Brookings: Experts - Myron Orfield

Economic and Racial Segregation in Greater Miami's Elementary Schools: Trends Shaping Metropolitan Growth

Anne Discher, Myron Orfield and Tom Luce — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Findings

An analysis of race and poverty trends in Miami-area elementary schools between 1993 and 2001 reveals that:

The elementary school student population in the Miami metropolitan area is growing rapidly, but the growth is very unbalanced. Regionwide, enrollment increased by 22 percent between 1993 and 2001. Miami-Dade County's elementary enrollment grew by 15 percent, while Broward County's enrollment grew by 35 percent. But some outlying communities in the region saw much faster growth—in some cases as high as 85 percent.

The region's two school districts became poorer over this period, and the degree of income segregation worsened. The number of low-income students in the Miami region grew 33 percent between 1993 and 2001. By 2001, 51 percent of the region's total elementary students were eligible for free lunches, up from 47 percent in 1993. Poor students were also more likely to attend school with other poor students at the end of the period. The share of students who would have had to change schools to achieve an identical mix of poor and non-poor students in each building edged up two percentage points, to 51 percent.

As the region's schools became more diverse, racial segregation eased slightly but remained severe. Miami-area students became a more diverse group between 1993 and 2001. Hispanic enrollment grew by 57 percent and black enrollment grew by 17 percent, while white enrollment decreased by 10 percent. Growth patterns contributed to lingering segregation. Approximately two-thirds of the growth in Hispanic enrollment was in Miami-Dade County schools, while nearly all of the growth in black enrollment took place in Broward County. The number of white students held steady in Broward and declined 29 percent in Miami-Dade.

The region's most dramatic social changes are taking place in the suburbs. While still at alarming levels, poverty and segregation rates in the central city are stabilizing. The most dramatic social changes are taking place in inner suburban communities, which often must address growing need with dwindling fiscal resources.

The concentration of poor and minority students in a particular school can fuel the flight of middle-class families from the surrounding neighborhood. These changes contribute to a vicious cycle of sprawl and disinvestment from existing communities. To help reverse some of these patterns, state and local leaders should explore reforms in land use, taxes, and regional governance.

Downloads

Download

Authors

Anne Discher
Myron Orfield
Tom Luce

Valuing America's First Suburbs: A Policy Agenda for Older Suburbs in the Midwest

Myron Orfield and Robert Puentes — Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Older, inner-ring (or "first") suburbs have their own unique set of assets and challenges that set them apart from newer suburban areas further out from the core of metropolitan areas, but also from their center cities.

Despite their assets, many first suburbs are beginning to experience challenges normally associated with age and disinvestment. In many places, the stresses they face are beginning to hamper their ability to remain, or become, economically competitive.

This report finds that, unfortunately, first suburbs are caught in a policy blindspot. They tend to not be poor enough to qualify for federal and state aid and not large enough to receive federal and state funds directly.

The authors call upon the Federal and state governments to do more to help strengthen the health and vitality of first suburbs before they become the next ring of decline. Coalitions of first suburban leaders can work to change the "rules of the development game" to ensure more balanced transportation, land use, economic development and reinvestment policies that are focused specifically on the unique issues and challenges they face.

Downloads

Download

Authors

American Metropolitics : The New Suburban Reality

Myron Orfield — Wed, 27 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Brookings Institution Press 2002 222pp.

In 1998, Myron Orfield introduced a revolutionary program for combating the seemingly inevitable decline of America's metropolitan communities. Through a combination of demographic research, state-of-the-art mapping, and resourceful, pragmatic politics, his groundbreaking book, Metropolitics, revealed how the different regions of St. Paul and Minneapolis pulled together to create a regional government powerful enough to tackle the community's problems of sprawl and urban decay.

Orfield's new work, American Metropolitics, applies the next generation of cutting-edge research on a much broader scale. The book provides an eye-opening analysis of the economic, racial, environmental, and political trends of the 25 largest metropolitan regions in the United States-which contain more than 45 percent of the U.S. population. Using detailed maps and case studies, Orfield demonstrates that growing social separation and wasteful sprawling development patterns are harming regional citizens wherever they live.

