City Escape

AS AMERICA'S CITIES cry for help, sinking in a whirlpool of corruption, economic decay and educational stagnation, the middle classes continue to row hard for the suburbs, ears plugged to the clamor, eyes fixed on what they leave behind.

Suburbanization, Exurbanization, Edge-Citification--call it what you want, it amounts to the abandonment of America's urban centers, and the abandonment of the belief in social and political solutions to social and political problems.

Not that these people who are leaving and who left never want to return to The Big City. The Big City is, after all, where you find Culture--museums, the ballet, the great old restaurants and the sports teams that haven't managed to get to the suburbs, where the real ticket money is.

Every Monday morning, like clock-work, these people jam the freeways that connect their beltway suburbs to their downtown jobs; or, increasingly, they jam the beltway that leads from their single-family homes to their service jobs in the beltway commercial parks.

Every Monday evening, like clockwork, they begin their odyssey home to Exit 37B (just completed six years ago) and to their living rooms to watch the news of violence and mayhem in the city they left in spirit long ago. "Those poor people. To have to live there."

Exit. Liberals since Locke have touted it as a way to escape tyranny. "Vote with your feet," they always said. And millions of Americans have done that, or at least have voted with their cars, in another great triumph of American individualism. They have chosen better schools, three-bedroom split levels and nice grass. But that choice cannot excuse them from obligation to what they have left behind.

THE MIDDLE CLASSES have moved to the suburbs for two reasons: social climbing and fear.

Social climbers took one path: First, trains and highways followed the rich to their country homes, bringing commuter suburbs into existence. The rich relocated, farther out, and the process repeated. The place to be slid from Georgetown to McLean to Culpeper; from Cambridge to Concord to Sherburne.

The frightened took another path: The urban riots of the late '60s and the busing fights of the early '70s were the last straw for an already frustrated white middle class. White flight resulted in a huge real estate turnover in middle class urban neighborhoods, the housing glut drove prices down, and working class whites or middle and working class Blacks inherited the neighborhoods.

The abiding racism of our society kept middle class Blacks from following whites into the great wide open. Realtors' discriminatory practices and a total absence of enforcement of federal Equal Housing laws signed, sealed and delivered urban Blacks and other people of color to ghettoization. It wasn't until the '80s that Black real estate dollars became irresistible and anything like suburbanization for the Black middle class could occur.

But however the middle classes, Black and white, got to the suburbs, they got there. (The Yuppie was a mythical beast from the day it was discovered, and only received as much attention as it did because our cultural producers are all located in urban centers.) And when they got there, the middle classes brought money.

Commercial sectors followed. Restaurants, grocery stores, big malls, little malls, strip malls, rows and rows of small shops run as tax write-offs. It became less and less essential to go into the city. The suburban beltway became a self-contained Habitrail for the middle classes.

The ideal of the suburbs, the old American dream of home ownership and clean, well-lighted streets, may still contain a dose of nobility. But this paradise of parking lots and chemically treated, weed-free grass has never lived up to its promise. No mass transit means that millions of minivans clog our roads and foul our air. Malls and office complexes have lovely little atriums with trees, even as their power plants consume vast reservoirs of fossil fuels to air condition them.

The "culture" of our suburbs has fared little better. This summer every mall Cineplex in the nation showed The Doctor, T2 and City Slickers. Every mall has a Gap, the Wonder Bread of clothing stores. Upscale malls have The Sharper Image; downscale malls have Spencer Gifts. Utility and necessity have faded into the distance as things suburbanites don't have to bother with.

The transition from crowded city streets to single-family homes has produced millions of atomized, self-directed people, disconnected from the greater community, until no community remains at all. The block party becomes an empty ritual, an enactment of what it would be like to care about neighbors. Fellow-feeling and concern becomes neighborhood snooping, since the entire landscape conspires against intimacy.

And these are our good places. Meanwhile, back in the City and the working-class suburbs, everything went to hell.

Industries left and blue-collar jobs vanished forever. Those who remained, the unemployed white ethnics in the suburbs and the unemployed people of color in the cities, were stuck. The burnt-out shells left behind are as bad as it gets, the American versions of third-world slums. They are hermetically sealed: No one ever goes in, and no one ever gets out. They make a land of equal opportunity a land of savage inequality.

WHICH BRINGS US to the point.

Suburbs, in their endless drive for autonomy (read "privilege"), especially over the consumption of public goods, have wanted, and gotten, it all. Good schools, good roads, good police, good parks, good hospitals, good golf courses. No one could stop them. No one was in a position to say, "No." Every city, every suburb, every village is independent, and unaccountable to the whole.

Back when we divided up this great land, we chose boundary lines that were either easy to see (like rivers--split right down the middle) or totally arbitrary (measure it, count it, draw a straight line through it).

This has meant that urban areas, which tend to follow natural forms and not surveyors' lines, pay no heed to political divisions (except when those lines correspond to major policy divisions like tax rates or school districts). The "Tri-State," "Tri-County," or Greater Whatever Area are where we live; the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, a balkanized netherworld of politics. Even though the area is an organic whole, even though suburbs and cities need each other, no one can do anything in more than one principality at a time.

Except of course the transit authorities, who see to it that all these commuters can get where they want to go. But the opportunity is long past for these transit groups, arm and arm with socially aware urban planners, to create endless residential communities that still relied on Downtown for everything they needed. And the naive 80's hope that a "Big Project" Downtown would bring people back was a disaster. Riddled with corruption, ideas like Detroit's Renaissance Center turned out more like Flint's Auto World than Boston's Faneuil Hall.

NOTHING WILL HAPPEN to make big city life substantially better for those trapped there until a sense of urban obligation appears in the suburbanites.

The problem is that creating something like a metro-regional consciousness runs up against middle-class autonomy in all it forms: economic liberty, local political autonomy, Reagan-Bush federalism, and all their corollaries.

One step in the right direction might be centralizing regional taxation authority in a democratic body with decidedly disproportional representation, with center dwellers counting more. It would force the suburbanites to fish or cut bait. They will either head all the way to the sticks or return to the Big City, if only to get their fraction of a vote back. (Step 1: A Miracle Happens.)

A more realistic way to promote regional unity would be to reconnect schools.

In the mid-70s, the Supreme Court stopped integration at city limits. Urban school districts lost their white students to all-white, well funded suburban high schools, and thousands of poor minority students languished in inadequate, unfunded, hopeless inner-city school districts. The solution is probably not busing thousands of inner city kids to suburban high schools, and vice versa, but metro regions have to address the issue to remain viable.

City kids have to learn the skills to move up through the suburban service economy, and the suburbs have to overcome their fear of thousands of disaffected, angry, unemployable, urban youths ruining their quality of life. Maybe the answer is some kind of cross-jurisdictional school choice, maybe it is resource-sharing, maybe it is something else. Whatever it is, regions must take steps to reduce this massive gap in opportunity.

And to make it work, to make suburbanites turn back to the center, they need the help of planners with regional view-points, who are less concerned with NIMBY squabbling and more concerned with regional integration.

All this won't stop middle-class America's daily commuting odyssey, but it will change the terms of that migration to the point where they better reflect true social costs. Sadly none of this will happen in a society where liberal rights outweigh democratic obligation.