13 NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE IN THE SUBURBS

The Changing Context of Suburban Neighborhood Life

The urban middle neighborhoods we discussed in chapter 11 were re-created in the suburbs that were built around every American city after World War II. Neither rich nor poor, these postwar or inner-ring suburbs re-created the family and child-rearing–centered model of the urban middle neighborhood but with a greater emphasis on the home over the community institutions of the urban neighborhood. As Robert Beauregard writes in his book When America Became Suburban, “the family was to be the center of social life.”⁶ He adds that “the design of the typical tract house reinforced these values.… Mass society, U.S. style, had found its ‘dream life.’ ”⁷

Although home and family were at the center of the new suburban neighborhoods, organized neighboring was intense. “This generation was also deeply engaged in the civic life of the community,” Beauregard states, “more so than the generation before and the ones that followed. Church attendance was high, and union membership was at a twentieth-century peak. Participation in league bowling was common and neighboring was prevalent.”⁸ This was echoed in William Whyte’s description of the Chicago suburb of Park Forest in his classic work, The Organization Man. The new arrival “has plunged into a hotbed of Participation. With sixty-six adult organizations and a population turnover that makes each one of them insatiable for new members, Park Forest probably swallows up more civic energy per hundred people than any other community in the country.”⁹ Each of Park Forest’s 105 residential “courts,” containing roughly one hundred homes or apartments, became a distinct minineighborhood with its own character.

The physical setting of the new suburbs, however, was radically different from that of the typical urban neighborhood. While individual lots were small by comparison to those in twenty-first-century exurbia, they were vast by comparison to those in the urban neighborhoods that the newly minted suburbanites had left, where even detached houses were as little as six to ten feet from their neighbors. The new houses rarely had either porches or stoops and were set back from the sidewalk by a lawn, limiting the informal interaction typical of urban neighborhoods. Even more significantly, while an elementary school and a small park or playground might be nearby, stores, workplaces, and churches all required a trip by car. New generations of shopping centers filled with chain stores and surrounded by parking lots replaced the neighborhood shopping street. After the ranch houses and Cape Cods, the ubiquitous parking lot became a defining symbol of suburbia.

The distance between the houses, their design and street setback, and the auto dependency of the suburban lifestyle all meant that the number of informal encounters fostered by proximity and by the many short walks that urban neighborhoods require declined precipitously. Informal interaction was largely limited to immediate neighbors and among parents of small children. The intense level of organized interaction that Whyte dubbed “Participation” was in many respects a way for the new suburbanites to compensate for the loss of the texture of informal interactions they had previously shared.

Unlike informal interaction, which in a healthy traditional neighborhood is largely self-sustaining, formal organizational interactions require ongoing maintenance and can be exhausting and difficult to sustain over time. Fundamental changes to society and the economy meant that the high participation suburban neighborhood would be short-lived. As children grew up and left the home, their parents’ child- and school-related interactions inevitably declined. Arguably the most significant factors, however, were social changes, above all the change in gender roles and the growth of female workforce participation. The stay-at-home wife and mother had been the mainstay of the participation neighborhood. As women moved into the workforce and as the number of child-rearing married couples entered a long-term decline, the intense level of neighboring that initially characterized the 1950s suburbs was no longer sustainable.

The weakness of many inner-ring suburbs to sustain themselves as good neighborhoods did not appear overnight. Although the number of children dwindled, many families remained in place for many years, carefully maintaining their houses and lawns. Churches and civic organizations remained viable, although often at levels of membership well below their heyday. But as with the Black urban middle neighborhoods of similar vintage, the original home buyers were aging out, and their children had largely moved elsewhere. Meanwhile, many of the more economically successful among the families who had initially moved into inner-ring suburbs were moving farther out to bigger houses on larger lots. In Thomas Bier’s study of housing moves in the Cleveland area, he found that nearly four out of five homeowners who sold their homes in Cleveland’s inner-ring suburbs during the 1980s and 1990s moved to newer suburbs farther out in the region.¹⁰

By the end of the century houses in these suburbs were looking far less appealing than they had in the 1950s, while the pool of well-to-do families looking for suburban homes could choose from shinier, larger, and newer alternatives. As the initial white homeowners moved away or aged out, many inner-ring suburbs began to undergo racial transition. Park Forest today is over 60 percent Black, as are many inner suburbs around Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other cities with large communities of color. This reflects not only the desire of African American families for better housing and quality of life but also the continuing reality of white flight. As researcher Samuel Kye found, middle-class white suburban families tend to move away as the percentage of Black or Latinx population increases.¹¹

Suburban decline is not a function of the “return to the city” or disenchantment with the suburbs generally. Three-quarters of all high-status neighborhoods are in suburbs, not central cities, a share that remained remarkably stable between 1970 and 2010.¹² The outward movement within suburbia, however, has created problems for older suburbs. A study of the one hundred largest metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2009 found that “metropolitan areas with greater levels of sprawl tended to have inner-ring suburbs with relatively lower per capita incomes,” while another study found that 22 percent of all suburbs lost population from 1980 to 2010.¹³

At the same time, not all older suburbs are in trouble. Many older railroad suburbs are thriving. Built around commuter rail stations, such as those of Philadelphia’s Main Line, they have distinctive historic architecture and vital mixed-use town centers. The most vulnerable suburbs are those built after World War II between 1945 and about 1960. Built to relieve the post–World War II housing shortage, they were mass-produced following methods pioneered by William Levitt in Levittowns across the Northeast (figure 13.1). Their houses are small by today’s standards and lack features such as the multiple bathrooms and central air conditioning today’s buyers expect. They form a belt around every major city, as figure 13.2, which highlights areas where 50 percent or more of the houses were built between 1940 and 1969, illustrates for the Chicago area.

