Georgetown University Law Center Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW 2000 Localism, Self-Interest, and the Tyranny of the Favored Quarter: Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism Sheryll Cashin Georgetown University Law Center, [email protected] This paper can be downloaded free of charge from: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1696 88 Geo. L.J. 1985-2048 This open-access article is brought to you by the Georgetown Law Library. Posted with permission of the author. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub Part of the Law and Politics Commons, and the Law and Race Commons ARTICLE Localism, Self-Interest, and the Tyranny of the Favored Quarter: Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism SHERYLL D. CASHIN* TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ......................................... 1986 I. THE LOCALISM DEBATE ................................ 1991 A. THE FRAGMENTED METROPOLIS ......................... 1991 B. THE NORMATIVE DEBATE ............................. 1995 C. NORMATIVE JUSTIFICATIONS FOR LOCALISM ................... 1998 1. Citizen Participation ............................ 1998 2. Efficiency .................................... 2000 3. Comm unity .................................. 2001 II. THE INSIGHTS OF POLITICS-POLITICAL CHOICE AND DOMINANCE OF THE OUTER-RING ................................... 2002 A. THE FAVORED QUARTER .............................. 2003 1. Public Infrastructure Investments ................... 2004 2. Tax Base and Job Growth ........................ 2009 3. Local Powers and the Exporting of Costs ............... 2012 * Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Empowerment Zones, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), assigned to Vice President Gore (1995-1996); Director for Community Development, National Economic Council, The White House (1993-1995). I would like to thank the following persons for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this article: Mark Tushnet, William Eskridge, Wendy Perdue, Georgette Poindexter, Daria Roithmayer, Paul Dimond, and Marc Weiss. An early version of this paper was presented to the National People of Color Scholarship Conference in March 1999 and to law faculty workshops at the Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Alabama School of Law, and the Vanderbilt University Law School. I greatly appreciate the many helpful comments received at these fora. I would also like to thank Katrina Lederer and Suzette Richards for their excellent research assistance. Finally, I would like to give special thanks to Myron Orfield and Robert Burchell for their invaluable suggestions regarding research on public subsidy allocations in metropolitan regions and metropolitan politics. 1985 1986 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 88:1985 B. PAROCHIALISM AND THE BARRIERS TO REGIONALISM ........... 2015 1. The Parochialism Theory .......................... 2015 a. Locational Sorting-A Process of Racial and Economic Differentiation..................... 2016 b. Reinforcement of Racial and Economic Differences and the Reduced Capacityfor Coalition Building . 2019 2. The Institutionalization Theory .................... 2022 a. Institutionalizationof PoliticalPower: The Competition For Public Investments ............. 2023 b. Institutionalizationof Economic Power: Horizontal Competition and the Process of Strengthening and Weakening ............................... 2025 c. Institutionalizationof Societal Attitudes and the Impact on Politics .......................... 2026 III. NEW REGIONALISM: CONFRONTING THE LOCALIST IDEAL .......... 2027 A. THE CURRENT STATUS OF REGIONALISM IN THE UNITED STATES . 2028 B. THE POSSIBILITIES FOR NEW REGIONALISM ................. 2033 1. Grass Roots Coalition Building to Redress Fiscal Inequality ...................................... 2034 2. The Smart Growth and Sustainable Development M ovement ..................................... 2037 C. RECONCILING NEW REGIONALISM WITH THE LOCALIST IDEAL .... 2042 1. Citizen Participation ............................. 2042 2. Efficiency ...................................... 2045 3. Community .................................... 2046 CONCLUSION .......................................... 2047 INTRODUCTION The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; ... and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and 2000] ADDRESSING THE BARRIERS TO NEW REGIONALISM 1987 execute their plans of oppression.1 What is required is a search for some improvement in the ways we accommo- date 2the varied interests of those whose lives are affected by organized social life. James Madison predicted that majority factions in smaller units of govern- ment would dominate and oppress minority groups in the absence of an external check provided by a national government. The political science literature offers some empirical evidence to support Madison's intuition.3 In a previous work, this article's author marshaled some of this evidence to argue that voters at the state level appear to behave more self-interestedly as decisionmaking authority is brought closer to them, creating a risk of majoritarian voter tyranny for welfare recipients.4 In America's metropolitan regions, however, the fragmentation of the polity into scores, if not hundreds, of separate political jurisdictions has created a different dynamic of oppression by powerful factions. Consistent with Madi- son's intuitions, political majorities in individual suburban jurisdictions fre- quently exercise delegated local powers in ways that exclude undesirable entrants.5 But this form of majoritarian dominance affects marginalized groups that live outside the individual community doing the excluding. Less well- known and examined in the legal literature is a phenomenon that will be referred to in this article as "the tyranny of the favored quarter." In most American metropolitan regions there are high-growth, developing suburbs that typically represent about a quarter of the entire regional population but that also tend to capture the largest share of the region's public infrastructure investments and job growth.6 Yet, through retention of local powers, the favored quarter is able to avoid taking on any of the region's social service burdens. Marginalized populations, particularly the minority poor who are relegated to poverty-ridden, central city neighborhoods, are largely excluded from participating in the favored quarter's economic prosperity. And the majority of the metropolitan population--citizens who live in central cities and older suburbs-often subsi- dize and are negatively impacted by the growth of the favored quarter. 1. THE FEDERALIST No. 10 (James Madison). 2. Gerald E. Frug, The City as a Legal Concept, 93 HARv. L. REV. 1059, 1151 (1980). 3. See generally Sheryll D. Cashin, Federalism, Welfare Reform and the Minority Poor: Accounting for the Tyranny of State Majorities, 99 COLUM. L. REV. 552, 583-97 (1999) (citing empirical evidence demonstrating that middle class suburban voters tend to have decisive influence on state budget allocations, that they strongly resist redistributive spending for the poor, and that negative racial stereotypes play a dominant role in shaping white voters' attitudes toward welfare recipients). 4. See generally id. 5. An oft-cited example of this phenomenon is the practice of exclusionary zoning whereby suburban jurisdictions zone for high-end residential and commercial uses in order to, inter alia, meet the rational economic goal of maximizing the property tax base while minimizing demands for public services. See infra notes 27-31 and accompanying text. 6. See infra text accompanying notes 99-138. 1988 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 88:1985 Viewed from a regional perspective, this dominance of the favored quarter is decidedly antimajoritarian. But the fact of fragmented metropolitan governance, coupled with society's strong cultural preference for local powers, may be blinding us to these realities. In particular, the degree of influence and subsidiza- tion of the favored quarter is completely hidden from public view. This invisibil- ity of the favored quarter's systematic advantage occurs in part because fragmented governance reduces the ability of citizens to learn what is going on regionally. But more specifically, it occurs because information about the geographic allocation of public investments is not systematically collected or disclosed to the public.7 In at least one instance, when accessible geographically coded data about the location of public investments were widely disseminated, it catalyzed the formation of a broad regional coalition for successful legislative change.8 This article argues that our nation's ideological commitment to decentralized local governance has helped to create the phenomenon of the favored quarter. Localism, or the ideological commitment to local governance, has helped to produce fragmented metropolitan regions stratified by race and income. This fragmentation produces a collective action problem or regional prisoner's di- lemma that is well-known in the local governance literature.9 More importantly, as argued below, metropolitan fragmentation produces a collective action prob- lem that benefits only an affluent minority of the metropolitan population. The legal