Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/051892/05189928.000

Text File | 1992-10-20 | 18KB | 356 lines

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                                                        ╚THE TWO AMERICAS, Page 28

This Land Is Your Land. . .This Land Is My Land


The L.A. riots underscored a painful truth: a relentless exodus
from the cities has split the country. Bursting with new
political power, the suburbs are increasingly being asked to
revive the decaying slums.

By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles and
Priscilla Painton/New York, with other bureaus


    Residents of Simi Valley don't usually have much contact
with people from South Central Los Angeles. The lustrous suburb
where the Rodney King beating trial was held and the inner-city
war zone that erupted in rioting two weeks ago are separated by
just a 45-minute ride. In most other respects they are a world
apart. But last week, for a fleeting moment of mutual
incomprehension, they came face to face.

    On Tuesday a convoy of 150 activists from South Central
arrived to picket the courthouse where the four policemen were
tried. "Why do you bother us?" Simi Valley housewife Suzanne
Heffernan shouted back at the protesters. "Let us go on with our
lives, like you are down there."

    "Down there" in L.A., Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a black
former Congresswoman who is running for the Los Angeles County
Board of Supervisors, sat in her campaign headquarters in South
Central. Across the street a block-long Thrifty Drug Store lay
gutted by fire, its ANNIVERSARY SALE banner still flapping over
the curb. Yet Burke is hopeful that the election of a new
representative from the inner city to the powerful five-member
board may help get local resources flowing back to the
neighborhood. "For the past 10 years the suburbs have been
dominant," she says. "Now we are going to move into another
era."

    Burke is right about the problem, though she may be very
wrong about the likelihood of a new era soon. Suburbanization,
the most irresistible demographic trend of the past 40 years,
is indeed at the heart of why the inner cities have been
reduced to hollow shells peopled largely by poor non-whites. The
process began after World War II, when veterans by the thousands
moved their families to suburbs like New York's Levittown. The
draining of the cities accelerated during the 1960s and '70s,
when malls sprouted across the nation, diverting shoppers from
downtown business districts. And it reached a peak during the
1980s, when employers joined the exodus from cities,
transferring millions of jobs to suburban office parks. Now
about half of America's 250 million people live in the suburbs,
and only one-quarter in central cities.

    The result is an America that is rapidly dividing into two
worlds, separated by class, race and drive time. Sheltered in
tree-lined streets where the fantasy of a homogeneous
middle-class society can still be entertained, many suburbanites
know the city mainly as a skyline glimpsed from an overpass or
as the place of a shooting reported on the evening news -- or
as a pillar of smoke and flame on the horizon.

    New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Detroit,
Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles -- many of the great American
cities have been severely, perhaps fatally, undermined by the
loss of jobs and taxpayers. In 1960, per capita income was 5%
higher in a sample of the nation's cities than in their suburbs.
By 1987, suburban per capita income was 59% larger than in the
cities.

    As workers and employers have retreated to their homes and
industrial parks beyond the city line, the poor left behind have
become more destitute than ever. In the past two years, welfare
rolls in Los Angeles County have climbed to historic levels.
Nearly 1.4 million Angelenos, a seventh of the county's
population, depend on one or more of the county-administered
relief services: Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
general relief, food stamps or the California state version of
Medicaid.

    The contrast between South Central L.A. and Simi Valley is
typical of the city-suburban divide. South Central, a largely
black and Hispanic neighborhood of 260,000 people, has long been
one of the poorest sections of the city. While there are
pockets of prim bungalows sprinkled among the run-down
commercial streets and crime-infested housing projects, the
average income is just $10,000 per adult. More than a fourth of
the area's families are below the poverty line.

    Meanwhile, Simi Valley -- 80% white, 13% Hispanic, 5%
Asian, only 2% black -- is a pristine bedroom community of just
over 100,000, where the average price of a home is $230,000.
Much of it is so fresh-out-of-the-cellophane new that in some
shopping malls the trees are not yet shade size. "We can see
some urban pressures like graffiti start to spring up," says
Mayor Greg Stratton, but he stresses that "among towns over
100,000, Simi Valley is one of the two safest communities in the
U.S."

    As befits the site of Ronald Reagan's Presidential
Library, Simi Valley also votes overwhelmingly Republican. The
Los Angeles riots have made the problems of the cities an issue
to be reckoned with in this year's election campaigns. But the
1992 presidential election will also be the first in which
suburbanites are a majority of the voters -- up from just 36%
in 1968, when the white backlash against the ghetto riots of
that era helped elect Richard Nixon. What Nixon understood then,
and what a great deal of state and federal policy has reflected
since then, is that the suburbs control the nation's political
destiny. Voters there will punish any candidate who would have
them transfer tax revenue back to the cities. And even if the
new suburban majority could be persuaded to agree to massive
urban aid, the damage wrought by the shift of wealth and jobs
to the suburbs might be too much for mere social programs to
remedy.

