Milliken v. Bradley fit in with other government decisions that supported a massive movement of the white population into suburbs in the decades following 1974. Tax revenues were used to facilitate suburban expansion by building roads, schools, water, and sewage systems to serve the suburbs. In contrast, the maintenance of the urban infrastructure abandoned by the new suburbanites was gradually decreased.1
The ability of cities to finance decent schools was made even harder in the 1980s as Presidents Reagan and Bush cut back federal grants to cities; federal grants to large cities fell over the decade by 35 percent, from $5.2 to $3.4 billion. Cuts were most severe in general revenue sharing, public service jobs and job training, and other block grants that gave states freedom to choose which programs to support. The schools of both black and white urban children lost resources and effectiveness. No wonder that poor urban children who got to college did worse than rich suburban kids.2
One result of the cuts in funding was that school buildings were not replaced. The lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, which was described in chapter 3, raised the question whether these old school buildings were dangerous as well. Lead in water is dangerous to health, affecting the development of intelligence in children and causing disease. The unfortunate sequence of ill-informed economic choices that increased lead in our water began over a century ago. As municipal water systems were expanded and repaired before the First World War, cast-iron pipes were replaced with lead pipes because they lasted longer. This was particularly true in cities with acidic water, since cast-iron pipes eroded faster there. Acidic water is soft water; hard water contains minerals that reduce soap suds and leave deposits on sinks and bathtubs. People like soft water, but the acid in soft water erodes pipes faster.
When iron pipes corrode, people ingest iron and zinc, which are not harmful to most people. When lead pipes corrode, people ingest lead, which is harmful. Although public health authorities in the nineteenth century had noted the ill effects of lead in water, water companies were more interested in lowering their costs. They wanted more durable pipes in cities with soft, acidic water. They chose to replace worn-out iron pipes with new lead pipes.3
This choice became relevant to schools in the twenty-first century because underfunding led urban school systems to use older school buildings. Education reformers have argued that old and dilapidated school buildings discourage poor urban students from learning. In the aftermath of the Flint lead crisis, many urban school systems are discovering that their old buildings are not only depressing, but actually dangerous. Among the reasons for low success in urban schools may be the results of lead in the pipes of old schools.4
Congress has not appropriated funds to fix the pipes in Flint after the 2015 lead crisis. It is not likely to fix the problems in other urban school systems as well. Decades of neglect have left poor cities with limited budgets to face accumulated problems of underinvestment and deferred maintenance. The FTE sector will not raise taxes to help the low-wage sector’s schools.
Not far from Flint, the decrepit state of Detroit school buildings emphasizes how cumulated neglect stands in the way of improving urban education. Congress passed a law to upgrade water sources containing lead in schools in 1986, but it was largely stuck down by a federal court in 1996. The only operative federal regulation is an EPA rule issued in 1991 requiring periodic tests and setting the safe limit for children at fifteen parts per billion. Schools pose the biggest problem for lead as they have old pipes, many a century old, and are occupied by children. Older urban schools serve mostly children from the low-wage sector, and the FTE sector does not have an incentive to push for their property tax dollars to be spent replacing pipes for urban schools.5
We have a dual residential system. Low-wage workers live in decrepit cities, and the FTE lives in ever more separated suburbs. Since the FTE sector will not support city services, urban conditions continue to deteriorate. FTE sector people do not experience many of the urban problems as they live separately and only visit cities when they want to. Many of them probably think that America’s urban troubles belong to a separate, less developed country.
Some of the very rich, the plutocrats, are moving now into tall glass towers in center cities. These well-maintained apartment buildings are very different from the underfunded buildings containing subsidized urban housing. The plutocrats travel in their own cars or car services; they seldom take public transportation. They often are not raising children in the city, and they send their children to private schools if they are. They are in the city, but only partially engaged in urban activities.6
The disadvantages of black students extended into some new suburbs. Public policy tried through subsidized housing to bring black families into the suburbs, but political pressure from local residents convinced the government to locate the new public housing in poor parts of towns. The result was to relocate some of the conditions that formerly had been in the center of large cities to smaller suburbs.
A federal case, U.S. v. Yonkers, was brought in 1980 to contest this pattern in a New York City suburb. The evidence showed that Yonkers was segregated in schools and housing, and the conflicts in enforcing the eventual judgment illustrate the anger of the new white suburbanites to the blacks among them. The concentration of poverty was decreased in the 1990s by rapid economic growth, but the trend was reversed after 2000 to produce more concentrations of poverty in smaller cities and towns.7
Oscar Newman was a city planner hired in 1987 as a consultant to the city of Yonkers by order of the court. He created the idea of defensible space to explain how concentrated public housing could destroy social capital. He argued that tall public housing encourages illegal and violent behavior because it has public spaces that no one cares for. City planners in Yonkers concentrated public housing in one section of the town, and they built them tall to save space. The government did not provide enough funding to keep elevators and corridors clean and well lit. Tenants did not have jurisdiction over these public spaces, and there were too many tenants to get together informally. The result was that residents maintained nice apartments that could be reached only through disreputable and often dangerous elevators and halls.
