Enticing visitors downtown…and then incarcerating them.

As much as street-level engagement for large projects in city centers should, by this point, seem like a foregone conclusion, it continues to amaze how many big ticket items—in cities of widely varying size—either engage in terpsichorean negotiations around it or neglect it completely.  When developers confront a zoning ordinance or design guideline that insists on activating the sidewalks with retail, commercial, residential, or offices, they might challenge the requirement through a number of arguments: the development itself is too small, the street is not prominent enough, the economy for retail is particularly soft.  If the public-sector approving agency for the development fears that the proposal will collapse without kowtowing to the developer’s demands, chances are likely it will pass, therefore lacking that street-level engagement otherwise mandated by code.

But what about when it is a big-ticket item, partly or even completely funded by public dollars?  A case in point is the Greater Columbus Convention Center in the capital city of Ohio:

Constructed by Peter Eisenmann in 1993 and expanded six years later, the façade details arouse widely varying reactions, judging from opinions on consumer rating sites.  Many think it’s faded and ugly; others respect its idiosyncrasy.  While the Easter egg color palette obviously evokes the time period of construction, I don’t usually like to criticize particularly time-sensitive architectural gestures, since it is inevitable that the appeal of a stylistically distinct building will wax and wane on the general cultural radar.  If this convention center seems outmoded now, it’s only a matter of time before the taste cultures shift and it falls squarely into retro 1990s chic.

The problem here is the programming of the building within these walls.  Why so much blankness?  Why so few windows?  Couldn’t the urban design have allowed passers-by to engage with it by providing something to do, let alone something to see?  The criticism here would be more of a stretch if the convention center sat in a forlorn and otherwise overlooked corner of downtown Columbus.  But it doesn’t.  The photo above depicts frontage on North High Street, the most vibrant commercial corridor in the entire metro.  The convention center links the fashionable Short North, an array of mostly locally owned establishments along High Street that connect The Ohio State University campus to downtown; this stretch of the artery represents the southern end of the Short North, right before it continues southward into the central business district of the city.  In other words, it should be bustling, but this side of the street really isn’t.  And the other?

The photo above (taken by Jung Won Kim) reveal that not only does this convention center façade extend in much the same fashion for several blocks, but the other side of the street, featuring an array of historic commercial buildings alternating with smartly integrated infill, is among the deadest on the entire stretch of North High Street.  I hope to replace this Google Streetview with some actual footage over the next couple weeks that will better demonstrate this distinction.  While most of High Street to the north of the convention center ranks among the most desirable commercial and retail real estate in the region, this section has struggled to secure very many stable tenants over the years.  It’s not completely desolate, but certainly not surging: a visit last December revealed that it was actually a bit blighted, which would be unheard of just three blocks north.  The forthcoming completion of a new Hilton in the parcel immediately south of this cluster of commercial buildings (and therefore west-southwest of the Convention Center) may help stimulate some pedestrian traffic.  Here's a view of the nearly finished Hilton looking northward, with the aforementioned block of commercial buildings in the distance.  Directly across from this is the Convention Center.

And here's a view of the Hilton looking southward.  Directly to the right of the photo is the underinvested block in question. Both photos are again courtesy of Jung Won Kim.

Thanks to the presence of both the Convention Center and the hotel, short-term visitors from out of town will dominate this block of High Street.  Unfortunately, tourists staying in hotels are not historically huge supporters of the local establishments that boosters of Short North aim to recruit.  However, given this segment’s recurrent struggles, if these storefronts eventually attract Starbucks, Noodles and Company, Chipotle, or even something surprising like Payless Shoes, it would be a welcome, stable improvement over the limbo that these old buildings have suffered for far too long.

Meanwhile, the Short North portion of High Street, particularly north of Goodale Street just blocks away, bustles—at least by the standards of a Midwest city of Columbus’ size and density:

Plenty of shops, plenty of cars, and (particularly during the school year) lots of pedestrians.  The conditions here beggar the question: why design the Convention Center in such a cold, alienating fashion?  By almost every estimate, it was a shrewd location: when stepping out these doors, a convention-goer is blocks from the Statehouse and the heart of downtown to the left, and visually linked to the best of Columbus’ university-driven nightlife to the right.  While I strongly suspect that some historic building stock (of similar appearance to the buildings across the street) met the wrecking ball in order to clear the room for the hulking Convention Center, the idea of a mega-attraction might at the time have seemed like a stimulus for an area that suffered huge disinvestment up until urban living evolved into an overt 1990s fashion statement.

But structures like Greater Columbus Convention Center pervade across the country: arenas, stadia, performance halls, or convention centers.  We continue to build most of them this way.  When they are “in session”—when an event is taking place within their doors—they attract a higher density of people at one time than all but the most successful museums, malls, or urban mixed-use districts (i.e. Short North).  But most of them are only active for a fraction of the week, and regardless of whether the interiors are buzzing or quiet, the exteriors of these hermetic, self-referential monoliths offer little to attract the outside world.  Their visual contribution to the surrounding urban environs involve little more than blank walls.

I would never question the economic development benefits of these attractions for their respective downtowns; aside from revenue generated in both property taxes and direct consumer spending, they bring throngs of people to one place for a limited time—something most downtowns for the past fifty years could never otherwise achieve.  But the design of these structures all too often seems to treat this as a virtue in and of itself—not a means to something even better through a symbiotic relation with the often much more pedestrian-scaled context.  With convention centers and arenas, the multiplier effect is a foregone conclusion.  But where’s the spinoff activity going on North High Street in Columbus?

The biggest offenders in this case are, incidentally, the ones closest to downtowns—the airplane hangars that displaced an assortment of smaller, aging, potentially obsolescent buildings that housed smaller-scale commerce quite easily, back when technological limitations mandated that four-story structures remain the status quo.  Long the Mother of them All, Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center is a minimal offender, since Lake Shore Drive separates it from most of the urban fabric—in this case, the near-southside neighborhood of Chinatown—obviating the destruction of many (or any) historic buildings.  At the same time, virtually no other city has perceived of Chicago’s convention center as a model of site selection, because its non-intrusive location along Lake Michigan, far from the Loop, also failed to link the throngs of visitors to the central business district.

Thus, we instead have witnessed an escalating tendency to push these hulks right into the heart of the city, with practically no other street-level storefronts, offices, or visual stimuli.  I pointed out the inclusion of a new arena in Evansville a few years ago that sacrificed a full block of century-old buildings.  While I’m certain there are others, the only exception to this that comes easily to mind is in Indianapolis’ Bankers Life Fieldhouse, which has one small storefront at its northwest corner, visible on Google Streetview.  (It hosted a Starbucks at the time of the Google photos; today it is a Dunkin Donuts.)  But arenas and stadia are not the most egregious urban design offenders: to some extent, their absence of retail storefronts is justifiable because of their erratic levels of activity.  Either they pull out all the stops to host an event, or they are completely empty.  Rarely do those key events take place during conventional business hours, the time when most retailers prefer to operate, so they are not a reliable generator of activity, even if they typically lure sell-out crowds.  It’s a bit surprising that even a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts would prefer to locate in an arena, despite the fact that essentially in the heart of Indy’s downtown.