Where they are situated within the larger pattern of metropolitan development is also important. As Homer Hoyt noted in the 1930s, suburbs are extensions of older urban settlement patterns; once established, high-rent neighborhoods “tend to move out in that sector to the periphery of the city.”¹⁴ Suburban development corridors reflect status hierarchies established in the central city. The tony Minneapolis suburbs of Edina, Eden Prairie, and Minnetonka are in many ways extensions of the affluent Lake District neighborhoods in Minneapolis. In Chicago, an ordinary postwar ranch house in a northern suburb such as Skokie or Morton Grove, extensions of affluent white North Side city neighborhoods, sells for $300,000 to $400,000, while a similar house in a southern suburb such as Park Forest or Markham, extensions of the historic Black community on Chicago’s South Side, may sell for only one-third as much. Similar patterns can be found in most metropolitan areas.

As with other neighborhood issues, markets matter. Studying suburban neighborhoods in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas, planner Karen Beck Pooley found that “socioeconomic changes … interact with local real estate market conditions in incredibly complicated and highly varied ways from one place to the next.”¹⁵ The small size and lack of architectural distinction of the homes in the first Levittown on Long Island have not doomed them to decline. The strength of the New York regional market, Levittown’s proximity to Manhattan, and the lack of nearby new housing production have ensured their market vitality. Levittown houses initially sold in 1949 for $7,990 (roughly $93,000 in today’s dollars). In January 2022, the median sales price for homes—albeit often improved and expanded—in Levittown was $575,000 (figure 13.3).¹⁶

In weaker market regions, where middle-income demand is modest and easily satisfied by those suburbs perceived as more desirable or farther from the urban center, an influx of low-income households can overwhelm suburban neighborhoods, as shown by increases in absentee ownership and housing vacancies. By contrast, stronger market suburbs can maintain economic diversity while accommodating rental and lower-income housing.¹⁷ Racial change follows similar patterns. Predominantly Black suburban neighborhoods are likely to experience stagnant or declining property values in weak market metros, but in areas with stronger markets and a large Black middle class, such as Atlanta’s DeKalb County and Maryland’s Prince George’s County, strong Black housing demand supports stable or rising suburban home values.

The decline of so many postwar inner-ring suburbs and the transformation of railroad suburbs, such as Montclair, New Jersey, into elite communities highlights an important reality. As with urban neighborhoods, suburbs are pulling apart and becoming more polarized along economic lines. Between 1980 and 2018 the percentage of the population in the nation’s fifty largest metro areas living in middle-income suburbs fell from 75 percent to 56 percent while increasing in poor suburbs from 8 percent to 19 percent and in affluent suburbs from 17 percent to 25 percent (figure 13.4).¹⁸

The economic disparities between suburbs can be huge. In the San Francisco/Oakland metropolitan area, median per capita incomes range from $165,947 in Atherton to $20,769 across the bay in San Pablo. Median home sales prices were over $7 million in Atherton and $335,000 in San Pablo. In much lower-priced Chicagoland, relative disparities were even greater. The median sales price was nearly $1 million in wealthy Wilmette on the North Shore but only $23,000 in impoverished Harvey, south of Chicago. These disparities have a huge impact on the ability of suburbs to provide quality public services at a reasonable tax rate, a key factor in the stability of good neighborhoods.

The polarization of neighborhoods by income and, by extension, property values is a serious problem everywhere but leads to a further troubling outcome in the suburbs. While we are under no illusions about equal distribution and quality of services by neighborhood within central cities, inequality is mitigated by the fact that neighborhoods are situated within the same taxing and service providing jurisdiction. Neighborhoods such as Hough in Cleveland and Homewood in Pittsburgh would be incapable of funding even the most minimal public services and schools if they had to generate all the necessary tax revenues from within their boundaries. Moreover, the presence of robust philanthropic and nonprofit networks in many central cities acts as a redistributive mechanism, providing resources to struggling low-income communities and their residents.

Many suburban regions are divided into multiple small municipalities, with each one responsible for funding public services from its own revenues, along with whatever level of aid the state provides. The San Francisco Bay Area contains 101 municipalities, 36 of which have been incorporated since the end of World War II, as well as unincorporated areas where county government provides services. That is modest by comparison to some other metropolitan areas. Far smaller Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, contains 132 cities, boroughs, and townships, the smallest of which, Haysville, has a population of seventy in 0.2 square miles. For poor municipalities, political fragmentation puts them in a situation analogous to expecting Hough or Homewood to provide their own public services. Vast disparities in municipal resources and public services are exacerbated by the thinner network of philanthropies and nonprofit organizations in suburbs compared to central cities. As we discuss in the next section, while underlying neighborhood dynamics may be driven by economic and social forces, the institutional framework within which they are embedded matters greatly.

