There's a lot of angst out there over whether products like Starbucks that seem somehow emblematic of an era of wasteful spending will outlast the current downturn. The other day it occurred to me to wonder if the same isn't true of US cities. The first model for an urban renaissance was, after all, New York. But while New York's renaissance was certainly a product of a lot of factors, all of the institutional improvements were funded by the post-1982 financial services boom. New York City is projecting its 2010 revenue will be down 30% from FY2008. That's three years after the recession started.
Those tax revenues supported New York's extraordinarily odd income
structure. New York has extraordinarily generous poverty benefits,
made possible because so many of its residents make so much money that
they don't really miss the extra taxes. A city with a more normal
income distribution couldn't support that level of spending. So if the
financial industry really is permanently smaller and less lucrative,
what happens to the 650,000 New Yorkers in public housing, the one in three New Yorkers on Medicaid, the 50,000 or so on TANF, and so forth?
Presumably they get fewer services, and get angrier, and commit more
crimes, which don't get solved as rapidly by the smaller police force.
And the families with children start moving back out. And presumably
this problem is replicated in cities like San Francisco and Seattle
which depend, indirectly, on revenue generated by the financial
markets. (That is, after all, what a stock option amounts to.)
But maybe I'm too pessimistic. Which is what comments are for. Tell me why I'm wrong.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
And presumably this problem is replicated in cities like San Francisco and Seattle which depend, indirectly, on revenue generated by the financial markets.
Seattle, unlike NYC, does not have an income tax; they get by on sales, B&O, and property taxes (and car tabs, unless they got rid of that along with the monorail). Furthermore, many of the stock-option-issuing companies are located in the suburbs. So the connection to financial-services incomes is there, but more attenuated. Besides, Seattle proper has fewer residents than NYC's projets, apparently.
I can't speak for SF. I would say NYC is in big trouble, except that Obama is going to bail them out eventually, so who really cares if they're viable or not?
Hmm. "Recession to NY: Drop Dead." But if it generates another Talking Heads or Television, it might be worth it in the end.
If New York would respond by forcing able people out of public housing and off Medicare, then it might actually benefit from the recession. It's great to have a safety net for folks who legitimately need it, but it's unhealthy to have a third of the population living on the backs of everyone else.
That said, New York won't do that, nor will it make the only other sensible move for saving money: renegotiating union contracts. Both are far too politically difficult for Mayor Bloomberg -- who is smart enough to know both steps would benefit the city but won't let good ideas stand in the way of his re-election.
Instead, the city will cut core services that make life livable and run up a lot of debt. Will it make the city a worse place to live? Certainly. Will it destroy the it? No. There are too many advantages to living amidst a huge cluster of smart and productive people for bad government to destory it entirely.
Yes, indeed, that smart and productive cohort managed to damn near burn down the world's financial system.
Maybe, just maybe, smart and productive people will decide that building ginourmous, too-big-to-fail institutions ruled by myopic groupthink is a really bad idea, and perhaps putting so many eggs into such large and unstable baskets might not really be the best way to run things.
"Yes, indeed, that smart and productive cohort managed to damn near burn down the world's financial system."
Um, no... that would be Barney Frank and the rest of the mortgage market-meddling Congress. Wall Street simply responded in a (mainly) rational way to the incentives government created.
Mr. Frank and Congress have a great deal to account for (and never will be called to do so), but the mortgage stuff alone didn't send us up in billowing flames. It was mismanaged risk in the bond markets that was the gasoline on the mortgage fire that did so.
"There are too many advantages to living amidst a huge cluster of smart and productive people for bad government to destory it entirely."
Crowded city = prime vector for the spread of contagious diseases. I think I'll stick to the 'burbs, where my kids can play in the back yard, I can have a big vegetable garden, and where owning a nice 4-bedroom house is cheaper then renting a crappy studio apartment in the city.
What, you do not get to enjoy the privledge of riding a germ incubator known as the subway? Packed with people, their bodies pressed against each other and the doors.
I am told, usually by those very young and without children, that living in the city is best for society as a whole. It is a view that is tailored fit for the smug.
Oh, but some people who write blogs grew up in the city, and became successful.
Therefore, everyone can, of course. And if they don't, it's because of the evil rich.
Whatsammater, dio777, don't you want your children to grow up feeling smug and superior to everyone else? don't you love your children?
You make the assumption that decreased access to public services leads to increased crime. I don't know whether this is true or not. There could be data on the question, I suppose.
Ultimately it will be a positive thing because it will move us away from an unsustainable model to a sustainable one.
However, in the short run, there will be hardships.
It is unfortunate that we have to have these boom/bust cycles to achieve sustainable economic policies.
I think you're generally wrong, but not necessarily wrong about New York. The most urban-renaissancey place in America is probably Portland, Oregon, and it doesn't really have any of the economic distortions (on either the high end or the low end) that you rightly cite for New York. I predict that more Portland-like places will get through the crisis just fine, while more New York-like places won't. On that spectrum, Seattle probably leans towards the former, and San Francisco towards the latter. But New York itself is certainly an outlier, by almost any standard.