Regardless of the weaknesses of major sporting or performance venues, the convention center still wins the urban underachiever award.  The configuration of most centers can accommodate multiple events simultaneously, and these events normally take place during the heart of the business day.  But the designs of the buildings practically never attempt any engagement with the surrounding downtown.  In fact, they do the exact opposite: most of them contain interior eateries, some have their own souvenir shops, and (particularly in the cold climates) a network of skyways connects them to adjacent hotels and parking garages.  An out-of-town convention-goer could spend three days in the host city without ever stepping foot on a downtown street or sidewalk.  But the biggest embarrassment? Public monies fund most or all of these developments!  The convention and tourism bureaus often spearhead the construction or expansion initiatives, and yet by commissioning designs that sequester the buildings from their surroundings, they are squandering many of their own efforts to get people to spend their money downtown—all at taxpayers’ expense.  I can conjure mental images of several downtown convention centers—Indianapolis, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Jackson, MS, Philadelphia—only the last one offers any exterior storefronts, and that contribution is only a twentieth (at best) of the overall frontage.  The others offer occasional windows to break up the blank walls—just like Columbus.

Nothing this article explores is novel within the world of urban design, but it warrants extra consideration because, even as many cities are catching on to strong street-level engagement with other publicly funded ventures, they continue to get convention centers wrong.  Civic leaders across the country learned a lesson from the relative isolation of Chicago’s McCormick Place, but it’s the wrong lesson.  Rather than taking a cue that its isolated position estranged it from the hotels and the attractions of downtown Chicago, other cities have imitated its hulking architecture while displacing the buildings that originally helped a central business district become a locus of all kinds of activity.  Columbus still boasts a fantastic asset in the Short North district that extends for well over a mile across North High Street, but it is just a few blocks less of an asset than it could have been, thanks to the pastel Styrofoam toy blocks that hug the east side of the street…otherwise known as the Greater Columbus Convention Center.

Streetscape enhancements in a spray can.

Most of us living in reasonably large metropolitan areas have witnessed the fallout from the bursting real estate bubble—one of several, successive machine-gun misfortunes to befall our economy during this ruthless recession. Even if you don’t live in a city that has suffered as greatly as Las Vegas or Phoenix or Naples, Florida, you most likely have encountered a proposed development that went to skids when the demand for new housing plunged. Some of these projects sit in rural areas, as platted subdivisions with fundamental infrastructure left to rot in relative obscurity—I wrote about one recently in south Louisiana.

The majority are entirely urban—apartments or (most likely) condos. The developers’ signs still stand, sometimes with a rendering, and maybe even contact information for those interested in new units. Hundreds or even thousands of people see these signs daily. And these days, the signs are bleached by the sun, embellished with the graffiti that usually accompanies neglect, and sometimes even decomposing from exposure to the elements. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened behind the chain link fence of this vacant lot in Columbus, Ohio:


But it’s clearly a stalled development in an area that was smoking hot just a few years ago. The signs most likely did not just accidentally tip over from a high wind; someone pushed them down because the images featured upon them no longer align with reality. These felled wooden displays sit off of North High Street, in the Short North area of Columbus, a largely revitalized, successful urban main street between the central business district and The Ohio State University campus. The vacant lots that remain offer the premier opportunities in the region for smart infill development, which is no doubt part of the community vision for this particular parcel. Unfortunately, lenders tightly sealed the spigot two years ago, and now the parcel sits in limbo.


But what is that poking out in the far right of the above photo? It looks like a mural, but the creative forces behind it might have had other intentions:

They covered up a developer’s sign that was most likely beginning to decay with a pastiche of cryptic illustrations, no doubt a collaborative product of local artists. To the left of the brown silhouette of a building on the upper corner mural is the Urban Scrawl, an apparent extension of street artistry taking place in a few weeks as a community gathering in Franklinton, a low-income neighborhood on the city’s west side.

Was this an act of vandalism? Possibly. But it’s just as likely that the developing agency lacks any money to pursue its construction goals, so the signage is just an empty reference; the developer may even have gone out of business. This apparent bottom-up effort to instill a bit of street beautification might not appeal to everyone, because it still implies a certain usurpation of private space by a non-owner, but it is unlikely to arouse controversy because of the clear ephemerality of the “canvas”. One day these murals will come down and will most likely host signs for a new development that, in a stronger economy, will inevitably get built; the Short North area is just too fashionable for this lot to remain fallow for long. In the meantime, the instigators behind Urban Scrawl offer to Columbus an initiative that sits uncomfortably between vandalism and stewardship; the apparent friction between aesthetics and property rights enriches the texture of the urban vernacular, far more than a tattered sign reminding passers by of halcyon days behind us.

Invisible fences for humans, Part III: Importing desirability to schools that lack the demographic advantages.

My previous post on this subject explored my hypothesis, on how school districts derive most of their competitive advantage from demographics that favor high educational attainment. The greatest public schools earn their cachet far more from demographics that skew towards either low poverty or ethnic homogeneity (or ideally a combination of the two) far more than intensive credentialing for teachers, sophisticated pedagogical technology, or a high per pupil funding.

If it wasn’t clear from that analysis, perhaps the picture above, from the highly ranked suburban school district of Plainfield, Indiana, should communicate exactly how this country regards its patchwork of widely divergent school systems. I’ll reiterate my conclusion from the previous post: Despite a non-exclusionary structure that resembles a public good, school districts are first and foremost commodities of variable quality which forces them to compete for patronage. When highly marketable, school districts endow land within their invisible boundaries with greater value. Therefore, both municipal governments and electorates themselves have commodified schools so intractably that it has become their ambition to refine the district continuously, ideally so that it attracts the demographic base that will allow it to perform at a high standard as efficiently as possible.

Realtors have long known that it behooves them to become proficient in the nuances regional school quality, particularly if the prospective buyer is under 50, but even older, childless clientele often seek good districts because they know it will influence the appreciation of their home values. Websites like http://www.city-data.com/forum/ provide a “grassroots” information exchange for people seeking to relocate, in order to get firsthand information from locals in that prospective region; the overwhelming majority inquire about school districts. In Indianapolis, the local respondents consistently steer people directly toward the suburbs, advising them to shun IPS and avoid most of the collar townships, with the possible exception of Washington Township, Franklin Township, Speedway, or Beech Grove—the four school districts outlined earlier in the map above. Thus, within Marion County, only the districts featuring the two darker shades of purple enjoy the consistent reputation of desirable places to raise a family, due to the quality of the public schools.



Where does this leave those districts that fall somewhere in the middle, the ones that are neither wealthy (like Bexley) nor homogeneous (like Beech Grove), nor entrenched with poverty and a lack of parental involvement, the way Indianapolis and Columbus Public Schools are? This comprises a considerable amount of the city’s land area. Many of these districts, such as the majority of the collar townships in Indianapolis, are currently simply average, which is hardly appealing to newcomers with high aspirations when they can find exceptional school districts just a few miles away, outside the city limits. Because these average districts fail to contain in their boundaries the demographics that make them high-performance, they can quickly translate to “unsuccessful” and will hemorrhage the student population whose parents have the wherewithal to seek better public schools. In time, the collar townships of Indianapolis, or suburbs like Whitehall in Columbus, could contend with the same malaise and atrocious test scores as the inner city public schools, when all the committed students and their families have left. The polarization of school districts into haves and have-nots continues.

