News Articles, 1995-1997
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A LOOK AT ... Segregation and Poverty: How We Promote Poverty
By David Rusk

Sunday, May 18 1997; Page C01
The Washington Post

"Our city government is becoming a shell government," the editorial page editor of the metropolitan daily told the attentive local audience. "The city no longer runs the public schools, the community college [or] the corrections system. . . . The public housing agency operates under court orders. City government will soon be just a mayor presiding over a public works department."

The editorial page editor of The Washington Post talking about fading home rule in the District of Columbia? No -- the editorial page editor of the Baltimore Sun describing the status of Baltimore at a Maryland Day panel discussion in February.

Any Washingtonian who believes the District's downward spiral is unusual should look just 40 miles northward, where cash-strapped Baltimore is steadily yielding agen cies and programs back to its parent government.

Residents of both cities are inclined to blame their mayors for this present state of affairs, but the truth is that no politician can just administer Baltimore City or the District of Columbia back to civic health. Like many older cities across the country, they have been converted by suburban development into warehouses of the region's black poor. Urban sprawl has drawn the black and white middle class out of cities, leaving poor minorities more concentrated in declining neighborhoods. Some cities, however, have made willful and successful efforts to overcome this pattern, using policies aimed at curbing sprawl and dispersing poverty. The District and Baltimore regions would do well to heed their examples.

A few numbers tell the story well: In 1950, the District's 802,000 residents accounted for 55 percent of the metro area's 1.5 million population. By 1996, the District's 543,000 residents comprised less than 12 percent of its 4.6 million-person region.

In 1950, Baltimore City, with almost 950,000 residents, was home to 71 percent of its region's 1.3 million people. Now, with 675,000 residents, the city registers barely 27 percent of the Baltimore region's 2.5 million residents.

Yet with its tiny share of the region's population, the District houses about 30 percent of metro Washington's poor and almost 60 percent of its African American poor. Baltimore City's math is more extreme: one-quarter of the population, 60 percent of all poor, and more than 85 percent of the region's black poor. No city with that poverty burden can succeed.

What happened in Washington and Baltimore, however, has more to do with what happened outside their borders than inside. Both cities are victims of the twin factors -- urban sprawl and racial segregation -- that have shaped urban America for 50 years.

Today, urban sprawl defines our cities. By official designation, metropolitan Washington now stretches 80 miles north-south from Frederick, Md., to Fredericksburg, Va., and 110 miles east-west from St. Mary's, Md., to Martinsburg, W. Va. Similarly, metropolitan Baltimore now covers the city and six Maryland counties. Together, the "Consolidated Washington-Baltimore Metropolitan Area" sprawls across 9,600 square miles -- with more than 7 million residents, the United States's fourth most populous megalopolis.

Since the Washington-Baltimore region includes much still-undeveloped land, a better measure of urban sprawl is the growth of the "urbanized area" -- all contiguous development around the two cities. From 1960 to 1990, suburbanization consumed the Washington area's land (177 percent growth) at twice the rate of population growth (86 percent). Greater Baltimore's suburbanization was more profligate, consuming land (a 170 percent increase) at five times the rate of its more modest population growth (33 percent).

In both regions, about 40 percent more new homes were built than new households formed to fill them. New homes in the suburbs almost always sell, leaving many older rental properties in the cities boarded up and abandoned.

Older neighborhoods are not automatically undesirable in the eyes of today's homeowners, as Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Alexandria's Old Town, and Baltimore City's revitalized Otterbein, Fells Point and Federal Hill neighborhoods expensively demonstrate. But here is where the second factor -- race -- comes in. Suburban America was built for middle-class whites. Until the 1960s, for example, the Federal Housing Administration insured mortgages only in "racially homogeneous" neighborhoods and favored new construction. The result: easy-to-get, low-cost, long-term mortgages for whites in new suburbs; tough-to-get, high-cost, short-term loans for blacks restricted to inner city, hand-me-down housing.

Almost half of the Washington area's poor African Americans (and three-quarters of metro Baltimore's) are warehoused in inner-city neighborhoods where poverty rates can reach 60 percent and good schools and good jobs have long since vanished. By contrast, four out of five poor whites -- more socially invisible -- live in middle-class neighborhoods with greater access to good schools and decent jobs.

High crime rates and poor school performance are products of concentrated group poverty more than individual poverty, many studies show. There is almost zero relationship between race and crime or race and school performance, but concentrated poverty is such an overwhelmingly African American phenomenon that most white Americans cannot see past race to focus on poverty.

The real question isn't even how to solve this problem, but rather how to give policy makers the political backbone to do what is right but politically unpopular. For 30 years, federal and state anti-poverty policies have stressed what I call the "inside game" -- help the black poor but leave them isolated where they are.

Some recent examples: The Clinton administration throws another $2 billion into "enterprise zones" and "empowerment zones" (including several in Baltimore City), despite evidence such programs do not lift most poor neighborhoods out of poverty. A budget-slashing Republican Congress adds billions of dollars more for city-wrecking highways and beltways while gutting funds for rent vouchers -- the urban poor's best ticket out of ghettos into better communities.

