Research paper

9

The New Geography of Inequality

The suburbs were the prototype for gentrification, not aesthetically but economically. Suburbanization was the original American experiment in using real estate to reinvigorate capitalism. Gentrification can be understood as a continuation of that experiment—suburbanization part two. The suburbs are also a good reminder that housing, planning, and economic policy in the United States is deliberate, and that its main purpose is to produce money, not adequately house people. It’s harder to see gentrification in this way because we’re still in the middle of the process. But if we can identify the motivations behind the creation of suburbia, we can find corollaries in current urban policy that can help determine the future of cities.

Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over. They will still exist. But because they are no longer as profitable as cities or as desirable for the wealthiest Americans, who now populate cities, suburbs have become the leftover spaces in which we house the poor and the middle class. The suburbs are being reused, reconfigured, and repopulated. They are becoming poorer, and that has wide-ranging implications for policy and the lives of lower-income people.

After I walked around the Mission with Anabelle Bolaños, she told me that if I wanted to understand the future of the Bay Area, I had to go east, past San Francisco, past Oakland, under a mountain, over a highway, and to Concord, the biggest city in Contra Costa County. The area, which was once mostly farmland, has become a sprawling mess of suburbs, exurbs, and car-centric mini-cities. I agreed to take the trip, but first I had to get over the bridge connecting San Francisco to the East Bay, which turned out to be a lesson in itself about the Bay Area’s new economy. Every bridge connecting San Francisco to the rest of the Bay Area has seen a double-digit rise in commuters over the last five years—a good indication, before census statistics catch up, that the region’s population is growing. On the Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland and the rest of the East Bay to San Francisco, rush hour now starts at 5:00 a.m. This is what happens when you create an urban economy that people cannot afford to live in.

Anabelle told me to go to Concord because her best friend, Oscar Perdomo, lives there. Oscar, forty-five, gay, Latino, and raised in San Francisco, has good reasons to dislike living in Concord, which is ugly, sterile, cultureless, very straight, and relatively white. But this is where he could afford to buy a home without leaving the Bay Area completely, so this is where he is.

Oscar grew up in the Mission. He and his mom lived in the same apartment for twenty-five years. It was a two-bedroom in an old Victorian with lots of wainscoting, vaulted ceilings, and creaky wood floors. He remembers loving getting dressed up for church as a kid, then going to the park with friends afterward. His family was neither destitute nor rich, and the Mission felt like a great way of life.

“I was raised there, I wanted to stay there, that’s all I know,” he told me, sitting outside a chain coffee shop on one of the empty downtown streets of Concord. “It was a bunch of brown faces. It was a community. Everyone knew everyone.”

But his mom’s apartment was falling apart. Several of the rooms had black mold. They paid $800 a month for it, but the landlord wouldn’t repair anything. It’s unclear if their apartment should have been rent-regulated, but Oscar and his mom, who has health issues, did not fight when the landlord started threatening them with eviction. The struggle just did not seem worth it. The landlord turned the apartment into a one-bedroom, got rid of the high ceilings and wainscoting to make it more modern, and raised the rent to $3,000. That was in 2011; it likely costs even more now.

So Oscar did what’s become known in real estate circles as “drive until you qualify”: he searched for two-bedroom condos for himself and his mother farther and farther and farther from San Francisco until he found one that he could afford, here in Concord. The trip between Concord and San Francisco can take thirty minutes or more than an hour, depending on the traffic.

There is little in the way of culture or community here. Oscar said he felt at home in the Mission, when people would wave to him on the street. He felt at home in the gay bars, in his church. He does not feel that in Concord. “The neighbors keep to themselves at the grocery store here,” he said. “If you’re hungry, there’s nothing at 10:00 p.m. Foot traffic stops at 7:00. Car traffic stops at 9:00. There’s no good taqueria, no good gay bar. You open up Grindr and see the same five people, and they’re all picky.”

After our coffees, Oscar took me on a walking tour of Concord. The downtown is a block long and, with the exception of the coffee place and a few small restaurants, nearly empty. Then the city sprawls outward and quickly begins looking like so many other parts of the United States. The sidewalks are narrow, the roads wide, the intersections far apart. There were some strips of sad grass separating Oscar and me from Concord’s multilane roads. We passed about two people in our twenty-minute walk. During the walk Oscar told me he had recently been laid off from his job as a graphic designer at a business news site in San Francisco. He’s still applying for new jobs, but the move out to Concord, coupled with the time needed to take care of his mom, has made it tough for him to keep in touch with potential employers in the city. He now works part-time at a local Home Depot.

