The American Spectator

Templeton Essay

Freedom and the City

By Brian C. Anderson from the October 2008 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Economist Deirdre McCloskey, returning to Chicago after living in small Iowa City and smaller Granville, Ohio, runs through the Windy City’s community scorecard: “30 Episcopal churches within easy driving distance instead of four or five; 70 ethnic groups in bulk instead of two; 20 Irish pubs instead of one.” Sure, Chicago has lots of Gesellschaft, or rational, businesslike association, too, McCloskey adds—but that’s because a big city has more of everything. “That’s why there are so many people there,” she concludes.

The bourgeois city survived its struggle with totalitarianism—just visit post-communist Bratislava, say, or Kraków, and feel the energy on the streets, the bustle of commerce, the sense of possibility that surrounds you. But urban civilization has faced two other enemies whose impact has been ruinous, both in the U.S. and in Europe: the city planners and the liberal establishment. During the post-World War II period, city planners throughout the West fatefully decided to remove their “slums,” seeing them as blighted anachronisms in a new rational age. Yet what were slums, argues philosopher Roger Scruton, but the “harmonious classi cal streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns”? Poor they might have been, but they were alive and actively reproducing themselves.

In place of the slums came something far worse: the modernist high-rise housing project, surrounded by empty, wind-swept plazas. Right out of the dark imaginings of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, the projects immediately became forces for social breakdown and disorder. All public buildings would henceforth be modernist, too, lacking facades and jarringly unlike their older architectural neighbors.

Making matters worse, new “rational” zoning regulations now separated what had always gone together: offices would go up in one part of the city, shopping in another, residences in yet another. As Jane Jacobs argued in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, these developments robbed neighborhoods of their round-the-clock vitality, in which someone always was at home or at work and could watch the street for signs of trouble or offer a helping hand when needed. Now, zoned for different purposes, whole sections of the city would remain all but uninhabited for parts of the day, save for predators and outlaws. One need only look at ravaged downtown Detroit, throbbing with menace and alienation, to see what the planners and their architect allies helped bring about.

From the 1950s on, as the dark and faceless towers rose up, middle-class families, empowered by the automobile, began fleeing in droves for the suburbs, draining cities of civic and economic vitality. The sprawling suburbanites weren’t just fleeing the planners and modernist architects, however, but the 20th century’s third anti-urban force: the social policies of the left-liberal establishment. It is hard to overestimate the damage liberals did to the bourgeois city, to urbanity, and thus to the essence of Western civilization itself, beginning in the 1960s. The left-liberals of that decade believed that America (Amerika, as they had it) was a deeply unjust country built on racist attitudes, and that aggressive government action was necessary to lift up the poor and especially poor blacks, who had crowded into cities after World War II; no free market could do the job. As a result of this belief, cities became the breeding ground for a demoralized underclass. Welfare payments undermined self-reliance; passive policing encouraged crime; and schools, given over to Deweyite goals of self-expression and self-esteem, enabled children to leave for the streets, with their ignorance and malice intact.

Not only did these measures fail to help the poor; they made cities less and less livable. New York, America’s biggest and greatest city, was hardest hit. A liberal-imposed fear of offending minorities, combined with a belief that crime was environmental, so that nothing could really be done about it unless all social problems could be solved first, so hampered law enforcement that whole swathes of the city were left wild zones. Felonies became endemic, scaling to hundreds of thousands a year, with murders hitting a grim high in 1990 of 2,262. Much of the crime was black preying on black, but the whole city suffered. Welfare programs in the city aggressively signed up every poor person in sight, spurred on by academics like Columbia University’s Richard Cloward and City University’s Frances Fox Piven, who saw the local public-aid system as the cornerstone of urban life, and who sought to lay the foundations for a nationwide welfare state. The welfare rolls exceeded one million under liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay in 1972 and reached an all-time high of 1.1 million in 1995, under liberal Democratic mayor David Dinkins. The result, as everyone but the blindest ideologue knows, was a human catastrophe: a culture of permanent government dependency that robbed whole generations of the future. Life on the dole accelerated the breakdown of the black family (some neighborhoods saw illegitimacy rates go past 90 percent)—a result that was further encouraged by the ceaseless liberal campaign to demoralize sexual relations and delegitimize old-fashioned mother- father-children families. Single-parent families, with reduced emotional and financial resources, were more likely to be dependent on welfare, closing the no-exit loop. As Irving Kristol once put it: the “welfare trap” had sprung.

