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Conservatives Should Live in the City
Matt Lewis has a thoughtful piece in The Week, arguing that conservatives ought to embrace urban living. He wonders whether traditional conservative values, especially family values, are undermined by the tolls of maintaining the suburban lifestyle, and, furthermore, whether the conservative’s instinct to remain anchored in history is undermined by the artlessness of most suburban architecture.
Conservatism has somehow become associated in the popular imagination with sterile suburbia, obnoxiously large McMansions, and gas-guzzling SUVs, while liberalism evokes images of city living in close quarters, with public transportation or bicycle commutes from high-rise lofts to open-floor workspaces.
Further:
Never mind the fact that conservative icon William F. Buckley rode a scooter, or that conservative icon Russell Kirk refused to drive a car, warning that automobiles would increase rootlessness in America. No, these days America seems to assume that conservatives, if they must live near a city, will seek to buy the biggest house with the longest commute they can possibly afford and endure, and buy the biggest, least fuel-efficient car to take them there. And you know what? Based on our choices, it’s pretty clear that we conservatives believe this, too…
Well, there’s a better way for conservatives (and all Americans), and it’s called New Urbanism. Essentially, New Urbanism promotes walkable (a side benefit: exercise!) mixed-use neighborhoods and homes of all shapes and sizes with narrow streets and retail on the sidewalk level, and apartments above. And it’s not just about high-density, high-rise buildings. New Urbanism lets you live within safe walking distance of your church, baker, stores, bars, restaurants, and more…
There’s no telling how many marriages were broken up over the stress of suburb-to-city commutes — or how many hours of the day children were deprived of their parents who, after all, were in the car making a big sacrifice so that little Johnny could have a huge yard, live in suburbia, go to a supposedly nice school, and have “rugged individualists” as parents. It’s also hard to quantify the spiritual and psychic cost associated with endlessly frustrating commutes, disconnection from a community, and ugly buildings. And there is certainly an economic cost of taxpayers maintaining low-density areas and infrastructure that yield relatively little revenue.
Lewis is right to point out the inefficiencies and unjustified costs of suburban life, as well as its lack of beauty. As he puts it, it is not the city or the country that disturb him, but the “ugly in-between.”
There’s one big missing piece to his criticism though: kids. I believe the liberal/conservative divide that we see between cities and suburbs is partly a reflection of the willingness of conservatives to raise more children.
Do you know how difficult it is to find an affordable three bedroom apartment in most leading American cities?
I lived for a short time in New York City. My wife gave birth to our first child at Roosevelt hospital in Midtown. We brought our new girl home in a yellow cab, and rode the elevator up to our 300 sq ft apartment on the 16th floor. Her nursery was a closet just big enough to fit the crib inside.
Since then, we’ve been busy making more kids—one every couple of years. We traded the subway for a Honda Odyssey. We now have four tiny faces running around, and man, did that happen fast.
We long since moved out of our little New York apartment, where we could walk to the grocery store, to restaurants, to work, to the doctor’s office, to our church, to Central Park. The real estate in our new hometown, Nashville, is a bit easier on the wallet than it is in Manhattan, but walkable, family-friendly housing is scarce here, and getting scarcer all the time as younger well-to-dos move back in to the city core.
What remains for most middle class families is miles and miles of tract house subdivisions—far removed from where most of them work, far removed, even, from many of the public parks, libraries, museums, and restaurants that make up the city’s vibrant culture. Unlike many older, east-coast cities, public transportation here is severely limited.
Cheap land makes for affordable housing, and conservatives with average incomes are only partly to blame for not choosing to embrace new urbanism, even if they do fail, oftentimes, to calculate the emotional cost of a long daily commute, and a life spent trapped somewhere in the soulless space between “the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store.”
The problem of suburbia may be partly a failure of conservatives themselves, but it also represents an epic and nationally pervasive failure of city planning. Then again, not all cities are equal. And being a “new urbanist” in Detroit is a heck of a lot cheaper than doing it in San Francisco.
Here in a semi-pricey city like Nashville, you don’t have to be a hedge fund manager to afford three bedrooms. If you are part of the upper-middle class, or among the wealthy, it is possible to be a conservative with van full of kids and still participate in the “new-urbanist” movement. For the middle class, it’s much more difficult. And that’s the story almost everywhere. America’s best and most desirable cities—its centers of influence and commerce and culture and power—remain firmly in the hands of millions of childless liberals who flock to these areas, and rent the one-bedroom apartments that they offer in abundance.
