To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

Lacking such public action, the Violence Commission predicted a "city of the future," with these features.²

• Central business districts in the heart of the city, surrounded by mixed areas of accelerating deterioration...will be largely deserted except for police patrols during the night-time hours.

• High-rise apartment buildings and residential compounds protected by private guards and security devices will be fortified cells for upper-middle and high-income populations living at prime locations in the city.

• Suburban neighborhoods, geographically far removed from the central city, will be protected mainly by economic homogeneity and by distance from population groups with the highest propensity to commit crimes.

• ...[O]wnership of guns will be almost universal in the suburbs, homes will be fortified by an array of devices from window grills to electronic surveillance equipment...extreme left-wing and right-wing groups will have tremendous armories of weapons which could be brought into play with or without any provocation.

• High-speed, patrolled expressways will be sanitized corridors connecting safe areas.

• Streets and residential neighborhoods in the central city will be unsafe in differing degrees, and the ghetto slum neighborhoods will be places of terror and widespread crime, perhaps entirely out of police control during night-time hours. Armed guards will protect all public facilities such as schools, libraries, and playgrounds in these areas.

• Between the unsafe, deteriorating central city on the one hand and the network of safe, prosperous areas and sanitized corridors on the other, there will be...intensifying hatred and deepening division. Violence will increase further, and the defensive response of the affluent will become still more elaborate.

In some respects, the Commission's predictions were chillingly accurate. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Commission's worst fears about violence in metropolitan areas were borne out. The middle-class fled to the suburbs in an attempt to create distance from the urban poor. Most suburban homes have, or pretend to have, elaborate security systems, and many newer suburban developments are surrounded by walls and staffed around the clock by private security guards. Many children must pass through metal detectors as they enter school each morning. Ghettos and barrios expanded dramatically, increasing the social and economic isolation of the inner-city poor even as the African-American middle class was able to take advantage of a new openness in the American economy. In many cities ?Washington, DC, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, to name a few ?"ghetto slum neighborhoods [became] places of terror with widespread crime, perhaps entirely out of police control during nighttime hours."

This has not necessarily been a world-wide phenomenon. For example, the American withdrawal from shared spaced is, in the words of Sophie Body Gendrot at the Sorbonne, "not currently the case in France, where the middle classes have not deserted city centers and where public service jobs force interactions among diverse socioeconomic and ethnic populations.³

At the same time, a dramatic improvement in the economic opportunity structure brought about by the low American unemployment rates of the mid and late 1990s is, as we have suggested above, part of the explanation for reductions in violent crime rates in major cities. The Violence Commission emphasized the crucial role of a closed opportunity structure in perpetuating inner city poverty and generating crime. "Believing they have no stake in the system," the Commission argued, "ghetto young men see little to gain by playing according to society's rules...the step to violence is not great."⁴ The recent reductions in violent crime during a time of expanded opportunity are consistent with this explanation. In addition, links among poverty, inequality and violent crime are fairly well established.⁵

Considerable evidence, then, supports the Commission's attention to the effect on crime of the concentration of poverty, and to the need for real economic opportunity. "Safety in our cities," the Commission concluded, "requires nothing less than progress in reconstructing urban life."⁶

Other parts of the "city of the future" may seem, at least to some, hyperbolic or at least exaggerated. Armed bands of militants don’t roam the streets, and not every suburban homeowner keeps an arsenal of weapons. Some central city areas and central business districts have, at least in recent years, experienced a Renaissance.

A number of other important developments were not anticipated by the Commission. It did not predict the racial bias in drug sentencing that would emerge in the criminal justice system. It did not anticipate the enormous inequality in income, wealth and wages that would occur. The Commission failed to predict that the spiral of decay would spill over from the central cities into the suburbs. And it overestimated the extent to which the middle-class would be successful at leaving behind the problems of the inner city.

In its analysis of concentrated "ghetto slums," the Commission saw the need for remedies that addressed both race and income inequality. In terms of race, there has been progress since the late 1960s on a number of fronts. For example, among African-Americans and Hispanics, the middle class has expanded, entrepreneurship has increased and there has been a dramatic rise in the number of locally elected officials.⁷

But there also have been many negatives in terms of race. For example, as Fred and Laura Harris have observed, American Indians (including, here, Alaska Natives-Indians, Aleuts, and Inuits) were not specifically dealt with in the 1969 report of the Violence Commission, which focused on big cities. Remedying that -- looking at them, now -- 30 years after the report, we find that these "first Americans" are first in a negative sense: the rate at which they suffer as victims of violence is higher than for any other racial or ethnic minority in America, twice the rate for the nation at large. The incidence of violent crime on Indian reservations and lands is increasing today, while declining elsewhere in the nation.⁸

Nor, as Dora Nevares-Muniz has pointed out, did the Violence Commission focus much on Hispanics. Yet today nearly 3 out of every 10 people living in poverty in America is Hispanic. In 2010, the Hispanic population will outnumber the African-American population.⁹ Whether or not that can result in a new vision of racial unity is still to be determined.

What we do know, from the work of Professor Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Education, is that urban America is resegregating in its neighborhoods and schools. Over two thirds of all African-American and Hispanic students in urban areas attend predominantly segregated schools. Over two thirds of those cannot achieve minimally acceptable scores on standardized tests.¹⁰ These test scores reflect some of the effects of "ghetto slum" concentration that the Commission warned against.

