The Sprawling of America

john powell,
Sonosky Professor of Law and Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Executive Director of the Institute on Race and Poverty

Q: I'd like to divide this into two parts and start with history, the history of cities. What existed before World War II in terms of black communities in cities like Detroit?

A: Well, there has always been a black presence in cities like Detroit and throughout the country. Although before World War II that presence was very small, and some of those communities you had a very stable (and Detroit in particular had a very stable) community. The church played a very significant role. Before World War II, many of the jobs were menial or service jobs. At the beginning of World War II that started to change. It started to change for a number of reasons. The economy in the South was undergoing transformation and blacks were starting to leave the South in large numbers. Historically, the country has sort of preferred European labor to black labor to deal with its labor crisis, but World War I interrupted that, and during World War I we saw a large migration of blacks, fairly large migration of blacks, to places like Detroit and Chicago. And then after the war we sort of went back to our European pull. And then World War II sort of created another break. So you had these very tight communities where the church played a very substantial role. And when there started to be a labor shortage in Detroit in the '40's, with the arsenal democracy, which is what Detroit was called, initially Ford (whom, as you know, has a history of being anti-Semitic and racist in many regards) - but it did reach out to the black community. He reached out initially to the black leadership and black churches, and there was sort of a patronage. You know, it's like, "I need a black worker." And the person would come through the church and the minister would send for the worker. Well that became unwieldy as the demand became so great and Ford, in particular River Rouge, became just an incredible place where blacks would have got in. And initially also there had been resistance from the Union because when blacks in the '30's had tried to get in, they were generally kept out of the labor market except for scabs. And so there was this hostility between the unions and blacks and, as you know, the UAW and CIO changed that in the '30's and started basically embracing blacks and changed their fairly racist policies of the '20's and '30s and prior to that of exclusion of blacks. So the '40's saw a huge transformation. And the number of blacks from 1940 to 1950 doubled in Detroit. It was during that same period that you have this expansion in terms of population. There was no housing being built. All of our extra energy, if you will, was going to fight in the War. So there was sort of this pent up demand for housing. And, you know, the big race riot in Detroit was not in 1967, it was in 1942, where I think something like 27 blacks were killed and the police were sort of complicit in sort of allowing it, because the country wasn't - even though there was a need for black labor and the population sort of exploded, there wasn't sort of the real infrastructure politically and socially to welcome blacks. So that was sort of the condition. And my parents, interestingly enough, were part of that wave. They came to Detroit in 1943, and Detroit was a bustling town. There was no housing in Detroit, there were no empty lots in Detroit, Detroit was the land of opportunity. There were good jobs for anybody - virtually anybody who wanted. There was racial tension, but there was still a lot of opportunity compared to the South.

Q: In those communities like Paradise Valley, one gets the sense there is a great deal of concentration, a great deal of autonomy.

A: Oh that's certainly true. I mean they owned their own paper, they owned businesses. And there was some real ambivalence. I mean it's actually interesting because as we moved to the '50's and even before then, the black middle class and upper middle class started really trying to get out because the conditions were deteriorating. But there was also a - some resistance to really opening up the entire city and the entire region for all blacks by the black middle class and black businesses because they realized that they had a captive market. And it was a captive market. And so even though the sort of elite both benefited from that situation, and at some point wanted to sort of relieve themselves of it, they didn't want the situation to totally change. Now of course this was before 1954, so Jim Crow was still the law of the land. We had explicit segregated housing patterns that were supported by the federal government and by state and local officials. So I mean one of the things I often said that the amount of segregation, which actually intensified in the '40's and '50's and '60's could not have occurred simply based on personal animosity. It needed some institutional and structural things in place. But initially, yes, you had a very vibrant community, a very intact community, and a community that was relatively healthy.

Q: You mentioned elite a minute ago in Detroit. Who were these elite? Do you know any of the names of some?

A: Well, there were some - and I don't know as many names, but there were certainly ministers, there were undertakers. Before we got on camera we were talking about the Diggs, they became a very prominent family in Detroit. They buried a lot of people in Detroit. My father's still there, he's 80 years old, he knows many of these people. And I remember - I was sort of young, but I remember the, sort of Joe Louis coming out of the factory in Detroit. So there were people who ran newspapers and there were people - there were people who loaned money. They couldn't get money from banks for many then so in a sense, like immigrant communities, they created their own infrastructure to support themselves. Like I said, there's a wonderful exhibit of this, I'm sure you've seen it, at the African-American museum in Detroit, with pictures of the different communities - Black Bottom, Paradise. I don't know many of the names, but if you're inclined, I would say go talk to my father!

