Conservatives, Progressives, and Cities

I recently read Jessica Troutstine’s Segregation by Design.  Like other commentators on segregation, Troutstine discusses segregationist policies such as exclusionary zoning and so-called "urban renewal."  But she also uses quantitative analysis to address factors that are associated with "segregation ... between cities rather than within them"—in other words, "white flight" to suburbs.  If I am reading her analysis correctly, she suggests that where central cities "elect minority mayors [and] when they spend more money" white flight increases, while "wealthy white residents choose to remain in the central city when budgets are more austere." Similarly, federal desegregation orders apparently led to more white flight.

Troutstine’s conclusions seem inconsistent with the conventional wisdom that liberals are pro-urban and conservatives are anti-urban. But in the name of equity, progressives sometimes favor policies that tempt affluent voters to move to suburbs. As Troutstine points out, high taxes do make cities less attractive to middle-class taxpayers (especially where the quality of government services does not keep up with tax rates). And in the 1970s, school desegregation policies favored by liberals made city schools less attractive because suburban schools were generally not subject to court orders requiring racially balanced schools. This meant that if you lived in the city, your children had to go to an allegedly desegregated school with lots of underprivileged children, while if you lived in the suburbs, you could go to a public school dominated by children from well-off households. On the other hand, when the Supreme Court refused to extend desegregation into the suburbs, the pro-suburb majority was dominated of the Court’s more conservative justices, while more liberal justices favored desegregation of suburban schools.  I suspect that had desegregation orders been extended into suburbia, suburban schools would have been less appealing to white parents.   

Today, progressives tend to oppose exclusive magnet schools (colloquially known as "exam schools") in my city and other American cities. These schools are limited to the most academically gifted students and as a result have reputations as good as those of suburban schools, thus making the city more attractive to middle-class parents.* Conservatives tend to favor continuing these schools in their current form, thus taking what seems to me to be a pro-urban position.

Some progressives believe that the police should be defunded and that only the most serious crimes should be punished; for example, Manhattan's newly elected district attorney has suggested refusing to prosecute a wide variety of minor crimes, and that violent crimes should lead to imprisonment only when "a deadly weapon causes serious physical injury." But both in the 1960s and in recent years, declines in imprisonment rates have been followed by increased crime.** Between 1950 and 1970, the imprisonment rate fell by over 20 percent, and crime began to rise in the early 1960s. Since 2009, the imprisonment rate has fallen by 16 percent, and the most violent crime has started to rise again over the past few years. If this pattern continues and cities grow more violent, they will be less appealing to some people who can afford to live elsewhere. So if we want cities to be appealing to those people, urban politicians should perhaps pump the brakes on their desire to decriminalize and decarcerate.

More broadly, it seems to me that conservatives (or, in cities where there are almost no conservatives by national standards, moderates) tend to be focused on making a city more desirable to people who can afford to live elsewhere, while liberals are more focused on the interests of marginalized people and groups.

Having said that, conservatives tend to be anti-urban in some respects. In my city’s municipal politics, progressives are more willing than conservatives to support bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly streets, while Republicans mostly represent the interests of outer-borough motorists. At the national level, liberals are relatively pro-transit, while conservatives are typically more supportive of sprawl-producing highways.

Another important issue, housing, cuts across ideological lines. Ideally, enough urban housing would be built to satisfy regional needs, thus eliminating the need for people priced out of cities to move to suburbs. But here both extremes seem to coalesce against the middle. In New York politics, the most left-wing politicians tend to oppose new housing in their neighborhoods because they fear gentrification, or at least favor creating procedural obstacles to new housing in the name of community engagement. On the other hand, many Republican politicians oppose upzoning their outer-borough neighborhoods and suburbs, perhaps because they fear that cheap housing might lead to an influx of poor households. The strongest supporters of new housing seem to be relatively moderate Democrats, such as Kathryn Garcia (who finished second in the 2021 mayoral primary).

In sum, political arguments about the proper shape and size of our cities is sometimes a liberal vs. conservative argument—but not always.

*A common progressive counterargument is that city schools are underfunded, and that if city schools received as much money as suburban schools, they would be just as appealing and there would be no need for exam schools. But in fact, some urban school districts outspend suburbs, so this claim is misleading. On the other hand, it could be argued that low-income urban children cost more to educate than wealthier suburban children; however, I am not sure if there is any objective way of quantifying this difference, nor am I persuaded that any politically feasible level of spending will equalize achievement levels enough to make poverty-packed schools as attractive to middle-class parents as more affluent schools.

**The progressive position is that if we just spend enough money on social services, crime will decline to European levels. But poverty nosedived between 1960 and the mid-1970s, when crime exploded more rapidly than at anytime before or since. Similarly, the explosion of anti-COVID public spending was very successful in reducing poverty, but was extremely unsuccessful in reducing the U.S. homicide rate. By contrast, crime declined in the fiscally conservative, tough-on-crime 1990s and 2000s. One might argue that during the high-crime periods, crime might have increased under any circumstances—for example, because of the 1950s baby boom. The fact remains that anti-poverty spending was not the hoped-for magic bullet.