Sir/Ma'am, I beg to differ. There was a front page WSJ article this week about the hipster d-bags flooding the Portlands and Austins despite there being no jobs available. There's nothing magical about these places that would create enough barista and local bike shop openings (worthless jobs in John Kerry's eyes) to properly absorb this influx. Eventually the drain from unemployment benefits will sap the municipalities and there won't be George Bush around to blame. The one lesson of the '02-'07 bubble is that fantasyland where people are rewarded in unproductive jobs has to end eventually.
On the plus side, the homeless really like Portland (can't speak for Austin) so at least the hipsters don't have to move back home to mom and dad.
Oh, the homeless really like Austin, too. There's far more services for them here than in the other big cities in Texas.
Unemployment benefits are paid by employers, not the state or city. Don't let that get in the way of you unsubstantiated snark, though.
If you read the entire article, instead of cherry picking the parts that support your dislike of the city, you'd also know that the author states that Portland will be better positioned than other cities when the economy turns around. Businesses tend to start, and/or locate where there is a concentration of creative, and educated individuals. Portland fits the bill nicely.
This may be a chance to see if the broken windows theory of crime prevention works or if the anti-crime bubble was simply an artifact of more police, fewer young men, and an end of the crack.
While it would seem to be true that Seattle and San Francisco depend (indirectly) on financial markets, it's not at all clear that the parts of the financial markets they depend on are being hit by the Current Unpleasantness. VC funds seem to be holding up pretty well, and there's little evidence of much contraction in low capital startups, e.g. software. There's even been a small resurgence in the IPO markets!
SF still has Silicon Valley and biotech. Unless Obama manages to demonize and then tax them out of existence.
Silicon Valley isn't really urban, it's suburban. Most "Silicon Valley" activity happens in other counties, so San Francisco doesn't get much direct benefit from it.
San Francisco housing prices haven't fallen much (nor are there many foreclosures), so there probably won't be an influx of IT people into SF for cheaper housing.
I predict that more Portland-like places will get through the crisis just fine
I'm curious to know who's going to pay for those trendy hipster condos in the Pearl or the places on the Southwest Waterfront. Heck, they just stopped construction on a highrise at Morrison and 9th because of a lack of funding.
We won't be seeing Death Wish: Burnside any time soon, but it's still going to be no fun.
We won't be seeing Death Wish: Burnside any time soon, but it's still going to be no fun.
Dude, I dunno -- there's a guy that looks an awful lot like Charles Bronson who rides the MAX.
I think that you may be right about mega cities, but this nation is filled with small to medium sized cities, too. And I'm not sure they will have the same types of problems; mostly because they have less income disparity overall.
They don't have the problems of New York (unto itself...) but they do have plenty of issues. Crime's actually gotten worse in many medium sized cities because they're less expensive than big ones and the cops there don't know how to break up the gangs: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime
@andrew smith "It's great to have a safety net for folks who legitimately need it, but it's unhealthy to have a third of the population living on the backs of everyone else."
Are you kidding? Living off the banks of everyone else? Ok, follow me for a moment. Taxpayers gave hundreds of billions to banks which the banks promptly used to pay tens of billions in bonuses to thousands of people, dividends to their shareholders, and protection to their bondholders who should have shouldered the loss. That's new york's tax base.
It's probably okay that taxes on that money (which came from the taxpayers) be used to take care of a few more people (like the health of Millions of new yorkers). Since the bulk of taxpayer safety net money already went to tens of thousands of financial industry participants. No harm, no foul. They can keep 90% of it. we're talking about less than 10% in tax, and only some percentage of that to sustain services for a few million people who couldn't get the "financial safety net for folks you legitimately need it" so directly.
And before we argue about the safety of the system and what not, we could have protected the system without protecting the bondholders/shareholders at 100% and paying the literally billions in bonuses at the same time as taking federal money.
I have 50 shares of Lehman I bot at $70 a few years ago. I do not feel protected 100%.
@dieselmcfadden:
Taxpayers gave hundreds of billions to banks which the banks promptly used to pay tens of billions in bonuses to thousands of people, dividends to their shareholders, and protection to their bondholders who should have shouldered the loss. That's new york's tax base.
Taxpayers gave tens of thousands of billions ot banks, of which banks paid eighteen billion in bonuses. Not all big numbers are the same.
@Megan:
Tell me why I'm wrong
THe financial services industry took a huge hit in 2001/2002 as well (after the 9/11 attacks) and we saw no such deterioration in New York City. Remember - significant numbers of these financial services workers (more than half, perhaps?) live in New Jersey, Connecticut or even Westchester/Long Island. The surrounding areas dilute the tax revenue, so 10% unemployment doesn't equal 10% revenue reduction in NYC itself. Also, while lots of New Yorkers work in finance, lots of non-New Yorkers spend money in New York, and very little of it is on Finance (Theater, Sports, Restaurants, etc.).
NYC will have it's budgetary ups and downs, but it's more multi-faceted than you suggest in your post (IMHO).
Thank god-- if the Urban Renaissance in New York City really craters, people like me will finally be able to live in Manhattan or (heavens!) stop having roommates before we're 40.
