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 The Urban Land Institute has published Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of Americas First-Tier Suburbs, by former U.S. Representative and Indianapolis Mayor William H. Hudnut. A senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, Hudnut displays his significant administrative and policy expertise in this new book, which focuses on the circumstances and prospects of the nations older suburban communities. Typically referred to as inner-ring or first-tier suburbs, throughout most of Halfway to Everywhere they are labeled first suburbs, which places them appropriately and accurately in historic context, for the communities Hudnut profiles in this book are the earliest artifacts of American metropolitan expansion beyond the boundaries of its great cities.
While introducing the reader to a great variety of these first suburbs, the book also supplies rich narrative on some of the leaders elected, appointed and grassroots who call these places home and labor to maintain and improve them, often against discouraging odds. While many of the nations oldest suburbs (e.g., Brookline, Massachusetts, Chevy Chase, Maryland and Oak Park, Illinois) have unquestionably retained their status as premier residential communities, Hudnut points out that many others have fallen on hard times, having experienced housing deterioration, job loss, failed public schools, and increases in poverty and crime. Some, in fact, have suffered from middle class flight akin to that which afflicted central cities following the Second World War. No longer the bedroom communities of choice for the upwardly mobile, many first-tier suburbs have evolved into extensions of the central-city neighborhoods they border, offering refuge to working class, immigrant, unemployed, and lower-income residents. In the process they have become remarkably diverse, and in some instances even transitioned to majority-minority communities.
Despite the urban problems they face, however, older suburbs have been largely neglected by urban policy at the state and federal levels, where housing and reinvestment interventions have favored central cities and inner-city neighborhoods. At the other extreme of the metropolitan spectrum, infrastructure expenditures and improvements have tended to target the needs of rapidly sprawling newer suburbs, thus placing older suburban cities in a double bind. (The current renewed appeal of central cities and downtown neighborhoods has also attracted talented and well-to-do people back from the suburbs, a phenomenon that, no doubt, has siphoned resources that might otherwise be invested in older suburbs.)
Halfway to Everywhere locates hope and a future for older suburbs in the creative (and sometimes heroic) efforts of public and civic leaders who have capitalized on the unique assets of their communities to attract jobs and promote redevelopment schemes. The resources at their disposal include land (abandoned shopping centers, factories, etc.), neighborhoods ripe for reinvestment (through seizure of neglected or delinquent properties, if necessary), and proximity to the central city (often with ready access to mass transit).
In its abundant celebration of often-modest good news, however, Halfway to Everywhere overlooks the simple fact that newer suburbs offer the kind of housing with greatest market appeal (e.g., large, modern and comfortable), just as central cities boast neighborhoods with significant assets (e.g., history, compactness, cultural amenities). Given these opposing forces, it will take more than code compliance and renovated shopping malls to stabilize the nations aging Levittowns, which suggests their future may lie in their ability to satisfy a particular segment of the housing market (i.e., entry level), while maintaining adequate tax base to assure quality public education and deliver satisfactory services.
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