Institutions Matter

In chapter 9 we discussed the central role of agents of change, the network of institutions and organizations that seek to intentionally revitalize neighborhoods. Although often underappreciated, the framework created by strong public as well as private institutions is a critical mainstay of the good neighborhood. The weakness of those institutions in most suburban settings combined with municipal fragmentation, overlaid on the physical and social dynamics of suburbanization, increase the risk of decline for many suburban neighborhoods.

We say “many” because it is impossible to generalize to all suburban areas. The suburbs created by and for the affluent through municipal incorporation and exclusionary land-use regulation provide a neighborhood quality of life that largely meets the needs of their residents, who can afford to pay for most of their needs through private, individual means. While the concept of neighborhood is not meaningless in such areas, it is more exiguous, something given little thought except in times of crisis, as when an affordable housing development is proposed to be built nearby. Affluent suburbs are alive and well. Our discussion focuses on the other side of the suburban coin.

It has long been recognized that the fragmentation of suburban areas into seemingly infinite numbers of small municipalities is neither a socially nor economically neutral phenomenon. In 1967, political scientist Norton Long wrote that “the suburb is the Northern way to ensure separate and unequal.”¹⁹ In 1974, sociologist Richard Hall noted that “in the context of a fragmented system of governments in the metropolis, municipal government becomes an institutional arrangement for promoting and protecting the unequal distribution of scarce resources.”²⁰ In some cases, the motivation for splitting was both economic and racial. In a famous 1970s case, a group of St. Louis County residents incorporated as the independent municipality of Black Jack in order to obtain the zoning powers they needed to block development of a low-income housing project.²¹

Municipal fragmentation enshrines vast differences in the fiscal capacity of local governments and school districts, rarely fully compensated for by state equalization grants, in ways that perpetuate and exacerbate economic and racial segregation and disparities in conditions and opportunities. Independent of school funding, research supports the conclusion that students from low-income families do better in schools that are economically integrated compared to schools that have a high percentage of students below or near the poverty line.²² School quality powerfully affects house prices and housing demand. White home buyers often shun racially integrated school districts, undercutting neighborhood housing values. Suburban fragmentation of school districts magnifies the feedback effects of economic and racial sorting, reinforcing downward spirals of resource-starved suburban neighborhoods.

The ability of local governments to provide the array of local public goods and services that are essential for good neighborhoods rests on their fiscal capacity, which depends in turn on a balance between expenditure need and revenue-raising capacity. While their expenditure need increases with rising poverty and aging housing stock and infrastructure, many inner-ring suburbs have limited revenue-raising capacity. Even where state laws permit local governments to raise revenues through income or sales taxes, that yields little benefit for municipalities with few industrial, office, or commercial properties. The result is that most suburbs are highly dependent on residential property taxes to pay for municipal as well as school expenditures.

These fiscal constraints undermine neighborhood vitality. Struggling inner-ring suburbs, particularly predominantly Black suburbs where property values, for reasons discussed earlier, tend to be lower than in their white counterparts, often have ruinously high property tax rates. One study found that in 2016 per capita property taxes in Chicago’s middle-class Black suburbs were 73 percent higher than in middle-class white suburbs.²³ In the United States, property taxes tend to average roughly 1 percent of a home’s market value; the 2021 property taxes on a house in East St. Louis, Illinois, that sold in May 2022 for $10,000 were $2,137, or 21.4 percent of value.²⁴ Ruinous property tax burdens drive property values down further, creating a vicious spiral while never providing enough revenues to deliver even minimally acceptable public services. Parks are dilapidated and trash-ridden, potholes proliferate, and streets lack pedestrian-scale lighting. In neighboring Missouri, where state laws limit property tax hikes, struggling suburbs in north St. Louis County have turned to traffic fines and court fees to raise municipal revenues, with devastating social consequences.²⁵

Reflecting a long history of urban services, from the first settlement houses through the programs of the war on poverty, most central cities tend to have a cross section of nonprofit organizations that provide many of the benefits of the modern welfare state, such as job training, childcare, and mental health services. These services are harder to obtain in the suburbs, so poor people in suburbs have less access to needed help. In a 2017 study, policy scholar Scott Allard found that the median expenditure by nonprofit human service providers in suburban counties in 2010 was only $106 per low-income resident compared to $884 in urban counties.²⁶

As with social service providers, philanthropies are disproportionately urban in their attentions. A 2007 study of community foundations in the Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, and Detroit metropolitan areas found, after examining over sixteen thousand grants, that the foundations gave $54.2 million to urban service providers compared to only $5.3 million to suburban service providers even though many more poor people lived in the suburbs than in the central city.²⁷

If lower-income people face disparities by living in the suburbs, the disparities for struggling places are even greater. Few small suburban jurisdictions have the resources to plan or execute place-based programs, while strong community development corporations capable of using the decentralized tool-based system we described in chapter 5 are scarce in suburban areas.²⁸ Few suburbs qualify to receive direct funding under federal Community Development Block Grant and HOME grant programs; while they are eligible to share in county or state pools, those funds are far more limited than those that flow to entitlement jurisdictions.