Sure, but will you still want to live there?
If the new normal for oil prices is $75-90 a barrel, I would think density levels will increase as people seek to drive less. This should be a positive for cities in general. Of course, this just means that instead of spending money on cars and gas people will spend that money on rent.
Some are wondering if even the universe will survive the mother of all bubbles.
NYC is a special case because it is to finance what Pittsburgh was to steel. But if the secular market of the last 20 years is over then the places where wealth accumulated the last 20 years, places like Seattle, are going to feel the pain. I dont know if it is tied so tightly to finance retrenching per say but housing is very high in those cities. Equity in housing being one of the major places excess wealth was stored during the last cycle, the decline in housing prices should hit these cities hard. I think it is easy to underestimate how much rising real estate values were THE driving force in the urban renaissance. Borrow some money, invest it in some urban real estate using 10 to 20 times leverage (5% to 10% down). It was like running your own private hedge fund and it made a lot of people a lot of money. A lot more money than stock options in high tech firms ever did. Maybe not retire at 30 rich but it made the difference between what we use to call a middle class life style and what we call today a urban professional life style. Even if real estate does not go down, just stays flat for 10 years or so, you wont get value out of the leverage that you did in a rising market. This will take a large amount of income out of the cities.
I say good riddance to NYC, and to the NYC-centric worldview that so often dominates media and politics.
None of you live in San Francisco, it seems.
You need to be more specific about what "urban renaissance" means--does it just mean that hipsters want to live there, because it's cool, despite the filth, crime, obscene traffic, massive homelessness and the rest of the social problems? Because that is what it meant in SF.
At the height of the tech boom, SF had a vacancy rate of 0% for rentals, and the housing market was on fire. It still had horrendous crime. It still had an obscene homelessness problem. It still had junkies shooting up in the stairwells of nearly every apartment outside of the tip-top-few square blocks of Pacific Heights. And that was in the hipster areas. The areas that suddenly had 800 sq ft shacks where the cop had been shot selling for 500k as a tear down still had terrible gang violence.
It will get a lot worse in SF, yes. Crime will be worse. Will it cause leftist hipsters to leave? I don't know what it would take to get them to leave.
More generally, though, I think it will hurt cities like Oakland, CA, Indianapolis, Baltimore, St. Paul and Minneapolis--places that had had terrible crime that had receded during the booms. St. Paul has retail corridors that didn't start improving until after 2000, and were still on the upswing side of needing to improve in 2004. Minneapolis has entire neighborhoods of foreclosures that need to be razed. It will be very very painful. Neighborhoods that were reclaimed by gentrification will go back to being abysmal.
I don't know what you call horrendous crime, but San Francisco is nowhere near the worst large cities in the U.S.
I can't resist: if you dislike the leftist hipsters so much, probably S.F. isn't the right place for you. Instead of wishing for catastrophes that makes them leave, why don't you leave?
San Francisco literally bought those homeless and crime problems. Until Newsome, in the only action he's taken in life that I agree with, got the system changed, the city paid cash out to people on general assistance. Now the city provides things like vouchers for food and housing, but for awhile every junkie in the country was trying to get to SF so he could get high on the city's dime. We went from having almost no beggars at all, to a beggar on every street corner, to a beggar on every street corner plus another half-way between corners.
I couldn't speak to city renaissance elsewhere in the country, but in SF there has definitely been a counter-renaissance of the last two decades.
I lived in the Bay Area (including Oakland and SF) between 1990-2006 and I have to challenge this idea that S.F. was out of control crime-wise *especially* during the era Allison is referring to. Like most major cities during the 1990s, S.F. saw a massive decline in all crime (and violent crime in particular). See this:
http://www.cjcj.org/files/shattering.pdf
Between 1990 - 1998, basically right up to the *edge* of the tech boom (but not quite in the throes of it), S.F.'s crime rate dropped 38%; violent crime went down by 43%.
Now, unless there was some magic bounce back during the tech boom, lasting through the housing boom of the early '00s, it's safe to assume crime at the very least plateaued if not continued to decline through the first half of this decade.
Was there still violent crime during this time? Of course. Gang violence? Sure. But city-wide? Absolutely not. This statement, in particular, is beyond hyperbole:
"It still had junkies shooting up in the stairwells of nearly every apartment outside of the tip-top-few square blocks of Pacific Heights."
Really? So there were heroin junkies littering everywhere in the Avenues? Castro and Noe Valley?
The homeless problem in S.F. is accurate. The insane rise in housing is accurate. The traffic problem is accurate. The idea that S.F. - as a city - during the late 1990s was a cesspool of crime and drug addiction has no basis in any statistical (or, in my experience, anecdotal) reality.
Moreover, the tech boom didn't bring a wave of "leftist hipsters" into S.F. Many of those folks already lived in the city prior to the boom. What the tech bubble brought was a new *monied creative class* into the city which is what helped drive up real estate prices and drive out working class families. Some of those folks might have been leftist and might have dressed like hipsters, but the gentrification of S.F. over the last 15 year is far more profound than just focusing on who took over 16th and Valencia.