We kept walking. We passed a strip mall and another one, and another one, and then we stopped at a large four-way intersection that wouldn’t look out of place in Florida, Ohio, or anywhere else. Oscar pointed to a set of newish condo buildings across the intersection, next to a park—“at least there’s a park,” he said, and he told me he sometimes watches the birds on the pond there—and said his condo was just beyond those. There was a brief lull in car traffic, but Oscar wouldn’t cross against the light—apparently the cops here delight in handing out jaywalking tickets. So we waited in silence for the cars to stop rushing down the road’s many lanes, and then Oscar walked toward what is now his home.

The suburbs were not built for poor people. Really, they were not built for anyone. They were built to reinvigorate capital. But they were especially not built for poor people, for people who rely on community, nonprofit service providers, and public transportation. They were built for a life of secluded individuality. As Jane Jacobs wrote: “ The well-off have many ways of assuaging needs for which poorer people may depend much on sidewalk life—from hearing of jobs to being recognized by the headwaiter. But nevertheless, many of the rich or near rich in cities appear to appreciate sidewalk life as much as anybody. They capriciously desert, after only a few decades of fashion at most, the monotonous streets of ‘quiet residential areas’ and leave them to the less fortunate.”

What does it mean that low-income people are now inhabiting these spaces built for the middle and upper classes? Both academics and social service providers are still catching up to the newness of the phenomenon. Poverty is still by and large considered an urban issue, and so the poor live relatively under the radar in their new geographies, disconnected not only from meaningful community but also from many of the services they relied on in the city. We do not know how this affects people—how the suburbs add to stress, how they change the ability of people to organize social and political movements. Suburban geography is not built for protest; it is not built for collective action. What we do know is that for the foreseeable future, the poor will be moving to the suburbs at unprecedented rates.

For the first time in US history, the majority of poor people in metropolitan regions live in the suburbs. In eastern Contra Costa County , just to the east of San Francisco, there was a 70 percent rise in poverty between 2000 and 2010. During the 2005 school year, 38 percent of students received free or reduced-price school lunch; by 2010, that number was up to 50 percent. These stats are not simply features of broader trends in income inequality or purely consequences of the recession that began in 2008. Yes, poverty has increased everywhere, but in the suburbs it increased at twice the rate it did in cities in the 1980s and 1990s. Fifty-five percent of poor people in metropolitan areas now live in suburbs, and 63 percent of the near-poor (those with incomes of up to twice the federal poverty level) live in the suburbs.

Ethnic demographics have shifted too. The percentage of poor black people in urban centers in the Bay Area decreased by 11.3 percent between 2000 and 2009 and increased in the suburbs by nearly 20 percent during that same period. The typical path for immigrants is no longer coming from abroad to the center of cities either, but to go straight to the suburbs and exurbs of those cities. This is another way that gentrification studies and displacement statistics do not accurately reflect the realities of gentrification, as those who ten or twenty years ago might have moved to the city center but who now move to the suburbs are not counted as displaced. Just over 50 percent of first-generation immigrants now live in the suburbs, and only 33 percent live in cities (the rest live in rural areas).

When people fall on hard times in San Francisco, the cost of real estate means there are fewer and fewer places to go. Rent vouchers via Section 8 do not cover the cost of apartments here, and charities cannot afford to build or subsidize housing in the city.

“We’re now essentially a broker for the suburbs,” Jeff Bialik, the executive director of Catholic Charities in San Francisco, told me. “[People] move into crisis, we move them into a shelter, and then move them out of the city. It used to be Oakland. Now it’s Antioch, Brentwood, Vallejo. And then of course when that happens they lose their entire support structure. Sometimes we feel really desperate, but what are we supposed to do?”

For those without cars, living in the suburbs is even harder. Public transit tends to be so bad that an average resident of a low-income suburb who is reliant on public transit can reach only a fraction of the jobs available in that metro region: only 4 percent of jobs are reachable with a forty-five-minute commute on public transportation, and if that commute is extended to ninety minutes, still only 25 percent of a metro area’s jobs are accessible.

