Packing them in

It is the Industrial Revolution all over again in the United States as cities, reversing decades of decline, have begun to suck in population once again. There are, of course, some differences this time. Laborers are drawn into the urban core not to toil away in front of a wall of spinning bobbins but instead to tend Twitter feeds for #brands whilst standing on balance boards (or, alternatively, to clean the toilets and prepare food for the balancers). Whether spinning cotton or spinning JavaScript, though, people need a place to live, and in both the last urban boom and this one cities have struggled to figure out where all of the new workers will sleep at night. In the nineteenth century, city leaders, eager to secure for themselves a mighty population count and its accompanying commercial pride, made sure not to stand in the way of builders and speculators. As a consequence, industrial cities first began to swell and then began to fester with with low-grade housing, produced on the cheap and rented out to naïve newcomers for as much as their pressed wallets could possibly bear.

The squalor and social disorientation of these cities was so unbearable that it became one of the defining features of the late nineteenth century. Having learned the lessons of the tenement-house and the industrial slum we are now more cautious about who may build what where. But are we too cautious? An increasing chorus of commentators, looking at the pricey closets where many in New York, San Francisco, and other élite cities now live, think that the times has come for cities to dramatically relax the control which they exercise over land development. Freeing developers to follow their pocketbooks in the direction of ever-higher, ever-denser downtowns will, according to this reasoning, open up room for thousands more to join the operatives of the New Economy—thereby rescuing them from the economic and environmental catastrophe of the American suburb. City life is associated with both with both higher salaries and a smaller carbon footprint, and the relationship, we are led to understand, must be strictly causal.

That our twentieth-century suburbs, built entirely around the doomed logic of the private automobile and the single-family mortgage-financed home, deserve both disdain and evacuation is not a claim I wish to controvert. But is the only alternative to Orange County really lower Manhattan? Can we extend the opportunity for a good life to millions of new Americans only by penning them up in a handful of economically viable cities—and, in so doing, radically alter the physical character of those cities, perhaps destroying what made them viable in the first place?

Those liberals who seek salvation in the thousand-foot crane, whose vision of happiness extends no further than the nearest cold press, suffer from a failure of the imagination—one which renders them “useful idiots” for the speculators who stand to reap the most certain windfalls from the emergency deregulation of our cities. There are thousands—tens of thousands!—of communities across the country which could, with wise planning and forward-thinking infrastructural investment, serve as good places to live not totally dependent on life in an automobile. To take just one of many examples: last week I stopped in Mansfield, Ohio, a city laid low by manufacturing disinvestment, but whose downtown is filled with cheap, lovely buildings, some of which bear the marks of a nascent revival. Most of the skilled jobs filling up places like the Bay Area could be as easily done in Mansfield as elsewhere, and here one could imagine a vibrant community, full of shops and public spaces, for a community in the tens of thousands, all without having to build above ten stories.

Rebalancing our economic vitality such that a small number of utra-wealthy ZIP codes no longer capture all of our economic growth should be one of the most sought-after priorities for a political program that struggles to fight against inequality. Yet too many liberals, who can see no further than their subway station and their rent payment, have not stopped to consider the consequences of letting cities explode. It is one thing for a well-heeled young blog writer to live in an ultra-dense city; he or she can afford to get out frequently, and to afford the kind of lifestyle amenities which make dense living tolerable. For a working-class family of four, quite by contrast, with little need for 100 bars within walking distance, it is understandable why a tract house in the suburbs—no matter how far a drive from the nearest sushi restaurant—might seem like a preferable alternative to a fiftieth-story apartment. Densification must consider not only those who choose to live in the city (often for a very constrained portion of their lives) but also those who must live in the city. This latter group deserves parks and sunlight and quiet and a humanely scaled environment as much as the rest of us do, and it is not fair to ask them to give this up simply so that others of us can better afford to live a shorter walk away from the Met.