This Land Is Your Land. . . This Land Is My Land

By Richard Lacayo

RESIDENTS OF SIMI VALley don't usually have much contact with people from South Central Los Angeles. The lustrous suburb where the Rodney King beating trial was held and the inner-city war zone that erupted in rioting two weeks ago are separated by just a 45-minute ride. In most other respects they are a world apart. But last week, for a fleeting moment of mutual incomprehension, they came face to face.

On Tuesday a convoy of 150 activists from South Central arrived to picket the courthouse where the four policemen were tried. "Why do you bother us?" Simi Valley housewife Suzanne Heffernan shouted back at the protesters. "Let us go on with our lives, like you are down there."

"Down there" in L.A., Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a black former Congresswoman who is running for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, sat in her campaign headquarters in South Central. Across the street a block- long Thrifty Drug Store lay gutted by fire, its ANNIVERSARY SALE banner still flapping over the curb. Yet Burke is hopeful that the election of a new representative from the inner city to the powerful five-member board may help get local resources flowing back to the neighborhood. "For the past 10 years the suburbs have been dominant," she says. "Now we are going to move into another era."

Burke is right about the problem, though she may be very wrong about the likelihood of a new era soon. Suburbanization, the most irresistible demographic trend of the past 40 years, is indeed at the heart of why the inner cities have been reduced to hollow shells peopled largely by poor non- whites. The process began after World War II, when veterans by the thousands moved their families to suburbs like New York's Levittown. The draining of the cities accelerated during the 1960s and '70s, when malls sprouted across the nation, diverting shoppers from downtown business districts. And it reached a peak during the 1980s, when employers joined the exodus from cities, transferring millions of jobs to suburban office parks. Now about half of America's 250 million people live in the suburbs, and only one-quarter in central cities.

The result is an America that is rapidly dividing into two worlds, separated by class, race and drive time. Sheltered in tree-lined streets where the fantasy of a homogeneous middle-class society can still be entertained, many suburbanites know the city mainly as a skyline glimpsed from an overpass or as the place of a shooting reported on the evening news -- or as a pillar of smoke and flame on the horizon.

New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles -- many of the great American cities have been severely, perhaps fatally, undermined by the loss of jobs and taxpayers. In 1960, per capita income was 5% higher in a sample of the nation's cities than in their suburbs. By 1987, suburban per capita income was 59% larger than in the cities.

As workers and employers have retreated to their homes and industrial parks beyond the city line, the poor left behind have become more destitute than ever. In the past two years, welfare rolls in Los Angeles County have climbed to historic levels. Nearly 1.4 million Angelenos, a seventh of the county's population, depend on one or more of the county-administered relief services: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, general relief, food stamps or the California state version of Medicaid.

The contrast between South Central L.A. and Simi Valley is typical of the city-suburban divide. South Central, a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood of 260,000 people, has long been one of the poorest sections of the city. While there are pockets of prim bungalows sprinkled among the run-down commercial streets and crime-infested housing projects, the average income is just $10,000 per adult. More than a fourth of the area's families are below the poverty line.

Meanwhile, Simi Valley -- 80% white, 13% Hispanic, 5% Asian, only 2% black -- is a pristine bedroom community of just over 100,000, where the average price of a home is $230,000. Much of it is so fresh-out-of-the-cellophane new that in some shopping malls the trees are not yet shade size. "We can see some urban pressures like graffiti start to spring up," says Mayor Greg Stratton, but he stresses that "among towns over 100,000, Simi Valley is one of the two safest communities in the U.S."

As befits the site of Ronald Reagan's Presidential Library, Simi Valley also votes overwhelmingly Republican. The Los Angeles riots have made the problems of the cities an issue to be reckoned with in this year's election campaigns. But the 1992 presidential election will also be the first in which suburbanites are a majority of the voters -- up from just 36% in 1968, when the white backlash against the ghetto riots of that era helped elect Richard Nixon. What Nixon understood then, and what a great deal of state and federal policy has reflected since then, is that the suburbs control the nation's political destiny. Voters there will punish any candidate who would have them transfer tax revenue back to the cities. And even if the new suburban majority could be persuaded to agree to massive urban aid, the damage wrought by the shift of wealth and jobs to the suburbs might be too much for mere social programs to remedy.

Money follows power. Community Development Block Grants began as a housing program for inner cities. Now half the $3.5 billion allocated for the program this year will go outside center cities. The politically sacrosanct tax deduction for mortgage interest costs the federal Treasury $50 billion each year, a benefit that flows mostly to the purchasers of suburban homes. At the same time, federal aid to cities declined from $47.2 billion in 1980 to $21.7 billion 10 years later.

