Why American Cities (Actually) Suck

My response to Noah Smith's case for Carceral Urbanism explaining what actually ails U.S. cities and it's not primarily law enforcement.

Anti-city politics in the United States is a major, if not primary cause of why US cities are in such poor shape to global peers. As highlighted in this infamous headline.

Usual disclaimer: The opinions in this article and all articles only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.

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If you’re an American who has traveled to a high-income, developed nation in East Asia or Europe, it’s easy to become jealous that safe, modern cities of that caliber do not exist in the United States. Frustration with crime fueled some right-wing shifts in cities in the 2024 election. Noah Smith, a writer from Bloomberg, makes a popular case that American cities must become totally crime-intolerant through higher levels of policing. Noah argues that Americans are “NIMBYs” because they feel that increased density levels and more public transit will increase area crime. He attributes this fear to major cities like New York or Los Angeles being associated with rampant crime and lawlessness, while European and Asian cities are much more orderly (note the photo choice of armed French police in Paris).

Increasing police staffing levels to European averages per capita is a good thing (I featured a great guest article on this topic), however, I don’t believe this will make Americans pro-urbanization, nor will it solve the fundamental economic and social tensions we have in the United States. “Carceral urbanism” selectively focuses on higher police per capita rates in Europe and Asia, but understates social safety nets and political culture which explain why foreign cities are nicer.

It also pretends that the U.S. hasn’t tried aggressively policing urban areas for the last half-century. Urban law enforcement relaxed in the 2010s and police abuse became more salient due to crime being at historic lows since the national crime wave of the 1970s through 1990s. Studies show that increasing police officers and income did decrease crime, but most of the decline was due to the removal of lead poisoning young people’s brains and better crime-fighting organization by police. (As I’ve discussed here.) As we rush to rely on the police to combat a new pandemic-initiated crime wave that is already receding nationally regardless of local law enforcement, we should think holistically about what makes our cities worse than our global peers.

— What Makes America Unsafe —

As Noah notes, the United States has a shockingly and embarrassingly high homicide rate by high-income nation standards. Even though the mass shootings take the headlines, the main culprit is handguns. But, removing guns, are Americans an especially criminal people? Some evidence suggests Americans aren’t more criminal than Europeans, just more deadly. Research conducted in 1999 by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that overall U.S. crime rates (including abuse, rape, and property crime) are not higher than those in many European nations. However, where the U.S. stands out is in homicide rates. Many of these homicides aren’t from crimes in progress such as robbery, but are often by hot-headed and ignorant young men who use their guns for arguments or domestic violence. We had a lot of that during the pandemic.

Guns is something other nations don’t have to deal with, yet Republicans make it worse by deregulating gun control. New York City is among America’s safest cities by homicide rate (you wouldn’t know that from media coverage), and it’s because they have aggressive gun control which Republicans have pledged to undermine. If NYC had Texas-level gun ownership, there would be a lot more shootings on the subway and we know that because Houston’s homicide rate is three times New York’s.

While European cities are less deadly and violent than American cities, we should also be honest that Europe keeps its city centers clean and presentable, but their suburbs, where tourists don’t venture, are segregated and low-income. Especially Paris. It’s the opposite in the U.S. — our suburbs are for the wealthy and most cities, until recently, were designated for the poor. Nevertheless, Paris is leading Europe in expanding its transit system while still having many ethnically-segregated, economically declining and crime-heavy suburbs. Many new French metro lines are going through high-crime, low-income enclaves, and it hasn’t impacted French support for public transit whatsoever. This contradicts the theory that people don’t support public transit out of safety concerns.

The real reason American transit isn’t expanded is because of three issues: (1) the federal government since Ronald Reagan funds the operation of highways at four times the rate it funds public transit. This is despite American roadways being now 134 times more deadly than public transit. In 2023, one American was being shot by driver road rage every 18 hours. (2) When transit is expanded the construction costs are astronomical because we don’t have American industries specializing in building transit systems. France builds metros much cheaper than the U.S. because there’s demand for this work non-stop. (3) The federal government funds transit development projects but day-to-day operations are heavily dependent on local and state funding, which most jurisdictions can’t sufficiently support especially if they’re in a Republican state.

