Part One: The State of America's Cities
Finding #2: Some older suburbs are experiencing problems once associated with urban areas -- job loss, population decline, crime, and disinvestment. Simultaneously, many suburbs, including newer ones, are straining under sprawling growth that creates traffic congestion, overcrowded schools, loss of open spaces, and other sprawl-related problems and a lack of affordable housing.
Challenges once concentrated in central cities have spread to some older suburban communities, such as Euclid and Garfield Heights (Cleveland), Southfield and Oak Park (Detroit), and East Point (Atlanta), that are facing such urban ills as crime, poverty, and population loss. These older suburbs, often referred to as "inner-ring" suburbs, surround the central city and were developed during the exodus of the 1950s and 1960s. These challenges are not restricted to one or two regions of the country but are national in scope.
In the 1990s, 90 percent of Minneapolis' inner-ring suburbs gained poor children at a faster rate than Minneapolis itself. Six of the 10 communities in the San Francisco Bay area with the highest poverty rates are inner-ring suburbs surrounding the bay. In four Atlanta suburbs, the growth in median family income between 1960 and 1990 lagged behind income growth in the central city.
Nearly 400 suburban jurisdictions in 24 States meet HUD's criteria for distress. Suburban jurisdictions -- like central cities -- are considered to be suffering from distress if their population has declined by 5 percent or more between 1980 and 1996 and if their 1995 estimated poverty rate exceeds 20 percent. Nearly 400 suburban jurisdictions met these criteria for distress in 1996. While many are small communities, 77 had populations greater than 5,000 and 22 had populations of 15,000 or more. As in central cities, disinvestment is creating blighted areas and sapping these communities of their economic vitality.
See Exhibit 16: Urban Problems Have Spread to Some Suburbs.
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Suburban Communities Increasingly Experience Urban Problems
Problems once associated primarily with central cities have spread to many older suburbs. Street gangs had just begun to emerge in the Chicago suburbs of Oak Park and River Forest in 1995 when the community decided it had better act fast. Already, there had been violent incidents attributed to gangs, including a drive-by shooting at a junior high school and the beating death of a teenager. School officials and police began referring students they suspected of being at high risk for joining gangs to a special team hired by the community. The team began intervening immediately when gang-related school violence occurred. The initiative includes social services for targeted families -- ranging from parenting skills and conflict resolution to job training and substance abuse counseling. Since the program began, gang-related violence has declined markedly. The community had 14 gang-related incidents in 1995; in 1998 there was only one. |
Suburbs are showing the strains of sprawling growth that creates long commutes and traffic congestion, overcrowded schools, and other sprawl-related problems. At the same time that disinvestment is harming central cities and many suburbs, other suburbs are showing the strains of sprawling growth. Sprawl is a particular type of suburban development characterized by very low-density settlements, both residential and non-residential; dominance of movement by use of private automobiles; unlimited outward expansion of new subdivisions and leapfrog development of these subdivisions; and segregation of land uses by activity. Suburban residents are suffering from the effects of increased traffic congestion, time-consuming commutes, and the loss of recreational opportunities and open space. Last November, voters around the country approved almost three-fourths of the 240 ballot initiatives to make already-developed communities more attractive for new investment and growth.
And there is a new readiness among local leaders to forge a common agenda across historical divides. A May 1999 survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors asked leaders of 93 central cities and 66 suburbs to identify the most important challenges facing their communities. The responses make clear that sprawl is creating strains for many suburbs: indeed, 74 percent of suburban officials identified "limiting the negative effects of sprawl on the community" as a challenge affecting their community. The specific problems associated with sprawl were also cited as important challenges: for example, suburban officials listed "cutting traffic congestion on roads and highways" as their top challenge, cited by 91 percent -- far more than listed any other challenge. Eighty percent listed "protecting the environment as the community grows," and 75 percent cited "avoiding overcrowding of schools."
