The Suburban Nightmare : While older suburbs experience many problems of the inner city, ‘edge cities’ now offer a new escape

Once upon a time, a placid town basked in the golden glow of its orchards. In the 1920s, it was renowned as the “Queen of the Citrus Belt.” In the 1940s, it served as one of Hollywood’s models for Andy Hardy’s hometown. In the 1950s, it became a commuter suburb for thousands of Father-Knows-Bests in their starched white shirts.

Now, its nearly abandoned downtown is surrounded by acres of vacant lots and derelict homes. Its major employer, an aerospace corporation, pulled up stakes and moved to Tucson. The 4-H Club has been replaced by local franchises of the Crips and Bloods. Since 1970, nearly 1% of its population has been murdered.

This town is, of course, Pomona, Los Angeles County’s fourth largest city. Although geographically a suburb, Pomona now displays pathologies typically associated with a battered inner city.

Its incidence of poverty, for example, exceeds Los Angeles’ and its murder rate, in bad years, approaches Detroit’s. Its density of gang membership, as a percentage of the teen-age male population, is one of the nation’s highest.

Unfortunately, Pomona is not unique. Across the nation, hundreds of aging suburbs are trapped in the same downward trajectory, from garden city to crabgrass slum. This silent, pervasive crisis dominates the political middle landscape.

But the arrival of a second urban crisis--potentially comparable in magnitude to the endless ordeal of American center cities--does not fit comfortably into either political party’s current agenda. Although urbanists and local government types have been screaming at the top of their lungs for several years about the rising distress “in the inner metropolitan ring,” most politicos have kept their heads buried deep in the sand.

The failure of candidates to address, or even grasp, the acuity of the suburban malaise explains, in turn, much of the populist rage that currently threatens the two-party status quo. America seems to be unraveling in its traditional moral center: suburbia.

Indeed, the 1990 census confirms that 35% of suburban cities have experienced significant declines in median household income since 1980. These downward income trends track, in turn, the catastrophic loss of several million jobs.

As a result, formerly bedrock “family-value” towns like Parma, Ohio (outside Cleveland), Brockton, Mass. (outside Boston), or University City, Mo. (outside St. Louis) are experiencing the social destabilization that follows the relentless erosion of job and tax resources.

As the National Journal tried to warn policy-makers last year, “older working-class suburbs are starting to fall into the same abyss of disinvestment that their center cities did years ago.”

In Southern California, of course, suburban decline is not necessarily a slow bleed. Recent aerospace and defense closures--like Hughes Missile Divisions’ abrupt departure from Pomona, or Lockheed’s abandonment of its huge Burbank complex--have had the traumatic impact of natural disasters. Following the Lockheed shutdown, for example, welfare caseloads in eastern San Fernando Valley soared by 80,000 in an 18-month period.

But older suburbs’ losses are usually someone else’s gain. Just as the inner-ring suburbs once stole jobs and tax revenues from central cities, so now their pockets are being picked, in turn, by the new urban centers--farther out on the spiral arms of the metropolitan galaxy--that Joel Garreau calls “edge cities.”

It has been estimated, for example, that the inner-ring suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul lost 40% of their jobs during the 1980s to the so-called “Fertile Crescent” of edge cities on the metro-region’s southwest flank. Outside Chicago, Schaumburg and central DuPage County--west of O’Hare International Airport--have had similarly adverse effects on the older suburban communities of Cook County, as have the young edge cities of Contra Costa County on the East Bay’s traditional blue-collar suburbs.

Closer at hand, the 18-mile-long tape-worm-shaped City of Industry puts a bizarre spin on the idea of the predatory edge city. This special-interest “phantom city” (population, 680) monopolizes most of the tax assets of the southern San Gabriel Valley--including 2,000 factories, warehouse and discount outlets, as well as a first-class golf course and resort hotel. Its malign influence on surrounding, tax-starved suburbs like La Puente and South El Monte has been compared to an economic atom bomb.

The one-sided competition between old and new suburbs has exploded latent class divisions in the historic commuter belts. Southern California, in particular, has become an unstable mosaic of such polarizations. Think of the widening socioeconomic divides between northern and southern Orange County, the upper and lowers tiers of the San Gabriel Valley, the east and west sides of the San Fernando Valley or the San Fernando Valley as a whole and its “suburbs-of-a-suburb”--like Simi Valley and Santa Clarita.

The have-not suburbs, moreover, have accelerated their decline by squandering scarce tax resources in zero-sum competitions for new investment. A decade ago, every aging ‘burb from Compton to Pomona had to have its own auto mall; now the magic bullet is believed to be a card casino--and both Compton and Pomona are scheming to build one.

In addition to the dramatic hemorrhage of jobs and capital over the last decade, baby-boom suburbia also suffers from what might be called “premature physical obsolescence.” Much of what has been built in the postwar period--and continues to be built--is throwaway architecture, with a 30-year, or less, functional life span. It is ill-suited to support the intergenerational continuity of community or property.

Millions of units of this disposable, ticky-tacky stuff are beginning to erode into the slum housing of the year 2000. The Ur-suburb of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, provides a telling example. The colossal damage inflicted by the Northridge earthquake (a “moderate” trembler on the Richter scale) exposed some of the submerged bulk of this building-quality crisis as residents were literally killed by shoddy construction.

Although no one has yet attempted the calculation, there is little reason to suppose this suburban “housing deficit”--the replacement cost of obsolete and unrestorable building stock--will be any smaller than President Bill Clinton’s now forgotten “infrastructure deficit.” Nor is it likely, as declining suburbs become the new pariahs, that the free market’s invisible hand will linger longer than it takes to draw a fatal red line around their prospects for housing reinvestment.

All this, of course, is especially bad news for poor, inner-city residents who are being urged by every pundit in the land to find their salvation in the suburbs. Indeed, confronted with virtually Paleolithic conditions of life in collapsing city neighborhoods, hundreds of thousands of blacks and Latinos are finally finding it possible to move into the subdivisions where Beaver Cleaver and Ricky Nelson used to live.

But their experiences too often repeat the heartbreak and disillusionment of the original migrations to the central cities. What seemed from afar a promised land is, at closer sight, scorched earth. Like a maddening mirage, jobs and good schools are still a horizon away.

In the meantime, the stranded and forgotten white populations of these transitional communities are too easily tempted to confuse structural decay with the sudden presence of neighbors of color. In the absence of any serious reform vision, one of the most worrying prospects is that new-wave racism--even some viral mutation of fascism--may yet grow limbs of steel in the ruins of the suburban dream.