Good article. The civility issues in many cities go well beyond mugging-type crimes and into general disorder, of course. A friend from a notoriously high-crime big city visited recently; we took him and his kids to a playground at a nearby school, and he commented that it would be fenced off and inaccessible back in his town, to protect it from being trashed. Similarly, I have relatives who live adjacent to a nice park in a big city, but they never use it because it is a gathering point for homeless and other generally idle people, many of whom are harmless but some of whom are intimidating and predatory. Being able to walk to a bodega in the middle of a city is great, but being able to take your kids a few blocks away to a safe playground on a Saturday is also a walkability issue, and that kind of thing may be MORE available in the suburbs in many cases. "This-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things" issues--pointless vandalism and hooliganism--can of course happen outside of big cities too, but those issues are quite simply fewer and farther between in suburbs due to the reduced density of people in general and disturbed or disadvantaged people in particular.
It's remarkable how determined progressive urbanists are to repress and ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative. As an example, the lauded study of Detroit by the lauded urban historian Thomas Sugrue doesn't address crime - at all! Imagine writing a history of Detroit that doesn't address the question of crime.
In the pre-Floyd era, occasionally something would get published, including books such as Harold Saltzman, *Race war in high school: The ten-year destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn* ; Scott Cummings, *Left Behind in Rosedale: Race Relations and the Collapse of Community Institutions,* or the collected works of the highly accomplished and recently cancelled historian Raymond Wolters.
One 2018 article examining the case of the Bronx has already been de-published (due to wrongthink?) but is still on archive.org for now: “The Push and Pull Dynamics of White Flight: A Study of The Bronx Between 1950 and 1980,” By Megan Roby.
Another dissident, Devin Helton, collected many of these sources here: "What caused the dramatic rise of crime and blight in American cities from 1950 to 2000?"
Public transit is just a way to slowly travel from places you aren't to places you don't care to be. Roads reach everywhere much more easily than public transit does. I will value that, plus our American tradition of arms-bearing as deterrent to crime (governmental and otherwise), far over whatever anti-crime benefits might be brought by making cities untraversable, and certainly far over whatever benefits the il-"liberal" anti-car wingnuts are touting.
Cities are each a centralized concentration of people and capital, the two main ingredients of industry. That's why the most valuable jobs tend to be there. But, for the same reason, the most valuable real estate is there, and certainly industry can derive far more value from it than housing. So the only way to actually make money in life (rather than wasting everything on housing), is to live in the middle of nowhere and commute to the city. Almost by definition, public transit will not reach all the way into my particular corner of the middle of nowhere. My car is the only thing that keeps multiple employers (all but one being prospective) competitive with each other even if their offices aren't all within walking distance of each other. I will take great effort to defend that profit.
Non-governmental crime in America, is concentrated in certain very small areas and certain very particular demographics and organizations within those areas. Considering only these particular subsets of America, they are warzones - and, legally speaking, they are also gun-free zones, meaning that the only armed people therein are the police lounging in the precinct, and the criminals. Considering only the remainder of America, we have remarkably little non-governmental crime compared to the rest of the world. And as for the warzones, I have no problem with the particular individuals and cultures who wish to commit warfare on each other, removing each other from the gene pool - they cannot do so fast enough.
As for governmental crime, well, the Pravda makes it very hard to make any sense of this type of crime, or to summarize just how much crime each government commits. The PR of C is about the only other modern-day government of a fully-developed nation that is so obviously dictatorial that we can unambiguously differentiate it from what America does to its citizens on a daily basis. Regardless, popular arms-bearing - as well as regular training and practice on how to bear arms effectively & safely in a team - is the only known way to deter governmental crime.
I'm not talking about the National Guard. They are part of the government. Expecting the National Guard to deter governmental crime is like expecting the watchmen to watch themselves.
I have often wondered if cars were the worst modern invention before the Internet.