Q: Were neighborhoods a cohesive center of culture and life within the African-American community? Did they operate on their own?

A: Oh sure. I mean it's interesting, you sort of hear of the Harlem Renaissance, which is real. I mean you had tremendous - the Mississippi Blues coming from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, the Harlem Renaissance. A lot of people don't realize that Detroit was really the sort of home of jazz. You know, you had a whole vibrant cultural community in place that really stayed there in many ways, probably until the late '60's. It's not an accident that Motown came from Detroit, and a lot of people don't realize that Motown had its roots in jazz. It came out of the jazz community. And the music of Motown was in a sense much tighter than much of the popular music of the time, but it sort of built on that Detroit culture.

Q: You touched a little bit on federal loan programs in the city, but talk about as best you can the impact of FHA in terms of how it loaned money and the things that it demanded for African-Americans, or whites really - the way they loaned out money to people.

A: Well, you know, the history of FHA is really probably one of the sorriest histories in our society in some regards, and yet some historians have said the single most institution in the last 5 years in America has been FHA. And I think both of those statements are probably true. FHA, which was started in the '30's, picked up the appraisal and lending practice of the Homeowners Loan Corporation, which essentially created redlining on a national level. I mean there was already racial segregation in the housing industry, but it wasn't nationalized, it wasn't institutionalized, it was individuals doing it, it was a lender here doing it, or a banker here doing it. The Homeowners Loan Corporation basically nationalized appraising and it made it a uniform system across the country. At the same time (this is in the '30's) it created four categories, with green being the best and red being the worst. And one of the things that made a community red was if it had - if the language was inharmonious racial groups. And what they really meant was non-whites. And in fact, if a community had Jews in it, it could not get the green rating. And any community that had blacks or might have blacks, would more often than not get the red rating. And FHA and the federal government went around to lenders and literally showed them how to do what they call residential maps and how to draw red lines around certain areas that weren't safe for loaning money. And before they did that (this is the 1930's and '40's, remember, so the middle of the Depression) in order to buy a home in the United States, many lenders required that you put 30, 40, or 50 percent down, and that the loan potentially would be amortized within five years. Needless to say, most Americans couldn't buy a home. So here comes the federal government, and they say, We're going to change this. You only have to put 10 percent down, and we're going to give you 25 to 30 years to pay off the loan. And if you're a VA after 1940's, you don't have to put anything down. It literally became cheaper to buy than to rent. But, it said, We want to live in a racially - essentially racial homogenous community - all-white community - and we prefer new construction to existing units. Which means out of the city. So I've said in some of my writings that literally the federal government paid white people to leave the city, and did not make that money available to blacks. Not only were blacks consigned to the central city, the central city was being divested.

Q: You were just coming out and talking about FHA and you were beginning to say that they basically subsidized white flight or paid for white flight.

A: So the federal government literally created the suburbs. I mean there's always been suburbanization in the United States, but up until World War II it essentially was for the rich, because the assumption was if you bought a new home, you would pay cash for it, you wouldn't take out a mortgage, that was considered tacky. And there was annexation all across the country, so cities, including Detroit, were able to for a period of time actually expand by annexing its suburbs - expanding suburbs. All that changed as blacks started coming in more. It's interesting also because you have to think about what was going on historically at this time. We were fighting a war against racism. We were sending American soldiers across an ocean to fight races, and then we had racism officially right here in our country. So there's this incredible ambivalence. And the country responded to it incredibly ambivalently. In a sense - and the Civil Rights Movement that basically said, Ok, we gotta change this, we can't have segregated troops anymore. Roosevelt issued an order in terms of - it was an executive order, I think it was 880, changing some federal practices. But at the same time, whites were saying, Wait a minute, you gotta protect us from this ocean of blacks that are moving into cites and to the North from the South. And so in a way what we did is that we gave blacks civil rights laws and we gave whites white space. We created fragmented metropolitan areas so that whites could be protected from blacks while blacks at the same time had the claim of full participation in society.