My recommendations have little to do with school management. I’m not a superintendent or a professional educator, and I wouldn’t pretend to know how to change operations within a particular school or classroom to adapt the curriculum to an evolving student body. Many of these recommendations would no doubt come across as naïve to someone intimately involved in public education. They probably are naïve. But I have been able to observe declining public attitudes towards some districts, while others remain ironclad bastions of academic excellence, and I have scrutinized the population changes taking place within these jurisdictions. Nearly all of the school districts in the collar townships of Indianapolis had strong reputations twenty years ago, and now many of them don’t, despite the fact that many of the same faculty and staff are still working there, just as committed as they were before. How can these middle-tier schools cope with demographic change? I propose a framework for rethinking the branding of schools districts that aren’t hot commodities like Bexley, or comfortably lily-white like Beech Grove—observations the ways to reinvent themselves so that their image, and the educational product they sell, can remain competitive.

1) Stop using the top-tier school districts in the rich suburbs as a model to emulate; look instead to the creative responses to challenges that the inner city schools are facing. Much of Indianapolis and Columbus city limits encompasses what demographers and urban planners are typically labeling inner-ring suburbia. These regions within the metropolitan landscape typically share similar features; among the most prevalent are their homes built before the 1960s, often in an automobile oriented configuration. The inner-ring suburban neighborhoods eschew the urban street grid, using curvilinear streets in a hierarchical configuration in which residential areas are segregated from commercial districts with minimal through-streets. The unadorned, outmoded strip malls in these areas are often heavily vacant, the houses are small (by today’s standards) and old-fashioned, and the newly arrived populations (often foreign-born or African American) have significantly lower spending capacity than the middle class folks who preceded them. These areas are, in many regards, economically declining. Thus, it is wishful thinking for the school districts that serve these areas (many of the collar townships in Indianapolis, for example) to continue to think that new school spending on state-of-the-art smart classrooms, stadia, or auditoriums will necessarily attract well-heeled newcomers to the public schools. Nonetheless, many of them have recently tried levying a new tax through mostly unsuccessful referenda. The fact remains that the middle class who once lived in these areas is receding, as families with the spending capacity make beelines to the excellent school districts in the shiny, new, poverty-free suburbs and exurbs. The new student population is less likely to have committed parents or college aspirations, which is typically reflected by higher drop-out rates and lower standardized test scores. These districts cannot compete with suburbia on academic performance statistics alone. They should instead look at the initiatives of inner-city districts, which struggle to attract anything other than the extreme poor to their catchment area. Indianapolis Public Schools offers a diverse array of charter programs (more than just about any district in the country), with a success rate that is mixed but still often surpasses the conventional inner-city schools. Magnet programs are an excellent way of preserving a degree of heterogeneity in a school district. Unfortunately, they typically sequester the highest achieving, more affluent students living in an inner city district through a college-placement curriculum, so that the poorer, less academically minded students only share the same roof with the aforementioned kids while taking completely different classes. Nonetheless, magnet schools instill a measure of socioeconomic diversity otherwise unseen in the overwhelmingly poor, minority districts throughout American inner cities. Many inner-ring districts in Indianapolis offer innovative programs, such as charter schools or a language immersion school in the collar township of Lawrence. School districts have to offer a viable service, and some families with enough disposable income to be choosy will seek innovation and creativity, even if it takes place in outmoded buildings. The continued popularity of magnet programs at schools such as Broad Ripple and Arsenal Tech prove that the political catchphrase of “instruction not construction” can elicit measurable results. By all means, fix the leaky pool or aging boiler, but no Olympic sized pool on its own is going to draw affluent families to the district if the suburb next door has a good pool and high test scores.

2) Embrace the cultural and ethnic diversity typically inherent in these school districts, particularly by accommodating programming in the fine arts, humanities, and athletics. With their diverse economies and low costs of living, cities like Columbus and Indianapolis have become increasingly desirable destinations for both middle class families and aspiring recent immigrants, particularly in the past decade or so. The dichotomy between the aforementioned groups, however, is profound—the white middle class families exercise their spending power and build new homes in the suburbs or buy in places like Bexley (if they can afford it), while the immigrants and foreign-born often settle with the older housing stock in the central cities. The inner-ring suburbs, though economically declining by many metrics, still offer better schools, lower crime, and greater accessibility to the scattered jobs in these decentralized metros than the aging housing in the inner cities, with their extreme mix of gentrified yuppie enclaves and profound minority poverty. The inner-rings are some of the most diverse areas in the nation, often boasting 20 to 30 languages within a few square miles, co-existing peacefully for the most part. In Indianapolis, few of schools in the collar townships in 1990 had a need for English as a Learned Language programs (ELL); today, nearly all of them do. A few of the elementary schools in the formerly lily-white Perry Township (just south of downtown Indy and IPS) now have student bodies that consist of 20% to 30% Burmese refugees. Clearly these foreign-born students have needs distinct from their English-speaking peers, but to what degree should they be sequestered? My speculation is that schools (at least in Midwest cities like Indianapolis and Columbus) are doing a much better job at recognizing this observation than my Observation #1. Many schools engage these students through international and cultural festivals, while classes with fewer language needs—such as mathematics and physical education—are frequently fully integrated. Administrators might be able to take this a step further by incorporating it into curriculum where an international Weltanschauung benefits everyone, including the native English speakers. Courses such as world history (sadly an elective across much of the US), art history, music appreciation, civics, phys ed (international sports), or even a sociology class devoted to immigration—all of these have the potential for malleability that would allow them to adapt to a broader cultural outlook, even if it only involves one or two days out of the entire semester. Not every middle-class parent is seeking ethnic homogeneity in the school districts; homogeneity just tends to yield the best test results, and people gravitate to favorable numbers. Branding schools as diverse by adding the multicultural perspective that international schools successfully adopted long ago (often with great success), could help turn around the struggling inner-ring suburban districts by tapping into the aspect of their identity that can distinguish them positively.

3) Accommodate socioeconomic or aspirational strata through increasingly divergent curricula beyond elementary school. I’ve read City-Data forum postings where well-educated, liberal parents have shrugged their shoulders at the fact they are shielding their kids from cultural diversity by sending them to the highly-ranked suburban public schools; they argue that their kids will get plenty of multicultural exposure in college and it’s more important right now to send them to a top school. I could hardly criticize this argument. Of course, much of the homogeneity that affluent parents seek in good school districts has less to do with race or ethnicity that socioeconomics. Not all these middle class families are so prejudiced that they move to the suburbs solely to avoid racial minorities. Wealthy, top ranked districts in the suburbs, such as Carmel High School north of Indianapolis, are not uniformly Caucasian. Many of these schools have a strong racial minority and foreign-born population; the difference is that these minorities are equally affluent and strive to send their kids to the top public schools in the region. Their parents have raised them in an English-speaking environment, either because the household is multilingual or they are second- and third-generation immigrants. The inner-ring collar townships of Indianapolis and the suburban outskirts within Columbus city limits aren’t remotely economically one-note. Even if, all too frequently, the more aspirational (and often wealthier) kids tend to become segregated into the accelerated educational track, both wealthy and poor students bump shoulders in the hallways between classes or in the non-weighted subjects, such as music or phys ed. High schools in the collar townships will continue to encompass socioeconomic diversity, which may prove beneficial for dealing with life down the road, since, unless we all move to places like Carmel, we all have to engage with people outside our income level now and then. Probably 30 to 50% of students at the inner-ring school districts go on to college; about 90% in Carmel do. Since only about 30% of all Americans have a college education, you can guess which school system is more reflective of the greater American population at large. I can’t help but wonder if the economically diverse schools appear under continuous strain because they have to accommodate such a wide variety of aspirations. Many reformers have argued that the American system has left itself hamstrung by nationwide, standardized minimum curricula, forcing nearly all students to get at least three years of mathematics, two years of science, four in English, etc, even when it is clear that a large contingent lack the aptitude, ambition, interest, or need for algebra or Julius Caesar. It makes me wonder how well an increasingly diverse nation such as Germany is adapting to its multi-tiered system, in which, after the Grundschule from grades 1 through 4, students are divided, based on academic ability and parents’ wishes, to one of three facilities. The five-year Hauptschule teaches some advanced subjects at a slower pace and prepares students for vocational apprenticeships. The six-year Realschule includes part-time vocational schools and advanced apprenticeships, with the possibility of moving up to the nine-year Gymnasium, the school for university-bound students. This structure generally favorably skews international test scores for Germans, since many standardized math and science exams only target the students enrolled in the full 13-year Gymnasium. From an American perspective, the German system may appear overly deterministic and highly segregated, filtering out students by ability at an inordinately young age. But lateral mobility from school to school is always possible, and it already bears a passing resemblance to the hierarchy of accelerated, gifted/talented, special ed, or remedial programs that exist throughout the US. Placing such a system under one roof would allow different aspirational levels to find a specific niche that allows a broader array of students the opportunity to excel, but it would still give the district the ability to focus quality programming on the college-bound contingent among the students. Some high achieving parents actually prefer such an educational environment because it is less “snobby” or elitist than the fancy suburban schools, but the standards for the college-bound students remain high. For parents with the financial resources who don’t want the demographics of their high school to echo the nearest country club, a school with diversified academic tracks aligned with ability may be a better fit.

