Urbanization has gone wrong. Billed as the best way for young men and women to maximize their autonomy and actualize their full self-expression, America’s largest cities are becoming dystopian and dysfunctional places that darkly parody the hype. Instead of unlocking wide-open paths toward flourishing adult lives rich with community and personal growth, the patterns of big-city life are taking on the contours of a new cliché: lower horizons, bottlenecked options, and diminished dignity.
“In high-density cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children,” The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson reveals in a blockbuster report on America’s high-prestige salt mines. “By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places.” What’s more, city populations are sinking, even despite steady in-migration from abroad. “The counties that make up Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia shed a combined 2 million domestic residents from 2010 to 2018.”
Saddled with insurmountable debt and a high cost of living, even many of the most relatively intelligent, attractive, and ambitious urban denizens move from one hotel-suite-style apartment to the next. Surrounded by homeless residents whose tent cities sprout under each overpass and in front of every unoccupied lot of land, they dart furtively, in uniform or de facto uniform, between the cold and interchangeable buildings containing their corporate service jobs, their gyms, their bars, and their habitations.
In San Francisco, the Emerald City of the creative Oz, the gazillionaires of Silicon Valley gaze down on an empire caked with human feces. In Los Angeles, diseased rats swarm trash heaps the size of city blocks. In Portland, police routinely capitulate to masked and armed militias of woke revolutionaries. Seattle, in a crowded field, rose at least by some measures to the top of the heap of homelessness; Denver finds itself with more marijuana than even its chronic stoners could possibly consume; Austin, groaning with refugees from the West Coast’s top metropolises, levels up its indigent population to match, granting permission to vagrants to rest, sleep, or pass out from heroin on residential sidewalks, so long as they don’t create a disturbance.
Since 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported, homelessness in San Francisco “rose 17% while Alameda County, which includes Oakland, saw a 43% increase. Homelessness grew 42% in San Jose over the past two years and 31% in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley.” Los Angeles County saw a 12% year-over-year increase. In 2017, the Associated Press ran a photo series of the “working homeless” of Silicon Valley. “Many of the homeless work regular jobs, in some cases serving the very people whose sky-high net worth is the reason housing has become unaffordable for so many.” Across the street from one mobile-home cluster, “two-bedroom units in the apartment complex start at $3,840, including concierge service.”
The story in Denver, via 5280 magazine: “From 2007 to 2017, violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) jumped by 46.3 percent.” Portland typifies the “tale of two cities” theme. From the Oregonian: “By many measures, downtown Portland is flourishing. Employment and wages are up, and more businesses have opened than have closed. Vacancy rates remain near historic lows. Skyscrapers command record prices, and cranes loom over the skyline as development dollars and new residents continue to pour in. Paradoxically, downtown retailers and others are faced with theft, break-ins, human waste and the detritus of the opioid epidemic on a regular basis. These problems are made worse by a shortage of police making the rounds, they say.”
In Seattle, meanwhile, residents of several neighborhoods publicly took the city to task for touting overall crime drops while ignoring targeted crime increases and other markers of public disorder, as Patch reported: “In south Ballard, crime increased 11 percent between 2017 and 2018. The largest increase has been in crimes like theft and car prowls. Other neighborhoods haven’t seen big increases in crime, but have seen other problems. [Seattle Police Chief Strategy Officer Christopher] Fischer said that Georgetown is overall a ‘low crime’ area, but reports of abandoned vehicles (2,500) and illegal dumping (1,000) jumped in 2018.”
“Slowly but surely,” the urban-policy guru Richard Florida reported in a new book on the new urban crisis, “my understanding of cities started to evolve. I realized I had been overly optimistic…”
What happened? In governance, the one-party system of rule that dominates all the megacities, and in some cases the states in which they grow, has fostered an entrenched form of patronage politics that rewards bloated and protective interests such as public sector unions while advancing a nationalized agenda that makes unnaturally uniform the urban lifeworld. Civic participation from New York to Los Angeles has cratered as machines and insiders consolidate their rule. Statewide labor unions in Oregon and city labor councils in San Francisco support countrywide projects such as a labor strike for the Green New Deal. The powerful California Teachers Association, bent on boxing charters out of their urban turf and protecting its members and their pensions, boasts a $40 million budget for political expenditures this year. The effect on education has been to drive parents out of cities and lock young singles into professional and social lives that make family formation prohibitive or undesirable.
At the same time, nationwide education policies geared toward inflating university endowments, staff, and prestige have over-credentialed students and overburdened them with debt, driving down the dollar value of higher education, driving up costs and debt, and leaving them with fewer marketable skills. Under these pressures, post-collegiates who can flee are beginning to do so, with New York and Los Angeles experiencing the biggest drains, and the suburbs accounting for 80% of millennial population increases this decade.
