Masking Urban Weaknesses

Metro expansion to the periphery has proven to be another aspect of urban containment. But it hasn't worked.

Boundaries of Indianapolis Public Schools and other schools districts in Marion County, IN. The IPS boundaries correspond to the city of Indianapolis’ boundaries prior to Unigov city/county consolidation in 1970. Source: indyencyclopedia.org

In my post a couple weeks ago I noted the problematic city/suburb relationships that harm Midwestern cities and metros. Urban problems are on full display for all to see. But there’s a flip side to the poor city/suburb relationship dynamic I spoke about, too. It’s this: some cities and metros are quite good at masking their weaknesses from the eyes of residents and visitors. And their metro perceptions benefit from it.

The Indianapolis Story

Let’s talk about Indianapolis.

Indianapolis is a city that doesn’t get a lot of nationwide coverage on much of anything. Indianapolis might be the archetype for what many people view as a Midwestern city – a decent, midsized city with a good quality of life, affordable, with some of the hallmarks of good urban living but not all. A nice place, but if you’re looking for sizzle, this isn’t it. Somewhere along the way it garnered nicknames like “Naptown” and  “India-no-place” and it hasn’t quite shaken the perceptions that come with it.

If there’s anything positive that outsiders recognize about Indianapolis is that it avoided the deep decline experienced by cities like Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit. In fact, Indianapolis might be better known for adopting a Sun Belt-style growth profile over the last fifty years or so, allowing it to grow in a similar fashion as modestly-sized similar Sun Belt upstarts like Nashville, Jacksonville and Oklahoma City. For people in the Midwest, especially in the Great Lakes, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s it was held up as an example of how to reverse decades of decline and become an urban success story.

But there’s more to Indianapolis’ perceived success than adopting another region’s growth profile.

Indianapolis following World War II was on the same trajectory as many other Midwestern cities. It was troubled by increasing crime, poor school performance, strained race relations and white flight to suburbia. However, Indianapolis took a path that few Midwestern cities did – it pursued a consolidated city-county government that changed its perceptions and trajectory.

In the late 1960’s, mayor (and later Indiana Senator) Richard Lugar proposed Unigov, or unifying the city of Indianapolis with its suburban communities in Marion County. It was mostly pitched as a way to expand the city’s tax base, putting the city on strong financial footing. It would reduce local government redundancies like police and fire service. However, there were pretty big carve-outs for communities and school districts that chose to remain independent.

The strongest dissenters to Unigov were in Indianapolis’ Black community, which made up about 23 percent of the population at the time. Black concerns centered on the overt omission of the consolidation of suburban school districts with Indianapolis Public Schools,, and Unigov’s reduction of political power for a growing Black community. Unigov supporters said that school district consolidation was a nonstarter that would doom consolidation in the minds of suburban residents, despite the fact that school segregation was already an issue that was vexing the metro area.

The proposal was approved by the Indiana General Assembly in 1969 and went into effect the following year. A legislative act added some 60 percent to Indianapolis’ population (about 475,000 pre-Unigov, 744,000 after) and quintupled its area (71 square miles to 350).

No Isolation Without Insulation

I believe Unigov’s biggest achievement was altering the general perception of Indianapolis as a suburban-oriented city rather than an urban one. This was done without any real change to the area within the city’s old boundaries, but simply by including the suburbs into the urban framework. At a time when suburban development was ascendant, Indianapolis aligned itself with the dominant development paradigm of the time, and the merged city reaped the benefits of it.

You can see this in the demographic profiles of the pre- and post-Unigov jurisdictions. In 1960, the last U.S. Census prior to consolidation, Indianapolis had a population of 475,000. Just over 79 percent of residents were white and 20 percent were Black (Latino and Asian demographics weren’t identified at that time). In 2020, including the Unigov consolidated areas, Indianapolis’ population rose to 888,000 residents. That’s a 46 percent increase over the old city boundaries.   Just under 50 percent were white, 28 percent Black, 11 percent Latino, six percent Asian, and five percent from other groups.

