You can really tell what the agenda behind this article is when author Joel Kotkin puts “white flight” in square quotes, implying that liberals made it up because of our irrational hatred of the suburbs. (Via Atrios, who points out that you aren’t exactly assaulting the suburbs when you pour hundreds of millions of dollars into propping up suburban home prices, so suburbanites who bought high don’t take a bath.) Except that the existence of white flight is not controversial, as Kotkin implies, or at least no more than evolutionary theory, which is to say not controversial to people who are open to evidence. It’s incredibly well-documented. His mouth-smacking about the suburbs becoming more diverse is misleading—-inner suburbs, sure, but that’s simply creating another round of white flight as many white residents run to the exurbs, preferring two hour commutes, it seems, over living in racially diverse neighborhoods. If you truly value diversity, then the explosion of suburbia should be a concern to you. That’s not the same thing as suggesting everyone who lives in the suburbs is a racist, or that was their motivation. But the larger trends shouldn’t be ignored.
Obviously, Kotkin wants to avoid this question, because his cute little thesis about how the President is going to be punished by suburban voters for his supposed anti-suburban views is basically one click to the left of the arguments put forwards by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck that Barack Obama is a “racist” out to get white people. I have no idea if that’s his intention, but that’s the effect. And without a real willingness to grapple with these realities of white flight and racism that are part of suburban formations, a lot of Kotkin’s arguments don’t really make sense. Like this:
In addition, the president’s stimulus—with its $8 billion allocation for high-speed rail and proposed giant increases in mass transit—offers little to anyone who lives outside a handful of large metropolitan cores. Economics writer Robert Samuelson, among others, has denounced the high-speed rail idea as “a boondoggle” not well-suited to a huge, multi-centered country like the United States. Green job schemes also seem more suited to boost employment for university researchers and inner-city residents than middle-income suburbanites.
Except that some of the biggest beneficiaries of public transit by rail are the very suburbanites in middle American cities that Kotkin claims to fiercely defend. Austin is a medium-sized city, and its light rail is being stymied by some pretty nasty political forces, but if they ever let it work, then the main beneficiaries will be people who live in the suburbs and work in the city—-the traditional suburbanite the Kotkin is slobbering all over in barely-concealed “Real American” style. In Dallas, it’s already working (and well) this way—-giving suburbanites a break from endless amounts of traffic going to and from work. But I can see where Kotkin is skeptical that people will actually use this transit.