Race adds a final layer of complication to the picture. As many African Americans have flowed into the middle class, they too have sought refuge in the suburbs -- often against the resistance of red-lining banks and reluctant white neighbors. Their departure has done more than deny tax revenue to the cities. It has deprived black youths in the ghetto of living examples of the steady work and stable family life of middle-class blacks.

Even the creation of inner-city enterprise zones, in which businesses would receive tax breaks and other incentives, may not be enough to draw employers into the dangerous world of drugs and violent crime that chronic poverty has created. After the Watts riots of 1965, Howard Allen, senior board member of Southern California Edison, was active in trying to lure manufacturing to the inner city. This time he is more pessimistic. To him it seems that the obstacles to attracting job-creating enterprises are more firmly entrenched than they were 25 years ago. Says Allen: "We are heading in the direction whose only definition is one of textbook class warfare."

The shift of power to the suburbs began slowly and was propelled by government policies. The first burst of suburbanization in the post-World War II era was made possible by guaranteed home loans for veterans and government subsidies for highway construction. The final and shattering blow came during the 1980s, when developers flush with government - guaranteed loans from savings and loan associations helped erect clusters of industrial parks and research-and-develop ment centers along the beltways that ring many central cities.

Corporations seeking relief from high big-city taxes also joined the rush, feeding the growth of hybrid suburb-cities like Virginia's Tysons Corner, Perimeter Center outside Atlanta, and the spanking new localities of the Route 128 corridor in Massachusetts. According to Joel Garreau, author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, by many standards of urban life these mostly low- rise population centers are already minicities. Most of the more than 200 suburban hybrids that he studied have more office space, shopping, entertainment, prestigious hotels, corporate headquarters -- even hospitals with high-tech CAT-scan machines -- than such conventional cities as Tampa, Tucson or Portland, Oregon.

Garreau's "edge cities" are very different from traditional suburbs that looked to the nearby city as their center. "They're not sub-anything," he says. "They are now the standard form of American urban life." As jobs and cultural attractions have moved out to such places, the people who live there have little reason to venture into old cities at all. "I never, ever go to the city," says Joan Schimansky, 43, a resident of the Miami suburb of Kendall. "There's not much down there for a family with two kids."

In the mostly homogeneous suburbs, people have less stake in solving the problems of people unlike themselves in the dimly remembered cities. It is also more tempting for them to dump their own problems there. Until last summer, Westchester County, a prosperous suburb of New York City, was exporting some of its homeless to a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Five years ago, the sewage-treatment plant in the bedraggled New Jersey city of Camden % began taking on sewage waste from every other community in the county. To protest the stench, residents stopped paying their annual $275 sewer fees. Last week the sewer authority halved the charge, but the plant's odor still tinges the air.

Some urban leaders are trying to find a silver lining in the clouds that rose over the burning blocks of Los Angeles. "What you are starting to see more and more -- and Los Angeles brought it home dramatically -- is that you can't isolate yourself in your little island of self-interest," says New Jersey Governor Jim Florio. "In a place like New Jersey, you can go from Short Hills, a very affluent community, to Newark in the space of 10 minutes."

But as Florio learned the hard way, if you bump up too hard against suburban interests, you can quickly go from popular Governor to political chump. Two years ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court directed the state to reduce disparities in school funding between affluent suburban communities and inner cities. In an attempt to comply with the court order, Florio pushed the Democratic-controlled legislature to agree to $2.8 billion in new taxes, including an increase in sales tax from 6% to 7%, along with deep cuts in state jobs and spending programs. He also redirected a portion of state education aid from suburban schools to poorer inner-city districts.

The response from suburban taxpayers was ferocious, ranging from death threats to calls for Florio's impeachment. Last November voters elected veto- proof Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. They are now trying to reverse most of Florio's program -- while also fumbling for a way to satisfy the same court order that led the Governor to formulate his plan.

The lesson of New Jersey is that even suburbanites who recognize the dimension of the inner-city problems often draw the line at paying to solve them. "It does not make sense to take the money away from good suburban schools so that you risk mediocrity everywhere," says Susan Bass Levin, mayor of the wealthy suburb of Cherry Hill, which is outside Camden. As a result of Florio's plan, she claims, her town lost $5 million in education funds in 1989. The following year Cherry Hill adopted the first in a series of annual school-tax hikes to offset the loss.

Ironically, suburbanites who bristle at the thought of federal or state dollars going to support inner cities can spend like liberals on a spree when their own communities stand to benefit. In recent years the voters of Georgia's Gwinnett County, a mostly white, Republican enclave outside Atlanta, have approved road and library bond issues, as well as a special recreation tax and a 1% local sales tax to finance roads, a new courthouse and a jail.

