On Cities, Suburbs, and Strategies
There isn’t a whole lot to disagree with in Joel Kotkin’s latest, “The Myth of the Back-to-the-City Migration” at the Wall Street Journal. His recommendations are on target as well:
The condo bust should provide a cautionary tale for developers, planners and the urban political class, particularly those political “progressives” who favor using regulatory and fiscal tools to promote urban densification. It is simply delusional to try forcing a market beyond proven demand.
Rather than ignore consumer choice, cities and suburbs need to focus on basic tasks like creating jobs, improving schools, developing cultural amenities and promoting public safety. It is these more mundane steps—not utopian theory or regulatory diktats—that ultimately make successful communities.
There’s nothing more necessary today than creating jobs and improving schools. Cultural amenities are a nice plus and public safety, well that’s crucial too. Now that the Obama administration’s bankrupt strategy for stimulating our way out of the recession with more stimulus to big business has failed to stave off the double dip, let’s see if it can do something in the two and a half years it has left before the radical Right takes over? How about a Manhattan-Project-level initiative to develop and implement alternative forms of energy to get us off away from petroleum? How about finding new ways to develop small, clean forms of industry? How about funding repair of critical infrastructure so that commuters from suburbs have better alternatives to driving? How about downsizing the military and restructuring the tax system so that the super-rich would have to pay their fair share, so that some of the massive income inequalities of the last two decades could be undone? Alas, that’s wishful thinking.