Maryland legislators throw $254 million more at the Baltimore public schools. In Washington, federal leaders, believing D.C. schools have enough money but need better leadership, throw a retired army general into the breach. Yet it is doubtful that either Maryland's millions and the D.C. schools' new CEO will significantly improve school outcomes when three-quarters of the pupils come from impoverished homes. By contrast, mixing public-housing children into middle-class neighborhoods and schools in Albuquerque led to improved test scores.

What does work? Adding a strong "outside game" to the "inside game" through regional strategies looking beyond city limits. Capture sprawl -- or better yet, control sprawl -- through regional growth management. Shift some revenues from wealthier to poorer communities through regional revenue sharing. Integrate more poor blacks into mainstream communities (the way most poor whites are) through regional fair share low- and moderate-income housing policies.

Many American cities have fought sprawl by capturing their share of new growth. Since 1950, half of America's 522 "central cities," such as Austin, Charlotte and Columbus, at least doubled their territory by annexing new suburbs. Another 20 cities, like Nashville, Jacksonville, Fla., and Indianapolis, in effect, annexed their counties.

Such near-regional cities are all fiscally strong. Not one has less than an "A" credit rating. Within their boundaries they shift taxes from wealthier neighborhoods to maintain decent services in poorer neighborhoods. Poor minorities tend to be more spread out among city neighborhoods.

Controlling sprawl may work better than capturing sprawl. Portland, Ore., is the shining example. Under a strong state law, Portland Metro, a popularly elected regional government, administers a tough Urban Growth Boundary for a three-county, 24-city region. During the 1980s, the Portland region's urbanized population grew 14 percent -- and its urbanized land by only 11 percent. In its Year 2040 plan, Portland Metro projects 50 percent population growth, but only 8 percent growth in urbanized land. (By contrast, Maryland's Planning Department last year projected the Baltimore area's population would grow only 15 percent, but suburban land would expand 75 percent.)

The Portland area has boomed in the 1990s, and its housing prices are escalating. High-tech companies are investing $13 billion in new plants inside the Urban Growth Boundary. By preventing developers from paving over farmland, Portland Metro has turned investment inward. In just five years, property values in Albina, Portland's poorest neighborhood, have doubled. New prosperity has come to older blue-collar suburbs as well.

While the region's poorer neighborhoods welcome new investment and middle-class households, low-income renters are facing a housing squeeze. The Metro Council, however, is considering stronger policies to scatter low-income housing throughout Portland. For inspiration Portland is looking to Montgomery County, long a leader in developing a comprehensive mixed-income housing policy. Almost 25 years ago, the Montgomery County Council began mandating that at least 15 percent of new subdivisions be affordable for working-class households. More remarkably, the countywide public housing agency buys up to one-third of the lower-cost units.

Complying with the county's new ground rule, private developers have built more than 10,000 affordable single-family homes, town houses and apartment units since 1975. The housing authority purchased 1,100 units scattered in 150 different neighborhoods. Most were located in western Montgomery County, including areas like Potomac, where most new construction occurred.

Montgomery County has become a mature inner suburb. Its progressive planning and housing policies have not totally prevented slow decline in its older, eastern areas like Wheaton and Silver Spring. But without the county's success in spreading many poorer households into newer neighborhoods and higher-income schools, eastern Montgomery County would face more severe social problems.

Neither the District nor Baltimore City can solve its problems by annexing its suburbs. But there are other hopeful stirrings. The Greater Baltimore Committee, the Baltimore region's preeminent business group, has put its weight behind regional growth management, regional affordable housing and regional revenue sharing. And this spring the legislature approved Governor Glendening's proposals to target most state, road, water and sewer funds on Baltimore City and older parts of Baltimore County, Montgomery County and Prince George's County.

The District's political hurdles are more complex, but there has been some progress. A federal control board is slowly paring down an overstuffed local bureaucracy. President Clinton has proposed federalizing the District's prisons, road department and other state government-type functions. And in Virginia, there are promising regional cooperation efforts afoot that could benefit the District as well.

Congress, though, needs to pass President Clinton's package for the District and correct federal policies that have been gutting the nation's cities for half a century. For starters, Congress needs to: reauthorize the federal transportation planning bill, the biggest boost to regional collaboration in two decades; increase funds for HUD's rent vouchers and support converting public housing projects into mixed-income communities; exempt home sales from capital gains taxes (which generally force sellers to move up and out); decrease the federal share of highway, sewer and other infrastructure projects that promote further suburban sprawl, and locate major federal offices in downtown areas.

Accomplishing all this -- and developing regional strategies for managing growth, sharing afforable housing and sharing revenue -- is essential to saving "Ballmer" and "Ol' D.C."

David Rusk, a former mayor of Albuquerque and New Mexico state legislator, is the author of "Baltimore Unbound" and "Cities Without Suburbs."

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