The costs associated with sprawl are mounting, so curtailing sprawl could save substantial sums of money over the coming decades. A research team at Rutgers University that carefully studied the costs of sprawl concluded that pursuing strategies to facilitate greater growth in developed communities would generate savings by decreasing the consumption of developable land and increasing land available for recreation. By growing smarter, communities could reduce traffic congestion and the Nation could save billions of dollars every year in spending for roads, sewers, water, and other vital infrastructure. The broader costs associated with sprawl include:
- Poverty concentration and job mismatches. The outmigration of middle- and upper-income Americans has left behind concentrations of poor people and has sapped once-thriving areas of their economic vitality. Rapid development outside of central cities has created a mismatch between where many potential workers live and where the jobs are located. This leads to high joblessness in some pockets while jobs go unfilled in other parts of the same otherwise healthy metro areas.
| Communities Address Job Mismatches
Ft. Worth, TX lost thousands of jobs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but employment has now come back strong. Fort Worth Works tries to ensure that central city residents can access jobs in the city's booming suburban markets. Thirty community agencies and educational institutions participate, providing training and other needed workforce supports. The initiative also provides transportation for inner city workers to jobs in the growing industrial area near the airport, as well as childcare support. Participating employers include Federal Express, Intel, S.W. Bell Telephone, Nokia, BF Goodrich, and Sprint. After landing a huge contract, Trinity Industries, a local rail car manufacturer, faced the difficult task of locating more than 600 welders. Fort Worth Works brought together the company, local school districts and other training agencies to find and train qualified welders. Trinity eventually hired 650 people -- 415 came from inner-city neighborhoods. |
A study of the changes in metropolitan area settlement patterns between 1980 and 1990 found that metropolitan areas, in which central city poverty was more concentrated in particular census tracts suburbanized faster than metropolitan areas in which central city poverty was less concentrated. For example, if Chicago's poverty population in 1980 were one-half as concentrated as it actually was, the Chicago metropolitan area would have suburbanized at a rate 19 percent slower than it actually did from 1980 to 1990.19 Moreover, an analysis from the Woodstock Institute quantifies the city-suburban job disparity in the Chicago region. From 1991 to 1996, employment in the Chicago region rose by almost 8 percent. But the city is actually losing jobs at a slightly greater pace than in the 1980s, with a decline of 40,000 manufacturing jobs between 1991 and 1996. In many older suburban areas, employment growth was slowing too; some areas registered actual job declines in certain key sectors.20
Public transit is frequently not designed to carry central city residents to suburban jobs. In Boston, researchers studying entry-level job openings found that welfare recipients using transit would, after a 1-hour commute, still access only 14 percent of the jobs in the region's fast-growth areas. In Atlanta, less than one-half of the region's entry-level jobs are located within a quarter mile of a public transit route -- and almost no jobs are accessible by transit in job-rich Cobb and Gwinnett counties.21 In addition, a significant share of central city residents do not have cars to access those suburban jobs.
Racial and ethnic segregation exacerbates the situation by limiting minorities' access to housing in the suburbs. As a result, African-Americans and Hispanics are likely to bear the largest employment losses from the discrepancy between central city and suburban rates of job growth.
- Shortages of affordable housing near jobs. Shortages of affordable housing in growing suburban areas compound job mismatches, as rental increases price poor workers out of growing areas with better job opportunities.
- Public capital and operating costs. Sprawl drives up total spending on roads, bridges, sewers, and other public capital because existing networks have to be extended further and because new systems -- typically underutilized -- must be constructed at high cost. Road costs are 25 to 33 percent higher and utility costs are 18 to 25 percent higher in communities marked by sprawl than in sprawl-free communities. Municipal and school district operating costs are 3 to 11 percent higher in sprawling developments.
- Loss of open space and sensitive environmental land. Sprawl encroaches on forests, coastal areas, and fragile natural habitats and threatens native wildlife. It consumes 25 to 67 percent more open land than nonsprawl development and produces about one-third more water pollution.
- Travel costs. Because of our development patterns, Americans are driving more. Between 1983 and 1990, the average miles traveled annually per person in the United States rose by 19 percent; vehicle miles traveled went up even faster -- by 37 percent.22 That means Americans now spend the equivalent of almost 2 waking hours every day driving somewhere in their cars.23 Persistent traffic jams used to be a problem in a handful of cities such as Los Angeles and New York. Now congested freeways are a national epidemic. An index developed by the Texas Transportation Institute indicates that congestion worsened in 47 of 50 major U.S. cities from 1982 to 1991.24 Concerns about traffic are not coming only from people who must commute. Increasingly, employers too are worried about long and enervating commutes for their workers and the negative impact of traffic on the capacity to fill suburban jobs.