The inequality of suburban institutions magnifies economic inequalities across neighborhoods. Encased in political boundaries, the feedback effects of neighborhood economic decline reverberate powerfully within struggling suburban municipalities, with rising tax rates and declining public services generating reinforcing cycles of neighborhood decline, while economic and racial segregation are exacerbated as more affluent households flee declining suburbs. Since its peak in 1980, Harvey’s population has dropped by nearly one-third. The research is clear: all else being equal, the greater the fragmentation across municipalities and school districts, the higher the level of economic and racial segregation.²⁹ Other studies have found strong associations between political fragmentation and racial disparities in health and life expectancy.³⁰ In the next section we describe how differences in political fragmentation affect the vitality of struggling neighborhoods in two sharply contrasting governmental settings.

Comparing St. Louis and Baltimore Counties

St. Louis County, Missouri, and Baltimore County, Maryland, are good places to tease out the role of local governments. Both are large suburban counties of similar population and land area surrounding similarly struggling central cities, both of which experienced deindustrialization, substantial population losses, and the growth of African American as well as low-income populations. St. Louis County, with eighty-six separate municipalities, is highly fragmented. By contrast, Baltimore County, unusual in the United States, has no separate municipalities; all governmental functions are performed by the county. St. Louis County has twenty-three school districts; Baltimore County has only one.

Although there are many factors at work, the evidence from these two counties is consistent with the research findings that more fragmented areas have greater place inequality. A much larger share of census tracts in Baltimore County are middle-income places, while St. Louis County has larger shares of lower- and upper-income tracts. In 2019, 45,431 residents of St. Louis County lived in census tracts with over 30 percent poverty compared to 8,154 in Baltimore County, or more than five times as many.

St. Louis County is also much more racially segregated than Baltimore County. While both counties have similar Black population shares, in Baltimore County less than 7 percent, or only two out of thirty-one census-defined places, were over 80 percent Black. In contrast, nearly one-quarter, or twenty-two out of ninety-eight municipalities and census-defined places in St. Louis County were over 80 percent Black. The racial dissimilarity index measures the percentage of one group that would need to move for every tract to have the same percentage of that group as the entire county. In 2019 at the census tract level, the dissimilarity index for St. Louis County was 52.8, while for Baltimore County it was 38.7.³¹ More than half of all African Americans in St. Louis County would have to move from one census tract to another to produce a fully integrated population; for Baltimore County the figure is closer to one-third.

Institutional fragmentation, we believe, played a significant role in generating higher levels of economic and racial segregation in St. Louis County compared to Baltimore County. There are two other significant differences, however, that undoubtedly also played a role. First, Baltimore County is part of the faster-growing and more affluent Baltimore—Washington, D.C., megaregion. Compared to Baltimore, the St. Louis area’s lower-priced, higher-vacancy housing market makes it easier for integration-averse households to flee areas experiencing increases in Black or lower-income households. Second, in 1967 Baltimore County enacted an urban growth boundary, the Urban-Rural Demarcation Line, that since 1967 has limited peripheral sprawl, concentrating development pressures toward the center, encouraging revitalization of older suburban neighborhoods. St. Louis County has neither legal nor physical constraints to limit suburban sprawl. In short, the story on the ground strongly suggests that municipal fragmentation is a major factor in neighborhood segregation and inequality, as our case studies of St. Louis County and Baltimore County demonstrate.

Ferguson and Fragmentation

The city of Ferguson became notorious in 2014 when a white policeman shot a Black teenager Michael Brown. It is a prism that reveals how many forces, including the timing of suburban development and its location within the broader metropolitan landscape, shape neighborhood dynamics (figure 13.5).

Ferguson began as an early railroad suburb.³² The mid-nineteenth-century railroad between St. Louis and St. Charles passed through Ferguson, allowing well-to-do downtown employees to live in a leafy suburban setting (figure 13.6). Old Ferguson was a typical railroad suburb with a mix of businesses and Victorian homes along Florissant Avenue, giving it the pedestrian quality of a small city center. By 1940, Ferguson was a small (population 5,724) but prosperous suburb. After World War II the city grew rapidly, reaching its peak population of 28,759 in 1970. New Ferguson emerged primarily to the east and north of Old Ferguson, one of many postwar suburbs in northern St. Louis County that served as a destination for white families fleeing the city of St. Louis. The new homes were generally small one-story ranch homes (figure 13.7).