Q: Before we move to that point, a little bit more history there. Talk a little bit about the attempts to create public housing in the city of Detroit all through that period from about the '40's on, and just generally some of the reaction that came down from whites to big organizations that were formed, the Sojourner Truth at one point. There were several things that were attempted.

A: Exactly. The public housing, first of all, was - a lot of it initially was seen as just a need for housing because there was a huge housing shortage, but soon it became associated with blacks and there was resistance almost at every turn. And so a neighborhood fought very strongly. There were neighborhood associations springing up, there were racially-restricted covenants. There were just all of these mechanisms put in place. But in a sense all those mechanisms were inadequate because they were individualistic. And so zoning became - if you could get out of the city and zone, it became a much more efficient way of dealing with this. Now it took years because in the 1940's there still wasn't a lot of housing being built. So there's a good ten-year period where the fight over space was all inside the city. The city was the suburb. And in the 1950's that started changing. And in a sense whites sort of conceded and said, Ok, you can have the city, we're leaving, in the '50's and '60's that started happening. And to the extent there was public housing, and we just had a big suit here in Minnesota. It also was completely segregated. People were assigned to housing by race. And once people got into the suburbs they were very clear that public housing would not follow them. Blacks would not follow them, public housing would not follow them into the suburbs. And the federal government was complicit in this also. Not only did it - it basically delegated to localities the right to sort of control all of the public housing money, all the federal money, and knowing that what that meant was it was going to be done in a racially-discriminatory way. So it basically said, Detroit, you deal with it in your own way. Chicago, you deal with it in your own way. We have very little public federal oversight to how you do this.

Q: There was an attempt to put a public housing project in Dearborn at that point, and Orville Hubbard reacted very strongly. Do you know the story?

A: I remember the story, I just remember it vaguely.

Q: This hideous quote of, "If you clean up the garbage in your backyard, you don't dump it on your neighbor's lawn."

A: Yeah. I remember growing up and literally being clear in the '60's - it was explicit that we were not supposed to go to Dearborn, and as we know, the Fords were out there and there was just a lot of - Dearborn and other communities had a very explicit racial history of exclusion. It's starting to break down now, sort of interestingly enough.

Q: Tell us a little bit about what the purpose of the (interstate) highway system was and its effect.

A: Well the stated purpose, as you know, was defense purpose. And supposedly Eisenhower saw how difficult it was to move troops, especially in Europe, and realized if there was a national emergency in the United States, we didn't have a system in place to actually move troops. And so initially the idea was that it was literally supposed to be interstate. It was supposed to move people from state to state and from city to city. That actually changed though. I mean if you think of how highways are built now, they really are not designed to get people from state to state or from city to city, they're designed to get people out of the city, and they were used. So that was sort of the stated purpose and that purpose is largely - I mean we do have a national highway system. But it was also used to destroy neighborhoods. The siting of highways was a huge issue, and sited in poor communities. We talked about the thriving communities in the '40's and '50's, a lot of those communities were broken up by saying, We need this land, (eminent domain), to build a highway. And some of those highways were never built. They cleared large blocks of land, which created a great housing shortage for blacks, and sometimes built and sometimes didn't build, but it was always at the expense of blacks. And so by and large, the highway system, while ostensibly having a military purpose, ostensibly became how to get suburbanites in and out of the city. And today, one of our largest expenditures of public money is the highways, and it really is not designed to help people in the city. Detroit, as you know, I think built the first freeway in the country - the Davis Freeway. I think it was the first freeway in the country. There was tremendous opposition to any kind of mass transit. You know, if you talk about New York, where they do have mass transit, and Bob Moses, he was explicit about how do you build a mass transit system so you keep blacks out? They build bridges so low that buses couldn't get under them, and the idea was that anybody who's going to be riding a bus, we don't want them out here. In Chicago they actually tore up part of their public transportation system because they were afraid blacks were going to use it. And in Atlanta they refused to build one. So all of these things - you know, when people talk about sprawl. And I say, Do you know what sprawl really is? Sprawl is white flight. Up until the '70's almost all the sprawl was white people fleeing the central city and really divesting from the central city in a racially explicit way. And the highway system was essentially that, because if people are going to live out in the middle of nowhere, how are they going to get back and forth? And initially the factories and the jobs were still downtown. You had to have a way to get back and forth. And so the highways became a way of solving that. And eventually, as you know, the jobs followed the people. I mean Detroit, Motor Town, there's a 20-something year history when not one automobile factory was built in the city of Detroit. They were built further and further out, which meant the people living in Detroit, which were increasingly African-Americans and other people of color (but largely African-Americans), were isolated from those jobs unless they had cars.

