Growing up in Cleveland, and seeing the city collapse, like
Detroit, and watching city services slashed, just like Detroit, I've seen this
as a crucial public policy question: What does a municipal government owe its
residents? And at what point does the elimination of these services accelerate
the city's decline, making a rebound impossible? As cities like Cleveland shed
jobs in the 1960s and 1970s, politicians gave tax breaks to companies in an
effort to prevent employers from departing.
But the practice seldom worked, and cities gave away taxes that could
have supported schools, and libraries, and infrastructure. It hastened the
city's slide, as services declined, and families fled to the suburbs. The
result: racial polarization and metropolitan sprawl. As whites moved out of
Detroit and Cleveland, they stopped worrying about fighting for city services.
From a recent article by Matthew O'Brien in the Atlantic: "Well-off whites
who work in the city and live close by have an interest in paying for the kind of
public goods, like mass transit, that benefit everybody. Well-off whites who
live far away don't. Atlanta, of course, is the prototypical case here: going
back to the 1970s, it's under-invested in public transit, because car-driving
suburbanites haven't wanted to pay for something they think only poor blacks
would use." This is as true in Cleveland as in Atlanta. Study after study shows housing being abandoned in Cleveland, and new homes, for the more affluent, built in distant suburbs. Abandoned homes accelerate the decline of inner-city neighborhoods, the cost of demolishing them - estimated at more than $525 million - beyond the reach of a cash-strapped municipality. Meanwhile, suburban families, who drive to work, lobby politicians to repurpose transportation spending to build and improve expressways, rather than support bus and rapid transit service in the city.
In an earlier post - one devoted to the music of Pere Ubu - I said this about Cleveland:
In sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly
Disadvantaged, I find a compelling description of what happens when cities
like Cleveland die. Persistent joblessness, caused by
the relocation of industry and the resulting collapse of retail businesses and
enterprises that service the manufacturers and the employees who depend on the
manufacturers for their paychecks, results in a cascade of social and
organizational collapse. Families that can – those with breadwinners with
better educations and more marketable and adaptable skills – flee the city,
relocating to suburbs to work in new industrial parks or, in the case of
Cleveland, moving to the sun belt to take jobs in Atlanta and Houston. As
families leave, stability providing local institutions shut their doors, as churches
and lodges and social clubs lose membership.
Obama's address at Knox College, aimed at mapping out a middle class agenda, is too little, and comes too late for cities like Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown. I look at the parade of horrors coming out of Cleveland - the kidnapping and killing of young women, seemingly over and over again - and I see a social fabric so frayed, and police resources so stretched, that basic expectations of public safety are no longer guaranteed. Photos of Detroit's spectacular decay have become a form of internet porn - the crumbling grandeur somehow stirs our emotions, reminding us of what we were. Are the monsters who stalk Cleveland's streets and abandoned neighborhoods a truer glimpse at what happens when communities fall into the abyss and we no longer care what happens to our neighbors? That's the bottom line - we have become a society where individuals no longer care about one another.
Vast income inequality, social distance, diverging trajectories, deepening racial distrust, have led us to a point where it is hard to imagine a path out of this discouraging fate. And this is a fundamental problem. The right loved to make fun of the Obama campaign's focus on Hope in 2008. But they were wrong. Obama said this during that campaign:
Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity
of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on
the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that
insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us
if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for
it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by
the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who
have the courage to remake the world as it should be.
What's funny about that? In what way is that inconsistent with a prevailing, deeply rooted American belief in progress? But here's the problem: if we have lost faith in one another, if we no longer care about our neighbor, or more broadly about our common fate, if we believe we can only struggle on alone, what hope is there to solve shared problems?
For a portion of our population, George Zimmerman is a hero. In our stand-your-ground society, where our safety and security is only guaranteed by our hair-trigger decisions, and the use of our concealed weapon, shooting first and asking questions later makes sense. Police won't be there for us. Our neighbors won't be there for us. Our safety is in our hands. In the form of our Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm pistol. But that is a discouragingly dystopian view. Government was engineered to provide for our common security, to permit us to achieve the things we could not accomplish alone. As the right has shredded our faith in government, and as municipal services have been dismantled in our decaying cities, large portions of the American public have come to believe that they are utterly alone in a hostile world.
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