Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Made Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier

by Edward Glaeser

  Today, urban distress troubles the late-nineteenth-century cities that formed as those Massachusetts towns declined. The second half of the twentieth century hit these industrial cities hard, and the recent recession dealt them another blow. The people suffering in those cities deserve our support, but we should not freeze urban change or artificially forestall urban decline. People moved to the Sunbelt for good reasons, and there’s no reason why the country as a whole should try to restore Detroit’s peak population of 1.85 million. National government should try to reduce human misery, but it shouldn’t try to stop the great course of urban change. Those currents are just too strong to hold back, and there’s no reason to even try.

  For decades, the federal government has subsidized inane attempts at urban renewal, such as Buffalo’s light rail system, and acted as if this balanced antiurban policies like the highway system and the home mortgage interest deduction. But these policies make little economic sense, and they don’t help the poor people who live in such cities.

  Helping poor people is simple justice; helping poor places is far more difficult to justify. Why should the government effectively bribe people to live in declining areas? Why should growing areas be handicapped simply to keep people in older places? Moreover, investments in places don’t always benefit the people living there. How were the residents of Poletown helped when the city of Detroit helped General Motors evict them? Renters who lived near the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao may well have been hurt by the art gallery, at least if they had little taste for contemporary art or architecture, because their rents rose significantly.

  The conflict between people and place got national attention in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina destroyed a great swath of New Orleans. President Bush got into the urban-renewal business and declared that “the great city of New Orleans will rise again.” He shouldn’t have committed the federal government to an expensive goal that was unlikely to do much good. New Orleans reached its economic apogee in 1840 when it was the great port of the antebellum South. The city has been losing population since 1960 because, like Detroit, changing patterns of technology meant that firms no longer needed access to its port, and, as in Liverpool, containerization meant that its port employs fewer workers.

  Hurricane Katrina was a great human tragedy, and common decency pushes us to help the people who were hurt by the storm. But again, helping poor people doesn’t mean helping poor places. Indeed, new research on the human diaspora created by the storm shows that the children who left New Orleans have learned more since leaving than comparable children who stayed. Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote found that children displaced from New Orleans by Katrina had a significant improvement in their test scores. He found that the biggest beneficiaries of the exodus were children from poorly performing schools who left the New Orleans area altogether.

  Well-meaning urban advocates, motivated by the real suffering in the Crescent City, proposed spending up to $200 billion rebuilding New Orleans. That’s more than $400,000 for every man, woman, and child living in the city before the hurricane, or more than $200,000 for every household in the much larger New Orleans metropolitan area. Surely the people of New Orleans would have been better off just getting that money directly, in the form of checks or housing and school vouchers, than for great gobs of cash to go to contractors. If it wasn’t for the durability of its homes, the city would have been much smaller a long time ago. No matter how much we all love New Orleans jazz, it never made sense to spend more than $100 billion putting infrastructure in a place that lost its economic rationale long ago. By wrapping policy discussions up in misty dreams of urban comeback, absurdly expensive projects suddenly seem reasonable.

  The government shouldn’t be indifferent to the problems of New Orleans or Detroit or Buffalo. Cities house many of America’s poorest people, and a humane society must help them. However, national policy should be aimed at giving those people the skills they need to compete, wherever they choose to live, rather than encouraging them to stay in one particular locale. Above all else, every child should have access to good schools and safety, and the federal government has every reason to invest in America’s children, whether they’re in Houston, New York, or Detroit.

  The Challenge of Urban Poverty

  Cities can be places of great inequality; they attract some of the world’s richest and poorest people. Although poverty can accompany urban decline, poverty often shows that a city is functioning well. Cities attract poor people because they’re good places for poor people to live. But whenever people crowd together, it’s more likely that disease will spread and water will become contaminated. When those crowded people are disproportionately poor, then the risks increase, because they have fewer resources to handle such problems on their own. At the local level, high concentrations of population and poverty demand strong policies that will combat the costs of density. Clean water and safe streets did not come easily to the cities of the West, and they won’t appear automatically in the developing world today. In the West, creating healthy, attractive cities required huge financial investments and often heavy-handed governmental intervention. George Waring never could have cleaned Manhattan’s streets if he had worried about offending every citizen who was inconvenienced by his street cleaners. Singapore has been so effective at providing a clean and safe city because its government operates with fewer constraints than governments in many other places.

  But even the strongest cities can’t—and shouldn’t have to—handle the costs of urban poverty by themselves. In the 1960s and 1970s, rich and middle-class city dwellers fled to the suburbs in part to escape having to pay the costs of addressing urban inequality. Rich enclaves have often formed right outside of urban political boundaries, where the prosperous can be close to the city without having to pay its taxes or attend its schools. A level playing field means that people should be choosing where to live based on their desires for neighborhood or opportunity, not based on where they can avoid paying for the poor.

