Brookings Report: The End of Black-and-White Urban Planning

White flight may be over. But when it comes to our ideas about suburbs vs. the city, the picture is still all black and white.

The news coming out of Brookings Institution's massive new report, "The State of Metropolitan America," is that young educated, white workers have headed back into the cities in the past decade, looking for job opportunities and a lively social environment. The suburbs, meanwhile, are getting poorer and more diverse.

At least that's the takeaway from urban-based outlets, always ready to pit lily-white suburbs against the true grit of the cities. "Suburbs Losing Young Whites to Cities," crys the headline on the AP story that ran on Huffington Post. "Bright Flight: Affluent Leaving Suburbs, Moving to Cities" seconds the Wall St. Journal's blog "The Juggle." Told this way, the story sounds like the burbs are getting their comeuppance.

The situation the Brookings report describes is somewhat subtler. Young whites have been moving downtown since the 1990s, lured by better infrastructure and the drop in crime. What Brookings says is that the "bright flight" accelerated in the 2000s (to the inner-ring burbs as well as the urban core) because of the recession and the collapse of the housing bubble. The jury's still out on whether the recent migration to the cities is a long-term reorientation or a recession-based "bounce."

Meanwhile, the growing poverty in the burbs is not a white/minority "switcheroo" as the eco-blog Grist has it, but a rechanneling of immigration patterns during the suburban boom of the previous decade: lower-class, unskilled workers have streamed to the suburbs because that's where their jobs were, and for the most part still are, as manufacturing firms left the cities.

The sum effect is not a simple reversal of white flight, but a blending of city and suburban reality that's been going on almost since white flight began. For years, Brookings analysts have been calling for a smarter, less balkanized approach to urban planning and management. Says the Brookings report, "governance must begin to transcend the parochial 18th-century administrative borders that frustrate shared approaches to increasingly shared challenges."

Suburban authorities have begun breaking down their municipal barriers, forming regional planning committees to solve common problems. The next step is for cities and suburbs to overcome the mindset neatly summed up by Grist's tidy but insufficient recommendation that "let's half of us fix the cities and half of us fix the suburbs."

Can Car Sharing Fly in the Suburbs?

Car sharing has made serious inroads in cities, where a lack of parking, plenty of public transportation, and general walkability make renting a car for an hour or a day far more practical than owning. Zipcar and other car sharing companies find their services are economically unsustainable in the suburbs, where conditions are just the opposite: walking is rarely a choice, getting to their cars often requires a car, and there's parking everywhere you look.

A new concept in car sharing makes it possible for suburban car owners to capitalize on their parked cars--literally, by renting them to strangers. Relay Rides, now operating in the Boston area, allows car owners to rent their vehicles during those hours when they aren't using them. Owners post their car's availability and location on a website where renters sign up for drive-away and return times. Relay Rides installs a push-button device in each car that gives the renter access--no key-swapping necessary--and tracks the car. The company also provides insurance for duration of the rental and checks on the driver's safety record.

Environmental advocates love the idea of car sharing because it reduces the number of cars in the world. So far, the personal carsharing model has been limited where it's needed most because in several states, like California, renting a noncommercial vehicle automatically invalidates the owner's insurance. Yesterday, a bill pushed by California assemblyman Dave Jones changed that, clearing the way for Spride Share, a car sharing company in the San Francisco area, ready to jump in with a system similar to Relay Rides.

By matching renters with cars sprinkled across the burbs, instead of at Zipcars central locations, car sharing companies may now map the Internet's fluid, multiple-node network onto the suburbs' troubling traffic patterns. The question now is whether suburbanites are willing to be that democratic--and capitalistic--about their rides.

photo by Andrew Currie

Times Square Bomber Gets a Crumbling Surbuban Facade

As they grope to make sense of Faisal Shahzad, the alleged failed Times Square car bomber, the newspapers are going with the "suburban time bomb" angle, playing on the fact that Shahzad owned--and left to foreclosure--a house in Shelton, Connnecticut, a former factory town on the Housatonic River north of Bridgeport. (photo by Professor Bop) This narrative line nicely ties together paranoia about the placidity of the suburbs--"it's quiet out here, a little too quiet--with the ravages of the real-estate boom.

