And these are our good places. Meanwhile, back in the City and the working-class suburbs, everything went to hell.
Industries left and blue-collar jobs vanished forever. Those who remained, the unemployed white ethnics in the suburbs and the unemployed people of color in the cities, were stuck. The burnt-out shells left behind are as bad as it gets, the American versions of third-world slums. They are hermetically sealed: No one ever goes in, and no one ever gets out. They make a land of equal opportunity a land of savage inequality.
WHICH BRINGS US to the point.
Suburbs, in their endless drive for autonomy (read "privilege"), especially over the consumption of public goods, have wanted, and gotten, it all. Good schools, good roads, good police, good parks, good hospitals, good golf courses. No one could stop them. No one was in a position to say, "No." Every city, every suburb, every village is independent, and unaccountable to the whole.
Back when we divided up this great land, we chose boundary lines that were either easy to see (like rivers--split right down the middle) or totally arbitrary (measure it, count it, draw a straight line through it).
This has meant that urban areas, which tend to follow natural forms and not surveyors' lines, pay no heed to political divisions (except when those lines correspond to major policy divisions like tax rates or school districts). The "Tri-State," "Tri-County," or Greater Whatever Area are where we live; the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, a balkanized netherworld of politics. Even though the area is an organic whole, even though suburbs and cities need each other, no one can do anything in more than one principality at a time.
Except of course the transit authorities, who see to it that all these commuters can get where they want to go. But the opportunity is long past for these transit groups, arm and arm with socially aware urban planners, to create endless residential communities that still relied on Downtown for everything they needed. And the naive 80's hope that a "Big Project" Downtown would bring people back was a disaster. Riddled with corruption, ideas like Detroit's Renaissance Center turned out more like Flint's Auto World than Boston's Faneuil Hall.
NOTHING WILL HAPPEN to make big city life substantially better for those trapped there until a sense of urban obligation appears in the suburbanites.
The problem is that creating something like a metro-regional consciousness runs up against middle-class autonomy in all it forms: economic liberty, local political autonomy, Reagan-Bush federalism, and all their corollaries.
One step in the right direction might be centralizing regional taxation authority in a democratic body with decidedly disproportional representation, with center dwellers counting more. It would force the suburbanites to fish or cut bait. They will either head all the way to the sticks or return to the Big City, if only to get their fraction of a vote back. (Step 1: A Miracle Happens.)
A more realistic way to promote regional unity would be to reconnect schools.
In the mid-70s, the Supreme Court stopped integration at city limits. Urban school districts lost their white students to all-white, well funded suburban high schools, and thousands of poor minority students languished in inadequate, unfunded, hopeless inner-city school districts. The solution is probably not busing thousands of inner city kids to suburban high schools, and vice versa, but metro regions have to address the issue to remain viable.
City kids have to learn the skills to move up through the suburban service economy, and the suburbs have to overcome their fear of thousands of disaffected, angry, unemployable, urban youths ruining their quality of life. Maybe the answer is some kind of cross-jurisdictional school choice, maybe it is resource-sharing, maybe it is something else. Whatever it is, regions must take steps to reduce this massive gap in opportunity.
And to make it work, to make suburbanites turn back to the center, they need the help of planners with regional view-points, who are less concerned with NIMBY squabbling and more concerned with regional integration.
All this won't stop middle-class America's daily commuting odyssey, but it will change the terms of that migration to the point where they better reflect true social costs. Sadly none of this will happen in a society where liberal rights outweigh democratic obligation.