The Paradox of Prosperous Suburbs

In the previous post, I briefly mentioned the relationship between cities and their suburbs as one of, essentially, predator and prey. More specifically, I made the claim that suburbs suck the life and the money out of cities. There are several reasons why this is so. The most important reason is that the people that move out to the suburbs are a group of people that are more likely to have money and influence, are more likely to know people that have money and influence, and are more likely to feel as if their voice matters when dealing with policy and planning issues. Consequently, this group, though they don’t outnumber city folk, votes at much higher rates, has a penchant for fighting growth and development that are not in their perceived best interest (“Not in my backyard!”), and produces a great demand for suburban economic development that would otherwise occur in the city. Suburbs drain cities of economic development.

A second reason why suburbs drain cities is because of the way city taxes that support infrastructure are collected and distributed. Since cities already have their infrastructure, such as sewers and streets, in place, the cost for maintaining it is minimal, and the people utilizing the infrastructure are, in general, more than paying for it; and although suburban dweller taxes are also funding city infrastructure, it is at a very low rate, and they are likely to use that infrastructure to travel to work. As suburbs continue to pop up, however, new infrastructure must be built to support those areas at a cost that is far beyond the maintenance of already existing infrastructure. Guess who funds a good majority of those costs? Sure, suburban dwellers pay taxes, and a good portion of those taxes supports their municipalities, but this is as it should be since those people are the users of that infrastructure. But a good portion of city-dweller taxes (in fact, probably a greater portion of a person’s annual income, based on per capita incomes in center cities being generally lower than those of suburbs) also support the suburban infrastructure that they hardly ever or never use. Suburbs drain cities of their tax funding for basic services and require city dwellers to pay for services not even rendered to them.

A final reason why suburbs drain cities has to do with the means of transporting suburbanites to their work places, the majority of which are either in the city or nearer to the city than the suburb from which workers are traveling from. Public transit is inherently inefficient in these suburban areas because of lack of density (as well as other reasons), and other alternative modes are not possible, so that leaves expressways; and we have plenty of those to speak of. But expressways in and of themselves are not necessarily bad. When done right, they provide a decent option for traveling quickly within a region. The main problem is that they are hardly ever done right. Freeways were never meant to be constructed through the hearts of cities, as they have been; they were originally intended to exist on the edges of cities. When entire downtown city neighborhoods were demolished to make way for expressways so that residents of the suburbs could reach their places of work more quickly, those parts of the cities were quickly and quietly destroyed. And since a city is a sum (or more like a sum of squares) of its parts, when one part languishes, the rest suffer as well.

So, there are three good reasons to reach the conclusion that in order for suburbs to flourish, cities must, in turn, fail. This couldn’t be more of a true assessment, but there is an unexpected twist to it: suburbs that border failing or failed cities, though they appear to be strong for a little while, all eventually fail as well. The suburbs of Phoenix, Detroit, and Los Angeles, just to name a few, have learned this lesson well. In order to get the best quality of life from those metropolitan areas, one must keep buying homes further and further away from the ever-more-failing main cities. So the paradox is this: suburbs cannot thrive without the failure of cities, yet they cannot continue to thrive with those failed cities either. The only way to fix the problem is to purposely invest most of the region’s resources into the cities, and the prosperity of the cities will actually spill over into the suburbs, at least those close enough to be beneficiaries of the economic and cultural success. For the system to work properly, we must accept that our suburbs will never be as prosperous as our cities can be; though, I suspect, this is not something that most of us are willing to accept.