4) Encourage the populations living in these districts who are unaffected by school quality to engage with the districts. This intense discussion about accommodating families with school children leaves out one sizable demographic: those for whom public schools are irrelevant. This contingent may even comprise a majority of the population in many major cities, since it includes households with no children, households for whom the children are grown and out of school, or households who send their children to private schools. Most struggling inner city public schools are experiencing a net decline in student enrollment form year to year; if these districts are experiencing any population growth whatsoever, chances are the new arrivals belong to one of the groups listed above. Many of these people have made the choice to move or remain in the central city despite steeper crime rates, higher taxes, deteriorating infrastructure, and a floundering public education system. The reasons for remaining are diverse, but embedded in many of them is a commitment to living in the city to support the amenities that urban centers have to offer (even if, as is frequently case in Indianapolis and Columbus, the environment in which they may live remains auto-oriented and suburban). Many of these people are themselves well-educated and affluent; the property owners among them have voluntarily subjected themselves to a certain level of taxation to support the local districts, even though it has no bearing on them personally, beyond the truism that good schools equate to higher home values. If school districts forged ways of getting these people involved in their respective districts, it could only broaden the aggregate level of stewardship. How can they achieve this? Recent retirees and empty nesters often seek volunteering opportunities and may be eager to help tutor ELL students, coach freshman football, or serve as an assistant director for school plays. Publicity for major events—the annual musical, a major basketball rivalry, a statewide debate tournament—should target far more than just the parents of children involved. These individuals could easily offer a relevant outsider’s perspective on school boards or education foundations. I think the inner-ring school districts have only just begun to tap into the communitarian-mindedness of the local childless population, perhaps because they would appear an unlikely source for additional financial support; after all, they’re already paying heavy taxes for a service they don’t use. But the property owners among them still have an interest in successful school districts because of the impact it can exert on their home’s value. The potential for volunteerism and fresh ideas these people offer remains generally overlooked.


If it isn’t obvious already from this long analysis, school districts across the US tend to polarize; the status quo is homogeneity, often by race and nearly always by social class. The inner-ring, collar county schools—the mediocre ones—get very little attention, sandwiched between the superstars in the outer suburbs and the deeply troubled ones of the inner-city. The success stories among schools that fit into this category rarely make it into the local newspaper, but in Marion County, one school district does seem to enjoy the lion’s share of positive press: Washington Township, the collar township directly north of Indianapolis Public Schools, outlined in yellow in the map above. North Central High School, the only grade 9-12 public school in the district, still enjoys a reputation that ranges from good to superlative, all while being far from racially or economically homogeneous. Department of Education snapshots reveal that the student body of over 3,200 is under 50% white, and the district encompasses some Indianapolis’ most prestigious neighborhoods, such as Williams Creek and Meridian Hills, while also feeding into some of the lowest income neighborhoods in the region, such as parts of The Meadows; 29% of the student body qualifies for the free lunch program.

Within the Indianapolis metro, North Central’s reputation is of an institution that manages to wield its colossal size and diversity towards overwhelming self-affirmation. It caters to a tough crowd yet annually sends kids to Harvard and Yale; it has a permanent security team after successful arson attempts in the 1990s yet offers a full array of Advance Placement and International Baccalaureate programs; it provides curricula to kids living in Section 8 as well as trust fund beneficiaries. The fact that it is “tough” and “urban” yet still elite has evolved to one of its primary selling points: the wealthy kids can prepare themselves for college while still understanding the need for street smarts that comes from having classmates who grow up entirely without privilege. Those same lower-income students may receive a discipline and sufficient exposure to academic success to motivate them when they find no inspiration or support in their immediate families. Co-existence of polar opposites under North Central’s mammoth roof is not a guaranteed success, but it has sustained itself for decades. My generalizations about the rich and poor are of course superficial to the point of being patronizing, but the essence of a school’s reputation is often based on similarly facile stereotypes. North Central’s reputation of tough and top-tier derives largely from the fact that it attracts an urban liberal gentry committed to a diverse worldview, and it is possible some of its programs—particularly the costly International Baccalaureate—would be hard to replicate in the other inner-ring, collar township schools of Indianapolis. But it is clearly getting something right that other districts such as Pike and Lawrence Township, are struggling to achieve as their growing diversity has resulted in a decline in the academic reputation. North Central remains the regional paradigm.

As I conclude this intensive study inspired by the differences inside and outside the Columbus suburb of Bexley, I am likely to subject myself to a wide array of criticism, much of it no doubt deserved. It may appear that I have overemphasized the importance school districts play in the overall desirability of a location. I’m sure other educational policy analysts would assert that I have focused on demographic influences on public schools, almost deterministically and at the exclusion of other variables. But I remain convinced that teachers, principals, facilities, computers, and overall cash flow have far less of an impact than the home environment to which students return at the end of a day. Dedicated teachers, sophisticated technology, and tremendous public spending will seldom compensate for lack of familial support. If too many students come from families who cannot be motivated to value their children’s education (as is the case in Indianapolis and Columbus Public Schools), educators will not be able to cultivate an environment that appeals to those families who do care. Perhaps I focus on the middle-tier schools that are losing ground because I went to an inner-ring school district myself and received a perfectly good education from it. A little over a decade later, many of the same teachers remain in my high school as committed to their jobs as ever, even while the student population has skewed increasingly toward foreign-born newcomers and racial minorities, seeking an alternative to dysfunctional inner-city schools but not wealthy enough to afford the elite exurbs. While the forces that instigate urban decline and renewal are infinitely complicated, for a significant portion of the American population, schools are the tail that wags the dog. We really do—at least many of us—value education that much.

Invisible fences for humans, Part II: Harnessing control through the schools.

Infill development near Bexley Main Street: a new synagogue.




After a longer lapse than usual, I treat whoever is interested to a feast of text with this post—not much to get excited about I suppose, but I promise this isn’t the new norm, and any responses are greatly appreciated.

