The very reasons people flee cities are also those that have created the poverty, rage, and despair currently on full display.
The very reasons that people flee cities are also those that have created the poverty, rage, and despair currently on full display.
T he coronavirus and the unrest following George Floyd’s death are shining an uncomfortable light on America’s cities. Many commentators have focused on whether or not the twin crises will mark a shift away from cities as people recoil from the virus and the violence, but the most important phenomenon we’ve seen revealed is something else: the culpability of city leaders for their current predicament. Outmigration won’t ruin cities, but they might well ruin themselves.
Despite predictions of their demise, cities will continue their outsized role in American life when things return to some semblance of normality. The forces that drive people into metro areas — culture, education, high-paying jobs — will still be at work after the pandemic ends. The fastest-growing companies in America are located in vibrant cities. The share of patents filed in large cities has been increasing for the past few decades. Income potential is expanding more in the biggest and fastest-growing cities than in the rest of the country. These trends will continue, especially as cities improve their ability to mitigate the virus while awaiting a vaccine.
There are some who think our largely successful move to telework spells the death of cities, which should sound eerily familiar to anyone who remembers the 1990s. Back then, the prophets of the Internet predicted that the future of work would be decentralized and cities would become less important as people no longer needed to cluster close together. Instead, the share of Americans living in cities has increased considerably in the last quarter-century. People in high-growth areas and occupations simply want to be around one another. The technologies that have allowed for telework’s expansion are incredible, but they’re no substitute for face-to-face human contact.
What’s more, the outmigration some critics of big cities observe is nothing new. People have been leaving the likes of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles for years, in favor of cities like Austin, Texas; Raleigh, N.C.; Nashville, Tenn., and Provo, Utah. They did not need a pandemic or protests to be convinced to move. It is too expensive to live in the biggest cities, hard to start a business, difficult to find a good school, and tiring to be told in polite company not to complain about the homelessness in your neighborhood or the rising crime in the next. When people flee, it is usually to the suburbs, and that’s a familiar, old phenomenon. For example, more than 90 percent of the growth over the past two decades in America’s consistently fastest-growing city, Austin, has been in its suburbs, not in its famously fun downtown. The flight from the biggest cities to other, smaller cities’ suburbs is a well-established American tradition.
The real story of America’s cities right now is not that people are fleeing the coronavirus or the George Floyd unrest. It is that the very reasons people flee cities are also those that have created the poverty, rage, and despair currently on full display.
It has been customary for city leaders to blame big problems such as inequality and racism on overarching, borderless culprits such as the rich, corporations, or “the system.” Yet it is the cities themselves that have limited housing supply and have priced lower-income and minority residents out of good neighborhoods. It is the cities themselves that have let unionized public employees turn their police forces and school systems into sloppy, and sometimes downright corrupt, disasters. It is the cities themselves that have played politics with pensions and squeezed budgets that should support public goods such as infrastructure. It is the cities themselves that have moved away from community policing to command-and-control police tactics. And it is the cities themselves that have let homelessness grow to sometimes shocking levels.
Those with the least ability to pack up and move — typically low-income Americans — are stuck in cities dominated by blame-shifting overlords who have priced them out of better neighborhoods, required their kids to go to lousy schools, and taxed them to pay public servants who are protected by a qualified immunity they could only wish to have. According to the Economic Innovation Group, the number of high-poverty neighborhoods in American cities doubled in the 30 years after 1980. This effectively moved most urban poor people from neighborhoods in which less than 10 percent of the population is poor to communities in which the poverty rate exceeds 30 percent. Low-income African-Americans have been hit especially hard. Someone who is poor and black is three times as likely as a poor white person to live in a neighborhood with a 30 percent poverty rate.
So here we are. The m.o. of (mostly progressive) urban leaders is out in the open for all to see: Using housing policy, they redline low-income people into violent districts with bad schools and overly aggressive police while blaming poverty and violence on big, nebulous forces beyond their control. They are helped in getting away with it by a pliant mainstream media all too happy to blame the same forces. But as the coronavirus, bad police, poverty, and failing neighborhoods all target the same people at once, the blame is shifting back to where it should have been all along. It is time for mayors, city councils, zoning commissions, and school districts to do their jobs and accept responsibility for what is happening around them.
Cities will continue to be where the action is in America. The question is whether a new generation of urban reformers will recognize that it is up to city governments — not the rich or the federal government or other forces beyond their control — to make sure all of their constituents get in on the action.