Luria and Rogers Reply

These generous and thoughtful comments show broad agreement with the economic and policy arguments we make in our piece--that metro regions warrant attention as economic units, and will more than pay that attention back for the nation as a whole as well as their occupants; that federal and state policies should be changed to remove subsidies to sprawl and inter-regional competition for business; that local governments should break with CEDs and start to build the infrastructure of high-road economic reconstruction. Nor is there disagreement that high-road administration requires a much more active role in the economy for popular organizations (beginning with organizations of workers), much less with the central political claim that inner-ring suburbanites and central city residents have common material interests sufficient to underwrite their alliance. From as diverse a group as this, that is a striking level of agreement.

If the comments have an edge, it is with our apparent slighting of the barriers to building the high-road metro coalition. Phil Thompson notes many hard reasons--from the irrationalities of present political structures to the embedded economics of racism--why suburban and central city politicians have not gotten together on this project. Myron Orfield, reporting from the trenches, cautions on the volatility of inner-ring suburban allies in it--even as he states their economic stake in its success even more forcefully than we. Rich Feldman reminds that labor will need some time to dig itself out of its present hole--and that doing so requires change not just in the scope and scale of union activity, but in its structure and politics. Margaret Weir, while also thinking that we've understated the potential range of coalition, has seen too many failed federal programs and inert social movements to believe the revolution will be easy, or begin with giant steps.

Fine and good. We agree the fight will be hard, the politics inevitably messy, and that sustained organizing is required. A new metro politics will stumble over material conflicts on the way to getting to common material gain, and the internal politics of coalition partners, which do indeed need to change, will slow progress toward their coalition. The real political question, however, is whether these sorts of cautions and obstacles amount to an argument against this particular political project--whether the problems in beginning or sustaining it are so severe that we should reject it for another. And here the answer--unamended by the commentators--seems clearly to be "no."

So we are left with broad agreement that metro reconstruction is urgently needed; that the means and material base of doing that are plausible and known; that the doing will require organization and the breaking of some rotten political eggs, but that the broad direction and means of doing that are also known. For us, that is more than enough to warrant getting started in earnest. Metro reconstruction is not just a nice idea. It is the central spatial dimension of any productive, egalitarian, democratic order. Those moved by those values should recognize that fact more clearly, and focus more clearly on realizing the possibility it describes. And with urban squalor and national inequality hitting all-time highs, they need to do that now.

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