I write from the American South, where our hideous highway system runs through mostly black neighborhoods, causing noise pollution and concrete eyesores near homes of marginalized citizens.
Then there are the grotesque billboards that further worsen whatever is left of the landscape. Billboard after billboard of personal injury attorneys and plastic surgeons.
But the problem is that our public transportation is terrible, and it's so unbearably hot for much of the year that it's not practical to walk more than 200 yards in the heat.
On the point of family formation being associated with car-loving conservatives, have you come across the idea that car dependency contributes to reductions in family size? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 It strikes me as pretty plausible - another small but significant factor in the collapse of fertility in modern urban environments. And another reason for (traditional) conservatives to be alive to the issues they cause.
yes that's true surely. We had to upgrade to a bigger car when number 3 came along. (although you see those big people carriers being driven by Hassidic men)
My family and I live in a suburb of Jackson MS! Every time we see MS mentioned in the media, it's always in relation to something quite bad, and inevitably true.
The crime point could not be more correct. My wife and I did a year of residency training at the hospital in urban Jackson. During that year we rented a home in the historic Belhaven neighborhood which is in walking distance of the hospital. We loved it! There's a small but vibrant collection of bars and restaurants right nearby too (Fondren). When we made the decision to stay, we considered living in Jackson, but one of the major deterrents was crime. Sure they told us not to lock our cars so that windows wouldn't be busted out, and we always had to keep our doors locked, but some crime just changes your entire perspective. That year there was a shooting about 3 blocks away from our home. A 69 year old woman was murdered by a 17 year old in her yard while trying to bring in her trash cans.
You see the statistics, you understand that most murders are escalations of some kind of fight or conflict, most murderers know their victims. But then there is this senseless violence that creates a different kind of fear. This kind of random violence is not uncommon here. And worse, no one really seems to care. It's just taken as a fact of life.
We moved 30 minutes north to a suburb and life is completely different. Safe, quiet, friendly. I hate not living in the city, I feel some guilt for fleeing, but I wouldn't ever want to raise young children in a neighborhood where that kind of violence occurs. There was a time when everything seemed to be getting better ~5-10 years ago, but now it appears all that progress is gone or even getting worse.
Another point worth adding to that discussion though is the complete mismanagement of cities by city governments. Suburbs tend to be newer and have functioning infrastructure. Jackson's water crisis has made national news but it is only one of the myriad of poor functioning basic services and that story is similar in other large, depopulated US metros. No one in leadership even seems interested in fixing these basic problems or limiting crime.
The "Mississippi River Towns" from St Louis to Memphis, Jackson (I know, Mississippi but not a river town) and on through New Orleans are probably some of our most flavorful and yet also insanely violent cities. The crimes that regularly occur in the Delta sounds like the kind of things you read about in cartel-controlled regions of Latin America more than the rest of the USA.
But at least your Governor changed the flag. That was the real issue.
Cities like you describe sound nice for people who like them. Some of us don't. I don't want to live close to my neighbors - I like my suburban lifestyle that means I have space around me. That means I don't live in a place with either the density levels to support public transport or the hub and spoke commuting pattern that makes it sort-of cost-effective. The world is big enough for some people to live in the sorts of places you describe and for others to live where we like it. I agree that lots of awful urban planning decisions wrecked lots of cities - but the problem there was letting a few people dictate how everyone lived, which seems like it might also be a problem with dictating any vision, including yours. Those 1960s urban planners thought they were doing the right thing, after all. Push these decisions down to the lowest level possible and let local communities decide how they want to live and then allow us to all vote with our feet about which ones we want to live in. There's no need for grand visions, there's a need for localism. (Of course, now we're in a. world where NIMBYism is a problem, but that's a topic for another day.)
There's a different type of place for everyone (although less choice here cos of density).
