Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  It has not had all the amenities. You still can’t get decent commercial and retail. But I don’t have to walk out of the house and worry about somebody asking me when am I going to pick up the garbage, as if I am a service employee. Life is difficult enough. I don’t want to go through that. If I were to move, the likelihood is that I’d either move into another African-American area with a bigger house, maybe. Or I might move into a more urban setting like downtown. But moving into the northern part of the city, which is predominantly white—I’ve never really felt that was good.”

  When I was talking to blacks on the Northside, I tell him, I began to get the attitude that Karl Marx was right—that issues of class are what control.

  “We all make our choices. If all the black people who could move away did move away, what we left behind would be pretty bad. I think that you cannot run away. I get angry very often when I drive through my community and I see some deterioration, I see the social problems. But at least I have to see them every day. ‘To whom much is given, from them much is expected.’ You can’t run away from that. You shouldn’t run away from that.

  “My tendency is to feel that for those of my brothers and sisters who choose to live their lives in Alpharetta—they’re selling their birthright for a mess of pottage. They are not getting much in return. They’re getting middle America. Maybe upper-middle America. They’re getting homogeneous affluence. They’re getting a kind of nondisturbing terrain. But that’s not reality. I hear my own people speak with disdain about the homeless and the unattractive qualities of urban America. They really believe that if they can spend a half million for a home, nothing should intrude upon them that is unattractive. I don’t think that’s the way the world is.

  “I think one of the things you might ask a lot of those people who tell you that class means everything—ask them how long they’ve had class. Many of them are first generation out! I think that they are running away from something and not just running to something more like them.”

  They really hate what they left, I acknowledge.

  “It shows you how painful and violent the scars of race remain in this country.”

  Lomax’s responses are important because they represent the orthodox thinking of many of the middle-class black people I talked to. And many of Lomax’s points are dead on. A striking number of the next generation of black kids who could go to college anywhere, for example, are now seeking the black university experience.

  Chris Lottier, Pat and George’s older son, chose to enroll as a freshman at Howard University in Washington. That is the first historically black school to have a full complement of professional graduate schools. When I sought him out there and asked why he selected a black school after living his entire life in white towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, he said, “I wanted to find out what it was like to be like the blond kid sitting next to me in high school—I wanted to find out what it was like to be in the majority.”

  Yet, he was thinking about transferring after two years to join his younger brother at the University of Virginia. It was not that he felt he would get a better education there, but he matter-of-factly said he thought that white employers would probably be more impressed with a UVA degree than one from Howard. And making money was important to him.

  Gregory T. Baranco, who is black, owns a chain of Atlanta automobile dealerships. One of them is in the working-to-middle-class environs of Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta. Gwinnett is among the whitest urban counties in America. Baranco owns the dealership that sells them Lincolns. When, for some reason, I found that amusing, he grinned and said, “All you need is a level playing field.”

  Baranco, who has also helped start a black bank, and his wife, Juanita, who is a lawyer, have built an entire subdivision off Panola Road in south De Kalb County, where the houses range from $334,000 to $600,000 and the owners are black. The Barancos were building a spectacular home for themselves there with banks of curved windows and an indoor swimming pool. Such homes are not uncommon in north Fulton. Why, then, did the Barancos choose south De Kalb, where they had to build a whole subdivision to get the house they wanted? Because you are buying not just a lot but community, said Harold Buckley, the other partner in the development, to the Atlanta Constitution. “If you are buying a home, you look for places where your family can establish long-time friendships,” explained Buckley, whose new home will be next door to the Barancos’.

  The Barancos’ daughter Evelyn, meanwhile, has had the same impulse as Chris Lottier. She was choosing to spend a year away from prestigious Wellesley, where she was originally enrolled, to attend Spelman. Lomax’s crucial point may well be that what matters in this society is the freedom and ability and wherewithal to choose—including the choice of when and how to congregate.

  Apart from that, it is exactly as Lomax said: race is an inherently ambiguous and pervasive issue in this country. It does echo throughout people’s lives. Because for so long it was the same thing to be black and to be poor, some first-generation middle-class black people are having trouble sorting out what it even means to be “authentically” black in the absence of privation. When I was doing my interviews, the trendy label being used by young black Atlantans for affluent people who were not thought to be acting sufficiently black was “pseudos.”

  At the same time, points out Juan Williams, who wrote Eyes on the Prize, the book that accompanied the PBS documentary series on the civil rights revolution, “Lots of white people live up to their asses in debt and don’t think that much about it. Middle-class black people are much more paranoid, sensing the wolf at the door. Poverty to them is much more real. They’re more likely to have family or friends who’ve been through an experience like eviction, where their clothes and furniture are put out on the street in an embarrassing display. In truth, the primary fear is of falling into some economic mishap that would take away our dignity, of reducing us merely to another poor black face. Just another ‘nigger.’ ”

  The impact on race of our new Edge Cities is similarly ambig uous. The argument that racism thrives is simple: racial patterns of residence are still very strong. Bart Landry claims that even Zip Codes that appear integrated statistically are not so when you get down to the block level. What you find is small enclaves of fifty black homes, not a general distribution, he believes.

