Economic History Seminar: April 16, 2007: American Suburbanization: White Flight and Middle-Class Flight

Leah Platt Boustan (2007), "Flight from the City: The Role of Suburban Political Autonomy and Public Goods" http://www.econ.ucla.edu/lboustan/research_pdfs/research01_blackbox.pdf:

By moving to the suburbs, households can avoid compromising with a diverse urban electorate on property taxes and public expenditures and can send their children to homogenous public schools. I reveal the marginal willingness to pay for this suburban autonomy during the era of post-War suburbanization by comparing prices for housing units on either side of city-suburban borders in three decades (1960, 1970 and 1980) and the changes in these cross-border price gaps over time. Identification arises from the fact that local policy changes discretely at these borders, while housing and neighborhood quality shift more continuously.

Preferred estimates suggest that a 20 percent increase in jurisdiction-level median income increases housing prices by around 5 percent, much of which is due to differences in spending priorities. Rich towns spend more on education and less on police and infrastructure maintenance. Houses in racially diverse jurisdictions lose value in the 1960s, while, in the 1970s, much of this value is restored. This timing coincides with the shock of 1960s riots, which attenuates over time. By 1980, desegregation orders are in place in many cities. Housing prices fall by around 1 percent for each required step in the court remedy, with student re-assignment or bussing associated with price declines of 5-6 percent.

The results suggest that the growing poverty in central cities was an independent cause of suburbanization. As a result, suburbanization may have been subject to a multiplier effect, which can help explain the dramatic and rather sudden decline of central cities in the mid 20th century.

1940-1970:

• Black population share of northern and western central cities increases from 5% to 16% from 1940-1970.
• Median city residents earned 2% more than metro average in 1950; 8% less in 1970.

Are these effects of suburbanization, or causes?

Talking about suburbanizaton as a feedback process: initial pulls to the suburbs by highways and FHA mortgages then compounded by white and middle-class flight?

Comments

[Cranky Observer]

> Identification arises from the fact that
> local policy changes discretely at these
> borders, while housing and neighborhood
> quality shift more continuously.

Mortgage Quality Maps anyone? I realize that HUD and its predecessors tried their best to find and destroy all of them, but they did exist. And therefore any attempt to analyze housing markets against race is going to be hopelessly jumbled up with the deliberate effort going on in the background to segregate and control the housing stock.

Cranky

[anne]

There is much to think through, but racial-ethnic mortgage-rental discrimination was pervasive and continuing from 1940 to 1970 and beyond.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Let's not forget the fine contributions of realtors, who made a great deal of money by encouraging white flight. They got commissions on both ends of the deals.

[Dano]

Concurrent is the freedom of travel afforded by the automobile. And the status of arriving home later by car - if you arrived earlier, you were blue collar, if later, white collar. Surely some of this arose as an excuse, as in your XM satellite to endure your 2.5 hours in a car daily, but still. Contributing factors.

Best,

D

[Sonia]

The other side of "white flight" that deserves to be examined is the extent to which single family housing in Northern cities opened up quickly and at relatively low cost to African American families.

Also the role of the mortgage interest deduction in encouraging large homes on large lots in conjunction with a progressive income tax ought to receive more attention. The exclusion from income of employer health insurance receives a lot of attention. The mortgage interest deduction encourages over comsumption of housing and mainly benefits higher income families.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/us/17stlouis.html?ex=1334462400&en=ea8ec2e91eaedb20&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 17, 2007

Hopes for a Renaissance After Exodus in St. Louis
By SUSAN SAULNY

ST. LOUIS — Cities, like most living things, have sensitive spots. Here in the old "Gateway to the West," the subject of population loss is one of the touchiest.

From a peak of nearly 860,000 residents in 1950, St. Louis had lost more than half a million people by 2000, a depopulation not unlike the devastating postwar exodus from Detroit. Since the 2000 census, St. Louis has kept shrinking, the Census Bureau estimates, while most old cities have added people.

Population is a critical indicator of any city's health, but the sinking numbers here are particularly unwelcome as the city has spiraled from one woe to the next.

In the past few months, the public schools were stripped of accreditation and taken over by the state; the city was designated the most dangerous in the country in a national crime survey; and 15 police officers and supervisors were disciplined for giving World Series tickets seized from scalpers to friends and family.

"These things are absolutely not helpful," said John Haul, an assistant professor of architecture at Washington University who has been involved in numerous municipal planning projects. "We have to redevelop the city regardless; this just makes it harder."

City officials question the accuracy of the census calculations and suggest the city has turned the corner. Their optimism is based on a flurry of downtown development since 2000, including hundreds of loft condominiums, boutiques and restaurants.

"We're actually doing very well," said Rollin B. Stanley, director of the city's planning and urban design agency, which puts the population at 354,000, about 6,000 higher than the Census Bureau.

But the effort to put a positive spin on the population debate — and with it, the hope for a long-awaited renaissance — comes against a difficult backdrop.

In March, the Missouri State Board of Education took over the public schools for consistently poor performance. Teachers and parents, who largely opposed the takeover, said the district had been starved for resources to care for some of the neediest students in the country.

