3 simple Q's (Who are buying homes? Why are suburbs Rep? Why are cities Dem?)

[dazzleman]

So let me just pose three simple questions:

1) What are the population factors behind the growth of the suburbs? We have seen no massive outflux of inner city families into the suburbs. Nor have we seen a massive increase in the nation's home ownership rate since 1997 (perhaps 2-3%) Hence, who are the people buying these new houses in the housing boom? The answers to this question may explain some of the partisan makeup of the suburbs, and whether a "conversion" occurs when one moves from area A to area B, and one's economic interests and social idenficiation perhaps alter.

2) Why are the suburbs so Republican? Is it class, race, family structure, or something else?

3) Why are the cities so Democratic? Is it class, race, family structure, or something else?

I think there are several answers to these questions, and much of the answer lies in demographics.

Suburbs are much more family-oriented than cities, and even in areas with liberal suburbs, such as New York and Boston, the suburbs will be considerably more conservative than the central cities.

Many trends have pushed the cities toward being havens for the rich and the poor, while the bulk of the middle class has been driven out to the suburbs.  This is largely due to the gap between promise and performance in our urban policies of the past 50 years.  The poor can't afford to leave the cities, and the rich have enough money to ward off the dangers/deficiencies that appear in the cities, though private security and private schools, so they can effectively enjoy the benefits of urban life without the downside that people with less money face. 

The middle class is unwilling to deal with the deficiencies, such as bad schools and crime, inherent in urban life, but cannot afford the measures needed to circumvent these problems in an urban setting, so they leave.  The reasons they leave, and the reasons that the poor and some of the rich stay, have much to do with the stark differences in political views between the cities and the suburbs.

The departure of much of the working class from the cities have made the cities more liberal.  I also think that in a certain sense, conservatives have been the victims of their own success, as people have very short memories.  New York in 1993 elected a Republican mayor who while socially liberal, was unabashedly conservative on issues such as crime.  But because he largely removed the fear of omnipresent crime as an issue, some people favor going back to the more liberal policies that produced the crime in the first place.

There is a complex interplay, both economically and socially, between the cities and the suburbs.  In Connecticut and much of the northeast, property values are determined largely by the quality of the school district.  And for most people here, no matter how liberal they claim to be, the perception is that a "good" district must be one that is largely white, with few minorities.  They won't say it out loud, but their behavior confirms this line of thought.  The result is that home prices vary drastically based upon the school district in which a house is located, and the same house two blocks away, in a different school district, could vary in price by $200,000.  This creates a situation that deepens the social and economic split between cities and suburbs, and this also deepens the political split, as there is almost no intercourse between urban and suburban communities that lie right next to each other.  Ironically, this situation was largely created by attempts to forcibly integrate public schools in the cities, schools which are now overwhelmingly black or hispanic.

The relative quiescence of the race issue since the 1980s has freed some suburbanites in liberal areas like the northeast to take a more liberal position than they would take if the sanctity of their neighborhood schools were threatened.  I think that in the wake of the failure of school integration, there has been a tacit agreement between liberals and conservatives that while they may occasionally pay lip service to the race issue, there's really no solution, and it's best to leave well enough alone on this issue and not push it further.  Likewise, it seems that blacks have decided that they no longer want real integration, but a better life within largely black communities.

There are too many factors to go into, but there has been a general pulling apart of American society.  The splits that are urban/suburban, black/white, etc. generally mirror the political splits.

[dazzleman]

Dude, we've finally found a guy who can spout out more stuff than I can!

You make a lot of interesting observations.  The ones about the differences between the haves and have-nots today, versus the 1940s, is particularly good.

One thing I would add, as a side effect to all this, is the different way poverty is perceived today versus then.  When the poor or relatively poor are part of the majority, poor people are ultimately viewed more as victims of circumstance or hard luck. 

Today, poverty is viewed, correctly in many cases, as a moral weakness.  I say correctly because there are cases in which moral weakness leads to poverty, through a complex interplay between illegitimacy, crime, drug abuse, and the degredation of available educational opportunities.  Despite the fact that the poor today are better off materially than in the 1940s, to be truly poor today is probably a lot worse today than it was then.

[dazzleman]

Thanks for your reply Dazzleman.

When you say that to be truly poor today is worse than in the 1940s, do you mean the truly poor today are worse off than in the 40s, or do you only mean that it requires greater moral weakness to be truly poor today than then?

A little of both.  I think the gap between the truly poor and the rest of society, both materially and culturally, is far greater than it was in the 1940s.  Being poor in the 1940s didn't necessarily mean living in a broken/abusive family, or in a high-crime drug-infested neighborhood, as it often does now, to a greater extent I believe than it did then.  Today, the truly poor are more isolated from society in every way, and the effect on their quality of life goes well beyond their dearth of material possessions relative to the rest of society.