But what perhaps would have disturbed the Commission the most is how prison building, racial discrimination in drug sentencing policy, expensive prison-industrial complex building, and consequent budget tradeoffs away from education and other investments in human capital have complemented one another in a downward spiral over the last 30 years, as we discussed in Chapter 2.

At the same time, income, wealth and wage inequality has widened dramatically since the Violence Commission. This development would have been hard for the Commission to anticipate in 1969, after years of substantial decline in income inequality during the boom years of the post-World War II economy.

Specifically, here is what has happened:

The degree of inequality in income distribution has increased both overall and within racial groups. Income divisions are widening within the African-American community, mirroring society as a whole.¹⁵ As a consequence, issues that cut across racial lines, like the conditions of the working poor and the quality of public education, assume a greater importance now than when the Violence Commission completed its work.

The extent to which typically urban problems ?decay and violence ?have invaded the suburbs is another area in which the Commission's view of the City of the Future was incomplete. As the Commission predicted, cities have divided into an "unsafe deteriorating central city on the one hand" and "safe, prosperous areas and sanitized corridors on the other." What the Commission did not foresee was that the process would become so advanced that some high-flying suburbs of 1969 as well as the central city would be left behind. The spread of urban blight has not stopped at the boundary of the central city. Indeed, many older inner-ring suburbs are experiencing similar declines.¹⁶ The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has identified nearly 400 suburban jurisdictions with elevated poverty levels (above 20 percent) and declines in population between 1980 and 1996.¹⁷ In Minneapolis, 9 of 11 inner-suburban school districts had more than 20 percent of their children eligible for the free lunch program by 1994 and were gaining poor children faster than the central city.¹⁸

Unlike central cities, declining suburban jurisdictions usually have no central business district, convention center, or arena that can serve as an anchor and a source of tax revenues. When they decline, the fall can be precipitous. Glen Cove, Illinois, for example, was once "the exclusive province of wealthy industrialists and robber barons," but now has many problems traditionally associated with the urban core, such as homelessness, welfare dependence, and abandonment. Glen Cove Mayor Thomas Suozzi concedes, "It's true, we are a suburban town with city problems."¹⁹

The Commission correctly anticipated that affluent members of our society would use geographic distance and economic homogeneity to shield themselves from the crime and social disorganization of the inner city. What it did not anticipate was the strategy would be, at least in certain ways, unsuccessful. The Commission predicted that suburbanites would speed from one sanitized area to another on "high speed...expressways." But the car-centered culture of the suburbs has led to traffic congestion as bad or worse than is found in the central cities. More importantly, as economic inequality has increased over the past 30 years, and as that inequality has been codified in the geographic layout of our cities, the violence and alienation produced by such a society has not been contained within the boundaries of the central city. The new suburbs form and are then are abandoned so rapidly that many lack any sense of community. People do not know their neighbors, don't participate in the civic life of their community, and don't know the parents of the children their children play with. There is a high degree of alienation and a low level of trust.

While the problems of such communities obviously pale in comparison to those faced by the residents of central city ghettos and barrios, there is a surprising similarity in the increase in social isolation both experience. Premier suburbs, such as Plano, Texas, experience heroin epidemics and strangely elevated rates of teen suicide. While necessarily speculative, it can be argued that the shallowness of human relations in cookie-cutter suburban communities may be one part of the explanation of the wave of school and workplace violence in recent years in "unexpected" places. A frequent refrain after such events as the "day trader" rampage in Atlanta or the school shooting in Littleton, Colorado is "how could this have happened here?" Suburbanites clearly believe that residence in a prosperous suburb should insulate them from violence, but this hope has proved unfounded in an American society with high mobility and rapid communication.

The Commission's recommendations on neighborhood change and metropolitan development are just as relevant today as 30 years ago.

The key recommendation of the Commission here was on changes in metropolitan governance. "[T]he relative ineffectiveness of the efforts of urban government to respond to urban problems," the Commission concluded, "derives from the fragmented and obsolescent structure of urban government itself."²⁰ As David Rusk and Myron Orfield argue in recent books, "effective action on certain critical problems, such as law enforcement, housing and zoning, and revenue-raising requires governmental units coterminous with metropolitan areas."²¹ The Commission recommended vesting taxing and zoning power in a "higher tier of true metropolitan governments," while at the same time retaining a lower tier of government that would be more responsive to the needs of local constituency groups.

As the suburbs have grown and now make up a plurality of the voters in national elections, such proposals to fold suburban governments into metropolitan governments to benefit the central city seem politically infeasible. The horse is already out of the barn. However, Minnesota has had some success in forming revenue sharing alliances between central cities and inner ring suburbs.²² We recommend that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as other federal agencies, replicate this model much more widely around the nation. In addition, given that the federal government has used fiscal incentives and disincentives to influence state actions on issues like speed limits and the legal drinking age, it also should use highway funds, HUD funds, other federal money and loan guarantees to encourage state governments to reduce the autonomy of local governments in zoning and housing issues.

The Commission's vision of the City of the Future, then, foresaw some important developments and missed others. It foresaw rampant suburbanization as a response to central city decline. But it did not foresee how unsuccessful and self-defeating the strategy would turn out to be. Crime and violent acts in the suburbs, such as the Littleton, Colorado, massacre, and the deterioration of the older "inner-ring" suburbs show that, in the long run, one can't simply abandon the nation's social problems. The Commission foresaw that a city based on the principle of flight to safety would only deepen social divisions. ²³

Notes

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