AMERICAN METROPOLITICS: The New Suburban Reality
by Myron Orfield
(Brookings Institution, 221 pp., $29.95)
For decades, from the passage of the Housing Act of 1949 to the Carter
administration's Urban Development Action Grant program, urban policy
advocates have looked to the federal government as the principal way to
help revitalize cities. But two major changes have occurred that have
led urbanists to rethink their strategy. First, the federal government's
role in urban policy has receded, despite several Clinton administration
initiatives, such as empowerment zones and community development banks.
Second, the old model of needy central cities surrounded by prosperous
bedroom suburbs has given way to a new, more complex mosaic of urban geography.
As a result, urbanists have shifted their sights to the state and metropolitan
level. They realize that the chances of a re-energized urban policy coming
from Washington are small, especially with a Republican-controlled House
and presidency. In addition, because the object of their concern now includes
not just central cities but also needy suburban communities, they justify
intervening by arguing that their policy goals of "smart growth"
and a strong urban core are good for the entire metropolitan area.
Myron Orfield's first book, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban
Reality, builds on this new framework and attempts to broaden the
traditional definition of urban policy to include the suburbs. Orfield,
a Democratic state senator from Minnesota, has made a name for himself
as "the master cartographer of metropolitan America's changing demographics."
Through a wide array of statistical data, including fiscal capacity, poverty,
and school populations, Orfield creates a typology of metro communities
and illustrates the new metropolitan mosaic through a fascinating series
of maps of several metro areas. In place of the traditional binary central
city/suburban definition, Orfield develops six categories of suburbs:
three "at-risk" suburbs -- segregated, older, and lower density;
a fourth group of developing bedroom suburbs; and both affluent and very
affluent job centers. He examines each type of community in detail and
considers how issues such as segregation, fiscal equity, and sprawl affect
them.
While Orfield has brought analytical sophistication to bear on the issue
of how diverse suburbs have become, he goes a step further: With real
political acuteness, he links that evolution to the strategy of building
metro-wide coalitions to advance a progressive urban policy agenda. Orfield
makes a case for three main areas of reform: fiscal equity, including
metro-wide tax-base sharing; land-use reform, including coordinated infrastructure
planning and regional housing to promote fair-share affordable dwellings;
and metropolitan governance reform, including annexation and metro-wide
planning.
The bottom line for Orfield is that he wants America's metropolitan areas
to have significantly less diversity among jurisdictions in terms of racial
makeup, income, tax base, commercial and industrial development, and infrastructure
provision. To get there, Orfield falls back on the old liberal solution
of transferring resources from the "have" communities to the
"have nots." Orfield urges activists to do what he did successfully
in the Twin Cities: Build a coalition of the poor and middle-income suburbs
and the central city against the rich suburbs.
But there are several problems with Orfield's analysis and approach.
Most significant is that in analyzing at-risk suburbs -- both the inner core
and outer developing edge -- Orfield never acknowledges that sometimes, a
community's distress is of its own making. Certainly the problems of some
older at-risk suburbs and central cities stem from government mismanagement
or even outright corruption. For example, as Cory Booker's insurgent campaign
for mayor of Newark so clearly demonstrated, Newark has long been synonymous
with mismanaged government.
The fiscal problems of fast-growing developing suburbs seem particularly
of their own making, since they often refuse to make new development pay
its own way. Orfield rejects hefty development impact fees as the solution,
instead proposing that wealthy suburbs pay for these development costs
through tax-base sharing. But unless strict regional planning controls
are instituted, giving money to fast-growing suburbs through tax-base
sharing would actually exacerbate sprawl since new developments would
be subsidized even more than they are now.
This goes to the heart of the major limitation of the book. While Orfield
makes a compelling case that at-risk communities would do better if resources
were distributed more evenly, his case that this would boost the overall
welfare of the entire metro area is on weaker ground. Though he argues
persuasively that metropolitan areas would be better off without wasteful
and expensive interjurisdictional competition to snag the best development
opportunities, it's just not clear that his proposals are a win-win for
everyone.
But even if Orfield's proposal for broad-scale tax-base sharing goes
too far, there are valid reasons regions should consider a more modest
version. For example, housing prices in many metro areas are exceptionally
high because communities restrict development. New houses often bring
new children, whose educations usually cost more than new development
brings in tax revenues. As Orfield correctly points out, an over-reliance
on the property tax to fund schools results in higher overall housing
and development costs. Even with increased federal and state funding,
property taxes still account for more than 45 percent of school revenues.
Increasing revenue-sharing for education, either by expanding state aid
or by metro-wide tax-base sharing, could help convince communities that
building middle-class housing is not a money-losing proposition.
Perhaps the most compelling argument Orfield makes is that the ruthless
competition among communities to attract commercial and industrial development
is a negative-sum game in which communities provide hefty and wasteful
tax subsidies to compete for development. In this context, the Twin Cities'
tax-base proposal -- requiring that a portion of the increase in commercial
and industrial property tax revenues be shared (to give all communities
an incentive to cooperate in the economic development of the region) -- makes
good sense. As a result, if shared tax-base revenue goes to schools and
is collected from industrial and commercial property, it can lead to an
increase in overall welfare.
There's no question there is a new metropolitan geography in the New
Economy, and Orfield does an excellent job of describing it. As businesses
spread throughout the entire metropolitan area and low-income residents
are no longer concentrated in just the central cities, policymakers and
elected officials need to deal with a more complex and challenging set
of problems. As Orfield points out, increasingly they will need to respond
regionally as well.
