Articles

Region's Self-Image is So Bright It Fails to See Some Blemishes

Jay Bookman
Associate editor of the Constitution's editorial pages
June 26, 2000

The changes wrought by growth in metro Atlanta have been so enormous in scope that they've obscured less obvious, but still important, issues in the region. But it's funny how a change in scenery improves your perspective.

Earlier this month, 70 business, civic, and government officials from metro Atlanta traveled to Cleveland to talk to their Ohio counterparts and learn how that metro region has addressed its problems, many of which dwarf those of Atlanta. Several of those making the trip were struck by the level of candor they found in Cleveland. Even on difficult issues such as race, poverty and suburban-urban relationships, people of differing viewpoints were able to talk freely about the challenges their region faced.

"We found people who had been engaged a long time in the ups and downs that Cleveland has gone through, people on different side of the issues, but who still had good connections to each other, who had a good humor about it," said Tom Weyandt, director of comprehensive planning for the Atlanta Regional Commission.

For example, Weyandt said, Clevelanders were candid about the problems posed for their region by the city's inner core of concentrated poverty and the decline of the first ring of suburbs outside the city, and about the social-service demands created by settlement of ethnic minorities in those aging suburban communities.

Atlanta has counterparts to each of those problems, but for various reasons we haven't really addressed them. In part, we're fixated on the problems created by growth, such as air quality, transportation and now water quality and water supply. Furthermore, matters of race, poverty and ethnicity are always testy problems to discuss.

But there's something else at work as well. We all have images of ourselves in mind, mental pictures of how we appear to those around us. The same is true of communities. They too have self-images, conceptions of who they are and what role they play. And while nobody's self-image is entirely accurate, sometimes the difference between how we see ourselves and how we really are can grow so large as to create problems.

The metro Atlanta region sees itself as a booming Sun Belt city of immense affluence and growing suburbs, and it's hard to argue that such a self-image is inaccurate. But like Cleveland, Atlanta is also a region in which black poverty has been concentrated in the urban core. The problem has been exacerbated here by a conscious decision on the part of suburban leaders to keep that urban core quarantined, so to speak. Although it may be changing, mass transit in this region is forbidden to connect the urban center, where people desperately need jobs, to the suburban areas, where service jobs are going begging.

But, you see, we can't talk about that.

Weyandt also mentioned what he called "the bifurcation of income" within the Atlanta city limits, the sometimes tense coexistence of great wealth with great poverty. The booming intown real estate market is exacerbating those tensions in areas such as Kirkwood and East Atlanta, where more affluent and generally white newcomers are driving up home prices, rents and property taxes. And, for the most part, we can't talk about that either.

Likewise, suburban dwellers might have noticed a growing number of abandoned strip shopping centers and big-box retail stores, a seeminly odd occurrence in a time and place when new stores and new shopping centers are springing up like weeds out of former pastures and forests. In essence, we are cannibalizing existing retail to feed new construction, much as peasants in the Brazilian rain forest clear a plot of land, farm it for a few years and then move on when the soil wears out, leaving behind a mess.

But trying to get that topic on the regional agenda is difficult, because the concept of decline in a suburban setting simply doesn't fit our self-image.

In fact, there's an almost Peter Pan kind of quality to much of our thinking about suburban Atlanta. It is eternally young, never aging, never changing, a land of green lawns and new homes and shiny new places to shop and entertain ourselves.

It's also difficult to acknowledge that the moat has sprung a leak. While some suburban planners and neighborhood associations have worked hard to discourage apartment construction, in part out of fear of those who might come to live there, smaller homes built on smaller lots in the early rush to the suburbs have already begun to turn over into rental units, filled by immigrants and others drawn by the glut of service and construction jobs. That trend will re-create on a smaller scale and in a suburban setting many of the social problems normally associated with urban areas.

Some suburban schools are already dealing with the impact of that trend, as are law enforcement officials. But on the whole, suburban counties and cities have never felt the need to offer the social services needed to address the problems of the less affluent. Even those officials aware of the change under way in their areas will find it hard to build public support for such expenditures, because that reality conflicts so directly with the self-image of the community they represent.

Communities, again like people, find it hard to look in the mirror and see graying hair and wrinkles.