January 17, 2011 - 8:29 am
Here’s a question for everyone.
“Re-urbanization” — using legal and economic coercion to pack us all back into dense cities — is the rallying cry of a certain breed of “anti-sprawl” progressives. (Although I suspect the breed is far from uncommon.) But look at Detroit. The New Deal coalition of Big Business/Big Labor/Big Government has held sway there for decades — and the city has emptied of people and productivity to a the point where their public schools “would close nearly half of its schools in the next two years, and increase high school class sizes to 62 by the following year.”
So I guess the question is: They couldn’t help but ruin one major city, how can we trust them with a nation of them?
These are two separate points that don’t contradict: “Liberals mismanaged Detroit” and “High-density urban environments are better places to live.”
The answer is cities with centrist or right-wing leadership. The new mayor of Detroit is turning the city around, though having a gangsta mayor and before that an extremely racist mayor gives the guy a lot of ground to cover.
High-density urban life might be better for you, but that’s a far-from-universal preference. The issue is, do progressives have any right to herd us into cities, and even if they did, why should we let them given their track record in Detroit (and elsewhere)?