARC's studies is the realization that there is a common trend of socioeconomic separation and inefficient sprawl occurring in the nation's metropolitan areas. This polarization is marked by private investment pushed ever outward by the concentration of urban poverty and its external effects-such as high crime, dysfunctional, poorly performing schools, high property taxes, and comparatively low per-capita government spending on barely adequate basic social services-and pulled steadily outward by concentrations of affluence-large investments of public resources, and low taxes with comparatively high per-capita spending on expensive public services. This socioeconomic separation results in the following, all too common, regional patterns. In contrast to popular perceptions, social, economic and racial change does not stop neatly at the central city borders. Reaching out from the core, often in sectoral wedges emerging from the expanding poor neighborhoods of the central cities, poverty and social and economic instability arrive in the older working-class inner-ring and middle-income satellite suburbs where 20 to 30 percent of the regional population lives. As growing social need hits these suburbs, it accelerates and intensifies. In the cities, older suburbs and satellite cities where the region's needs are the greatest, the local governmental resources in terms of property, sales and income tax base are the lowest. Thus, as these communities become the poorhouses of their region, they do so with the highest taxes and lowest spending per capita on services. In some regions of the country these trends have left many suburbs with higher poverty rates and smaller per-capita resources than the central city they surround. In a related pattern, growing middle-income communities, dominated by smaller homes and apartments, develop without sufficient property tax base to support schools and other public services. These fiscally stressed communities-which include both second-ring cities and townships as well as rapidly developing communities on the region's edge-become tomorrow's declining suburbs. Often they develop on inadequate and environmentally harmful septic systems, with roads that have too little capacity, and with under-funded, over-crowded local schools. Ultimately, the many people who move to these places from declining inner suburbs or from poor rural towns and satellite cities find themselves jumping out the social frying pan and into a fiscal one. These communities account for 20 to 40 percent of U.S. regions. Finally, upper-income suburbs, with little or no affordable housing, are capturing a disproportionate share of regional infrastructure spending, economic growth and jobs. They accept all the benefits of a regional association-funding for roads, wastewater treatment, and airports, as well as a shared labor market and product market-but eschew regional responsibilities such as affordable housing and the fiscal burden of caring for the region's poor. As their property tax base expands, and their housing markets exclude, social needs proportionally decline. These communities-where only about 15 to 30 percent of the regional population lives-become further isolated from regional social and economic responsibilities. As a result of the above conditions, the affluent suburbs are frequently referred to as the "favored quarter". However, these communities also face serious threats. As Joel Garreau has argued in his book Edge Cities, these places soon become as "urban" as the areas that their residents were attempting to avoid. Because of the concentration of retail and offices in the area, local roadways become extremely congested with employees and shoppers. Also, as property in these cities attracts even more executive homes or office and retail buildings, open spaces are threatened and soon lost. Because of the affluence and relative power of the citizenry who live in them, these are often the first communities to actively fight urban sprawl-passing local laws that limit development and/or purchasing open spaces in the area for public parks. The Link Between Socioeconomic Decline and Sprawl The term "urban sprawl" refers to inefficient land-use patterns that often occur at the edge of a metropolitan region. MARC's reports emphasize the relationship between socioeconomic polarization and urban sprawl, which results in severe environmental degradation. As the wave of socioeconomic decline rolls outward from the city and older suburbs, tides of middle-class homeowners sweep into fringe communities. Growing communities, facing tremendous service and infrastructure needs offer development incentives and zone in ways that allow them to capture the most tax base. In so doing, they lock the region into low-density development patterns that are fiscally irresponsible, foster automobile dependency, contaminate groundwater, and needlessly destroy tens of thousands of acres of forest, farmland, and fragile lands. Existing governmental and philanthropic efforts-such as significant investment in anti-poverty initiatives in the region's core and in land trusts to protect land on the fringe from development-have been unsuccessful in reversing these trends. A growing core of scholars; national, state, and local government officials; and activists from urban, faith-based, business, good-government, and environmental backgrounds, believe that only through a strong, multifaceted, regional response can social and economic polarization and wasteful development patterns be countered. To combat these trends, there are three areas of reform that must be sought on a regional scale: 1) greater fiscal equity among jurisdictions of a region, particularly those with land-use planning powers, 2) smarter growth through better planning practices, 3) structural reform of metropolitan governance and transportation planning to allow for fair and efficient transportation and community planning. These reforms are inter-related and reinforce each other substantively and politically.
