Municipal Fragmentation in Essex County: Equity, Efficiency and the Evasion of the Social Contract

Jason J. Moreira

09 October 2013

Newark’s story is one that has been told and retold.  Once a bustling industrial power and an engine of the middle class, in recent decades the city has been wounded by racial strife, suburban flight, and industrial abandonment.  From a high in 1948 of nearly half a million, Newark’s population today has plummeted to 277, 540.  The intersection of Broad St. and Market St., once the busiest retail nexus in the country, is now a shadow of its former self.  More than a quarter of Newark’s people are in poverty, and its black population is hypersegregated from its white population according to multiple spatial metrics.

The purpose of this paper is neither to romanticize Newark’s past achievements nor lament its present decline.  Its purpose is to analyze Newark’s continuing struggle, as a city plagued by urban poverty yet circumscribed by suburban wealth, to educate its youth, empower its citizens, and harbor the same opportunities for socioeconomic advancement as its more affluent municipal neighbors.

The problem may be stated simply.  There is place-based inequality of opportunity.  The place one lives—the zip code in which one grows up, the school district one attends, the region in which one seeks to get a job—has a profound effect on one’s access to opportunities for social and economic advancement.   Whether one looks at housing, education, nutrition, transportation, or any other proxy for the presence or absence of opportunity, a quick survey of the extant social science literature will show that discrepancies persist along lines of race, class, and most importantly, place.

The root cause of this inequality is the ideology of local control and the fragmented structure of local governance.  The former constitutes its ideological justification; the latter, its legal implementation.  By concentrating taxable property wealth within their own boundaries, affluent municipalities are empowered to fund their own governments, infrastructures, schools, and other crucial public institutions with a fraction of the property tax burden borne by the less affluent municipalities around them. They need not accommodate or even acknowledge the negative externalities their protectionist and exclusionary policies cause and perpetuate. Some commentators have described this competitive, fragmented, zero-sum system as one of markets, antimarkets, and metamarkets. Others have framed it as an “evasion of the social contract.” Whatever one’s metaphor of choice, in practice the highly fragmented structure of local governance in New Jersey in general and Essex county in particular allows the few to hoard society’s benefits and forces the many bear its burdens.  

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Municipal Fragmentation in Essex County: Equity, Efficiency and the Evasion of the Social Contract