When I Say "City," You Say...

A brief low point in American urbanism became an anti-urban ideology

I’ve been writing a lot about cities recently from a somewhat philosophical point of view—about what cities are, about the urbanity of small towns, about the conflation of “urban problems” with the traditional urban form itself.

There’s an attitude I keep bumping up against: particularly with older folks, but sometimes with younger people too; frequently with conservatives, but not always. It strikes me as an example of what Catholicism calls “invincible ignorance”: when a person finds it impossible to believe something.

Baby Boomers can be invincibly ignorant as to the pleasant reality of many cities today, and the desirability of urban life. Perhaps my generation, for its part, is invincibly ignorant as to the reality of many cities at their low point during “urban renewal” and the crime wave.

I think of the things my mother saw or heard about, growing up in Upper Manhattan. Stabbings; threats and menaces on the subway (not just uncomfortable situations, actually threatening ones); a troubled man on the street who meowed like a cat at the children (was that all he did?); an older classmate who threw a hardened mud ball at her for no reason.

When my parents visited her old neighborhood for a school reunion in the 1980s—their first time back since she actually lived there—somebody up in a tenement building shot out their driver’s side car window with a BB gun.

Both my parents grew up in New York City, both moved to Long Island as teens, and then, after a few years as a married couple, they left for central New Jersey, where the city and its crowded penumbra became no more than a place to schlep to work and occasionally drive to for a day trip, as long as you kept your street smarts. As a child, I was scarcely aware that it was possible to take a train into New York City; I do not think we ever entered the city other than by driving in and then parking for the day. I don’t think I rode a bus until I was in college.

Many of the fathers I knew growing up commuted the roughly two hours each way into Manhattan. They were not living out in central Jersey because they drove until they qualified; the express point was to exit the gravitational pull of the city, and only enter it on your own terms.

As far as I can tell, from my own vantage point, the discrete occurrences that led to this situation—that is, the crime wave; the urban problems that seemed natural to this generation in its childhood; possibly actual experiences of crime or at least nuisance or a sense of danger—blurred and hardened over time into something like an anti-urban ideology and a general suspicion of “the city.” The word “city” itself became a sort of pejorative.

Let me give you an analogy. Sometimes when I encounter something puzzling and frustrating, I’ll say, this feels like math, flashing back to nights trying to finish homework. When some Baby Boomers encounter even the better elements of urbanity, they will often think, in the same tone, something like this feels like the city.

If I’m being honest, I know that feeling. I think of the slight frisson of danger that driving into a big city produces in me even today, and which I always felt as a child in the backseat of the car. Much of that, I realize now, is a function of cars—the noise, the traffic jams, the difficulty of parking—not cities per se. But I didn’t grasp that in my childhood. And many people, of course, feel it for other reasons.

And so one of the things I’ve begun to realize is that for the generation that lived through the crime wave—when boarding a subway train really could be taking your life into your own hands—the idea of a nice city doesn’t really compute. There is a huge population of older suburban homeowners and their children who inherited these beliefs, whose families left the cities in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and never, ever looked back. They might have commuted into the city, or even day-tripped there. But the idea that anybody might want to live in a city, and that urban living might be nice, just doesn’t add up. (White flight, of course, was part of this. But many people of other races, including African Americans, often left for the suburbs if they were able to. This is partly why Prince George’s County in Maryland is a fairly affluent majority-black county, and why the core commercial strip of Rockville, in the next county over, is effectively the region’s Chinatown.)

What happens, though, is that people who view cities like it’s still the height of the crime wave are baffled by the high housing prices in cities. They feel like something other than supply and demand must be determining these prices, because there’s no way in hell that so many normal people are actually bidding up the prices because they want to live there.

This, I think, is part of why you encounter so much suspicion when you discuss housing and urbanism with suburbanites. The certainty that cities are undesirable overrides the obvious economic signal that they are not. The radiating housing crisis pushing people further and further out from urban cores is interpreted as a plot to forcibly urbanize the suburbs, not as a symptom of our failure to properly and fully urbanize our cities. Instead, it’s “payback” to white people for leaving the city, a radical environmentalist agenda, or whatever conspiracy theory is in vogue.

But people who hold these views have trouble seeing that building up the city is a solution not only for would-be urbanites but for their own opposition to development further out. Suburban NIMBYs should be urban housing advocates. But they seem to think that the city in its very essence produces “urban problems”; that it cannot be reformed. And they view those who desire urban living as naïve at best. You’re going to ride transit in the city? Fine, learn the hard way. And yet, when your sole visit to the old rough neighborhood in two decades results in your window getting shot out, maybe it is not psychological possible to feel otherwise.

There is an assumption, abstracted from these old memories and now living apart from them, that any increase in density, or even an increase in amenities, will bring with it urban problems. There is an undercurrent of “invasion”; why can’t they just leave us alone? They’re going to bring crime and homelessness and vagrancy and noise and dirt. I have basically had people say to me, I’d rather my town be kind of economically dead than “vibrant” and “interesting.” Go to New York or Philly. I hear they’re “interesting.” I’ve had people in central Jersey, full of pharma and logistics and other firms, swear there are no local jobs; no real reason to put housing here except to prove the point that you will never be allowed to escape or opt out.