  A nation’s poor are every citizen’s responsibility, not just the people who happen to live in the same political jurisdiction. It is fairer, both to the poor and to cities, if social services are funded at the national rather than the local level. We remedy some of this problem when states and the federal government provide aid to poorer areas, but middle-class people still have too much incentive to flee cities and avoid paying for the poor.

  One downside of America’s education system that I have already discussed is that too many children end up with too little learning. A second problem is that our localized school system creates strong incentives for people to suburbanize in order to get better schools. There is no innate reason why suburbs should have better schools than cities. Paris has some of the best public high schools in the world, and some of the finest schools in America are big-city private schools. Yet the combination of inner-city poverty and locally funded schooling means that urban public schools are often a disaster. In some cases, this represents mismanagement, but even in the best-run school systems, urban poverty creates enormous challenges for educators.

  Poor children are more likely to have behavioral problems and less training at home. Holding spending constant, schools filled with well-off children have much higher test scores than schools for the poor. That doesn’t mean that the poor can’t thrive—many of them do—but it does mean that poverty makes education more difficult. Because public schools bring together all the children in a school district, the presence of poverty in big cities pushes the prosperous to flee to form their own enclaves.

  There are less-antiurban alternatives to the current system. Regional voucher programs could break the link between where a family lives and where its children go to school. If big-city schools can harness the forces of competition and variety that thrive in dense metropolises, then urban schools will start improving. More aid to big-city schools is also an effective, if expensive, means of leveling the playing field. Grouping students together by skill level, whe
ther in separate classrooms or in magnet schools, also makes urban public education more attractive to parents of bright children. The opponents of tracking argue that it deprives less-fortunate children of good peers, and they are right. But if poorer students are going to be deprived of those peers anyway, because of flight to the suburbs, then it’s better for wealthier families to stay in the city.

  When the neighbors of poor people are forced to carry single-handedly the financial and social burdens of poverty, then those neighbors will leave, impoverishing cities further and isolating the poor. A far better and more practical approach would be for higher levels of government to distribute funds in a way that offsets the added costs of poverty. In many states, including Massachusetts, state aid to localities increases with the poverty of the locale, and that makes sense. Providing more support for cities that must address the problems of poverty reduces the incentive for richer people to leave those cities.

  The Rise of the Consumer City

  Of course, successful cities attract rich people as well as poor people. As cities have become safer and healthier, they have become increasingly attractive to the well-heeled. Today, New York residents are actually willing to pay a premium to enjoy its pleasures. The success of London and New York and Paris today reflects, in part, their strengths as consumer cities. There is every reason to think that an increasingly prosperous world will continue to place more value on the innovative enjoyments that cities can provide. The bottom-up nature of urban innovation suggests that the best economic development strategy may be to attract smart people and get out of their way.

  But how can places become consumer cities and attract skilled residents? One vision, espoused by urbanist Richard Florida, emphasizes the arts, toleration for alternative lifestyles, and a fun, happening downtown. A second vision focuses on better providing the core public services that have always been the province of cities: safe streets, fast commutes, good schools. City leaders typically have scarce resources; they can’t do everything for everybody. Even if one believes, as I do, that every city should subscribe to a bit of each vision, there will always be the question of where to invest the revenues of city government and the energy of its leaders.

  In a sense, the relative appeal of the two visions depends on whom you think of when you imagine an ideal citizen. The first vision, with its fondness for coffeehouses and public sculpture, seems aimed at a twenty-eight-year-old wearing a black turtleneck and reading Proust. The second vision, with its focus on core urban services, seems to address the needs of a forty-two-year old biotech researcher concerned about whether her family will be as comfortable in Boston as it is in Charlotte. There are roughly three times as many people in their thirties, forties, and fifties as there are in their twenties, so it would be a mistake for cities to think that they can survive solely as magnets for the young and hip.

  As much as I appreciate urban culture, aesthetic interventions can never substitute for the urban basics. A sexier public space won’t bring many jobs if it isn’t safe. All the cafés in Paris won’t entice parents to put their kids in a bad public school system. If commuting into a city is a lengthy torment, then companies will head for the suburbs, no matter how many cool museums the city has.

  The Curse of NIMBYism

  In cities and suburban enclaves alike, opposition to change means blocking new development and stopping new infrastructure projects. Residents are in effect saying “not in my backyard.” In older cities like New York, NIMBYism hides under the cover of preservationism, perverting the worthy cause of preserving the most beautiful reminders of our past into an attempt to freeze vast neighborhoods filled with undistinguished architecture. In highly attractive cities, the worst aspects of this opposition to change are that it ensures that building heights will be low, new homes will be few, prices will be high, and the city will be off-limits to all but rich people.

