The Need for Coalition

Myron Orfield

In this very impressive article, Luria and Rogers seek to connect the nascent regional movement with a more effective economic development strategy that seeks to improve the economy and promote individual opportunity. I know more about regionalism than economic development, so I will concentrate my remarks on the former.

Luria and Rogers argue that cities are important and that it is important to stop their decline for reasons of morality and economic cost. Both are valid reasons. However the most compelling political motivation comes from the rapid decline of inner-ring suburbs, the stagnant nature of blue-collar developing suburbs, and the consequent politics of self-interest.

Contrary to popular belief, socioeconomic instability does not stop neatly at central-city borders. As it crosses into inner suburbs, especially into suburbs that were once blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods, it accelerates and intensifies. Older working-class suburban communities have less hopeful prospects than the cities they surround. Though central cities get hit first by social and economic change, they have a fiscal, governmental, and social infrastructure to slow these powerful trends. In contrast, inner suburbs lack the central city's business district, elite neighborhood tax base, social welfare and police infrastructure, and network of organized political activity. Once the trouble hits, they often decline far more rapidly.

Further, while favored-quarter suburbs (generally 25-35 percent of the population of a metropolitan region) get virtually all of the new development infrastructure and truly prosper, the patterns of metropolitan polarization play a cruel joke on most middle and lower middle-income families seeking a better life at the edge of the region. As they flee the socioeconomic dislocations of the central cities and inner suburbs, they arrive in rapidly growing school districts with small tax bases. Because their tax base is inadequate and their neighborhoods have throngs of young children needing to go to school, their local governments will build almost anything that stands simply to pay the bills. In part perhaps because of overcrowding and minimal spending per pupil, these districts have some of the highest drop-out and lowest college attendance rates in their regions.

Despite all these troubles, however, the creation of a coalition between the central cities and inner, low tax-base suburbs is no mean feat. These middle-income (often working-class) suburbs, which have been a loose cannon politically since 1968, hold the balance of power on regional issues and arguably on most political issues in the United States. Our most distinguished political commentators have written about the central significance of this group in holding and maintaining a ruling political coalition.

On the merits, these middle-income, blue-collar suburbs are the largest prospective winners in regional reform. To them, tax-base sharing means lower property taxes and better services, particularly better-funded schools. Regional housing policy means, over time, fewer units of affordable housing crowding their doorstep. Once understood, this combination is unbeatable. What stands in the way of this coalition, however, are long-term, powerful resentments and distrust, based on class and race and fueled by every political campaign since Hubert Humphrey lost the White House in 1968 and Archie Bunker became a Republican.

I think this is the central problem: rebuilding a spatial and economic coalition between the central city and the struggling suburbs and their residents. I think that this will aid in both regionalism and economic reform. But for the reasons I mentioned, we have our work cut out for us.

As to the second broad thrust of the article--high road v. low road development--I need to be educated. As a practical politician, I have been disgusted with low-road strategies. But I have also been hard put to tell poor, struggling communities, from which all economic activity is leaving, to wait for a better policy or not to act. Here we need a concrete transitional program. Further, I believe, but do not know, that solving these problems will require a powerfully reinvigorated labor movement; that as the world economy becomes seamless, we must use some of the profits to educate and train our workforce and cushion the impact of the transition; and that a metropolitan and national policy that discourages bidding wars between cities, states, and suburbs and leads to equity among jurisdictions could help. We need more discussion on these issues: Luria and Rogers are to be commended for starting it.

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