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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The Suburban Challenge
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The challenge goes beyond the current crisis. The mental line between city and suburb no longer makes much sense; policies need to treat metropolitan areas as a whole. Washington should support regional clusters for high-tech industries and other sectors. Such clusters foster innovation and economic growth, and they don't gather neatly in one municipality or another. That's why we speak of Silicon Valley and Route 128, rather than San Jose or Boston. Federal job-training funds should reflect the way metropolitan economies actually work: in clusters of firms that span boundaries.
And all levels of government need to reinvent the physical landscape. We need to create walkable communities and more public transit to link people in the burbs to jobs, schools, concert halls and sports fields that may be in the next neighborhood, the next municipality or the next county. As much as they may love their SUVs, suburbanites would benefit from lower greenhouse-gas emissions, less traffic and higher housing values (proximity to transit boosts home prices).
The federal government has a key role to play by providing funds and lowering regulatory hurdles. Certainly President Barack Obama seems aware of the challenge: he has decried the "outdated 'urban' agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas" and has pledged "a strategy that's about South Florida as much as Miami; that's about Mesa and Scottsdale as much as Phoenix; that's about Stamford and northern New Jersey as much as New York City." His office of urban policy promises to be the generator of that strategy.
The end of the (traditional) suburbs was inevitable. Hopeful, mobile Americans may once have thought they could leave behind the pressures, demands and compromises of city life. But social concerns inexorably follow society. Our leaders, starting with a metro-minded president, now have to make the mental jump across the urban-suburban boundary, and catch up.
Katz is a vice president at the Brookings Institution and founder and director of its Metropolitan Policy Program. Bradley is a senior research associate there.
© 2009
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