Uneasy Money

Paul Krugman has a post about a New Yorker piece by Tim Wu discussing the surprising and disturbing increase in vacant storefronts in the very prosperous and desirable West Village in Lower Manhattan. I agree with most of what Krugman has to say, but I was struck by what seemed to me to be a misplaced emphasis in his post. My comment is not meant so much as a criticism, as an observation on the complexity of the forces that affect life in the city, which makes it tricky to offer any sort of general ideological prescriptions for policy. Krugman warns against adopting a free-market ideological stance – which is fine – but fails to observe that statist interventionism has had far more devastating effects on urban life. We should be wary of both extremes.

Krugman starts off his discussion with the following statement, with which, in principle, I don’t take issue, but is made so emphatically that it suggests the opposite mistake of the one that Krugman warns against.

First, when it comes to things that make urban life better or worse, there is absolutely no reason to have faith in the invisible hand of the market. External economies are everywhere in an urban environment. After all, external economies — the perceived payoff to being near other people engaged in activities that generate positive spillovers — is the reason cities exist in the first place. And this in turn means that market values can very easily produce destructive incentives. When, say, a bank branch takes over the space formerly occupied by a beloved neighborhood shop, everyone may be maximizing returns, yet the disappearance of that shop may lead to a decline in foot traffic, contribute to the exodus of a few families and their replacement by young bankers who are never home, and so on in a way that reduces the whole neighborhood’s attractiveness.

The basic point is surely correct; urban environments are highly susceptible, owing to their high population density, to both congestion and pollution, on the one hand, and to positive spillovers, on the other, and cities require a host of public services and amenities provided, more or less indiscriminately, to large numbers of people. Market incentives, to the exclusion of various kinds of collective action, cannot be relied upon to cope with congestion and pollution or to provide public services and amenities. But it is equally true that cities cannot function well without ample scope for private initiative and market exchange. The challenge for any city is to find a reasonable balance between allowing individuals to organize their lives, and pursue their own interests, as they see fit, and providing an adequate supply of public services and amenities, while limiting the harmful effects that individuals living in close proximity inevitably have on each other. It is certainly fair to point out that unfettered market forces alone can’t produce good outcomes in dense urban environments, and understandable that Krugman, a leading opponent of free-market dogmatism, would say so, but he curiously misses an opportunity, two paragraphs down, to make an equally cogent point about the dangers of going too far in the other direction.

Curiously, the missed opportunity arises just when, in the spirit of even-handedness and objectivity, Krugman acknowledges that increasing income equality does not necessarily enhance the quality of urban life.

Politically, I’d like to say that inequality is bad for urbanism. That’s far from obvious, however. Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities right in the middle of the great postwar expansion, an era of widely shared economic growth, relatively equal income distribution, empowered labor — and collapsing urban life, as white families fled the cities and a combination of highway building and urban renewal destroyed many neighborhoods.

This just seems strange to me. Krugman focuses on declining income equality, as if that was what was driving the collapse in urban life, while simultaneously seeming to recognize, though with remarkable understatement, that the collapse coincided with white families fleeing cities and neighborhoods being destroyed by highway building and urban renewal, as if the highway building and the urban renewal were exogenous accidents that just then happened to be wreaking havoc on American urban centers. But urban renewal was a deliberate policy adopted by the federal government with the explicit aim of improving urban life, and Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities precisely to show that large-scale redevelopment plans adopted to “renew” urban centers were actually devastating them. And the highway building that Krugman mentions was an integral part of a larger national plan to build the interstate highway system, a system that, to this day, is regarded as one of the great accomplishments of the federal government in the twentieth century, a system that subsidized the flight of white people to the suburbs facilitated the white flight lamented by Krugman. The collapse of urban life did not just happen; it was the direct result of policies adopted by the federal government.

In arguing for his fiscal stimulus package, Barack Obama, who ought to have known better, invoked the memory of the bipartisan consensus supporting the Interstate Highway Act. May God protect us from another such bipartisan consensus. I found the following excerpt from a book by Eric Avila The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, which is worth sharing:

In this age of divided government, we look to the 1950s as a golden age of bipartisan unity. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, often invokes the landmark passage of the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act to remind the nation that Republicans and Democrats can unite under a shared sense of common purpose. Introduced by President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, the Federal Aid Highway Act, originally titled the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act, won unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans alike, uniting the two parties in a shared commitment to building a national highway infrastructure. This was big government at its biggest, the single largest federal expenditure in American history before the advent of the Great Society.

