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A large part of this distrust [of cities] is driven by the fear of what urbanism brings: Poor people. Immigrant people. People who aren’t like us. That’s what drives our sprawl—that distrust, that fear of The Other. Diversity is no problem, as one longtime Houstonian once said, until we have to live together.
A hundred-plus years ago, the first American suburbs were created to afford escape from the masses of Eastern and Southern European immigrants – “the mongrel classes,” as they were known – that filled eastern cities. Now the descendants of those Polish and Italian immigrants live in places like Kingwood and League City, where they watch Fox News and send fevered Tweets about Ebola-infested Mexican babies crowding our inner cities.
Thirty years ago, a law professor named Jonathan Simon wrote a prescient essay, “The Emergence of the Risk Society,” in which he argued that in the emerging American cities, all of the old divisions – race, culture, religious affiliation – would become irrelevant, leaving only one question: Can you get credit and insurance, or can’t you? Simon saw our cities bifurcating into “grey zones”—filled with the poor, the sick, the poorly educated, and others considered “bad risks”—and “safe zones” of gated communities with first-class amenities, populated by well-educated professionals, the kind of people who have no problem getting approved for a bank loan.
We are living in the city Simon envisioned. An acquaintance once told me that his upscale Sugar Land enclave was “more diverse” than my slightly gone-to-seed subdivision in Alief, “because you have just one kind of people, and we have true diversity.” What he meant was that in his neighborhood, some of the Anglos and Latinos and Asians and African Americans were MBAs, and some were physicians, and some were attorneys, while in my neighborhood everybody was just poor. Poor is its own race, its own religion, and those who aren’t Poor fear it, distrust it, want to be as far away from it as they can. That’s how you end up with concentric circles of toll roads, and suburbs that stretch halfway to Dallas.
