CHANGING CENTRAL CITY-SUBURB RELATIONSHIP

The relationship between cities and suburbs has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Fifty years ago, urban areas were the focal point of a region’s economic and social activity. Cities were where a community’s major employers, museums, theaters, as well as most people, made their home. Today, those resources, and the economic activities that surrounded them, have dispersed.

Spatial Development Diagram
of the San Francisco Bay Area

{Spatial Development}

Source : Urban Evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area, UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies, 1964

Suburbs no longer depend on central cities as they once did. Indeed, the relative affluence of suburbs has grown as they have captured more new housing and jobs. Although central cities continue to serve as regional job centers, they also struggle to provide services to relatively more needy populations with static or declining funding. Attempts to remedy the situation by raising revenues, for example by increasing hotel or sales taxes, are often counterproductive since such increases may motivate businesses to move out of the city.

INTERDEPENDENCE

This does not mean, as some suggest, that newer, more affluent suburbs can ignore the problems of older suburbs and central cities. Research has demonstrated that the most successful metropolitan areas are those where cities and suburbs are healthy and vital.

Suburban areas adjacent to vibrant central cities have higher income, population, and employment growth than those surrounding stagnant central cities. Metropolitan areas where the incomes of suburbanites and city dwellers are more equal generally have higher rates of growth. Also, most evidence suggests that the complementary nature of city-suburb relationships is likely to increase in the emerging global economy.

Anthony Downs, author of New Visions for a Metropolitan America, distills the arguments about why suburbs should care about the fate of cities to four major points:

Creeping blight: symptoms of urban decline will spread outward from the cities to the inner-suburbs and eventually to newer suburbs;
The majority of the nation’s (and the region’s) population growth will occur among people most at risk (people of color and low-income) and will be disproportionately located in the cities, eventually creating a drag on the regional economy;
Many suburbanites depend on cities for their jobs; and
The region is the basic unit in the global economy. Success demands healthy cities and suburbs.

THE REGIONAL LINKAGES

Today, the region, rather than the city, is the basic geographic unit in which goods and services are produced. Workers are hired from a regional labor pool. Transportation and infrastructure systems are regional. That interdependence is clearly illustrated by the increasing mobility of the Bay Area’s labor force. For example, Silicon Valley and San Francisco have significantly more jobs than employed residents. Job-rich communities rely on their neighbors to provide housing, schools, and transportation for their workers.

Percentage of San Francisco Bay Area Workers Commuting Outside of Their County of Residence
{Commuting}

The Bay Area also shares natural and human-made resources. Its colleges and universities help incubate new businesses and produce highly educated workers for businesses throughout the region. Its urban communities, and the region as a whole, benefit from the fruitfulness of their agricultural neighbors. Its ports-–air and sea-–link the Bay Area to the world. Its three major cities, San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, continue to house a number of the region’s major art and cultural centers and sports arenas. And, all of the region’s inhabitants share the use of, and responsibility for, the Bay Area’s land, air, and water resources.

GLOBAL ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS

Despite all that we share, there are substantial disparities between urban and suburban areas in terms of income, race, crime, and safety. To the extent that the region ignores these differences, its ability to compete in the global marketplace will be hurt, reasons Neil Peirce, author of Citistates: How Urban America Can Prosper in a Competitive World.

“Trouble in the cities isn’t cost free,” says Peirce. “Fail to address inner-city social problems now, and the bill—in higher welfare costs, failed schools, packed prisons—will come back to haunt everyone in higher taxes.”