Q: Why was Detroit so different?

A: Well, it was only different in degree. I mean this is a national phenomenon, and every city has its story. But Detroit, unlike New York, unlike Chicago, unlike L.A., didn't have a significant third racial population. It was largely a black and white town. And that's important because if we look at these patterns, basically society has taken - has been especially hostile toward African-Americans, much less so than toward Asians or Latinos. In addition, Detroit was largely a one-industry town. And so as other cities diversified and got sort of ready for this global economy, Detroit was sort of stuck in an industrial backdrop, if you will, a retrograde. And so the thing that sort of devastated Detroit - there were a number of things that all came together. Here you had the automobile industry really dominating, you had the sort of reindustrialization or de-industrialization of the '70's that hit all over the United States, but particular hard in Detroit, and other places had other things they could fall back on. Detroit didn't have that. You also had Detroit sort of not being a port of entry for immigrants. New York, L.A., almost any major city on the East Coast has actually lost indigenous population but it's replenished it with immigrant population. Until very recently, Detroit did not have that. Detroit's population was essentially black and white Americans. So what was happening in New York was happening in Detroit in stark contrast because there was no buffer, there was no other industries, there was no other people coming in, it was literally our history in black and white.

Q: Since the 1970's and the disturbances in the inner cities, what has happened? Have things gotten better or have things gotten chronically worse?

A: It's both. I mean for example there's a guy named Paul Dragowski, he's written a book called "Poverty in Place," and he tracks concentrated poverty, which is a term that William Wilson has made popular, he's out of Chicago. And what Wilson said is that when you have a whole community living in poverty (Dr. King talked about this), it's substantially different than having individuals living in poverty. So a poor white person - and poverty is hard in America, period. But a poor white person is most likely to live in a middle class neighborhood. Their kids are going to go to a middle class school. Whereas a poor black person is more likely to live in a neighborhood where everybody else in the neighborhood is poor. So for those who have been stuck in the city, where concentrated poverty has exploded since the 1970's, things have gotten worse, and concentrated poverty is doubled in population from 1970 to 1990. That's interesting. There was an article in the paper yesterday saying the poverty rate for African-Americans is lowest in US history since we've been keeping data. So clearly things are getting better. Some people are getting out of poverty. But for those trapped in poverty, they're oftentimes trapped in the central city and isolated from opportunity, isolated from good schools, isolated from resources, and the other thing that's different since 1970, it's interesting, the Civil Rights Movement was essentially about getting access to opportunity, being part of America in real terms. What this fragmentation has done is really isolate people from opportunity. And we are more segregated jurisdictionally today than we were in 1950 before Brown. And so if you're in a segregated jurisdiction like Detroit, Detroit has, I think, something like 33 snow removal trucks. So when it snowed there a couple of years ago, they couldn't remove the snow, right. We are a city of 1/3 the size of Detroit here in Minneapolis, we have 360 snow removal trucks. So why doesn't Detroit go out and buy some? Well one of the things, once you get a city that's poor, you have a situation where its tax base is eroding. How does it get - it actually has a tax rate that's higher than the rich suburbs. So it's taxing people at a very high rate. But what it yields is very little. So it runs an infrastructure deficit. And that becomes racialized. People look at Detroit and they say, I remember Detroit in the '50's when it was really working. It's not working now. It can't work. You know, you can change mayors, and I'm not saying some mayors may or may not make mistakes, but the city is fiscally starved because we took all the resources out of the city - we depopulated the city, not just the people but in resources. We have a city, literally, built for almost two million people, where the population now is probably right around a million, maybe less than a million, and many of them poor. It would be like everybody having two homes. So that's the situation for those trapped in the city. So once you have the situation, people who can, including middle class blacks, start leaving. But then the more middle class people leave, there goes your tax base. So you have all the problems concentrated in one place, and all the resources concentrated someplace else. So it's both. For people who are trapped in the situation without those resources things have gotten much worse. For people who can get out, things have gotten better.

Q: Explain a little further what you mean by metropolitan fragmentation and how tangibly do we see it?

