PAST ARTICLES AND EDITORIAL BOARDS
THE URBAN CRISIS: MADE IN WASHINGTON
Michael E. Lewyn
4 J.L. & Pol'y 513 (1996)
Over the past several decades, most older American cities have lost residents and jobs to their suburbs. The decay of urban neighborhoods creates a vicious circle for many cities: as businesses and taxpayers leave, urban tax bases shrink, causing cities to levy higher taxes. Many liberals argue that the federal government abandoned cities by not giving them adequate aid. By contrast, more conservative commentators contend that suburbanization is the "manifest pattern of millions of individual American desires over seventy-five years." This article proposes that big government, rather than individual choices, caused urban decline. Through a carrot-and-stick' approach, the federal government, and to lesser extend, state governments, drove Americans into suburbs by favoring suburban schools, highways and new homes over urban schools, apartments and mass transit.

Suburbanization adversely affects both middle-class and low-income city residents. Moreover, it increases society's dependence on automobiles. Suburbanization is a problem that continues to grow because of, rather than in spite of, federal policy. Thus, traditional big government solutions to these problems, such as federal aid to cities, are not the only possible solutions to urban decay. Instead, the government can encourage repopulation of cities by cutting subsidies to suburbanization, such as highway spending, and by eliminating roadblocks to urban renewal, such as desegregation rulings that force parents to choose between good schools and city living.