Edge City

by Joel Garreau

In bright blue light, from the top of that hill overlooking Dominique’s, it proclaimed: CORPORATE SPECTRUM.

  John Lewis has had a singular perspective on the American Dream for the last thirty years. When he arrived in Washington in 1986 as a congressman, he was already an important figure in American history. The National Journal noted that it’s not your typical freshman congressman who is sought out by his senior colleagues wanting to hear the stories he’s got to tell.

  In 1959 and 1960, John Lewis, then only nineteen, helped organize the first lunch-counter sit-ins in America. They established the right of all Americans to be served whatever they had the money to buy—a meal, in this case.

  In 1961, he was one of the leaders of the Freedom Rides. The issue again was whether all Americans could equally use the nation’s public facilities—this time, interstate Greyhound bus terminals. For this he was beaten viciously in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Lewis was a keynote speaker at the 1963 March on Washington where King gave his “I have a dream” speech. In 1964, he helped coordinate the Mississippi Freedom Project. In 1965, in Selma, Alabama, he helped lead 525 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were attacked by Alabama state troopers using clubs, whips, and tear gas. His cause that time was whether all Americans had the right to vote. The result was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  Today, still straightforward and guileless, John Lewis is the U.S. Representative from the Fifth Congressional District of Georgia, whose state flag is still three-quarters filled with the Stars and Bars. Seventy-five years before John Lewis was born, Sherman burned Atlanta flat. Fifty years after Lewis was born, he was a second-term member of the House representing that town. In between, the world into which Lewis was born—a family of sharecroppers in Troy, Alabama—was so antique, so feudal, that Lewis cannot remember even seeing a white person until he was eight.

  Historians use examples like this to address the matter of scale—the notion that, depending on which lens you use to look at something like change, thirty years can be an excruciatingly long time or a strikingly short one.

  There is no question that John Lewis is pretty much astounded by what he’s seen in his life so far. “Pockets of south De Kalb, Hunter Hill, Cascade Road, Guilford Forest, Loch Lomond, Stone Mountain—it’s wealth. Nothing but wealth. Lots of blacks doing extraordinarily well. And it’s all happened in the last twenty-five years.

  “It’s altogether a different world. If you had told me twenty-seven years ago, when I first moved here, that I would be able to go into a neighborhood and knock on the door and say, I’m John Lewis. I need your help. I need your support. Will you vote for me?’ I’d’ve told you you were crazy. You were out of your mind. It would have been very dangerous for me to go some places. I wouldn’t have gone to some neighborhoods that are now in my district. I just wouldn’t have done it.”

  He means it. Although these are neighborhoods he won with 90 percent of the white vote in his last seriously contested election.

  This has, of course, not been without a price. He recalls a day not long ago when he had a nodding acquaintance with virtually everyone in Atlanta in the black middle class. Now, “I go to places, I go campaigning, I go to a church, a restaurant—I feel I should know that person. And I don’t. We are dispersed. We had a greater feel of solidarity in the days of segregation. Twenty-five or thirty years later, we have choices, and we’re taking them. People don’t want their children to come in contact with the undesirable elements. Fear of crime, fear of violence. So they move away. You can even see it in the churches. We are paying a price.

  “The revolution is not complete. But in so many ways we have witnessed a quiet, nonviolent revolution. Could I imagine it when I was growing up? No, no. Those days of the marches? No, no.”

  Lewis points out the window of his district offices in a downtown high-rise near Five Points, just beyond an American flag behind his desk. He says, “Right in that building there, where the drugstore is—I was arrested in that building in 1964.”

  When I chatted with him there was a controversy going on. Affluent black parents in suburban De Kalb County wanted the local public schools upgraded. Yet, as Lewis noted, “you hear black parents say, ‘I don’t want my children bused.’ For the first time in my life, in thirty years in the Movement, ‘I don’t want my children bused.’ Strange to hear that. ‘We want our school, this school, in this neighborhood, upgraded to a first-class school.’ ”

  So much for “separate but equal.”

