Privatized Lives: On the embattled ‘burbs
Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000
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The “Haves” Versus the “Have Nots”
Park Forest is simply one example of the way in which the fortunes of suburban communities are rapidly diverging, claims urban analyst Myron Orfield. The logos of high-tech and financial firms are glued onto mid-rise office buildings that line the lushly landscaped freeway corridors within so-called favored-sector suburbs, attesting to their abundance of high-paying white-collar jobs. (The most expensive executive housing will be found nearby.) The taxes generated by the high-value commercial and residential development underwrite excellent schools, ample parks, roads, libraries, and other government services. Many older inner-ring suburbs (like Park Forest) struggle to provide good schools and government services on a tax based composed of low-priced housing, lower-tier retail, and warehouses. Emerging middle-income suburbs, at the outermost urban reaches, while not saddled with aging housing stock or infrastructure, often can’t attract the kind of high-value residential or commercial development to underwrite the fast-growing demand for services and bursting-at-the-seams schools.. .
Orfield draws a starker picture of suburbia’s future than many analysts do, but his findings have become widely accepted in policymaking circles–if not in political ones, where the consequences are regarded as potentially explosive. Orfield sees many forces that are driving communities apart both spatially and sociologically. The favored sector encompasses the “edge cities” described by Joel Garreau. This sector grew up around already wealthy areas with few tax burdens and has enjoyed the advantage of highway and airport infrastructure paid for by older communities. Favored-sector towns often defend their affluence through exclusionary zoning–keeping out apartments and small-lot developments that might draw people who consume more services than their tax payments would underwrite. In the early postwar years, housing near jobs and good schools was readily available in suburbs near most cities, and affordable on a single income. In desirable metro areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, median house prices today are increasingly out of reach for even relatively affluent dual-income families. Other once-inexpensive communities are rapidly catching up. Orfield asserts that edge cities use their wealth to offer incentives to draw businesses out of older downtowns and, nowadays, older suburbs (thus keeping the tax base high without taxing its own residents and businesses too heavily). They wield their considerable political clout to secure the lion’s share of business-attracting infrastructure.
Outside the favored sector, however, stagnation and decline, not prosperity and growth, are too often the reality. Affordable communities offer less appealing subdivisions with scruffy overcrowded schools, fewer recreational amenities, significant exposure to crime and long commutes through gut-wrenching traffic to where the jobs are. While Chicago’s poorest and most desolate neighborhoods occupy dozens of census tracts, Orfield points out that struggling inner-ring suburbs comprise eighty-seven troubled communities stretching in a mind-boggling sixty-five-mile crescent from O'Hare Airport south and east into the northwestern corner of Indiana. If these and similar communities around the country continue to deteriorate, America could face blight and poverty on a scale that would dwarf the urban devastation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Big city residents have long faced dilemmas such as whether to forsake friends and urban amenities to move to a community with good schools and safe streets. Similar dilemmas now plague suburbanites as the homogeneity and small-town ambience they sought “out there” gives way to increasing sociological difference.
The Privatist Cul de Sac
In 1968, historian Sam Bass Warner decried the chaotic and fragmented urban landscape, blaming it on the culture of privatism, a culture that America developed early on, essentially at its founding. Although he was not criticizing suburbia in his book The Private City (it goes largely unmentioned), his analysis of how privatism has operated and its consequences for the urban landscape remains more compelling than ever. “Psychologically, privatism meant that the individual should seek happiness in personal independence and in the search for wealth,” he wrote. “Socially, privatism meant that the individual should see his first loyalty as his immediate family and that a community should be a union of such money-making, accumulating families; politically, privatism meant that the community should keep the peace among the individual money-makers, and, if possible, help to create an open and thriving setting where each citizen would have some substantial opportunity to prosper.”
The privatism that Warner analyzed notably lacks the civic idealism that animates so many other American values. But can anyone doubt that these are the citymaking values that nearly every American takes for granted as fundamental, whether they like them or not? The city that Americans have so long sought to escape can in certain important ways be understood largely as the product of America’s culture of privatization.
The idea of suburbia presumed that the city and its perpetual upheaval–driven by privatization–would remain distant. So when the fast-growing bedroom communities became affordable to a wide swath of the middle class after the Second World War, business eventually followed the homeowners outward, bringing the ethos of privatism to the invention of a new kind of low-density urbanism. Privatism in the suburbs did not evolve as it had in the cities, however, and this is why it has been difficult to recognize its capacity to destroy precisely what people came to suburbia in search of.
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