Which is what comments are for. Tell me why I'm wrong.
You might be right. An alternate story is that housing costs fall sufficiently to attract other "knowledge workers" (though I hate that phrase), since living in big cities is still very, very valuable. The revenue loss might thus be smaller than anticipated because of New York's unique value.
Which will happen? I haven't the slightest idea.
What has always stuck me a strange is the degree to which people always assume things are going to continue to go in the direction they are heading.
Times are good - people things the good times will last forever. Times are bad and people are certain we will soon enter a dystopian hell.
It's 1982 and 14% 30 year treasury bonds are a hard sell as are stocks with P/E multiples of mid single digits - but gold at the inflation adjusted price of $2400 a ounce is flying off the shelves.
On the flip side - it's 2006 and you better buy a home because soon no one will be able to afford one. How prices could continue to rise when no buyer could afford the new prices was never explained.
Its different this time. I am shorting the Dow all the way to zero.
The dramatic drop in violent crime from the 70's/80's to the 90's/00's is the principal enabler of the urban renaissance. What caused this drop is unclear, and everyone has their own pet theories - and probably it's some combo of them that's the correct one. Nevertheless it is also likely a simple causal relationship does *not* exist for the reverse - that is economic uncertainty breeds crime. Because neither the 2001 downturn nor even the great depression showed this. And other 'boom' times showed an increase in crime.
So while crime may rise again for a number of reasons -or no real good reason at all - and *that* would puncture the urban bubble - it is too simplistic to say that economic adversity in and of itself would have the chain of events you describe and thus probably will not happen.
Thanks Kolohe, I was wondering about the bad times=more crime equation too.
I think that it depends on the city.I am amazed at all of the articles featuring empty houses in Detroit, that say that the empty houses are a result of the recession. I am no expert on Detriot, but I do not think that those houses emptied out over the past year. Detroit has been in trouble for a while.
Every 10 to 15 years we have a recession in America and the media suddenly discovers that there is poverty in this country.Like JMO3 said in a comment above. We go from one extreme prediction to another.The problems that cities face today did not appear in the past year. And when the stock market starts to go up again, and the media forget that there is poverty in the U.S. , the cities will still have problems.
I am not saying that the recession has not hurt the cities.I live in the city of Baltimore. And there are a lot of people out of work. I myself am lucky if I work 2 days a week.But we have always had under employment in Baltimore.There is hardly any industry left. So people work in jobs like construction, that are temporary by their very nature.
My personal opinion is that cities like Baltimore managed to survive deindustrialisation. They managed to survive the crack epidemic. they survived AIDS and other diseases.This may sound corny .But I think that Baltimore is a lot tougher than you might think.
I think that the cities in this country can survive . But it is up to the people who live in them ,to make the cities better. The federal government can only do so much.As for me. I'm staying in the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore.Because i know that we can survive!
"But I think that Baltimore is a lot tougher than you might think."
I suppose you would know better than me. But I recall that, even in the height of the boom, I thought Baltimore looked awfully dystopian. I went to visit my sister there, while she was doing a summer program at JHU. There were a few blocks of decent buildings and shops and whatnot around the Inner Harbour, and then miles of cracked and peeling paint out to Baltimore Penn Station and JHU and whatnot. Drifts of trash spilling out from the alleyways, mangy dogs, dingy shopfronts, empty lots full of junk, etc. etc. Perhaps I just missed the main roads while walking through, but my impression was that Baltimore was easily one of the most miserable and depressed cities I have ever seen, in this country or any other.
Just which countries have you been too? I mean, for all of Baltimore's problems, the large majority of cities in the world are trashier, mangier, dingier, etc.
I am not going to lie to you and say that we are Paris or Budapest. Baltimore is a post industrial city. But it is not all slums. In my opinion the best neighborhoods in Baltimore are not the richest or the poorest ones.
The best neighborhoods in my opinion are places like Hamden ,Canton ,Highlandtown ,Riverside, Fells Point ,Charles Villiage or Locust Point. All cities are gritty to a point . But we are not one big slum .
Baltimore has changed a lot for the better in the last 10 years. I do not know when you visited your sister or which places you went to.But while JHU Homewood campus has a few bad areas around it, most of the surrounding area is pretty nice. The campus is stuck between Hamden and Charles Villiage. Neither of which could be described as a slum in any circumstances.
I am sorry that you did not enjoy your stay. Next time skip the Inner Harbor. It's like Times Square. Something for the tourists.Next time go to Fells Point or Lexington Market instead.
Thanks for your comment and best wishes to you Balfegor
The Detroit problem is one of magnitude. There have always been run down neighborhoods and abandoned buildings. But the blight is spreading rapidly, and the flux of people who are leaving appears to be increasing rapidly. Though interestingly, conditions in the nice downtown section are improving, and more people are moving to that part of town.
I also suspect that a good portion of the low sale prices are from divesting slumlords who hold large sections of Detroit, previously hoping to make a fortune when the next big project comes through.
The other thing that is new is the flight of people out of well heeled suburban areas. The neighborhood down the street from me has had 30/200 houses foreclosed on in the last year (of course, it also had signs at the peak stating "affordable housing, starting in the 600's.")