A: Well, the idea is that - I mean we know that we live in regions. We know that the housing market, the job market, the transportation market is a regional market. Most American travel across jurisdictional boundaries several times a day without even knowing it, without even thinking about it, to go to work, to go to the doctor's, to go grocery shopping, to go pick up their kids at school. And what we've done is created these very little boxes, these very small jurisdictions. Over half of the urban areas in the United States are a jurisdiction of less than 1,000 people. So these small, little boxes. And what are they like? They all try to exclude anyone with need and capture anyone with resources. And so that creates political fragmentation. And Detroit is sort of, again, the poster child of that. I mean if you think about school segregation. In the 1970's some black parents sued Michigan saying that they had intentionally segregated the schools. It was Milliken v. NAACP. They won. Why? Today, over 90 percent of the students are black and over 90 percent are poor. What did they win? Well, what they won, the court said - initial the law court said, Look, at this rate and the rate that Detroit is becoming isolated, they can't desegregate the schools unless they include the surrounding suburbs. The state and the school district, as far as federal law is concerned, until recently, had no standing. The federal constitution only recognized states, not cities, not school boards. But the U.S. Supreme Court said no. It said you cannot force Dearborn, you cannot force Grosse Pointe, you cannot force the 22 surrounding suburbs of Detroit to participate in the desegregation unless you can show that each one of them intentionally segregated the schools. And the people said, They did it through housing. And the Court said, We don't know why people choose their housing patterns, but maybe it's natural. And so Detroit is one of the most jurisdictionally fragmented communities and one of the most racially.

Q: How do sprawl and fragmentation work hand-in-hand and what is it that they leave behind. I mean what's in their wake?

A: Well, they're closely related, although they're different things. It's possible to have sprawl without fragmentation. It's possible to have fragmentation without sprawl, although seldom. Because the thing that sort of generated sprawl initially was both public policy and political policy, but also race. It was an effort to basically get out of the central city as millions of blacks were moving to the city. But it's not enough to get out of the central city if blacks can then follow you, and blacks would have followed if they could have. What you then need to do is close the door, and so you want to do that through fragmentation, you want to create your own little township, your own little city and develop things like exclusionary zonings, restricted covenants, racial steering, to make sure that these undesirables don't get in. You want to build a wall, which as we're talking about, Detroit literally did build a wall to keep people out. So it's a jurisdictional law to say, You don't belong in this community, this is not your community. And then you try to control resources. Now, the reality is, because we have this ambivalence, and because when you leave what you leave in the wake is devastation, you leave extreme poverty, you leave vacant lots, you leave declining tax base, you leave failing schools, you leave empty department stores. Well people who can, people who really have a choice, then will leave, and so middle class blacks and middle class Latinos say, Well wait a minute, I don't want to stay in this situation. And poor blacks and poor Latinos would say the same thing, but they don't have the resources to exercise their choice. So they move out. And when they move out, white people move further out. And you started getting this churning effect, as sort of racing, and people moving further and further out. So in a sense this sort of initial fear of blacks which caused many whites to leave and then the subsequent fear that they're going to be followed creates the sprawl. And it's interesting, one of the things I say to my students is that we all know, although we don't opt to talk about it, is that when the black moves into a middle class white neighborhood, property value is going to go down. And it's true. But the reason it goes down is not because the black moves in, it's because the white move out. We're focused on the wrong thing. And we know that because there had been a number of situations in places like Oak Park, Chicago, places like Shaker Heights, where whites did leave and blacks moved in and property values went up. It's the exit. And since these regions aren't really growing in population very much, it means that we're becoming less and less dense. It means that the infrastructure that we have in one place, we're not really using and we have to build a new infrastructure in another place. So it's also incredibly inefficient. There are some signs that we're starting to become fed up with that, not because we care about what happens to blacks, not because we care about equity, but because we care about sprawl. It's destroying farmlands, it's destroying habitats for animals, and it's creating congestion in older suburbs. I was on a panel about a year ago with the mayor from Birmingham, which 35 years ago was at the edge of the region of the Detroit metropolitan area. Now it's a suburb. 85 percent of the traffic that goes through Birmingham is pass-through. They're not stopping for gas, they're not stopping to shop, they're not stopping to go to school, they're on their way someplace else. So Birmingham is saying, Hey, wait a minute, this is not a good deal. And in a sense that's the hope because this problem really affects most Americans negatively. If it was just the city versus the suburbs, I'm afraid we still would not be able to deal with it. But now it's the city and the older suburbs. It's three-quarters of any kind of metropolitan area is affected negatively by this. And the environment is affected negatively by it. So we have places in Georgia, Atlanta, for example, has started to enact very radical policies to deal with the smog. Houston. These are not places of liberalism, and certainly not social justice. But if we're going to address these issue right, we have to really understand how race has played and continues to play an important role in both fragmentation and sprawl.