  I had just come from Lenox Square Mall, the most chic in Atlanta and, arguably, the South. It is well patronized by black people, as is Cumberland Mall, where more people shop in a month than live in Atlanta proper. It occurred to me to have the temerity to ask Lewis what he thought Martin Luther King, Jr., would have made of these Edge City malls.

  That gave Lewis pause. “Dr. King was born and raised here in Atlanta. For the most part he knew the old Fourth Ward [the Sweet Auburn neighborhood]. There was a sense you could not go any farther. It was unthinkable, living beyond North Avenue.” Lewis’ voice turns into a reverie as he goes on. “This friend of mine has built this unbelievable house near Stone Mountain. Swimming pool. Heated swimming pool.” Pause. “That covers itself,” he continues, so softly that he is almost talking to himself. “I’ve been living here since 1963. I think I’ve been to Stone Mountain maybe twice. I heard of Stone Mountain [back then], I heard of the Klan. At least once a year there would be a fiery cross on Stone Mountain. Now there’s a black guy with a swimming pool.”

  Lewis is in his fifties, which almost makes him too old to be statistically part of the new generation of the black middle class, and he recognizes that. “The young black professionals know much more than I do about what has happened all around this place,” he says. And Lewis, now a congressman, has layers of aides. That insulates a person from life’s grottiness. Hence, there are lots of thoughtful people who differ with Lewis. They look at America’s promises to itself and see the glass as, at best, half empty. So I ask Lewis, Is this what the Beloved Community looks like?

  “Atlanta’s not the Promised Land,” Lewis reflects. “It is not the Beloved Community. But it is in the process of becoming. It’s like democracy. It is ever becoming.”

  When the interview seemed to be over, I thanked Lewis for his time, and started packing up my gear. Somehow, we got talking about what had been Lewis’ favorite pastime—collecting antiquarian books by and about black people. Recently, he said, he had pretty much lost the desire to pursue his hobby because he’d completely run out of space. “My wife accuses me of being a pack rat,” he said. I joked with him that what he needed was to move out to one of those semi-Tara tract mansions out in some Edge City, out in Cobb County, in Marietta.

  No, Lewis said, I have to stay close to the airport, really.

  Then he added, “I will show you a house that I would love to have.” It seems a couple of his supporters held a grand fundraiser for him once. And “across from them is this old, old house.” Lewis has discovered that it’s not up for sale yet because the ancient lady who lives in it has established a lifetime trust. But it is on eighteen acres within the city limits, on Cascade Road, the most affluent black suburban neighborhood in Atlanta.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Lewis. “For a politician it would be an ideal place. Have a barbecue or something for all of the people in the district. It’s an old house, a great house. They had a dairy. In the back you will see the old windmill, and what you put the corn in, the silo. And this is near to the city.

  “I would love to have a little place I could raise chickens. There’s enough room. Eighteen acres. I would love to be able to raise some chickens there. They are such innocent creatures. That was life growing up. It was fine—made me responsible. Made me a better person. No question about it. A sense of responsibility, in the sense of caring for something. I owe a great deal to my early life, and to the chickens.”

 
; We joshed. So all you need is eighteen acres on Cascade Road and a few chickens. “And a few chickens,” he replied, laughing. And you’d be a happy man! I teased. “That would be. Almost. The Beloved Community,” he replied. We laughed. “I’m kidding,” he insisted. “Just kidding.”

  His voice trailed off. Earlier, he had dismissed his longing for this place. Think what eighteen acres in suburban Atlanta costs. But as he continued, I thought, This is not entirely a joke.

  “Beautiful sight,” he added, so softly as to be almost inaudible. “I have never seen the inside of the house,” said he, sounding surprised at his own revelation. “But I would buy it without seeing the inside. It reminds me of growing up on the farm. Just the outdoors, the trees, the oak trees. And that’s the thing about Atlanta. If you’re flying over this city, it’s a city of trees. You can be living in the city, but you’re out there, in the grass, the trees, the flowers. Beautiful dogwoods. All in a line. As they get older, they just get shadier.”