Lots of people like low-density suburbs, but far more live there IMO because of urban incivility. It's a choice millions have to be made. Even if you can tolerate the squalor, the schools become too much of a problem
As an urban-loving conservative I don't buy into the whole soulless suburb concept. I grew up in a suburb, most Americans live in suburbs, and suburbs vary as greatly as any built environment. Some are beautiful, others are not. It's easy to sneer at endless subdivisions devoid of identity but what of the endless dreary urban neighborhoods of uniform terraces and cheap apartments? Most of an urban city isn't beautifully restored historic neighborhoods and bustling shopping districts with upmarket boutiques and cafes. Crime and car ownerships weren't the only reason people left cities in large numbers, they were leaving behind cramped tenements and rowhouses, the sea of concrete and scarce landscaping, and massive pollution from nearby factories.
But the impact of cars on American cities was certainly devastating and I can mourn the loss of a connected urban fabric that is now ripped apart by interstates and beltways and expressways, isolating parts of cities from other area, destroying historic neighborhoods with tremendous loss of architecture, and ruining the concept of true walkability. To add insult to the injury, endless blocks were demolished for parking lots, leaving many American downtowns a weird cluster of high rises in a sea of parking lots. There had been a brief period when American cities were embracing the European mass transit, with trolleys and trams and streetcars and the early subways and commuter rail and it is a national regret those were given up too quickly.
But this restructuring of American cities did go hand in hand with urban renewal and urban clearances and tearing down the slums (aka historic neighborhoods) for brand new public housing for the poor and oppressed and left behind. We know how that all worked out, but if the capitalist car market had a role in wreaking havoc on American cities, so did the progressive urban planners.
the story of Detroit is so interesting. I think people are aware of the damage done by car lobby but it wouldn't have been possible without the huge increase in crime.
There is a website somewhere, need to find it, where you can see how much land in urban America is taken up with car lots. it's amazing.
(I say suburbs but that varies. I live in a sort of suburb but my street is 3-4 story and mostly terraced housing so it's a walkable suburb)
The suburbanization of post-war American was in part driven by white flight from cities and while racist issues were very real as a factor, what is ignored and shuffled aside is that buried within these fears were crime fears. The explosion of black populations in cities across the north and midwestern America came hand in hand with an explosion in crime. I've read too many accounts of well-meaning people who supported integration and campaigned to welcome new black residents in formerly all white neighborhoods but then a year or two later sold up and moved because of crime and declining schools. And it's an issue that still persists to this day in many cities. A difficult topic few people have the courage to talk about and it's a real shame because so many innocent well-behaving people lost quite a lot in the process (of all races).
Crime is the big elephant in the room that most progressives don't want to acknowledge beyond vague claims it's all due to systematic racism. The Democrats don't want to address the issue because it means having to be truthful and harsh with a core constituency and reevaluating many of of their policies and dotcha know Republican fears of crime is all a racist bogeyman concept, the Republicans don't care because they live in the suburbs anyway, they increasingly hate cities as a cesspit of left wing progressives, and it's a convenient campaign issue to win on. Then throw in the political polarization of modern America, anything a Republican says is automatically suspect to most Democrats and vice versa.
I think you're doing really important work here. Republicans/conservatives should in theory have a very strong claim on urbanism as an issue. Urbanism is traditionalist in that, for the most part, the older a city is, expecially to the extent that it hasn't been fundamentally reshaped by the bulldozer, the better it is from an urbanist perspective. Free market economics has a lot to say about affordable housing and economic opportunities in cities, even congestion pricing is a really right-wing idea. School choice is a proven solution to probably the #2 reason that people move out of cities, schools, and inherently works better in densely-populated environments. And yes, crime is the #1 problem that drives people and business out of cities, and Republicans/conservatives are by far more competent to address it. I'm not even sure why Republicans shouldn't be in favor of a limited, but healthy public sector, providing quality public services universally. I mean the biggest turnaround in the biggest, most urbanist city in the country was led by a Republican, right?
