New visions for metropolitan America

For half a century America has had one dominant vision of how its metropolitan areas ought to grow and develop. This vision, best described as unlimited low-density sprawl, encompasses personal and social goals that most Americans cherish: a home in the suburbs, a car, good schools, and responsive local government.

While Americans have been overwhelmingly successful in achieving these goals, that success has generated a host of growth-related problems, including intensive traffic congestion, air pollution, rising taxes for infrastructure, loss of open space, and the relegation of many poor households and minorities to destitute inner-city neighborhoods. With the long-run viability of American society in danger, America is in desperate need of a new vision for metropolitan growth.

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In this book, Anthony Downs identifies growth-related problems and examines current efforts to control growth. He explains that individual suburban governments have reacted with policies intended to manage local growth; but those policies taken together have actually aggravated problems at the regional level. The most dangerous result of growth management policies is that they help perpetuate the concentration of very poor households in depressed neighborhoods in big cities and older suburbs.

These neighborhoods are riddled with exploding rates of crime and violence, increased numbers of children growing up in poverty, poor-quality public education, and many workers excluded from the mainstream work force.

Downs asserts that these problems undermine social cohesion and economic efficiency throughout the nation, yet many Americans fail to recognize how serious they are. He shows that as suburbs develop, their residents come to believe that their welfare no longer depends upon the economic and social health of central cities. Suburbanites feel emotionally detached from cities or hostile to cities' fiscal and social problems even though they are partly responsible for creating those problems.

New Visions for Metropolitan America examines the effects of growth management in communities that have tried to alter the course of urban growth. It also analyzes several alternatives for metropolitan growth - alternatives that might reduce the problems that have arisen from the pursuit of unlimited low-density development.

Downs's analysis focuses on the relationship between the suburbs and the central cities, and identifies the policies likely to be most effective in helping to resolve growth-related problems.