There are only four commuter lines in the Bay Area. Outside San Francisco, the stops for each are far between and the trains run relatively infrequently. One day, a San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit employee tweeted from the company’s official Twitter account that “ BART was built to transport far fewer people , and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life.” Another tweet characterized the transit agency as overwhelmed by the tech boom. It was a rare candid moment—an agency essentially admitting there was a problem it could not fix, and no easy way out.

There’s also evidence that poor students do less well in the suburbs than in inner cities: low-income students in Antioch and Pittsburg , two far-flung Bay Area cities absorbing much of San Francisco’s population exodus, were found to underperform their counterparts in San Francisco.

While poverty overtakes many suburbs, the systems we have set up to grapple with poverty have remained within urban cores. Nonprofits in the suburbs operate over much larger geographical areas than their urban counterparts, and their funding sources seem to be more precarious; consequently, as more and more poor people move to the suburbs, the resources of those nonprofits are stretched thin. which keeps them off the table for many suburbs. Nonprofits are struggling too.

“What they’re dealing with is extremely weak public infrastructure and primary services, and we’re trying to build that out but we have much more experience and expertise in the urban center,” Dawn Phillips, a program director for Causa Justa/Just Cause, one of the biggest Latino activist groups in the Bay Area, told me. “For us, it’s not a question of whether or not to expand. This is part of the regionalization of life. We didn’t feel like we had a choice, but we’re still reckoning with it.”

Even basic services are hard to find in the new exurbs of the Bay Area. Many poor people are moving to unincorporated towns in the middle of the desert that don’t have sewer systems, or even clean drinking water.

“ It’s like people are living in colonies of the United States,” one activist told a local news website. “Living in a Third World country, that’s close to what you see here today.”

This is the new geography of the Bay Area: people living in trailer parks in dusty towns with no centers and no clean water.

Suburbs and sprawl simply don’t make sense for low-income people who depend on public infrastructure and programs for survival. When you think about it, suburbs make it difficult for people of any income level to build community, which is at least part of the reason people raised in suburbs seem to dislike them enough to move into cities. But for decades, suburban life has been representative of all the American dream has to offer. It’s worth asking how and why that happened, and why suburbs were developed in the first place.

One of President Roosevelt’s main advisors on housing and geography, Rexford Tugwell, explained his plan for a new urban geography. “My idea is to go just outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people into it,” he said. “Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them.” Roosevelt was not a conservative. He was a supposed champion of the poor. The fact that one of his most powerful housing advisors had such a negative view of cities suggests just how anti-urban US housing policy is at its core.

Since they began being planned on a massive scale in the early 1930s, suburbs have always been envisioned as a way to fundamentally alter the way Americans interact with each other. They were never just about space. They were about reinvigorating the economy, yes, but they were also about more than that. The suburbs were a way to reinforce a specific way of life more favorable to the country’s ruling class. Engels had warned that mass homeownership would have the effect of “chaining workers” to the factories in which they work, therefore lessening the chance they could rebel against factory owners. Engels was a communist, but plenty of capitalists admitted that was the intent of the creation of the suburbs as well. One railroad baron in the nineteenth century said he was happy when workers owned their homes because they “therefore cannot afford to strike .” Perhaps the man most synonymous with the suburbs, William J. Levitt, who built the 50,000 houses in the all-white suburb of Levittown on Long Island, felt much the same way. “ No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” he said in 1948. “He has too much to do.”

Joseph McCarthy, the senator who became famous by going after Hollywood liberals he suspected were communists, actually first made a name for himself by linking multifamily housing in general and public housing in particular with communism. When the federal government funded a housing project for veterans in 1948, he said they’d just paid for “ a breeding ground for communists .”

Suburbs, to McCarthy and so many others, were capitalistic not just in an economic sense but in a moral and philosophical one as well. Take Robert Moses , the man who through various New York governmental agencies, mostly the Parks Department, did more than anyone else to suburbanize the Northeast. Moses was virulently anti–public transit, anti-poor, and pro-automobile. Nearly all of the hundreds of bridges Moses commissioned from New York out to its suburbs were built too low to accommodate public buses, which Moses saw as the main transportation choice of poor people and black people.

