Yes, America’s Cities Can Be Saved

C ities 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.

Trump’s cartoon-nightmare vision of American cities, echoed by Trumpist candidates eager to burnish their anti-coastal-elite cred, was widely regarded as just that — a cartoon — among everyone except his most loyal followers. The political class on the left, though, had its own caricatures that too many people believed to be true. Paul Krugman’s “nothing to see here” view of urban dysfunction, a “myth” that he blamed on right-wing propaganda in 2021 — were all those Manhattanites who fled to Florida during the pandemic really listening to right-wing talk radio? — was a common view among left-leaning commentators even as homicides, crime, and diminished policing were atop the lists of worries that urban residents expressed to pollsters in 2020 and 2021.

When the pileup of urban problems grew too large to ignore, macro forces became the enemy. For instance, one writer recently declared in the Atlantic that Chicago’s dysfunction is evidence that large American cities have become ungovernable. The “ungovernability hypothesis” has a long history. Not long after Edward Banfield’s 1970 classic, The Unheavenly City, which made a legitimate argument that urban America really did have serious problems, New York City’s deputy mayor published an essay wondering whether some cities had grown too large to be governable. In 1978, Douglas Yates’s The Ungovernable City argued that, by their nature, cities were unable to resolve the endemic crises of crime, poverty, and languishing schools and neighborhoods. Those authors had a point back then. Cities really were a mess.

But today, after decades of successful urban reforms, the ungovernable-city hypothesis has also become a caricature. For proof, you just need to look at any of the fastest-growing cities in America over the past 25 years. Houston, for example, is now America’s fourth-largest city, and set to overtake Chicago for the third position in the not-too-distant future; it also appears to be, well, pretty governable. Other top-ten cities such as Phoenix, Dallas, and San Diego are well-governed by almost any metric. Chicago is as ungovernable as New York was in the 1980s, which is to say it is badly governed but fixable — although Chicago’s new mayor-elect has ideas for the city that suggest it still won’t be fixed for a while yet.

Which brings us back to the important lessons that just about everyone is missing about the urban areas that we love to caricature but hate to learn from.

American cities are the brightest indicator that people prefer normalcy in policy and politics these days, not the ideological goals that political elites on both sides of the aisle are prone to foist upon them. A desire for normalcy — which largely accounts for GOP culture warriors’ underperformance in the 2022 election, the failure of Biden’s ambitious social-spending plans, and Trump’s loss in 2020 — explains much of the migration to and from cities that has gotten a lot of coverage the past several years.

Urban elites and boosters of city life have had the hardest time seeing this. Their narrow — and often overly ideological — views of what makes cities great (hip districts, progressivism, density, arts and culture, etc.) blind them to the most important drivers of urban success. Those drivers, it turns out, are so basic as to be boring, which is why urbanists have ignored them for too long even as urban residents have continued to demand them.

When we look at the top-ten major metropolitan areas in America by population growth, economic performance, and relative affordability, they include places such as Charlotte, Jacksonville, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, and Austin. These are America’s “opportunity metros,” which attract young and old alike due to both good jobs and a healthy mix of quality-of-life essentials such as public safety, decent schools, and a range of housing types for different budgets. A recent analysis of census data by the Wall Street Journal shows that while pandemic-era migration rates have since slowed, these metro areas and others continue to win the contest for new workers and residents.

The “movie-set cities” such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco were all struggling to keep residents from leaving before the pandemic, which blew the lid off their out-migration and served as an accelerant rather than a cause. Leaders of these cities had developed a bad habit of aspiring to be the urban embodiment of the intellectual vanguard on issues from climate change to race to schooling, which ultimately meant sacrificing housing affordability, public safety, and parents’ best hopes for their children.

What lessons should policy-makers and political leaders take from this?

First, quality-of-life basics are the key urban issues these days. People choosing where to live find them more attractive than those cool things in which urban elites have wrongly put their trust for so long. Recent national polling shows Americans are still more concerned about crime than any other issue except inflation, and police are still resigning in record numbers. Local polling around the country consistently shows housing affordability as a top issue, and last year saw high levels of voter support for state and local affordable-housing ballot initiatives. These are not historically sexy issues, but they’ve become tremendously important to voters.

Second, along with affordable housing, people also like less density. Personally, I love life in my dense urban neighborhood, where I can walk everywhere, but I’m a statistical oddball. Most people want a place of their own and room to spread out. This goes for young adults, too, contrary to conventional wisdom. Most 25- to 35-year-olds were locating in the suburbs of urban areas long before the pandemic. This is a challenge for urban leaders, but they can’t wish it away. They need to free up more land for development while also making it possible to offer a wide variety of housing types in order for their cities to be a more attractive destination for footloose professionals and young families, instead of adhering to overly narrow ideas about density. New urbanism has had a considerable impact on suburban development over the past 20 years, and now cities need to experiment with a kind of “new suburbanism.”

Third, urban school reform continues to offer huge political opportunities to leaders willing to champion it. After decades of charter-school proliferation in urban areas, the pandemic revealed that the appetite for new schooling models and alternatives to the status quo is nowhere near sated. Parents in districts whose schools adopted the most-restrictive Covid-mitigation policies withdrew their kids from those schools at twice the rate of parents in districts whose policies were not restrictive. From hybrid schools to homeschool co-ops, the energy behind renewed efforts to expand education savings accounts and traditional school-choice policies is high. Urban leaders will do more to prevent further out-migration by doubling down on school reforms like these than by picking sides in the curriculum wars.

Fourth, competent governance — another boring-sounding idea — pays political dividends. In their recent reelections, popular Republican governors such as Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Ohio’s Mike DeWine grew their vote shares in their states’ deep-blue major cities through good governance rather than overtly ideological goals. Austin voters sent former Democratic mayor Kirk Watson back to the mayor’s office last fall after the city’s crime and homelessness problems spun out of control, because of Watson’s reputation as a pragmatic problem-solver who’d ushered Austin into its golden age. Studies show that cities with constitutions forcing pragmatic dealmaking fare better by most important measures than those that allow mayors and city councils to pursue ideological agendas. Some of the most popular Republican politicians in recent memory, such as former governors Mitch Daniels (65 percent approval when he left office) and Larry Hogan (77 percent approval when he left office), were loved for their competence. The same could be said for the Republican mayors of the 1990s (Giuliani, Goldsmith, Golding, et al.), who governed successfully in blue cities.

Too many great American cities became playgrounds for ideological agendas before the pandemic, and they are now paying a price for it. Those that have figured out how to provide voters the normalcy they crave are booming — and will continue to thrive for quite some time to come.