MR/MRS TIMES CURRENT
Thank you for your reply and the information that you provided.I hope things get better for you guys in Detroit.Compared to you guys , we in Baltimore have nothing to complain about.
I know that this may seem like ancient history for some. But what goes unmentioned is the 1968 riots, both in Baltimore , Detroit and other cities.
These riots devestated many cities.and many were just starting to come back recently.Some have never fully recovered.I think Baltimore falls in that catagory. And i would suspect that Detroit does too.
This is not to be negative about either city. It should just be remembered that these cities went through some tramautic times over the last 50 years.It is amazing that they have survived.
Detroit would appear to be similar to many cities in developing nations, where the poverty is not in the center but in areas surrounding the center. If you could make a circle around Detroit it would be like a donut, only the donut itself would be the area with the majority of the poverty. The donut hole, and the area outside the donut is doing comparatively well.
Southeastern Michigan had too many problems to discuss here well before the current economic crisis began. Mainly it was a collective disregard for reality. Many of the jobs in automotive (and not just union jobs) paid more than they should have. GM wasn't called Generous Motors for nothing.
Developers believed that even though Michigan's population was declining, demand for half million dollar houses in the middle of nowhere would not drop. The development continued right up until the industry dropped off a cliff.
Having spent the majority of my life in Metro Detroit, but also having lived in Portland, OR, Denver, CO, Washington, D.C., and Madison, WI, I can say that Detroit managed to keep the blinders on longer than any other city. The area's been in trouble for as long as the Big Three have been in trouble...decades. It was a collective intentional ignorance.
After thinking about this a bit, I would say that the fate of urban centers depends on the types of policies we adopt (Note: that's distinctly different from the polices we say we are going to adopt.) Policies that support families, in particular.
But I would put more weight on education then crime. When schools are good, families with children who are able to choose like urban areas; when schools suck, families who can't choose, are stuck with shitty schools.
Crime is important, but I'd guess easier to manage if we stopped warehousing dysfunctional people in HUD housing projects, where dysfunction often feeds on dysfunction. In economically diverse neighborhoods, poor people are more likely to gain skills and opportunity simply because they're surrounded by people modeling successful behavior. So I would put housing high on my list, with a focus toward mixed housing (maybe letting more people live in smaller places; one-kid one-bedroom might be unreasonable, for instance. We don't have those rules for families living or renting on their own, maybe we shouldn't have them for people in public housing,) disbursed throughout a neighborhood.
My utopian vision would see more emphasis put on regional supply chains; more smaller local business and fewer large national businesses; what you lose in the scale of economies you may well gain in local stability. As New York is finding now, what Detroit and Pittsburgh and countless other mill towns demonstrated, a single-income city is one business failure away from catastrophe. (I know NYC is not a single-income town, but as Megan so often points out, finance generates an unusually large percentage of tax revenue and local spending.)
ZIC
I agree with your comment. But what you said about HUD projects though has already happened in many parts of the country.Most of the large projects in Baltimore have been dynamited.
They have been replaced by the section 8 program.As you may know, this is a program that provides housing vouchers. The problem is that the government does not pay much attention to where the people with these vouchers go.
It is supposed to disperse poverty. But instead many neighborhoods [ like my own] are now swamped with section 8 houses.As you say this leads to concentration of poverty. It also means that while i live in a neighborhood that is over 50 percent black, there are few black ADULT MEN in my neighborhood.Every neighborhood needs at least some men!
The Atlantic Magizine did a great article on the section 8 program, a couple of issues back.If you did not get to read it , you should look it up. It was very good.
By the time i posted this comment TSOTHA had already posted a link to the article that i mentioned.Thank you TSOTHA
"But I would put more weight on education then crime. When schools are good, families with children who are able to choose like urban areas; when schools suck, families who can't choose, are stuck with shitty schools."
Actually, something I'm seeing in NYC right now is families that can no longer afford private schooling coming back to the public schools in their neighborhoods and staging hostile takeovers. Lots of proto-PTA strategizing in the playgrounds this summer. Should be interesting - a lot of schools in mixed neighborhoods have become used to passive (and poorer) parents, because the active parents have been actively getting their kids out of those schools. They probably aren't going to know what hit them when confronted with organized Yuppies who have lost their exit options but still have high expectations, are used to getting what they want and, to a much greater extent, have the means to get it.
I'm not sure how successful they will be - organized, educated, entitled Yuppies are pretty formidable, but in a mud-wrestling bout with the entrenched NYC public-sector unions I know where I'm putting my money. (If they aren't fairly successful, I expect to see many fewer of our local hipster parents mouthing pro-unionized public education platitudes.) The possibility of a critical mass of pissed-off, privileged professionals backed into a corner with their children's education at stake makes me more hopeful for NYC's public schools than I have been for years, actually.
The answer is not in dispersing dysfunctional families. All you are going to do is disperse crime.
