The lost city
Maybe it’s too painful to consider what we’ve lost. Maybe the political obstacles to rebirth appear too great. Whatever the case, many Americans seem to have written off our old-line core cities. When families increasingly see cities as no-go zones for raising children, something is clearly wrong.
For much of our nation’s history, city leaders from coast to coast assembled public and private resources to create grand parks and parkways, pedestrian-friendly boulevards, iconic city halls, noble monuments, museums and libraries with architecture worthy of ancient Greece or Rome, and landmark bridges. They even managed to imbue massive infrastructure projects with beauty: Picture the Brooklyn Bridge with its cathedral-like double archways opening onto a vista of old Manhattan. The city leaders of yore laid down the foundations of modern civilization – water, sewer and drainage systems, and humane street grids with sidewalks and trees. They established and built esteem in local police and fire departments. Somehow, they did it all with minimal interference in private land use decisions and at reasonable rates of property taxation – and before the advent of sales taxes (or income taxes, for that matter).
Writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries show civic leaders burning with ambition to make their hometowns safe, prosperous, high-functioning, humane and beautiful. This mentality (combined with periods of prosperity) gave us the historic parts of Boston, Charleston, and New Orleans – cultural capitals that sought to compete with the charm and urban fabric of grand European cities. Later – among visionaries like Frederick Law Olmstead in New York (and elsewhere) and Daniel Burnham in Chicago – order, beauty, cleanliness and quality of life were core concerns.
Those who came afterward embraced International Style conformity, glass and steel, and low-slung banalities set behind parking lots. Mid-20th century planner Robert Moses and his acolytes sliced through neighborhoods with grim expressways. Core cities became increasingly interchangeable political subdivisions, rather than unique expressions of civilization. They also became more stratified. As the middle class retreated to the suburbs for the safety and education of their children, core cities became ethnically divided hives for the affluent and the economically dependent, for the highest and the least educated. To symbolize these changes, core cities installed blobs of grim modernity in place of ornate fountains, monuments and equestrian statues of war heroes.
Resources that might have gone toward infrastructure, public safety, and public spaces went instead into spiraling pension obligations, expanding social services and bureaucratic expansion that far outpaced population growth. Along with all of this came major declines in quality of life, family stability, neighborhood cohesion, cleanliness and, particularly from the 1970s to the 1990s, public safety.
The near-universality of this trend across the U.S. suggests it was inevitable – that nothing could have been done to stop it.
A Tale of Two New Yorks
One is tempted to point out that the older American core cities, during this entire period, have been subject to one brand of urban politics. But there are exceptions – the Giuliani era (1994-2001) in New York, for instance.
That exception is telling. As mayor, Rudy Giuliani prioritized public safety, quality of life enforcement, economic expansion, and welfare reform. These priorities tended to reinforce each other. A safer city with fewer quality of life nuisances opened the way for investment, which fed into a job boom, which in turn helped him turn welfare offices into job centers that saw welfare dependency cut in half. His metrics-driven management style knocked the crust off the gears of city bureaucracy across a range of functions, from response times to inspections to street cleaning. His aggressive enforcement against panhandling, public intoxication, graffiti, illegal street vendors, and noise and sanitation violations made the public square more orderly, more comfortable. In short, there came a stronger sense of well-being. Before Giuliani, Times Square and the subways were regarded as cesspools. By the time he left office, they had become safer and even tourist friendly. There was a massive increase in visitors to the city.
When a city adheres to certain tried-and-true principles of public safety and service, success can follow.
I lived in New York during the midpart of the Giuliani era. It was noticeably different from the marijuana-wreathed slouch toward socialism of the post-Bloomberg era. Today, on the subways and public parks, false compassion prioritizes the wild-eyed whimsies of mentally ill n’er-do-wells over the security and comfort of the general population. Instead of keeping taxpayer burdens down and creating the environment to increase housing supply, the city government gorges itself and leans into affordability gimmicks – as housing costs surge. Since Giuliani left office, New York City’s budget has increased from about $43 billion to $116 billion. After adjusting for inflation, the city’s operating budget is still roughly 50% larger than it was in 2002, while population has grown only modestly.