  But even more telling are perceptions. They can vary tremendously, depending on whether you are black or white—irrefutable evidence of how much race still matters. I once debriefed a young black Washington Post colleague from a suburban background after she completed a three-month Edge City assignment. Her articles had given no hint of her private perceptions of Edge Cities. It turned out they were scorching. No matter how many black people may have been there, Edge City reminded her of South Africa. “The people there are so consumed with themselves and their ideas of success that it is to the exclusion of anyone else. In trying to reject failures of any sort, they have lost compassion. The glass buildings are narcissistic. They reflect like the inside of a spa. It’s all people admiring their own muscle. They have no soul.” She said she had not met a single person during her assignment whom she found herself personally liking.

  But again, there are more powerful arguments against the idea of racism being crucial to the rise of Edge Cities. They include Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Toronto, London, and Paris. As for perceptions, take Chet Fuller, a senior editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, who is black. He talks about Atlanta, with its overwhelming complement of Edge Cities, as a “place of big dreams. It says, ‘We’ve tried a lot of things and we’re not finished yet.’ It’s sold all these wolf tickets—it’s bragged on itself so hard—that it has had to go out and back it up. There’s a confidence in the air [among black people]—the way people carry themselves. They look people in the eyes—they don’t look down. The word you hear is that anybody with skills and talents can make it here. It’s a place of opportunities. There’s lots
of support. There are networks in place, a good political climate in place, and corporations with black people in decision-making positions. We in the South deal very publicly with our racial problems. On the network news, sometimes. Doesn’t keep us from doing business.”

  These contradictions, this squishiness, is why, talking to Lomax, I couldn’t let go of this bone I had in my teeth about class as an explanation of affairs. I couldn’t help wondering whether there were any class origins to his elegant college professor-politician’s construct. So as I was walking out the door, I asked him a few final questions about his own life:

  What did your father do?

  “He was an attorney and a businessman in Los Angeles. We’ve had black businesses for three generations now.”

  Where did you go to school in L.A.?

  “Predominantly white Los Angeles High—[affluent] West L.A.”

  Your siblings? Where did they end up?

  “One’s in China, teaching in a university. I have a sister who’s an attorney in West L.A. in the Wilshire area. She lives up in the Hollywood Hills. I have a brother who works for the court system and he lives in West L.A., but in a predominantly white area. Another sister who’s a dancer and who lives in West Hollywood. My mother lives in Pasadena.”

  Then, being an intellectually honest man, he saw where this was going. “None of them lives in a black community.”

  In the early 1990s, the new frontier for Atlanta-area developers was semirural land well outside downtown, and also south of those invisible lines which divide the posh Northside from the Southside.

  Urban areas have been divided according to class for as long as there have been cities. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., in The Urban Wilderness, demonstrates that in Chicago the residential patterns by class were fully set up by 1894, long before race became an issue.

  Around Atlanta, there are a lot of historical reasons, other than race, that Southside traditionally has been full of lower-income people, both black and white. Wealthy neighborhoods in every city on earth are generally upwind, uphill, and upriver from the center—to be cooler and to avoid noxious fumes. Southside has always had the problem of being at the wrong end of the Chattahoochee River. The wisdom of the ancients genuinely is enshrined in the motto—excrement flows downhill.

  Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom at this time was that the Southside had become ripe for development. Air conditioning was as available there as anywhere else. If anything, it had less congested roads and more untapped sewer capacity than the booming Northside. (In the late 1980s, there were more cars and trucks in Gwinnett County, to the northeast, than people.)

  Best of all, it had Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, with more nonstop flights to more American cities than any other airfield. The noise was a serious drawback. But if you could get out from under the actual flight path, the Southside should be prime Edge City territory, all the real estate interests believed. The land cost a third of what it did on the Northside.

  The issue then became: Would affluent whites live there? Among affluent suburban blacks? Or among semirural whites whom everybody stigmatized as “rednecks”?

  To put it another way: What exactly was the home price that would do the trick? If the commutes were equal, how much extra would people pay to live on the Northside, when the same subdivision house was available on the Southside for $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 less? What exactly was the price people were willing to put on racism, classism, and its long-time effects—such as the shopping on the Southside being substantially less than good, as were the available jobs?

  When I was there, Peter Calabro was betting millions on an 850-acre planned community, Bridgport, in south Fulton County. It was on Camp Creek Parkway, a short, straight shot to the airport. Calabro was planning the development, which surrounded the deep waters of 146-acre Lake Cowart, to include a golf course, a country club, a conference center, shopping, and offices. The single-family detached homes would range from $150,000 to $350,000. We’re talking doors of beveled glass, here, in front of a two-story “lawyer foyer,” with a mailbox out front embedded in a massive pillar of stonework.