Q: I want to take you back to the zoning you just mentioned a minute ago, which is the return of whites to cities. How does that seem to be playing in the communities?

A: It's a very complicated issue and a very important issue. I'm glad you mentioned it. It's important for a number of reasons. HUD several years ago adopted a policy called HOPE 6, and the idea was, it says, Ok, you're right. Building these concentrated vertical ghettos was wrong, and we need to do something about that. We need to build stable, mixed-income neighborhoods, and that's the way that communities remain vibrant. And they're right about that. But what they did in many instances is that they said, We're going to tear down many of the public housing and we're only going to replace about one for every four that we tear down. And we'll give people vouchers and let them go into the private market to find housing. Well if there was a high vacancy rate, that strategy might work. But there's not a high-vacancy rate. There's not a high-vacancy rate in many cities in the United States. Not in Chicago, not in Minneapolis, not in San Francisco, not in Boston, and yet we're doing this all around the country. So essentially what we're doing is we're reducing the number of affordable housing at a time when a hot economy is putting tremendous need - and an influx of people is putting a tremendous need on housing. So we actually have an absolute decline of affordable housing. So what advocates oftentimes find themselves in a position of either arguing for keeping (public housing)(which is a mistake, it should have never been built), or let it be torn down, recognizing that people will have no place to go, maybe becoming homeless. Now whites are moving in, to some extent middle class blacks are moving back to the city. And in poor cities - I do a strategy where I call - talking about poor cities, middle class cities, and rich cities. San Francisco is a rich city. Detroit is a poor city. Poor cities need middle class people to move in. Detroit has somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 vacant lots. You could do a lot of building in Detroit, a lot of infield. Not just Detroit, but around the suburbs, without displacing anybody. We need - Detroit needs - tax base. They need middle class folks to move back in. San Francisco does not. But what happens in gentrification is that it's not creating mixed-income neighborhoods, it's a process where whites move in (upper middle class white and largely whites and blacks move in) and people get pushed out. And so once again, just as concentrated poverty and segregation isolated people from opportunity in the '70's and '80's, gentrification is again isolating people from opportunity. San Francisco has a huge tax base. It has a lot of opportunity. The dot com industry. But poor folks are having to go to Oakland. And now they're getting pushed out of Oakland. So not only are they losing their homes, they're once again being isolated from opportunity. So both concentrated poverty and gentrification are racial processes that isolate people from opportunity.

Q: Is this a new form of urban renewal?

A: It is new. Urban renewal, in many ways was, as you know, an explicit government policy. Gentrification is not. In urban renewal (which was oftentimes referred to in the black community as "urban removal") where they went and removed a number of black people so that the area would become more desirable, in that sense it's very similar. It's removing people and fixing up an area. Well that's great you're fixing up the area, but what about the people? The whole idea of fixing up the area is for the people. This is largely being driven by other forces. The government certainly plays a role in it by one, tearing down public housing, and by two, getting out of the low-income housing business generally. But it's actually going on on a much more massive scale. It's going on all across the country, it's going on almost at the same time, and for the first time in terms of gentrification - we've had gentrification before at the neighborhood level. We even had some cities. Now we have whole regions gentrifying. We never had that before. In a place like San Francisco where the average cost of housing is $500,000. And the whole region is being affected. So we need some clear, effective public policy that says you got to build affordable housing, and the way to do that is to use the market and to have inclusionary zoning, and to make it clear that we have to have mixed-income housing. Now the good news is that some businesses are started to say, Yes, that's right, and they're saying it because they can't get their workers. And I think it was Aspen (I forget which one), they actually had an affordable housing ordinance passed, not because most of the town leaders were really poor, but they found that they couldn't get their nannies - when it snowed, the nannies all lived on the other side of the mountain. They couldn't afford to live in town. And so when it snowed they couldn't get their help. And so they said, We need homes here for people who do our services.

