Where David Rusk Went Wrong: The Real Challenge for Cities isn't Elasticity

In 1995, renowned urban scholar and expert David Rusk wrote Baltimore Unbound, a booklet in which he declared Baltimore to be "beyond a point of no return" (along with 33 other American cities).  His assessment was based on the same theory as his book Cities without Suburbs, namely that cities that can't grow and expand through annexation are doomed.  Baltimore's last annexation happened in 1918 and ever since it was an inelastic city. So there you go: surrounded by affluent and growing suburbs the city in the center is suffocating, the public housing project of the burbs. Rusk wrote in 1993 in the Baltimore SUN:

Rusk book 1995

Forty percent of America's cities are programmed to fail. Gary, Camden, East St. Louis are already clinically dead. Bridgeport, Newark, Hartford, Cleveland, Detroit are on life-support systems. New York, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia are sinking. Though seemingly healthy, Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta are already infected.
These cities, and a hundred more like them, will fail because they are programmed to be their own suburbs' poorhouses. The burden of black and Latino poverty is crushing these ''inelastic'' cities, which, for many reasons -- bad annexation laws, hostile neighbors, myopic city politics, anti-black prejudice -- have remained trapped within their city limits.

Since then we have seen a general renaissance of cities and the above analysis sounds like overly bleak hyperbole, especially if one thinks about New York or the supposedly infected cities of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Boston. (Rusk offers a 2010 update that reflects on those new trends).

To be fair, while Rusk's emphasis on the geographic inelasticity problem appears unconvincing today, the concentration of poverty remains a pervasive urban problem including its special racial make-up which is especially on display in Baltimore where over 70% of poor blacks live in high poverty neighborhoods but only poor 23% of whites do. Over 22 years ago Rusk correctly described problems that in 2015 were still front and center of the discussion about cities in America. A Federal Sustainable Communities grant awarded to Baltimore was used to prepare an Opportunities Collaborative report in which concentration of poverty, the lack of affordable housing in the suburbs and problems of access were front and center. 

Orfields argument for
regionalism

Rusk's bleak geography based assessment of inelastic cities showing New York City sinking to the deathbed has proven to be spectacularly wrong. Many inelastic cities have, in fact, recovered from their downward spiral in spite of being surrounded by boundaries that don't allow any expansion and sometimes even though they were located in the rustbelt and not the sunbelt, where most of Rusk's "elastic" cities are located and where growth seems to be on auto-pilot anyway. Examples of recovery of inelastic cities include the District of Columbia, the City of New York and San Francisco to just name a few that are now thriving beyond what anybody could imagine in 1993.

Contrast the ''inelastic'' cities with ''elastic'' cities -- Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, Raleigh, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, San Diego and Portland. These 15 ''elastic'' cities have expanded their city limits over 700 percent, capturing 42 percent of their metro area's population growth in their own suburban-style subdivisions. (Rusk in the same 1993 SUN article)

The last two decades have also shown that elasticity has not prevented concentration of poverty and has also not kept those elastic cities from being part of the ever increasing gap between poor and rich. In fact, Rusk's findings about lower concentrations of poverty for elastic cities may well be self-fulfilling prophecy in that the elastic cities with their incorporated suburban areas simply mask the discrepancy between the core and the periphery because the expanded jurisdiction creates better averages. Not to mention how elasticity can be a sprawl inducer and as such the ferment for an actually less sustainable urban model.

Still, Rusk's suggested solution for inelastic cities, better regional collaboration has merit:

Make suburbs accept their fair share of responsibility for poor blacks and Latinos through metro-wide affordable-housing requirements, metro-wide public housing programs and metro-wide revenue sharing.
Such strategies will not only save inner cities. They will also help save inner-city people. The most effective anti-poverty program is to help poor people just get out of ghettos and barrios. High levels of crime, unemployment, dependency, broken families and illegitimacy are substantially the result of concentrated poverty.
This is the toughest political task in America.

The suggestion that the suburbs should absorb a larger share of the poor as a precondition for moving out of poverty is precisely echoed in the Baltimore region's Opportunities Collaborative report. There is no question that core cities benefit from any more regional approach to planning and resource allocation. Myron Orfield has shown that as well in his publication following Rusk's book in the 90's.

Port Covington industrial railyard area now largely abandoned (SUN archive)

While studies show the validity and success of the dispersal of poverty especially for children, the concept is not only "tough" as Rusk admits, it is also deeply unpopular not only with those in the suburbs who resent the mere idea of a less homogeneous set-up in their stratified communities, but also with the people who are the supposed beneficiaries, the urban poor who resent leaving their community behind.

Rusk maintained in a recent interview on a Baltimore radio station that most residents in poor neighborhoods would "be glad to get the hell out" and only people who don't even live in poor communities would say otherwise. But that isn't my experience and doesn't address issues of cultural identity or the problems of access in the suburbs. Nor does it address what should happen with communities from which people have left in droves, or entire cities that are diagnosed to be "clinically dead".  I would like to argue that the solution of high concentration of poverty is not that the poor people should get relocated but that more affluent people should move into areas currently characterized by high poverty.

Instead of weakening core cities further by enticing even more people to leave the core should be strengthened. The typical European city with affluence in the core and concentrations of poverty in giant "projects" in the suburbs (the banlieu) is not a model we should emulate. 

Which gets us to the cities that flourished in the last twenty years even though they are inelastic. In those cities people moved into poorer neighborhoods like Washington's Columbia Heights simply because the city grew by so much that folks ran out of space in the well-to-do neighborhoods. The problem then, became not how to evacuate poor people into the suburbs ("the last one please lock the door") but one where so many people move into a previously poor area that, while concentrated poverty is eliminated, poor people could simply be pushed out altogether, and the zip code based income and quality of life inequalities further reinforced by other means. This process is commonly described as gentrification.

