Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Outward Bound
In some American cities, the center is not holding.

by Rebekah Daniel

The Flip Side

American cities don't face quite the same pressures of metropolitan areas elsewhere around the globe, where problems are most widely defined by the influx of low-skilled workers from the rural countryside. The counterpart to those rural workers struggling around the world are the urban homeless in the United States, but their collection into shantytown communities in and around American cities is happening on a far less significant scale. The U.S. problem is most clearly characterized by flight from the cities into surrounding suburbia, a flight that takes with it the resources and support that middle-class tax dollars can provide, an exodus that moves jobs, compromises services and, in general, leaves a vacuum in its wake. Nature abhors a vacuum. This one is filled with drugs, crimes, general decay.

Joy Clark is the type of homeowner that urban revivalists in the United States long for in their cities. She's committed to her three children, ages 10, 7 and 4. She's maintained a 3.4 grade-point average in pursuit of an associate's degree, despite working full time. Her family ties are strong, and she is involved in her community, serving as secretary of her neighborhood association.

Her accomplishments stand in greater relief considering her location: the heart of Detroit, a city more often associated with economic hardship than economic opportunity.

Despite her accomplishments, Clark faces a host of problems common to the working poor in America's cities.

Flight to the suburbs has undermined support for local institutions such as schools and faith communities. Vanishing tax dollars compound the problem. Drug trade flourishes, supporting crime runs rampant. Unemployment is discouragingly high and stubbornly entrenched.

Decent, affordable housing is often so far from jobs that urban dwellers end up spending an unhealthy percentage of their incomes on transportation.

	The locations of jobs and affordable housing tend not to be in great proximity to each other.

As transportation costs increase, the money left over for other things--food, clothing, insurance--is accordingly lessened. According to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, households in the bottom expenditure quartile that devote more than half their outlays to housing and transportation combined had less than $300 left over each month for other necessities.

"The locations of jobs and affordable housing tend not to be in great proximity to each other, and the hours that low-income families have to work tend to be odd hours--evenings, weekends, swing shifts," Stephen Seidel, director of Habitat for Humanity's Urban Programs, says.

There have been some 250,000 building permits issued in Detroit in the last decade; only a handful have been for construction in the inner city, the vast majority earmarked for the suburban rim. John Mogk, chairman of HFH Detroit's board of directors and a law professor at Wayne State University, notes that land in the city proper has so little value that the affiliate sometimes finds itself in the position of building houses that appraise for less than it costs to build them.

"Detroit has a tremendous amount of vacant land and many square miles of distressed neighborhoods," Mogk says. "The private sector is reluctant to venture in because it takes so much more than houses to create a market."

Until Habitat--and, eventually, commercial builders--moves in, residents are at the mercy of landlords who often charge excessive rents. Their tenants are the urban poor who are most victimized by the housing/transportation dilemma that takes so much money away from so many other pressing needs.


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Habitat makes a difference in cities throughout the world by building decent, durable houses that are also affordable--such as these in the San Diego area.