Yet although Congress unified around the construction of a national highway system, the American people did not. Contemporary nostalgia for bipartisan support around the Interstate Highway Act ignores the deep fissures that it inflicted on the American city after World War II: literally, by cleaving the urban built environment into isolated parcels of race and class, and figuratively, by sparking civic wars over the freeway’s threat to specific neighborhoods and communities. This book explores the conflicted legacy of that megaproject: even as the interstate highway program unified a nation around a 42,800-mile highway network, it divided the American people, as it divided their cities, fueling new social tensions that flared during the tumultuous 1960s.

Talk of a “freeway revolt” permeates the annals of American urban history. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of scholars and journalists introduced this term to describe the groundswell of grassroots opposition to urban highway construction. Their account saluted the urban women and men who stood up to state bulldozers, forging new civic strategies to rally against the highway-building juggernaut and to defeat the powerful interests it represented. It recounted these episodic victories with flair and conviction, doused with righteous invocations of “power to the people.” In the afterglow of the sixties, a narrative of the freeway revolt emerged: a grass- roots uprising of civic-minded people, often neighbors, banding together to defeat the technocrats, the oil companies, the car manufacturers, and ultimately the state itself, saving the city from the onslaught of automobiles, expressways, gas stations, parking lots, and other civic detriments. This story has entered the lore of the sixties, a mythic “shout in the street” that proclaimed the death of the modernist city and its master plans.

By and large, however, the dominant narrative of the freeway revolt is a racialized story, describing the victories of white middle-class or affluent communities that mustered the resources and connections to force concessions from the state. If we look closely at where the freeway revolt found its greatest success—Cambridge, Massachusetts; Lower Manhattan; the French Quarter in New Orleans; Georgetown in Washington D.C.; Beverly Hills, California; Princeton, New Jersey; Fells Point in Baltimore—we discover what this movement was really about and whose interests it served. As bourgeois counterparts to the inner-city uprising, the disparate victories of the freeway revolt illustrate how racial and class privilege structure the metropolitan built environment, demonstrating the skewed geography of power in the postwar American city.

One of my colleagues once told me a joke: if future anthropologists want to find the remains of people of color in a postapocalypse America, they will simply have to find the ruins of the nearest freeway. Yet such collegial jocularity contained a sobering reminder that the victories associated with the freeway revolt usually did not extend to urban communities of color, where highway construction often took a disastrous toll. To greater and lesser degrees, race—racial identity and racial ideology—shaped the geography of highway construction in urban America, fueling new patterns of racial inequality that exacerbated an unfolding “urban crisis” in postwar America. In many southern cities, local city planners took advantage of federal moneys to target black communities point-blank; in other parts of the nation, highway planners found the paths of least resistance, wiping out black commer- cial districts, Mexican barrios, and Chinatowns and desecrating land sacred to indigenous peoples. The bodies and spaces of people of color, historically coded as “blight” in planning discourse, provided an easy target for a federal highway program that usually coordinated its work with private redevelop- ment schemes and public policies like redlining, urban renewal, and slum clearance.

One of my favorite posts in the nearly four years that I’ve been blogging was one with a horrible title: “Intangible Infrastructural Capital.” My main point in that post was that the huge investment in building physical infrastructure during the years of urban renewal and highway building was associated with the mindless destruction of vastly more valuable intangible infrastructure: knowledge, expectations (in both the positive and normative senses of that term), webs of social relationships and hierarchies, authority structures and informal mechanisms of social control that held communities together. I am neither a sociologist nor a social psychologist, but I have no doubt that the tragic dispersal of all those communities took an enormous physical, economic, and psychological toll on the displaced, forced to find new places to live, new environments to adapt to, often in new brand-new dysfunctional communities bereft of the intangible infrastructure needed to preserve social order and peace. But don’t think that it was only cities that suffered. The horrific interstate highway system was also a (slow, but painful) death sentence for hundreds, if not thousands, of small towns, whose economic viability was undermined by the superhighways.

And what about all those vacant storefronts in the West Village? Tim Wu suggests that the owners are keeping the properties off the market in hopes of finding a really lucrative tenant, like maybe a bank branch. Maybe the city should tax properties kept vacant for more than two months by the owner after having terminated a tenant’s lease.