As I am still and will remain a happy resident of a small rural community in Alaska, it's still something of a curiosity that I'm still writing about the state of America's cities and Democrat/leftist (but I repeat myself) jurisdictions. If you've been reading my work over the last few years, you know I grew up in a rural community in Iowa and am now a content rural dweller myself. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they stink. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional moose eating our raspberry bushes, that's fine.
So, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas host much of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's less the case now.
There's a concept called an "Urban Vision," which a recent City Journal by Aaron M. Renn described, and it's interesting, given what is becoming of our cities today.
Cities historically grew and prospered because of their location by rivers, ports, or natural resources. They might also have been the capitals of great empires or religious centers, or boasted vital institutions like universities, museums, and industry clusters—legacies of great economic booms.
The age of modern media has seen the emergence of a new key element catalyzing growth in contemporary societies: a compelling urban vision. Urban visions formulate attractive paradigms of what a successful city looks like, focusing on four central ingredients: people, businesses, leaders, and capital.
American cities largely lack such a unifying idea today.
Bear in mind those four ingredients:
People, and not just any people; industrious people, people of vision, people of industry, people of drive.
Businesses, employers, investment opportunities, that will build an economy; these will necessarily arise from the former item.
Leaders, who will foster the business world, who will push through policies that will attract the sort of people a city needs, and will allow the robust growth of business, the kind of leaders elected by the people described above.
Capital, brought in by the people to start the businesses that will make the city prosper.
These are the things that are absent now in too many of our urban areas. The Great Sorting is the result; excessive taxation, regulation, and lax justice systems have driven the people out, and they have taken their businesses with them.
Renn's essay presents one example of how an American city started with a vision, and how it all went wrong: Portland, Oregon, the home of Antifa.
The Creative Class found its epicenter in Portland, Oregon, the city to which urban leaders around the country feared losing their young people. Portland limited sprawl through its urban growth boundary and promoted mixed-use, walkable density, supported by light rail. It cultivated a culture of locally owned businesses, regional agriculture, and cutting-edge restaurants, coffee, and beer, alongside an emphasis on ethical production and social consciousness. It prized good design, the outdoors, and a quirky, bohemian sensibility. The story it told was as much about consumption and lifestyle as about production.
So, what happened?
Two things: The BLM/Antifa riots, and COVID-19.
The summer of 2020 was when the rot in Portland and many of our other cities kicked into high gear. Remember those four things. That was the summer when the nation exploded into riots, fueled by the death of a career criminal in Minneapolis. That was the summer that a gang of Antifa goons actually rose up in a no-Schiff insurrection, taking over a portion of the city of Seattle, claiming it as an autonomous zone that became an autocracy ruled by an armed warlord. That was the summer when the Great Sorting began in earnest. And it continued, for months on end.
The people, the productive, industrious people, were forced to spend a year working remotely. With no incentive to remain in the crowded and expensive cities, many of them fled to the suburbs or the smaller towns and cities, where crime rates are lower, where housing is cheaper, where taxes are lower.
With them gone, businesses followed. Look at Seattle today; I've been there, last summer. The streets are marked with closed stores, windows covered with graffiti-daubed plywood. Homeless encampments abound. Crime rates in many of our cities are starting back up, with "street takeovers" and other mob events appearing in the news weekly.
The leaders of vision left with the productive. Now these cities are electing socialists and outright communists, who are accelerating the decline by implementing policies driving out the remaining people and businesses, leaving only the dependency class and a few leftist elites.
And, of course, those people of enterprise took the capital with them. The socialist leaders will, in time, find themselves in the position of having nothing left to tax.
The vision is great. The notion of an urban vision is a good one. We could examine several compelling examples, not least of which is New York under Rudy Giuliani. The four elements required are still present in our country. But they are leaving the cities, and chaos is all that remains.
Before these people will return, bringing back enterprise, prosperity, and the capital necessary to fuel them, there will have to be new, radically different leadership. The open-air drug markets and homeless enclaves will have to be cleaned up. Taxation will have to return to being a tool used only to obtain necessary funds for essential services, not as a cudgel with which to bludgeon the productive. Regulation will have to be minimal, to ensure certain standards in things like building codes.
Most of all, these city governments have to return once more to their core purpose: Protect the liberty and property of the citizens. All of the citizens.
In the epic film 2000 Gladiator, Richard Harris as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius had this line:
There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile. And I fear it will not survive the winter.
That was an urban vision, of sorts. And it's appropriate; the dream of our cities as they were, did indeed prove fragile. All it took was crime and communism to bring them down. And until these cities have new leadership, leaders of vision, matters in our urban areas will only continue to deteriorate. Without that, our cities will not survive the coming winter — and it's already getting cold.
