From Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice’s article on the libertarian Manhattan Institute’s recent survey analysis on teenage delinquency, suburban and urban. The longitudinal survey found that teenagers in both cities and suburbs were familiar with sex and drugs.

Surprised? That’s because we continue to idealize the more affluent suburbs and demonize the poorer sections of the city…

Most of us recognize that there is no hermetically sealed place to rear youngsters. But some people still think so, says [Jay] Greene, [co-author of the study and] a graduate of New Trier High School on the North Shore.

“A lot of the flight to the suburbs is still related to the perception that certain social ills are so concentrated in the city,” Greene said.

That perception is reinforced by television shows and movies about city life; by the news. It’s so ingrained that we tend not question it. We take it for granted.

The bottom line is that if parents and teens give up their responsibilities or are disengaged, no matter the reason, then these rates will continue to rise across the board.

Combined with the higher accidental death rate of suburban teens — driving is the #1 cause of death for young Americans, and suburbanites drive far more than city dwellers — and the case for moving “for the children” falls apart.

What’s more, a move to the socially alienated suburbs is a radical way to disengage from the public life of the city streets, a way to “give up the responsibilities” of being a citizen. Most obviously, it is a way to avoid paying city taxes, thus becoming a way to avoid the messy business of democratic cross-subsidization that comes with any large government with diverse interests to please. In the USA, suburbanites are fiscally disengaged from the real problem of fixing the social ills concentrated in cities: poverty, crime, deteriorating infrastructure.