💡 5 Quick Questions for ... ‘uber-geographer’ Joel Kotkin about the future of American cities
'If we just allow it to happen, we could reinvent cities by letting them become more decentralized.'
Quote of the Issue
“Its traditions and its faiths preserved, there is new beauty and new strength in the city of tomorrow. In its commerce and its culture; its sports; its sciences and its arts.The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future. The strivings of man: his ambitions, his achievements, his aspirations -- all are mirrored in the face of his cities.” - Narration from the Futurama exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
5QQ
💡 5 Quick Questions for … “uber-geographer Joel Kotkin about the future of American cities
Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Urban Reform Institute. He is also Executive Editor of NewGeography.com and the author of several books. In a 2010 op-ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks dubbed Kotkin America’s “über-geographer,” the best description I’ve seen of his wide-ranging analysis of cities. Recently, he and the American Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Streeter co-edited The Future of Cities, which features an introduction and conclusion written by Kotkin.
1/ With the rise of remote work, some have speculated that cities may be over or face extreme challenges. What do you make of that claim?
I think it's going to vary where you are. Particularly hard hit are going to be the traditional central business districts, which are very transit dependent. People are not going back to transit, particularly in expensive areas where people are often commuting 45 minutes or an hour each way. Obviously, remote work is giving them the option of at least not doing that every day of the week. That's going to have a real impact. I think cities will come back. Certainly the Sunbelt cities seemed to be not overly affected, because they already had dispersed work patterns to start with.
I think cities are just going to have to reinvent themselves and play a different role. I think the sort of Paul Krugman view that everybody outside of the major cities and maybe your occasional university town is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal is just not the case. What we're seeing is that cities are now going to have to compete for talent with suburbs. The focus of that talent attraction won't be downtown. It may be some of the attractions of the city, but the real attraction will be those people who just enjoy the urban lifestyle.
That urban lifestyle has to be safe, to start with, has to have a decent infrastructure, and over time is going to have to eventually deal with the education issue. You're going get people who will say, “Hey, I love living in Brooklyn, but when I'm 35 and I'm about to have my first child, I don't know if I want to spend that much money.” These are the things that really matter. Some of the urban elites still think that this is temporary. What amazes me is that there are plans to build high rise offices in New York that would make the Chrysler building look like a shack. What planet are these people living on?
2/ You've written a lot in the past about cities like San Francisco, which really are bifurcated between very high-income people and poverty, with no middle. Will the pandemic accelerate this dynamic?
I think the pandemic has certainly changed the situation. Then the ensuing crime that followed it — that changed things. People are much more concerned about being overly exposed to other people, let's say on the subway car, both for safety and for health reasons. So it certainly changed things. It could be an opportunity, if cities are able to adopt things like charter schools and really begin to reverse crime. The homicides I think are going down, but property crime is pretty consistent. And they need to deal with things like homelessness. If they don't do those things, then the effect of the pandemic will be permanent. If they deal with these things, they can come back. They will never go back to the dominance that some fantasized about and existed let's say until the 1960s.
I mean that's really the problem: Cities have been unable to hold a middle or an upwardly mobile working class.
3/ Is it your sense that mayors understand the crime issue? I recall the new mayor of Chicago recently making a comment that when thinking about crime, we need to think more about the “root causes.”
I think the mayor of Chicago is a particularly bad case, particularly in a city that really has severe crime issues that are much greater than let's say New York or L.A. has. Some of the better informed and more flexible people, mayors like Adams in New York, are certainly trying to deal with it. But there's a terrible problem. When people ask whether cities will come back, I say the biggest problem I see for cities is their demographics. Even before the pandemic, who was going into the city? Young people who are at that age where they still haven't quite been mugged by reality enough to move to the center. Also a large and growing population of people who are not only poor but are destitute.
My grandfather was a window washer and my mom would say, “Everybody was poor, but we didn't know it because everyone was poor.” In Brooklyn at that time there was Murder Incorporated and some very nasty people, but she said as a young girl she could walk across a park and it would be totally safe. What we've got is this, to use the Marxist term, lumpenproletariat. There's a big difference between the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat. The proletariat is working, the lumpenproletariat is on the margins of society. Cities have become filled with these kinds of people, and then they have a very elite population. They are still getting record rents in Manhattan because the reality is if you want that urban experience, there's nothing like New York, London, Paris.
There are like five or six places in the world where that real concentration of unique experience exists. The problem is you don't have the working-class ethnics in the same numbers, even let's say with the Hispanics. I work a lot in issues involving Hispanics and certainly Asians. The moment they have a pot to piss in, they move to the suburbs. I mean that's really the problem: Cities have been unable to hold a middle or an upwardly mobile working class. So they get bifurcated, as the late Fred Siegel used to put it, with an “upstairs-downstairs” coalition of the very wealthy and then their servants. And then the people on the outside, if you want to use the term lumpenproletariat.
4/ How will cities need to deal with demographic decline?
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