No Harm, No Foul?

Why I guess I'm not a progressive

The other day, I had a couple of Twitter conversations ongoing: one with a retired woman in the South, who had to sign off to feed her chickens; one with a young woman who left the D.C. metro area during the pandemic for the rural/small-town Northeast.

We were talking about a lot of things, but particularly how life remains not quite back to normal; subtly different. Sometimes subtly, and sometimes obviously, worse.

Before that, I was having another conversation with an urban progressive, who questioned my use of the term “social order” and suggested that my dislike of fare evasion and other nuisance behavior or low-level crime was merely a middle-class aesthetic preference. That in asking for the law to be enforced, I was a sort of special interest, aligned against the default state of the city, which many progressives seem unable to unbundle from crime and nuisance.

He also suggested that if fare evasion or graffiti or what-have-you didn’t harm anybody—as they generally don’t, except in a broad economic sense—they should be very low on the law-enforcement priority list. It is true that scarce law-enforcement resources should go towards serious matters. But, to adapt the expression, you can walk and clean up gum at the same time.

That idea that only harm should determine priorities seems very narrow and shortsighted to me; and beyond that, sort of metaphysically empty. It is curious to me that many of the same people who champion density and diversity also whistle past the graveyard when it comes to order, trust, and the other intangible things that hold communities together. In diverse communities without tight neighborly ties, these things become even more important. And they’re easier to maintain than to rebuild.

Cities in other countries, and much more progressive countries, don’t seem to hold this view that cities are sort of inherently unpleasant; this Puritan-esque idea that there’s some virtue in putting up with the unpleasantness, that cities are broccoli or spinach. Montreal, for example, is deeply urban and quite diverse, but it’s far cleaner and safer than most large American cities. In the 2010s, Amsterdam ejected “problem” families from social housing and sent them to barebones housing outside the city for a period of time. There are many, many ways this kind of policy could go wrong. I would not endorse it. But to the question of what should be done, a CityLab writeup could only offer this:

Tidying them away into distant metal boxes seems unlikely to make their behavior a thing of the past, provide them with a less antisocial way of living their lives, or create healthy neighborhoods in the places to which they are banished. More insidiously still, the plan has a divide and rule undertow, its naming, shaming and banishing implicitly suggesting that social problems in poorer areas are not connected to deprivation but will simply evaporate if a few bad apples are sifted out, publicly ostracized and sent away.

In other words, the vast majority of people are simply to have no recourse. Because most of the frustration of this majority does not rise to the level of harm. This brings me back to the Strong Towns podcast episode about 15-minute cities, which was really about why conservatives view urbanism with such suspicion. Charles Marohn discussed Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations” test, which quizzes people as to their values, and discussed how the liberals on the team mostly cared about “harm/care,” while the conservatives cared about almost all of the different “channels”—fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as harm/care. Apparently, these results are fairly typical of how this quiz breaks down along political lines.

I can’t vouch for the validity of the quiz, but those results are interesting. I’ve seen it myself, as I did with these Twitter discussions in which I’ve been told that low-level urban problems don’t harm anyone.

If that’s the gospel; if this is a package deal; if the message is that you should live in the city, and that you should tolerate nuisance, disorder, and low-level criminality; then of course conservatives will perceive urbanism as an imposition or a conspiracy. And not just conservatives.

Now, I agree that the police should not be tasked with enforcing middle-class aesthetics at the point of a gun. Some conservatives do, and they’re wrong. In a piece defending the man who killed homeless former subway performer Jordan Neely, Heather Mac Donald wrote of subway performers in general: “Many riders experience their barely veiled extortion as a lesser degree of assault.”

This isn’t just wrong; it’s inverted. It’s more wrong than you would be by accident. What turned out to be a fatal attempt to restrain Neely is fine; a man losing his life is just one of those things. Playing music for money in the subway, on the other hand, is a species of actual assault. And from someone who almost certainly believes that words are not violence. For what it’s worth, I read this line to my New Yorker parents, and they found it strange. Everybody found the subway performers amusing and fun to watch, they recalled. They weren’t the same as the “squeegee men,” the guys who cleaned your windshield with dirty water and then might break your mirror if you didn’t pay them, or so the stories go.

So I’d put the subway performers and the unlicensed street vendors in a different bucket than the fare evaders and shoplifters. Entrepreneurship is not lawbreaking. And caring about order and safety does not mean declaring open season on anybody behaving oddly in the subway.

I think—while small infractions should be punished—they should not be punished punitively or severely. Predictable but minor consequences, whether for fare evasion or for minor traffic offenses, is the way to go.

But the problem is that disorder isn’t just aesthetic. It isn’t just graffiti. It’s also locked or “out of order” bathrooms, everyday products behind glass, store entrances closed off, parks the domain of the homeless. It’s a breakdown, a deterioration, in the ability of people to exist unselfconsciously in the city. At some point, instead of finding the values of the majority defective, you have to make some concessions to their preferences.

Much of this inconvenience and occasional sense of risk is bearable, or maybe even largely invisible, if you’re street-smart, or if you’re single and/or childless. But once you add kids, it gets so much worse. The danger and inconvenience is heightened. There’s a very real parent/non-parent divide in urbanism and cities. A kid can’t just hold it when the CVS or Starbucks bathroom is locked up; a kid can’t be trusted not to point at or say something to the strange fellow on the subway who may or may not react.

I remember, as a kid, learning not to point at or talk to random people when we visited the city. I think what I took away from that was that cities are places where you have to look over your shoulder and be on your best behavior. They’re places that take constant mental work to exist in. It took me many years to realize that this didn’t have to be true, and wasn’t always true; that cities were in fact places you could just casually go.

But many families, and many individuals with a low tolerance for risk, simply will not tolerate any of this if they have any choice in the matter. For all of its problems, suburbia is a place where you can feel completely safe walking (though not on an arterial road) and where you can still pop into a store and use the bathroom. In a way that is hard to quantify, that’s worth a lot to people. The very real dangers posed by cars are just, psychologically, not the same thing. (And, unfortunately, the danger from cars applies in cities too.) The risk, even very remote, of being hassled or assaulted while going about your business exerts a constant stress.

I understand that many people have it much worse. But beyond all of the particulars, there’s something deeper here. Progressives understand their view as focusing on real harm, not criminalizing poverty, elevating empathy for desperate people over middle-class emotional comfort. But what it can look like from the outside is elevating the marginal over the mainstream; arguing that the city can be for the petty criminals and for everybody; arguing that only the normal, law-abiding people must make accommodations and compromises. This is how the notion arises that progressives are driven not by compassion for the poor but by contempt for normal Americans. That they aren’t really rejecting the idea of social order, but arguing that that order be determined by a small minority of unfortunate and badly behaved people.

If the idea that the city must be friendly to the broad middle class, and to children, and to people who aren’t street-smart, is met with pushback or hectoring by urban progressives, then the city itself will be met with pushback from the broad middle class. As, in much of America for a long time, it has been.

Middle-class Americans aren’t a special interest. Families with kids are not a special interest. They’re in many ways the median American. They’re not the last word, but they have to be the starting point. If normal Americans feel like progressives are concealing an ideology behind their advocacy for the city, they’ll recognize it, and they’ll say no.

I’d rather see cities be pleasant and hospitable to the broad middle of the country than see them burn. I’m not sure everyone—or even every urbanist—agrees.

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Related Reading:

When I Say “City,” You Say...

15 Minutes to Midnight?

What’s a City To You?

Crime and Housing

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