  That’s when it finally occurred to me. John Lewis has a dream.

  He has a dream that’s a very familiar American one. That one day, he might have a big old house. Surrounded by the most expansive lawn in creation. In a fashionable neighborhood. Among his peers. Three minutes from the beltway. Fourteen minutes from the Edge City of Cumberland Mall-Galleria. Closer to that Edge City than to downtown. With extraordinary access to the airport. In the most vibrant metropolitan area of the Deep South.

  It’s what generations have sacrificed and strived for. It’s the way a lot of people have reassured themselves that they do, in fact, live in some kind of a meritocracy—in a system that, for all its grievous flaws, sometimes approximates fairness. It is the residential portion of the dream that made Edge City inevitable.

  In other words, maybe John Lewis has an image of the Beloved Community that some people might dismiss out of hand as a silly, irrelevant, middle-class suburban caricature of the American Dream.

  But I, for one, ended up seriously hoping that John Lewis gets that house. For all that he has gone through—in the service of his country—on mature reflection it seemed to me he has earned it.

  * For quick reference to the demographic undergirdings of this and other chapters, see the Notes.

  * In fact, the National Association of Black Journalists awarded its Frederick Douglass Prize to the author in 1988 for his previous reporting on the black suburban middle class, which culminated in this chapter.

  6

  PHOENIX

  Shadow Government

  Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want … and deserve to get it, good and bad.

  —H. L. Mencken

  DOROTHY KRUEGER, sixty-one, stood squarely amid the rust-golden grit of the Sonoran desert. She wore orange-red lipstick, bright yellow earrings, blue sweat pants, new white Reeboks, two gold chains, and a matte black semiautomatic Glock 17. There were seventeen bullets in the grip of the pistol. On the webbed black belt around Krueger’s waist hung two more clips—for a total of fifty-one rounds—inside the tooled leather cases that matched her holster.

  Krueger fired at a human silhouette target first with her strong hand, then her weak hand, then with both hands. She shot quickly, three rounds in four seconds, timed with a stop watch. From three yards, seven yards, fifteen yards, twenty-two, she blazed professionally. Five points for a chest shot. Only two for the head. On order, she reloaded from the belt. “You never want to holster an empty weapon” came the fierce scold of the instructor over the loudspeaker. Up and down the line, the thirteen senior citizens—most of them noticeably older than Krueger—quickly complied.

  Jack Goodrich and Dick Schiefelbein wore the brown shirts of their uniforms crisply creased; their badges shone brightly in the Arizona sun. They watched Krueger, a candidate for promotion, critically. These two commanding officers of the Sun City Posse, seventy-one and fifty-eight respectively, had always preferred the .357 Magnums hanging on their belts. But as the cacophony of firepower erupted and slugs volleyed in bursts of dust into the backstop of a flood-control canal, they could see why Krueger liked her Glock. With plastic parts, it was lighter and easier to draw and aim than their enormous six-guns. It was also much quicker to reload. No wonder the “bad guys,” as they put it, had come to favor that handgun—causing many police forces to switch to the new 9mm standard. And no way was the Posse going to be behind the times.

  After all, the Posse had an image to uphold. The uniforms of its members—which included everyone on the Posse-owned firing range—were virtually identical with those of the county’s deputy sheriffs, right down to the handcuffs and the Mace. The Posse’s full-sized Chevrolets, with the flashing lights on the roof and the star painted on the doors, were also practically indistinguishable from the real police. The Posse’s equipment, of course, tended to be newer than that of the police. And their headquarters featuring a color portrait of John Wayne was bigger than the nearby substation. Their big brown beaver Stetsons were more beautiful. For that matter, their shooting range was nicer.

  But then again, there were 183 members of the Sun City Posse—far more than there were police officers in the area. That was why this partnership between the privately funded, privately organized Posse and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department was formed, Goodrich explained.

