Guest post: Make our suburbs sub again
Originally a comment by Papito on The beautiful suburbs.
What makes a suburb “successful” is a good ratio of property value to number of children. Property value is maintained by zoning. With high property value, you get rich people living there, and public schools funded by rich people’s property taxes, and a lower rate of public school attendance because rich people don’t have as many kids as poor people and so many rich people send their kids to private schools anyway.
What “abolishes” a suburb is revising the zoning to allow smaller lots, or (god forbid!) apartment buildings, increasing population density and reducing per-unit prices. Cheaper, smaller housing brings a lower ratio of property tax to children. People who are poor or who live in smaller apartments have more children per capita and rarely send them to private school. Also, though this is obviously irrelevant, there are some correlations of poverty to race. Not that making a suburb more “urban” means anything at all besides increasing population density.
The phenomenon as we see it near where I live in an American city is that the near suburbs are full of people who like to talk a lot about fair housing and fair this and that and black lives matter, but if you try to build an apartment building near them they will determine that it just wouldn’t be safe because of, you know, traffic reasons or where are we going to build a new elementary school or something. Black lives matter as long as they stay over across the interstate.
I am embarrassed to admit I live in one of those leafy, wealthy, white suburbs. It wasn’t deliberate, I moved here a few years ago and was somewhat naive. I can’t say I don’t love it here because I do, I just wish it was more diverse.
One of things that startled me was when we moved in, we were invited to join Nextdoor. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s social media that is populated with the neighborhoods in your vicinity. It’s a strange place. On the one hand, you can buy and sell things like a virtual garage sale, people offer things for free and there are notices about lost cats and dogs.
But oh! The moaning about new apartments or condos being built, or land rezoned. Sometimes they have a point, we have some narrow roads and building without considering traffic capacity is a problem. But that’s not the big complaint. The big complaint is that “we don’t need any more apartment buildings”. Funny how they don’t object to the ridiculous amount of office space we have, and is being continually added to. It’s stupid, several of the buildings are almost empty.
Despite this, they vote Republican faithfully every year. They whinge about the mayor and the town council “ruining” the city but keep re-electing the same morons again and again.
In connexion with Papito’s good post, I recommend, from a British perspective, the book ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race’ by Reni Eddo Lodge. It is very perceptive, informed, intelligent and well-written, and describes what she prefers to call ‘systemic racism’ rather than the ‘institutional racism’ that is defined in the report (1999) prepared by Sir William Macpherson in connexion with the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager, and the subsequent peculiar inability of the police to bring anyone to book, not to mention their attempts to smear Stephen Lawrence’s parents. The book was chosen as Non-fiction Book of the Year by the bookshops Foyle’s & Blackwell’s, and long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. It received excellent reviews everywhere, including in such reliably right-wing publications as the Daily Telegraph & Spectator. It describes precisely the sort of attitudes that Papito & Claire draw attention to.
Two of my favorite bookshops on the planet.
One introduction: an extract in The Guardian in 2017.
Thank you, Ophelia, for finding this. There is of course this from one of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letters from Birmingham Jail’ (which Edo-Lodge quotes):
“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
I’ve been thinking since watching the CNN and MSNBC reporting last night of the paltry trivial self-centered notion of “freedom” coming from the anti-mask crowd compared to that of The Movement.
I lived in one of those largely-white suburbs for a couple of decades, and raised my kids there. My (ex-)wife and I chose the place because of the quality of the schools, and because they managed to achieve this quality with somewhat lower tax burdens than some other towns, hence the town didn’t need (and didn’t have) the kind of per-capita wealth of some other towns to which it liked to compare itself. Two conversations from that time come to mind.
One was with a friend from a nearby town; he was more conservative than I, and his town was more well-to-do. He complained about people who moved to town to raise kids and then leave. In his view, they were taking unfair advantage of the town by living there when they were the biggest burden and not paying taxes to support the town after they ceased being a burden.
Another was with a woman in my town. She was going to vote against a tax increase for the schools because her kids were all grown, so she no longer cared about the schools.
Both of these conversations I think highlight problems with local funding of schools. The town I lived in had very few students going to private schools. Some well-to-do towns had well-funded schools as well as significant numbers of private school students, but some wealthy towns chose not to fund their schools well, since few people they cared about used the schools.
I do recall municipal fights over affordable housing, and apartment buildings, and busing students from the city to the suburbs. In light of those, and in light of the fights over school funding, I think the idea of viewing the “success” of a suburb through a ratio of property value to number of children is very clever.
Combining Papito and Sackbut, a modified formula for success:
P * T / Cwhere P = mean property value, T = mean property after-tax rate, and C = mean children per household.Of course, this all amounts to an argument for pushing school funding as many governmental levels up as possible. To get the most out of that, however, we would have to consider doing away with private schools. If there were no private schools, then the wealthy would not be incentivized to support cuts to school taxes, since they would have no privately funded alternative. By the same logic, public school tuition could not be means tested.
In a way, the topic has a lot of the same feel as the healthcare discussion. To get the full benefits from making things universal, they have to be universal.
Tim,
Thanks for the review. I’ve been eying-up that book for a while.
Of course, Nullius is right about one of the necessary solutions to the inequality of American public schools. School funding can be done through property taxes, but doing it through local property taxes clearly perpetuates inequality. Putting that theory into practice is, however, thorny. If the resistance of some Americans to wearing face masks is shocking, then just imagine how federal involvement in education is received.
A little while back, there was a lawsuit over inequal funding of public schools in Kentucky. It went all the way to the state supreme court, and it was successful. Funding provided at the state level became the principal source of funding for all public schools in Kentucky. The resulting SEEK formula, at its peak, had moved the per pupil local and stead funding of the lowest wealth districts from 63% of that in the wealthiest districts to 85%. The equalization has since reversed course, as wealthy districts have adapted to the law and found other ways to increase local funding to their benefit.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/26/475305022/kentuckys-unprecedented-success-in-school-funding-is-on-the-line
https://wfpl.org/who-pays-for-kentucky-public-schools-more-and-more-its-local-taxpayers/
In other states, a lot of the tug-of-war about school funding has to do with the extra costs involved in educating special needs kids, poor kids, and kids who don’t speak English as a native language (or at all). In my city, all public school kids can have free breakfast and lunch at school year-round, because for some of those kids it’s the only reliable food source. Even if they did give a a school where most of the kids fall into one of those three categories the same funding as a school in a rich white suburb, that might be equality but it wouldn’t be equity.
In other numbers, Nullius’ formula might be further refined by adjusting the value of C for such variables as percentage of C attending private school and percentage of C with special educational needs.