The sad part of this plan is that it’s doomed to failure and worse. Everyone would lose, especially those the far left claims they want to help. Imagine that the suburbs are integrated into the governmental structure of the cities they surround. We would have a repeat of the School Busing conflict of the 1970s. Back then, given a choice of having middle class kids who were assigned to failed urban schools spend three hours a day on a bus to attend a dangerous school, or taking a loss on the house and moving to the suburbs, millions of Americans moved. Involved parents left, even if they were not racist. That was just one of many problems in the cities, but together with other issues, white flight killed many previously successful parts of our urban schools.
If the far left grabs the suburbs, we’ll have a rerun of that catastrophe. Parents, faced with the corrupt and inept governments and school systems of Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, DC, Philadelphia, and similar cities taking over their pristine suburban schools, will flee. They may go just outside reach of the first urban land grab, provoking a second urban land grab, or they might immediately cross state lines to the adjacent states of WV, CT, NH, VT, and ME, or they might cross the country to the comparative safety of Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, and Texas. Either way, instead of failed cities with failed schools but still a tax base generated by business and jobs, the cities will be surrounded by a radius of desolation to which no educated parent would expose a child, unless protected by private school. While the top executives, lawyers, physicians, and accountants might be able to afford elite schools like Sidwell Friends (where the Obama kids go), not enough will have salaries in that range to maintain a full business base near the cities. The urban employer will die, dragged down by this power grab from bloated and corrupt city governments. What reason beyond pure evil (glorying in the destruction) or pure stupidity (obliviousness to unintended but inevitable consequences) could the far left have for such a plan?
see post 61