In 1942, Moses wrote an appraisal of the mid-nineteenth-century reconstruction of Paris. That reconstruction, carried out by Georges-Eugène Haussmann under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, turned Paris into the “city of light” we know today, with its wide boulevards. The reconstruction of Paris had three explicit purposes: absorb the surplus money floating around the empire; jump-start the working class, which was facing high unemployment; and take away momentum from the leftist social movements brewing in Paris’s urban core. The plan worked. Neighborhoods were razed, disaffected workers were put back to work (and therefore less likely to join revolutionary movements), Paris turned from a provincial working-class city into a consumer- and tourist-friendly city, and Haussmann proved that urban planning was a tool not only for economic growth but also for social and political restructuring. Like many capitalist projects, the win was unstable: fifteen years later, the French economy came crashing down, largely thanks to the grand ambitions of builders such as Haussmann, and a revolutionary socialist movement rose up in the center of Paris. But despite the eventual failure of Haussmann’s project, Moses pushed a similar countrywide infrastructure project in the United States and city planners followed suit.

The 1940s were precarious times for ideological conservatives in the United States. While World War II had solved the economic problems of the Great Depression, culture and politics were in upheaval. Women were working more than ever and becoming increasingly independent of men both politically and economically. There was a brewing gay movement in many major cities, particularly San Francisco and New York. Union membership was high. The United States seemed to be heading toward liberalism. The suburbs became a way to reestablish conservative values .

The suburbanization of the United States pushed whites into a privatized, anti-communal form of living, encouraged more traditional gender roles (women as housewives, men as breadwinners), and reified racial boundaries—keeping white people separate from black people, Latinos, and other ethnic groups.

In place of collectivism or urbanism, the suburbs offered consumerism—a life in which meaning is built through buying things. When Herbert Hoover, in one of his best-known moments, promised Americans “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” he was offering not just prosperity but a vision of a future America in which nuclear families lived in detached housing with well-appointed kitchens and garages.

The suburbs were a very particular and peculiar idea from the outset, but they were a necessary project if the United States was to maintain itself as a hypercapitalist, individualistic, patriarchal, and racist society. They were by no means a natural or even logical creation. Even the rich had to be convinced to move to the suburbs. The idea of moving farther away from one’s work to isolated communities in the middle of nowhere was a hard sell. And so unprecedented measures, both cultural and economic, had to be taken to convince consumers that a less-convenient life was in fact in their best interest. Ads for suburban homes filled magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, selling Americans on the idea that the suburbs were a moral good, a cure-all for the pestilent life of the urban core. Some ads were placed by homebuilders , including Sears, which sold books that helped you design your own home that Sears would then build. Others pushed the idea of the suburbs in order to sell all the things required for a suburban home to function—toasters and dishwashers and new refrigerators. In one General Electric ad, a woman sitting on a bench is pictured hugging a serviceman who is drawing with a branch the outline of the typical suburban home—a square box with a triangular roof—in the dirt beneath their feet. The ad implores women to buy war bonds as an investment so that when their husbands get home from the war, they’ll have enough money to buy a house and fill it with GE appliances. The suburbs may have been inconvenient, expensive, and boring, but they were also Americans’ patriotic duty.

Television was the biggest tool for selling suburban culture. It’s no coincidence, Yale architecture professor Dolores Hayden argues, that TV’s rise coincided with the suburban boom of the 1950s. TV sets were a way to convince people that the idea of suburban living was popular, natural, and American, with sitcoms and dramas providing images of happy housewives using new appliances and men driving new cars to their far-off jobs (those appliance and car manufacturers would also advertise on the same programs). “ The person sitting in the living room window watching the set was a kind of minor-league star as well as a spectator,” cultural critic Karal Ann Marling wrote. “Look at me! Look at my house and my new color TV!”

After the war, suburban culture became a weapon in the Cold War fight against the Soviet Union. In 1959, in an iconic moment of television, Vice President Richard Nixon debated the merits of American culture with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in front of a model American home decked out with every modern appliance available, in what came to be known as the “kitchen debates.” These material goods—the toaster and the television , the canned foods and Pepsi products—Nixon argued, were the best proof yet that Americans were living a lifestyle superior to that of the communist Russians.

Hollywood got in on the propaganda too . In 1961’s Bachelor in Paradise, Bob Hope plays a critical essayist who goes to a California subdivision to write an analysis of suburban life, only to fall in love with a real estate agent and move there. In 1948’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream Home, Cary Grant plays an ad executive who gets tired of New York City and moves his family to the suburbs. Things go awry at every step of construction (these mishaps, at least one film historian argues, were a way to show the perils of unionized labor right as the United States was subsidizing housing construction at unheard-of rates), but the family ends up happily in the suburbs in the end. The film served the dual purposes of convincing Washington in the McCarthy era that Hollywood was pro-American and of selling the consumer dream of the suburbs. The movie even employed corporate tie-ins with General Electric, as well as paint, carpet, and steel companies. Several replica “Mr. Blandings homes” were built by real estate developers to sell people on the suburban lifestyle around the country. (A sequel by the writer of Mr. Blandings, in which the main character gets sick of the suburbs and moves his family back to the city, was written but never filmed.)

