The idea that where you live affects your opportunities is not new. As America’s major industrial cities began shedding jobs and population to the shiny new suburbs, cities were left to fend for themselves with smaller budgets. That had a huge impact on the quality of services government could provide. But a new book by three Temple University professors and a research with The Reinvestment Fund goes a long way to explaining why “your place” is not the same as “my place” by looking at how the inequities have played out in the region over the decades. The book is Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality.

It’s Our City contacted Carolyn Adams, one of the authors, to find whether town borders really mean that much in how we experience living in the Delaware Valley. Adams is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University.

IT’S OUR CITY: CAN YOU EXPLAIN FOR IT’S OUR CITY READERS WHAT YOUR NEW BOOK “RESTRUCTURING THE PHILADELPHIA REGION” IS ALL ABOUT?

Carolyn Adams: Our main theme is that the place where you live matters enormously in shaping your future because many of the important opportunities that affect your future are tied to place.  Everyone who follows city development knows that the quality of urban places is crucial to attracting businesses and residents.  But a lot of the discussion in the media focuses on cities and whole regions as if they were unified places whose quality could be measured and ranked against other cities or regions.  (Think about “Places Rated” and other similar national rankings.)

Our book does not treat the city or the region as a whole.  Instead, we document the dramatic differences in the quality of the different communities contained within greater Philadelphia.  We explain why those differences are so important in shaping the life chances of residents.  The varying opportunities available in different places in the region don’t merely reflect the already-existing differences in different families’ life chances.  The differences in place actually widen social gaps, breeding more inequality.  So when families are limited to communities with low-performing schools, limited access to job centers, and stagnating housing values, their opportunities over a lifetime are being curtailed.  And families moving into communities with high levels of opportunity are enhancing their starting advantages.

HOW IS THIS BOOK DIFFERENT FROM YOUR EARLIER BOOK “PHILADELPHIA:NEIGHBORHOODS, DIVISION, AND CONFLICT IN A POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY”?

Our earlier book focused on the city of Philadelphia.  We documented the inequalities generated by an economy that has been producing lots of “good” jobs and “bad” jobs, but a much smaller number of jobs in between  — the kind of secure but modest-paying jobs that historically supported America’s middle class.  Our first book analyzed the consequences of that changing economy for Philadelphia’s job market, its housing markets, and its redevelopment.

This book kicks that analysis up to the regional level, showing the dramatic differences in the conditions prevailing in the hundreds of separate communities that comprise the greater Philadelphia region.  This book recognizes that for large numbers of residents, the search for good jobs, housing, and schools ranges across the entire region.  To study the structure of opportunity in our region, we had to move beyond the city boundaries.

Since writing our earlier book, we’ve managed to assemble an enormous data base (with support from The William Penn Foundation).  Using that information, we were able to compare conditions in over 350 separate cities, towns and boroughs in the greater Philadelphia region, including both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey sides. What we found is a region made up of hundreds of separate communities whose fortunes are growing farther apart, as are the fortunes of individual families residing in these communities.

WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT INEQUITIES PEOPLE FACE IN THE REGION, CAN YOU GIVE US SOME EXAMPLES?

The book focuses mainly on three kinds of inequities — jobs, housing, and education. We show that there are stark differences in the kinds of opportunities available to different residents in these three realms.

We mapped where new jobs are being created and concluded that having an automobile is crucial to gain access to most of the growing suburban employment base.  But when we looked at auto ownership patterns, we found that only 6% of White households lack an automobile, compared to 28% of Latino households and 35% of African American households.

When we looked at how much home owners were benefiting from increasing home values in their communities over a recent decade, the differences ranged all the way from some homeowners benefiting by an average appreciation over $20,000, to other communities where the average home actually lost value over the same decade.  When we compared access to good quality mortgage credit in different places, we found that in the most affluent communities of the region, less than 3% of mortgages being granted were of sub-prime quality, while in the least affluent communities, over 16% of mortgages were sub-prime.

Perhaps the most obvious way that communities affect their residents’ life chances is through the quality of public education.  We documented astonishing gaps in school spending in different parts of the region.  The least affluent school districts were spending around $7,000 per student each year, while the most affluent districts spent almost $20,000 per pupil  -a ratio of almost three-to-one.  Not surprisingly, we also saw substantial differences in students’ performance levels in these different school systems.  In the high schools of some districts, the students taking the SAT exam in order to apply to colleges earned averaged combined scores under 900 points, while test takers in the best scoring districts achieved average scores well over 1100 points.

WHAT ROLE DOES RACIAL PREJUDICE PLAY IN CREATING THE INEQUITIES THAT WE SEE IN THE PHILADELPHIA REGION?

We mapped the residential patterns of African-American, Latino, and Asian households in the Philadelphia suburbs and discovered that only a few dozen of the region’s hundreds of towns contain substantial minority populations.  So it is certainly true that minority residents are generally clustered instead of broadly distributed across the region.  But our study doesn’t try to measure how much of that clustering is due to racial steering or other forms of discrimination in housing markets.  (Fair housing studies done in Philadelphia and elsewhere show continuing –although somewhat diminishing -racial prejudice affecting housing markets.)

Our book shows that once families are sorted into different communities, by a combination of their incomes and preferences and racial prejudice, those communities can either improve their opportunities going into the future, or limit their opportunities.

WHAT’S BEING DONE TO MAKE THINGS FAIR FOR EVERYONE?

People naturally tend to look toward government to address these inequities, since local governments carry responsibility for maintaining the vitality of the community’s economy, residential neighborhoods and schools.  Yet we found that most of the work being done to address these inequities is not being led by local governments.  Instead, the initiative is being taken either by state government agencies or organizations operating in the “third sector” –that is, non-profit agencies or quasi-governmental authorities that operate outside the bounds of formal government.  Examples would be nonprofit housing associations, special service districts, regional development coalitions, community development financial institutions, and charter schools.  These non-governmental organizations are actively working to bring more opportunity to disadvantaged communities and to help disadvantaged families move to places where opportunities are more plentiful.  They often work in partnership with each other, with government, and with businesses.  To a great extent, they are driving regional efforts to cope with the inequities that will continue to widen across our regional landscape if they are not addressed.

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The book is Restructuriing the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality.

It was published by Temple University Press Aug 2008

Authors

Carolyn Adams is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University.

David Bartelt is a Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University.

David Elesh is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Service Science Data Library at Temple University.

Ira Goldstein is Director of Policy and Information Services for The Reinvestment Fund.