But when hard-pressed cities try to tax their citizens more to pay for needed services, it often backfires, provoking another wave of middle-class flight to suburbs where property levies are lower. Moreover, urban government's attempts to expand their revenues are often thwarted. Hartford, Connecticut, where a third of the population lives below the poverty line, has an effective property-tax rate 66% higher than that of the well-to-do suburb of Farmington next door. Last year Hartford city manager Raymond Eugene Shipman proposed a payroll tax on the thousands of commuters who flock to the city's downtown office towers by day but flee by night. In the 1960s and early '70s, 15 major American cities had been granted such power by their state legislatures, which must approve municipal taxes. But as the legislatures filled with representatives of the burgeoning suburbs, major cities found it harder to win taxing authority. Los Angeles has been the only one to succeed since 1972. The Hartford idea was doomed from the outset.

Another way to recapture fleeing taxpayers might be to extend the city limits. In the 1960s and '70s cities like New Mexico's Albuquerque, Florida's Jacksonville and Kentucky's Lexington have preserved their tax base by annexing or merging with neighboring suburban communities. "They have not ghettoized their black and Hispanic populations to the degree other communities have," says David Rusk, a former mayor of Albuquerque, who is now an urban-affairs consultant.

But many of those cities were able to negotiate their expansion deals before their urban centers had deteriorated enough to frighten the outlying areas. "Generally speaking, the cities that have had luck in annexing were the ones that were not too troubled or low income to begin with," says Kevin Phillips, the ex-Nixon aide who first identified the gop advantage in suburbia in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. "When it's a problem city, the suburbs fight like hell, and they can usually succeed."

If anything, it has been more common in recent years for the better-off areas of large cities to try to break free, as Marina del Rey, a rich coastal enclave of Los Angeles, talked about four years ago. "The tendency of the suburbs is traditionally to insulate the people who live there insofar as possible by secession," says Charles Stewart, an aide to California state senator Diane Watson. "Failing that, their tendency is then to oppose all taxes."

One reason that suburbanites are ready to circle the lawn mowers is that many of them see the cities' problems seeping into their own community. While the more distant and wealthier suburbs can still claim to be free of graffiti, gangs and drugs, urban squalor is spreading into the less fortunate towns. Wander for only a few minutes from the leafy avenues of Garden City, a New York City suburb, and you find yourself in the run-down, drug-infested apartment blocks of Hempstead. Reported robberies grew by 17% on Long Island last year. They fell by 1.6% in New York City in the same period.

Urban planner Allen Kracower has seen the signs of unwelcome change in an array of suburbs, even the most affluent. "At one time the suburbs were a place to escape," he says. "Schools were better. The air was cleaner. Now it's the same kind of crime, dirty air and homeless people."

The first suburbs to feel the strain are often located on the outskirts of spreading cities. In Hennepin County, just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, some social-service agencies have doubled and tripled their caseloads in recent years. "The first-ring suburbs are starting to reflect what we saw in inner cities 10 to 20 years ago," says Patty Wilder, executive director of the Northwest Hennepin Human Services Council.

Older suburbs are also suffering from a graying effect. The newlyweds who set off the baby boom are now retirees with fixed incomes but growing demands on local services. "Senior citizens tend to have an increasing need for home maintenance, transportation, meals on wheels and a host of other support services," says Patricia Paruch, the mayor of Royal Oak, a century-old suburb of Detroit, where more than 20% of the 65,000 residents are over 65.

Since state legislatures and Washington are reluctant to help or are too strapped for cash, there are two approaches that might help to alleviate the poverty of the city. One is to move money to the cities through court-ordered revenue-sharing. Over the past decade, 10 states have decided or been ordered to bridge the gap between rich and poor school districts by overhauling their financing system. Legal challenges to school-financing systems are moving through the system in a dozen other states. Though federal courts have grown more conservative under the weight of Republican appointments, many state supreme courts are still willing to enforce equity from the bench.

Another way to dissolve knots of urban poverty is dispersing the poor in manageable numbers to the suburbs. Courts in several states, including New Jersey and Kentucky, have ordered localities to provide low-income housing, or forbidden them to prevent the construction of such housing. The prospect of poor people nearby makes suburbanites shudder. Yet the same self-interest that has made them turn away from the cities may eventually force them to recognize that the larger health of America requires the cities to be rescued. Even in a nation as spacious as the U.S., people are running out of places to escape.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles and Priscilla Painton/New York, with other bureaus