And just in terms of realpolitic, most cities are one-party states, which inherently leads to corruption and inefficiency. Even if there were Republicans in name only that ran in cities on a completely different agenda than Republicans in suburban and rural areas, I'm not sure why that should be a problem for the GOP. There needs to be at least two viable parties contesting in every election for democracy to work properly. For example, all of those people who recalled the San Francisco School Board and District Attorney recently, they're probably not conservatives for the most part, but why shouldn't the Republican Party still be able to represent them in the political system of that city, if no one else is? Less regulation, lower taxes, more and better policing, school choice, limited but competent government, historic and ecological conservation. I think that agenda could win in a lot of cities, and those cities would be all the better for it.
it's a ying and yang thing, progressives tend to be better at running the arts and transport, law and order (and related, education) better by conservatives (in theory, not so much here where they've cut funding). problems as you come when places become one party states. Problem everywhere is that very nice places become overwhelming progressive, and they end up ruining everything.
Yes, people tend to forget or take for granted how those places got so nice! It's truly stunning to me when you look at New York City, nearly left for dead in the late 1970's, 2000 murders a year in the early 1990's, then the safest big city in the country twenty years later, unbelievable amounts of urban prosperity and vitality, and then the voters and politicians just tossed it all away in the blink of an eye, because of something that happened 1000 miles away.
For young parents, cars are incredibly convenient.
My wife grew up in suburban America, where no place of work was more than 15 minutes drive away. Faster travel also makes for much more space per person, meaning the average house is massive (by UK standards).
She now lives in a box in London and has to spend 1.5 hours a day on a crowded tube, which she can't stand. Communting eats into our private life, and we both struggle to balance work with rushing home to pick up our kid. We each lose 5 hours a week with our kid to commuting vs what we would in her home city (which is bigger than Manchester) - 240hrs a year. I don't see how we'd manage another any time soon.
I can't see how this trade-off can possibly be worth the aethetic gain of cobbled streets.
The counter argument I suppose is that there are huge gains to be made from density, and if a city is attractive it will increase its density - once that happens, public transport is way more efficient than driving. Driving in London is hellish most of the time.
The same reason of course why rail travel and public transport in general is less pleasant than by travel by car; aside from the door to door convenience travelling by train at night runs the risk of encountering antisocial and intimidating behaviour - from drunkenness right through to physical violence. Air travel has less of this due to zero tolerance of anything looking like a security risk.
There is a strain on the libertarianish Right who tout what William James called "the fighting side of life" -- Matthew Crawford's "Why We Drive" comes to mind -- but to the rest of us looks sort of resembles Mad-Max Hobbesiana. They camouflage it with coincidentally donor-friendly Cars = Freedom branding, which would be fine if staying out in Montana but they just can't stay there (lefty moneytarians moving into Montana being the sincerest form of flattery to this 1970s macho ideology). I would be interested to study the overlap of sprawl supporters with middle-aged male helicopter pilots deciding they can also be superior at wearing a dress and pearls, while they're at it.
Interesting case a few years ago. Two young Brits in Miami went to a nightclub and went out looking for a kebab or such afterward. They wandered into the wrong place a few streets away and were murdered. Local PD had to be persuaded that it was not a drug buy. Because no one would go walking round like that
Good article. The civility issues in many cities go well beyond mugging-type crimes and into general disorder, of course. A friend from a notoriously high-crime big city visited recently; we took him and his kids to a playground at a nearby school, and he commented that it would be fenced off and inaccessible back in his town, to protect it from being trashed. Similarly, I have relatives who live adjacent to a nice park in a big city, but they never use it because it is a gathering point for homeless and other generally idle people, many of whom are harmless but some of whom are intimidating and predatory. Being able to walk to a bodega in the middle of a city is great, but being able to take your kids a few blocks away to a safe playground on a Saturday is also a walkability issue, and that kind of thing may be MORE available in the suburbs in many cases. "This-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things" issues--pointless vandalism and hooliganism--can of course happen outside of big cities too, but those issues are quite simply fewer and farther between in suburbs due to the reduced density of people in general and disturbed or disadvantaged people in particular.