"Without financial and human resources, we're set up to fail," said Chip Clatto, an assistant principal at a school on the north side. "I'm wondering if people on the outside realize that not only are we trying to educate these kids, we're trying to turn them into citizens when their society has failed them."

Signs of a looming disaster for the district of 35,000 students, mostly poor and black, had been clear for years. In 2004, a national education advocacy group found that only 5 percent of 11th graders in city schools were proficient in reading.

"They've had a revolving door in and out of the superintendent's office for some time," said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the group, Great City Schools. "They've had a lot of turmoil, and it's made it almost impossible for the system to gain any momentum."

In October, St. Louis was identified as "America's most dangerous city" by a private research firm that publishes an annual crime ranking....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26jacobs.html?ex=1303704000&en=6aafe7bde2a4775c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

April 26, 2006

Jane Jacobs, Social Critic Who Redefined and Championed Cities
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Jane Jacobs, the writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet of her own Greenwich Village street and came up with a book that challenged and changed the way people view cities, died yesterday in Toronto, where she moved in 1968. She was 89....

In her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities.

At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a joyous urban jumble.

Her critique of the nation's cities is often grouped with the work of writers who in the 1960's shook the foundations of American society: Paul Goodman's attack on schooling; Michael Harrington's stark portrait of poverty; Ralph Nader's barrage against the auto industry; and Malcolm X's grim tour of America's racial divide, among others. And it continues to influence a third generation of students.

"Death and Life" made four basic recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition and use. 4. Population must be dense.

Ms. Jacobs's thesis was enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street, near 11th Street.

In that description, she puts out her garbage, children go to school, the dry cleaner and the barber open their shops, women come out to chat, longshoremen visit the local bar, teenagers return from school and change to go out on dates, and another day is played out. Sometimes, odd things happen: a bagpiper shows up on a February night, and delighted listeners gather around. Whether neighbors or strangers, people are safer because they are almost never alone.

"People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is," Ms. Jacobs wrote. "I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads, like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses."

Robert Caro, the historian, said in an interview yesterday that Ms. Jacobs was far from the first urban theorist to stress the importance of neighborhood and community. "But no one had ever said it so brilliantly before," he said. "She gave voice to something that needed a voice."

Some critics used adjectives like "triumphant" and "seminal" to describe "Death and Life." Others, not a few of whom with an ax to grind, were less kind. Lewis Mumford, the critic and social historian whom Ms. Jacobs eviscerated in the book, suggested in a review in The New Yorker that she had displayed "aesthetic philistinism with a vengeance."

The battles she ignited are still being fought, and the criticism was perhaps inevitable, given that such an ambitious work was produced by somebody who had not finished college, much less become an established professional in the field....

[Randolph Fritz]

There's also a hefty direct subsidy for suburban life in the interest tax deduction, and indirect subsidies in low fuel prices and federal funds for highway construction. Brad, you live in the Bay Area--think how many of the freeways you use day-to-day were funded as part of the Interstate system.

[anne]

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070423&s=press

April 23, 2007

The New Suburban Poverty
By EYAL PRESS

Rockingham County, North Carolina, has never been known for its opulence, but until recently most residents would not have hesitated to describe it as comfortably middle class. For several decades the county, a rectangular block of land in the north central part of the state, owed its prosperity to textile mills and tobacco plants, industries that weren't always friendly to unions but that nevertheless furnished the local workforce with jobs that paid enough to raise a family and buy a nice house somewhere.

Among those to do so was Johnny Price, a 44-year-old African-American who lives in a ranch house with green shutters on a street called Sparrow in a leafy residential subdivision on the outskirts of the town of Eden. Two towering oak trees dominate Price's front lawn. In his driveway sits a navy blue station wagon. By the standards of some newly built suburbs, the setup is modest, but for Price, the youngest of ten children whose father died when he was 6 and whose mother worked as a domestic servant, it's a testament to the rewards of hard work and perseverance, values he's tried to instill in his teenage son and daughter, who have lived with him since he and his wife divorced. Lately this has gotten more challenging. A year ago Price lost the job he'd held for nineteen years in company-wide layoffs at Unified, a textile manufacturer. He's now struggling to make do on $1,168 in monthly unemployment benefits and, like many people in Rockingham County, which has been ravaged by plant closings in recent years, wondering how long he'll be able to continue paying his mortgage.

Stories of downward mobility in America's suburbs have not exactly cluttered the headlines over the past decade. Gated communities of dream homes, mansions ringed by man-made lakes and glass-cube office parks: These are the images typically evoked by the posh, supersized subdivisions built during the 1990s technology boom. Low-wage jobs, houses under foreclosure, families unable to afford food and medical care are not. But venture beyond the city limits of any major metropolitan area today, and you will encounter these things, in forms less concentrated--and therefore less visible--than in the more blighted pockets of our cities perhaps, but with growing frequency all the same. In the three counties surrounding Greensboro, North Carolina, the city half an hour south of where Johnny Price lives, the poverty rate has surged in recent years. It now stands at 14.4 percent, only slightly below the level in New Orleans.

Greensboro, it turns out, is not alone. Last December the Brookings Institution published a report showing that from Las Vegas to Boise to Houston, suburban poverty has been growing over the past seven years, in some places slowly, in others by as much as 33 percent....