The census as a call to action.

• Author: Barron, David J.

With the release of the first figures from the 2000 census, we are on the verge of knowing more about where Americans are living these days. But we are also on the verge of misinterpreting why they are living where they are. It is clear that the rush to the suburbs that began in earnest half a century ago continues apace. Now it is the far flung suburbs that are growing most rapidly, as more and more rural areas are becoming suburbanized. Many large cities have also increased their population somewhat, while others have not, and those that are growing have done so mainly as a consequence of immigration from abroad.

What do these developments mean? For some, as a Harvard economist recently told the New York Times, "What all this says is that consumer preferences are important," (1) On this view, immigrants move to cities and long-time residents leave them for the far-out suburbs because that is where they have chosen to live. Central cities that want to grow must therefore find a way to sell themselves better to those now moving outside the beltways. They should start by trying to remake themselves in the image of the suburbs that seem to be so popular with today's metropolitan residents. For example, the Harvard economist suggested that to be attractive places to live, cities "need to make streets safe and schools solid." (2) No doubt, he would add, to keep themselves attractive, suburbs should be sure to continue doing the same thing.

This way of thinking about the census results is a mistake. It is just as likely that the new census data reflect not consumer preferences but the fact that we have done too little in the last half century to give citizens a meaningful set of choices about where and how to live. That is because we have done virtually nothing to change the legal rules that have promoted unceasing sprawl since the end of the Second World War. These rules establish the framework within which individual choices are made, but they are not natural or inevitable. Even those that were chosen by citizens (rather than by the courts) were often chosen decades ago--so long ago, in fact, that we now take them for granted. If one reads the census results with these legal rules in mind--and if one also keeps in mind that these legal rules can be changed--it will become clear that the picture that some census-readers divine of a well functioning market in which consumer-voters choose where to live misses much of what is really going on.

This is not to deny that some people are choosing some suburbs because they want lower taxes, less crime, and better schools. But those staying behind in central cities and declining suburbs are not doing so because they want higher taxes, more crime, and worse schools. They want the things that the prosperous suburbs have too, but they cannot have them. Why not? The answer is that current legal rules allow some places to have good schools and low crime while paying less in taxes than the places that have bad schools and high crime. These rules include those that allow local governments to engage in exclusionary zoning, that base school financing on local wealth, and that give incentives for economic development to occur farther and farther away from poor people who need the jobs it creates. These rules allow the rich to exclude the poor from their jurisdiction and then to spend the money raised from local taxes on schools that admit only local residents and on crime control techniques that protect these residents from outsiders. In other words, they allow some people to gain privileges by isolating themselves from those across the city line who want the same privileges.

One way to see how local government law enables this to happen is to read the population figures for the multitude of cities that now constitute American metropolitan areas. In Los Angeles County, for example, the city population varies from 91 (Vernon) to 3,694,820 (Los Angeles); in the St. Louis metropolitan region, it varies from 12 (Champ Village) to 348,189 (St. Louis); in the Boston region, it varies from 844 (South Hampton, New Hampshire) to 589,141 (Boston)...