Jerold Kayden offers up a profoundly dull thesis about urban policy in response to Joel Kotkin -- to be successful, cities need "cool" urban amenities and good basic infrastructure. Even more boringly, virtually all big city politicians know this perfectly well. Some mayors succeed whereas other fail largely because of different objective circumstances that make it difficult for older rust belt cities to adopt to contemporary tastes, the contemporary economy, and a federal policy environment that isn't very favorable to their pre-existing urban designs.
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Boringly Sound Views
12 Dec 2006 12:35 pm
Comments (12)
Jerold Kayden's article may be dull, but it's probably right. Sometimes good policy is, in fact, quite dull.
Matt, your idea that rust-belt cities face different "objective circumstances" that prevent them from reforming is, in contrast, very interesting. Having just moved from California to the rust belt, I've been wondering about why this region's cities and economy have been so slow to adjust to the changing times. What are your thoughts?
How does this stuff even pass the laff test? Behind every successful city is an unsuccessful city- a city that failed, leaving vacant lofts, low rents, and the kind of moral anarchy that let the gay people take over San Francisco, or the 'grunge' culture flourish in Seattle. These are the environments that let new art and industry enter.
And this, really is the most depressing anti-climax of the American Imperium- that the affordable real estate of the future will lie in the psychically deadest portions of America, the suburbs. The Boomer cohort had the good fortune to find abandoned city cores on every hand, enobling remnants of late 19th century and early 20th century culture for poor artists and entrepreneurs to colonize. Children born at the turn of this century will seek affordable rentals or homes in the decayed monoculture of single-story suburbia.
(Of coure, none of the above applies to those born to rule, who will continue to opine from uncharacteristic venues such as Washington DC, undisturbed by the obvious differences between that city and cities such as Pittsburgh or Cleveland.)
Buyers who don't care where they live, and can afford to do so, will seek good services from cities that have no other raison d'etre. All others, as in the past, will continue to seek a chink in the armor of the Establishment, and continue to prove that the best revenge is living well.
Urban policy ought to be important to the incoming Democrats. Just before the election, I heard a radio talk show out of Pittsburgh in which a 60ish African-American man was maintaining that the younger people he knew in the community were just not voting, there wasn't that much in it for them, they thought. And I realized that nobody, really nobody, was talking about problems in the cities. So why should they care -- and, given the conservative social views of many African-Americans, the Democrats could actually lose their votes if they don't adopt policies that will address their problems. (Not that they'll ever vote for Confederate flag-flying Republicans; but they will stay home, and that will do it.)
As for Mr. Noah's question: "why this region's cities and economy have been so slow to adjust to the changing times?" I can't think of many places that have been fast to adjust to the kinds of changes that the Northeast has faced. Imagine, your town is full of big businesses (say shoes, textiles, steel) constituting most of your employment and tax base and the guys who own them pick up and leave, just like that. What city ever really dealt with that kind of change very quickly? What did they do? Limped along for a long, long, time, I bet. (California has never had that kind of economy, I think, and it's never faced that change, as far as I know; but maybe I'm wrong.)
Noah--Seriously? Lack of non-bus public transportation and the weather. Anyone who thinks buses and rail are the same just really don't understand. And if you're choice is the constant 60-70 degree of Nocal versus the -10 to 90 degrees of the midwest, well its not that hard.
David, see the post-Communist collapse in the aerospace industry in the early '90s in SoCal.
Well, NYC has reinvented itself pretty well over the years, as have San Francisco (an old industrial town) and Dallas (cowtown).
As for the "different objective circumstances" that Matt was talking about, I'm not sure what he means. Maybe the rust belt is a disadvantageous location for transporting goods and services to other areas?
Richard Florida's urban hipster theory of civic prosperity has it exactly backwards -- the hipsters follow the money, not the other way around.
Sure, booms and bohemians tend to correlate, but who really attracts whom to a metroplex? Do the engineers and salesguys actually pursue the gay art dealers and immigrant restaurateurs, or are Dr. Florida's footloose favorites more likely to follow the money generated by the pocket-protector boys?
In the 1970s, for example, Houston suddenly became one of the gayest cities in America, even though Houston was not famously tolerant. No, Houston got (briefly) hip because gays, immigrants, and artistes flocked there because OPEC had raised prices, making Houston's unhip oil companies rich for a decade.
In contrast, famously tolerant New Orleans and Las Vegas ("Sin City") rank today near the bottom of Dr. Florida's talent tables because his kind of folks can't make much money in either. So, he appears to have gotten the arrow of causality mostly backwards.
The main "objective circumstance" seems to me to be the freeze-your-ass factor. No matter how good the public policy gets in Rochester or Lansing, I'm not going to want to live there.
Rob - I think you're right about the non-bus transportation (though not necessarily the weather, look how well Seattle's done). Detroit, for example, refuses to install public transit because of the powerful auto industry. Another factor might be the relocation of population away from the Northeast, which the rust belt traditionally supplied. But, I never discount the power of entrenched political cultures that resist change...
Steve Sailer - Richard Florida was probably thinking about San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, Boulder, etc. Young, intelligent high-skilled workers do indeed tend to move to "culturally vibrant" places, because they value living a good life in a good community. That means nightlife, it means music and art scenes, it means a liberal culture that tolerates smart people, and it means lots of other young, hip people to form a pool of potential mates.
Of course, the "hip technopolis" is not the only model for growth. You can be a sprawling mega-suburb like Phoenix or Dallas or Houston, and you'll get a different mix of people and industries. There are many paths to growth, but the thing they share in common is political will at the top.
One more point - anyone really interested in city growth and decline should read up on the "economic geography" theories of Krugman and Venables (yes, the NYT Krugman), which stress the importance of transportation costs, as well as the "cluster" theory of Michael Porter, who stresses effective government and industry planning. I'm thinking of studying this for my PhD...
Another thing to consider is the overall culture of the metropolitan area. In the smaller cities (and most rust belt cities were at their hearts smaller), the exurbanifing desires and forces tended to dominate. The plain fact is that a lot of middle Americans want to (or think they want to) live in calm, placid, homogeneous suburbs and edge cities - they really don't enjoy rough-and-tumble Jane Jacobs-type diverse environments. In New York, Chicago, Boston, etc the exurbanifing forces were not strong enough to fully root out and destroy the bohemian forces; in the smaller cities (midwestern in particular) they were.
Therefore, for all the griping about the "decline of our city", no one (be it power-holder or just plain voter) really wants to go back to a dynamic urban environment; they are quite content to house the "poor people" (= people of the wrong race) in the decayed urban core, and to keep building the exurbs farther out.
What is going to happen when gas hits $5/gal will be interesting to see.
Cranky
Comments closed December 26, 2006.
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Heads in the Sand
I don't find that surprising or counter-intuitive at all.
What a lame pundit!
Posted by Realish | December 12, 2006 1:45 PM