In a recent post, I observed the distinctive character of the suburban enclave of Bexley, Ohio, which is surrounded by the bigger city of Columbus. Bexley abuts some of the larger city’s rougher neighborhoods yet remains resolutely prosperous—one of the metro area’s premier places to live, in fact. By the conclusion of the post I surmised that Bexley’s consistent desirability derived less from its attractive urban character or governance (it certainly shows no evidence of legislation that deliberately excludes the poor), as much as it achieved favorable demographics early in its development, then promptly built a political fortification around itself. Those favorable demographics—an affluent, well-educated, largely Jewish, predominantly white population—anticipate the city’s highly ranked school system: such a community will inevitably have high test scores or Harvard-bound graduates because it’s filled with high achievers. The stellar reputation of the system in turn amplifies Bexley’s property values. With Columbus surrounding it on all sides, the city’s limited housing supply will never meet its demand, so values are significantly higher than the regional norm, further pricing out low and even middle income people. Its only option for expanding its housing supply has been through infill development on parking lots and formerly low-density sites, but even these will immediately command a high price tag. Bexley’s elite status is virtually etched in stone.

Such “maximum-performance” suburbs are common to almost every large city in the county, so Bexley is not unique. The second half of this study is going to veer away from Bexley—I’ve talked enough about the town already—and more about its most powerful political tool: its school system. Not so much a stick for fending off the undesirables (as I inaccurately referred to it in the first essay), the Bexley Public School District is more of a defensive gesture—it’s too passive to equate it to something like law enforcement. My suspicion is a city like Bexley would need a more robust police force than its comfy demographics might suggest (certainly more than rich outer suburbs like Dublin, Ohio), simply because the criminality of Columbus is so much closer at hand. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I speculate that Bexley and other enclaves wield their power through their prestigious public school systems.

In Furious Pursuit of the Best Public Education

The state of American primary education—particularly in the context of public schools—undergoes countless scholarly and journalistic reviews for its widely divergent and often abysmal quality. Scarcely a year passes when some new statistic shows American high and junior high school students’ mediocre performance on international tests in mathematics, science, and the humanities, compared to other developed nations (as well as developing ones).

Education reform has long served as a cudgel by which opposing political viewpoints use to beat one another: the left frequently asserts that inadequate funding for teachers or supplemental resources leave American students flagging academically, while the right rebuts that permissiveness and a lack of structure have killed the majority of public schools beyond reform, frequently advocating voucher programs to allow academically minded parents of limited incomes to “buy” a slot in the reputable private schools nearby. International reports shake their heads, frequently allying with the left, sometimes to the point of condescendingly suggesting that underfunded schools demonstrate the low regard that Americans have for public education in general.

That final observation could not be further from the truth. Wide variability in educational aptitude exists in every nation. But the strongest proof that a sizable portion of Americans are driven to succeed is not manifest in our internationally admired higher learning institutions (in which many of the American public universities rank among the best), nor is it evident in the high representation of Americans among prestigious global honors such as the Nobel Prize. The best demonstration that, fundamentally, Americans in general value education is through their moving and resettling patterns.

Look at any metro area in the nation. Those with high public school test scores are invariably the fastest growing districts. In the Midwest, cities like Naperville (west of Chicago), Carmel (north of Indianapolis), or Overland Park (west of Kansas City across the Kansas state line) absorb a significant portion of their metro areas’ growth rates because of the enduringly high quality of the public schools. High demand pushes land values upward, ensuring that any new growth in the undeveloped areas of these sprawling suburbs will remain prestigious because only the affluent can afford to live there—a population who, in this meritocracy, will typically ensure the public schools’ test scores remain high. However, if a certain district is no longer growing because it lacks the room to grow—like Bexley—then its property values are typically through the roof. Parents often search aggressively for the district even within a single metro with the ideal public school system to meet Billy and Suzie’s needs, relocating to a new suburb if necessary.

Sometimes these aspirational parents even engage in benign deception, as one man did whose family owned a fancy home just outside of Bexley in Columbus, but rented an apartment for him and his children in Bexley limits, living apart from the wife/mother so they could attend the schools there. Bexley officials caught on to the scam, asserting that the kids still spend the majority of their time in the Columbus house rather than the Bexley apartment, and ousted the family. The father sued to get his kids re-enrolled; the City countersued; legal fees have escalated into the thousands of dollars. All this just to get the kids into Bexley Public Schools.

Carving an Academic Enclave

Desirability of school districts almost invariably exerts an influence on residential property values in an area, even if the region in question has previously been largely undesirable. A recent initiative in Philadelphia provides an excellent example: the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander School (grades K – 8), better known as Penn Alexander, began in 2001 as a partnership between the city’s public school system and the adjacent University of Pennsylvania. The University has offered subsidies and teaching expertise to serve this West Philadelphia neighborhood, with income levels that range from profound poverty to urban gentry. Degreed professors and yuppies sit cheek-by-jowl with the inner city (most African American) poor in a part of the city where prosperity and personal safety often varies from block to block, if not house by house. The Philadelphia Public School system is predictably troubled, and prior to 2001, most affluent residents of West Philadelphia either had no children or sent them to private schools, leaving the public schools almost exclusively to the area’s poor. The result is a neighborhood where children of less advantaged households have little opportunity to engage with those whose parents seek the best educational options for their children.

But the Penn Alexander School’s performance, curricula, and innovative programming have ranked it comparable to the best private schools in the region, and local realtors have pounced on the housing within its constrained catchment area. The predictable results? Home prices have skyrocketed. Along the boundaries of the catchment area, a three-story house on one side of the street could be worth as much as $100,000 than its less favorably situated neighbor on the other side. Many of the low-income residents for whom the Penn Alexander School intended to serve can no longer afford to live in the area, whereas wealthy professors from Drexel or Penn quickly snatch up the properties so they can send their kids to the school. The goal of reaching across multiple strata through this Penn-Assist program has weakened as the gentrifying West Philadelphia has become increasingly socioeconomically homogeneous.

In essence, the minds behind the Penn-Philly Public School partnership have appropriated a small pocket of the West Philadelphia neighborhood and rendered it prestigious by interpolating a new catchment area that aligns with this generously endowed school. Everything around it remains saddled with the struggling Philadelphia Public School system (sans partnership). Are the boundaries for the Penn Alexander School the be-all and end-all? Crime rates, education levels, percentage of vacant/abandoned houses, and job growth indicators in West Philadelphia remain variable and generally compare unfavorably to the Philadelphia suburbs, yet the catchment area remains extremely desirable, suggesting that many people seeking housing are willing to overlook crime and urban grit if they can find a good public school. Regardless of the original intentions, the lucre of this school district in a diverse urban environment could eventually shift the demographics in this area to a duplicate of Bexley, but without the distinction of two adjacent municipal governments—only school administrative authority.

How Populations Respond to Fixed School District Boundaries

Returning to the Midwest, Indianapolis offers a particularly unusual patchwork of jurisdictions and school districts, unlike Columbus, or any other large city in the country. The city, formerly comprising most of the center of Marion County, expanded its boundaries to coincide with that of the county through the 1970 initiative known as Unigov. Today, Marion County and Indianapolis city limits are nearly coterminous, with the exception of four excluded communities—Southport, Beech Grove, Lawrence, and Speedway—which each have almost complete autonomy, with their own mayors and city councils. (A fifth municipality, Cumberland, would also have been considered an excluded community except that its city limits straddle both Marion and the adjacent Hancock County.) The Wikipedia map below illustrates how these systems operate within Marion County, with Indianapolis comprising the red portion of the county, while the excluded cities are labeled in the gray regions:

Any unlabelled gray regions on the map above are “unexcluded towns” with limited self-governance but are essentially incorporated within Indianapolis. They have limited political authority on their own. As you can see, three of the four excluded communities—Southport, Beech Grove, and Speedway—are enclaves, functioning much the same way as Bexley, with the city of Indianapolis surrounding them.