It's remarkable how determined progressive urbanists are to repress and ignore anything that doesn't fit their narrative. As an example, the lauded study of Detroit by the lauded urban historian Thomas Sugrue doesn't address crime - at all! Imagine writing a history of Detroit that doesn't address the question of crime.
In the pre-Floyd era, occasionally something would get published, including books such as Harold Saltzman, *Race war in high school: The ten-year destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn* ; Scott Cummings, *Left Behind in Rosedale: Race Relations and the Collapse of Community Institutions,* or the collected works of the highly accomplished and recently cancelled historian Raymond Wolters.
One 2018 article examining the case of the Bronx has already been de-published (due to wrongthink?) but is still on archive.org for now: “The Push and Pull Dynamics of White Flight: A Study of The Bronx Between 1950 and 1980,” By Megan Roby.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190918180612/http://bronxhistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/M.Roby_.pdf
Another dissident, Devin Helton, collected many of these sources here: "What caused the dramatic rise of crime and blight in American cities from 1950 to 2000?"
https://devinhelton.com/why-urban-decay
that is amazing.
Ive never been to Detroit but it does seem to be one place where the dystopia (in Robocop) is not as bad as the reality
Public transit is just a way to slowly travel from places you aren't to places you don't care to be. Roads reach everywhere much more easily than public transit does. I will value that, plus our American tradition of arms-bearing as deterrent to crime (governmental and otherwise), far over whatever anti-crime benefits might be brought by making cities untraversable, and certainly far over whatever benefits the il-"liberal" anti-car wingnuts are touting.
Cities are each a centralized concentration of people and capital, the two main ingredients of industry. That's why the most valuable jobs tend to be there. But, for the same reason, the most valuable real estate is there, and certainly industry can derive far more value from it than housing. So the only way to actually make money in life (rather than wasting everything on housing), is to live in the middle of nowhere and commute to the city. Almost by definition, public transit will not reach all the way into my particular corner of the middle of nowhere. My car is the only thing that keeps multiple employers (all but one being prospective) competitive with each other even if their offices aren't all within walking distance of each other. I will take great effort to defend that profit.
Well, we seem to have a lot more crime in America than places where few people own guns.
Non-governmental crime in America, is concentrated in certain very small areas and certain very particular demographics and organizations within those areas. Considering only these particular subsets of America, they are warzones - and, legally speaking, they are also gun-free zones, meaning that the only armed people therein are the police lounging in the precinct, and the criminals. Considering only the remainder of America, we have remarkably little non-governmental crime compared to the rest of the world. And as for the warzones, I have no problem with the particular individuals and cultures who wish to commit warfare on each other, removing each other from the gene pool - they cannot do so fast enough.
As for governmental crime, well, the Pravda makes it very hard to make any sense of this type of crime, or to summarize just how much crime each government commits. The PR of C is about the only other modern-day government of a fully-developed nation that is so obviously dictatorial that we can unambiguously differentiate it from what America does to its citizens on a daily basis. Regardless, popular arms-bearing - as well as regular training and practice on how to bear arms effectively & safely in a team - is the only known way to deter governmental crime.
Your last sentence speaks of a “well regulated militia.” Unless you’re talking about the National Guard, we don’t have one these days.
I'm not talking about the National Guard. They are part of the government. Expecting the National Guard to deter governmental crime is like expecting the watchmen to watch themselves.
"well regulated" had an entirely different meaning when the 2nd Amendment was written (https://constitution.org/1-Constitution/cons/wellregu.htm) and "militia" had a much broader one (https://constitution.org/1-Activism/mil/cs_milit.htm).
I have often wondered if cars were the worst modern invention before the Internet.
I write from the American South, where our hideous highway system runs through mostly black neighborhoods, causing noise pollution and concrete eyesores near homes of marginalized citizens.
