“America’s treasured cities,” writes semi-libertarian Jeffrey Tucker, are in “grave danger.” He believes that people are leaving cities to get away from “forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status” due to the pandemic. He doesn’t consider the possibility that people didn’t want to be in cities in the first place and were all too happy to use the pandemic as an excuse to leave.
Do we treasure living in the cities or the suburbs? Photo by Andreas Praefcke.
Before the pandemic, urbanists were chortling about the “triumph of the city.” World population data showed that urban areas were growing while rural numbers were shrinking. In citing these data, urbanists conflated “urban areas” and “cities” to make their case, effectively arguing that more people moving to the suburban parts of urban areas meant that more people wanted to live in the dense central cities.
Yet that clearly was not the case. According to 2020 census data, the nation’s 100 largest cities that are not suburbs of other cities collectively housed less than 64 million people, less than 20 percent of the nation’s population. The smallest of these 100 cities have about 200,000 residents. With 20 percent of people living in small (under 5,000) towns or rural areas, that left 60 percent of people living in suburbs or small cities (5,000 to 200,000). That hardly sounds like a triumph of big, dense cities.
Moreover, as the Antiplanner has pointed out before, a 2018 Gallup poll found that 40 percent of people who lived in big cities wanted to live somewhere else, mostly suburbs or rural areas. A 2021 repeat of that poll found that the share of people who wanted to live in big cities declined only slightly (from 12 to 11 percent), so the pandemic didn’t significantly change where people wanted to live; it only enabled more people to live where they wanted to.
Tucker is the founder of the Brownstone Institute, an organization opposed to government mandates, especially those related to the pandemic. So Tucker looked at the data showing people moving to suburbs, small towns, and rural areas and blamed the trend on the policies he opposed rather than on people’s genuine desires to live in such areas. Yet people weren’t “forced” to move out of big cities, as he claims; they did so because they wanted to even before the pandemic.
Large, dense cities are an artifact of a time when most urban jobs were in downtown factories and walking was the only transportation affordable to most factory workers. Those conditions began to change more than a century ago and, as a result, most major U.S. cities lost population between 1950 and 2000. The pandemic merely accelerated this trend.
If Tucker were a true libertarian, he wouldn’t be muttering about “treasured cities” or imagining there is some sort of Anthony Fauci-inspired secret plan to depopulate those cities. Instead, he would be celebrating that more people are able to leave the crowded, congested, polluted central cities in favor of whatever lifestyles they prefer more.
It’s complicated.
We can see that from the accounts Christopher Ingraham shared when he moved to a small town in northwest Minnesota.
Was it for a better quality of life? Sure.
Was it for a home his family could afford to buy? Sure.
I suspect many of those that made these moves post-covid were already looking to do it. Covid didn’t change them; it was the catalyst.
It’s complicated.
But it isn’t really complicated at all. Population has been dispersing away from dense areas for decades. Contrary to the proclamations of so many armchair urbanists, only a small minority of people are interested in living in an environment of flesh crushing human density. The vast majority of the population prefers personal space. It’s not a “majority rule” issue – it’s a personal preference issue. No amount of faux economic argument, faux environmental argument, or faux efficiency argument from AUs changes reality. They often try to resort to shaming on these grounds because their arguments just don’t hold water.
I appreciate the Antiplanner points out how urbanists conflate “city” with “urban areas”. AUs are deliberately sloppy with these terms. They have to be.
I often hear arguments that government regulation is preventing so many various housing types and zones. Well in Texas, only cities have zoning. There is no zoning in unincorporated areas of counties. In other words, developers could build what they want. Even in the absence of zoning restrictions you will not find the housing styles or built forms promoted by AUs. Why? Because the market doesn’t support them.
Globally, urban areas in major regions were growing.
outside the west, we call these places Slums.
Part of the reason why downtowns won’t return is because in the *best* case, they’re based on restaurants, bars, tourism, and govt employees. The worst case is empty buildings, vagrants, crime, and govt employees; The latter of which doesn’t do well to attract the first or make them decent places to go to. it’s catering to it’s demographic voter base. the American justice system overwhelmed by diversity it wasn’t designed for. Average Black IQ is 85, Latino IQ…. pretty much same and Migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, MidEast, it’s even lower that they occupy immiserate underclass. That’s why Ilhan Omars district resembles the nation she fled.
Many such examples, sadly it also can’t be fixed with the current voting electorate. ONCE a School/Neighborhood/City becomes white minority, it economically/socially collapses in about 3 or 4 generations.
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Well in Texas, only cities have zoning. There is no zoning in unincorporated areas of counties.
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In some states, Texas being one of them, some city ordiances like zoning are applied to unicorporated areas in counties near those cities.
Cities can have limited authority in the extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) but those powers tend to vary with the size of the city. There isn’t going to be a blanket prohibition against housing types. The purpose of the ETJ is to allow for expansion of city boundaries in the future and they don’t tend to cut off all other options for land use up front. In unincorporated areas outside ETJs there are no zoning restrictions whatsoever. Texas has lots and lots of land that is outside ETJs. There are plenty of ETJ areas where there are no restrictions on type or built form for housing. Yet you don’t see all the housing aesthetically acceptable to AUs show up – because the market doesn’t support them.
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That’s why Ilhan Omars district resembles the nation she fled.
” ~LazyReader
FFS, can you be any more ignorant?!?!???
First of all that IQ by “race” is well known to be pure BS devoid of meaningful evidence. It’s down right racist. Stop it.
2nd, Ilhan’s district is MPLS + some parts of a few inner ring suburbs. It’s one of the whitest, if not _thee_ whitest US congressional district in the country that covers a major core city.
Any notion that Ilhan’s district resembles anything in Somalia is born of your ignorantly lazy “thinking”, LazyReader. FFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota's_5th_congressional_district