metropolitan areas through the lens of suburban Black middle-class jurisdictions’ capacity to garner sufficient tax revenue for maintaining high-quality public goods and services.
Prior to academia, Simms served in the federal government for seven years as a Presidential Management Fellow and legislative analyst at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Texas-Austin, and a bachelor’s degree in government from William and Mary.
Simms applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book compares state and local investment patterns in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to a county it borders—Montgomery County, Maryland. Both of these counties also share a political boundary line with Washington, D.C. I explain that in the 1970s Prince George’s was on the path to shift from a majority-White and working-class county to a majority-Black and middle-class county, while Montgomery County has remained majority- or plurality-White and middle- and upper middle-class. Maryland infrastructure and other policies combined with local policies in both counties, such as zoning laws for apartments, lead to Prince George’s County having more affordable apartments along its border with D.C. than Montgomery County. More affordable housing in Prince George’s is one of the reasons the county is responsible for a disproportionate share of the D.C. region’s economically constrained households. This responsibility puts greater pressure on Prince George’s County’s budget as it seeks to serve high-needs residents, while the county also has fewer of the conditions for a growing tax base.Visit Angela Simms's website.
Yes, amazingly, the Page 99 Test works! It’s an insightful window into core arguments in the book regarding political and economic dynamics shaping local jurisdictions’ tax revenue generation.
Fighting for a Foothold explains how current federal, state, and local government policies and market practices combine with the historical legacies of White domination and anti-Blackness, to create new mechanisms for White Americans to hoard material resources. I argue that local jurisdiction boundaries—those between cities and counties—create a mechanism for White Americans to cordon off their household-level incomes and wealth in ways that enable majority-White counties to experience growing tax bases. Consequently, these counties can consistently fund high-quality public goods and services—from schools and health services, to roads and bridges—to a greater degree than majority-Black counties.
Majority-Black jurisdictions endure the cumulative effects of underinvestment in and extraction from Black people and Black spaces, including, among other things: during the Jim Crow segregation period Black people paying local and state taxes, while receiving no or lower quality public goods and services, which meant Black Americans effectively invested in White Americans’ material wellbeing; Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance policy that did not insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, which meant Black people had less opportunity to accrue wealth through home buying; and banks’ predatory lending practices in Black neighborhoods (most recently, this occurred in the lead-up to the Great Recession of 2009-2011 when mortgage lenders blanketed Black communities with non-standard mortgages and refinancing options). Overall, Fighting for a Foothold reveals the extent to which Black middle-class people, and jurisdictions serving them, can attain the same financial returns for the same inputs as their White counterparts. I contend that not only do middle-class Black Americans not gain the same rewards, but they subsidize White wealth accumulation.
I conclude my book with policy recommendations: (1) increased federal and state taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations, which will enhance the capacity for government to distribute and redistribute material resources equitably; (2) increased state-level funding of public goods and services, which would decrease local jurisdiction reliance on locally-generated tax revenue; (3) regional tax and cost sharing arrangements, which will ease competition between local jurisdictions in regions; (4) higher penalties and stronger accountability for market actors who enact racial discrimination; and (5) reparations, or equity funds, that seek to repair harms Black Americans have endured across levels of social organization—household, neighborhood, and local jurisdiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
