The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods

In 1968, LBJ's Kerner Commission famously said we were becoming ``two increasingly separate Americas,'' one black and one white. But most people don't remember what else the commission, set up in the midst of the country's worst urban riots in this century, predicted: that within 20 years we'd become ``a white society principally united in suburbs, in smaller central cities, and in the peripheral parts of large central cities; and a Negro society largely concentrated within large central cities.'' Today, over half the population lives in 39 metropolitan areas--with most blacks living in the central cities and most whites in the suburbs. Here, Cleveland State University law professor Keating describes community and government attempts at healing this suburban-urban racial divide. He chronicles efforts to break down suburban racial barriers in housing throughout the United States, but focuses on Cleveland, which joins Chicago and Detroit as the nation's most segregated metropolitan areas. Although the country's many failures and few successes at suburban housing integration are carefully profiled here, Keating's data also points up our urgent need to focus public policy on depopulated and increasingly impoverished and homogeneous urban centers. As he convincingly demonstrates, private and government attempts at suburban integration, as well as special urban integrationist projects have achieved spotty results at best. What's needed is a rethinking of metropolitan policy. While that's beyond Keating's scope here, his book usefully illustrates some of our current policy's intractable problems. (May)