The first section of the book, "Metropatterns," illustrates a common pattern of growing social separation and wasteful sprawling development throughout the country-a condition that limits opportunity for the poor (particularly people of color), diminishes the quality of life for most Americans, and threatens our fragile environment. It also shows how these patterns reveal the existence of three types of suburban communities-those at risk of social and economic decline, those struggling to pay for rapid growth, and a very small number of places that enjoy the benefits of economic growth with few social costs. Ironically, this last group is often the center of the movement against sprawl. "Metropolicy," the second section, analyzes past policies and programs that have attempted-and failed-to address the challenges of concentrated poverty, sprawl, and inequitable distribution of resources. Orfield lays out a comprehensive regional agenda to address these problems, with solutions for land use planning from a regional perspective, greater fiscal equity among local governments (with an emphasis on reinvestment in the central cities and older suburbs), and improved governance at the regional level that will help facilitate the development of policies to benefit all types of metropolitan communities. The third section, "Metropolitics," discusses examples of political strategies that have led to successful programs on land use planning, tax equity, and regional governance. Using detailed analysis of 1990's election data it identifies and maps the nation's swing political jurisdictions which are overwhelmingly in at-risk and growth-stressed suburbs. Finally, the book draws a new and incisive picture of the political structure of U.S. metropolitan regions, and lays out a series of strategies for moving regional reform efforts forward.

With detailed maps of conditions in each metropolitan region, comprehensive data on existing conditions and voter attitudes, and bold, innovative strategies for change, American Metropolitics is an important book for anyone concerned with the future of our cities and suburbs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Myron Orfield

Downloads

Sample Chapter

Ordering Information:

{CD2E3D28-0096-4D03-B2DE-6567EB62AD1E}, 978-0-8157-0248-1, $62.5 Order
{9ABF977A-E4A6-41C8-B030-0FD655E07DBF}, 978-0-8157-0249-8, $32.95 Order

The American Metropolis: Are We Growing in the Right Direction?

Fri, 21 May 1999 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

May 21, 1999
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT

Co-Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy

The purpose of this conference was to tie together economic research and practical experience on the issue of metropolitan growth and development. Panels discussed the costs and benefits of metropolitan growth; the way government policies and the market influence growth; school quality as a key component of economic development; and metropolitan governance and politics. The keynote speaker, Alice Rivlin, vice chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, discussed her work, not as an economist but as a practitioner, as head of the Control Board for the city of Washington, D.C. She explained the opportunities and challenges ahead for Washington and its entire region.

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

reserveboard

Conflict or Consensus? Forty Years of Minnesota Metropolitan Politics

Myron Orfield — Tue, 01 Sep 1998 00:00:00 -0400

Skeptics tell me that regional equity reform will never happen in America's metropolitan regions because the suburbs are now in charge of American politics. It may be true that the suburbs are in charge of American politics. But the politics of metropolitan reform is not about cities versus suburbs or, for that matter, about Democrats versus Republicans.

Downloads

Download

Authors

Myron Orfield

Metropolitics: Coalitions for Regional Reforms

Myron Orfield — Mon, 01 Dec 1997 00:00:00 -0500

"It couldn't happen here." Not in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. We thought we were immune to the urban decline, inner-suburban decay, and urban sprawl that had blighted so many other American cities. We were reform minded. Our philanthropic and governmental centers were coordinated and responsive. But with the 1980s, the all-too-familiar patterns of metropolitan polarization—the push of concentrated poverty and the pull of concentrated resources—indisputably showed up right here at home.

Polarization begins with the initial concentration of poverty in the city core and the consequent disinvestment and middle-class flight. Waves of socio-economic decline roll outward from the city center astonishingly fast, with deeply distressed communities, like disposable cities, marking their passage. Strict zoning rules and competition for tax base by developing fringe communities lead to wasteful, low-density overdevelopment. Spending on infra-structure, such as highways and sewers, in the developing suburbs drains more resources from the built community. The increase of property wealth in prosperous outer suburbs and the decline of property wealth in central city and inner suburbs represent an inter-regional transfer of tax base from some of the poorest and most troubled communities in American society to some of the most thriving and affluent.

Since the 1993 session of the Minnesota state legislature, a powerful reform coalition in the Twin Cities has been fighting back. Spurred by the advent of cheap, accessible cartographic software whose mapping of demographic and economic data graphically delineated their shared plight, the central core, the older suburbs, and the developing low-tax-base suburbs on the periphery have joined forces. They have stretched across the metropolitan divide in support of a regional reform agenda that includes fair housing, property tax-base sharing, reinvestment, and revitalized regional governance.

