A new phrase has been coined to describe the ghettoization of the suburbs - Slumburbia. If you've known me for a while then you've probably heard me talk about it at one point or another over the last decade. It's one of those things that, after a few beers, will really get me going. The Atlantic ran an article on it about 2 years ago detailing the fallout of the still unfolding sub-prime crisis. Now that the dust is starting to clear there is more data . . . and this op-ed piece from the NYTimes. The author of the Times article seems to think that 1. people will continue to immigrate to the US (with its failing economy) in record numbers and 2. that they will fill up all of these empty houses in the suburbs and exurbs. I disagree on both points. Immigrants these day are generally moving to central cities or the inner-ring of suburbs. In the case of Philadelphia that means places like South Philly or inner-ring, suburban places like the Northeast and towns like Upper Darby and Maple Shade.
The article raises another good point - one I discussed with some neighbors recently - that this mess was caused, in part, by the idea that everyone should be a homeowner.
My neighborly discussion began because some non-profit group is trying to build a 120-bed halfway house (on the 1400 block of Snyder Ave.) for people recently released from the prison system. My position was, "we have enough of this crap already with the mentally ill and recovering addicts. I know it needs to go somewhere but we have enough. Some other neighborhood can take their turn." Then I said something like, "we really need to figure out just how many institutional beds this neighborhood can handle." My neighbors insisted that it wasn't quantifiable. I called BS. It might take more resources than the three of us have but it's definitely quantifiable.
I mentioned something about home ownership and my one neighbor said that he disagreed with the assumption that neighborhoods can only be good when most people own their homes. He's right. Go to NYC or even Center City, where most people rent and you'll find thriving neighborhoods where crime is low and the streets are clean. My initial assumption was to throw some European cities in there for good measure but it's actually not true. I knew rates of homeownership in Western Europe were comparable to those in the US but I didn't expect it to find it in so many European cities. For comparison the rate of homeownership in the US is about 67%, in Philadelphia it's 65%, NYC is 31%. In France it's 63% but in Paris about 30%. In Spain it's 85% and in Barcelona it's 68%. The Netherlands as a whole and Amsterdam are both around 55%. This is sort of surprising to me because Barcelona is like NYC or Paris in that it's largely a city of walk-up or high rise apartments. One would expect Barcelona to follow the pattern of housing tenure in NYC or Paris but instead it has fewer renters than rowhouse cities like Amsterdam or Philadelphia.
Having lived in and around NYC from 1978-1992 it wasn't always Sex & the City and Disneyfied Times Square. It was way worse than it is in Philadelphia these days. And don't go too deep into the boroughs because you probably won't like what you see there today either. Manhattan and much of Brooklyn has cleaned up in the way that it has in part through sweeping demographic changes over the last 20 years but largely through countless Special Services Districts. The rates of homeownership in NYC hasn't changed much. The difference is that there's now a hidden tax that pays for what, in European cities, are basic municipal services. People don't think they're paying for it because it's usually funded through the neighborhood business community but the costs are always passed on to the consumer. Europeans don't need BIDs or SSDs to have successful neighborhoods and shopping districts because the services are already funded through their sales and use taxes.
The rate of homeownership in Philly is slightly below the national average but near the top in terms of big cities. We can look around this city and compare neighborhoods where the number is more than 10% above or more than 10% below the average and you find strong corollaries with most of the hallmarks of a stable neighborhood. Even within my neighborhood we can find sharp distinctions between blocks with high rates of ownership vs. those with high rates of renters.
I'm not anti-apartment. I just think that it's reasonable and fair to say- in a country, in a state, in a city where nearly 2/3 of households are owner-occupied - that the number of rental units in our neighborhood should not exceed 50% of total units.
I also think it's fair to point out that the State aimed to save money by "privatizing" a lot of social services. The social workers dealing with the parolees are still getting paid the same. The State saves a lot of money by externalizing the other costs. For instance, since they're not in jail anymore the State isn't paying guards to watch them. Now it's on us.
When the federal government, vis-a-vis Ronald Reagan, defunded the mental health system a lot of states responded by closing down their mental hospitals. In and of itself it's not a bad thing. There were a lot of people in those hospitals that really didn't need to be. The problem is that most of these hospitals were in rural or exurban areas and when they shut down and simply let people walk out the front door they didn't stay in those rural or exurban areas. The suburbs wouldn't allow outpatient facilities so they wound up in big cities, sleeping on the streets. In fact up to 50% of the homeless on streets in big cities are mentally ill. That should be intuitive to any one who passes panhandlers on a daily basis.
In the case of ex-cons, I'm not anti-guy-made-a-mistake-now-he's-trying-to-get-back-on-his-feet. This neighborhood could probably support 24 of those beds in a rowhouse here and a rowhouse there. Stick the another 24 beds in Gladwyne and see what Allen Iverson and M. Night Shyamalan have to say about it.
If 3/4 of the metro population live in the suburbs. 3/4 of these beds should be in the suburbs. Most of the junkies running around on Market and Filbert are there because 1. that's where the methadone is and 2. most of them are from the suburbs and that's where the train stations and bus terminals are. At some point they become part of the city's homeless problem because they lose their house or apartment and/or can't afford to keep going back and forth. I'm not suggesting that the city doesn't have more than enough homegrown addicts to go around but if you hang around 10th & Filbert or 8th & Market and listen to the conversations you know most of those people had problems long before they wound up in Philadelphia. I'm also not saying that we should turn away people who need help just because they're driver's license says Montgomery County but at the same time we aren't a dumping ground for everything suburbanites think they're too good for.
And how else have the suburbs enjoyed 60 years of supremacy? By taking the good (along with a lot of state and federal money) and then sending or trapping the bad stuff (like incinerators and prisons) in places like Camden, Norristown, Bristol, Chester, etc, etc. But the gravy train has ended and court rulings like the Mt. Laurel Decisions make it harder to site the bad stuff in the city. Now high energy prices - in neighborhoods that are 30 miles from the nearest employment center - in an economy where employment centers are shrinking spell big trouble.
It's going to take a long time for a lot of suburban people to come around to the idea of metro revenue sharing . . . and I think by the time they do the big cities will be in a position to say, "No thanks."
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