Step back from your usual twisting and straining of my views, Mr. Hobbs. I've lived in neighborhoods for years with people in need lined up at local service providers (both private and public) for assistance. I would prefer that those people not have to stand in line in the cold and other harmful elements only to be told to come back later. You obviously have no knowledge of Fehr School's small facilities (or you don't care). But the small building is the reason people were lined up outside.

I also believe that urban neighborhoods unfairly bear most of the burden for social services. It's time for surburban neighborhoods like yours to share some of the social responsibility for safety nets that cities have been shouldering for too long now. I can live with social services in the 'hood. My guess is that surburbanites like yourself could not. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't.

Posted by: S-townMike at December 30, 2005 11:19 AM

That's what I thought you meant, but your post was written poorly and it sounded (due to the lack of explanation) that you just wanted the poor not to line up in your 'hood, so I decided to tweak you.

By the way, Franklin provides a number of social services, and we live with it just fine. Franklin hosted one of the largest post-Katrina shelters in the region, has housing projects and various services for the poor, etc., etc.

But, hey, don't let facts get in the way of your anti-suburbs bigotry.

Posted by: Bill Hobbs at December 30, 2005 2:28 PM

Let's see if I've understood this rightly:

Suburban growth is largely due to "white flight."
You live in the suburbs, but you accuse me of bigotry.
And all I expect is for suburbanites to shoulder their fair share of the safety-net load, rather than continuing their free ride.

Well, okay then.

Posted by: S-townMike at December 30, 2005 5:29 PM

"White Flight" happened half a century ago, and was really "middle class flight" as middle class people moved to the 'burbs for lower taxes, less crime, better schools and, frankly, a better lifestyle than living in a cramped city surrounded by noise, traffic, crime, pollution, etc.

Middle class whites moving to the 'burbs was NOT RACIALLY MOTIVATED, as Robert Bruegmann notes in his excellent new book Sprawl: A Compact History (University of Chicago Press, $27.50). Bruegmann, a professor of art history, architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes that, while it is true that In many Southern cities whites fled city centers in the 1960s, the pattern of out-migration in cities with minimal African-American populations, such as Minneapolis, was exactly the same.

Today, says Bruegmann, "Blacks move out of the city the same way whites do, when they have the chance, because nobody wants to be in neighborhoods with crime and bad schools."

My neighborhood is a perfect example. Until a few weeks ago, when one African American family moved to Atlanta on a job interview, the 15 or so closest homes to mine in this section of the subdivision included four African-American families, one from India, and a mixed-race (white/black) family.

Stuff your "the suburbs are full of white racial bigots" - it's a false and slanderous generalization and has been for a couple of decades now.

As for the notion that the burbs aren't shouldering their fair share, I dare say that, per capita, the people of Franklin pay more in taxes to the state and federal government than the people of your neighborhood, just given that they have a higher per capita income, thus paying more federal income taxes, and they spend more money, so they pay more sales taxes to Tennessee.

The community that isn't paying its fair share is the city - that's why so much of the government's transfer payments go from suburban taxpayers to city programs and urban-centric welfare.

But of course as long as Nashville and other cities drive out their middle-class with high taxes and crappy schools and rising crime rates, and replace those folks with lower-income immigrants, the imbalance will only grow worse.

Posted by: Bill Hobbs at December 30, 2005 6:45 PM

There might be a couple of authors here and there who would disagree with your [mis]characterization of a purely benign "middle class" flight to the suburbs.

As I have written before: race is less a reason now for leaving the suburbs. I couldn't resist pointing out the hypocrisy, though, of one who enjoys the benefits of the suburbs so freely throwing around terms like "bigotry." So, as for "stuffing" my "suburbs are full of racial bigots": there's nothing to stuff (I've conceded that race is a diminishing factor). I don't believe that the suburbs are full of bigots, just as you should not charge me with bigotry. That doesn't change the fact that suburbs prospered for race-based reasons and that class rarely had anything to do with it. You cannot rewrite history to suit your mythos.

