MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-06-20 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] urban exodus
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Opinion | The Coming Urban Exodus
Daniel Henninger
6-7 minutes
In his speech last weekend to the graduates of the U.S. Military Academy
at West Point, President Trump said something with which, in normal
times, few would disagree: “What has historically made America unique is
the durability of its institutions against the passions and prejudices
of the moment.” Until now.
Among the most durable of those institutions is what some call “the
great American city.” America’s cities are indeed a wonder—built quickly
from nearly nothing across a vast continent into a unique story of
social and economic success. We may now be on the cusp of a great
reordering of the nation’s population as many people decide it is time
to separate themselves and their families from the social, political and
moral turbulence of this country’s large urban areas.
A familiar story line of recent years has described the rise to economic
and political power of urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles, San
Francisco and Washington as young, politically progressive workers in
the knowledge and service industries poured in. This, by popular
account, increased tension and division between urban sophisticates on
the forward edge of everything and the stodgy suburbs and conservative
rural communities. I think the coming urban exodus will be different.
People with all sorts of political beliefs are going to get out because
they are watching city after city reach a tipping point of social
disorder and political disorganization.
In two recent, overlooked articles, demographer William Frey of the
Brookings Institution reports that the well-noted migration into large
metropolitan areas that occurred from 2010 to 2015—predicting “the
decade of the city”—has in fact reversed sharply in the past five years.
Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and
Washington are all leaking people. Meanwhile the presumably disdained
suburbs and exurbs, distant from these city centers, are gaining residents.
Then came the pandemic and the protests of 2020.
Hardly anyone disputes that the coronarivus pandemic was going to affect
individuals’ trust in the human density of urban living. Many were
already daunted by the possibility of again enduring a shutdown of every
aspect of city life while quarantined in small living quarters.
Late May witnessed the killing of George Floyd, followed by nonstop
street marches and significant looting in multiple city centers—the ones
already losing population: New York (as always), Philadelphia, Chicago,
Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles,
Portland, Ore., on and on.
Urban dwellers are resilient, but these simultaneous events have forced
people to face a hard reality. In just three months it has become clear
that modern urban progressivism is politically incompetent and
intellectually incoherent.
After the days and weeks of marches through cities, what has fallen out
of it is basically one idea—defund the police. In New York, with blocks
of stores boarded up and cherry bombs exploding nightly everywhere, the
City Council has agreed to cut the city’s police budget by $1 billion,
or one-sixth. How hard is it to connect the dots?
A shapeless mass declares multiple blocks of Seattle now belong to it,
and when asked how long it could on, Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan wanly
offers: “I don’t know. We could have a Summer of Love.” The first one
was in 1967, also accompanied by massive urban unrest.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over the weekend issued a plaintive request
to the daily street protests: “You don’t need to protest. You won. You
won.” Then the kicker: “What reform do you want? What do you want?”
Historically, the media and press have served an arbitrating function
among competing urban forces. No longer. Through the pandemic and now
the protests, much of the urban-based media have become bizarrely
invested in apocalyptic story lines, picking at scab after scab and
problem after problem, with not much effort at sorting substantive
policy alternatives other than heading deeper into the progressive frontier.
The message being sent is that progressive governance is, at best,
ambivalent about maintaining civil order. The net result the past three
months has been a sense in many cities of irresolvable chaos, stress and
threat.
I think many younger, often liberal families would stick it out if they
thought there was anything resembling a coherent strategy to address
this mess—the new health threat, the homeless, the rising crime, the
filth, the increasingly weird school curriculums. But there is no strategy.
The quality of the response by both political and institutional urban
leadership to the pressure of these two events has been so uniformly
unproductive that it sends a message: The cost-benefit just isn’t
working anymore, with incentives mounting to move out.
The unhappy result as young families and well-off retirees leave is that
these cities will increasingly become more divided between upscale
progressive singles able to afford the political incompetence and the
residents of inner-city neighborhoods that will fall further behind.
For those who’ve always wondered what the 1960s were like, you’re living
it, but this time without much love.
Write henninger-at-wsj.com.
https://gothamist.com/news/illegal-fireworks-soar-nyc-complaints-2020
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-city-growth-stalls-further-as-the-suburbs-make-a-comeback/
https://www.brookings.edu/research/even-before-coronavirus-census-shows-u-s-cities-growth-was-stagnating/
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
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Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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