I Surrender

At long last comes a Joel Kotkin article that doesn't appear to have been dashed-off at blog-like speed, and I must admit that I basically agree with its conclusion:

This will mean making choices. New York needs to decide that fixing its subways represents a more important use of its bonding authority than a stadium for the Jets. Los Angeles needs to decide its biggest priority lies in preventing the region's port complex, its largest generator of private sector jobs, from becoming hopelessly congested and obsolescent. Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and the other hard luck cases need to focus on trying to fix their schools, transportation systems, and economies. Phoenix needs to concern itself with generating jobs and opportunities for its soaring immigrant population. Let the glitzy restaurants and rock clubs take care of themselves.

Steps like these will require a new political consensus. Much of the current progressive agenda--with its anti-growth economic bias--does little to boost the competitive status of urban centers. Cities must return to a progressive focus on fixing their real problems--that is, the problems of the majority of the people who live there--not serving the interests of artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons. Right now school reform is often hostage to the power of teachers' unions. City budgets, which could be applied to improving economic infrastructure, are frequently bloated by, among other things, excessive public sector employment and overgenerous pensions. In the contest for the remaining public funds, the knitted interests of downtown property holders, arts foundations, sports promoters, and nightclub owners often overwhelm those of more conventional small businesses and family-oriented neighborhoods that could serve as havens for the middle class.

Ultimately, a new urban progressivism must challenge this power axis. It would force local governments to focus on the most important historical work of cities: the transformation of newcomers to America into successful, middle-class citizens. This has underlay the emergence of all great modern cities, from fifteenth-century Venice to seventeenth-century Amsterdam to twentieth-century New York. The American metropolis can be more than a way station for the wealthy young and part-time destination for the nomadic rich. It can be a place where average people live, thrive, and build communities across lines of race and class. Now that would be a cool city.

I must say, though, that I continue to be puzzled by the implication that the real problems here have something to do with the massive political clout of "hipsters" who, in my experiene, are all for better transportation infrastructure and tend not to be the ones pushing massive public subsidies for sports arenas. Instead, the problems of urban governance seem to be mostly attributal to fairly banal things like the massively disproportionate political influence of people who donate lots of money to candidates for office; a not-unfamiliar problem in the United States which is aggravated by the predominance of "weak mayor" models that make it hard for citizens to figure out who's responsible for what (corruption and malgovernance, like moss, grow in the shade), along with the fact that America's constitutional structure tends to put city governments at the mercy of events in state capitals.

Here in the District of Columbia, for example, I'm quite certain the mayor would, if he could, not have a Metro system primarily designed to serve the needs of suburban commuters rather than the residents of the city he's supposed to be in charge of. But it's not up to him. And I, as a citizen, would very much like to try and reward with votes a candidate who would commit to increasing the frequency of the Green Line but control of WMATA is so diffuse that it's very hard for me to know how to do that. And I have, for personal and professional reasons, much more ability than the average District citizen to figure out who's responsible for what. None of that gets the Williams administration off the hook for the stadium farce, but much as I'd like to believe there was a direct tradeoff between stadium money and better transportation, that doesn't actually seem likely to me. Instead, one of the most frequent ways you see cities improve their transit infrastructure is as a relatively small piece of a large, wasteful stadium boondoggle.