America's Problem: Suburbia

With ever-rising gas prices and my long search for the best place for me to live, the discussion of suburbs, inner-city neighborhoods, gentrification, and public transit is never far from my mind. Today I looked up some info about Montclair, NJ, because a friend recommended it as a solid middle class town with a substantial young population (at Montclair State University) and proximity to New York City.

In the Wikipedia article I found this interesting tidbit:

After a referendum held on February 21, 1894, Montclair was reincorporated as a Town, effective February 24, 1894.[6] In the late 1970s, after protesting for years at the inequities built into the formulas, Montclair joined several other communities to qualify for a pool of federal aid allocated only to Townships, that allowed townships to receive as much as double the revenue-sharing aid per capita received by the four other types of New Jersey municipalities — Borough, City, Town or Village.[7][8]

Citation #7 points to a New York Times article from 1977, a year when big cities were on the verge of bankruptcy as its most affluent, and generally white, population left to the suburbs. This coincided with, and surely had some influence on, a surge in crime and a reduction in city services. A popular theory among the group we in 2008 may call "Obama supporters" (students, yuppies, people under 30, city-dwellers) states that the federal government in fact promoted "white flight" and the deterioration of big cities through policies that favored the suburbs over the urban areas and made it easy for wealthier folks to move out of the city.

Favoring townships over the other kinds of municipalities is one example of such a policy. Although I don't have access to the full New York Times article, I can venture a guess that townships are more rural and suburban than boroughs, cities, towns, and villages. They tend to have more commuting professionals or, in very rural settings, large farming enterprises- in other words, people favored by Republicans over both poor minorities and wealthy urbanites. This is the kind of policy that promotes suburban sprawl, increases dependence on the automobile, and generally "Wal-Martizes" America.

When I ran a search for "revenue-sharing aid" I stumbled upon the book Inside Game/Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America. One of its main themes is that elastic cities- those that expand geographically by annexing empty land or adjacent towns- do better economically than inelastic cities. Inelastic cities don't expand, so when people move out of them into the suburbs, the cities lose their taxes. Elastic cities collect taxes from both the rich and the poor by including them in one municipality; inelastic cities get stuck with the poor, while the rich live in their own little worlds.

New York City is a prime example of an inelastic city. Its long-established rich suburbs to the east and north will never give up their independent and parasitic status. New Jersey, across the river, has the largest number of municipalities per square mile in America, because everyone wants to be exclusive. Town mergers would be an obvious and very cost-effective way of reducing the state's financial woes, but who would want the rich and the poor to mix in one town, much less on one street? It's as un-American as it gets.