Cities Need to Get Back to Good-Government Basics

The best way for cities to advance "equity" and all the social justice buzzwords is just to deliver public services well.

I’m having a difficult time right now relating to people who are flabbergasted we lost the election. There is a certain amount of programming and sloganeering that nothing can penetrate, or maybe it will just take a while, for the folks who are the biggest loyalists anyway.

It has been reassuring, however, to read some good takes that seem to be converging on a couple points. I agree with people like Josh Barro and Ryan Puzychi that failures in urban governance in major coastal cities were an important factor in Democrats surprising (depending on your perspective) weakness.

Josh Barrow writes this about New York:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs.

I think Democrats love to style themselves as the upright and heroic party in contrast to Trump’s crass open corruption. And the people who haven’t yet assimilated some of the lessons from this election, they take that at face value.

But this kind of “soft corruption” — aka patronage — has been a feature of urban government for more than a century. Voters know it. And — regardless of what is happening on the national stage — it makes it difficult to Democrats to argue, sincerely, that they are acting in the public’s best interests and above being beholden to special interests.

Democrats can’t on one hand, act like the adults in the room, and have an inability to deliver public services that substantially improve people’s lives. There are just too many examples of that from the last few years.

Puzychi’s post is more focused on housing failures. And I strongly agree that Democrats inability/unwillingness to get a handle on their housing crises has tarnished the Democratic brand.

New York and California — our strongholds and national economic superpowers — are losing population now. As someone who comes from a place where global economic trends have undermined the economy for decades, it’s just mind-blowing to me that places with New York and California’s natural and economic assets managed to actually lose population. A remarkable failure.

People (middle class and lower-middle class! people) are voting with their feet. I DGAF how many progressive bills you pass protecting vegans from fat shaming or whatever, if people non-rich can’t afford to live in your state, none of that matters. (Though Puzychi does note that — hopefully — many major cities passed substantive measures aimed at tackling the housing crisis this election.) Red states like Texas and Florida and Arizona are scooping up those new residents because, whether we want to admit it or not, they are the places where the concerns of the middle-class are better accommodated.

In addition, both Barrow and Puzychi — and SO many of the pundits — are male and maybe don’t have kids. And I think they ignore, dismiss the importance of public education in these discussions.

In San Francisco for example — sorry, but this sorta has to be the poster child here — local voters rendered crystal-clear verdicts against some of the more trendy progressive education initiatives over the last few years: #1. being extended Covid-era school closures and #2. being “detracking” students (basically getting rid of “gifted” programs and selective schools because they were “too white” (in reality too Asian.) (Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, has had its own semi-disastrous, imo, experiment with “detracking.”)

If you want to win in politics, the policy proposals you back have to work. And those trendy progressive education initiatives were fiascos. It will take a decade to make up the losses heaped on primarily low income students by SF’s shameful 18-month school closure. These policies were wildly unpopular EVEN IN SAN FRANCISCO, where voters are exponentially more attuned to our whole agenda than everywhere else.

Since-recalled SF School Board Member Alison Collins — who was ousted with 70% of voter support in 2022 — is sort of a master class in the performativeness and toxicity and (ironically) inequality-expanding scorched-earth progressive nonsense Democrats need to run screaming from right now. (In case you didn’t follow this story, Collins oversaw an 18-month closure of the SF public schools during which the board was preoccupied with renaming schools — colonialist! etc — but somehow got all their historical facts wrong and embarrassed themselves. While she was grandstanding about “equity” and racism and local students were literally barred from attending school, she also made some bizarre racist remarks about Asians, who make up a a third of the city’s voters.)

Now, everyone is always dunking on San Francisco. But AT LEAST voters there actually cared enough about public education to have a recall campaign and help restore responsible leadership.

In Cleveland, where I live, kids were similarly screwed and there was no big reckoning. Our Mayor in Cleveland, Justin Bibb, ran successfully three years ago on “modernizing City Hall.” It was a popular message and one I think more city leadership should be looking at right now. Still turnout in Cleveland was horrible. Less than half of voters bothered to show up at the polls. For me, the handling of Cleveland schools during the pandemic was eye opening about Democrats’ true priorities/loyalties, which seemed to lie with organized labor even when their interests (as they defined them at the time) diverged from what was probably in students’/and the public’s best interests.

There are definitely a lot of folks in our bluest, blue cities who have checked out, and become cynical about the whole enterprise, and as I mentioned before, I don’t blame them on some level. Certainly, it was eye opening for me, as a public school parent during the pandemic.

Democrats are great at soaring rhetoric about equity. Where they struggle is living up to their words in deed. When voters try to hop on an expensive, brand new public transit system in Los Angeles and see them operating as makeshift homeless shelters, they lose faith in the whole project (no matter what kind of tortured argument some college sophomore who majored in sociology tries to apply.)

These failures matter to voters. And they matter especially to the working class. In the spring of 2023, 22 people fatally overdosed on Los Angeles Metro, as the system descended into chaos. As I wrote in Planetizen last year, I was shocked that the LA Times was able to photograph a man smoking fentanyl in a metro train — and that the man GAVE THEM HIS REAL NAME. Shame on anyone — I know a lot of urbanists who did this and it’s embarrassing — who minimized the effects of that on Metro’s ridership, which is primarily working class (not to mention the bus operators).

Democrats have to demonstrate we are good at governing. Complaints about disorder — dismissed by well off professionals who were insulated to some degree from the fallout — were/are serious.

In New York City and Washington, DC, a huge percentage of drivers — following loosened (in retrospect insane) registration requirements — have been driving around with fake tags or no license plates at all, breaking traffic laws and skirting tolls with impunity. This is the kind of thing, I don’t ever remember seeing until this last two or so years. It’s the kind of thing we could expect more in a developing nation.

We need bold leadership to address these challenges. Too many influential people just looked the other way as this was happening, because they didn’t want to get yelled at by tweed-coat wearing graduates of Minor Ivies on Twitter. Innocent people are getting killed because of our inability to manage our traffic systems with even passing level of responsibility in cities like Washington, D.C., which claims to be committed to vision zero. Instead they hid behind some excuse about “racial equity” and looked the other way while their streets descended into chaos.

Right now we need bold leadership. We need folks in office who can call bullshit on bullshit and excuse the core functions of government with competence and integrity.