The city’s public schools were not going to help anyone escape the trap. Controlled by monolithic and self-interested teachers’ unions, their officials propagated failed pedagogies and shrugged as minority students dropped out at alarming rates. New York began spending much more than it could afford, and it drove up taxes to business-killing levels. The city lost most of its Fortune 500 companies, which left for more economically hospitable climes. Movies like Taxi Driver and Escape from New York started to depict Gotham not as a place where dreams could be made real but as a modern-day Inferno, populated by lost souls and soulless killers. The title of historian Fred Siegel’s great book on the urban crisis, The Future Once Happened Here, captured the widespread sense that New York had become ungovernable, had exhausted its life force, and would soon expire. Nor did the crisis affect only New York. For a while, it seemed as though the bourgeois city were finished.

Thankfully, that hasn’t happened, at least not yet. The 1990s, as Siegel and others have brilliantly documented, saw a breathtaking rebirth of urbanity. New York led the way out of the urban crisis, just as it had led the way in. Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton, New York said “enough” to high crime. Cracking down on low-level offenses like aggressive panhandling and prostitution, under the assumption that tolerating such “victimless” crimes encourages more serious criminals to act on their baser impulses, and employing sophisticated computers to map crime while holding police commanders responsible for real crime-reduction results, Bratton’s NYPD pulled off the greatest policy success story of the postwar era: a complete turnaround on crime. Felonies plummeted during the Giuliani years, and have continued to fall under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose top cop, Ray Kelly, has kept in place the older reforms and added some of his own. In fact, serious crimes are down 77 percent, murder included, since the Dinkins-era peak.

Emboldened by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which ended the federal entitlement to welfare, Giuliani energetically slashed the welfare rolls, which have also continued to shrink under his successor—down to 345,000 at present, the lowest number since October 1963. Mayor Giuliani also cut some taxes, the first time that had happened in the city for many years (though, alas, Bloomberg has raised taxes since). The lowered crime, slashed welfare rolls, and more friendly business environment enabled the renewal of New York City’s economy. People began to talk about how pleasant life in the big city could be. Blacks have benefited perhaps most of all, with once-blighted neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx buzzing with investment and growth. Not even the worst day in the city’s history, September 11, 2001, could derail the recovery. Even the city planners have become more sensible, at last recognizing the worth of Jacobs-style mixed-use zoning, though the reign of architectural modernism has yet to end, with architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind still dominating the competitions. New York’s experience shows that the bourgeois city is not fated to extinction. European cities, whose crime rates, other than for murder, are today generally higher than those of U.S. cities, show signs of learning these lessons too. Yet the revolution is far from complete and victories remain precarious.

Middle-class families have started to trickle back into urban areas, but high taxes and unacceptable public schools stand as obstacles to further renewal. The crime turnaround demands perpetual vigilance. And left-wing “community organizers” and interest groups work night and day to bring back the ruinous policies of the liberal era. Worse, they now have their national candidate: Barack Obama, a man wedded to a refuted conception of the city and its needs. Conservatives, too often dismissive of cities as left-wing satrapies, need to stand up to this liberal reaction. In so doing, they would be defending the vision of the city that has come down to us from Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and Genoa. This vision distinguishes Western civilization and provides us with our highest political ideal: a society of free citizens, bound together by consent, and governed by a law of which they themselves are the authors. Hayek was right: civilization as we know it is inseparable from urban life.

Brian C. Anderson is editor of City Journal, and author of A Manifesto for Media Freedom (with Adam Theirer), Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, and South Park Conservatives, among other works. He writes often for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. This essay is the eighth in a ten-part series being published in successive issues of The American Spectator under the general title, “The Future of Individual Liberty: Elevating the Human Condition and Overcoming the Challenges to Free Societies.” The series is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this series are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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