Newman argued that space that no one controls always deteriorates in this way. Defensible space that people can and will maintain is space under their control. For families and neighborhoods, families need to own or have responsibility for the spaces around their dwellings. Residents of ground-floor apartments have responsibility for their front yards and walks. Street barriers that prevent through traffic speeding through local streets empower neighbors to keep the resultant dead-end streets clean and safe. Defensible space is the space that someone has responsibility to maintain. Large buildings with insufficient funds for maintenance have too much indefensible space.8
This insight has important implications. City planners in the 1950s and 1960s did not understand the idea of defensible space and unwittingly built public housing in tall buildings. They were encouraged to do so in cities where land was expensive and in suburbs where white residents who had escaped from cities did not want public—and largely black—housing near them. Public housing designed to help poor people survive in cities and suburbs may have hurt them instead by speeding the breakdown of community spirit. In the language of the Lewis model adapted to modern conditions, these families lost social capital.
Newman’s insight illuminates a controversy about the lack of social capital in Northern black neighborhoods. William Wilson argued that unemployment and poverty in Northern poor black neighborhoods produced the observed lack of social capital. Charles Murray reproduced Wilson’s results in Northern poor white neighborhoods. Their analysis showed that the lack of social capital in Northern cities today was due to current conditions more than the legacy of distant history.9
Although the causes of social dysfunction may have been similar for blacks and whites, there was still tension within public housing between the races. Affluent whites escaped from mixed neighborhoods by moving to the suburbs; poor whites did not have that option. They comforted themselves by regarding themselves as superior to people with dark skins. The resulting conflicts gave the violence caused by poverty and bad housing design a racial content.10
Newman’s theory of defensible space explains how public policy designed to cure social ills instead worsened them. Public housing designed to create better living conditions for poor people in urban neighborhoods contributed to the breakdown of social capital in these neighborhoods. The lack of defensible space in public housing led to the breakdown of trust and the growth of antisocial behavior. The War on Drugs criminalized much of this behavior and led to steep losses of social capital. The escalation of conflict between the police and residents then further diminished social capital.11
Recent research has shown that when African Americans move out of the toxic buildings and neighborhoods they have been forced into, they regain some of the lost social capital. This effect has been hard to demonstrate because it is visible largely in the second generation. The children of parents who move into better neighborhoods go to better schools and live in safer and greener areas where there is little indefensible space for antisocial activity. The children are more likely to attend college and less likely to become single parents. It is not simply the legacy of slavery that destroys black families; it is the conditions in which poor African Americans are forced to live—partly because their ancestors were slaves—that erode their social capital.12
Policies toward cities since 1970 have starved urban schools of funds. They have created hostile environments for black families stuck in these cities and recreated the conditions of blacks—and now increasingly Latinos—before the Civil Rights Acts. African Americans were deprived of education completely when slaves and given only the semblance of an education before the First World War. They began to get good education in the 1960s and 1970s, but opposition to the Civil Rights Movement has blocked and reversed these gains.13
Recent policies also have eroded the mobility of urban residents as they sought work or to get out of their local neighborhoods. The neglect of American infrastructure can be seen by looking at a few specific items such as bridges and mass transit. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) provides a “report card” for American infrastructure every five years, most recently in 2013. An advisory council of ASCE members assigns grades according to eight criteria. They noted that grades have been near failing as we start the twenty-first century, averaging only Ds, due to delayed maintenance and underinvestment across most categories.14
ASCE gave American bridges a C+ in 2013, a low grade for one of the world’s richest countries. One-third of the total bridge decking area in the country is structurally deficient, indicating that there is a long way to go to universally reliable bridges. American bridges on average are over forty years old and near their fifty-year design life—the time that bridges are expected to function without problems. ASCE concluded that preserving aging bridges while replacing deficient bridges is a significant challenge for cash-strapped state and local governments to manage.