The school districts, though, are an entirely different matter: Marion County has 11 of them, mostly tied to the nine townships that stack within the county like a tic-tac-toe board. Indianapolis Public Schools comprises the central portion of the county, including all of Center Township and parts of some the surrounding townships; its irregular boundaries comprise the Indianapolis city limits before the city-county consolidation through Unigov. Each of the surrounding eight townships, hereafter referred to as the “collar townships”, has its own school district. Meanwhile, two of the four excluded cities, Beech Grove and Speedway, have their own districts outside of both the townships and Indianapolis Public Schools. The other two excluded cities, Southport and Lawrence, remain part of the township school districts in which their boundaries rest. The map below from the SAVI Community Information System illustrates this effectively, showing the success rates of 10th graders on the 2008 ISTEP based by school district throughout the metro area:


Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) occupies the amorphous blob in the center of Marion County, colored in the palest shade of purple. Like most inner city school systems with high concentrations of poverty, its statistics are unimpressive: according to the legend to the left of the map, less than 43% of students in the high schools there passed the Math and English portions of the ISTEP, the worst results in the entire region. The eight surrounding “collar townships” performed somewhat better, with results all above 43% and some as high as 75%. (Of course, none of these statistics compare to the stellar scores in surrounding counties such as Hamilton or Hendricks, where the darkest purple indicates ISTEP pass rates of 75% to 92%. Nonetheless, the focus must remain on Marion County, where the various school districts labor valiantly to improve academic performance, yet only a few districts show above average results. Which areas show the highest desirability? Two of the townships rate more highly than the others. Washington Township north of the IPS district (outlined in yellow) is generally perceived as a strong school district; while racially diverse, it also houses many of the most affluent households in the entire metro, as well as some of the families with the highest levels of college education. Franklin Township, to the southeast of IPS (outlined in green), is not as wealthy as Washington Township, but is much more homogeneous, remaining predominantly white and middle class, with relatively new exurban development.

Lastly, and most compellingly, the two enclaves with their own school districts, Speedway (outlined in blue) and Beech Grove (outlined in brown), also have ISTEP pass rates above the city’s mediocre average. Both districts abut gritty parts of the low-performing Indianapolis Public district, yet their respective districts continue to perform relatively well and generally have strong reputations. Could they be the Indianapolis equivalent of Bexley? The racial composition suggests that might be the case:


Like Bexley, both Speedway and Beech Grove are more homogeneous than their surrounding city and metro. Beech Grove in particular is overwhelmingly white. But neither Speedway nor Beech Grove share Bexley’s economic advantages. While Bexley’s 2000 median household income was $70,200, placing it well above the national average, Beech Grove’s median income was $41,548 and Speedway’s $37,713. Neither town can claim the affluence of Bexley; it would be safe to refer to either community as lower-middle or even working class. Thus, the differences between Beech Grove or Speedway and the Indianapolis that surrounds them is far less striking than is the case with Bexley and Columbus. Nonetheless, they remain more desirable than many sections of Indianapolis because their school system have a superior reputation, even if nowhere near as highly ranked as the system in the better educated suburb of Bexley. The differentials in property values between Beech Grove/Speedway and Indianapolis are far less profound than between Bexley and Columbus, but they’re still significant enough that a low income family looking to get out of the IPS district may struggle to afford the housing in Beech Grove or Speedway just a few miles away. In all three cases, the enclaves are less ethnically and economically diverse than their surrounding communities, which translates to a selling point for families looking for a good school system that fits within their price range.

This study has already asserted that most Americans generally demonstrate a value for education through the population growth trends that favor suburbs with great schools. These enclaves in Indianapolis and Columbus would suggest that Americans value homogeneity just as much: rich, white communities can grow astronomically yet remain rich and white. I’m not convinced that Americans are so fixated on racial prejudice that they are identifying these suburbs as “good” solely because they are mostly white, but a couple of embedded demographic features are shaping these settlement patterns. 1) Whites remain the numerically dominant race as well as the wealthiest, and they consequently have the greatest freedom to move into communities of their choice (though the numeric and economic dominance of whites is slowly declining). 2) Homogeneous educational environments do tend to foster greater academic success, whether homogeneity is ethnic or (particularly) economic.

If this latter postulate seems discomfiting, it’s not derived from racial or ethnic prejudice so much as the fact that homogeneity of all types facilitates efficiency of resources. The more racially diverse school districts in Indianapolis, such as IPS or the collar townships, must cater to a broader economic array, from the affluent to the extreme poor, while the suburbs generally only educate the affluent, regardless of race. School districts in Indianapolis (excluding to the two homogenous enclaves of Speedway and Beech Grove) require English as a Learned Language (ELL) programs for an increasing array of students. Even if the suburban school districts enroll some ethnic minorities and foreign-born citizens, the language and cultural barriers are smaller because these ethnic minority families already had the financial strength to move to the suburbs. Indianapolis Public Schools and the surrounding collar townships must assimilate a rapidly growing array of foreign born students. For better or for worse, economically and culturally homogenous communities—the Bexley, the Beech Grove, or the Speedway—typically demand far fewer resources in aggregate and are therefore easier to teach.

Buying the Right School System

Despite a non-exclusionary structure that resembles a public good, school districts are first and foremost competitive commodities. When highly marketable, school districts endow land inside their invisible boundaries with greater value. Therefore, both municipal governments and the electorates themselves have commodified schools so intractably that it has become their ambition to refine the district continuously, ideally so that it attracts the demographic base that will allow it to perform at a high standard as efficiently as possible.

Where does this leave the other schools? The final section of my already complete report will focus on my own recommendations for how schools that are neither suburbs of a single social class, nor impoverished inner-city can harness their diverse demographics to remain recognizable and competitive.

Invisible fences for humans, Part I: The Columbus example at the ground level.

The most concise definition for an enclave according to the principles of political geography is a small land area outside its home country, completely surrounded by the neighboring country. In a world atlas, the most visibly obvious example of this is the small mountainous kingdom of Lesotho, surrounded in totality by the large Republic of South Africa. Closer to home, a number of large cities in the US contain independently incorporated municipalities (typically with their own mayor, code of ordinances, and independent public services) completely surrounded by the larger city. In many cases, these enclaves began as suburbs of the larger city. As the city grew over time, it expanded its municipal boundaries through municipal annexation until it completely surrounded the enclave. When one municipality is considerably larger than the other in annexations, the large city often proposes to absorb the smaller city, resulting in the deincorporation of the community as it waives its right to levy taxes and provide city services on its own. The absorbed community no longer has political autonomy. (In other instances, these smaller communities were never incorporated to begin with, and the larger city only needs to engage in annexation proceedings.) Over time, such absorbed communities typically function as neighborhoods within the larger city. Enclaves, however, frequently reject the larger city’s proposal and retain most (if not all) of their autonomy; in short, they operate as mini-cities within a city.