The New York Times' front page sets the tone with the headline, "A Suburban Father Who Gave No Warning Sign," though there's little in the way of suburban angst in the story that follows. Instead, realty-obsessed New Yorkers get a rundown on the property's descending fortunes. Shahzad bought his new-construction, single family home in 2004 for $273,000 with a $218,000 mortgage, the Times reports, before kicking at the alleged mass-murderer for trying "to cash in on the real estate boom." Listed for $329,000 in 2006, the house finally sold within the past year for $284,500.

By that time, Shahzad had long since abandoned suburban life. In June of 2009, he stopped paying his mortgage and moved his family to Pakistan, where he may have gotten some terrorist training, according to reports.

This isn't the usual route to the heartbreak of foreclosure, but that doesn't keep The Danbury News Times, presumably with better local sources, from spinning a deeper tale of suburban desuetude: "American Dream faded quickly for accused terrorist" reads the paper's headline.

The NT's contribution to the real-estate story is that Shahzad bought the home four years before he married--just one of the 52 percent of singletons choosing the burbs over city life that Coldwell-Banker has been touting in recent weeks. The local paper also turns up a $65,000 home equity loan taken on the property in February 2009, leading a University of New Haven professor to speculate that Shahzad was struggling to keep up with the Joneses. "Maybe he was starting to see the hopes of living the good life in America die and he began feeling like a failure," says clinical psychologist and criminal-law prof James Monahan.

Maybe. Or perhaps the frame of suburban economic and spiritual shipwreck doesn't fit the picture. Maybe three months before he left for Pakistan, Shahzad was already turning toward terrorist activity and was looking to suck funds out of a property he was intending to walk away from. We'll never know--that's the way it is with these mild-mannered suburban madmen.

Suburban Immigrants Feel Arizona Heat

On Long Island, native residents have an ambivalent attitude toward immigration. Though they employ undocumented workers by the thousands--New York state harbors a greater percentage of illegal aliens than Arizona (five percent versus four percent of the national total from 2000 to 2006)--Long Island has become a flashpoint for anti-immigrant protest.

In 2005, the town of Farmingville was the site of one of the most controversial day-laborer shape-ups that have raised suburbanites' ire. On the exurban frontier of eastern Long Island, a tense court case recently wrapped up with the conviction of a teenager who knifed a man while "beaner hopping"--targeting Latino immigrants as a violent lark. Last week, an SUV was spotted in Nassau County with a homemade bumper sticker that read, "Go Arizona."

Yet Long Islanders who support Arizona's new immigration bill often cite not the current influx of foreigners, but their own family histories. "My grandfather was an illegal from Ulster," someone wrote on a Long Islander's Facebook recently, adding, for the record, "He left and came back legally. Plenty of people wait years to get a green card, why should other be able to cut in line?" A woman with an Italian last name wrote on the same thread about her grandparents. "Not only did they come through this country legally,but they got jobs, contributed to the economy, built lives and raised children who respected the country that afforded their families the opportunities for education and a decent life."

Nevermind that the implication here--that today's immigrants don't contribute to American society--have repeatedly been proven false. The grandparents of today's middle-aged homeowners were for the most part not legal immigrants, at least not in the sense that they secured green cards before stepping ashore.

Before 1924, when the first mass immigration measures were enacted, visas were not necessary to enter the country (unless you were Chinese, in which case you didn't come in). Even after quotas were imposed, those who were allowed in simply showed up. This system lasted until Ellis Island closed in the mid-1950s, and as immigration lawyer and Hofstra Law School professor Patrick Young points out, "If that system was in place today, there would be no illegal immigrants."

Not that second- and third-generation European-Americans shouldn't be proud of their forebears. And they are. The 2000 U.S. Census showed that Italian-Americans in particular are increasingly claiming their heritage. This trend is no doubt the result of the success of their group in American life. Or possibly today's Italian-Americans have finally recovered from the intense prejudice that greeted their grandparents when they arrived half a century ago.