ASCE gave American mass transit a D. Rail-based systems carry just over a third of all mass transit trips. But they have the greatest maintenance needs of all mass transit modes, with a backlog of $59 billion, compared with $18 billion for non-rail systems. Rail systems are some of the oldest infrastructure assets still in use, particularly the heavy-rail systems in cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston. Reducing the maintenance backlog is complicated as many transit agencies do not systematically monitor the conditions of their facilities. As with bridges, the funding needs are a significant challenge.15
Problems are particularly acute in the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston. The interstate highway system was started in the 1950s and cut into railroad revenues in the following decade. While the roadbed for trucks was constructed and maintained by the government, the roadbed for trains was built and maintained by the railroads. The U.S. Postal Service switched its business from trains to trucks and airplanes in 1966. Congress combined several troubled railroads into Amtrak in 1971—that pivotal year—to preserve passenger train transport. Amtrak is a private enterprise, and it was expected to make a profit, but Amtrak is heavily regulated and prevented by Congress from dropping unprofitable routes. Amtrak makes profits on the Northeast Corridor and has large losses in less populated areas. As Minow observed, restrictions like the ones Congress imposed do not allow railroad passenger traffic to benefit from privatization.
The ridership of Amtrak and commuter trains has doubled since 1971, but its infrastructure has not been updated. Its tracks, power lines, bridges, and tunnels have begun to wear out. The result has been a series of delays and cancellations that have made passengers miserable. Passengers also are missing work, and the Northeast Corridor Infrastructure and Operations Commission established by Congress estimated that a one-day shutdown of the corridor would cost the country $100 million. The commission has a five-year plan to update the capital structure of transport in the Northeast Corridor, but it is woefully underfunded.16
Recent political decisions have not been productive. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey discussed in the last chapter, canceled the proposed third Hudson River rail tunnel that would have increased mass transit access to New York City in 2010 on the grounds that the state was unable to pay its share of anticipated cost overruns (at least too poor if the state did not increase the low New Jersey gas tax.) Every day, approximately 275,000 people commute across the Hudson River to New York. During rush hour, Amtrak and regional trains are full, and the two Hudson River automobile tunnels are near or at capacity. A third tunnel would have provided room for 70,000 more commuters to reach Manhattan each day; in its absence, Amtrak says that rail delays may become the new normal.17
A new tunnel would have increased the reliability of commuter trains, reduced automobile congestion, supported economic growth, and increased neighboring house values. But the direct gains would have gone mainly to members of the low-wage sector, and the members of the FTE sector are not interested. Even though the FTE sector depends in part on the services of the low-wage sector, American politics do not seem to consider indirect effects. Many members of the FTE sector would rather keep their taxes low than consider investments that may indirectly help them, much less the needs of the low-wage sector.
Boston received a wake-up call about its mass transit system in the winter of 2015 when extensive snowfall led to a protracted breakdown of the transit system. Charlie Baker, governor of Massachusetts, acknowledged the problem, but like the governor of New Jersey, he was not willing to spend money or raise taxes for mass transit. The result parallels recent educational reforms that have done their best without costing any extra money. The results have been disappointing because the reforms do not correct major problems. The same future appears to be likely in mass transit.18
Federal transit investigators found the Boston subway system lacks a comprehensive plan for maintaining the system. They requested quarterly reports to show how the system is complying with federal guidelines for employing disadvantaged companies in their repairs. But estimates of the needed plans amount to around $7 billion, and the subway is running a deficit in its current operations. Boston and Massachusetts leaders think more about how to fix the deficit than about how to raise funds to keep the whole system operating.19
The Metro in Washington, DC, is half the age of the Boston subway, opening in 1976. But the capital’s once-glorious subway system is now a terrible mess. It is unreliable, complained about by everyone, and on the edge of being unsafe. It is facing a large current deficit and predicted to be nonfunctioning in a decade if not repaired. How did Congress, which oversees the capital, respond? Congress said it would not “bail out” the Metro. As in other cities, the supervising authority with access to funds will not use those funds to maintain—not bail out—the city’s infrastructure. The FTE sector does not want to spend its money on infrastructure that helps the low-wage sector.20
The appalling state of American infrastructure has become a common story. The Financial Times ran a story saying the neglect of infrastructure globally is sadly in disrepair. Political arguments were mentioned that are not very different than those raised here, albeit stated differently. The New Yorker more recently had a column on system overload, meaning decaying infrastructure. Economists wonder why governments don’t upgrade their bridges, roads, and schools when interest rates are near zero.21
But when the issue is presented to the electorate, the supporters of lower taxes win the day. Governments have to borrow to finance reinvestment in the absence of more tax revenue now. But the FTE sector wants to reduce the public debt. An infrastructure bill passed Congress late in 2015, but it was only for highways and to relieve congestion. This limited kind of spending was approved by both political parties because members of the FTE sector get caught in traffic and waste time. For them, but not for members of the low-wage sector, will the government authorize a plan. But since Congress appropriated only a small part of the planned spending, it is not clear how much of this limited plan will be done. Both candidates for president in 2016 campaigned on promises to repair our infrastructure, but recent history does not suggest that these promises will be kept.22