Adopting and life in the burbs

By Bill Steigerwald

Boonesville, Kentucky — Here in deepest Appalachia, where a pound of
tobacco costs $3 and a pound of marijuana costs $1,200, magazine stands
as we know them do not exist.

In big, green, empty Owsley County — population 5,000 —


People,


Seventeen
and Off-Road Weekly are all you can expect to find at the local Rite Aid.

It’s a good thing I brought a

New
Yorker
magazine along on my newspaper assignment (which is to cover the good works 130 Pittsburgh people are doing for some of the poorest folks who live in this county, one of the state’s poorest).

Not only does the current New Yorker — which I intend to donate to the Public Library of Owsley County — have a great article on Hitler’s relatives, it has a valuable piece on the potential pitfalls of adopting foreign children.

Now, adopting a child from a Russian or Eastern European orphanage is a great thing to do. God bless those brave and caring souls who are willing to rescue one of the estimated one-half million orphans stashed in the state-run institutions of the former Soviet Union.

It is a long, complicated, expensive and emotionally trying process. And, because of the damage done to the tiny bodies, brains and souls of children raised in orphanages, many new parents must spend years treating their children’s often severe medical, neurological and developmental problems.

Few parents must deal with the horrific kinds of problems described by New Yorker writer Melissa Fay Greene. Her article, “The Orphan Ranger,” is about the adoption doctors who treat post-institutionalized children.

It is a good introduction to a controversial and incredibly complex subject. But it is not even close to being all you need to know about the perils of foreign adoption.

It paints a too sanguine picture of the ability of even the best doctors and therapists to overcome the effects of emotional, physical and psychological neglect and make the former orphans whole.

Nevertheless, every parent who is contemplating adopting a child from an orphanage — especially in Eastern Europe and Russia — ought to read it.

Cities vs. the burbs
Worrying about the life, death and ill health of our great cities has been a national pastime since about 1950 — when the federal government began pushing local governments to destroy huge, rich, socio-economically diverse hunks of cities in the name of urban renewal.

Many cities still have big-time troubles — sprawl, poverty, poor-paying jobs, horrible schools, aging infrastructures, broken bureaucracies and federal policies that skew everything in the wrong direction.

Not to be too cynical, but they are mostly the same old problems we’ve been throwing trillions of dollars at for decades.

To try to drum-up excitement for a new agenda of public-private solutions, and to repair the damage done to cities by the last round of failed public-private solutions, the summer

Brookings
Review
offers a package of essays under the title, “Reinventing the City.”

It’s sometimes a bit murky and too heavy with policy-wonk musings, but it is fairly interesting. To sum it up, it looks like our cities are going to get more suburban and our suburbs are going to get more urban.

As William Frey writes in

“The New Urban Demographics: Race, Space
& Boomer Aging,”
there are two important demographic trends cities have to deal with.

One is pretty simple to understand: Cities that are booming and growing the fastest — L.A., Houston, San Diego, etc. — are those that attract immigrants, foreign and domestic. Cities that are economically stagnant and bleeding population — Pittsburgh, Philly and Cleveland etc. — aren’t attracting immigrants.

Nothing complicated there.

The other trend has to do with aging Baby Boomers and certain U.S. mayors — namely, those who are risking hundreds of millions of their citizens’ future tax revenues on the hope that graying Baby Boomers can be lured downtown to rejuvenate their center cities. Frey says they are going to be mighty disappointed. Most Baby Boomers will become old and gray in place — in the burbs.

Speaking of cities, you don’t have to be a professional urbanologist to know that “horizontal” Sun Belt cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas are land-swallowing, car-happy, job-generating boom towns.

But how many of us know that Austin, Texas, now has a larger population than Boston? Or that Baltimore is the fourth largest political jurisdiction in Maryland? Or that the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County is the leading industrial center in Pennsylvania?

Welcome to “America’s Startling New Urban Geography,” the subject of Fred Siegel’s piece in the July/August issue of

American
Enterprise.

According to Siegel, America is decentralizing faster than any other society in history. The dirty name for this continuing dispersal of people across the landscape, of course, is “suburban sprawl.”

It is fashionable in some elite circles to hate our thinly populated, “soulless” car-burbs and our “Edge Cities,” and to prefer the high-population densities and congestion of our metropolises.

But as Siegel shows, the cultural and economic lines between cities and non-cities are blurring more and more all the time.

Mayors of cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit and even Pittsburgh are encouraging suburb-like developments within their boundaries just as the suburbs are beginning to institute slower growth policies and preserve open spaces.

“As the boundaries between older, de-densified cities and the dispersed cities of their surrounding counties blur,” Siegel says, there are bound to be bitter fights between those who want the new hybrid areas to remain suburban and those who want it to become more city-like (i.e., denser).

Siegel says the great political question is whether “this will re-create the kinds of centralized governments that ultimately did in traditional cities — the very governments that today’s exurbanites fled from.”

Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and writer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He has written a weekly column about magazines for the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Trib since 1987. Read more of Bill Steigerwald's articles here.