The Push of Concentrated Need

During the 1980s, Minnesota's Twin Cities became the nation's fourth fastest "ghettoizing" region. Inner-city tracts with more than 40 percent of their residents in poverty tripled from 11 to 32; their population grew from 24,420 to 79,081. Surrounding these ghetto neighborhoods, "transitional" neighborhoods (between 20 percent and 40 percent of their people in poverty) expanded from 43 to 57 census tracts, from 102,682 to 153,700 people.

As it does in every city it visits, the residential concentration of poverty in the Twin Cities created social repercussions far greater than the sum of its parts. Physical separation from jobs and middle-class role models, as well as dependence on a dysfunctional welfare system, devalued education and work in the eyes of inner-city residents. Social isolation fostered what some experts have termed an "oppositional culture" and contributed to soaring crime.

By 1994, both Twin Cities' central cities were struggling under a disproportionate share of concentrated poverty—and racial segregation. More than half the children in the Minneapolis school system were on free or reduced-cost lunch. Minority student enrollment had risen to 59 percent. Saint Paul suffered the same lot. Both core cities lost one-third of their preschool white children.

Crime and joblessness soared. In the poorest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities, violent crime rates were 10 times the metro average, 30 times the suburban average. And as social needs multiplied in the inner city, the financial resources to address them dwindled. In Minneapolis, residential property around the expanding poverty core lost 10-25 percent of its value over a five-year period, and businesses decamped for the exclusive suburbs.

The chaos did not stop neatly at central-city borders but spread into working-class inner-ring suburbs. By 1994 most inner-suburban school districts were gaining poor children—and minority children—faster than Minneapolis. Eighteen of 29 inner-ring cities had lost large numbers of white preschool children. The inner suburbs were the only place in the region except the city core where crime was increasing. And lacking the central city's business district and elite neighborhood tax base, social welfare and police infrastructure, and organized political network, the inner suburbs faced prospects even bleaker than those of the core cities.

The Pull of Concentrated Resources

At the edge of the Twin Cities metropolitan region, the most prosperous developing communities used restrictive zoning to exclude "undesirables" and build a broad, rich tax base to keep services high and taxes low. The "favored quarter" (a term coined by the real estate industry) dominated economic growth. During the 1980s the Twin Cities' prosperous southern and western edge suburbs, with 27 percent of the region's people, had 61 percent of the region's new jobs. They also enjoyed the region's largest property tax base growth. Two communities in particular, Eden Prairie and Minnetonka, together had the same commercial-industrial tax base as Saint Paul ($1.5 billion), but only one-third as many residents and, unlike Saint Paul, virtually no poor people. Southwestern suburban schools enjoyed insulated, stable prosperity and high achievement. Neighborhood crime rates, already low, steadily declined.

But these neighborhoods are closed to all but the prosperous. The zoning practices of the southwestern suburbs—almost no new apartment buildings, large lots for single-family homes, and other regulatory barriers—prevent lower-income workers from reaching for opportunity and keep the marketplace from responding to their quest for affordable housing. Not surprisingly, a metropolitan mismatch has developed between where the jobs are and where the people who need them are. More and more people are bused—on what one worker riding them dubbed "Soweto Expresses"—from the city to minimum-wage jobs in the southwestern suburbs. Thousands of jobs go unfilled for lack of workers.

What's more, over the past two decades, state, metropolitan, and local governments in Minnesota have spent billions of dollars building freeways and sewer systems in the Twin Cities' southwestern suburbs. Of the $1.1 billion spent during the 1980s on new highways for the entire metropolitan area, 75 percent went to the southwestern suburbs. In addition, in the mid-1980s, the state legislature adopted a system of sewer financing by which the core of the metro region subsidized the construction and operation of new sewer capacity in the most exclusive suburban areas. By 1992, the central cities were paying more than $6 million a year to help move their middle-class households and businesses to the edge of the region.

But not all the communities on the periphery are doing so well. Opposite the favored quarter lie blue-collar developing suburbs. They too tried to win the fiscal zoning battle. But instead of expensive housing and commercial industrial properties, they had to settle for modest homes, apartment buildings, and trailer parks, and few businesses. The patterns of metropolitan polarization played a cruel joke on these middle-income families. Fleeing the breakdown of the central cities and inner suburbs, they arrived in rapidly growing school districts with small tax bases. The results are poorly planned, badly functioning communities. Their schools, for example, have some of the highest drop-out and lowest college attendance rates in the Twin Cities region.