I grew up in public housing. The vast majority of people in my twenty story, 160 unit building were decent and hard working. It only takes a few knuckeheads to mess everything up. And they succeeded in messing up my building. It became a den of drugs and crime. And I dare say more than 90% of the folks in that building were victims and not perpetrators.
No, the anwser like everything else starts with preventing the dysfunction in the first place. Reducing out of wedlock births to underage, spouse-less women would be a great start. Teaching values and the importance of work to young people is another. How to accomplish that without force re-education camps- I have no idea. But the main problem is our culture.
Thanks for the thoughtful, well written post. In a way, it draws an analogy to asymmetric warfare I've never thought of before.
The Urban Renaissance thing was a bit over done by the media.
http://www.joelkotkin.com/Urban_Affairs/TNR%20Urban%20Legends.htm
Frankly, I am of two minds. One would think that the inevitable increase in energy costs would favor cities in the long run.
On the other hand, most of the people I know with kids would give up a lot before considering expensive city living, with poor schools and a higher crime rate.
Most of the job growth in the past 10 to 15 years has been in the suburbs. And, of course, so has most of the population growth, so maybe higher energy costs might push companies to the burbs instead of employees into cities.
It is way to early to tell. Ordinarily, I would believe that immediate past trends will continue into the immediate future, but the immediate future might well be a watershed change from the immediate past.
That has been the theory which fed the trend over the last decade or so was away from those giant HUD projects. Lots of them have been torn down, in fact. in favor of housing vouchers and section-8 type programs to keep the density of people on assistance down. It hasn't really worked out - the crime didn't go down at all, it's just spread over a wider area now.
The Urban Renaissance thing is going to continue with respect to the "hip" cities, as everyone gets into alternate energy and biking to work and electric cars, especially if the cities become connected through high-speed rail. Suburbia was always sterile, and we're never going back to rural living. Which is a real shame, because I like rural (although not suburban). Eventually there will be another bubble, and the people who run bubbly companies like hip things just as much as the next kid, so they will put their offices and factories in places where they themselves like to live and they'll employ all their friends. Where's Apple located? Google? Amazon? And then there will be jobs in Portland and Austin etc.
I don't think crime is going to go back up (in addition to social reasons, how can you mug people when everyone has a cell phone? or break in when all of us can hook up webcams that will record anyone breaking into the building?) but I just want to comment that I was here in NYC when it was crime-ridden and do you know what crime keeps away? The cowards. Think about it, people who are less disturbed by crime are more likely to be risk-takers and less likely to be fearful, complaining types. In the past decade we've had people move into this town who are here only for the money and only because it was safe, and I wouldn't mind seeing them all leave. They did nothing but make the real estate unaffordable.
I spent some time in Sommerville, MA earlier this spring, after a 12 year separation 20 years in Boston. It rocked. Your description fits what's happening there to a tee.
Zic, it's Somerville...
Thank you. It still rocked, even losing an 'm.'
Apple is located in Cupertino, Google in Mountain View. Both places are very much suburbia, at least the Silicon Valley version of suburbia. Some of the hipsters who work there (think marketing folks, not engineers) live in SF and reverse commute down, but most don't.
I find that many people are absolutely clueless about the level of violence that people are capable of committing on their fellow citizens.
Consider that the number of murders in New York City were above 2500 in the year 1990. The number of aggravated assaults numbered near 100,000.
If the crime levels return to those early 90's numbers, it will have nothing to do with the bravery or lack of from the people of NYC. It will have alot to do with people having scruples and not wanting to be a victim of a violent crime. The city will return to the state of decay that it was in during the 70's and 80's.
As for the view that webcams and cell phones are going to prevent crime. No, that is unrealistic. Look at what has been happening in the West Villiage the past few months. Just a few days ago a man was severely beaten AFTER telling his assailant he was an off duty cop.
As for sterile suburbs. I do not what that means? The NYC suburbs are big, with a lot to do if one opens their mind and eyes to it. I live in NYC but I enjoy "hanging out" in the suburban restaurants, clubs, and small town/cites.
Regarding a comment that ZIC made about cities that depend too much on one industry.
I think that the days of one company towns is coming to a close. But that does not mean that the cities have to lose all industry.In my city of Baltimore there is a small company called American Alloy Foundry. They were featured in a recent article in The Baltimore City Paper.Apparently some years ago , the owner decided to stay small because he enjoyed the craftmanship of the job.
The result was that when many foundry jobs went overseas he could compete with China because if a factory needed a small specialised peice right away he could deliver it faster and quicker than China.The company is family owned.
There is also a company called Baltimore Toolworks that makes chisels. If you look on the New York Times site , there is a video about them.They make their chisels in Baltimore City. I use their chisels and not only are they good. They are also just as affordable as the chisels made in China.
My point is that maybe this could be the future of cities. Small workshops , instead of mammoth factories. Small workshops providing small specialised products might be the only way we can compete with China.
There are many young men and women in the cities who need work. And all of them may not be the right fit for college.[I am not being condescending,i dropped out of high school myself]. Not all of these young people are going to find work building high priced condos either.
If the city governments spent less time subsidising high priced condos, and more time helping entrepeneurs set up workshops , we would be better off. Believe me ,one thing our cities do not lack is empty wharehouses and abandoned factories.They can be used to create jobs instead of just housing the rich.
