Rethinking the Local

Gerald E. Frug

Theodore Lowi's valuable insights into the conservative impact of globalization are marred by his crude distinction between the federal government and state and local governments. Lowi wants us to believe that the federal government promotes liberal policies while state and local governments promote conservative policies. It is for this reason, he argues, that the decentralization of power inevitably leads to an embrace of the policies of the right. Only at the very end of his article does he hint at what follows from this analysis. What we should do, it seems, is return to-perhaps even increase-a reliance on federal power. Hey! The New Deal and the Great Society were right after all.

One problem with Lowi's argument is that the federal/local distinction does not neatly map onto the liberal/conservative distinction. No doubt some federal policies have promoted a liberal agenda and some state and local policies have promoted a conservative agenda. But the reverse is also true. Where has Lowi been over the last 20 years? We all know that the Reagan administration launched a major attack on affirmative action, an attack that has been taken up and developed by Reagan's (and some of Bush's) appointees on the United States Supreme Court. Affirmative action policies adopted by many American cities have therefore been declared illegal. We also know that, through the Defense of Marriage Act and many other measures, the federal government has sought to limit the rights of gays and lesbians, while many American cities have passed ordinances that legalize domestic partnerships and prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The fact that the federal government can be an instrument of the right is not news. Consider, for example, an issue central to Lowi's argument: the segregation of American cities and neighborhoods by race, income, and ethnicity. How did this come about? Lowi suggests that state and local policies are to blame. But it was the federal government, through Standard State Enabling Act of 1923, that developed and nourished the idea of local zoning, a major instrument used by American suburbs to exclude the poor and people of color. And it was the federal government's program of federally-insured mortgages that not only subsidized the suburbs at the expense of America's central cities but did so in a way that pursued explicitly race-based housing policies well into the 1960s. And that's not all. The federal government's policy of locating public housing for African-Americans in black neighborhoods, its use of federal transportation funds to support highways designed for suburb-to-suburb commuters rather than mass transit-the list of federal policies that have contributed to the simultaneous creation of prosperous white neighborhoods and declining minority neighborhoods goes on and on. From this history one should learn a simple lesson: one cannot rely on the federal government to pursue liberal policies. It might-but, then again, it might not.

Of course, the same can be said about state and cities. The question thus remains: does decentralization or centralization offer the best chance of reversing the current conservative trend in national, and worldwide, politics? Lowi assumes that the alternative to federal power is a transfer of power to state or local governments, each of which would have the ability to pursue any policies it desires even if these policies promoted its own self-interest at the expense of its neighbors. If this were the only possible version of the decentralization of power, Lowi might be right that increasing the power of the federal government would be a better idea. Over the last half-century, American urban policy has divided most of our metropolitan areas into more than 100 cities, and all of these cities have been given the power to control the nature of their populations through exclusionary zoning. Since the presence of the poor-and of African-Americans of any income-are widely thought to lower property values, this fracturing of metropolitan areas has spurred a competition between cities to see who can best exclude them. Those who have succeeded in this exclusionary process have been able to build on their creation of "good neighborhoods" to lure businesses from neighboring jurisdictions, and the presence of these businesses, in turn, has helped support schools that have attracted even those not opposed to integration. The cities that have refused to embrace exclusion as an urban policy or that have failed in their effort to exclude are the ones now most threatened with economic decline. A decentralization of power to cities divided in this way is not likely to turn those who are profiting at the expense of their neighbors into liberals.

Decentralization of power, however, need not be structured as vehicle for the protection of local selfishness. The legal rules that determine what cities are permitted to do can be changed so that they recognize the impact that local policies have on people who live elsewhere in the same metropolitan area. This can be accomplished by modifying the current legal entitlements that feed suburban power, such as the ability to engage in exclusionary zoning and the ability to capture all the income raised from business locating within their borders. One way to do this would be to require cities to take regional considerations into account in their decision-making. Another would be to build on the attachment metropolitan residents already have to cities other than their place of residence (why can't people who shop at the mall, and not just those who live near it, benefit from its taxes?). Reconceiving the decentralization of power in one of these ways could re-connect the metropolitan residents who are now so estranged from each other and help them learn how both globalization and current government programs are accelerating the decline not just of central cities but of many suburbs as well. It could stimulate across the country different methods of reversing the local policies that foster not only this economic decline but divisiveness, such as unequal schools and unequal protection against crime. And it could allocate the considerable resources that now can be found within every metropolitan region in the country to ensure that the less divisive policies work. No one thinks that revising the current legal definition of city power will be easy. But increasing federal power would not be easy either, and it would simply lead to more top-down decision-making. The difference between these two approaches is that a progressive form of decentralization has the potential of changing how people think about race and class differences and about crime and education. And a change in thinking is what we need.