New York now spends nearly $14,000 per capita. To put this in perspective, Miami’s per capita spending is roughly half this amount (including relevant county and school spending). So much for economies of scale.
New York offers a clear lesson: When a city adheres to certain tried-and-true principles of public safety and service, success can follow. When it ignores those principles in favor of bloat and ideological wish lists, it invites stagnation and decline.
A New Agenda for Cities
What if we were to reimagine the old cities as America’s crown jewels? How would we increase livability? To begin, the age-old basics must receive laser-like focus. A kitchen-sink approach to governance, without hard prioritization, is certain to raise costs and sap civic energy.
Among other things, this suggests that cities should:
- Prioritize services and infrastructure. These are the basics of civilization and why local government exists. In too many cities, unsexy service provision and core infrastructure projects get the short shrift in favor of flavor-of-the-month social programs, splashy capital investments and identity-politics empire building. The basics for which cities have responsibility can get swamped in broader social or environmental agendas over which local governments have little or no actual control. Value for taxpayers and timely delivery of infrastructure and services come first.
- Avoid bloat and waste. Resources are not infinite. If the neighboring city or county library system is happily running just as well with half the revenue, maybe it’s time to take a hard look at library spending.
- Prioritize the safety and well-being of the general public. No city can attract investment or provide opportunity if it fails to treat robust policing and an effective criminal justice system as a threshold requirement. New York’s example suggests ripple effects when a city is safer, with clean public spaces managed for the well-being of the general public. Some cities seem to have forgotten that in recent years.
- Prioritize service to citizens, not the preferences of entrenched bureaucrats. Cities should take a hard look at their human resource systems. Staying beholden to a failed civil service system that protects employees at the expense of taxpayers is simply foolish. If your city faces flooding threats, for instance, you should want hiring (and firing) systems that ensure competent water management. A recent heavy rain in New Orleans caused perhaps millions of dollars in damage to citizens’ property simply because staff failed to run the pumps properly.
- Measure success and hold people accountable. An unmeasured city is an unmanaged city. And the measurement is meaningful only if there is accountability (in the form of personnel changes or budget cuts) for failure to meet reasonable goals.
- Re-evaluate the total compensation picture. Too many public sector employers pay modestly upfront but provide a pension bonanza for employees who stick around for a long time. This attracts and retains mediocre employees and can put intolerable risks on taxpayers. Too many cities are frightened to create a compensation structure that is responsive to the demands of the market even for new employees, saddling the next generation with expensive mediocrity.
- Remember that taxing capacity is limited. When in some places the average property tax bill exceeds $10,000 a year, local government needs to keep tax rates down in the name of affordability. But sometimes cities actually increase the tax burden in the name of affordability or “equity.” San Francisco is projecting fantasyland costs to meet its affordable housing goals – with construction costs projected at $900,000 per unit. In fiscal 2024-25, the city expected to spend $234 million in local taxpayer dollars on the city’s housing office, with hopes to spend far more. Who pays for this? Well, among other taxpayers, the burden falls on homeowners and, downstream, renters – guaranteeing, whatever the results of the housing program, that the cost of living will increase across the board.
- Identify opportunity sites. Every city has places where relaxing land use requirements can only yield an improvement. Picture a busy corridor lined by one-story strip malls containing vape shops, tattoo parlors and empty storefronts. It might be grandfathered in under single-family zoning or burdened by crippling parking requirements – locking urban deformity into place. Cities should systematically identify such sites and blow open their zoning for higher-density housing, mixed-use town centers or commercial uses that provide new tax base.
Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the urban political monopoly dominating the old core cities precludes putting safety, service, infrastructure – and the average productive citizen – first. Maybe managerial decline, waste, insensitivity to city livability and disordered, ideologically-driven agendas will continue the slow-burning self-immolation. History will record that outcome as a grand-scale tragedy.
But maybe, after decades of the same old failed approaches, it’s possible to break free and try something new.
Peter Reichard is chief development officer at the Sutherland Institute in Utah. He has served as a public policy organization executive and researcher for nearly 25 years, including 15 years focused on local government reforms.