The lack of federal funding for transit operations worsens transit crime and anti-social behavior because local agencies must choose between improving policing or running more services with little money. When I rode the Los Angeles Metro trains at night, they were packed with security personnel because (as I witnessed) some people would smoke on the trains. But the train ran every 25-30 minutes after hours, which isn’t competitive against driving or Uber in Los Angeles. Every salary paid to a security guard on the train is one less that could have been used to hire a train operator, which would have increased train frequencies and made the service competitive.

My friend, a 40-year-old Black woman in Oakland who lived in Paris told me she doesn’t take transit here because it’s sketchy. Recalling she was a victim of theft on the Paris Metro, I asked why she continued riding it, to which she thought for a second and admitted, “Well it’s the best way to get around.” Not to downplay the importance of transit being comfortable and safe, but whether people ride transit is primarily dependent on how reliable it is. NYC, for all the headlines, is a heavily transit-first city because transit is dependable.

— Anti-City Politics: An American Thing —

One of the main reasons Tokyo and Shanghai are so rich in modern infrastructure is that their national governments understand that their countries are judged by foreigners by the cleanliness and functionality of their flagship cities. In contrast, the Republican Party not only doesn’t care for the well-being of New York, San Francisco, or Washington D.C. but openly despises these places and cuts funding for all urban infrastructure whenever possible. A lot of my foreign friends in the Bay Area see encampments, severe poverty, and crumbling infrastructure and tell me America is a failure. But it’s not just the Bay Area.

Southern cities reek of poverty, severe racial segregation, and disinvestment because gerrymandered Republican state legislatures withhold funding. It’s not like they haven’t earned funding: Democratic counties provide 70% of the nation’s economic productivity. Yet Tennessee and Georgia’s state politics are fundamentally about suburban, mostly white jurisdictions hating and defunding Memphis and Atlanta’s transit systems, schools and infrastructure whenever possible. Texas’ state legislature makes bullying Houston, Austin, and Dallas a state sport for the GOP.

Trump, Elon Musk and Republican lawmakers were just trying to cut funding for restoring the collapsed Baltimore bridge simply because it’s an urban, Democratic area. California Republicans have made opposing high-speed rail and sabotaging federal funding among their top issues for 25 years. Bullet trains, the pinnacle of East Asian advanced societies that make American tourists so jealous, have been mainly opposed by the GOP and libertarian think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

Imagine how awful Tokyo would be if Japan’s national legislature were dominated by politicians who hate Tokyo. Anti-urban and pro-rural politics have such a strong presence in the GOP (the governing party), while if anything, East Asia is the opposite: pro-urban and anti-rural. I’m not anti-rural, but politics in this country are extremely anti-urban, and it’s not focused on coastal, Democratic cities but all cities throughout the land. There’s some obvious historic issues at play: anti-urban politics obviously rose up on the right due to Black people moving to urban areas in the 20th century as part of the Southern Strategy.

But today, Democrats are unwilling to attack the records of Republican states. Red states and swing states dominate 17 of the top 20 states in homicide and rank the lowest on the Human Development Index. Yet we hear endlessly about crime in California — a state with fewer homicides than Texas and Florida — or genuinely homicide-infested Chicago (one city), while hearing nothing about staunchly Republican Oklahoma, which leads the nation in heart disease, suicides, low test scores, and poor overall health.

Whenever it’s pointed out that crime is worse in Republican states than in Democratic ones, Republicans just retort by saying these issues are segregated away from middle-class areas and therefore not their problem. If half the country’s solution to social issues in areas void of far-left progressives is to just lock themselves into gated communities, I’m not convinced going nuts on policing will make people more pro-urban.

The 2024 election has re-inforced to me that Americans don’t have a national identity, but mostly view themselves in contrast to other Americans they think they’re better than. It’s Urban vs. “Rural”, Black vs. White, Immigrant vs. Native-Born, Republican vs. Democratic, college vs. no college, and middle-class vs. poor.

There has been an obnoxious amount of anti-social behavior on public transit since the pandemic, but this country glorifies anti-social behavior. People drive around like they’re insane with a total disregard for others around them, killing tens of thousands annually. People aspire to segregate themselves rather than help communities in need. We’re addicted to guns and don’t care to change course even when whole families are wiped out by gun violence. Americans are truly an anti-social people, not in speech but in action. This makes urbanism, which requires a degree of collaboration and social trust, quite difficult to accomplish.

