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Cities Are Learning--Revitalize or Else
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19315 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
2,647 Words |
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Sam Staley
Sam Staley is president of the Urban Policy Research
Institute, an independent public policy research organization
based in Dayton, Ohio, and an instructor in economics at
Wright State University. He is the author of Drug Policy and
the Decline of the American City (Transaction Books),
forthcoming. |
Ricky is a "good" man, according to his friend, Dwayne Bray, a journalist for a Midwestern newspaper. He is also addicted to crack. Migrating from rural Tennessee in search of employment and the American Dream in the mid-1970s, Ricky found only unemployment, frustration, and dashed dreams. The image of Ricky--illiterate and unable to lift himself off the street corner where drug traffickers peddle their wares--has come to embody the frustrations and problems of the contemporary American inner city.
Urban America is in all throes of a wrenching social, economic, and political transformation. Once the heart of an economic region and the source of its vitality, the central cities are finding their roles and functions radically altered to reflect the rising dominance of growing, vibrant suburban communities groping for their own independent destinies. Educated white-collar workers commute to their jobs in middle management and the service sector during the day, leaving central cities to the low-skilled, less-educated, blue-collar work force of previous generations.
In the wake of these changes lie the remnants of forgotten neighborhoods, unskilled and undereducated workers, and the poor. An understanding of the causes of this transformation is essential to develop workable solutions to revitalizing the central city.
Suburbanization
Few trends have had an impact on the city as clearly as the suburbanization of the American population. Whereas people have moved from central cities to the countryside for ages, the process dramatically accelerated during the post-World War II era.
The manufacturing boom of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s led to rapidly increasing incomes. The pillars of the economy were the traditional manufacturers such as the automobile, steel, rubbers, and textile industries. These industries, which were also highly unionized, provided good wages for semiskilled and unskilled labor. These same good wages enabled the blue-collar worker to look beyond the three-story brownstone in the traditional inner-city neighborhood to the single-family home on a quarter-acre in the suburbs.
Access to outlying suburban areas was eased even further by massive investment in the interstate highway system. Originally designed to aid the mobility of the military during war, the proliferation of interstate highways unintentionally stimulated the
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