Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

The new theory that the suburbs may no longer be ideal could become a college course. I can’t count the number of book I’ve seen in the last two years about this topic, but I’ll name a few-The End of the Suburbs, Walkable City, Cities Are Good For You, The American Way of Poverty, The Metropolitan Revolution-they all have the same message; when the jobs vanish, so does prosperity.

   Confronting Suburban Poverty in America is a detailed and thorough book. In the first chapter the author admits that suburbs can be great, with low crime, good schools, and clean air. But nowadays the public services like sanitation, law enforcement, building code enforcement, are in trouble. Lack of property tax is part of the problem, now that houses are being abandoned. Lakewood (outside Cleveland) isn’t the usual bedroom community; the houses are closely spaced and there are lots of two family homes. But with the houses sitting empty, there’s less tax to pay for the police and fire departments. Some blame factory closings, others blame subprime loans. Regardless, the neighborhood is in deep trouble.

    I wonder sometimes if prosperity is the reason for this? Perhaps the former “working class” have moved on to better neighborhoods, leaving the little old wooden houses empty.  Look at St. Louis, for instance; whole neighborhoods torn down, leaving the area looking more like a street-vectored field. Who wants to live in a run-down neighborhood with no jobs if they could get a better deal in Atlanta? Or perhaps Orlando? Or maybe the kids move to the city for college and stay? Keep in mind that a lot of the troubled suburbs were really subdivisions, built on speculation. Jim Lynch Drive in Elberon, NJ, is one such example. The houses today are unoccupied.

    But there is hope, according to this book. Detroit has begun tearing down abandoned homes, so that they won’t burn and make work for the fire department. The Cuyahoga Bank in Cleveland (non-profit) buys vacant houses and refurbishes or demolishes them. But other than that, there’s not much you can do and things look bleak. There are lots of things a city council can do, but not if they can’t agree. The suburbs were all grassland, woods, and swamps before the houses came along. They’ll be that way once again after the people are all gone.