This one is about “regionalism.”
So warned, feel free to turn the page. INC. usually has a juicy item or two on Mondays and the weekend concert reviews are always a treat.
Most discussions of regionalism, on the other hand, have a vagueness to them that leaves the average person thinking this must be important but not knowing exactly why.
That’s because regionalism–the powerfully interconnected forces that shape the quality of life in a city and its suburbs–is discussed mainly by intellectuals who go out of their way not to offend anyone.
This I learned while attending and/or participating in a half dozen organized discussions on the subject this spring. They were talking regionalism at the Civic Federation and at the DuPage Mayors and Managers Conference, at the Bright New Cities forum and at the Metropolitan Planning Council.
Interest in the “R-word” among civic and business thinkers is, by my lights, at an all-time high. Two reasons:
– The recently-concluded session of the Illinois General Assembly set a new low for ugly antagonism between Chicago Democrats and suburban Republicans. A lot of thoughtful people are worried our region is flying apart politically, like some kind of midwestern Sarajevo.
– Second, there is a creeping awareness that the wide and widening gulf between the area’s haves and have-nots is darkening the Chicago area’s economic prospects, and perhaps even our collective soul.
Our predicament was summed up nicely last week in a report issued by the Metropolitan Planning Council. “The Chicago region faces a choice,” say the planners at MPC, “to launch an effort to maintain and enhance its role as a world economic leader, or to allow uncoordinated growth and a lack of cooperation sap the region’s promise and reduce its quality of life.”
The central problem, according to MPC, is galloping suburban sprawl. The metropolitan real estate game, as played under federal and state rules, all but guarantees rapid development along a booming fringe and a hollowing-out at the core. It’s a process fueled by cheap gas and cheaper farmland, by federally subsidized highways and treatment plants, by the deductibility of mortgage interest and a state revenue code that goads suburbs into grabbing as much commercial development as they can regardless of the impact on other suburbs, or on city neighborhoods from which the businesses fled.
None of this is new, of course, but the cumulative effect over the last 50 years is truly alarming. The Loop and north lakefront are holding their own, as are several close-in dowager suburbs, but in general the city and its older suburbs are losing population, and those who are left behind tend to be poor and getting poorer. And though Chicago may have the deepest pockets of poverty, a worse fate awaits have-not suburbs and tumble-down unincorporated areas that lack the city’s still-considerable tax and employment base.
Every self-respecting regionalism conference also talks about the negative impacts the sprawl game has on the “winners.” There’s the traffic congestion in western DuPage and southern Lake Counties; the prime farmland being paved over in McHenry, Kane and Will Counties; the soaring property taxes as outlying suburbs build new schools even as older suburbs mothball theirs.
And there is the less-visible but real price the winners pay via increased state and federal taxes to fund all the jails, courts, welfare clinics and detox centers required by the game’s losers.
At this point the regionalism discussion often turns to the pros and cons of various solutions: metro-government, regional tax-sharing, affordable housing quotas, urban growth boundaries and so forth.
At which point this hoary skeptic begins to lose interest, for there is in northeastern Illinois no popular constituency for any of those things.
Why? Because despite all the horribles listed above, and despite all the well-intended discussion, the sprawl machine works only too well for a majority of Chicagoans. At least it works in the short term, the time frame in which most of us make our personal decisions about where to live and why.
First and foremost, the sprawl machine gives middle-class whites a dependable means of escape from the advance of poor blacks and others whose lifestyles they cannot abide. This is what the regionalists, at their polite conferences and workshops, cannot bring themselves to say. Even the new MPC report largely skirts the issue of race, referring instead to a widespread desire to “escape from problems of older areas, such as disinvestment and crime.”
Fact is, our region has crafted a highly efficient machine for separating haves from have-nots, blacks from whites, problems from resources.
This did not occur by accident or omission, but by decades of subtle maneuvers and gentleman’s agreements, of winks and nods, of fears whispered around kitchen tables and zoning boards.
To meet our demand for escape a great industry has grown up. There are developers and builders, real estate agents and mortgage lenders, and yes, newspapers fat with real estate ads touting sylvan subdivisions along the fringe.
Ultimately our regional problems–and make no mistake, they are our biggest problems–are not so much about planning or zoning or transportation or open space as they are about our personal, moral commitment to the well-being of others.
Absent that commitment, it’s all just talk.