  Unfortunately, it is all too easy to understand why people oppose change:

  • You’ve bought a house in a leafy suburb. Right now, there aren’t a lot of homes there, and you like that. After all, that’s why you bought. A neighboring landowner wants to put up twenty townhouses on her five acres of land. You’re furious. That’s not why you came to this town. You don’t want the bother of the nearby construction or the extra traffic once the new neighbors move in. You want things as they were.

  • You’ve bought an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with lovely views. A developer wants to put up a high-rise across the street. You’d be able to see it from your apartment, and you don’t want to lose your views. Also, you’re not sure you’d like the new people who’d move into that building. You want the neighborhood to stay the way it was when you moved in. You want things as they were.

  • You’ve lived in a Boston triple-decker for twenty years. A university wants to build a contemporary art museum on its land a few blocks away. You’ll be able to see it from your apartment. You expect that the museum will attract many outsiders into your area. You don’t much like contemporary art anyhow. You want things as they were.

  These are real-world examples of NIMBYism. Case by case, they couldn’t be more comprehensible. Someone else is changing your neighborhood. You don’t want to live in a denser, or taller, or artsier place. You just want the status quo. What could be more reasonable than that?

  But NIMBYism that seems reasonable can often have terrible consequences. Stopping new construction may seem like a good idea to you, but it imposes costs on everyone who would have liked to live in a new subdivision or apartment building. Stopping a new, privately funded museum deprives the city of an amenity that would have appealed to many residents and brought in tourists who would have contributed to the local economy. The interests of people who oppose change are certainly comprehensible, but their interests usually don’t match the public interest.

  Moreover, in each of these cases, the angry neighbor doesn’t even own the property that he wants to control. The property owner with five acres owns her land, as does the urban developer and the university. The enemies of change essentially want to control somebody else’s property. From that vantage point, stopping growth isn’t so much maintaining the status quo as it is taking someone else’s rights and reducing the value of someone else’s property.

  There are two powerful, interlocking psychological biases that lie behind the popularity of NIMBYism. The first is called status quo bias, which is an overly strong attachment to the current state of affairs. One set of famous experiments illustrating this bias shows that people will forgo far more money to keep a mug that they have been given than they will pay to buy the exact same mug. The second bias is impact bias, which causes people to significantly overestimate the impact that a negative shock will have on their happiness. The enemies of a new high-rise may think that the tower will make them miserable, but in reality, they will quickly adapt to the new situation.

  Over the past forty years, we’ve experienced a little-remarked revolution in property rights in America. We have gone from a system wherein people could essentially do what they wanted with their own property to a system wherein neighbors have enormous powers to restrict growth and change. Some of this revolution in rights is for the better, but much of it is for the worse.

  Not all change is good, but much change is necessary if the world is to become more productive, affordable, exciting, innovative, and environmentally friendly. At the national level, we mistakenly oppose change when federal policies try to preserve older places at the expense of growing regions. At a local level, activists oppose change by fighting growth in their own communities. Their actions are understandable, but their local focus equips them poorly to consider the global consequences of their actions. Stopping new development in attractive areas makes housing more expensive for people who don’t currently live in those areas. Those higher housing costs in turn make it more expensive for companies to open businesses. In naturally low-carbon-emissions areas, like California, preventing develop
ment means pushing it to less environmentally friendly places, like noncoastal California and suburban Phoenix. Local environmentalism is often bad environmentalism.

  In older cities, preservationists can be the great enemies of change. They couch their arguments in terms of beauty and history. I respect their values enormously, but also believe their power must be checked. Many buildings must be protected, but cities also must grow to thrive. Striking the right balance between protecting architectural treasures and allowing change will never be easy. It’s hard enough in San Francisco and New York, and it becomes even more complicated in places like Paris and Rome, where humanity’s history is written in stone. The key is to make the most use of the space that is allowed to change. In no way do I favor running roughshod over the most important and beautiful structures in older cities, but in those areas where rebuilding is permitted, it makes sense to allow as much new development as possible. Smarter preservationism would push new buildings to be taller, not shorter. Building taller, newer structures would reduce the pressure to tear down other, older monuments.

  The importance of allowing change becomes particularly clear when America or anyplace else considers building new infrastructure. The same forces that have slowed private development of homes and apartment buildings have also made it far more difficult to construct urban megaprojects that could benefit cities and society as a whole. In France, Germany, and Japan, high-speed rail service has connected major cities for decades. In 1994, Amtrak tried to bring such rail service to the United States with its Acela line. The Acela can reach speeds of 150 miles per hour, which would bring New York-to-Boston train service down to less than ninety minutes, making trains a speedy, ecofriendly alternative to plane service. However, NIMBYist politics keeps Amtrak from laying the straight track that would enable the Acela to reach those speeds. Its current, circuitous route keeps speeds down to an average of 86 miles per hour, and travel times between New York and Boston exceed three hours. In today’s political climate, community opposition makes it impossible to straighten a route, even if the economic and environmental advantages of faster rail service outweigh the costs.