By 1970 there were two distinct Fergusons, the older railroad suburb on the west side with the feel of an urban village and a new postwar area designed around separation of land uses and automobile dependency.³³ It was an entirely white community. Officials in Ferguson, which shares a border with Kinloch, one of the first Black suburbs in Missouri, built a five-foot culvert across Suburban Avenue to discourage residents of Kinloch from driving into Ferguson.³⁴ Until the mid-1960s Ferguson was known as a “sundown town,” where the presence of Black people was only permitted during daytime hours.³⁵

As African American families began moving to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, St. Louis suburbs responded in one of two ways: either trying to exclude them or welcoming them and working to maintain stable integration. One St. Louis County suburb that successfully pursued an integration maintenance strategy was University City, discussed briefly in chapter 8. Although University City, which borders the campus of prestigious Washington University, benefited from “place luck,” it also took action to foster racial integration, including passing a stringent point-of-sale inspection ordinance to prevent housing deterioration and banning for-sale signs to prevent blockbusting. By 1990, the Black population of University City was approaching 50 percent; since then it has slowly fallen to about 36 percent. While the majority-Black Third Ward is not without problems, it remains a viable neighborhood that has not fallen victim to reinforcing processes of decline.

Ferguson took a different path, and for a time its strategy of exclusion seemed to work.³⁶ During the 1960s as University City went from less than 1 percent to 20 percent Black, Ferguson remained almost totally white. Changing conditions, however, and Ferguson’s location in the heart of North County meant that it was impossible for the city to indefinitely block racial change. By the 1970s the white families who had initially bought the modest houses built in the 1940s and 1950s were starting to move out, while growing numbers of Black families living in the north side of St. Louis were looking for suburban housing. During the 1970s the Black population of the city of St. Louis dropped by nearly fifty thousand and from 1980 to 2019 by another sixty thousand. The proximity of suburbs such as Ferguson to centers of Black population and the higher cost of housing elsewhere in St. Louis County made North County the principal destination of Black urban out-migrants. As the pool of Black buyers grew, the pool of white buyers in North County shrank. Ferguson’s Black population share went from all but zero in 1970 to 15 percent in 1980, 25 percent in 1990, 52 percent in 2000, and 67 percent by 2010. Over time as more of the small postwar houses were bought by absentee investors who then rented them out, in-migrants became increasingly lower-income often single-parent families. From 2000 to 2019, the homeownership rate in Ferguson dropped from 66 percent to 54 percent. Since its 1970 population peak, Ferguson has lost nearly 30 percent of its population.

While Ferguson was largely zoned for single-family homes, at least in part to exclude low-income renters, fiscal pressures led the city in 1964 to annex the land occupied by Emerson Electric, a Fortune 500 company located just across the eastern border of the city. As part of the annexation, however, Ferguson also acquired land that had been zoned multifamily by the county. Five large apartment complexes were constructed on this land, including Canfield Green, Park Ridge, and Northwinds, where Michael Brown lived with his grandmother at the time he was shot. At the time these apartment complexes were not considered a problem—if anything, the opposite. Built in 1970, the 415-unit Canfield Green complex, for example, was described in a 1978 advertisement as “deluxe” housing “tucked away among single-family homes” featuring a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a clubhouse.³⁷

Over time, however, the residents of these apartment complexes became poorer, and conditions deteriorated. The owners took advantage of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program to refurbish the units, from which point the complexes were limited to low-income families earning less than 60 percent of the area median income. While the physical condition of the apartment complexes was much improved, the new income restrictions turned the area, with well over one thousand apartment units, into an increasingly distressed area of concentrated poverty. This cluster of concentrated poverty was hidden from the rest of the community, with only one road leading into it from West Florissant Avenue, a grim, barren five-lane highway largely lacking sidewalks and lined with fast-food outlets, liquor stores, and check-cashing establishments (figure 13.8).³⁸ Michael Brown and his companion had crossed this road and were walking back along Canfield Drive when Brown was shot.

During the 1990s as the apartments along Canfield Drive were becoming increasingly problem-ridden and isolated, the City of Ferguson was working hard to revitalize the heart of historic Old Ferguson along South Florissant Road, installing new streetlights and sidewalks as well as a gazebo and a clock tower. A special district was formed supported by assessments on property owners, buildings were refurbished, and a handful of new stores and restaurants opened, including a wine bar and microbrewery. While the revitalization of Old Ferguson was a modest success, the city’s overall fiscal condition was gradually deteriorating.

The median house price in Ferguson, where most of the recent home purchase loans were high-cost or subprime loans, was only $75,000 even at the peak of the housing bubble but plummeted as the foreclosure epidemic hit the city hard. When the bubble burst, foreclosures exploded. Between 2006 and 2013, 2,402 distressed sales occurred in Ferguson.³⁹ Formerly owner-occupied homes were bought by absentee investors and rented out, further destabilizing many neighborhoods. The homeownership rate in Ferguson dropped while the poverty rate nearly doubled, rising from 12 percent to 23 percent. By 2017 the median sales price for a home was $29,820. That year, only ninety-eight homes changed hands in a city with over seven thousand single-family homes, a sure sign of a weak housing market.

