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4 Separate Places The Changing Shape of the American Metropolis P overty is not confined to the lowest-income areas of cities.It has spread across metropolitan regions. In the mid-1990s a representative from Minneapolis to the Minnesota legislature used the word metropolitics to propose expanded regional cooperation. The idea was to form an alliance of the Twin Cities with their inner suburbs—to share the burdens of housing for the poor, coordinate sewer construction, pool tax revenues, even to protect farmers against subdivision pressure.By cooperating with the city,nearby municipalities could marshal forces against the privileged, farther-out suburbs .1 The notion of metropolitics, pursued perhaps most famously with Portland’s growth boundary and Toronto’s municipal consolidations, fits the new metropolitan reality.2 Especially in the most populous urban areas, a simple geography no longer applies—it is not just impoverished central cities surrounded by well-to-do suburbs.3 We can no longer speak the way some people used to of chocolate cities with vanilla suburbs, or of rich doughnuts with empty holes in the middle. Instead, metropolitan geographies are complicated , more like checkerboards, with poor neighborhoods moving outward until more than half of the poorest residents live not in central cities but in the surrounding suburbs. This situation presents linguistic problems of no small consequence, and the language may reveal lack of understanding. As we noted in Chapter 1, words like city and urban have come to signify problems not urban in their essence but national or even international, with origins in such maladies as changing industrial fortunes, inequalities of family incomes, and racial discrimination , rather than in the character of a location. Researchers examin- Separate Places / 109 ing school failures invented the ugly word urbanicity, pseudoscientific language suggesting that a school’s urbanness makes its children fail. Those who blame something called“the city”sidestep the need to understand how schools fail, why housing is unaffordable, what makes men and women jobless, and why crime occurs. Such city blamers need not explain why local economies and governments at all levels shortchange poor people who may feel forced to live in central neighborhoods. Nor when urban poverty clones a twin, suburban poverty, do they try to explain it with the word suburbanicity. The problem lies not just with our language but with our understanding. Sometimes, in this chapter, we slip and revert to standard linguistic practice. Then we use the words urban and city to indicate troubled central areas, whether in the city itself or its nearby suburbs, and the word suburb to indicate better-off peripheral areas. We beg the reader to remain cautious about the dual use of these freighted terms. As we know from Chapter 3, some U.S. competitive metropolitan areas answer profitably when the global economy calls.In every case,however,whether the area thrives or falters, it must cope with profound internal differences. Suburban wealth and urban poverty—there’s that risky usage—have become defining characteristics of American society, so common that we regard them as natural. The continuing waves of subdivision that have extended middle-class suburbs for decades serve to divert attention away from the troubled neighborhoods of Black, Hispanic, and immigrant poor households consigned mainly to central cities and first-ring suburbs. Over recent decades, in periods when labor markets have become more demanding, fewer and fewer men and women living in these unfavored areas have found well-paying full-time jobs. Many of these people lack good schooling and strong skills, and so many of them are incarcerated that the nation’s prison population exceeds that of any other time or any other country. In Chapter 3 we traced metropolitan economic fortunes through four periods—the Great Depression and World War II, the post–World War II decades of rising equality that we call the American Century, the New Gatsby decades of market worship and rising inequality, and finally the times of economic crisis starting in 2007.4 From the 1970s the economy shifted sharply to services, occupational categories bifurcated throughout the economy, and jobs moved overseas , so while new possibilities for higher wages or promotions to better jobs appeared for some workers, incomes stagnated for the majority. The suburban movement of middle-class African Americans, Latinos, and Asian immigrants, especially since 1990, worked as a political relief valve, lowering the overall ethnic pressure but leaving many central neighborhoods and some suburbs to collapse like worn-out flat tires. Without pumping up, these...

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