Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [54]
Another organization that has had difficulty coping with sprawl is the U.S. Postal Service. An ex-Postmaster General once explained to us where most of the postage money goes: to those little Jeeps and vans delivering mail on the suburban fringe. These vehicles are the main reason why the post office is perennially hiking its rates, and why aluminum gang mailboxes at subdivision entries have replaced door-to-door delivery on foot. The main-street post office as social center has also become an endangered species, as large-scale vehicle-storage requirements lead toward the consolidation of services into regional mega-offices on the suburban fringe.
Crime prevention has suffered as well. The most successful technique in reducing crime has proven to be community policing: getting the police officers out of anonymous patrol cars and onto the street, where they become part of the neighborhood. But, like the walking letter carrier, the community policeman is only effective at certain densities, and it is hard to imagine the community officer marching in and out of the cul-de-sacs of a modern subdivision. Even patrol cars have difficulty doing their job in suburbia, with its long distances and single-entry subdivisions. The response time in some suburban municipalities is often twenty minutes or more.
Subdivision residents are already aware of the ineffectiveness of suburban policing, which is why many of them pay substantial sums to employ their own security forces. Indeed, such private security is often necessary, as the suburbs have begun to experience the same social pathologies—crime, vandalism, drugs, and gangs—that helped trigger the flight to the suburbs in the first place. Unlike the real police, whose primary duty is to maintain law and order, these guns-for-hire are not public servants and need only enforce the objectives of their employers. Sadly, these objectives often lead to the harassment of visitors who fail to match the proper socioeconomic or racial profile—unless they are carrying mops or pushing lawn mowers.
THE IMMOBILE POOR
Suburbia’s most helpless victims do not live in the suburbs at all. They are left behind in the cities, on the bottom tier of our increasingly polarized society. The exclusion of the poor from the gated enclaves of the wealthy may be the most obvious inequity of suburbia, but it is hardly the most significant. The rich have often contrived to separate themselves from those less fortunate, and the new suburbs are remarkable only for the thoroughness with which they accomplish this task. Far more troubling, though, is the concentrated poverty that remains in our inner cities. While this radical segregation of haves and have-nots seems natural to most American observers, it was by no means an inevitable outcome of our national evolution. Government policy might have prevented it, but it didn’t try. To the contrary, our suburban expansion was largely government-driven, and completely lacking in incentives to integrate different housing types or incomes among the new construction. In a sense, our government did half its job: it provided the means of escape from the city—highways and cheap home loans—while neglecting to allocate those means fairly. The resulting social stratification of suburban development—compounded by racially based white flight—continues today.
Inevitable or not, the fact remains that the inner city is now where America’s least privileged are most concentrated, a condition exacerbated by sprawl. Two aspects of suburbanization contribute dramatically to the plight of the urban poor: government investment in suburb-serving highways has left many inner-city neighborhoods sundered