Q: You argue that sprawl is not a result of free market forces but federally subsidized policies. We talked about some of them here. Are there policies that exist today that that's true of?

A: Oh sure. I mean first of all, housing is an incredibly regulated industry. Almost no one builds a house without deep subsidies. You know, you start with the mortgage deducton. There are billions of dollars every year that Americans are being subsidized to buy a house. And the bigger your house, the bigger your deduction. So when people talk about the free market, no one says, The free market, let's get rid of mortgage deductions. There are all kinds of state taxes that sort of support it. No one pays for their sewer hookup, it's all subsidized. You know there was just a large company in New Jersey that decided to build, and they said, But then you have to build a road for us. You have to have sewer hookup, you have to have electrical hookup. All of that's public money. And we could say in New Jersey - not New Jersey, but Maryland has said, as well as some other states have said, We're going to only invest our public money first in areas that already exist. We're not going to build new infrastructure for somebody's new house out in the middle of a cornfield. If you want to build in the middle of the cornfield, (talking about the market), you can do it, but you're on your own. They said, What about our schools? You're on your own. And most people cannot afford to do that and most people would not do that. So they turn to the public to support all the infrastructure, and they don't see that as regulations or as government intervention. They only see government intervention if you talk about low-income people. But all of us, in fact, there have been a number of studies by HUD showing that middle class are the most heavily subsidized in housing. Now you look at zoning. Most of us would not want an incinerator next to our house, less zoning. The fact that - and it makes good planning. So the idea is not to have no planning, it's not to have complete planning, it's to have rational panning to accomplish what we need to accomplish. And what we've done is to plan fragmentation and plan racial and economic segregation. That's what we plan. And it's destructive. It has a lot of, as they say, other externalities that now we're saying is bad. And they are bad. And we need to plan differently. And we should plan. I mean there are ways to make sure that we have stable, integrated, economically and racially integrated neighborhoods, and as we talk about moving toward a majority/minority country that's probably openly simplistic, how do we do that? All the growth and the workforce in the country is going to largely be from immigrants and from people of color. How do we make sure they are close to the job, that they are well-trained? It's all about benefits. It's not going to happen just by letting the market do what the market will.

Q: Can you give me a clear definition of what you mean by concentrated poverty?

A: Sure. The sort of accepted definition in sociological literature is where 40 percent of a community is below the poverty level. And I'm going to just go on from there. That's high concentrated poverty. And again, the effect of it is devastating. Because you know, when Rockefeller was alive, he - in a sense, the whole community in New York and in Chicago, benefited from his largesse. He lived in the community, he wanted a community where - you know, he wasn't a person that didn't have his faults, but he had some virtues, right. He spent - the community was affected by his spending. When we have a community where no one has resources, you can't tax your way out of the problem. You can't tax Detroit enough so that it can fix its streets, so that it can fix its buildings, so that it can fix its sewers. And so concentrated poverty, when it's happening on a city level, means you're guaranteeing that people's life chances are constricted. And the first person who talked about concentrated poverty was not William Wilson, it was King George VI, and he was talking about white folks. And he noted that when you isolate a lot of poor people together, it's bad planning. They're recognizing that in Ireland right now also. So when you concentrate poor people together, that's the problem. It's not the poor people are the problem, I mean there are, you know, criminals who are poor people and criminals who are rich people. But concentrated poverty is a crime in and of itself.

Q: How does this growing isolation between city and the newer suburbs create concentrated poverty? I think you sort of touched on this a little bit before. And what are the consequences inside the cities?