This view of how poverty is looked at is interesting because it is all tied up with race. There's a substantial body of research out there that suggests that since poverty became tied up with images of welfare and blacks in the 1970s and 80s, tolerance of welfare programs and poverty has gone down a lot because it's viewed as "giving money to blacks." In fact, I think that there might soon be some evidence suggesting that the notion that blacks are lazy has declined since the end of welfare, but I'm not sure about that.

I think that the juxtaposition between welfare and blacks, which really came together in the 1960s, is unfortunate.  The majority of those on welfare were not blacks, though black participation was highly disproportionate to their share of the population.

Having said that, I think that Great Society welfare programs had a more devastating effect on blacks than on any other segment of the population.  I blame many of those welfare programs, and the overall philosophy behind them, for the precipitous collapse of the black family structure since 1965.  The damaging effects of this more than offset any good that those programs did, and this family structure collapse is one of the biggest factors in keeping large numbers of blacks cut off from the greater society, and mired in perpetual poverty.

I think liberals did blacks no favor in linking racial justice with highly questionable anti-poverty programs.

Also, I've heard it suggested that the Great Society changed people's perceptions of poverty in the opposite direction which you suggested... that prior to the 1960s, it was seen that if you were poor, this was a character fault, and that since then, it has come to be seen more as a facet of environment, although these people would probably categorize "illegitimacy, crime, drug abuse, and the degredation of available educational opportunities" as facets of environment rather than inherent personal factors.

Here, you're contradicting your previous paragraph.  I think that there is a difference between how people view poverty in general, and how they view their own poverty.

Prior to the New Deal, really, people tended to blame themselves for their own poverty, and were therefore very reluctant to accept charity or help.  The New Deal softened some of this attitude, and during the depression, poverty was a pretty normal condition, with external economic factors largely to blame.  There was no opportunity for most in society not to be poor.

By the time of the Great Society, the overall society was becoming quite affluent, and the Great Society, more so than the New Deal, was meant to deal with those who, for whatever reason, were unable to participate in the affluence being enjoyed by the larger society.  Because anti-poverty programs got tied in with the fight for racial equality, the notion of welfare as a promoter of social justice was created, and when the results of welfare became so obviously abysmal -- higher illegitimacy, crime, lack of work ethic, terrible attitude, etc. -- this gave weight to the idea that poverty was linked to moral failing, particularly among blacks.  And the proof was right in front of us, if the facts were interpreted in a certain way.

I think that during and after the Great Society, liberals who were not poor started to say that the poor were victims of circumstance, no matter how much their own decisions and behavior contributed to their situation.  Many of the poor themselves believed this, and those who did felt no responsibility to change their behavior.  But this is an argument that the liberals lost.

[dazzleman]

This could actually be true. I think it's the collapse of the Keynesian state more than the Great Society that ended the decline of poverty though. Even without the Great Society, the Keynesian economic policies of the Fordist era after 1930 were tending towards equalization. This ended around 1973, and Great Society or not, I think it fundamentally changed the structure of poverty reduction; basically killing it.

I agree with most of what you've said, but I think this statement is questionable.

I don't think economic equalization can ever realistically take place, no matter what the economic policies are that are being pursued.

The excesses of the Great Society, and their obviously bad effects, killed the public support for much of the anti-poverty agenda.  In addition to that, the types of programs championed by the Great Society effectively encouraged the type of behavior that inevitably leads to poverty.

The decline of the economic well-being of the blue collar working class, relative to the rest of society, which began in the early 1970s, was not in my opinion due to economic policies, but due to changes in the international economic situation, most notably the loss of US manufacturing supremacy that had existed since WW II.  Much of the working class, facing harder times than before, looked down rather than up for their class enemy, and strongly resented non-working poor being given what they had worked for.

[dazzleman]

I don't think economic equalization can ever realistically take place, no matter what the economic policies are that are being pursued.

Again, I agree with all that you said except for this. Firstly, public opinion does undergo change after long periods of time. Change is possible in what the public is willing to accept, and as I've said to Al, there's evidence of a more populist mood in this country lately as a backlash to Bush's overwhelmingly "my base are the haves and the have-mores" legislative agenda. Second, there is no correlation between economic equalization and performance. Jeffrey Sachs has I think done a great regression on this in his new book on poverty which I was browsing through about a month ago.

I'm not sure what you mean by "economic equalization."  I firmly believe there's no such thing, and never can be, regardless of the policies pursued by the government.  We can narrow the gap between the haves and have-nots, but we can't eliminate it without bringing everybody down to the lowest common denominator.

