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Christina Greer Timothy Weaver

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URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.60,Issue3,P.

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Editor's Note: This issue revisits the influential article by Elinor Ostrom, “The Social Stratification-Government Inequality Thesis Explored,” which was published by UAR in September 1983. We encourage readers to examine this article from our archives. The introduction below provides some historical and disciplinary context for Ostrom's article. https://doi.org/10.1177/004208168301900107.To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Urban Affairs Review, each issue of Volume 60 features a UAR article that the editors and editorial board identified as representing a significant contribution to the study of urban politics in a given decade. Our first issue began with the 1960s and featured Robert Conant's “Black Power: Rhetoric and Reality” (Conant 1968). The second issue focused on 1970s, highlighting Michael Lipsky's “Street Level Bureaucracy and the Analysis of Urban Reform” (Lipsky 1971). In this third issue, we delve into the 1980s with an article from Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, entitled “The Social Stratification-Government Inequality Thesis Explored,” which was published by UAR in September 1983.In her influential article, Ostrom critically assesses the argument at the heart of the social stratification-government inequality (SSGI) thesis, namely that the fragmentation of municipal space into separate jurisdictions promotes inequality along economic and racial lines, particularly with respect to the delivery of public services. Coined by Max Neiman in 1976 (Neiman 1976), the key ideas underpinning this somewhat inelegantly named thesis had been articulated by those such as Norton Long (Long 1967) and Richard Hill in the 1970s (Hill 1974). Hill captured the essence of the idea when he wrote: “municipal government becomes an institutional arrangement for promoting and protecting the unequal distribution of resources” (Hill 1974, p. 1557; quoted in Ostrom 1983, p. 95). As Ostrom notes, this concern gives rise to the policy recommendation that municipal boundaries separating central cities from their suburbs should be eliminated to reduce inequality.In scrutinizing this claim, Ostrom deconstructs the SSGI thesis into its central propositions, each of which are evaluated in light of the extant empirical evidence, including that offered by Mark Schneider and John Logan (Schneider and Logan 1981), which also appeared in Urban Affairs Review. Ostrom's analysis of the relevant evidence leads her to question many of the propositions that buttress the SSGI thesis. As such, she argues that the apparent merits of municipal consolidation should be treated with “considerable skepticism” (Ostrom 1983, p. 91). In particular, Ostrom points out that inequality, segregation, and discrimination are as likely to occur within central cities (and within suburbs) as between suburbs and cities. Moreover, drawing on evidence presented by Susan MacManus (1978), Ostrom (1983) further notes that “revenue and expenditure levels are considerably higher in central cities than among suburban communities” (p. 100). Though these patterns would shift due to the Reagan administration's assault on cities and the neoliberal turn in social policy (Caraley 1996), these transformations were the result of contingent political decisions rather than as a fundamental function of municipal fragmentation.Although skeptical about the SSGI thesis, Ostrom is keenly aware of the ways “wealthy white families and business firms have been able to use metropolitan institutional arrangements to their benefit” (Ostrom 1983, p. 92). Still, Ostrom finds that the key claim at the heart of the SSGI thesis—that eliminating municipal boundaries would promote equality—is found wanting.Notably, the SGGI thesis is the precursor to debates about regionalism and “opportunity hoarding,” and the potential benefits of municipal consolidation that would play out in the decades following the publication of Ostrom's article. There is insufficient space to capture the full breadth of these discussions, so we focus here on the core issues at stake.Urbanists have frequently clashed about the degree to which metropolitan inequalities are driven by institutional or political-economic factors, though, in truth, almost all participants in these debates acknowledge the role of both elements. At issue in these debates is the question of the extent to which cities can promote equality without undermining prosperity. At one end of the spectrum are those, such as Paul Peterson, who regard almost any municipal program to redistribute resources as doomed to fail, since people or firms with sufficient resources will simply leave for jurisdictions with lower rates of taxation (Peterson 1981). At the other pole, those like Richard Schragger maintain that cities are not nearly as constrained as Peterson's “city limits” thesis implies and that cities can and should employ redistributive policies that benefit their residents (Schragger 2016).Although Peterson's thesis came under fire during the 1990s (see, e.g., Logan and Swanstrom 1990), some of those very critics argued along lines not dissimilar to Peterson that the American system of municipal fragmentation, when combined with cuts to federal assistance, constrained cities’ ability to meet the needs of their poorest residents and address deep inequalities along racial and class lines (see, e.g., Weir, Wolman, and Swanstrom 2005). One solution to this was regionalism, embraced by those such as David Rusk (Rusk 1992), Myron Orfield (Orfield 1998), and Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom in their landmark book, Place Matters (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2004). Each of these accounts rehearse elements of the SSGI thesis, emphasizing the point that horizontal fragmentation undermines the wellbeing not only of cities as a whole (as Peterson claims), but for the poor especially. As Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom (2004) maintain, “cities, by themselves, cannot capture enough of wealth generated within their borders to significantly reduce poverty. We will need metropolitan-wide and national policies to do that” (p. 25).Just as SSGI found a critic in Ostrom, UAR played host to David Imbroscio's critique of the “liberal expansionism” that lay at the center of the regionalist paradigm (Imbroscio 2006). Like Ostrom, Imbroscio identified regionalism's key propositions and drew on the available empirical evidence, as well as urban theory (contra Ostrom), to argue that the underpinnings of liberal expansionism are highly questionable. Moreover, Imbroscio maintains that such perspectives blithely ignore “literally thousands of alternative local economic institutions capable of anchoring capital (such as worker-owned firms), of generating alternative revenue streams for cities (such as municipal ownership), and of augmenting the degree to which local economies benefit from local economic activity (via enhancing local multipliers)” (Imbroscio 2006, 243; also see, Guinan and O’Neill 2020). Imbroscio's key point was that the path to urban prosperity and equality was not via institutional fixes but through the development of locally rooted alternative economic arrangements, a point Schragger would amplify forcefully in his book, City Power (Schragger 2016). The debate on liberal expansionism continued in UAR and is well worth revisiting (see, Swanstrom 2006; Wyly and Pearce 2006).In recent years, concerns about the potential for wealthy and predominantly white residents to exploit place-based institutional levers to their advantage have reemerged, now identified in terms of “resource hoarding” and “exclusionary zoning.” Not dissimilar to SSGI, scholars have paid special attention to the ways in which control over fragmented metropolitan jurisdictions enables those with privilege to prevent the “exit” of their taxable resources (by setting property taxes at a local rather than at the regional scale) and preventing the “entry” of low-income residents via locally controlled exclusionary zoning practices. As with SSGI, the assumption is that devolving power to the local level tends to exacerbate rather than reduce racial and class-based inequalities (see, e.g., Rothstein 2017; Trounstine 2018; Freemark, Steil, and Thelen 2020; Cashin 2021).Just as Ostrom suggested that SSGI be treated with circumspection, others have argued that viewing contemporary problems of racial and or economic inequality as rooted in, and thereby soluble though, institutional arrangements are missing the far deeper roles of capitalism and racism (either operating separately or in tandem as “racial capitalism”), which are seen to be the key drivers of urban injustice (Dantzler 2021; Imbroscio 2023). Urban Affairs Review is pleased to be a venue in which these issues will continue to be debated.