From the 'Burbs to the 'Hood

"There's no such thing as the suburbs anymore," says Minnesota State Representative Myron Orfield as he drives me past run-down apartment complexes and near-empty strip malls in the blue-collar communities north of Minneapolis. "They're all so different now." Except for the squat 1950s and 1960s architecture, this area looks like the inner city: check-cashing outlets, day-labor agencies, wig shops, pool halls, a social-service agency housed in an old 7-11 convenience store. In the suburb of Hilltop, the city hall sits in the middle of a trailer park. Orfield notes that schools in Brooklyn Center are 50 percent minority (in a region that is only 9 percent) and that 55 percent of students are eligible for free-lunch programs--suggesting a concentration of poverty approaching that of hard-hit neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A few months later Orfield takes me on another tour, this time through the southwestern Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, where we travel down newly reconstructed highways surrounded on all sides by mounds of black dirt. As rolling farmland is dug up for a new Blockbuster video store, a new Outback Steakhouse, new glitzy office parks for firms with quintessentially Year 2000 names like Veratech and PageNet, and new subdivisions of half-million-dollar homes, the air is full of the smell of fresh asphalt and the sound of pile drivers. "I get sad out here," he says. "The landscape is being destroyed and money is being sucked out of the city."

Orfield, 39, who grew up in Minneapolis and now represents it in the state legislature, has launched an ambitious political initiative to slow suburban sprawl and the accompanying flow of wealth from older neighborhoods into booming new communities on the fringes of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. He sees central cities and blue-collar suburbs as allies in an emerging political coalition to revitalize low- and middle-income communities--not just in Minneapolis-St. Paul but across the country. Working with a growing national movement of social-justice activists, environmentalists and municipal officials--both urban and suburban--Orfield promotes the idea that problems like poverty, affordable housing and inner-city decline are best solved on a regional basis. Struggling Brooklyn Center and ritzy Eden Prairie, along with the public housing projects and gentrified neighborhoods of Orfield's Minneapolis legislative district, are all part of the same metropolitan community. And their fates are inextricably linked.

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