Is Newark a New York City Suburban? Essay Example

Over the recent past, diverse sets of voices have signaled Newark as a New York's suburb (Lockard 44). The major and other leaders herald on the Newark Renaissance, characterized by an increase in high-profile improvement projects. Media consistently report on the relocation of new businesses or the expansion of existing operations. The state-of-art fiber-optic network of the city continues to draw high-tech businesses and plan for waterfront development, development of downtown urban villages and construction of a new professional hockey and basketball arena reinforce the importance of Newark and point towards the rebirth and progress of the city. Although the largest city of New Jersey, Newark can be considered as a suburb of New York City because of its proximity and its convenience with respect to economy-related businesses and industries.

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Newark, during the twentieth century, did not gain from the transformation that most American metropolitan regions experienced (Chandler & Neumark 12). However, at the turn of the new century, the city is gaining from globalization that has resulted in international trade and immigration. Like other cities, New York experienced an outflow of wealthy and middle-class residents to other cities and suburbs, like highway construction and transportation technology allowed easy movement. Like other major cities the African Americans were unable to exploit the opportunities presented by suburban housing due to discriminatory practices within the banking industries and real estate. Today, the city and its surrounding suburbs are racially segregated with whites and black living separately. The dissimilarity index between blacks and whites is 80.4, which is anything but similar to the trend in New York City.

Despite the interest about the revival of the city, and the new development both envisioned and completed, Newark remains a much-troubled city. Scholars of the modern urban landscape came up with the expression "dual cities" to elucidate locations where sparkling playgrounds for the elite coexist with dilapidated landscapes and the deprived communities. Newark is fitting into the above description, as novel investments within the waterfront and the downtown areas attract affluent suburbanites for jobs or concerts, and as city officials and private investors seek to develop an environment that attracts the middle class to occupy the lofts and townhomes (Lockard 49). However, for years the residents of Newark remain disproportionately poor and working class, experiencing an extreme level of ill health and low educational attainment levels. Numerous neighborhoods within the city, including downtown, are characterized by deteriorated or abandoned dwellings and vacant lots. Striking is the difference between Newark neighborhoods and the nearby suburbs where the wealthiest communities reside.

Newark is home to the poor and underprivileged people of the New York City. As the New York, Newark responded to the housing program of the government unlike the surrounding regions, which resulted to a relatively higher level of public housing per capita with respect to other U.S. cities (Moore 55). Newark is a beneficiary of job outflow coupled by immigration to suburbs, motivated by inexpensive land and economic restructuring that drove manufacturing jobs to the oversees and South. The city's location within the Mid-Atlantic or Northeast region situates it in a declining region of the United States. Over the past years, the Midwest and Northeast population has been shifting to the West and South of the country. Within a decentralized system of governance, where councils offer services from the revenues gathered largely from property tax, the declining tax base of Newark has had adverse consequences on the standard of living within the city.

The transformation bears a racial cost, which is not unique to Newark. As the fortunes of the city decline, the Newark's population turned predominantly African American. The city became majority-minority with fifty-four percent of its occupants are blacks. The conflicting racial relations also underlie the demographic transition (Moore 13). The African Americans developed a vibrant entity, founding professional, social and political organizations that unfortunately did not benefit the early growth of the city as a result of exclusion from the government. A peculiar response to generation of discrimination and neglect was civil strife. Such disturbances brought about further disinvestment and flight from the city, and today a significant portion of the city remains vacant. Similar disturbances catalyzed a political transition to black from white with the former dominating city government.

Conclusion

As shown by the above indicators, Newark epitomizes not only an urban transformation but also a worst-case model. The city was envisaged as a leader in the transformation of American cities but it has turned out the opposite with Newark leading in urban decline. Other industrialized and older cities, such as Baltimore and Cleveland appear to be much ahead in their revitalization processes. Today, changes brought about by globalization are impacting Newark, as numerous other cities. The record level of immigration is benefiting the stabilization of the city with nearly twenty-five percent of the population being foreign nationals mostly from Latin American countries. These trends affirm the notion the Newark is the suburb of the New York City with most spillover effects of the latter have a tremendous impact on the fate of the former.

Works Cited

Chandler, Annmarie, and Norie Neumark. At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet. , 2005.

Lockard, Craig A. Societies, Networks and Transitions: A Global History. Boston, Mass: Houghton mifflin, 2008.

Moore, Deborah D. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. New York: New York University Press, 2012.