Colleagues -

Some of you might be interested in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times,
about how commercially-driven urban design in the US has promoted
inequalities (I venture to guess the same is true in Canada). An excerpt:

"In a troubled city like Newark, all the major downtown department stores
closed as suburban shoppers started staying closer to home. In addition, the
largely black Central Ward became a commercial wasteland after the 1967 race
riots, which prompted white-owned stores to close and banks and insurance
companies to resist supporting new investment. Thus city residents without
cars were largely excluded from participating in the promises of postwar
consumerism. And if customers looking conspicuously different from typical
suburbanites actually made it to the mall, they were often met by
unwelcoming security guards who had been hired by management and were not
accountable to any public authority.

Inequality manifests itself in other ways. For example, malls have done
little to encourage public transportation to accommodate the low-paid, urban
workers who now dominate shopping center sales forces. (Initially, many of
these jobs were held by suburban housewives, who then turned to more
lucrative careers in the 1970's.) The death in 1995 of a black retail clerk
from Buffalo, killed trying to cross the seven-lane highway that separated
her bus stop from her job inside a suburban mall, was only the most brutal
example of this form of discrimination.

The location of shopping centers reinforced other discriminatory policies.
As developers sought sites close to the affluent populations to which they
catered, their presence augmented the prosperity of host communities,
exacerbating an already unequal distribution of economic resources in
metropolitan areas. Not only did a suburban municipality with a shopping
center find its residential property values increased by convenient
proximity to stores, but the presence of major commercial development
greatly enhanced its tax base and, in turn, its core services like schools,
which are funded overwhelmingly through local property taxes.

While Newark's commercial infrastructure was crumbling, a mere dozen miles
away the upscale Short Hills Mall poured dollars into suburban Millburn's
tax coffers. By the mid-1970's, it had helped to raise that town's per-pupil
school expenditure to 36 percent above Newark's, while its property tax rate
was actually 41 percent lower. Education, the major vehicle to upward
mobility in postwar America, became captive to the shifting geography of
commerce."

The full piece is "Trying to Buy Our Way Out of Trouble", by Lizabeth Cohen,
at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/opinion/11COHE.html?todaysheadlines.
Retrieving the article from the Times web site will require you to register
(free) with the Times, but you can then retrieve future articles without any
problem.

John Butler
Markham Ontario

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