Colin Gordon (2)

Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (2008): Long review, because I may need this for my notes later. There’s been some excellent work on St. Louis and its suburbs, and the role of property law in producing the situation there, after Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson. Gordon’s book provides excellent background on how St. Louis and its suburbs got the racial and economic configurations they have, which are both typical of U.S. urban areas and also uniquely concentrated (St. Louis has long been one of the most segregated urban areas in the U.S., which is a real feat). There’s a companion website with very good interactive maps, recommended.

Gordon emphasizes that what looks like private choice—white flight to the suburbs, black concentration in declining urban areas—has long been driven by public policy. Public policy, in turn, reinforced the effects of private discrimination and violence. St. Louis was both a harbinger—events there often occurred earlier than elsewhere, but along the same lines—and an outlier because Missouri enabled so much political fragmentation that neighboring municipalities incorporated both to avoid having to pay taxes to the city but also so that they could compete to be most “favorable” to business and to wealthy homeowners, ensuring further starvation of the city’s tax base. Gordon quotes Myron Orfield, explaining that local suburbs mastered “the art of skimming the cream from metropolitan growth while accepting as few metropolitan responsibilities as possible.” Urban renewal, since the early decades of the twentieth century, aimed at displacing African-American residents from the areas in which they were concentrated without replacing their housing, which seems quixotic yet persisted through generations of efforts. Other solutions to the decline of the city, like better freeways and more parking, actually accelerated its decline by making it more attractive for anyone who could do so to live in the suburbs. Ultimately, these dynamics undermined the victories of the civil rights movement, because suburban jobs and good schools were out of reach to poor African-Americans even if they couldn’t legally be excluded from them.

Tax incentives also participated in the region’s beggar-thy-neighbor policies—municipalities would grant huge tax breaks to businesses to get them to locate within a place, but basically that just meant that the businesses would be able to play different suburbs and the city against each other, resulting in lower revenues for everyone. From the mid-1950s, tax policy also encouraged new building over renovation of older commercial properties, which sent retailers fleeing to the suburbs and contributed to the deterioration of the city and inner suburbs. “Tax increment financing,” which allowed municipalities to borrow money on the promise of repaying it from taxes, attracted only the safest bets outside the city and amounted to public subsidies for malls in wealthy areas. One suburban mall was declared “blighted” and eligible for $30 million in tax increment financing because it lacked an upscale anchor store like Nordstrom’s. The city’s western suburbs ultimately began “blighting” stable retail areas “in a bidding war for bigger and better shopping malls.” Tax increment financing diverted money from schools to repay the investors, so it was actually worse than zero-sum.

Outer suburbs like Ladue used spot zoning (changing the zoning for a particular parcel once there was a developer’s application to do so) so that they could pick and choose between commercial uses and get only high-end ones. After all, one Ladue resident noted in 1945, everyone in Ladue had a car and could easily reach anything else that was desired. There was no standard for judging a need for commercial development other than the word of a developer itself; officials would commonly reject unsubsidized development—that is, stuff the free market was willing to build—in order to get “better,” tax financed commercial development such as a big-box retailer or an upscale department store.

But commercial and multifamily residences paid more in taxes—in 1972, the County estimated that the lowest-density single-family residential zones cost it over $20,000/year, while apartment zones netted tax revenue over $16,000. So local planners often tried to develop small apartments for singles, students, young couples, and retirees, which critics called “hysterectomy zoning” for its efforts to exclude school-age children.

As for individuals/families, racially restrictive covenants and federal subsidies for (white) homebuyers encouraged white flight into the suburbs from the 1930s on. Black people also wanted to move to better places, but were often restricted; of the 70,000 housing units built in the city and county between 1947 and 1952, fewer than 35 were available to African-Americans. The Federal Housing Administration codified existing redlining, deeming areas unworthy of investment because they were where black people lived, and then the subsequent unavailibility of investment ensured that those same areas would deteriorate by comparison to areas getting funding. A repeated theme is the hope that, somehow, blacks would just disappear: plans were made in which they’d just … drop off the map. For example, the FHA designation for D areas, usually triggered by the “infiltration” of a black community, said “the only hope is for the demolition of these buildings and transition of the area into a business district.”

Even after racial restrictions were formally lifted, realtors steered them to black neighborhoods, and Gordon says that in the late 1960s most blacks who did so moved to get ahead of the bulldozers coming to their “blighted” neighborhoods, whereas whites moved “largely to escape the path of racial transition.” African-Americans were steered to old homes, not new construction, and often offered only bad mortgages.

