Can the Suburbs Be Opened?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 5% of black Americans live in the suburbs. Yet suburbia is where nearly 80% of the nation's new jobs are. During the 1960s, industries increasingly settled there, lured by the cheap land, low taxes, pleasant environment. But the blue-collar jobs they create remain inaccessible to blacks trapped in the inner cities. When the National Bureau of Standards left Washington to relocate in Gaithersburg, Md., for example, the total number of employees increased by 125. But black employment decreased by 73; blacks could not afford suburban housing and the commute took up to two hours each way.

The result has been called "the white noose." Without paying urban taxes, the surrounding suburbs batten on the central city's cultural assets, transit lines and white-collar industries (finance, law, publishing). Meanwhile the city gets poorer. Moreover, the constant outflow of whites and jobs leads, says Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University and chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "toward the tragedy of two separate societies. One is white and comfortable; the other black and poor."

There are ways to resolve this dilemma. Suburbanites often advocate improving the transportation system between urban ghetto and suburban industry, thus keeping the blacks in the cities. Some politicians--and many blacks--favor moving industry back to the inner cities. Others hope to build integrated new towns either by starting from scratch in the country, or else by redeveloping vast areas of existing cities. But probably the most practical and far-reaching solution is to open the suburbs to urban blacks.

Actually, 200,000 middle-class blacks are moving to the suburbs each year, but white hostility tends to confine the newcomers to black suburbs or "gilded ghettos." Legally, the suburbs are open to blacks. But while the Federal Government and 27 states have antidiscrimination housing laws on the books, they are notoriously unenforced. Example: the U.S. Justice Department has assigned 13 lawyers to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968; they have brought 44 cases to court and have won 13. Nor does persuasion hold much promise. When Vice President Spiro Agnew recently proposed that suburban housing and jobs be opened to blacks, suburbanites were ready with a reply: their towns already had plenty of "urban" problems (mainly caused by large populations of poor whites) and needed more federal help--not more blacks.

Another obstacle to opening up the suburbs is each township's power to block any increase in its population of poor people--black or white. The means is restrictive zoning laws. If a suburb does not want excessive development, for instance, it can pass large-lot (two-to five-acre) zoning requirements. This sends the developers to more leniently zoned neighboring communities--with disastrous effects on regional land use.

A New York urbanologist named Paul Davidoff has decided to attack zoning in the courts. His first target is the affluent town of Oyster Bay on Long Island's North Shore, where he is advising the N.A.A.C.P. in preparing a lawsuit. His charge: "Land use control has been used to create a segregated society--one of de jure, not just de facto, segregation."

Of Oyster Bay's 360,000 people, only 2,000 are black. Moreover, most of the 1,500 acres of open land in Oyster Bay are zoned for one-or more acre lots, which blacks cannot afford. Though the town has built 96 low-income housing units and has another 213 planned, all but 48 of them are restricted to senior citizens, who have no children for the town to educate. Davidoff and the N.A.A.C.P. would like the zoning changed so that 450 acres could hold single family houses on quarter-acre plots, and 300 acres could serve for multifamily units. The net effect would be to bring in 18,000 more residents, including 5,700 children. Town officials protest that Oyster Bay simply does not have enough schools, sewers and other services to cope with such an influx.

The change that many planners would like to see is creation of regional authorities to control zoning. Davidoff advocates a regional or statewide authority that would tax an entire greater metropolitan area, thus exposing the real costs that suburban living imposes on the central city. Such a regional tax, he argues, would eliminate the need of local communities to protect real estate and property tax values and therefore would do much to open up suburban land, money and jobs. "There is no chance to rebuild the inner cities," he says, "unless we can use the resources of the suburbs."

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