Then there are the grotesque billboards that further worsen whatever is left of the landscape. Billboard after billboard of personal injury attorneys and plastic surgeons.
But the problem is that our public transportation is terrible, and it's so unbearably hot for much of the year that it's not practical to walk more than 200 yards in the heat.
Great article, and absolutely right.
On the point of family formation being associated with car-loving conservatives, have you come across the idea that car dependency contributes to reductions in family size? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 It strikes me as pretty plausible - another small but significant factor in the collapse of fertility in modern urban environments. And another reason for (traditional) conservatives to be alive to the issues they cause.
yes that's true surely. We had to upgrade to a bigger car when number 3 came along. (although you see those big people carriers being driven by Hassidic men)
My family and I live in a suburb of Jackson MS! Every time we see MS mentioned in the media, it's always in relation to something quite bad, and inevitably true.
The crime point could not be more correct. My wife and I did a year of residency training at the hospital in urban Jackson. During that year we rented a home in the historic Belhaven neighborhood which is in walking distance of the hospital. We loved it! There's a small but vibrant collection of bars and restaurants right nearby too (Fondren). When we made the decision to stay, we considered living in Jackson, but one of the major deterrents was crime. Sure they told us not to lock our cars so that windows wouldn't be busted out, and we always had to keep our doors locked, but some crime just changes your entire perspective. That year there was a shooting about 3 blocks away from our home. A 69 year old woman was murdered by a 17 year old in her yard while trying to bring in her trash cans.
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2016/09/14/jury-begins-deliberating-belhaven-shooting-case/90360896/
You see the statistics, you understand that most murders are escalations of some kind of fight or conflict, most murderers know their victims. But then there is this senseless violence that creates a different kind of fear. This kind of random violence is not uncommon here. And worse, no one really seems to care. It's just taken as a fact of life.
We moved 30 minutes north to a suburb and life is completely different. Safe, quiet, friendly. I hate not living in the city, I feel some guilt for fleeing, but I wouldn't ever want to raise young children in a neighborhood where that kind of violence occurs. There was a time when everything seemed to be getting better ~5-10 years ago, but now it appears all that progress is gone or even getting worse.
Another point worth adding to that discussion though is the complete mismanagement of cities by city governments. Suburbs tend to be newer and have functioning infrastructure. Jackson's water crisis has made national news but it is only one of the myriad of poor functioning basic services and that story is similar in other large, depopulated US metros. No one in leadership even seems interested in fixing these basic problems or limiting crime.
The "Mississippi River Towns" from St Louis to Memphis, Jackson (I know, Mississippi but not a river town) and on through New Orleans are probably some of our most flavorful and yet also insanely violent cities. The crimes that regularly occur in the Delta sounds like the kind of things you read about in cartel-controlled regions of Latin America more than the rest of the USA.
But at least your Governor changed the flag. That was the real issue.
Cities like you describe sound nice for people who like them. Some of us don't. I don't want to live close to my neighbors - I like my suburban lifestyle that means I have space around me. That means I don't live in a place with either the density levels to support public transport or the hub and spoke commuting pattern that makes it sort-of cost-effective. The world is big enough for some people to live in the sorts of places you describe and for others to live where we like it. I agree that lots of awful urban planning decisions wrecked lots of cities - but the problem there was letting a few people dictate how everyone lived, which seems like it might also be a problem with dictating any vision, including yours. Those 1960s urban planners thought they were doing the right thing, after all. Push these decisions down to the lowest level possible and let local communities decide how they want to live and then allow us to all vote with our feet about which ones we want to live in. There's no need for grand visions, there's a need for localism. (Of course, now we're in a. world where NIMBYism is a problem, but that's a topic for another day.)
There's a different type of place for everyone (although less choice here cos of density).
