This Land Is Your Land. . . This Land Is My Land

RESIDENTS OF SIMI VALley don't usually have much contact with people from South Central Los Angeles. The lustrous suburb where the Rodney King beating trial was held and the inner-city war zone that erupted in rioting two weeks ago are separated by just a 45-minute ride. In most other respects they are a world apart. But last week, for a fleeting moment of mutual incomprehension, they came face to face.

On Tuesday a convoy of 150 activists from South Central arrived to picket the courthouse where the four policemen were tried. "Why do you bother us?" Simi Valley housewife Suzanne Heffernan shouted back at the protesters. "Let us go on with our lives, like you are down there."

"Down there" in L.A., Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, a black former Congresswoman who is running for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, sat in her campaign headquarters in South Central. Across the street a block- long Thrifty Drug Store lay gutted by fire, its ANNIVERSARY SALE banner still flapping over the curb. Yet Burke is hopeful that the election of a new representative from the inner city to the powerful five-member board may help get local resources flowing back to the neighborhood. "For the past 10 years the suburbs have been dominant," she says. "Now we are going to move into another era."

Burke is right about the problem, though she may be very wrong about the likelihood of a new era soon. Suburbanization, the most irresistible demographic trend of the past 40 years, is indeed at the heart of why the inner cities have been reduced to hollow shells peopled largely by poor non- whites. The process began after World War II, when veterans by the thousands moved their families to suburbs like New York's Levittown. The draining of the cities accelerated during the 1960s and '70s, when malls sprouted across the nation, diverting shoppers from downtown business districts. And it reached a peak during the 1980s, when employers joined the exodus from cities, transferring millions of jobs to suburban office parks. Now about half of America's 250 million people live in the suburbs, and only one-quarter in central cities.

The result is an America that is rapidly dividing into two worlds, separated by class, race and drive time. Sheltered in tree-lined streets where the fantasy of a homogeneous middle-class society can still be entertained, many suburbanites know the city mainly as a skyline glimpsed from an overpass or as the place of a shooting reported on the evening news -- or as a pillar of smoke and flame on the horizon.

New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles -- many of the great American cities have been severely, perhaps fatally, undermined by the loss of jobs and taxpayers. In 1960, per capita income was 5% higher in a sample of the nation's cities than in their suburbs. By 1987, suburban per capita income was 59% larger than in the cities.