NYTimes | Detroit is a symbol of the old economy’s decline. It’s not just the
derelict center; the metropolitan area as a whole lost population
between 2000 and 2010, the worst performance among major cities.
Atlanta, by contrast, epitomizes the rise of the Sun Belt; it gained
more than a million people over the same period, roughly matching the
performance of Dallas and Houston without the extra boost from oil.
Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit
gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying,
where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the
economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which
children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their
parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit. And it’s far
lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even
though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.
So what’s the matter with Atlanta? A new study suggests that the city
may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out
of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods. Sprawl may be
killing Horatio Alger.
The new study
comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which is led by
economists at Harvard and Berkeley. There have been many comparisons of
social mobility across countries; all such studies find that these days
America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity,
actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced
nations. The new project asks how social mobility varies across U.S.
cities, and finds that it varies a lot. In San Francisco a child born
into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has an 11 percent
chance of making it into the top fifth, but in Atlanta the corresponding
number is only 4 percent.
When the researchers looked for factors that correlate
with low or high social mobility, they found, perhaps surprisingly,
little direct role for race, one obvious candidate. They did find a
significant correlation with the existing level of inequality: “areas
with a smaller middle class had lower rates of upward mobility.” This
matches what we find in international comparisons,
where relatively equal societies like Sweden have much higher mobility
than highly unequal America. But they also found a significant negative
correlation between residential segregation — different social classes
living far apart — and the ability of the poor to rise.
And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because,
basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl,
even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities. This would make
an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate
even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a
result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may
be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.
The apparent inverse relationship between sprawl and social mobility
obviously reinforces the case for “smart growth” urban strategies, which
try to promote compact centers with access to public transit. But it
also bears on a larger debate about what is happening to American
society. I know I’m not the only person who read the Times article on the new study and immediately thought, “William Julius Wilson.”
A quarter-century ago Mr. Wilson,
a distinguished sociologist, famously argued that the postwar movement
of employment out of city centers to the suburbs dealt African-American
families, concentrated in those city centers, a heavy blow, removing
economic opportunity just as the civil rights movement was finally
ending explicit discrimination. And he further argued that social
phenomena such as the prevalence of single mothers, often cited as
causes of lagging black performance, were actually effects — that is,
the family was being undermined by the absence of good jobs.