I’ve struggled with putting this particular phenomenon into words: this transmogrification of urban vitality into urban nuisance; the abstraction and hardening of 30 or 40 years of American life into anti-urban dogma that transcends the circumstances that gave rise to it.

I think, for example, of videos of these block parties in Philadelphia, which urbanists share with joy—this is what cities can be!—and anti-urbanists share with contempt—this is how they want you to live.

I think of an D.C.-area urbanist who noted that the presence of buskers in Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland made the place feel alive, diverse, welcoming, energetic. And then I think of Heather Mac Donald writing, in her defense of the man who killed homeless subway performer Jordan Neely: “Many riders experience their [subway performers’] barely veiled extortion as a lesser degree of assault.” (So much for sneering at “safetyism,” I suppose; commentators like Heather Mac Donald skewered anybody who took COVID half as seriously as she does the threat of subway performers.)

I think of my hometown, experimenting with the trendy idea of letting people drink beer from a local brewery out on the local street, the goal being to attract and then locally disperse young crowds with money into the immediate commercial area. This trendy idea is all about economic revitalization and is popular all over the place. But many people, again, perceive it as an attack on the quiet character of the small town, or as a Trojan horse to permit homeless and drunks to colonize previously safe, pleasant public space in the name of “social justice.”

And so the other day, my wife and I were in Reston Town Center, during one of the development’s summer weekend pedestrian days: closed streets, vendors, music, games, beer and wine on a limited network of streets. A festival atmosphere. We saw a portable trailer hosting a trendy ax-throwing game (as it happens, my hometown has also hosted pop-up ax throwing near its microbrewery). We saw a young mother with a glass of rosé shepherding her daughter along; we saw a DJ playing loud music and a woman performing with a violin; we heard the sharp thuds of axes hitting the plywood backing. Young couples, teens, children, some older folks: everyone.

It felt so energetic, yet family-friendly; like such a reprieve from the boredom, isolation, and physical distance of typical suburbia. Seeing stuff like this makes me more excited to be young and autonomous, but at the same time more excited to have kids. It’s a hint of what can be. Through a glass darkly.

But I can imagine so many people taking all of this in and shaking their heads. This feels like the city.

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All of this leads to an absurdity. The theory seems to go—in a weird point of agreement between right-wing NIMBYs and anti-development socialists—that building housing causes homelessness. That there’s something inherent in cities, as a type of place, that causes the problems which these places often suffer from. And the theory further goes that the urban problems of the middle of the 20th century, and the urban form of the city itself, are one and the same.

In other words, the only way to prevent homelessness, disorder, and crime is to prevent a place from coming to resemble a city. This is why the construction of nearly anything, or the creation of a new transit line, is seen as a harbinger of worsening safety and quality of life. This is why amenities and signs of vitality are almost by default seen as the opposite. Some people say “There goes the neighborhood.” What is really happening is that there now is a neighborhood.

The suburban, escape-from-the-city theory of crime and nuisance is akin to the theory of spontaneous generation; rotten meat produces maggots, just as a city produces crime. And so the way to fend off urban problems is ultimately not to solve them, or even to police them, but to destroy the city as one would discard a piece of rotten meat; to treat the city and its form as a blight and nuisance.

It is true that cities produce crime only in the sense that groups of humans produce crime. Abjuring cities because they bring people together, and because this can sometimes result in mischief, has a certain logic to it. But it is a logic of misanthropy and negation. It is the logic of burning down your house to kill a fly.

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Cities exist for economic reasons first and foremost. They are concentrations of people gathered together to make certain economic activities more efficient. They arise, as far as history tells us, naturally. Urban settlements are, as Strong Towns calls them, “human habitat.” And yet for so many people they are an idea, a cultural abstraction. The actual, observable, and provable reasons that cities arise, endure, and attract do not even enter into the discussion.

We forgot what cities were in the middle of the 20th century. We forgot what our history was. We gutted cities and hollowed them out for the convenience of suburban commuters. We leveled thousands of homes and businesses in hundreds of neighborhoods to build car infrastructure. We destroyed in one moment what in many cases took centuries to organically build. We called it things like “urban renewal” and “slum clearance,” telling ourselves we were excising cancer as we hacked off the patient’s limbs.

We marvel today at Historic Annapolis, or Old Town Alexandria, or the old downtowns of Seattle and Portland, or Charleston and Savannah, as though every once in awhile, America was capable of building lovely urbanism at a relatively low intensity. Gee, some people may wonder with a glimmer of curiosity, if *this* is what cities were… And the tragedy is that they were and are. America’s “great cities” are mostly just America’s surviving cities. Like many antiques, they are not unique, per se; they are just common things no longer made, and once cast off.

The Greek playwright Sophocles penned over 100 plays. How many do we still have? Seven. That is the situation of American cities today. America’s urban problems could scarcely have been avoided, given what we did.

That was one tragedy. The other tragedy is the one still unfolding: mistaking the fruits of this destruction for some intrinsic truth about the places we destroyed.

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Related Reading:

Housing and Deservingness

Still Renting After All These Years

“Why Don’t You Just Move?”

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