    Money follows power. Community Development Block Grants
began as a housing program for inner cities. Now half the $3.5
billion allocated for the program this year will go outside
center cities. The politically sacrosanct tax deduction for
mortgage interest costs the federal Treasury $50 billion each
year, a benefit that flows mostly to the purchasers of suburban
homes. At the same time, federal aid to cities declined from
$47.2 billion in 1980 to $21.7 billion 10 years later.

    Race adds a final layer of complication to the picture. As
many African Americans have flowed into the middle class, they
too have sought refuge in the suburbs -- often against the
resistance of red-lining banks and reluctant white neighbors.
Their departure has done more than deny tax revenue to the
cities. It has deprived black youths in the ghetto of living
examples of the steady work and stable family life of
middle-class blacks.

    Even the creation of inner-city enterprise zones, in which
businesses would receive tax breaks and other incentives, may
not be enough to draw employers into the dangerous world of
drugs and violent crime that chronic poverty has created. After
the Watts riots of 1965, Howard Allen, senior board member of
Southern California Edison, was active in trying to lure
manufacturing to the inner city. This time he is more
pessimistic. To him it seems that the obstacles to attracting
job-creating enterprises are more firmly entrenched than they
were 25 years ago. Says Allen: "We are heading in the direction
whose only definition is one of textbook class warfare."

    The shift of power to the suburbs began slowly and was
propelled by government policies. The first burst of
suburbanization in the post-World War II era was made possible
by guaranteed home loans for veterans and government subsidies
for highway construction. The final and shattering blow came
during the 1980s, when developers flush with government -
guaranteed loans from savings and loan associations helped erect
clusters of industrial parks and research-and-development
centers along the beltways that ring many central cities.

    Corporations seeking relief from high big-city taxes also
joined the rush, feeding the growth of hybrid suburb-cities like
Virginia's Tysons Corner, Perimeter Center outside Atlanta, and
the spanking new localities of the Route 128 corridor in
Massachusetts. According to Joel Garreau, author of Edge City:
Life on the New Frontier, by many standards of urban life these
mostly low-rise population centers are already minicities. Most
of the more than 200 suburban hybrids that he studied have more
office space, shopping, entertainment, prestigious hotels,
corporate headquarters -- even hospitals with high-tech CAT-scan
machines -- than such conventional cities as Tampa, Tucson or
Portland, Oregon.

    Garreau's "edge cities" are very different from
traditional suburbs that looked to the nearby city as their
center. "They're not sub-anything," he says. "They are now the
standard form of American urban life." As jobs and cultural
attractions have moved out to such places, the people who live
there have little reason to venture into old cities at all. "I
never, ever go to the city," says Joan Schimansky, 43, a
resident of the Miami suburb of Kendall. "There's not much down
there for a family with two kids."

    In the mostly homogeneous suburbs, people have less stake
in solving the problems of people unlike themselves in the
dimly remembered cities. It is also more tempting for them to
dump their own problems there. Until last summer, Westchester
County, a prosperous suburb of New York City, was exporting some
of its homeless to a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Five years
ago, the sewage-treatment plant in the bedraggled New Jersey
city of Camden began taking on sewage waste from every other
community in the county. To protest the stench, residents
stopped paying their annual $275 sewer fees. Last week the sewer
authority halved the charge, but the plant's odor still tinges
the air.

    Some urban leaders are trying to find a silver lining in
the clouds that rose over the burning blocks of Los Angeles.
"What you are starting to see more and more -- and Los Angeles
brought it home dramatically -- is that you can't isolate
yourself in your little island of self-interest," says New
Jersey Governor Jim Florio. "In a place like New Jersey, you can
go from Short Hills, a very affluent community, to Newark in the
space of 10 minutes."

    But as Florio learned the hard way, if you bump up too
hard against suburban interests, you can quickly go from
popular Governor to political chump. Two years ago, the New
Jersey Supreme Court directed the state to reduce disparities
in school funding between affluent suburban communities and
inner cities. In an attempt to comply with the court order,
Florio pushed the Democratic-controlled legislature to agree to
$2.8 billion in new taxes, including an increase in sales tax
from 6% to 7%, along with deep cuts in state jobs and spending
programs. He also redirected a portion of state education aid
from suburban schools to poorer inner-city districts.

    The response from suburban taxpayers was ferocious,
ranging from death threats to calls for Florio's impeachment.
Last November voters elected veto-proof Republican majorities
in both houses of the legislature. They are now trying to
reverse most of Florio's program -- while also fumbling for a
way to satisfy the same court order that led the Governor to
formulate his plan.

    The lesson of New Jersey is that even suburbanites who
recognize the dimension of the inner-city problems often draw
the line at paying to solve them. "It does not make sense to
take the money away from good suburban schools so that you risk
mediocrity everywhere," says Susan Bass Levin, mayor of the
wealthy suburb of Cherry Hill, which is outside Camden. As a
result of Florio's plan, she claims, her town lost $5 million
in education funds in 1989. The following year Cherry Hill
adopted the first in a series of annual school-tax hikes to
offset the loss.