Vision for a city in the city at Port Covington (Source: Sagamore)

But why did these cities experience growth in spite of inelasticity? What makes them different from stagnant or shrinking cities if it isn't an abundance of space they could annex?

The real set of questions seems to be how more cities can be made to grow and what measures could be taken to avoid displacement of the poor. If in-elasticity isn't the differentiator between successful and failing cities, what is it then? How can those cities on Rusk's list that still struggle such as St Louis, Baltimore, and Detroit emulate the success of their prospering brethren but avoid the income stratification and equality gaps that appear to be such an inseparable part of urban success stories in America?

I am afraid, the answer to why some cities grow successfully and others shrink is much more based on whether a city is located in the historic rustbelt ("legacy cities") as part of the old (industrial) economy or in the sunbelt where it is likely to be part of the new (knowledge) economy. A well worn distinction.

Interestingly, though, new counter-flow trends turn rust-belt cities if not into sunbelts then at least into "brain-belts". One of the reasons is the relative affordability of legacy cities which attracts knowledge workers ("the Creative Class") who can't afford life in Irvine or Silicon Valley. Another is the presence of strong legacy anchor institutions in some rustbelt cities such as Pittsburgh or Cleveland, even though those academic institutions woke only slowly to the condition of their host cities and realized only with much delay how their own fate was tied to that of the cities surrounding them. Finally, some legacy industries turned from a deadly downward spiral of decline to a re-birth as innovation industries. An example of that can be found in a number of legacy auto companies but also in knowledge industry's orientation towards making as is the case with Tesla or Google.

A combination of those trends  has recently catapulted some rustbelt cities from their desperate location at the end of the train to the front. The most famous example may be Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

The final frontier, though, and here we get right back to David Rusk, remains entrenched poverty and the challenge to unlock the talent of people mire into its vicious cycles. Once again, cities like Baltimore which have the most acute problems in this category, may become innovators and leaders in the biggest challenge of all: How to re-integrate the large portion of the population that has been left out as a result of de-industrialization and the emergence of the knowledge economy. The Baltimore based non-profit Baltimore Corps expresses that in their slogan: Baltimore - The best place in the world to change the world.

Congressman Elijah Cummings at Innovation
Village event in West Baltimore:
"I will say ALL of Baltimore until I die"

Does the knowledge economy offer opportunities to break out of the cycles of poverty or does it just further reinforce them? There is an increasing body of writing that describes the new economy as a "gig-economy" in which pseudo independent individuals have to hustle for "gigs" (such as Uber rides) to make a living.  Johns Hopkins political science (associate) professor Lester Spence has expressed his skepticism about the neo-liberal pitch that everyone can be an entrepreneur in his book Knocking the Hustle.

The core of neoliberalism economic philosophy is the idea that society, and all of its organizations and institutions, works best when allowed to operate on free-market principles, free especially of government intervention. Neoliberalism, in the view of its advocates, produces a system that rewards enterprising people who improve the return on their human capital—the entrepreneurial hustlers.
New technology can be devastating but it also carries the seeds of liberation. The information age makes it easier than ever to become an entrepreneur without the need for huge capital true emancipation from the dependencies of traditional industrial employment. At least that is the promise of non-profits such as Baltimore Corps or any number of social impact undertakings to close the increasing gap between the skills that are needed and the skills people have. (Bret McCabe in the Johns Hopkins Magazine about Lester Spence)

New technology can be devastating but it also carries the seeds of liberation. The information age makes it easier than ever to become an entrepreneur without the need for huge capital. It van mean true emancipation from the dependencies of traditional industrial employment. That is the promise of non-profits such as Baltimore Corps or any number of social impact undertakings intent on closing the increasing gap between the skills that are needed and the skills people have.

Mass incarceration: Locked up talent

The feverish pace of start-up pitch events, makerspaces, incubators, angel funders and innovation districts may strike many as a fad. But we should take it as the last chance we have to finally lift those that have been left behind for so long.

The inelastic legacy cities, then, could rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Just as they discovered that the curse of abandoned industrial land sitting fallow could become the engine for growth, from Manhattan's rail yards to DC's Navy Yard, and Baltimore's Port Covington to London's Docklands, legacy cities also have undiscovered amounts of talent stuck unemployed and fallow in concentrations of poverty.

Ultimately, the future not only of rustbelt or sunbelt cities, elastic or inelastic cities, but the future of the entire country, will depend on whether this human capital can be unlocked. Old rustbelt, ineleastic cities may, indeed, be best positioned to find ways to do this. The Baltimore unrest has brought attention, money and interest in the issue.

The manner how the US locks so many of its citizens out from the current economy begins as the story of  inelastic rustbelt cities. It has since become the story of the 2016 election. In Europe where similar trends locked entire nations out from prosperity this has become the fear instilling narrative that drove the Brexit vote.

Finding ways to open more pathways into the new economy, whether it is entrepreneurship or other ways of participation, has become the most urgent task the world faces (next to climate change). To find a way how to distribute the proceeds from innovation more equitably, so that a much broader section of the populace can actually exist from it, would make the renaissance of the inelastic formerly industrial city truly complete. I am sure Rusk would agree.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

updated for the % of poor blacks living in areas of concentrated poverty. The figure was first erroneously given for all blacks. More info on the racial aspect of concentration of poverty can be found at the Century Foundation report (see map on page 10). The specific Baltimore figure is quoted from David Rusk's broadcast interview from May 14, 2015

Podcast with David Rusk 2015, revisiting Baltimore Unbound
Critique of Rusk's data analysis
Testing the Elasticity Concept