"Donald Trump’s victory last week wasn’t the only important election result. Big cities in California shifted away from so-called “progressive” governance. In San Francisco, progressive champion Aaron Peskin was soundly defeated in the mayoral race, and his vacated seat was won by a moderate. Peskin’s close ally, Dean Preston, was unseated by moderate challenger Bilal Mahmood, and the Board of Supervisors is expected to lose its progressive majority. In Los Angeles progressive district attorney George Gascón lost his reelection bid, while Oakland’s Pamela Price was recalled. This followed a national trend of progressive DAs getting the boot; meanwhile, San Francisco’s moderate DA Brooke Jenkins, who succeeded the notorious Chesa Boudin after the latter was recalled, easily cruised to reelection.
It’s possible to interpret these victories as part of a general revolt against progressive governance in big cities. At the local level that’s a good thing, since that governance has proven remarkably poor. But at the national level, the urban revolt against probably helped usher in another four years of Donald Trump. Although large metros still voted for the Democrats overall, they swung harder towards Trump than any other geographic region...
Josh Barro wrote an insightful post-election post arguing that big cities’ failure to curb urban disorder, fiscal waste, and soaring housing costs drove their inhabitants away from the Democratic party...
It’s important to remember that just a few years ago, the general consensus was that big cities in America were doing really well. In 2017, Will Wilkinson cited the success of American cities as a reason to reject Trump...
Wilkinson’s paean to big cities was the culmination of decades of real success. In the middle of the 20th century, America’s cities had been hollowed out, by a combination of soaring urban crime and the lure of the suburbs. In the 1970s, big metropolises were still losing population. NYC almost went bankrupt.
Starting around the 1980s, though, America experienced an urban revival. Big cities began to gain back some of the population they had lost.
There were a number of reasons for this revival. One was the rise of knowledge industries like tech, finance, and business services, which tend to cluster together in cities. As Enrico Moretti shows in The New Geography of Jobs, human capital tended to cluster in big cities after around 1980 or so; Richard Florida also famously documented this in The Rise of the Creative Class. Here’s some data from Jed Kolko for 2000-2014 that’s pretty representative of the general shift:
A second reason for the revival was immigration — just like a century earlier, immigrants flocked to big cities.
Then in the 1990s, crime plummeted. In 1992, New York city had 2,245 murders. By 2016 it was down to 292.
The combination of the crime drop and the knowledge-industry boom
made American cities great places to live, at least for a couple of
decades. TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends and Sex and the City and How I Met Your Mother celebrated the lightheartedness of upper-class city life. Urban art and fashion and culture bloomed again, producing the hipster era.
But the renaissance was short-lived. In the 2010s, the urban revival stalled, and the populations of big cities plateaued. The reason was simple: housing. Since the 70s, American cities had developed an entrenched culture of NIMBYism and a thicket of laws like rent control, which prevented cities from building new housing in order to accommodate the influx of population. As a result, rents rose. And since rich people — the same knowledge workers who were powering the urban boom — were better able to afford the rising cost of housing, it was middle-class and working-class people who were pushed out of the cities. New York, San Francisco, and the rest became playgrounds for the affluent.
More progressive cities in blue states consistently built less housing than cities in red states...
As a result, progressive cities became less affordable.
This divide continues to this very day. Blue cities are still building a minuscule amount of housing.
At the same time, many blue cities were spending way beyond their means.
Some of this was due to the chronic problem of city pension obligations, which have grown more severe due to unrealistic assumptions about stock returns, the power of public-sector unions, and simple short-sightedness. But some was because local infrastructure and city services got very, very expensive — witness how New York City pays several times the cost per mile to build a new subway that a French city would pay.
Some of this ballooning cost is due to broken bidding processes and the erosion of state capacity. With their own departments having shrunk, progressive cities have been outsourcing more and more of their core functions to inefficient and often corrupt nonprofits. Recall the infamous case of La Sombrita, the ineffectual sun-shade that the Los Angeles Department of Transportation paid a nonprofit $200,000 to create.