The result was a “white noose” around the city. Suburbs zoned for the maximum number of large single-family homes, excluding multifamily housing whenever they could, in a process of carving up the metropolis and taking the best parts for themselves. Children in cheap houses were of special concern, because they’d burden the schools without paying enough in taxes. “By the 1960s, suburban city planners generally considered even a duplex a ‘nuisance’ under the police power, agreeing with single-family homeowners that such uses were ‘annoying to them, interfered with their proper use and enjoyment of their homes, and tended to depreciate the value of their homes.’” Ferguson and Bellefontaine Neighbors, two inner-ring suburbs, rezoned to get rid of allowances for duplexes and smaller lots (even that couldn’t keep poor people out forever, given their proximity to the city; but it’s worked fine for Ladue). Inner-ring suburbs ultimately began to look more like the city, underzoned with multifamily housing in commercial districts (because zoning usually allows “higher” uses in commercial/industrial areas, and “higher” uses are residential uses).

Areas in St. Louis county repeatedly incorporated so that they could exclude black people/poor people and adopt single-family zoning, once it seemed necessary to do so. Zoning was often the whole point, to the exclusion of other traditional city services: in 1957, of 86 St. Louis County municipalities surveyed, only 33 had more than one paid police officer; only 17 had full-time fire personnel; only 2 had health departments. This “expulsive zoning” included “underzoning” in the city, which is the practice of allowing unpleasant commercial and industrial uses in neighborhoods that have lots of residences—but only in African-American areas. “In the short term, this pattern denied those neighborhoods protection from commercial or industrial development. In the longer term, it hardened the view that black occupancy was a nonconforming blight on the central city and paved the way for its displacement under urban renewal.”

These suburbs zoned to maximize their own tax bases, often trying to grab unincorporated land nearby as long as it was already developed for commercial use or single-family residential use. From 1979 through 1987, municipalities were allowed to opt out of the countywide sales tax and claim local revenues, giving them an incentive to allow particular commercial developments. The resulting “patchwork of political authority” was amazing: in 2000, there were 233 incorporated municipalities in the metro area, 91 in St. Louis County alone; these overlapped with about 500 school districts and nearly 100 other special taxing districts or authorities. In Richmond Heights, for example, residents were governed by the city; a fire district; St. Louis County; four school districts; the City-County Zoo-Museum District; the Metropolitan Sewer District; and two junior college subdistricts. As of 1997, there were 789 distinct political units, nearly three times the average for large metro areas in per capita terms.

The 1980 Hancock Amendment was the nail in the coffin: it banned new or increased local taxes without a popular referendum, leading to reliance on local licenses and fees (and lots and lots of fines, as post-Ferguson reporting has noted)—turning property taxes from a source of revenue to a tool that could basically only be lowered for the aforementioned competition for businesses. The gap between available revenues and need for services increased drastically in the city, while a suburb with large-lot single family homes and a big shopping mall generated “stable revenues and minimal demands.” Urban renewal further destroyed the tax base in order to save it by limiting and exempting developers from taxes for decades in return for their participation in building new things in the city.

Meanwhile, public housing deepened segregation: public housing projects were all-white or all-black, and often drew from the very mixed neighborhoods that were targeted for destruction because of black “infiltration.” To quote scholar Gary Orfield, this was a policy of “federally-funded, locally-administered residential segregation and resegregation.”

Urban decay and slum clearance became the justification for urban renewal projects, but somehow (remember that “only hope”?) the projects ended up aimed at helping out businesses and building roads, not reconstructing good housing. As of 1989, $2 billion in government investment in the city had generated “28 million square feet of commercial development and fewer than 7,000 residential units.” Planners rejected building new housing in poor neighborhoods because it would be a magnet for more poor people. Urban renewal in the outer suburbs, meanwhile, targeted and destroyed the three most established African-American communities outside the city. Displaced people were expected to go to public housing or, ideally, just disappear; many of the displaced African-Americans never even received the relocation assistance they were supposed to get. “[D]isplaced familes faced both the stark racial logic of the region’s private housing market and the candid determination of redevelopment officials to encourage African Americans to move ‘back’ to the City.”

Gordon concludes that the racial assumptions and prejudices that guided the diagnosis of the city’s problems made the solutions counterproductive or, at best, unhelpful. Cities are more productive, more environmentally friendly, and they have better jobs than the suburbs do, not least because concentration of workers makes unionization easier. The solutions are the usual anti-sprawl New Urbanist prescriptions, but as a matter of easing the racist legacy of a century of law and policy.… (altro)