For the record i do not work at Baltimore Toolworks or American Alloy Foundry.nor do i know the owners.
But if anyone is interested in these kind of small workshops, they both have websites. Plus the New York times did an article and a video on Baltimore Toolworks.
Instead of inviting the big shots from the auto industry or Wall Street to Washington ,Congress should talk to the owners of these types of companies. They must be doing something right. They seem to be making money without a government hand out. And they are successfully competing with China.
New York has to cut Medicaid. And cut it to a massive extent. If the recession forces something to be done, well, in the long run it'll be to the city's huge benefit.
Megan wrote:
So, if I'm understanding you correctly, the model we should be thinking of, when we think of the permanent underclass living on welfare and other government benefits, is a mafia protection racket? Pay us or we will torment you?
And this is a system you support, right? One in which society needs to keep paying the savages off or they'll attack us?
Wow.
I agree with you BLIGHTER. I always hear the so called "spokesmen for the underclass" saying that we should aid the poor neighborhoods or there will be riots.
They never say that we should aid these neighborhoods because they are full of hard working people.Most of whom work everyday. Nor do they mention the fact that many of these neighborhoods are full of veterans who bravely served their country.Instead they threaten violence. They do the people in these neighborhoods a diservice.
Most people in the inner city are hard working people who are law abiding and church going, and just want to raise their families in peace and quiet. But too many politicians pander to the small minority of thugs in these communities who are the very ones who are doing their best to destroy our neighborhoods.
I live in East Baltimore. Neither I ,or any of my neighbors want to riot.I wish the politicians would stop portraying us as animals .
If someone does riot ,it will not be because they are poor or hungry.It will be because they are a thug who has no respect for their own neighborhood.
Andrew Smith is correct, unless NY restructures, it will decline again,perhaps permanently. The huge share of people on the dole and whole swaths of the city given over to public housing are insane. The operating assumption since the 80s is that finance and media (new media especially) could subsidize the do-nothings) There are plenty of people in NYC who do nothing, they get a check from god knows which government agency and seem to have plenty of money to gamble in A-City, Foxwoods, go to Florida and Vegas. It is astonishing.
I finally moved out of NYC last month after the so-called "millionaire's" tax was implemented - the last straw. My wife is a free lancer and we simply couldn't stomach her paying a 60% marginal tax rate on small jobs.
As for "the people" "bailing out" the banks, most people scarcely pay taxes. Most banks can easily - and will - pay back their TARP money now that they have seen how sleazy the Obama clique's intentions are. I will puke having to listen to airheads proclaim they have "bailed-out" the banks. The government bought preferred stock in banks, in many cases twisting their arms to get them to agree and is now trying to nationalize all industry including banks. Sometimes I wonder if I am living in Venezuela or some idiotic place like that.
Megan, you are 100% correct re: crime. Just two days ago it was reported that NYC violent crime had spiked.
Across the city they are seeing increases of 30% and more over last year, and we're talking about assaults, rapes, etc. This isn't jay-walking.
Which is what comments are for. Tell me why I'm wrong.
Because you are doing an economic analysis of an
engineering problem; It is not how much a city costs
to run, or live in, it is how much it costs to fix it
after it suffers a catastrophic infrastructure failure,
and whether anyone who survives the failure will stay
in the city. "Escape from New York"; not just a movie.
You tell me: If the city of New York loses electrical
power, even to one Borough, at the height of the
summer heat, how long will it be before the city
becomes unlivable ?
"Oh, it can't happen here, no it can't happen here;
I've checked it out, a couple of times, and
it can't happen here." - Frank Zappa, Mother of Invention
Uh, no.
"The city's crime rate for the first three months of 2009 was the lowest in more than 40 years"
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/04/25/2009-04-25_city_crime_still_falling.html#ixzz0G9lme5CG&B
Sorry that was a response to RobM
After thinking about this some more, I think the next few years will disfavor cities relative to suburbs. The administration's energy and spending policies will increase the cost of living for all Americans.
That will push more Americans out of cities into lower cost suburbs.
logicFAIL
But I would put more weight on education then crime.
The two issues are not unrelated, in that they have related causes and feed on each other.
Perhaps the conundrum is which is the cart, which the pony, or are they both wheels of a front-wheel drive car, and need to function together?
So what you're saying is, we need a limited-slip differential theory of urban planning, which lets us move forward even when half our efforts lack traction?
That would, it seems, be an improvement in efficiency.
But after three years, I still miss my Subaru AWD.
Most banks can easily - and will - pay back their TARP money now that they have seen how sleazy the Obama clique's intentions are.
After receiving billions indirectly from the AIG bailout.
You are wrong because a Great Tsunami will flatten New York first.
Byrk
perhaps you are unaware (or don't care) but getting money as collateral does not give a bank (or anyone else) income or add to their net worth, so no, not a "bailout"
There is a big distinction between having capital (excess of assets over liabilities) and having cash. The main ways to raise capital are to 1) sell stock (selling bonds won't do it) or 2 ) earn money. Getting collateral on a derivatives contract accomplishes neither so, no, no bank or securities firm has been bailed-out directly or indirectly by having AIG post collateral with them
I am sure for years gliberals will hold forth - Oliver Stone like- that AIG money "bailed out" the banks, but this is bunk.