The Effects of Social Separation and Sprawl
Schools: the First Victim of Metropolitan Separation Schools are the first victim and the most powerful perpetuator of metropolitan separation. Local schools become socioeconomically distressed before neighborhoods themselves become poor. Hence, increasing poverty among a community's schoolchildren is a prophecy for the community. First, the community's children often become its adults. Second, middle-class families, who form the bedrock of stable communities, will not tolerate high concentrations of poverty in their schools, and frequently depart in search of better educational opportunities for their children. The results can be clearly seen in and around places where there is dramatic flight from the schools. The central city and the declining inner communities of American metropolitan regions struggle under a disproportionate share of concentrated poverty and segregation. These schools, developing without sufficient property tax base, face increasing social and academic challenges, often with the lowest per-pupil spending in the region. On the other hand, affluent suburban systems enjoy insulated, stable prosperity financed by local business growth. Just as concentrated poverty in schools destabilizes communities, it has a very negative effect on individual access and achievement. Schools are not just instruction and textbooks, but, like neighborhoods, represent a series of reinforcing social networks that contribute to success or failure. Fast-track, well-funded schools with a high percentage of students from stable middle- and upper-class families are streams moving in the direction of success, with currents that value hard work, goal setting, and academic achievement. Monolithically poor schools in central city or inner-county neighborhoods with a large number of students in poverty are streams moving toward failure, with currents that reinforce anti-social behavior, drifting, teenage pregnancy, and dropping out. Minority Enrollment: Measuring Racial Segregation The evidence is clear that concentrated poverty and racial segregation are highly intertwined. Research by Paul A. Jargowsky shows that a majority of those who live in concentrated poverty areas are Black and Hispanic (77 percent in 1990), greatly disproportionate to the general population of the U.S. (20.5 percent in 1990). This is as true in regions with small minority populations as it is in regions with large minority populations. Nationwide, in 1990 there were almost as many poor white persons in the country's metropolitan areas as Blacks and Hispanics combined (10.8 million poor whites, 6.9 million poor Blacks, and 4.8 million poor Hispanics). Yet three-quarters of these poor whites lived in middle-class neighborhoods (mostly suburban) while three-quarters of poor Blacks and one-half of poor Hispanics lived in transitional or extreme poverty neighborhoods. The Jobs/Housing Mismatch Twenty-five years ago, John Kain, an economist at Harvard, argued for the existence of a "spatial mismatch" between affordable housing and available jobs. The theory posits that American cities are undergoing transformations from centers of goods and production to centers of information processing. The blue-collar jobs that once made up the economic backbone of cities have either vanished or moved to the developing suburbs, if not overseas. Central-city low-skilled jobs are no longer available. In addition, neighborhood retail businesses that served the middle class also have, to a large extent, relocated to the suburbs. The spatial mismatch theory states that it is not a lack of jobs per se that is the problem, since central-city population growth has been as slow as central-city job growth. The problem is that the percentage of central-city jobs with high educational requirements is increasing, while the average education level of central-city residents is dropping. In addition, essentially all of the net growth in jobs with low educational requirements is occurring in the developing suburbs. This low-skilled jobs exodus to the developing suburbs disproportionately affects central-city poor people, particularly minorities, who often face a more limited choice of housing location in job growth areas and a lack of transit services from the urban core to those places. Social Separation and the Environment: Measuring Urban Sprawl Not only does regional polarization negatively impact neighborhoods of the central city, older suburbs, and satellite cities of a region and the people who live there, but it also creates serious problems on the region's fringe -- both for the communities that are developing there and for the natural environment. Because growing communities on the region's fringe face tremendous service and infrastructure needs, they often offer development incentives and zone in ways that allow them to capture the most tax base. In so doing, they lock the region into low-density development patterns that needlessly destroy tens of thousands of acres of forest and farmland, destabilize environmentally sensitive areas, and greatly increase vehicle miles traveled and number of automobile trips made. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a city's urbanized area consists of the central city and its adjacent urban fringe, including all contiguous territory settled at the density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile. By comparing the change in population between census periods within a designated urbanized area and the change in the size of the land area that is defined as urbanized, one can determine whether that area as a whole is becoming more compact or is sprawling as it develops. Fiscal Disparities When the property tax and local sales taxes are basic revenue sources for local governments with land-planning powers, fiscal zoning occurs as jurisdictions compete for property wealth and sales tax revenue. Through fiscal zoning, jurisdictions deliberately develop predominantly expensive homes and commercial-industrial properties with low social service needs. In such a way, they prevent the construction of lower-cost housing that has associated social needs, thus keeping demands on tax base low. Spreading these controlled needs over a broad, rich property tax base further reduces property tax rates. The dynamic of fiscal zoning creates three sets of mutually reinforcing relationships. First, the wealthier jurisdictions that have little or no affordable housing and have low property tax rates continue to attract more and more business, the presence of which continually lowers the overall property tax rate and increases tax revenues to the city. Because of low social needs, these places can provide a few high quality local services. A second reinforcing relationship involves those jurisdictions that have increasing social needs on a declining property tax base. This combination leads to both declining consumer demographics and increased property tax rates, resulting in fewer and less adequate public services. All of these factors are large negatives in terms of business location and retention. Often, central cities and inner, older suburbs spend a great deal of money on unsuccessful efforts to become more socio-economically stable, as their property tax base and their sales tax revenues evaporate out from under them. The third relationship concerns the developing jurisdictions that lose the battle of fiscal zoning. These are fast-growing suburbs that have not yet attracted business or executive housing and must pay for their schools, police, parks, curbs, and gutters with fewer resources. To keep property tax rates from exploding, they are forced to abandon long-range thinking and frantically build lower-valued homes and multi-family units, big-box retail centers, shopping malls, and research office parks rejected by the wealthier jurisdictions. These decisions, in the long run, catch up with working- and middle-class suburbs and they become the declining suburbs of tomorrow. Further, in a perhaps futile attempt to remain competitive in terms of property and sales taxes, working- and middle-class developing communities often suppress local expenditures on public services, particularly on schools. The increase of property and sales tax wealth in some communities and the stagnancy or decline of property values and retail outlets in the central cities and older, inner suburbs represents an interregional transfer of tax base. As such, the loss of value in older poorer communities is one of the costs of economic polarization and urban sprawl. Federal, state, and local governments spend billions of dollars building infrastructure such as schools, freeways, and sewers which add enormous value to growing parts of the region. To the extent that these public expenditures serve to transfer value, they are wasted. Adding to this dysfunction, the infrastructure of new cities is paid for by taxes and fees levied on the residents and businesses of the older parts of the region.
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