San Francisco, as usual, is the worst offender, with a new nonprofit corruption scandal popping up every month or so.
In the late 2010s, blue cities brought yet another problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.
The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder — drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.
Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders.2
Nowhere was the chaos more evident than in San Francisco. Although murder rates in SF stayed low, more minor crimes, like car break-ins and theft, skyrocketed.
And the epidemic of public drug use in SF got utterly out of control.
After the pandemic, there was an epidemic of store looting that continued for years, causing many of the stores in the downtown area to close.
The American urban renaissance is now well and truly over. In the 2010s and early 2020s, many progressive cities squandered the massive windfall from the knowledge industry boom. With its seemingly invincible network effects and ever-increasing bounty of tax revenues, that boom seemed to convince progressive cities that they had infinite amounts of fiscal and social surplus to dispose of as they pleased — that they could tolerate crime and disorder, spend infinite money, and neglect the need to build new housing, and that none of this would end up mattering. That turned out to be wrong, and now the bill is coming due.
Reviving blue cities will require a number of big changes. Elections like the recent one in San Francisco will be needed to push out “progressive” leaders who want to continue the failed experiments of the last decade. A sensible policy is going to have combine material abundance with intolerance toward crime and disorder...
But fixing blue cities is going to require more than just waves of voter anger or a laundry list of good policies. It’s going to require a mindset change — a shift in people’s understanding of what a city should be and how it should be run.
The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare.
Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.
But in fact, permissiveness toward the behaviors that create urban disorder destroy more value than they redistribute. When you don’t make people pay for public transit, you scare people off the train, thus causing the train to go bankrupt. Pretty soon neither the rich nor the poor have a train, and everyone is screwed. This is the tragedy of the commons.
Measures to curb disorder therefore represent defense of the commons. When Bay Area trains put in new stronger gates to prevent people from riding the train without paying, crime on the train fell and rider satisfaction increased. Similarly, measures to curb shoplifting — including punishing shoplifters and letting security guards and business owners defend their stores with violence — allow local businesses to keep operating, which means that poor and working-class urban residents have places to shop for their daily needs. And so on.
Second, Josh Barro is absolutely right when he says city services should “focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services”. In other words, progressive cities need to realize that costs are bad for the city government.
The habit of having cities overpay for everything is another form of highly inefficient redistribution. A bunch of people do get paid out — nonprofits, overstaffed contractors, expensive consultants — but at the end of the day the ballooning costs that result from all these payouts mean that cities don’t actually have the infrastructure or services they need. All too often, progressive cities are operated for the benefit of the people who get the money instead of the people who get the stuff.
That payout-focused behavior is driving cities to bankruptcy while worsening the quality of infrastructure and services alike. Cities need to replace consultants and nonprofits with civil servants, implement stricter oversight of outside contractors, improve their bidding processes, and in general do everything they can to bring down the cost of everything they do and provide better value to the citizenry.
Finally, cities must realize that housing is non-negotiable. Fundamentally, cities are places that people live — if people do not have houses to live in, you don’t actually have a city. Housing is what allows businesses to function, because most people live near to where they work. Housing is what allows retail to function, because it creates a sufficient density of customers. Housing sustains knowledge-industry network effects, by allowing more knowledge workers to live close to each other and exchange ideas. In most states, housing generates more tax revenue for the city as well. And of course, housing reduces homelessness.
Blue cities should therefore do absolutely whatever it takes to get a lot more housing. “Whatever it takes” includes upzoning, deregulation, planning, public housing, and cutting back on policies like rent control. The correct method of building housing is “any and all methods”. That’s what it means for a goal to be non-negotiable.
I loved the blue cities of fifteen years ago. They had already sown the seeds of their own decline, but in the brief moment between the chaos of the 1970s and the foolishness of the 2010s, America’s big blue cities were indeed the glory of the country. They can and should recapture that glory."