Ferguson was in a fiscal bind. With existing tax revenues making it impossible to maintain adequate municipal services and with tax increases capped by Missouri state law, Ferguson, along with many other North County municipalities, took the path of raising revenue by ramping up traffic fines and court fees. Predictably, law enforcement was soon subordinated to the goal of raising money; by 2013, 20 percent of the city’s general fund revenue came from traffic fines and court fees. With fifty white police officers of the fifty-four total in a city that was two-thirds Black, ticket writing was pursued in a racist fashion with devastating effects on low-income African Americans. After Michael Brown’s shooting the US Department of Justice conducted a study of policing in Ferguson, which concluded that “many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”⁴⁰ The protests following Michael Brown’s shooting and the violence that followed were a disaster for Ferguson and in particular for the Canfield Drive area. Based on a visual inspection in 2021, most of the units in the 438-unit apartment complex where Brown had lived were boarded up and vacant. Stigmatized by the shooting and plagued by crime, many people simply refused to live in the area, while many businesses along West Florissant Avenue, where most of the property damage from the protests was concentrated, remained empty.

Although the shooting of Michael Brown put the national spotlight on Ferguson, it is less an outlier than an exemplar of contemporary struggling suburbia. The racism that drove the city’s leaders to try to exclude Black residents and to retain white political control long after Black residents had become a majority is not unusual in American suburbs.⁴¹ Racism is simply an incremental layer on top of already powerful structural issues, beginning with the political fragmentation that undermines the ability of a small, poorly resourced municipality to cope with complex challenges. Adding to the difficulty, an indifferent county government has provided little help, and the state has imposed rigid fiscal controls on cities such as Ferguson without providing the means to deliver adequate services. Ferguson was not alone in turning to traffic fines and fees as a way out of its fiscal bind or in letting that process turn into a pernicious hunt for money at all costs.⁴²

Ferguson is the product of three distinct legacies, all of which contributed to its difficulties: First, the legacy of the small, aging postwar houses and their lack of market appeal in more recent decades; second, the legacy of suburban zoning, which created such dysfunctional environments as the concentration of poverty on Canfield Drive; and third, the creation of barren pedestrian-unfriendly environments, such as West Florissant Avenue, fostering an automobile-dependent setting adverse to low-income families. To this must be added the legacy of subprime lending and the ensuing foreclosure crisis.

While Ferguson’s efforts through the 1960s to remain a segregated white community can be seen as both racist and foolhardy and while it would be tempting to suggest that had the Ferguson behaved more like University City things would be fundamentally different today, that is unlikely. Ferguson lacked the assets that made it possible for University City to succeed. Ferguson’s proximity to the University of Missouri–St. Louis, a commuter school separated from the city by Interstate 70, is a far cry from the close spatial and economic relationship between University City and Washington University. University City, largely built up before World War II, has a larger share of architecturally distinctive prewar homes that continue to draw middle-class buyers. Even Ferguson’s self-proclaimed historic downtown is little more than a handful of undistinguished buildings scattered across barely two city blocks. Ferguson made many mistakes, but its spatial context and the political fragmentation of St. Louis County meant that it was always going to face fierce headwinds in trying to build stable, integrated neighborhoods.

Baltimore County and Dundalk

Baltimore County, which all but surrounds Baltimore City (figure 13.9), shares many of St. Louis County’s challenges, including the pressures of demographic, economic, and social changes beyond its control. Its inner suburbs are characterized by the same modest postwar housing. As the county’s Strategic Plan 2020 put it, there are “pockets of housing that did not age gracefully: many are obsolete by current market standards.”⁴³ What sets Baltimore County apart from St. Louis County as well as most other metropolitan counties is that it is entirely governed by a single entity, the Baltimore County government. There are no incorporated municipalities within the county’s 682 square miles. County government manages all municipal and school functions for its 854,535 (2020) residents. If it were a city, it would be the eleventh-largest city in the United States.

Baltimore County controls all land use within the county. In 1967 at the height of the county’s population boom, Baltimore County adopted an Urban-Rural Demarcation Line, which restricts extension of public infrastructure in roughly two-thirds of the county’s land area and has led to 90 percent of the county’s development being concentrated in the remaining one-third. Moreover, the county’s efforts have been supported by the State of Maryland, which since the 1997 Smart Growth Areas Act has targeted state funding to areas with existing public infrastructure. As the county’s inner-ring suburbs were suffering from rapid decline in the 1990s, Baltimore County enacted, in the words of researcher Thomas Vicino, “one of the most comprehensive local approaches in the nation to confronting suburban decline.”⁴⁴ How did this institutional and policy environment shape neighborhood change in Baltimore County?

