That comment is intolerable! Who are YOU to decree that some people are more entitled to procreate than others? Then why don't you condemn all the mothers who engendered the reckless bankers who contributed to the crisis and have led the government to march in to save the system? Your ideas do not make sense at all and are racist and dangerous. You ought to be gaged! Everybody has the right to live. This is at the basis of all civilized societies and, by the way, written in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
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Illustration by Sean McCabe for Newsweek
GEOGRAPHY
The Suburban Challenge
Washington needs to recognize that many of the country's biggest problems—and biggest opportunities—have moved beyond the city limits to the burbs.
Published Jan 17, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jan 26, 2009
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The suburb is one of America's most treasured stereotypes. Writers can argue whether suburbs are the apotheosis of the American Dream or a suffocating nightmare of sameness, but there's general agreement on their defining characteristics. Suburbs are middle-class family values expressed in stucco, brick and carpet grass. They're all the things that America's noisy, diverse, striving, poor cities are not.
But the suburbs as we think of them are vanishing.
They no longer represent a retreat from the tumult of American life, but the locus of it. What do we do now that they resemble our cities, in good ways and bad?
Suburbs now provide more jobs than cities. Only about 22 percent of jobs in major metropolitan areas are located within three miles of a traditional downtown; twice as many are more than 10 miles out. Suburbs also host more immigrants: in the largest metropolitan areas, nearly six in 10 foreign-born residents now live in the suburbs. In places like Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis, Sacramento, Calif., and Washington, the first address of many new Americans is most likely down a suburban lane.
Then there are the downsides. Nationwide, a million more suburbanites are living below the poverty line than city dwellers. SuburbanSt. Louis County, Mo., has 50 percent more working-poor families than the city of St. Louis itself. The mortgage crisis only adds to the problems. The foreclosure rate in Clayton County, which encompasses many of Atlanta's southern suburbs, is twice as high as that in Atlanta. Homes in neighborhoods close to downtown Chicago, Pittsburgh and Portland, Ore., have held their value, while prices for homes far from those urban cores have plummeted, according to new research by Joe Cortright, an economist at Impresa Consulting.
America can't ensure its leading place in the global economy unless we grapple with the problems and opportunities of our suburbs. Nonprofits, long focused on inner cities, need to reach out to poor families and immigrants in the suburbs. The federal government should support the production and preservation of affordable housing there. Even more important, Washington needs to recognize that suburban governments are being flattened by the housing crisis—they don't have the experience or the capacity to slow the tide of foreclosures or deal with neighborhoods strafed by vacancies. The Feds need to use some of the billions in recovery funding to help local governments buy up foreclosed properties and put that land to productive use.
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