American Cities: Competent Governance and Normalcy Can Save Them

Cities have been the most surprising source of useful insights for policy-makers over the past few years — not that the political class has noticed.

From the appearance of cities in Donald Trump’s “American carnage” 2017 inaugural address and his warning of urban threats to the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” to the prolonged misinterpretation on the political left of what was happening in U.S. cities during the pandemic, urban America has been more central to political discourse recently than it has been since perhaps the mid 1990s. But it has almost always been more caricatured than understood, to the detriment of policy-makers.

About the Author

Ryan Streeter

Ryan Streeter is the executive director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Cities have been the most surprising source of useful insights for policy-makers over the past few years — not that the political class has noticed.

From the appearance of cities in Donald Trump’s “American carnage” 2017 inaugural address and his warning of urban threats to the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” to the prolonged misinterpretation on the political left of what was happening in U.S. cities during the pandemic, urban America has been more central to political discourse recently than it has been since perhaps the mid 1990s. But it has almost always been more caricatured than understood, to the detriment of policy-makers.