Most suburban development in the county lies along three corridors radiating out of the central city and reflecting the character of the adjacent central city areas. The northern suburbs, such as the county seat of Towson, tend to be largely white and upper income, extensions of Baltimore City’s most expensive upscale older neighborhoods. The eastern corridor is predominantly white and working class, while the western corridor is heavily African American, largely following a path along Liberty Road extending from the African American neighborhoods of West Baltimore (figure 13.9). Looking at the census tracts bordering Liberty Road from the city border to the Urban-Rural Demarcation Line, Gregory Smithsimon found that between 1970 and 2010 the percentage of African Americans along Liberty Road increased from 5 percent to 83 percent.⁴⁵ Some of these communities are struggling, but for the most part they have avoided the rapid racial tipping and economic decline of the suburbs of North St. Louis County. Randallstown, a predominantly Black suburb, has maintained itself as a stable middle-income neighborhood, with its per capita income remaining steady since 2009 at roughly 92 percent of the regional average. The racially changing suburbs of Baltimore County, Smithsimon concludes, “have been remarkably successful at altering the traditional story of racial transition … that often results in a decrease of property values and median household incomes.”⁴⁶ Racial change has taken place slowly over a forty-year period and has in most cases been accompanied by social and economic stability. Roughly half of the majority-Black census tracts along Liberty Road have median household incomes above the county average.

By contrast, the largely white working-class suburbs of east Baltimore County have faced the greatest threat of suburban decline. Dundalk is an industrial suburb founded in 1917 by the Bethlehem Steel Company for workers in its Sparrows Point plant. Made up mostly of modest one-story detached homes and row houses, it grew steadily through the 1960s, reaching a peak population of 85,377 in 1970. For its first thirty years restrictive covenants forbade sales to Black steelworkers, who were only allowed to live in Turner Station, a separate area immediately south of Dundalk proper. Beginning in the 1970s as industrial jobs began to disappear, Dundalk’s modest houses became less appealing in the marketplace. Upwardly mobile households moved to newer homes elsewhere in the suburbs, and the area fell into a steep decline.⁴⁷ By 2000, Dundalk’s population had fallen to 62,306, a drop of 27 percent.

By the 1990s, Baltimore County officials saw neighborhood decline as a significant countywide concern. In 1995, the county created the Office of Community Conservation and launched its Renaissance Development Initiative to revitalize aging suburban communities. Between 1995 and 2005 the county invested about $1 billion in declining neighborhoods, effectively redirecting resources from affluent parts of the county to struggling areas.⁴⁸ Dundalk was one of the neighborhoods targeted for funding. The county fostered the formation of the Dundalk Renaissance Corporation, a community development corporation that now has five full-time staff and an annual budget of about $1 million. From 2002 to 2007, the county invested some $70 million in housing rehabilitation, demolition of substandard housing, and other improvements in Dundalk.⁴⁹

Like the two Fergusons, though, there are two Dundalks. From Turner Station’s origins as a squatter settlement, by midcentury it had become a vital tight-knit African American community characterized by solid middle-class values and strong collective efficacy.⁵⁰ Solidly and prosperously working class thanks to jobs at the steel mill, it had its own school and movie theater, and a two thousand-seat ballpark. In many respects, Turner Station was a Bronzeville or Black Bottom in miniature. With the end of Jim Crow, though, the neighborhood school closed, and more prosperous families began to move out. As the industrial jobs that sustained Turner Station began to disappear, the steelworkers’ children sought opportunities elsewhere, and the neighborhood declined. Between 1970 and 2000, its population fell from 4,958 to 3,301. Turner Station was replicating the fate of hundreds of once-solid Black neighborhoods across the country.

Beginning in the 2000s, however, Turner Station benefited from the Baltimore County revitalization initiative. The Dundalk Renaissance Corporation chose Turner Station as one of its five target areas, making the area eligible for a variety of assistance programs. The county’s Community Conservation Plan was created with strong community input, and a neighborhood organization, called the Turner Station Conservation Teams, was formed to implement the plan. The county built the Sollers Point Multi-Purpose Center, with an auditorium, meeting spaces for community events, a library, and the Turner Station Historical Center, and spent $25 million in federal funds to upgrade Lyon Homes, which had been built as war-worker housing in 1942. In 2011, the Henrietta Lacks Legacy Group was established to honor the memory of Turner Station’s most famous resident,⁵¹ supporting community activities and increased educational opportunities for neighborhood youths.

The investments in rebuilding Turner Station have had an effect. Population decline has slowed since 2000, while household incomes have kept pace with inflation over that period, unusual for older African American neighborhoods. The neighborhood has become somewhat more racially diverse, with the Black population down to 68 percent from 82 percent in 2000.⁵² The cohesive working-class community of the mid-twentieth century, though, is long gone, and the area struggles with economic and social as well as environmental challenges. That said, Baltimore County’s intervention and the energy of the community have in many respects stabilized the neighborhood, albeit at a low and still challenged level. While perhaps not a success story, it is a far better outcome than that of the many Black minicities and neighborhoods in north St. Louis County that are desperately struggling for survival.

The unified governance of Baltimore County, its growth boundary, and its significant investment in revitalizing inner-ring suburbs such as Dundalk and Turner Station have helped stabilize the county’s neighborhoods. Racial transition in the county has been more gradual and has led to less concentrated poverty and segregation than the parallel racial transition in St. Louis’s suburbs. This is not to suggest that Baltimore County lacks serious challenges of both poverty and racial inequity, including issues of policing and public education, where rapid racial transition and the growing numbers of students from poor families increased since 2000. The unified public institutions of Baltimore County, however, mean that affluent families cannot secede from the larger community and form their own enclaves. In addition, the financial, institutional, and organizational resources of a relatively affluent large and diverse political entity are available to all its residents, thus increasing the likelihood that the institutional network critical for good neighborhoods is widely available. In both white Dundalk and Black Turner Station, the county actively redirected resources toward stabilization and revitalization. Such an environment makes maintaining good neighborhoods easier than in the fragmented setting of St. Louis County. Good neighborhoods, however, we must acknowledge, only address structural racism and rising economic inequality at the margins.