Lots of people like low-density suburbs, but far more live there IMO because of urban incivility. It's a choice millions have to be made. Even if you can tolerate the squalor, the schools become too much of a problem
Maybe all the local communities will decide to price YOU out, Andy!
As an urban-loving conservative I don't buy into the whole soulless suburb concept. I grew up in a suburb, most Americans live in suburbs, and suburbs vary as greatly as any built environment. Some are beautiful, others are not. It's easy to sneer at endless subdivisions devoid of identity but what of the endless dreary urban neighborhoods of uniform terraces and cheap apartments? Most of an urban city isn't beautifully restored historic neighborhoods and bustling shopping districts with upmarket boutiques and cafes. Crime and car ownerships weren't the only reason people left cities in large numbers, they were leaving behind cramped tenements and rowhouses, the sea of concrete and scarce landscaping, and massive pollution from nearby factories.
But the impact of cars on American cities was certainly devastating and I can mourn the loss of a connected urban fabric that is now ripped apart by interstates and beltways and expressways, isolating parts of cities from other area, destroying historic neighborhoods with tremendous loss of architecture, and ruining the concept of true walkability. To add insult to the injury, endless blocks were demolished for parking lots, leaving many American downtowns a weird cluster of high rises in a sea of parking lots. There had been a brief period when American cities were embracing the European mass transit, with trolleys and trams and streetcars and the early subways and commuter rail and it is a national regret those were given up too quickly.
But this restructuring of American cities did go hand in hand with urban renewal and urban clearances and tearing down the slums (aka historic neighborhoods) for brand new public housing for the poor and oppressed and left behind. We know how that all worked out, but if the capitalist car market had a role in wreaking havoc on American cities, so did the progressive urban planners.
the story of Detroit is so interesting. I think people are aware of the damage done by car lobby but it wouldn't have been possible without the huge increase in crime.
There is a website somewhere, need to find it, where you can see how much land in urban America is taken up with car lots. it's amazing.
(I say suburbs but that varies. I live in a sort of suburb but my street is 3-4 story and mostly terraced housing so it's a walkable suburb)
The suburbanization of post-war American was in part driven by white flight from cities and while racist issues were very real as a factor, what is ignored and shuffled aside is that buried within these fears were crime fears. The explosion of black populations in cities across the north and midwestern America came hand in hand with an explosion in crime. I've read too many accounts of well-meaning people who supported integration and campaigned to welcome new black residents in formerly all white neighborhoods but then a year or two later sold up and moved because of crime and declining schools. And it's an issue that still persists to this day in many cities. A difficult topic few people have the courage to talk about and it's a real shame because so many innocent well-behaving people lost quite a lot in the process (of all races).
Crime is the big elephant in the room that most progressives don't want to acknowledge beyond vague claims it's all due to systematic racism. The Democrats don't want to address the issue because it means having to be truthful and harsh with a core constituency and reevaluating many of of their policies and dotcha know Republican fears of crime is all a racist bogeyman concept, the Republicans don't care because they live in the suburbs anyway, they increasingly hate cities as a cesspit of left wing progressives, and it's a convenient campaign issue to win on. Then throw in the political polarization of modern America, anything a Republican says is automatically suspect to most Democrats and vice versa.
Oh well.
I highly recommend Paul Clemens' book on Detroit: Made in Detroit: A south of 8 mile memoir - very insightful and beautifully written. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-385-51140-7
thanks!
I think you're doing really important work here. Republicans/conservatives should in theory have a very strong claim on urbanism as an issue. Urbanism is traditionalist in that, for the most part, the older a city is, expecially to the extent that it hasn't been fundamentally reshaped by the bulldozer, the better it is from an urbanist perspective. Free market economics has a lot to say about affordable housing and economic opportunities in cities, even congestion pricing is a really right-wing idea. School choice is a proven solution to probably the #2 reason that people move out of cities, schools, and inherently works better in densely-populated environments. And yes, crime is the #1 problem that drives people and business out of cities, and Republicans/conservatives are by far more competent to address it. I'm not even sure why Republicans shouldn't be in favor of a limited, but healthy public sector, providing quality public services universally. I mean the biggest turnaround in the biggest, most urbanist city in the country was led by a Republican, right?