  These were ambitious plans. So although he raved about the “picturesque beauty” of the site, and the “skin-contact” quality of the lake’s water, Calabro was not banking on the place selling itself. He had used “focus groups” extensively. That’s the research technique in which you first analyze the market statisti cally. Then you go out and find human beings to match the statistics. Then you sit them down in small groups and grill them about their likes, dislikes, and behavior, videotaping the results for extensive analysis. In such fashion do you hope to divine the future.

  Calabro had kept class constant, but divided his focus groups racially. In the black focus group, this is what he found:

  There were significant concentrations of black people who could afford the homes he wanted to build. That was not much of a surprise. In newly constructed subdivisions nationwide, when blacks arrive, the education and income numbers tend to rise. The level of class goes up with the arrival of blacks, over the rural white population that may have preceded the subdivision.

  The members of this black focus group said they liked the product he proposed building. They were willing to live in a mixed neighborhood—that is, with whites. But these black suburbanites expressed skepticism about how mixed the development would end up being. If there were a lot of blacks—if they made up as much as half, say—they doubted that there would be large numbers of whites of the same class willing to live there, too.

  Calabro would not release to me the results of the white focus group research; he thought it was badly flawed. He said he believes it did not reflect the attitudes of the white portion of his market. (It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess what these whites had said.)

  But Calabro was undeterred. I asked him whether he was kidding himself about white people being willing to live next to black people of the same class. He thought not. There are two kinds of white people, he said: those who had experience with blacks as peers, and those who had not.

  Those who had not passed the threshold of sharing any portion of their lives with affluent, educated black people, he said, based their focus group reactions on stereotypes and fears. They would never buy a house near blacks.

  Those, by contrast, who had gone past “hello” with a black person, who had routinely dealt with blacks at least as accomplished as they, would rapidly make far more critical decisions, he believed. They would want to know about more class-based issues: how the schools were, what the price of the house was, what the commute was. He was banking on the idea that race was not an issue that was ambiguous—that it just was an issue that was complex. And the complexities were ones that white people would be able to dissect with sophistication, given the opportunity.

  Calabro, who is white, was betting his professional life on that belief. It will be interesting to see whether he is right or wrong.

  The First Law of Demographics is: You cannot count on people to change. You can, however, count on them to die.

  That means that members of one generation should not try to predict the future based on their experience. As they die off, they will be replaced by a generation with different life experiences that have produced different attitudes. Not necessarily better, but certainly different. And in this fashion, questions that obsessed one generation sometimes never really get answered; they just end up sounding more and more archaic.

  It is only a truism, then, to say that the future of race issues is in the hands of the generation that has recently entered adulthood. After all, this is the first generation to go to integrated schools, the first to operate routinely at a variety of levels with people of other races. So who knows whether it is significant, but it turns out that the hottest disco in Atlanta is Dominique’s. It is smack in the middle of the Edge City growing up around the Cumberland Mall and the Galleria.

  The Cumberland Mall-Galleria area is a classic of the Edge City
genre. The Galleria itself—the mall-hotel-office complex—has a helicopter landing pad. It is directly opposite the Kinder-Care day-care facility, and near the Embassy Suites for businessmen who want a little extra space because they plan to live out of their hotel room for a long time. The landscaping is very, very high—the purple wisteria of spring is everywhere, as is the white dogwood, pink dogwood, red tulips, and masses of pansies and azaleas. Near where Sherman took the last high ground before marching on Atlanta, yuppies now spend the weekend rafting. This is probably the only Edge City in America that encompasses a National Recreational Area—the Chattahoochee River—with its Smokey the Bear park ranger signs. Not for nothing does the real estate profession call this the Platinum Triangle.

  And there, right in the middle of it, is Dominique’s. Named after Dominique Wilkins, number 21 of the Atlanta Hawks, it has the most heavy-duty sound system I have ever experienced. The bass line from the JBL speakers the size of refrigerators that hang from the ceiling is so serious, it does not merely enter your chest. It moves your shirt while you are standing still. Tumbling neon light displays, shifting from green to pink and blue, reflect off banks of video screens simultaneously showing the same weird cop movie as the beat thunders on.

  The Saturday night I was there, I could barely move. It was business suits and ties everywhere—hundreds, if not thousands, of young professional people. The crowd—at ground zero of this majority white Edge City in the middle of Georgia—was 90 percent black. No one seemed uncomfortable with this arrangement.

  When I got back to my car, what I saw on top of the hill across the way was a big slab of Edge City office building. It had a sign at the top that seemed a metaphor for what I had just been part of.