Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [55]
The new highways of the sixties and seventies, designed to provide suburbanites with better access to downtown, were located on the cheapest land available, land usually confiscated from poor neighborhoods. The devastation wrought by such inner-city highways was, in retrospect, so extreme that one cannot rule out a nefarious social intention. Less obvious, but almost as damaging, are the many streets in low-income neighborhoods that were widened and relieved of on-street parking to facilitate through traffic to distant destinations. While the era of the community-killing highway may be over, such roadway widenings continue unchecked. These regular investments in automotive infrastructure—too small to be noticed by anti-highway protesters—can subject a community to a death by a thousand cuts. Previously pedestrian- and businessfriendly streets in almost every large city continue to expand at the expense of their host communities, primarily so that suburban commuters can get through them more quickly. Bringing suburbanites into the city is a worthwhile goal, but not when it means turning local streets into dangerous speedways.
Of greater concern to the urban poor has been the gradual disappearance of many of the jobs that the working classes rely upon for survival. Corporate flight to the metropolitan fringe would be less damaging if adequate public transportation existed to bring the urban poor to and from exurban jobs. Unfortunately, most new jobs in the suburbs are accessible only to people with cars, and automobile ownership is a hurdle that the would-be working poor are often unable to surmount.
While waiting for a taxi recently in the outskirts of Washington, we saw a black hotel worker likewise trying to hail a cab. After watching several pass him by, we hailed the next taxi, invited him to ride along, and then learned that he spends $25 a day on the only form of transit available to his suburban minimum-wage job. The inaccessibility of suburban work has become such a dominant factor in the cycle of poverty that it was recognized as a key policy issue in the Clinton Administration’s welfare reform proposals, which asked Congress for $600 million to fund welfare-related transport programs.br
One oft-suggested solution to this predicament is governmentsupplied job-chasing vans, but these have inflexible schedules and often involve multiple-hour commutes, since the suburban employers are too dispersed to be reached by mass transit. It might be more effective simply to give free jalopies to the poor, as several philanthropic organizations are now doing. Once again, it is clear that the fundamental inefficiency of the suburban model—its organization around the automobile—is its most ruthless quality, victimizing those who can’t drive even more than those who can.bs
A final problem emanating from the separation of rich and poor exists at the level of municipal government: there are now rich cities and poor cities. The rich cities have good infrastructure, good services, good schools, and good management, all supported by ample taxes from high-end commercial and residential real estate. The poor cities have a deteriorating physical environment, woefully inadequate services, and a severely limited tax base, compounded by an inability to attract jobs, commerce, or real estate investment. The federal government’s largesse in subsidized housing and other forms of assisted development—halfway houses, rehabilitation centers, homeless shelters—congregates the needy in needy places, further institutionalizing their character of poverty.
This situation is exacerbated by the costs of sprawl. Everyone’s taxes—from rich and poor cities alike—fund the construction of new far-flung infrastructure. Minnesota State Representative Myron Orfield has effectively demonstrated how the poor in deteriorating cities subsidize the new suburban enclaves of the wealthy. In Minneapolis—St. Paul, the central city pays $6 million more