In some cases, the distinction between enclave and surrounding city is so subtle that the only identifying feature is a welcome sign at the boundary. Other enclaves adopt their own infrastructural and streetscape design, with visibly different paving surfaces, street lights, road signs, and even possibly a different vernacular architecture for the homes and commercial buildings. Bexley, an enclave of approximately 13,000 people within Columbus Ohio (population 750,000), to the east of downtown, takes the distinction to an entirely different level. Its origins, as a turn of the century bedroom community for the gentry of Columbus, places the municipality at a location that may have seemed exurban at the time of its founding, surrounded by rural estates and farms. Today Bexley sits more or less squarely in the inner city. It certainly borders no other municipalities, as evidenced by this Wikipedia map of Franklin County.

Bexley’s roughly quadrilateral shape only offers clearly discernible physical boundaries on two of the four sides, as this outline of the city limits demonstrates. The western edge of Bexley consists of the Alum Creek and Wolfe Park; the northern edge consists of a rail corridor.
Despite being surrounded by Ohio’s largest city, Bexley still offers a way of life typical of an affluent older suburb. Its commercial main street—resting along Columbus’ main east-west arterial—remains quite successful, offering upmarket goods and services within a pedestrian friendly vernacular architecture in this overwhelmingly automobile oriented metro area.
(Unless otherwise indicated, all photos in this series are courtesy of Jung Won Kim.)

The housing stock to the north and south of Main Street in this community of a mere 2.4 square miles echoes the affluence of the commercial district, presenting a variety of Tudor and neocolonial homes, mostly dating from the first half of the 20th century. Most of Bexley’s residential districts follow strict rectilinear grids, with ample sidewalks and a largely consistent tree canopy. In many cases the lots are smaller than what would be desirable in contemporary Midwestern suburbia, with about four or five homes to an acre.
However, if visitors step outside of Bexley, they are in the big city of Columbus, no matter which direction they travel. And the differences are typically striking. This housing, just north of Bexley in the Columbus limits offers a good example of the contrast:
While hardly impoverished, it is visibly unadorned and shows no indication of the prosperity of its neighbor to the south. This Google Street View screen shot shows another image of Columbus at 6th Avenue, just north of Bexley, on the notorious “other side of the railroad tracks.” A third image reveals respectable but unremarkable low-density housing immediately south of Bexley in Columbus.
But perhaps the biggest contrast is in the primary commercial corridor. Main Street Bexley clearly offers a well preserved urban retail experience for a clientele with high disposable income across much of the street’s nine-block length.

Step outside of the city limits, though, and this is what one would see in Columbus:
An auto oriented strip mall to the east.
Low end retail with some evidence of high vacancy to the west, as one ventures closer to the Columbus downtown. Notice also that the cheap cables are hoisting the stoplights, instead of the more attractive metal masts featured in Bexley. Other portions of Columbus immediately outside Bexley yield similarly less aesthetic results, such as the intersection of Livingston Avenue and Alum Creek Drive just southwest of Bexley.

Bexley is only 4 miles east of downtown Columbus. If one were to draw a radial line from Columbus’ center at High and Broad and trace the circle formed by that radius, in many cases it would place a person in some of the metro’s most struggling neighborhoods. But Bexley is not struggling in the least. If anything, it’s growing as much as it can within completely constrained political boundaries through densification. Main Street Bexley has successfully introduced several new infill developments in the past few years, enhancing the retail corridor while providing residential options in the upper levels, thereby increasing its potential customer base.


The most remarkable differences, however, rest precisely on those municipal boundaries. Take Mound Street, for instance, which within Bexley is as pristine as anywhere else in the community.
Just a block away, in Columbus, the character changes completely, but more interesting is the physical impedance separating the two cities resting along this eastern boundary, at Gould Street. This photo, taken from the Columbus side, shows a garage resting squarely on what would have been the east-west right-of-way where Mound Street intersects Gould Street, the later of which is little more than an alley.
While it is possible this garage has always stood there, reinforcing the privately owned strip of land that bisects Mound Street, a map would suggest that the parcel bears the necessary physical dimensions to comprise a continuous right-of-way.
So what happened here? Did someone in Bexley buy the public right-of-way to the street to transform it to private property, thereby impeding public access between Bexley and Columbus in this location? Obviously this is only speculation, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first example—I’ve even observed in an early blog post a scenario where an installed road barrier blocked automobile access between an apartment complex and a condo complex in suburban Indianapolis. In that instance, however, the barricade only inhibited automobile traffic, and pedestrians could walk around it. If my speculation is correct, here in Bexley the landowners have completely removed a segment of a collector street from public access.

The evidence is subtle and may very well be a red herring, but it does appear that a certain contingent has made a conscious effort to alter the infrastructure in ways that weaken the accessibility between Bexley and surrounding Columbus. By why would a community attempt to do this? Obviously for the same reason that affluent gated communities have been cropping up across the country: the income differentials between the inside and outside are formidable, and the wealthy inside aims to stave off the undesirable perceived behavior characteristics of the outsiders. This near-east side of Columbus, though not uniformly poor, has not generally benefited from any of Bexley’s ostensible prosperity; all evidence suggests that it is considerably less affluent than the enclave it surrounds. The Community Data Center, under the management of Community Research Partners, provides useful cartographic economic indicators for all of Franklin County, revealing Bexley’s economic distinctiveness. This map showing median household income in 2000 by census tract is fully demonstrative: Bexley’s city limits are traced in yellow, and the Columbus Statehouse (the center of the city) indicated by a purple circle.
Echoing these trends is a map of the 2007 assessed value of residential properties in the area, again using census tracts:
Under both metrics, Bexley stands out as wealthier and with higher appraised home values than surrounding Columbus in all directions, but particularly to the east (across Alum Creek) and to the north (across the railroad tracks).

As far as the perceived desirability of the community is considered, these efforts to keep Bexley carefully sequestered from its more socioeconomically diverse “parent” city have proven overwhelmingly successful. In short, Bexley is almost uniformly affluent; the surrounding neighborhoods of Columbus are not. But the physical barriers to Bexley, aside from a few privatized rights-of-way, are relatively modest. Bexley is hardly surrounded by a gate. Cars and pedestrians are free to travel in and out of the municipality, and can easily do so on the arterials or collector streets. So what has given this suburb such cachet, when other neighborhoods in Columbus city limits also feature architecturally distinct houses, tree lined streets, pedestrian commercial corridors, and the characteristics that have made urban living appealing to many?

It helps to know a bit of the history of the area. Today, Bexley is a freestanding municipality, with its own mayor, city council, clerk of courts, police force, department of revenue, etc. It originated as a bedroom community called Pleasant Ridge, which emerged to house professors and their families after Capital University relocated in 1876 from its earlier site near Gooddale Park. Only after the Pleasant Ridge Improvement Association attracted infrastructure upgrades did the area begin to function as anything more than a rural assessment; the 1907 initiative added sidewalks, paved roads, and streetlights, encouraged tree planting, and restricted large signs, all in an effort to attract more people to the area. The efforts proved successful: by 1908 the Association decided to incorporate, combining several small neighborhoods to form the Village of Bexley. Incidentally, the City of Columbus sued the village shortly after this incorporation, contending that Bexley was annexed territory and subject to Columbus taxes. However, the Village successfully fought the suit and the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that Bexley was a separate and legally incorporated village and beyond the reach of Columbus taxes. Secure in its political autonomy, Bexley grew quickly and by 1931, the recent Census had proven that Bexley had achieved the minimum 5,000 residents in order to become a city. Its first mayor remained in office for 32 years. In short, Bexley was a fully incorporated community at a time when the surrounding Columbus neighborhoods were still new developments, and, in some cases (particularly to the south) virgin land. Columbus had grown eastward to meet Bexley and then continued to develop around it.

