Suburbs, decline and poverty

1. From "The suburbs' grim future," in the Toronto Star:

Poverty is one thing in the city, quite another in the suburbs. Historically, cities enabled the poor to work their way up the socio-economic ladder. But what happens when low-income families are concentrated in post-war suburban communities where they are isolated and kept apart?

The prospects don't look good. "If you were poor in Cabbagetown you had access to an enormous number of services," says David Hulchanski of the University of Toronto Centre for Urban and Community Studies. "If you're poor in the suburbs, it's a constant struggle just to survive."

2. A good way to understand this is to read the chapter on the use value of place, in Urban Fortunes: Toward a Political Economy of Place. From the chapter:

Types of Use Values

Daily Round: The place of residence is a focal point for the wider routine in which one's concrete daily needs are satisfied.

Informal Support Networks: Place of residence is the potential support of an information network of people who provide life-sustaining products and services.

Security and Trust: A neighborhood also provides a sense of physical and psychic security that comes with a familiar and dependable environment.

Identity: A neighborhood provides its residents with an important source of identity, both for themselves and for others. Neighborhoods offer a resident not only spatial demarcations but social demarcations as well.

Agglomeration Benefits: A shared interest in overlapping use values (identity, security, and so on) in a single area is a useful way to define neighborhood.

Ethnicity: Not infrequently, these benefits are encapsulated in a shared enthnicity... When this occurs, ethnicity serves as a summary characterization of all the overlapping benefits of neighborhood life.

Agglomeration benefits (critical mass) of social and organizational services is the advantage of living in larger places, ranging from transit to libraries to employment services.

3. There's also "N.Va. Foreclosures Form 'Ring of Fire'," from the Post, about the number of foreclosures in the outer suburbs.

4. And Christopher Leinberger's piece about the "Option of Urbanism" in Atlantic Magazine, "The Next Slum?"

5. Plus the talk about consolidation of small towns, or at least the provision of services, in New Jersey. My sense is that there is something to be said for smaller towns. There is a greater sense of accountability in places like Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, Rockville, or Takoma Park, Maryland, whereas a bigger city like Washington, DC, it takes days to get the snow plowed, and for the most part the Mayor and the City Council are disconnected from democracy.

See "Tiny Towns in N.J. May Have to Merge," from the Post.