Per capita the people of Franklin also deduct more sales taxes than the people in my neighborhood, which means they get much more back than the people in my neighborhood at tax time. Besides, everybody knows that sales taxes tax the income of the poorer classes more than they tax those of the rich. That goes without saying.

No need to keep reciting the TTR faith-based mantra that people are moving out of cities to the suburbs because of higher taxes. That mantra is based more in anecdote and on innuendo than anything else. As I have written elsewhere: 1) People move to the suburbs for many different reasons based on cost-benefit analysis and more profound interests (taxes are one among many). 2) Based on market principles, city real estate prices should decrease with demand if taxes were driving people toward suburban rather than urban neighborhoods. The opposite is true. Hence, no net increase in urban outflow because of higher taxes. 3) Lower class residents are less likely to move to Franklin than to stay in Nashville, because social services are disproportionately located in the city. Suburban outflow is by definition classist, unless you are housing displaced New Orleaneans, whom you obviously expect not to stay in Franklin. 4) If cities were truly hemorraging the middle class to the suburbs rather than attracting a large number back in, then there would be a higher demand for more services like police and schools and proportionately a higher drain on suburban revenues and a higher need for taxes; except when your population grows like Spring Hill, where they can pay for their services in part due to "state-shared" revenues that get awarded on the basis of growth; which means that the rest of us Tennesseans are paying for some of Spring Hills services so that they don't have to. I still haven't decided whether to call that "reverse entitlement" or "reverse welfare." 5) Other variables, including: a) population growth leads to upper middle and upper class "overflow" from urban into suburban areas. b) Gentrification and its sibling, "in-filling," are exploding in Davidson County like in other metropolitan areas. These are almost exclusively middle class processes of revitalization of urban neighborhoods. If the middle class were not returning or staying in Davidson County, then these processes would not occur at all, let alone proliferate.

The only good reason for buying the TTR mantra is that it serves the interests of conservatives like yourself in suburbia. But it does nothing good for Metro Nashville or the Middle Tennessee region.

Posted by: S-townMike at December 30, 2005 8:21 PM

"Bigotry" does not always involve race. The word refers to intolerance and prejudice, but that intolerance and prejudice can be based on differences other than race. One can be bigoted against, for example, Muslims, even though there are Muslims of every racial group including but not limited to caucasians, blacks and asians. One can be bigoted against rural folk, against Yankees or against southerners.

Or against suburbanites.

Now, as to the main issue - suburbanization - consider these questions:

1. If everyone who moved from Davidson County the suburbs in the last 20 years had, instead, stayed in Davidson County, what would the average price of a house or condo, or rental apartment, be in Davidson County today? Answer: Perhaps double - perhaps even more than double what it is today.

2. If everyone who moved from Davidson County the suburbs in the last 20 years had, instead, stayed in Davidson County, would there be more affordable housing in Davidson County today or less? Answer: Less.

Suburbanization is good for the urban poor becaise it reduces the upward pressure on housing and rental costs.

Portland, Oregon, is a good example of how NOT to do it. They limited the growth of suburban development via a "smart growth" urban boundary, outside which land could not be subdivided into plots smaller than 5 acres. The result was housing prices in the city shot sky high and created an acute shortage of affordable housing.

This doesn't hurt the well-off, as they can merely go outside the "urban growth" boundary and buy 5 acres and build a house. The poor and lower-income working class, however, were greatly impacted as a larger and larger share of their limited resources was consumed by housing costs, or they had to move into crappier homes because that's all they could afford.

Portland's answer wasn't to cancel the "smart growth" plan that was forcing up housing prices by placing an artificial limit on the available supply of developable land, but to use taxes to subsidize affordable housing.

Posted by: Bill Hobbs at December 30, 2005 10:33 PM

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