Over the years the neighborhoods of Columbus that surround Bexley have met widely divergent fortunes: some have remained working or lower-middle class, some have declined significantly, while a few closest to the downtown (such as Old Town East) are showing early evidence of reinvestment and gentrification. Bexley, conversely, has consistently remained upper-middle and upper income regardless of its “parent” city’s vicissitudes. It has also remained largely college-educated, as reflected in this map from Community Research Partners:
Correlations between income and education level are so powerful and widely known that the results of these analytical maps should come as no surprise. Bexley is an island of educated affluence. Equally unsurprising is the racial/ethnic composition of the community. Unfortunately the US Census Data does not isolate Bexley for analysis in its 2008 American Community Survey, so I will have to use 2000 results.
A more refined examination, of course, would evaluate the census tracts individually through charts, but since maps are a more expressive tool at illustrating spatial organization I will demonstrate the percentage identifying racially as white by census tract according to 2000 data.
Compared to the surrounding neighborhoods (particularly to the lower income north and east) Bexley is overwhelmingly white. In short, these political boundaries have in essence quarantined the municipality from poverty, low education, reduced property values, and racial diversity. The city’s political independence allows it to determine laws, budgets, millage rates, capital improvements, zoning—everything short of determining who gets in on a person-by-person basis.

Yet many of those other policy initiatives could just as easily serve as a de facto means of limiting those who otherwise would hope to live in Bexley but cannot afford it. For example, Bexley could have required laws that require certain construction standards—a high quality building material, for instance, which ensures that homes will be of a certain minimum value, rendering them less affordable than if those standards did not exist. In the city’s earlier days of development, it could have required subdivisions to be platted at a certain minimum lot size—for example, two homes to an acre. The land costs would have been prohibitive to many. It could have restricted residential land use to single family homes of a minimum square footage, thereby precluding the construction of lower-cost multifamily or small residential units—also making it quite difficult for higher density apartment buildings to break ground. All of these actions would have entailed the practice of exclusionary zoning, ruled unconstitutional by the influential New Jersey Supreme Court Decision Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mount Laurel Township first in 1975, then again in 1983 (with more enforcement powers) after public officials in Mount Laurel largely ignored the ruling the first time and continued to zone out affordability. Though the Mount Laurel Decision remains the most influential case determining the necessity of inclusionary zoning, most other decisions requiring the provision of affordable housing remain enactable only at the municipal or county level. No nationwide regulations prohibit zoning to exclude low-income persons.

Bexley’s distinctive affluence could just as easily derive from forces completely divorced from the public sector. Redlining, in which mortgage lending companies would systematically deny loans to neighborhoods marked in red by a map (usually poor and racial minority), was a perfectly legal practice until federal legislation in the late 1960s and 1970s prohibited it. Most affordable housing advocates would argue that redlining still takes place under more covert methods. Restrictive covenants, in which certain obligations embedded in a deed prevent a homeowner from selling real property to a racial minority, also promoted and retained racial (and usually socioeconomic ) homogeneity in neighborhoods. This, too, was rendered illegal, first by Supreme Court ruling Shelley v. Kramer (1948) and, after that failed to stem the practice, the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

While it is possible that Bexley engaged in some or all of these practices, the built environment does not immediately reveal evidence of exclusionary zoning. Lot sizes vary widely, as do the sizes of homes. In fact, recent Brookings Institution research indicates that Bexley and Columbus are the only two cities in the metro area with zoning that allows densities over 30 dwellings per acre. Building materials include brick, stone, and wood. And while the city is overwhelmingly wealthy and white, nearly 8% of the population is of some other race, which certainly makes it more heterogeneous than many other Columbus suburbs. In addition, persons of Jewish heritage—an religious group often targeted in restrictive covenants—comprise about a third of Bexley’s population. Without digging up Bexley’s entire legislative and zoning history, let’s hypothesize that none of these discriminatory practices were prevalent in the community. So how did Bexley get to be so rich? And, more importantly, how did it stay that way?

The city’s incorporation at a time when it was a sleepy, prestigious bedroom community helped galvanize its exclusivity. Defining its boundaries as a small distinctive suburb at an early stage became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: it has always attracted people in Columbus with high aspirations (it also houses the Governor’s Mansion and the President of Ohio State University) and their own spending capacity have promoted a prevailing culture of affluence. Imagine if the Gold Coast of Chicago or the New York’s Upper West Side had incorporated as a separate community a century ago, or even if they did it today: it would be a freestanding municipality of elites. In essence, a suburban community outside the old center of Los Angeles did much the same thing when threatened by annexation from the parent city. Beverly Hills, now a virtual enclave of the superwealthy, incorporated in 1906, just two years before Bexley. Is Bexley the Beverly Hills of Columbus? Two other enclaves within Columbus, Grandview Heights and Worthington, are also quite affluent, but they are less striking because they directly abut some of the wealthier sections of Columbus; the contrast when crossing their boundaries is less striking. Conversely, Whitehall, a municipality about a mile to the east of Beckley that is also surrounded by Columbus, is not remotely affluent and in recent years has shown indications of escalating poverty levels. An enclave does not ensure exclusivity.

One final map may prove the lynchpin to Bexley’s continued prosperity: the city’s school district boundaries, which, unsurprisingly, are conterminous with the city limits. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the Bexley Public School system is one of the highest-ranked in the state, but then a community such as Bexley has the deck stacked in its favor: the high assessed value of the homes translates to a robust tax base that may not even require a high mill rate to funding the –public schools generously. And what’s around it? The widely variable and sometimes abysmal Columbus Public Schools. The virtual absence of poverty in Bexley results in a minimal demand for low-income programs such as reduced lunch or subsidized sporting equipment. But the demographics itself favor an excellent school system: a municipality with such a high proportion of well-educated residents almost guarantees a high-achieving student body. Even if the schools were poorly funded (and they aren’t), the students would no doubt perform well. Like any city with sterling test scores, Bexley touts its school system, further enhancing its desirability and ensuring that real estate in the area remains high—and that a lower-income population (or even a middle class one) will never intrude upon its serenity by imposing greater educational burdens, or lowering the median test scores. Prestigious suburbs across the country share similar demographics, and their school systems are nearly always exemplary. Metro Columbus has a few of its own. But most of these other suburbs are not surrounded by a big city with broad swathes of poverty. The City of Bexley is basically impervious, as long as the well-oiled gears of its school system keep chugging along efficiently. The tree-lined streets, the walkable business district, the well-maintained older homes, the proximity to center of the state’s government—these factors in aggregate render the city immune from the higher crime and considerable poverty in the city that circumscribes it. Among the few palpable examples is a garage that blocks the right-of-way on Mound Street. But the intangibles exert a lasting power—the impeccable school system is the billy club that keeps the ne’er-do-wells away.

If this conclusion comes across as an attack on Bexley, let me mitigate it by asserting that I am not attempting to castigate success. If Bexley achieved its prosperity through passive, “organic” means rather than exclusionary laws, it would scarcely deserve condemnation when dozens of other municipalities have deliberately excluded the poor and continue to do so. Bexley is a particularly striking example that is worthy of a dozen other socioeconomic evaluations. Part II may arrive far in the future as my current workload is intense, but I hope to examine the demographic implications of Bexley’s success, and how other municipalities—and particularly their school systems—can wield their own demographics into a position of economic opportunities, even if they lack the embedded advantages of a place like Bexley.