A Regional Agenda

The forces of metropolitan polarization exact immense costs in terms of human and governmental waste, an overtaxed and overregulated business climate, environmental destruction through poor land use, and balkanization of political life. Although polarization takes its toll on cities as a whole, the spotlight most often shines on the havoc wreaked on the inner cities.

Traditionally both Democratic and Republican policymakers have tried—the former through government-aided empowerment, the latter through private strategies to impose discipline—to solve the problems of America's inner cities in place by turning their disadvantaged residents into more successful, more middle-class people. Most people agree that a strong middle-class presence is indeed necessary for healthy, stable communities. But transforming dense clusters of poor people into middle-class people is extraordinarily hard. The difficulty is not poor people themselves, but the unnatural concentration of poverty and the attendant flight, disinvestment, and crime. Only by deconcentrating poverty can these other problems be addressed.

Deconcentration helps solve the problems of poverty on two levels. For individuals, it opens access to opportunity in the form of jobs, unstressed schools, and adequate local services. For a community, it breaks poverty down into more manageable pieces. By alleviating overwhelming social and fiscal stress on cities and older suburbs, it stabilizes community decline and creates metropolitan stability.

Most of the nation's urbanologists know what needs to be done to deconcentrate poverty. Regional reform in fair housing is the first step. The regulatory barriers to affordable housing in prosperous edge suburbs must come down. Once affordable housing is built at the metropolitan periphery, the expansion of the urban and suburban distressed areas will slow and ultimately stop. And a little "pull" in terms of affordable housing continually achieved at the edge of a metropolitan area can make a huge difference. In a study of 40 of the nation's largest cities, Brookings's Anthony Downs found that if 5 percent of the new development in the 1980s had been set aside for subsidized housing, it would have allowed almost 13 percent of the inner-city households in distressed neighborhoods to move to developing, job-rich communities. Over several decades, progress could be considerable.

A second, and complementary, step is property tax-base sharing. For example, a certain portion of commercial, industrial, or residential property taxes on high valued homes could be shared regionwide. As long as basic local services are dependent on local property wealth, property tax-base sharing is a critical component of metropolitan stability. Its purposes, all interrelated, are fivefold. Property tax-base sharing: (1) creates equity in the provision of public services, (2) breaks the intensifying metropolitan mismatch between social needs and property taxþbased resources, (3) undermines local fiscal incentives supporting exclusive zoning, (4) undermines local fiscal incentives supporting sprawl, and (5) ends intra-metropolitan competition for tax base.

Part of the revenue could go into a redevelopment fund to increase housing opportunities in the suburbs and help the market rebuild the core. The fund would be a self-correcting solution to the problem of regional investment skewed disproportionately to the wealthiest suburbs, for the wealthy communities that have gained the most from recent regional infrastructure investment would be the largest contributors to the fund.

The redevelopment fund could be used to construct a variety of market-rate housing in affluent communities for households earning more than 50 percent of the metropolitan median income. For those earning less, the market will not, by itself, provide opportunities. Outside resources will be needed to underwrite low-income housing-based on a system of portable rental vouchers and scattered as broadly as possible to forestall mini-concentrations of poverty.

Finally, these steps toward deconcentration and revitalization should take place as part of a regional master plan approved by a regional governing agency or, in its absence, by the state legislature.

Metropolitics

In an ideal world, regional reform, as envisioned by the experts, would grow naturally out of popular consensus emerging from a broad regional perspective based on the common good. But the common good and the regional perspective, like truth, beauty, and justice, do not exist in some ideal form. In the end the closest approximation to a regional perspective comes from a fair contest of ideas, values, and perspectives among the elected representatives of the people. From these contests, real reform can emerge, but the process is always hard and often controversial.

Pundits have argued that regional reform of the nation's metropolitan areas is impossible because of the political dominance of the suburbs. While suburban dominance is as much in evidence in the Twin Cities as elsewhere, it is also true that the region's suburban communities are not a monolith with common experiences and political needs. Indeed, what prompted the building of the Twin Cities reform coalition was the discovery of the commonality of interests between the city core and the inner and low tax-base suburbs.

Americaþs working-class suburbs have been a loose cannon politically since Hubert Humphrey lost the White House in 1968—and since Archie Bunker became a Republican. As E. J. Dionne, Stanley Greenberg, Kevin Phillips and others have noted, these communities are central to holding and maintaining a ruling political coalition nationally. They also hold the balance of power on metropolitan issues.