Suburbs and Neighborhoods

Suburbs are neighborhoods too. And with most of America’s population living in suburbs or thinking of their environments as suburban, suburbs matter greatly in the picture and prospects for the twenty-first-century neighborhood.⁵³ As we have stressed, however, suburbs vary as much as cities even within a single county, from the struggling streets of Turner Station to the horsey country in north Baltimore County. Still, a few tentative generalizations are in order.

Suburbs are, after all, suburban. Although the suburban matrix includes some higher-density communities, such as the nineteenth-century railroad suburbs, they are defined by lower population density, consistent separation of land uses, and settlement patterns that depend on access to the automobile for their economic and social functioning. To the extent, then, that the concept of neighborhood is dependent on face-to-face interaction and on the weak ties associated with informal and unplanned social interactions, one can reasonably argue that suburbanization itself strains the vitality of neighborhoods and that suburban sprawl at progressively lower and lower densities all but inevitably leads to fewer weak ties and more vulnerable neighborhoods.⁵⁴

On the other hand, most suburbs are clearly viable somethings. Exurban communities of McMansions on two-, three-, or five-acre lots are not struggling, nor are exclusive inner suburbs such as Scarsdale in Westchester County north of New York City, where the median income is $250,000 and the least expensive house for sale early in 2021, on the border with significantly less tony New Rochelle, was listed at $1.4 million. Are they neighborhoods? While leaving that admittedly subjective question open, we suggest that in many respects they are less neighborhoods than communities of interest. They exist because they meet the needs of people who have a common interest in buying certain public or private goods such as open space, excellent schools, and public safety for themselves and have the means to pay for those goods or simply want to live among people of similarly high economic status. That may be unfair. Scarsdale, at least, thinks of itself as a neighborhood-oriented community, with clearly defined neighborhoods and neighborhood associations that organize events and advocate on behalf of neighborhood interests for such things as pedestrian crossings and playgrounds.⁵⁵ Scarsdale, however, is a railroad suburb, with a small but vital town center that may play a role in fostering community identity.

Neighborhoods play a less significant role in the lives of the affluent, especially the well-educated affluent with their geographically dispersed social networks. As one moves down the economic ladder, however, the role of neighborhoods becomes progressively more important. This is where the inherent qualities of the American suburb become increasingly problematic. A low-income Black resident in a suburban single-family subdivision or worse renting an apartment in a project tucked away such as Canfield Green without a car (or at best one car per family) in a place where a car is needed for access to jobs, shopping, and community connections may desperately need neighborhood ties but be unable to find them. The vitality of the postwar subdivisions described by Whyte and Beauregard was the product of intense organizational activity, which was in turn heavily dependent on a long-gone generation of stay-at-home wives and mothers.⁵⁶ It could not last and cannot be resuscitated in those neighborhoods today.

The problems of struggling neighborhoods and their residents are greatly exacerbated by the twofold patterns of governmental fragmentation and the absence of what might be called a communitarian safety net in the form of foundations, social service organizations, community development corporations, and the like. Governmental fragmentation drives an inequitable distribution of public goods and resources, allowing the wealthy residents of towns such as Atherton and Scarsdale to claim a disproportionate share and forcing the residents of towns such as Ferguson and Park Forest to do with less. Suburban tax revenues and services are a zero-sum proposition. Municipalities such as Park Forest find themselves in a vicious cycle, a feedback system of declining homeownership rates and home values along with rising vacancy, poverty, and tax rates. In the absence of a concerted effort at redistribution from the state or federal government, their opportunity space for building good neighborhoods is tightly constricted.

While recognizing the role that racism plays in suburban inequities and the difficult challenges this raises, it remains that this is an area where, far more than in other settings, public policy can play a meaningful role in redressing imbalances and fostering good neighborhoods. We would not argue that the people of Baltimore County are necessarily any less racist than those of St. Louis County, but it is clear that the institutional structure of Baltimore County has furthered an environment of significantly greater neighborhood-level equity along lines of race and economic class than in St. Louis County. This is a function not only of a unitary system of service delivery across racially and economically diverse neighborhoods but also of the capacity of a large government to engage in intentional activities to redistribute resources and stabilize or revive struggling neighborhoods.

In many respects the proposition———that the larger the governmental jurisdiction the healthier the neighborhoods———is ironic in that a long-standing American tradition prizes governments that are small and, at least nominally, close to the people. That tradition has value, but in much of today’s suburbia it has become a vehicle for racial and economic segregation and for the hoarding of public resources, with pernicious effects for those on the wrong side of the metaphorical tracks.