If you define economic equalization as I am, then I don't agree that there's no correlation between economic performance and economic equalization.

It is necessary to continually search for the right balance in economic policy.  The basic reality is that the greater good for the largest number of people is served by allowing a certain degree of economic inequality, and most people recognize this and don't mind, as long as they are reasonably well off.  But if the economic gap gets too great, it can undermine the whole system.

I think that rather than attempt to control the gap between the haves and have-nots through policies like confiscatory tax rates, which have other bad side effects, both social and economic, we are better to make the greatest attempt to help our workers adapt to the changing needs of the marketplace, in order to give them leverage in dealing with potential or actual employers.

Those who have the skills employers want have power and leverage to improve their economic circumstances.  Those who do not have those skills are without those powers.  The poor are mostly found among the second group, and no amount of legislation can make them marketable and competitive in the job market.

[dazzleman]

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I've defined equalization exactly as it sounds-- a more equitably distributed gradient of income and wealth across society. I don't think that's impossible at all. There's a notion out there that there's some kind of a trade-off between equality and growth... I don't think that's true at all. History has shown it's not true. An analysis of cases over the years since World War II have shown it's not true. That's what I'm saying.

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I agree with the first 2 paragraphs, but that's not incomptible with equalization. Equalization can be achieved by helping the lower classes be copetitive. I don't agree that "no amount of legislation can make" people who would otherwise be poor competitive. If that was true, public funding for education would be pointless. Yet perhaps the biggest problem is societal rather than governmental. The government's policies will be reflected and mediated through the society. If our society is divided, then the government's efforts will be undermined and fail. It's hard to get a society as big as the U.S. to see a common good. Not impossible, but harder. That's why to a certain extent I think it might be better to try and do it at the state level. But it's an uphill challenge in the U.S. because of the way our society works, not because of economic impossibilities.

You are defining economic equalization as narrowing the gap between the rich and poor.  This implies that there will still be a gap.

I think that whether the push for economic equalization compromises economic performance depends on the thrust of that push.  If the thrust is confiscatory tax policies and redistribution of income, then it will hurt economic performance.  But if the thrust is constructive -- such as well-conceived initiatives to improve education -- then there can be both a move toward economic equalization and positive economic gains overall.

When I said no amount of legislation can make the poor non-competitive, I meant that legislation cannot have a direct effect.  We cannot will it.  Improved education can make the poor more competitive, assuming they are interested in that, but that is an indirect, rather than direct, effect of legislation that seeks to improve education.

You will never get people to see and work toward a single common good, except in the short term under extraordinary circumstances.  The best we can do is to try to get people to see that it is in their interest to improve society, and explain how.

I think failed liberal initiatives, such as ill-conceived Great Society anti-poverty programs and busing, just to name a couple, have drained the public of its will to improve certain situations.  Liberals clung to these bad policies long after it was obvious that they were making worse the problems they were supposed to solve, and that compounded the negative effect.  There are only rare, and short, windows of opportunity when people are willing to address in a large-scale way issues beyond their own personal concerns, and these opportunities were lost with ill-conceived policies to which liberals stubbornly clung.

One of my pet peeves on the education issue is the belief that in order to help those who don't have access to good education currently, we must somehow hurt those who do.  This was the main premise, practically speaking, behind busing, and it caused people to reject violently any larger societal concerns, and look out for number one totally.  If some people have access to good education, we should seek to spread that, not destroy it, as we have effectively done in many cases.

[dazzleman]

Politically, the busing issue was terrible for activists, I'll easily admit. It screwed over efforts to improve the lot of the poor for a generation or more.

I completely agree.  It was a stupid, ill-conceived idea, implemented hypocritically by those who exempted themselves from it.  It misdiagnosed and refused to acknowledge the real problem, and sought to hurt whites on the lower rungs of the economic ladder as atonement for our racial sins, while exempting better-off whites, by their design.

Busing is one of the major reasons that the image of the "elitist liberal" gained such currency among the middle and working classes.  I would venture to say that elitist liberal support for busing is the largest single contributor to this accurate image.

[dazzleman]

Democrats are much more interested in considering issues of class.  In turn, central cities are Democratic because of the enormous class disparities that exist there.  Residents of central cities (especially old-fashioned, high-density cities) see large numbers of very wealthy and very poor, often with no  middle class. Such a situation creates anger among the poor and guilt among the rich. In both cases, the result is a Democratic landslide. Suburbs tend to be MUCH more homogenous. If you only see people who are economically similar to you, you're going to be much less likely to feel a great crisis in wealth distribution.

Excellent observation.

Whatever the political leanings of a city, the suburbs of that city will almost always be significantly more conservative.

Even in the northeast, where suburbs are trending Democratic, they are significantly more conservative than the cities they surround.