The average suburban household drives 3,300 more miles than its central city counterpart -- about 31 percent more annually. That additional driving amounts to an additional $753 per year per household in transportation costs. Assuming an average driving speed of 30 miles per hour, suburban residents spend 110 hours more behind the wheel each year than their urban counterparts -- almost 3 full weeks of work.
| "Land in the United States is being consumed at triple the rate of household formation; automobile use is growing twice as fast as the population."
The Cost of Sprawl -- Revisited,
page 425 |
- Decline in the sense of community. Sprawl-affected suburbs contribute to the loss of a sense of community because of their leapfrog development patterns, segregated land uses, reliance on automobiles, and lack of a central community focal point. Studies show that people living in sprawling developments gather less often in public places and feel less responsible to one another and to shared surroundings than residents of more dense communities.
| Atlanta
The Atlanta metropolitan area has sprawled outward by leaps and bounds -- growing from 65 miles from north to south in 1990 to 110 miles in 1998. Driven by decaying air quality and gargantuan traffic jams, the State of Georgia this spring created a super-agency -- the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority -- to promote more rational development in the Atlanta region. GRTA has broad powers to guide growth, including the authority to stop construction of highways or shopping malls that don't promote smart growth.
One impetus behind creation of GRTA was Atlanta's designation as a "serious" violator of the Clean Air Act of 1990 because of the excess air pollutants produced by the region's traffic. The designation jeopardizes Atlanta's Federal highway money. But an even more compelling reason for creating GRTA was the region's growing traffic gridlock. In a mid-1999 poll of more than 200 metro Atlanta leaders, respondents overwhelmingly rated traffic congestion as the region's most serious challenge. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the average resident in the Atlanta region drives more than 34 miles a day, more than the residents of any other American city. |
- Degradation of air and water quality. Current patterns of development exacerbates air and water pollution problems by increasing the number of miles that commuters drive, causing air pollution, and by increasing paved surface area, causing runoff pollution. One study, for example, found that residents on the sprawling fringe of the Denver metro area used 12 times as much gasoline as those in Manhattan26 -- and this extra driving results in emissions of carcinogenic and toxic air pollutants as well as soot and other compounds that cause respiratory disease as well as ugly smog. Another study found that reducing sprawl in New Jersey would decrease the amount of new paved area needed by 30 percent, resulting in a 40-percent reduction in the amount of water pollution caused by stormwater runoff.27
| Roots of the Urban Decline-Sprawl Cycle
Until the 1960s, most growth in metropolitan areas occurred within the boundaries of central cities. In 1950 almost 70 percent of the population of our major metropolitan areas still lived within the city limits. In contrast, by 1990 more than 60 percent of our population lived outside central cities.28
Sprawl was not part of earlier outmigration expansion from central cities. Before World War II and for a decade thereafter, suburban communities generally followed growth patterns that had guided the development of our urban communities. The first suburbs, in inner rings around major cities, were multipurpose communities with a mix of public and private spaces, stores, shops, parks, and homes of varying size and value.
By the 1960s, however, a new development pattern had emerged. The Nation began building subdivisions of homes and locating shopping centers, commercial strips, and industrial parks elsewhere -- without much connection among any of these land uses. Increasingly there were no town centers and dependence on automobiles increased. As steadily we moved to new communities, we disinvested in the communities we had left behind.
As a result of this new pattern, U.S. metropolitan areas started to become much less densely developed by the 1980s. According to a recent report, growth in developed land outpaced growth in urban populations by almost four to one between 1970 and 1990.29 Nation-wide, land in urban areas increased from 52 million acres in 1982 to 65 million acres in 1992 -- a 25-percent expansion in just one decade.
Today, this single-use development occurs on a micro basis in almost all of the Nation's 3,141 counties and is a dominant form of development in about 20 percent of those counties. Sprawl is especially evident in metropolitan areas that are expanding much faster than their populations are growing. From 1950 to 1990, for example, Phoenix's population grew by 828.7 percent, but its land area expanded by 1,247 percent.30 The land area of Kansas City's metropolitan area grew by 70 percent from 1990 to 1996, but the population increased only 5 percent.31 |
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