Sorry, you are repeating a myth. Investigate further if you really care about the truth or falsity of what you post.
I don't know about this. How big of a tax base could financial services be all on their own?
I mean, a lot of other economically significant things do happen in New York. It's not like Detroit and the auto industry.
I for one don't want to live in some big city like New York. I know that many people do, however, and that's their choice. What I resent is that when things start going ugly for the urban dwellers they expect everyone else to cough up tax dollars to subsidize their precious cities. If your urban existence is so wonderful and economically productive surely you can come up with some internal solutions to your financial problems that don't involve transferring wealth from the hated 'burbs' and flyover country to yourselves.
If our big cities really are the generators of wealth in this country, as their proponents claim, it follows that the cities have within their jurisdictions wealth to tax. If that wealth doesn't exist, then it says something truly, truly bad about that particular city, in which case it surely DESERVES to fade away.
Dear Ms. McArdle
It was not so much the financial market, but the real estate market that was driving the urban renaissance in California’s urban centers. There were three driving forces for the urban “renaissance” here in California. First, once affordable suburbs experienced huge increases in value. This made the relatively affordable urban centers more competitive. Second, rapidly increasing assessed values in urban centers translated into an increase in property tax increment revenue that was quickly bonded by Redevelopment Agencies to generate huge pots of money that could be used to subsidize reuse. With the exception of some loft projects, much of the renaissance was not market created, but a function of generous subsidies. The third and final aspect of the renaissance was that urban centers had large inventories of industrial buildings sitting vacant or underused because traditional manufacturers fled to lower priced labor markets. To encourage reuse of these structures, many cities crafted looser development standards for “lofts” and other reuse projects (e.g., parking standards – a huge cost component of urban reuse projects where parking has to be put within the structure – were waived or substantially reduced). All three of these conditions are now substantially eroded.
With housing prices collapsing in the remote suburbs (Modesto and Stockton near the San Francisco Bay Area, and the "Inland Empire" in the eastern LA basin have experience some of the worst foreclosure rates in the nation) and falling substantially closer in, the financial incentive to live in crowded and dangerous urban core neighborhoods is substantially reduced. The collapse in prices is also driving down tax increment revenues, making it difficult to cover existing redevelopment bond payments, let alone providing further subsidy. Finally, the most desirable reuse sites were gobbled up during the expansion.
The urban renaissance bubble here in California burst at the same time the real estate bubble burst, though with far less fanfare. Urban centers that used to look half full are now looking half empty.
Neobuzz
Yes, many New Yorkers are on the dole and abusing the privilege. Some of the most egregious of these are our retired teachers, firemen, police, sanitation and other former city workers—retired after comparatively brief service and walking away with incredibly generous payments which, by state constitutional provision, can't be touched for any reason. Their unions have for many years stuffed money and perks into the hands and pockets of our legislators. And when they don't get what they want directly from the city, they go to the state legislature, which has the authority to change many of our pension and disability arrangements and stuff it down our throats. If we only had to worry about the poor, we'd be in great shape.
Oh, and for Tcobb:
This is what New York sent to the Feds in 2001 (in millions): $166,554. They then spent about $126,990 here.
Here are the contributions of some of those fly-over states:
Minnesota 36,519
Mississippi 12,094
Missouri 33,718
Montana 4,359
Nebraska 10,415
Nevada 15,014
I get $112,119 total from that bunch. And all except MN get back more from the Feds then they put in. So I'm not exactly clear on who's subsidizing who. Unless perhaps you are referring to the billions in farm subsidies going to those flyover states. Possibly we ought to stop those subsidies and see which of those economies "DESERVES" to fade away.
Are these figures on a per capita basis? Also, let's be clear where much of that money leaving NYC is coming from. The financial community with those odious bonuses.
Farm subsidies are paid to Nebraska (et al.) but everyone benefits through cheaper food prices. So New Yorkers get the second level of financial benefit back out of those ag subsidies, amounting to a large % of household income saved.
It always struck me as odd, how poor my English relatives seemed, because they had so little discretionary income. Their food costs as a % of household budget was just so much higher than ours. We have cheap food, comparatively.
So stop h8ing, NYCers.
That's gross, not per capita [http://www.ppinys.org/nybalpayments.htm]. Those "odious bonuses" are also taxed. Those people making those odious bonuses receive them for helping to generate huge profits, in part by helping those flyover state folks sell their water treatment bonds in the bond market, e.g., and financing real companies with real products being sold in real marketplaces. Now, just ask what happens when that financial community with its odious bonuses ceases to generate the capital that leads to those bonuses?
BTW: why are those bonuses any more odious than the multi-million dollar crop subsidies going to AMD?
My bad for not being clear that I have absolutely no problem with people being paid bonuses. My point was that now that those bonuses are greatly reduced, those figures stated above will probably be less one sided.