— More Solutions We Can Learn From Europe & Asia —

There are ways to improve law enforcement in the United States. American police are just not good at clearing criminal cases which makes getting away with crime a lot easier here. Lower rates of officers per capita compared to Europe and over reliance on excessive prison time are part of the problem. Another major culprit? Cars.

It’s very easy to commit a violent crime in the U.S. and just drive away because of the lack of traffic enforcement technology and the cheapness of owning a car. Most high-income nations have traffic surveillance technology, but here it has a lot of bipartisan opposition, from motorists who don’t like being held accountable, to civil liberties groups like the ACLU who ideologically oppose it. In France, traffic enforcement on urban and country roads is primarily under the purview of speed cameras. Car ownership is pretty low in Paris so beat patrols are much more effective. Traffic surveillance isn’t very popular with Americans but many nations — including Japan — have strong privacy laws with this technology to stop police abuse.

American cities are designed to get in and out of as quickly as possible with a car. In the U.S., criminals can knock over a store and be on the other side of a region and several police jurisdictions away in half an hour. Even if a plate is captured, depending on the severity of the crime, it’s going to be lower on the priority scale for traffic stops. The dense urbanism of New York City and difficulty in car ownership are major reasons why NYPD’s clearance rate for homicide is 80% while nationally it’s 50% and dropping.

There are many valid criticisms of left forms of urban governance. For example, a lot of progressives touted Portugal’s drug decriminalization without actually understanding that Portugal just decriminalized possession. Drug dealing was and is a crime that’s enforced, and drug addicts are put into rehab centers or threatened with reduced welfare if they don’t accept treatment. But they also have safe injection sites and don’t condition being sober to receive welfare benefits, which contradicts the American policies of conditioning welfare on sobriety. Maybe that combination is needed for major cities reeling with drug addiction and it would be productive to have that debate.

But if we’re going to take foreign cues we shouldn’t just selectively focus on police. Asian countries are a lot more collectivist and don’t adhere to the nuclear family unit, which makes it easier to support family members who fall through the cracks. Maybe it should be a broader family or community’s responsibility to take care of mentally ill or disabled people rather than condition their housing and well-being on their ability to work or have a rich family. I know many mentally ill homeless people in the Bay Area whose families just don’t have the resources to take care of them. When America did de-institutionalization, it was supposed to be replaced with well-funded local community health centers (Mental Health Systems Act of 1980). This didn’t materialize at scale.

We should take cues from most European countries and automatically enroll eligible, poor people into Medicaid. We should stop administering Medicaid at the state level so that red states don’t make their programs even harder to access for the poor. A lot of drug addicts and unwell people don’t have access to treatment because it requires a tremendous amount of paperwork that exists to stamp out insignificant fraud. The fact that you need charity groups and nonprofits just to do the administrative work to access your benefits explains why unwell people aren’t getting the services they’re eligible for on San Francisco streets.

How about copying Europe and Asia’s approach to urban planning, which mostly plans for cities at the state level? Then people would have a collective interest in the region rather than various communities shoving homelessness and housing shortage impacts to other communities. We know that homelessness is mostly a product of housing shortages and rent levels, which is why we don’t see open drug use on Florida or the Rust Belt’s streets like California’s. The Bay Area has nine different counties and 101 cities funding hundreds of nonprofits and agencies with an uncoordinated approach to housing and homelessness. It should be one or two agencies and one region solving the problem, together.

The drug and mental health crisis in downtown San Francisco is shocking, but until the federal government takes this issue seriously, local governments can only do so much. Anti-urban politics isn’t primarily hurting New York or San Francisco but the cities of the Midwest and the South, where Substack writers and crime video pundits don’t live. These towns are full of indoor drug addiction and are economically decaying. Many of their voters went for Trump this time because the Republicans blamed it on illegal immigration while Democrats didn’t address Republican governance failures whatsoever.

If we want to help all American cities we can’t just promise to swell them with cops and pretend their longstanding social issues will disappear. It isn’t fair to the citizens or the police. We have to tell them the truth and fight the anti-urban politics and culture that make American cities so inferior.

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