The pre-Unigov jurisdiction today is quite different. The population declined significantly to just 319,000 people in 2020, a fall of 33 percent. That’s consistent with the rate of loss in Cincinnati over the same period (-38 percent), a nearby city whose boundaries haven’t changed. Pre-Unigov Indianapolis’ demographic breakdown in 2020 was 43 percent white, 34 percent Black, 17 percent Latino, two percent Asian and five percent from other groups. The post-Unigov additions to the city? They were 54 percent white, 24 percent Black, 11 percent Latino, six percent Asian and five percent from other groups. That indicates to me a moderate to significant concentration of Blacks and Latinos within the old city boundaries – i.e., segregation. Cincinnati has a demographic profile similar to pre-Unigov Indy (48 percent white, 41 percent Black, four percent Latino, two percent Asian and five percent other groups). It also probably has greater perceptions of segregation stigma as a result.

This is also evident in Indianapolis income and poverty data as well. In 2021, the website Statista produced a chart of the poverty rates in the 25 most populous U.S. cities, of which Indianapolis is one. As a whole, Indianapolis had a poverty rate of 15.4%, ranking it 14^th out of the 25 cities.

However, Census data from the 2021 American Community Survey shows that the post-Unigov added areas had a poverty rate of 12.4%. On its own this area would rank 20^th out of the 25 cities, between Austin, TX and San Diego, CA. The pre-Unigov boundaries of the Indianapolis Public Schools had a poverty rate of 20.9%, which on its own would rank second highest out of the 25 cities, behind Philadelphia.

There are areas of greater or lesser demographic diversity in every city, and greater or lesser income. But the lines we draw that distinguish cities and suburbs aren’t all defined in the same way, and it can greatly alter our perceptions of place.

Put another way, Unigov had the impact of absorbing and subsuming the inner city challenges seen in Indianapolis, so the city could contain – and forget – about them.

Expansion and Containment – Working Hand in Hand

The book Cities Without Suburbs, written by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk in 1993, made the case back then that cities could end the economic and social isolation of central cities by having cities and suburbs embrace each other. Rusk noted that cities that were able to expand had better economic outcomes, and those boxed in by dozens of smaller municipalities had low ceilings for future economic growth. Rusk argued for the kind of local government consolidation that Indianapolis achieved through Unigov.

Indianapolis is not alone in this kind of merger. Cities like Jacksonville, Nashville and Louisville completed similar city/county mergers, with similar effect. What’s more likely for communities that have the ability to do so, however, is annexation – cities gobbling up unincorporated lands at their outskirts, preventing small independent municipalities from forming and boxing cities in. Getting boxed in is the story of most Northeastern and Midwestern cities. Annexation expansion or consolidation defines many Southern and Western cities.

Unfortunately, a couple of unintended consequences perverted the message. The cities that could expand their boundaries did so at an accelerated pace. The cities that needed to rely on suburban cooperation led by state-level elected officials found their efforts stalled.

In either case, it can be argued that expansion to the periphery is another aspect of inner city containment. It’s containment that despite our efforts, doesn’t work.

Annexation laws, and municipal incorporation laws, differ from state to state; some states make annexation or incorporation easy, others difficult. Where annexation is easy and incorporation is less so, cities are able to expand their boundaries at will. Conversely, where annexation is difficult and incorporation is simple, cities remain frozen into rigid boundaries for decades. Consider this chart of the nation’s 50 largest cities, organized by their change in land area since 1960:

Twenty-eight of the 50 largest cities more than doubled their land area between 1960 and 2020 (the seven at the top – Las Vegas, Mesa, AZ, Colorado Springs, CO, Raleigh, NC, Virginia Beach, VA, Bakersfield, CA and Arlington, TX – were not among the 100 largest cities in 1960; my research included only the 100 largest cities of each decade). You’ll note the strong Southern and Western orientation of the expansive cities, with Indianapolis, Columbus, Kansas City, Omaha and Louisville (depending on how you define it) as the outliers.

There are another 15 at the bottom of the table that hardly expanded or, in fact, decreased in size. I attribute these differences to improvements in determining the land area of cities over time, but also to occasional de-annexations (removing property from a municipal jurisdiction) or even the loss of some wetlands previously viewed as developable land area. Either way, it’s a complex mix of coastal cities that have become costly because they’re growing yet haven’t been able to expand outward or upward, or Midwestern cities that are stagnant or declining, with more visible concentrated segregation and poverty.

And that’s how the stark city/suburb divide in the Midwest becomes easily apparent to the rest of the nation.