The disparities among governments in the metropolis re-inforce the advantages of fiscally stronger communities in their competition for high-income residential development and desir-able forms of industrial-commercial growth. Privileged places able to provide more advantages at lower costs influence the de-cisions of industry and people of different social classes, generat-ing different levels of benefit for the area and its residents. Rich places get richer as the well-off seek places that will make them still better Research on population changes in individual sub-urbs reveals that, apart from any other community characteristics, whites and wealthy families are significantly more likely to move into communities with a strong property tax base, whereas blacks and the poor tend to go elsewhere (Schneider and Logan, 1982a,
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1982b). And as we previously indicated, business firms in both manufacturing and trade take into account the local tax base (and social milieu) in a similar way in evaluating alternative suburban locations. It is a self-reinforcing system in which the presence of a well-off population base acts as an attraction for capital invest-ment; the industrial presence then induces more affluent resi-dence.
Suburbanization thus operates as a stratifying process. The well-to-do harness the resource of government autonomy to work on their behalf, and the dynamics of the competitive system cause the already wea k to grow weaker through their relative inability to use autonomy in the same way. Whereas in the past urban admin-istrations may have used class elitism, ethnic favoritism, or racism as a basis for discriminatory taxation and service delivery, politi-cal ecology now accomplishes the same end in a postreform era.
Excluded as always from the residential enclaves of the wealthy, the marginal groups are now also jurisdictionally segregated from the richest tax bases and job settings as well. The poor are left to support public services in their communities from their own
mea-ger tax revenues, and to rely on their own group's political and economic resources for individual mobility. Small government is best exploited region-wide either by rentiers (serving the needs of capital) or by the most affluent residents (because they have the power to keep the system from intruding in their own lives). For those without resources, location and its autonomy become still another hindrance to use value goals. In short, growth politics, coupled with small-scale government independence, favors ex-change over use values: but even when use values are by chance or by design enhanced, they are the use values of the well-off.
Suburbanization fuels the growth machine and reinforces place and social inequality.
These patterns of inequality are not a consequence of govern-ment autonomy by itself. Instead, the decisive issue is the fiscal and economic context of this autonomy. In the period, before modern suburban industrialization, autonomous suburbs did exist, but with less tendency to engage in fiscal zoning. There were fewer fiscal plums to capture and bigger environmental costs to pay if successful. (1984) found in his study of Southern California suburbs that differences between towns in social class,
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wealth, and revenue were far greater among suburbs incorporated after 1960 than among the older suburbs incorporated before 1950. Similarly, Logan and Schneider (1982) report that the household-income gap between central cities and suburbs is sig-nificantly greater in those parts of the United States in which local property taxes support a larger share of municip al imply-ing again that the fiscal context the geography of priv-ilege. It is the particular conditions of modem suburbanization that shape the patterns of place stratification.
Fiscal disparities among suburbs, and between central cities and suburbs, are both a continuing cause and a result of class and racial segregation in the metropolis. Together, segregation and home rule prevent the equal application of governmental re-sources to the needs of the metropolitan black and poor popula-tion. When coupled with the other structures for opportunity that community provides, city incorporation patterns become part of the basis for the of poverty" often attributed to cultural or personality traits. At the same time, the typical suburban land de-velopment process allows business and least those sectors of business and industry that are geographically mobile or sufficiently large-scale to dominate a local be in-sulated from the costs of maintaining groups most disadvantaged by their own hiring and wage patterns. In the active, dynamic process that creates and sustains the suburbs, the actors with the greatest impact are the rentiers and the industrialists. Just as they managed the timing, boundaries, and administrative structure of towns to maximize private advantage, so they continue to domi-nate the planning and fiscal policies of these places. Working-class towns and unincorporated residential areas remain residual phenomena, containing the people and land that nobody else wanted. This, in brief, is the heart of their problem.
The meaning of suburban differences, like all differentiation of territory, depends on the overarching political structure. In Brit-ain, France, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, the advent of sub-urbanization has not meant fragmentation and service inequalities. Hence, the growth of the metropolis does not inher-ently carry with it a new form of social stratification. The federal role in local growth in the United States has been primarily to subsidize it; the federal government does not even go so far as to
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coordinate the sometimes contradictory directions of these subsi-dies. Federal sponsorship of local advisory "councils of govern-ment" (the 1968 "A-95" program), which were supposed to en-courage towns and cities to coordinate their development, were effective only on matters that would help regional growth as a whole, such as water supply and transportation 1977;
Horan and Taylor, 1977). Otherwise, the councils, representing little more than local growth machine interests, accomplished little and were eliminated under the first Reagan term.
The unequal development of American suburbs replicates, on a small scale, the patterns of inequality that have long been no-ticed throughout world regions between rich and poor zones (see chapter 7). In the suburban milieu, as in the larger world system, the advantages adhere to the places of the rich and the disadvan-tages to the places of the poor (Frank, 1967; 1972, 1979a;
Wallers tein, 1979). Th e affluent employ ing suburbs and the exclu-sive residential towns are privileged because they can attract resi-dents and migratory capital as a place of firs t resort. Corporations, if they can get into such places at all, are less often there because
of inertia or special subsidy, which is more often the case with working-class suburbs or distressed central cities. Corporations in privileged places are likely to be part of the core economy, which makes them better able to respond to demands to provide ameni-ties and be a "good corporate citizen." All this helps make the privileged "core towns" sound and insulated from the changes of federal aid policies. Their residents have access to the
"good life" not only because of relatively high incomes but also because of the superior public services and premium (and higher value) shopping opportunities in their areas (see Caplovitz, 1963).
Economically peripheral places (whether older cities or poor sub-urbs) have the opposite set of characteristics: high fiscal vulnera-bility, inability to independently attract capital, and residents who are left out of the favored life style and economic mainstream.
As is generally true with geographically uneven development, people's location at the low end of the stratification of places com-pounds their individual disadvantages. For someone trapped be-hind political boundaries, geography becomes destiny.
In the United States today, communities are encouraged, even by national urban policy, to compete like business to
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attract business enterprises, and to externalize the costs of their success. Making the city into a business displaces other values and concerns, such as the role of the polity in helping people find greater satisfaction in life, the role of government in building a strong community, or the role of government in caring for the disadvantaged. The business style of local politics and of urban planning is often couched in a technocratic argot that allows "bot-tom lines," like growth of the tax base, to be the only pub lic goals.
Moral issues disappear because most of the people who need em-pathetic attention end up segregated behind boundary lines, de-ployed into jurisdictions where the least help is available (see New ton, 1975). Not only are the poorer citizens out of sight and out of mind, they lack even legal standing to demand wealth and service redistribution. The Great Depression and postwar gains wrested by the poor and minorities in spheres such as welfare, education, and civil rights are being undermined by locational strategies that change the meaning of citizenship.
Both planning and home rule have been used to benefit affluent communities, and to benefit especially the local any can manipulate municipal policy to their entre-preneurial advantage. In the following chapter, we consider the consequences of these local manipulations in an era in which the scale of capital and of politics is fast outgrowing all local bounds.