These Mayors Understand How to Run a City

Urban leaders have greeted the return of Donald Trump with about as much enthusiasm as they would have for a reprise of the bubonic plague. The National Urban League imagines an “extreme right-wing” administration that will ban abortion, threaten the civil service, and end both immigration and racial quotas. Trump has even proposed building new planned cities—so-called freedom cities—that could compete with the existing urban landscape. Some urban leaders fear Trump’s actions will force them to “go it alone”—to grapple with their cities’ problems without the benefit of federal funding. But perhaps this is less of a problem than it seems. After all, cities have declined over the past four years with a Democrat in the White House. Weaning cities from federal assistance may be just what’s needed to spur change.

Indeed, several mayors seem ready, if not eager, to go it alone. These include Houston’s John Whitmire, Fort Worth’s Mattie Parker, and San Francisco’s newly elected Mayor Dan Lurie. They are seeking to adjust to harsh urban realities by discarding the often-dreamy progressive notions that tend to dominate urban political discourse. They are keenly aware how cities have lost much of their appeal in recent years to fast-growing suburbs and exurbs and are intent on fighting a patient battle against these tides.

As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.

Unfortunately, many were succeeded by progressive mayors like Bill de Blasio in New York, who undermined the reformers’ achievements, notably in law enforcement. The new generation of urban leaders is today epitomized by Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, who is rapidly driving his once-great city, the nation’s third largest, into financial ruin. Johnson’s formula for destruction: borrowing massively to fund big raises for his teachers’ union backers while driving away many of his most productive citizens.

The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, is engulfed in a wildfire catastrophe whose end has still not been reached. Critics across the political spectrum have ripped Mayor Karen Bass for her ineffective and inattentive leadership. But even before the wildfires, Bass, like many of her predecessors in the mayor’s office, had rejected sensible policies, especially the pro-business, pro-public-safety approach of Republican Richard Riordan, who left office in 2001. City government has become progressively dominated by left-wing politicians and divisive ethnic activists, as well as corruption, leading to multiple arrests of city councilmembers and commissioners. Despite massive public expenditures, the city has the nation’s second-largest homeless population and faces a deepening budget hole, while building less new housing per capita than many other large U.S. metros. Its downtown, beneficiary of billions of dollars in spending on transit as well as a convention center, has devolved into something of a disaster zone, including a graffiti-strewn, uncompleted high-rise.

America’s new realist mayors, by contrast, look to restrain spending while focusing on the increasingly stiff competition for companies and workers. They recognize that downtowns in particular have lost almost half their working population in the past three years, a trend that seems unlikely to change dramatically anytime soon. Worse still, the very jobs that cities rely on, such as those in finance and professional services, are also the most likely to be hybrid or fully remote.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Davide Ragusa, under CC 1.0 License.