The Antiplanner » News commentary » Densification the Hammer; Cities the Nail

Densification the Hammer; Cities the Nail

By | | News commentary, Urban areas

With 560 murders this year and counting, Chicago has become known as the murder capital of the nation. Some take issue with this, noting that Chicago’s murder rate per 100,000 people is much lower than many other cities including Baltimore, New Orleans, and Newark. Yet the moniker has stuck, leading many to ask why Chicago violence is so bad.

According to Atlantic‘s CityLab and Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, the answer is urban sprawl. Both say there is a strong correlation between declining city populations and rising crime.

Of “the six U.S. cities that have earned the dubious distinction of official ‘murder capital'” over the past 30 years, says CityLab, four have had declining populations. The Metropolitan Planning Council points to a study that found, “almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased outmigration rather than a decrease in arrivals.” The solution, both CityLab and the MPO argue, is to promote gentrification and immigration.

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But the MPO article fails to add the conclusions of the study it cites, which was written by economists at the University of Michigan and University of Chicago. After looking carefully at crime and population flows, the study says that “Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation.”

In other words, curbing urban sprawl won’t stop crime. The solution to rising crime is to stop crime, and that in turn may slow urban sprawl. But, given that the hammer of densification is their only (or at least their favorite) tool, urban planners see every city as a nail.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

4 Responses to Densification the Hammer; Cities the Nail

  1. JOHN1000 says:
    October 12, 2016 at 9:25 am

    The writers of the study were being extra careful not to offend the planners when they wrote the conclusion: “Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation.”

    Appears? Not too many people say: “Hey. let’s go move into a neighborhood where we can get shot.”

  2. prk166 says:
    October 12, 2016 at 7:40 pm

    Culture matters; in this case some may call it a sub culture.

  3. CapitalistRoader says:
    October 15, 2016 at 9:59 am

    Related: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

    See, I’m from a “blue” state — Illinois — but the state isn’t blue. Freaking Chicago is blue. I’m from a tiny town in one of the blood-red areas…As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. “Their ways are strange.”

    And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.

    Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes — either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

    “Nothing that happens outside the city matters!” they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you’d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

    But who cares about those people, right? What’s newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

    …

    If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said the fear and hatred wasn’t of people with brown skin, but of that specific tribe they have in Chicago — you know, the guys with the weird slang, music and clothes, the dope fiends who murder everyone they see. It was all part of the bizarro nature of the cities, as perceived from afar — a combination of hyper-aggressive savages and frivolous white elites. Their ways are strange. And it wasn’t like pop culture was trying to talk me out of it.

    If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called “Cost of Living.” Let’s say you’re a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen’s and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you’re paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters. Unless, of course, you’re planning to move to one of “those” neighborhoods (hope you like being set on fire!).

    …

    And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, “You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!” Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities.

  4. Scott says:
    October 17, 2016 at 6:25 pm

    Many flaws with the supposed correlation about decreasing population & increasing crime. In addition to people wanting to leave a city with high crime, the history has been over-looked.

    Many older cities (east of the Miss. River & St. Louis) had population peaks in the 1950 census. Since then, population gradually declined for most of those cities, while crime decreased too, until recently.

    The reason for the increase crime started with what’s known as the Ferguson effect. Additionally, Bawreck Obummer, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Black Lives Matter and other factors have added to that. Two main results of all of that is that some are more embolden to crime, and police are holding back for fear of being labeled racist & fear more than previously for their lives.

    Sometimes, there are even directions from the mayor for police to pull back. Most notably that happened in the Baltimore riots. I also noticed that in San Jose when Trump visited earlier this year — not riots, but police didn’t protect persons from violent anti-Trump protestors, as directed by mayor Sam Liccardo.

    BTW, Sam Liccardo was a guest speaker in a property class (for an MUP) that I took almost a decade ago when he was a councilman. I could tell then that he wasn’t real bright. For example, there was a recently finished 12-story apartment building about 2 miles south of downtown. The first story has space for retail, which was about half empty.

    He then made several errors. He blamed the developer for that. He doesn’t realize that a sizable customer base is needed for any business. He made the absurd assumption that having a handful of retailers in the same building will significantly reduce driving.

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