Key points
- Rusk: elastic cities that annexed their suburbs prospered; inelastic ones concentrated poverty and declined.
- Suburbs use exclusionary zoning to keep the poor out and keep the tax base.
- Minneapolis has shared 40 percent of commercial tax-base growth since 1971; Montgomery County has required affordable housing since 1974.
Metropolitan fragmentation is the division of an urban region into dozens or hundreds of independent local governments, each with its own taxes, zoning and schools, and David Rusk, mayor of Albuquerque from 1977 to 1981 and later a researcher in Washington, identified it in Cities Without Suburbs (1993) as the main cause of inequality and decline in American cities. His thesis is that elastic cities, those able to grow by annexing or merging with their suburbs, prospered, while inelastic cities, locked within fixed boundaries by independent suburbs, concentrated poverty, lost population and tax base and entered a spiral from which many have not emerged.
Elastic and inelastic cities: Houston versus Detroit
Rusk built his argument with data from American metropolitan areas between 1950 and 1990. Houston, Charlotte, Indianapolis, which merged with its county in 1970, or Nashville, which did so in 1963, captured suburban growth within their boundaries and kept middle classes, income and social mix; Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis or Newark, surrounded by independent municipalities that refused annexation, were left with the poor, minorities and ageing infrastructure. The result, he shows, is that racial and income segregation is greater and decline deeper the more fragmented the region.
Exclusionary zoning and taxes: the spiral of decline
The mechanism is fiscal and regulatory. In a fragmented region, wealthy suburbs use exclusionary zoning, large minimum lots, bans on multifamily housing, to keep lower-income households out, and fund quality schools and services from their tax base, while the central city, with more needs and less revenue, raises taxes and cuts services, driving out those who can leave. Rusk formulated a point of no return: once the central city falls below a certain ratio of income to its suburbs and of population to the region, it no longer recovers on its own.
Tax-base sharing, inclusionary zoning and metropolitan government
His proposals target the regional scale. Annexation and city-county consolidation where possible; regional tax-base sharing, such as the Minneapolis-Saint Paul fiscal disparities programme, which since 1971 has shared 40 percent of the growth in commercial and industrial tax base among the area's municipalities; inclusionary zoning requiring every development to include affordable housing, as Montgomery County, Maryland, has done since 1974; and metropolitan governments with real powers, such as Portland's Metro. In Inside Game/Outside Game (1999) he systematised that agenda.
Influence, criticism and fragmentation outside the United States
Rusk's influence shows in the American regionalist movement and in the segregation studies of Myron Orfield or Bruce Katz, and it also drew criticism: elasticity describes Sunbelt cities with available land better than those of the Northeast; annexation does not guarantee equity if the enlarged city reproduces segregation within its borders; and consolidations depend on political majorities suburbs rarely grant. Outside the United States, fragmentation takes other forms, but the problem of a poor central city surrounded by wealthy municipalities that do not share is recognisable from Madrid to Mexico City.
David Rusk's lesson is that the real city is the metropolitan region and that governing it in fragments produces inequality by design. Sharing the tax base, opening up zoning and deciding transport, housing and schools at regional scale are the policies that allow a central city not to be left with the problems while its suburbs keep the resources. Without them, he warns, no downtown regeneration compensates for what fragmentation extracts every year.
Frequently asked questions
What is metropolitan fragmentation according to David Rusk?
It is the division of an urban region into dozens or hundreds of independent local governments, each with its own taxes, zoning and schools, which lets wealthy suburbs exclude lower-income households and leave the central city with the needs and without the resources, the main cause of American urban decline according to Cities Without Suburbs.
What policies does Rusk propose against fragmentation?
Annexation and city-county consolidation, regional tax-base sharing such as the Minneapolis-Saint Paul programme since 1971, inclusionary zoning requiring affordable housing as in Montgomery County since 1974, and metropolitan governments with real powers such as Portland's Metro.
