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Review: Planning by Law and Property Rights Reconsidered

Nancey Green Leigh, and Andrew McMillan analyze the 100 largest US metropolitan statistical areas to examine whether urban management strategies—including smart growth and regionalist policies—have affecting older, “inner-ring” suburbs. They find that while federal and state policy fosters urban revitalization, and sprawl encourages growth along the metropolitan fringe, deteriorating inner-ring suburbs are skipped over. Planners should heed the conclusions of both chapters in this section, especially since New Urbanism pervades the profession. Sections 4 and 5 focus on the recent foreclosure crisis and how suburbs have addressed the consequences of the recession and economic decline. Gregory Smithsimon’s excellent chapter on Baltimore’s nonwhite suburbs contends that community decline was not the consequence of racial turnover from white to black (which he argues was the outcome of civil rights demands among upwardly mobile African Americans), but “neoliberal” policies that simultaneously inflated property values, enabled predatory lending, and produced stagnant incomes. When economic crisis hit, African American suburbs suffered disproportionately. Worst of all, neoliberal ideology emphasized individual failures to pay down mortgage debt rather than the structural causes of the crisis. The remaining chapter in Section 4 by W. Dennis Keating concludes that local governments in three of Cleveland inner-ring suburbs were ill-equipped to handle foreclosures during the recent recession. In Section 5, Kathryn W. Hexter, Edward W. Hill, Benjamin Y. Clark, Brian A. Mikelbank, and Charles Post assess “suburban” revitalization strategies in four distinct older suburbs in the Midwest, South, and Northeast. They find that local corruption, outdated public bureaucracies, localities beholden to larger county governments, and unnecessary jurisdictions impeded recovery. Professionalization of public agencies, vigorous use of federal block grants, state-implemented regional economic strategies, and even combining suburban governments or services into regional authorities worked best. Lastly, Benjamin J. Roth and Scott W. Allard argue that nonprofits, who provide critical job training, food pantries, and other noncash social services in the suburbs, were illequipped for the recession, lacking multilingual staff, adequate job-placement and training services, needed funding from private suburban donors, and only offered fragmented support that helped some suburbanites but neglected others. Of all sections, the last two are the most relevant to planners and policymakers. Both can utilize the analysis of declining suburbs’ structural origins, the identification of institutional suburban social safety net failures, and the assessment of attempted reforms. Overall, there is little to criticize. As with any edited volume, the quality of individual chapters varies—W. Dennis Keating’s chapter is poorly written and lacks a coherent thesis, for example. If there’s one broad complaint that can be lodged, it’s the lack of a conclusion or overall assessment of the literature, surprising given that the contributors complement one another so well. The introduction abruptly ends after an outline, and there is no concluding chapter. Readers are left to draw their own synthesis to figure out what this all means. Perhaps this is by design, so that the book remains a collection of scholarly interpretations rather than an authoritative account of the subject. And this is ultimately the value of The New American Suburb. The assembly of the field’s authoritative scholars is a resource to a variety of researchers navigating a new frontier of urban research—the declining suburb. Social scientists can see how others exploit the latest census and survey data. Planners and policy advocates have a quick reference to what’s worked, what hasn’t, and useful statistics for future policy proposals and advocacy. And the book is great for a graduate seminar, as it introduces students to the literature, methodology, and exemplary studies that cover all the dimensions of contemporary suburban problems. Most important, the volume provides the data for moving beyond the twentieth-century ideological assumptions about the geography of poverty, along with the empirical evidence for what new policies might work. It cuts through the media portrayals that use the suburbs as a metaphor of the nation’s ills, providing a coherent and rigorous understanding of what is actually happening in contemporary suburbs and why. For that, it is invaluable.