  “In the days of the Wild West, the sheriff would go into a bar and pick out four or five people and deputize them and go out and catch the bad guy,” Commander Goodrich said. “Now bring it up to modern status, why, we are on a continuing posse status. They don’t let us go when the job is done. We just keep doing it. We’re a permanent crime-control posse.”

  Sun City, Arizona, on the west side of metropolitan Phoenix, bills itself as the largest “adult” community in the world. It has ten shopping centers and forty-six thousand residents. It is a privately owned development that has fervently resisted incorporation into any municipality in order to avoid a new level of taxation. But, though private, it has taken on many trappings of a city. It runs everything from libraries to parks to swimming pools to an art museum to a crisis-counseling hotline to a fire department to a symphony orchestra. The squad cars of its legally franchised, armed, unpaid private posse routinely patrol the public streets. Its innocuously named Recreation Association, meanwhile, has the power to assess fees that are functionally indistinguishable from taxes. If a homeowner does not pay the fees, the association has the legal right—so far unexercised—to slap a lien on that person’s house and sell it at auction.

  Sun City is by no means an aberration. It represents several forms of private-enterprise governments—shadow governments, if you will—of which there are more than 150,000 in the United States. These shadow governments have become the most numerous, ubiquitous, and largest form of local government in America today, studies show. In their various guises shadow governments levy taxes, adjudicate disputes, provide police protection, run fire departments, provide health care, channel development, plan regionally, enforce esthetic standards, run buses, run railroads, run airports, build roads, fill potholes, publish newspapers, pump water, generate electricity, clean streets, landscape grounds, pick up garbage, cut grass, rake leaves, remove snow, offer recreation, and provide the hottest social service in the United States today: day care. They are central to the Edge City society we are building, in which office parks are in the childrearing business, parking-lot officials run police forces, private enterprise builds public freeways, and subdivisions have a say in who lives where.

  These shadow governments have powers far beyond those ever granted rulers in this country before. Not only can they prohibit the organization of everything from a synagogue to a Boy Scout troop; they can regulate the color of a person’s living room curtains. Nonetheless, the general public almost never gets the opportunity to vote its leaders out of office, and rarely is protected from them by the United States Constitution.

  “The privatization of government in America is the most i
mportant thing that’s happening, but we’re not focused on it. We haven’t thought of it as government yet,” notes Gerald Frug, professor of local government law at Harvard.

  These governments are highly original, locally invented attempts to bring some kind of order to Edge Cities in the absence of more conventional institutions. Edge Cities, after all, seldom match political boundaries. Sometimes they do not even appear on road maps. Few have mayors or city councils. They beg the question of who’s in charge. Are these places exercises in anarchy? Or are they governed by other means?

  The answer is—government by other means. Nowhere was that more clear than in Phoenix in the early 1990s.

  Objectively, metropolitan Phoenix should have been writhing in anarchy by 1991. It seemed as if the entire leadership class had been decapitated. Arizona had been functionally without a governor since the mid-1980s, when the former Pontiac dealer Evan Mecham squeaked into office with a minority of the vote and then disgraced himself so badly that the ensuing impeachment proceedings were launched by his fellow Republicans. The relentlessly pro-growth old-boy elite called the Phoenix Forty had lost control of events when Terry Goddard, a political outsider who championed neighborhood power, became mayor. Then Goddard quit the mayor’s job to run for governor—an election he lost. In Phoenix, his void was filled by a new mayor who meant well, but he was a thirty-one-year-old contractor who hadn’t finished college.

  Meanwhile, the majority and minority leadership of the state legislature had almost completely turned over. High-rolling developers who had overbuilt Phoenix’s commercial real estate market by 30 percent dropped like citrus after a heavy frost. The region’s most prominent bankers disappeared as their institutions were gobbled up by Los Angeles and New York giants like Security Pacific and Citibank. The area’s savings and loans were devastated by the federal clean-up of the industry. The very symbol of that scandal nationwide became Charles H. Keating, Jr., once the most visible man in Phoenix. Keating’s campaign contributions and influence peddling tarnished most of the state’s congressional delegation, not to mention senators from California, Michigan, and Ohio.