And just in terms of realpolitic, most cities are one-party states, which inherently leads to corruption and inefficiency. Even if there were Republicans in name only that ran in cities on a completely different agenda than Republicans in suburban and rural areas, I'm not sure why that should be a problem for the GOP. There needs to be at least two viable parties contesting in every election for democracy to work properly. For example, all of those people who recalled the San Francisco School Board and District Attorney recently, they're probably not conservatives for the most part, but why shouldn't the Republican Party still be able to represent them in the political system of that city, if no one else is? Less regulation, lower taxes, more and better policing, school choice, limited but competent government, historic and ecological conservation. I think that agenda could win in a lot of cities, and those cities would be all the better for it.
thank you.
it's a ying and yang thing, progressives tend to be better at running the arts and transport, law and order (and related, education) better by conservatives (in theory, not so much here where they've cut funding). problems as you come when places become one party states. Problem everywhere is that very nice places become overwhelming progressive, and they end up ruining everything.
Yes, people tend to forget or take for granted how those places got so nice! It's truly stunning to me when you look at New York City, nearly left for dead in the late 1970's, 2000 murders a year in the early 1990's, then the safest big city in the country twenty years later, unbelievable amounts of urban prosperity and vitality, and then the voters and politicians just tossed it all away in the blink of an eye, because of something that happened 1000 miles away.
For young parents, cars are incredibly convenient.
My wife grew up in suburban America, where no place of work was more than 15 minutes drive away. Faster travel also makes for much more space per person, meaning the average house is massive (by UK standards).
She now lives in a box in London and has to spend 1.5 hours a day on a crowded tube, which she can't stand. Communting eats into our private life, and we both struggle to balance work with rushing home to pick up our kid. We each lose 5 hours a week with our kid to commuting vs what we would in her home city (which is bigger than Manchester) - 240hrs a year. I don't see how we'd manage another any time soon.
I can't see how this trade-off can possibly be worth the aethetic gain of cobbled streets.
The counter argument I suppose is that there are huge gains to be made from density, and if a city is attractive it will increase its density - once that happens, public transport is way more efficient than driving. Driving in London is hellish most of the time.
The same reason of course why rail travel and public transport in general is less pleasant than by travel by car; aside from the door to door convenience travelling by train at night runs the risk of encountering antisocial and intimidating behaviour - from drunkenness right through to physical violence. Air travel has less of this due to zero tolerance of anything looking like a security risk.
That was really interesting, Mr. West.
thank you
There is a strain on the libertarianish Right who tout what William James called "the fighting side of life" -- Matthew Crawford's "Why We Drive" comes to mind -- but to the rest of us looks sort of resembles Mad-Max Hobbesiana. They camouflage it with coincidentally donor-friendly Cars = Freedom branding, which would be fine if staying out in Montana but they just can't stay there (lefty moneytarians moving into Montana being the sincerest form of flattery to this 1970s macho ideology). I would be interested to study the overlap of sprawl supporters with middle-aged male helicopter pilots deciding they can also be superior at wearing a dress and pearls, while they're at it.
Interesting case a few years ago. Two young Brits in Miami went to a nightclub and went out looking for a kebab or such afterward. They wandered into the wrong place a few streets away and were murdered. Local PD had to be persuaded that it was not a drug buy. Because no one would go walking round like that
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/22/florida-britons-shot-dead-trial
America, roadways, crime, and urban disconnection are consistent themes of the most prescient comic book of my Reagan-era youth, Judge Dredd.
I was never really into Dredd, preferred Marvel comics although vigilantism and crime was obviously a big theme.
Lima takes 3 or 4 hours to get across.
I was an hour or so late for interviews a few times which was not a big deal because everyone was