Let a hundred cities bloom: what killed the American city; herewith, a diagnosis, and a solution too sensible to be adopted

National Review, July 11, 1994 by Peter Shaw

With the exception of a few of the largest metropolitan centers, American cities no longer truly exist. Maps still locate them, airports take their names from them, some people even venture into them during daylight hours. But they have declined to the point where they represent little more than focal points around which suburbs are organized.

From a distance the former cities present a plausible appearance. Roads lead in and out. One sees houses and, in the center, office buildings, hotels, and government buildings. Take a closer look and the buildings reveal themselves as individual fortresses. If there is a downtown mall it is certain to be visitable for but a few hours each day.

To comprehend the death of the cities, visit them at night. Hotel guests are locked within separate bastions of safety. The remainder of the city is empty save for the occasional convenience store, gas station, lonely bar. The Other Side of Town is open and alive, to be sure. But that is a region less explored than the Hebrides or Patagonia. At 8 o'clock on a recent evening it was possible to drive across the width of downtown Baton Rouge and see a total of four pedestrians. Together, they were entering a parking garage - yet another secured, forbidding facility of the kind that has replaced the mixed-use buildings found in a true city. The same lonely drive can be duplicated in Wilmington, Dallas, Newark - to name only those small - to - medium-sized cities recently surveyed by this observer.

A downtown of deserted, mausoleum-like buildings, surrounded by black slums: this is the definition of most former cities of the United States. To contemplate what might be done about these forlorn places, it is necessary to understand who benefits from their present condition. Two groups stand out for their reluctance to see any changes. The first is those remaining in the inner city. They have accepted deteriorating living conditions in exchange for the lures of welfare. The law-abiding among them are obliged to live cheek by jowl with mentally disturbed and criminal elements once confined to asylums and jails. But all alike benefit from the Welfare system and continue to live in its vicinity.

The second group is the suburbanites driven out of the city by the same conditions. The suburbanites regard the city as a convenient catchment area for the people they moved away from. This is why, despite their economic conservatism, they support the welfare system. They hope that, together with free medical services and subsidized housing, welfare will keep the underclass away from them.

Suburbanites no longer miss the cultural features of a genuine city: the bustle of diverse businesses generated by the haphazard crowding of a true downtown; enhanced educational opportunities like the teaching of obscure languages in high-school districts with enough students and teachers to offer specialized courses; professional sports teams; enough people to support a genuine French restaurant. Instead, the downtown and suburban populations alike send their children to segregated schools where the cultural diversity that is no more is assiduously celebrated.

The compelling advantages of present arrangements ensure that nothing will change. This leaves us free to offer solutions in confidence that they will be entirely ignored. Not to say that the following solutions are offered in a spirit of frivolity. They rest on the proposition that downtown redevelopment and the concentration of dependency populations are the cities' twin blights. Dealing with them must come first, followed by initiatives encouraging the retum of population and investment.

First, then, must come the elimination of bureaucratic practices that perpetuate the location of dependency populations in the city core. Therefore, foolish and destructive as they are, allow the continuance of welfare payments, housing subsidies, drug-abuse treatment, food stamps. But provide these somewhere truly convenient for the state - that is, somewhere chosen not because it keeps undesirable people away from suburbanites, but because it keeps them away from the law-abiding.

The result would be to reduce the destructive and discouraging effects exerted by the cities' pathological populations. These effects removed, those left behind would come to resemble the viable poor populations of the past. Social pathology there always was in the slums, as well as crime and drugs. But none of these was on the scale made possible since the 1960s by government subsidy. Viable slums above all meant orderly behavior as the norm. If such behavior could have been maintained, American small and medium-sized cities need not have suffered their extinctions.

It is true that life can go on in an atmosphere of fear. But our society has also demonstrated that smaller cities do not survive in such an atmosphere. Clearly they stand no chance of being repopulated until fear has been banished. Yet to so much as refer to restored public safety is to run up against the syndrome in which our elites, racked with class and racial guilt, bereft of any conviction of legitimacy, deal with crime and violence by surrendering civic order.