Megacounties: The Boom Towns

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The most disturbing trend in the rise of the megacounties, however, may be the increasing racial polarization it brings to American society. Says Gary Orfield, a political scientist at the University of Chicago: "We've got these enormously affluent outer suburban areas that are almost 100% white growing at a tremendous rate. They are drawing not only the upper-income jobs but other jobs -- in construction, for example -- that might be available to people without high levels of education. These jobs are becoming completely inaccessible to the black and Hispanic people in our metropolitan areas; they are in another world." In their own way, Orfield adds, the megacounty whites are isolated too: "A great many people who will be leaders will have grown up in these suburbs. They are going to have no skills in relating to or communicating with minorities."

Unhealthy or not, the trend to suburbanization appears unstoppable. Pierre deVise, professor of public administration at Roosevelt University in Chicago, has this message for megacounty residents: You are already living in "the future white community of the U.S." Twenty years after the Kerner Commission report predicted that the U.S. was resegregating itself into two separate and unequal societies, megacounties are threatening to confirm that disturbing thesis.