In healthcare, big-city support for comprehensive entitlements and corporate benefits has not translated into effective care for young residents who don’t have corporate health insurance and don’t qualify for large subsidies. The recent popular Twitter hashtag #millennialretirementplans showcased a litany of young urbanites complaining that health costs made it impossible to plan for their later years. A deeper indifference to urban maladies is evinced by the wide availability of dangerous and dependency-forming drugs, ranging from opioids to other prescription drugs to bad heroin and black-market marijuana and hash products. Seattle, an import hub for hard drugs such as Chinese fentanyl, is decriminalizing their use. Pot decriminalization has turned big cities into stoner heavens but undermined its own viability. Legal marijuana shops in West Coast cities are struggling to maintain growth as black-market operations explode. A WeedMaps audit presented to California Gov. Gavin Newsom showed three times as many illicit outfits than legal ones.
The list goes on. At the highest scale of policy, the elite metropolitan agenda firmly advances financial and economic policies that drive globalization no matter what its effects on city-dwellers themselves.
That means “boardroom liberalism,” as it was known in the Obama years, and “woke capital,” as it’s known now — approaches that were designed to legitimize historic economic inequality and profit-taking by organizing corporate philanthropy and culture around performing social justice. Essentially, it’s a social justice protection racket. While officials frequently rotate into high-salary corporate and nonprofit positions, ordinary residents are pinched. In Seattle, for instance, where city officials hiked minimum wages and taxes simultaneously, incomes and jobs for workers toward the bottom of the totem pole decreased.
It means higher-density urban planning that makes it more difficult to commute by car into city cores, reduces the square footage available to families and couples, drives rents especially high for singles with children in need of more than one bedroom, and creates sustained downward pressure on lower-income tenants, the weakest of whom are pushed out on the streets with the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless persons hardest to shelter even with significant budgets. L.A.’s “Transit Oriented Communities” program incentivizes high-rise construction near rail and bus hubs so long as they include token set-asides for lower-income residents, hardwiring deeper inequality into the housing system. Austin’s city council has snarled traffic with expansive bike lane and no-car regulations. Rent in top California cities consumes nearly half of incomes for millennial workers, according to a Zillow study; in cities such as Seattle and Denver, households need 120% or more of the median income to qualify for a median home with 10% down. And it means wild imbalances in property markets, making it difficult or impossible for young residents with big debt to compete to invest in starter homes or apartments, effectively freezing them out of the development boom at a time when they need to build some wealth in order to plan effectively for retirement, to say nothing of their own potential or actual children’s educations.
Finally, two policies driving globalization have further hurt non-elites: trade contracts that have enriched China and immigration flows, both at the high-skilled and low-skilled ends. Especially vulnerable populations, such as the African-American communities in Portland and San Francisco, are being pushed out of town. Big cities with tech centers depend on HB-1 visas to pull in immigrant talent, but it historically cycles offshore via outsourcing companies. These two arrangements have brought outsized benefits to urban elites while helping lock young urbanites into tighter job markets, diminishing purchasing power, and states of mind where blowing “disposable” cash is necessary to make the grind “worth it” instead of saving and building a future. All the while, high-risk, high-reward investment opportunities open to international corporations are foreclosed to American citizens.
Yet in spite of this veritable conspiracy of harmful policies, cultural allies of big-city elites insist that the devil’s bargain is worth it. And there is no denying that America has become truly reliant on its ultracities for economic gains. According to data in a new Axios report, more than half of America’s nearly $20 trillion gross domestic product is distributed in 25 metropolitan areas, with New York and Los Angeles alone accounting for over 10% of the sum, and seven other leading cities contributing nearly 20% more.
But these numbers do more to mask the rot beneath than to treat it. “High density areas have become economically thriving multicultural havens while whiter, lower density places are facing stagnation and decline,” the Niskanen Institute’s Will Wilkinson writes in a new report on urbanization. “Their populations have become increasingly uniform in terms of socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, and lower levels of education.” While inexorable urbanization “just is the story of a strengthening relationship between density, human capital, and economic productivity,” Wilkinson argues, conservative “self-segregation” has “created the polarized economic and cultural conditions that led to populist backlash.” This “density divide,” according to Wilkinson, is the real demographic of destiny. It’s why cities are so big and so prosperous, and everywhere else isn’t. It’s a fantasy of self-celebration that ensures the cycle of bad policies will continue while elites blame the victims of those policies.
Young people are voting with their feet, swelling suburbs and exurbs and slowing growth in urban cores. Why? According to Blue Cross data, once they enter their late 20s, their health begins to decline, in just the ways we associate with the soul sickness of the big city. From 2014 to 2017, the report shows, so-called behavioral health tanked — with depression a third higher, psychosis up 15%, and substance abuse up 10%.
The backlash against urban utopianism — and the dystopias cities have too often become — is already well underway. Density sorting effects may tend to increase a sense of urbane superiority among coastal elites, but the depression and despair spreading in their midst, and the simple disenchantment of the cool-class lifestyle, are cutting sharply against the narrative that only losers avoid urban enclaves. The specter of a life wasted haunts Americans inside and outside our great centers of wealth and productivity, which do less and less to deliver the goods of a life well-lived to those who want what most human beings have always wanted, wherever or whenever they live: good friends, close family, and worthwhile work. That is the true promise of our autonomy, no matter what the masters of our biggest cities say.
James Poulos is the executive editor of the American Mind, an online publication of the Claremont Institute. He is a contributing editor of American Affairs, a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life, and the author of The Art of Being Free.
