Urban vs. Suburban: Facts Fly in the Face of Myths


Posted these two pieces on my Democrat and Chronicle blog and decided to put them here, too. Who knows how long that blog will be accessible, and besides I think my regular readers would enjoy these too.

On a lark I googled the terms drugs urban suburban. I do this sometimes just for the hell of it, to see what comes up. Here's a fascinating article on the myths of urban (i.e., mostly black) vs. suburban (i.e., mostly white) youth. Contrary to expectations, fleeing to the burbs doesn't seem to help keep kids away from drugs, alcohol and meaningless sex. 

This is an education working paper put out by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. In an executive summary the authors state: 

"For the last several decades middle-class families have been fleeing from the cities to the suburbs, in part because many parents see the suburbs, and suburban public schools in particular, as refuges from the disorder and social collapse they see as endemic to America's urban school districts. Parents believe that suburban public schools provide children with safer, more orderly, and more wholesome environments than their urban counterparts.

This report finds that those perceptions are unfounded. Using hard data on high school students from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, one of the most comprehensive and rigorous studies of the behavior of American high school students, it finds that suburban public high school students have sex, drink, smoke, use illegal drugs, and engage in delinquent behavior as often as urban public high school students. Students also engage in these behaviors more often than most people realize." 

Read more about it here .

You can get a pdf of the full report.  

Yeah, that reminds me of what I had to deal with as the single parent of a teen girl in Iowa City in the 1980s. Iowa City, like most of Iowa, is mostly white, though it's a bit more colorful than the rest of the state because of the University. A town of 50,000 people, 30,000 of them students and most of the rest working for the university, it seemed an ideal place to raise a child. I won't embarrass my daughter with the details, but I can tell you this: those kids were into sex and drugs big time. Most of the parents were blithely unaware of their kids activities.

That also reminds me of another post I made on the D&C site I should include here.

Friday I received an interesting email from a woman in a small Texas town who apparently found this weblog by googling "how do I take back my neighborhood." She writes:

"I have a million questions and I think you may have a few answers. To give you the brief over view I live in a small urban town in North Texas and recently my eyes have been opened to so much.

I want to challenge my community to clean up. Clean up trash, clean up our roads, clean up our lives for the sake of our children. I'm pretty on fire about this right now and need a good starting line. I live in a community plagued by meth. I have a step-daughter that I cherish that has fallen victim to this drug. Come to find out the area where I live has fallen victim to it as well.

I want to change our community. I'm even willing to donate some land to have a park or skate park built for our local youth. I just don't know where to start. What are the first things? How do I rally together other citizens that may share my feelings? Do you know of any helps: articles, web-sites, books or people that handle these things till they are up and going?"

Fortunately Rochester hasn't seen much of the meth scourge. So far. But it has devastated families in many small towns and rural villages across the country. This woman asks me for help finding a way to respond to the problems she sees. I don't know quite how to answer her, as I only know about resources in Rochester.

Maybe there is someone out there who can help me send her in the right direction. I have already attempted a reply, but I'm afraid it was woefully inadequate for what she needs.

But more than anything, for me this makes the point that drug addiction knows no boundaries of city and suburb, urban and rural, poor vs. middle class and wealthy. Drug addiction is not the sole province of the inner city, though that appears to be where most of our attention is focused because the media direct us there. And perhaps that makes it harder to fight, because when you think there is no problem you are not inclined to try to solve it.


Posted: Sun - March 16, 2008 at 12:08 AM          

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