On the merits, these blue-collar suburbs are the biggest prospective winners in regional reform. To them, regional fair housing policy means, over time, fewer units of subsidized housing crowding their doorstep. Property tax-base sharing means lower property taxes and better services, particularly better-funded schools. Once understood, this combination is unbeatable.

In 1993, after two years of constant cajoling and courting—and after constant reminders of the growing inequities among the suburbs—the Twin Cities' working-class suburbs joined the central cities and created a metro-majority coalition in the state legislature. In 1994, the coalition passed the Metropolitan Reorganization Act, which placed all regional sewer, transit, and land use planning under the operational authority of the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities. In doing so, it transformed the Met Council from a $40-million-a-year planning agency to an $600-million-a-year regional government. In both 1993 and 1994, the legislature passed sweeping fair housing bills. Both were vetoed by the Republican governor, but in 1995 a weakened version was finally signed. In 1995, the legislature also passed a bill that significantly increased the existing regional tax-sharing system known as "fiscal disparities." That bill too was vetoed.

The legislative road has been controversial and bumpy, but the reform movement is growing. In 1994, regional churches, environmental groups, communities of color, community development agencies, and other good-government groups formed the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability. As the alliance gains visibility and develops a common language and agenda, the potential for broad-based regional action increases.

The lessons learned in the Twin Cities are transferrable. Policymakers who face rapid polarization in metropolitan communities elsewhere can take advantage of them as well. The local coalitions that are beginning to take action in the Twin Cities can be built over and over again.

Authors

Myron Orfield

Metropolitics : A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Revised Edition)

Myron Orfield — Wed, 29 Jan 1997 00:00:00 -0500

Brookings Institution Press 1997 244pp.

Metropolitan communities across the country are facing the same, seemingly unsolvable problems: the concentration of poverty in central cities, with flashpoints of increasing crime and segregation; declining older suburbs and vulnerable developing suburbs; and costly urban sprawl, with upper-middle-class residents and new jobs moving further and further out to an insulated, favored quarter. Exacerbating this polarization, the federal government has largely abandoned urban policy. Most officials, educators, and citizens have been at a loss to create workable solutions to these complex, widespread trends. And until now, there has been no national discussion to adequately and practically address the future of America's metropolitan regions.

Metropolitics is the story of how demographic research and state-of-the-art mapping, together with resourceful and pragmatic politics, built a powerful political alliance between the central cities, declining inner suburbs, and developing suburbs with low tax bases. In an unprecedented accomplishment, groups formerly divided by race and class--poor minority groups and blue-collar suburbanites--together with churches, environmental groups, and parts of the business community, began to act in concert to stabilize their communities.

The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul believed that they were immune from the forces of central city decline, urban sprawl, and regional polarization, but the 1980s hit them hard. The number of poor and minority children in central-city schools doubled from 25 to 50 percent, segregation rapidly increased, distressed urban neighborhoods grew at the fourth fastest rate in the United States, and the murder rate in Minneapolis surpassed that of New York City.

These changes tended to accelerate and intensify as they reached middle- and working-class bedroom communities, which were less able to respond and went into transition far more rapidly. On the other side of the region, massive infrastructure investment and exclusive zoning were creating a different type of community. In white-collar suburbs with high tax bases, where only 27 percent of the region's population lived, 61 percent of the region's new jobs were created. As the rest of the region struggled, these communities pulled away physically and financially.

In this powerful book, Myron Orfield details a regional agenda and the political struggle that accompanied the creation of the nation's most significant regional government and the enactment of land use, fair housing, and tax-equity reform legislation. He shows the link between television and talk radio sensationalism and bad public policy and, conversely, how a well-delivered message can ensure broad press coverage of even complicated issues.

Metropolitics and the experience of the Twin Cities show that no American region is immune from pervasive and difficult problems. Orfield argues that the forces of decline, sprawl, and polarization are too large for individual cities and suburbs to confront alone. The answer lies in a regional agenda that promotes both community and stability.

Copublished with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Myron Orfield

Ordering Information:

{9ABF977A-E4A6-41C8-B030-0FD655E07DBF}, 0-8157-6639-4, 22.95 Order
{CD2E3D28-0096-4D03-B2DE-6567EB62AD1E}, 0-8157-6640-8, 28.95 Order
{9ABF977A-E4A6-41C8-B030-0FD655E07DBF}, 978-0-8157-6639-1, $22.95 Order
{CD2E3D28-0096-4D03-B2DE-6567EB62AD1E}, 978-0-8157-6640-7, $29.95 Order