A: Well, as people leave the central city, as I said, they create barriers to make sure that no low-income housing is built outside. So where is the low-income housing going to be built? It gets built in sort of economically and politically the weakest part of the region. And if all the low-income housing is built in one place, that creates concentrated poverty. When you build those vertical ghettos called public housing, it's a powerful move toward concentrated poverty. And it's interesting, when you create concentrated poverty, the actual population of the neighborhood and the city actually declines, because even though poverty is concentrating, you have more people living in a discreet area than before, everyone who can exercises their option to leave, so the overall population decreases. And so St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Newark. You know, Newark was one of the most vibrant cities. Detroit was one of the most vibrant cities. Take all the middle class - I mean the example I use sometimes is I say, We're going to create an insurance plan. Everybody who has cancer, who had a preexisting heart condition, who has - who smokes a lot, you have to self-insure, and you're over 60. Everybody who runs, who exercises, who doesn't eat a lot of fat, who's never had any precondition, whose family has no serious medical - you also self-insure. The reality is, this group will have very low premiums. This group won't be able to afford it. We put all the people with need together and say, Fix it. And that's not what being a citizen's about, it's sharing. I mean in a sense what the unions were fighting for in many ways in the 1930's were shared risk, and what this fragmentation does basically is say, We're not going to share in your risk. We'll still get the benefit of the city, we'll still get the benefit of some of the city's infrastructure, but we're not going to share in your risk. So you have to pay for your own schools, even though your needs are great because now you have all low-income kids. Your own hospitals, even though your needs are greater. Your own police. And so that's - it also creates inefficiencies because you have these little, bitty towns, each one of them have their own fire department, their own police department, their own water. And sometimes we address that by having what they call inner-jurisdiction of agreements. Because, you know, you've got thousands of little towns that simply can't support themselves, so they (speak) up and say, Ok, we'll share water, but we're not going to share schools.

Q: I know you've written a lot and talked a lot about regional solutions, communities that work together, cities and suburbs, education, all kinds of systems. Talk a little bit about regional tax base sharing and how that can benefit cities.

A: Well, in Chicago, for example, the Chicago region, the disparity between the rich and poor municipalities, I think it's 300 to 1. And the municipality that's at the bottom end of that, they can't tax themselves out of their predicament. Now tax base sharing, it's interesting because, you know, I've talked a lot about this and I think that it's really the most important civil rights issue today, that is the way we undermine civil rights. We gave people the right to be part of Detroit but not to be part of the region. And then we took all the resources out of the region. And so we still have segregated schools, which are deteriorating, and Detroit's tax base, I think, is like 26 percent that of the region. Detroit's buying power is like 40 percent of that of the region. It can't tax itself - and its need - it's like 150 percent/200 percent of the region. In other words, all of the poor people are largely isolated in Detroit and all the resources are outside Detroit. And you say, Now tax yourself to deal with that. What tax base sharing does is to say, Look, we are a region, and we have it here in Minnesota, and so when something is built in the region, you will capture (and here I think it's 40 percent) of the additional growth of taxes for the region. So Mall of America, which is the largest revenue-producing mall in the world, is out in Bloomington, a town of 90,000 people. Instead of saying the people of Bloomington will control all the taxes and tax base for Bloomington, they have to share with the entire region. And it reduces the disparity from, I think, 12 to 1 between the rich and poor municipalities, to 4 to 1. There's still a disparity, but it makes it manageable. It also lessens the competition between municipalities because what municipalities are competing for are two things. They're competing to keep poor people out and to get resources in. And they want them so they can have them for themselves. And even if they win, tax base sharing says, Ok, you won, but you have to share. And it makes sense because what happens in one municipality has an effect on another municipality. The idea of autonomous municipalities, especially in a global economy, simply doesn't make sense. What happens in the region affects the entire region. And so tax base sharing moves in that direction. Now one other thing I think is important to mention is oftentimes, especially in an African-American community, when you hear about these problems, they think - they say, Yeah, I've lived that history, I know it's right. But when you move to the solutions, they're hesitant, and they're hesitant because of racial political dynamics in the United States, and they say, If we do something with white people politically, we're going to loose control. Now Detroit is, I think, about 75 or 80 percent black, but blacks only represent 25 to 30 percent of people in the region. So if you had a whole regional governance where everyone had just one vote, blacks would be outnumbered. And blacks are nervous about that. And they should be nervous about that because that's exactly what happened in the South. When blacks moved into central cities in the South, one way to make sure that they would never have control is that every time they almost got to a majority, they expanded the governance to the county level, to the regional level, so blacks never got the majority. And so you have to address that because you can't tell people, You're going to get resources, but the cost of getting resources is to give up your voice, is to give up your culture, is to give up your identity. And so we have to address both of those things at the same time, and I've (heard) some solutions that I think move in that direction, and tax base sharing is an example of that because Minneapolis, if it gets a tax base from the pool, it still gets to decide what the tax rate is and how to spend the money. No one tells us, you know, You have to spend it on this because you got our money. No. I mean it still has control. And there are many other examples of what I call federated regionalism that look at creating both regional cooperation on some levels but local autonomy or local agency on other levels.