But culture alone couldn’t sell the suburbs. The mass exodus from cities in the mid-twentieth century required hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives, which came in the form of highways, home loans, and myriad smaller, more subtle supports of subsidization. The FHA and VA mortgage programs were the most effective subsidies to the suburbs. Those loans not only trapped low-income Americans, especially blacks, in the center of cities but encouraged the rest of the cities’ populations to move out into the suburbs. In the 1950s, one-third of all private housing was financed with FHA and VA loans. While not all suburban homes were financed through those agencies, the magnitude of the subsidy depressed the market for low- and moderate-income housing, with the result that nearly all new investment in housing went to single-family homes. Home mortgages are still subsidized today via tax deductions that rise with the expense of a new home. These tax breaks end up costing the federal government four to five times what it spends on public housing each year.

The highway system functioned similarly, providing people with an illusion that it was cheap to move out to the suburbs. The United States’ interstate highway system is one of the biggest infrastructure projects ever created, spanning some 48,900 miles. Ninety percent of it was funded by the federal government . Roads are still heavily subsidized by the feds: one study found that drivers pay only half the real cost of driving.

Even today, the suburbs remain such an illogical system of living that they require immense subsidy in order to function (and they still function poorly). For the privilege of enduring traffic, air pollution, isolation, and monotony, Americans subsidize the suburbs to the tune of $100 billion a year. Without massive highway funding as well as fuel and mortgage subsidies, the suburbs could not exist. These subsidies to the suburbs have given us the twin illusions that the American city was in some sort of natural tailspin for decades and that the suburbs are inherently more desirable, when in reality the suburbs are just better funded.

Given the extreme illogicalness of the suburbs—the fact that only with hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives did it make sense for so many Americans to move out of cities and to the suburbs—it seems predictable that their drawbacks would manifest relatively quickly, and that those who could afford it would eventually find other ways of living. That’s exactly what’s happening: children raised in the suburbs have decided their lives would be better elsewhere, and if they have enough privilege, they have mostly decided to settle in city centers instead.

This desire to escape the suburbs is not in and of itself a bad thing. The suburbs are a terrible way to house Americans. From a progressive urban planner’s perspective, an ideal world wouldn’t even contain American-style suburbs. Everyone would live in denser environments surrounding public transit hubs. This is not outlandish fantasy but how much of the world looks: as Kenneth Jackson points out in Crabgrass Frontier, if you take a twenty-minute train journey from most European cities, you’ll be in the country. And if American cities were built to accommodate everyone—the poor, the middle class, and the upper class—the influx of people and wealth back into city centers would likely be perceived very differently. After all, we cannot fault the children born into suburbs for abandoning an illogical, environmentally harmful historical anomaly in favor of something much better.

But cities in the United States are not built for everyone, and so the suburbs are not going anywhere. For one, the National Association of Realtors is the second-biggest lobbying group in the country, right behind the US Chamber of Commerce, and they have a vested interest in keeping the market for single-family homes strong. But the bigger problem is that there isn’t enough equitable housing in cities. Everyone should have a right to live in a city, but with housing stock limited and poor regional planning the norm, those with a higher economic status are granted more choice in where they live. And with few protections for the poor, we can expect urban geographies to continue to be remade—the suburbs will continue to be abandoned by the rich, who will continue to move into urban centers, and the poor, who are never stably housed in this country, will get pushed out, forced to take whatever housing’s left.

Soon most major metropolitan areas could start to look like the Bay Area does now. If you go to the central neighborhoods of San Francisco today, there are almost no people of color walking the streets. There are few stores with affordable food. The Castro seems more frequented by tourists than by gay residents. The city has become a sterilized, whiter version of itself.

To see San Francisco’s former self, you now have to go outside it—to BART stations in the East Bay overflowing with passengers, to the highway leading to the Bay Bridge during rush hour, to the shared apartments and trailers in the exurbs of San Francisco. In these outer suburbs, there is no public transportation and no density, and community is hard to come by. This is what a gentrified city looks like: nothing like a city at all.