    Ironically, suburbanites who bristle at the thought of
federal or state dollars going to support inner cities can spend
like liberals on a spree when their own communities stand to
benefit. In recent years the voters of Georgia's Gwinnett
County, a mostly white, Republican enclave outside Atlanta, have
approved road and library bond issues, as well as a special
recreation tax and a 1% local sales tax to finance roads, a new
courthouse and a jail.

    But when hard-pressed cities try to tax their citizens
more to pay for needed services, it often backfires, provoking
another wave of middle-class flight to suburbs where property
levies are lower. Moreover, urban government's attempts to
expand their revenues are often thwarted. Hartford, Connecticut,
where a third of the population lives below the poverty line,
has an effective property-tax rate 66% higher than that of the
well-to-do suburb of Farmington next door. Last year Hartford
city manager Raymond Eugene Shipman proposed a payroll tax on
the thousands of commuters who flock to the city's downtown
office towers by day but flee by night. In the 1960s and early
'70s, 15 major American cities had been granted such power by
their state legislatures, which must approve municipal taxes.
But as the legislatures filled with representatives of the
burgeoning suburbs, major cities found it harder to win taxing
authority. Los Angeles has been the only one to succeed since
1972. The Hartford idea was doomed from the outset.

    Another way to recapture fleeing taxpayers might be to
extend the city limits. In the 1960s and '70s cities like New
Mexico's Albuquerque, Florida's Jacksonville and Kentucky's
Lexington have preserved their tax base by annexing or merging
with neighboring suburban communities. "They have not ghettoized
their black and Hispanic populations to the degree other
communities have," says David Rusk, a former mayor of
Albuquerque, who is now an urban-affairs consultant.

    But many of those cities were able to negotiate their
expansion deals before their urban centers had deteriorated
enough to frighten the outlying areas. "Generally speaking, the
cities that have had luck in annexing were the ones that were
not too troubled or low income to begin with," says Kevin
Phillips, the ex-Nixon aide who first identified the gop
advantage in suburbia in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican
Majority. "When it's a problem city, the suburbs fight like
hell, and they can usually succeed."

    If anything, it has been more common in recent years for
the better-off areas of large cities to try to break free, as
Marina del Rey, a rich coastal enclave of Los Angeles, talked
about four years ago. "The tendency of the suburbs is
traditionally to insulate the people who live there insofar as
possible by secession," says Charles Stewart, an aide to
California state senator Diane Watson. "Failing that, their
tendency is then to oppose all taxes."

    One reason that suburbanites are ready to circle the lawn
mowers is that many of them see the cities' problems seeping
into their own community. While the more distant and wealthier
suburbs can still claim to be free of graffiti, gangs and drugs,
urban squalor is spreading into the less fortunate towns. Wander
for only a few minutes from the leafy avenues of Garden City,
a New York City suburb, and you find yourself in the run-down,
drug-infested apartment blocks of Hempstead. Reported robberies
grew by 17% on Long Island last year. They fell by 1.6% in New
York City in the same period.

    Urban planner Allen Kracower has seen the signs of
unwelcome change in an array of suburbs, even the most affluent.
"At one time the suburbs were a place to escape," he says.
"Schools were better. The air was cleaner. Now it's the same
kind of crime, dirty air and homeless people."

    The first suburbs to feel the strain are often located on
the outskirts of spreading cities. In Hennepin County, just
outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, some social-service agencies
have doubled and tripled their caseloads in recent years. "The
first-ring suburbs are starting to reflect what we saw in inner
cities 10 to 20 years ago," says Patty Wilder, executive
director of the Northwest Hennepin Human Services Council.

    Older suburbs are also suffering from a graying effect.
The newlyweds who set off the baby boom are now retirees with
fixed incomes but growing demands on local services. "Senior
citizens tend to have an increasing need for home maintenance,
transportation, meals on wheels and a host of other support
services," says Patricia Paruch, the mayor of Royal Oak, a
century-old suburb of Detroit, where more than 20% of the 65,000
residents are over 65.

    Since state legislatures and Washington are reluctant to
help or are too strapped for cash, there are two approaches
that might help to alleviate the poverty of the city. One is to
move money to the cities through court-ordered revenue-sharing.
Over the past decade, 10 states have decided or been ordered to
bridge the gap between rich and poor school districts by
overhauling their financing system. Legal challenges to
school-financing systems are moving through the system in a
dozen other states. Though federal courts have grown more
conservative under the weight of Republican appointments, many
state supreme courts are still willing to enforce equity from
the bench.

    Another way to dissolve knots of urban poverty is
dispersing the poor in manageable numbers to the suburbs. Courts
in several states, including New Jersey and Kentucky, have
ordered localities to provide low-income housing, or forbidden
them to prevent the construction of such housing. The prospect
of poor people nearby makes suburbanites shudder. Yet the same
self-interest that has made them turn away from the cities may
eventually force them to recognize that the larger health of
America requires the cities to be rescued. Even in a nation as
spacious as the U.S., people are running out of places to
escape.