But Lewis is right: the city needs more conservatives, and conservatives need the city.
Published in General
Whiskey Sam, this debate will become irrelevant when the event that Warren Buffet and his insurance gurus assign as 95% likely sometime in the next generation, the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a US City , occurs.
For me, suburbs aren’t substitutes for cities, but rather for towns. I don’t have a lot of desire to live in a large city, but I would like to live in a small to medium sized town. My grandparents lived in a small town in western North Carolina, and it really was a little like a version of Mayberry. I later studied, worked, and got married in Germany and found that towns have a lot to offer, including urban style amenities (interesting places to walk, bars and cafes, lots of opportunities for chance meetings with friends, etc.) but without a lot of the problems of larger cities. The towns I lived in or visited in Germany put you nearly always within a few minutes walk or bike ride from open countryside.
Towns also tend to offer something for everyone – a high-density center of shops and stores on the ground level and apartments above with a gradual transition to less density (i.e. the original suburbs) as you leave the town center.
Unfortunately, we can no longer build towns like those I just described because our zoning laws make such mixed use illegal.
Been there. Done that. Lived in the city for 25 years. Moved to the country two years ago. It is much better. We just had a deer in the yard. Last week it was a bear.
In the city we had to fight our way though the schools. They are crippled with misguided ideas on education and shot through with racial issues.
Country simple. Me glad to leave city behind. City expensive, too. Not worth money or aggravation. I wish I had raised my kids here in the country.
This is an important point. Cities are fragile. Top-down control is fragile. Fixed high speed rail corridors are fragile.
A population that is spread out is anti-fragile. A transportation network that is made up of a web of roads instead of high density corridors is anti-fragile. Bottom-up decision making is anti-fragile – there’s no head to cut off. Diversified, distributed manufacturing and distribution is anti-fragile.
From a long-term societal health standpoint, spreading out and being self-reliant is a lot smarter than packing everyone into big targets and controlling them from a central location.
It doesn’t have to be a nuclear bomb that cracks the fragile egg. Financial collapse, social collapse, epidemics, you name it. Spreading out and diversifying decision-making is the best defense against any kind of large-scale disaster.
In ‘simple economic terms’, dormitories are even more efficient. Or Soviet-style concrete tract residences. When it comes to actually living, rarely can choices be boiled down to ‘simple economic terms’, no matter how much central planners might love to do so.
“On the other hand, rows of condos, however efficient they may be, do nothing if the commercial and cultural life of a town and city is not incorporated into the the design.”
How long is this design to last? How presumptuous to think that a ‘new urban architect’ can know enough about the commercial and cultural needs of a community that he can plan buildings that not only meet those requirements, but will meet the requirements of the people that will live there throughout the life of the community. The information is not available to him, and is too complex.
More so than ever, our economy and social arrangements are fluid and dynamic. Detroit is a shell of what it was 30 years ago, and its needs today are radically different than what they were in the 1970’s.
Nathan Harden:
If you think urban planners can meet the needs of a large community, I invite you to consider a much simpler problem: Designing a sidewalk system in a university ‘quad’ to meet the needs of the students. Let’s say you have an open quad area with buildings all around it. You need to put in sidewalks in an efficient pattern so the students can walk between the buildings without destroying the grass. Where do you put them?
Well, it really depends on the course schedules, doesn’t it? And where is the cafeteria? What about bathrooms? What if students like walking with their friends, and take an average route? How’s a humble social planner supposed to sort that all out?
Invariably, the sidewalks are placed in some pattern to minimize concrete or to be aesthetically pleasing. Then the students ignore them and trample the grass. The next step is usually command – putting up obstacles to force them to conform to your ‘vision’.
Or, you can simply wait, let students trample patterns in the grass revealing their preferences, and pave where they trampled. That works – until the next semester.
Social preferences are pretty opaque to central planners.
Nathan Harden said:
Even if you like the suburbs, there is a lot to fault in the way suburbs are typically laid out, which is to say, without much planning and without much attention to beauty or community.
Here’s an idea: Perhaps we should minimize the ‘planning’ of other people’s lives. Spontaneous order is a good thing – like letting those students find their own paths across the quad.
Do you think a centrally planned internet would be better than the spontaneously-organized one we have today? Is the spontaneously emergent English language inferior to ‘scientifically’ planned Esperanto? Did the highly regulated and centrally planned rail and trucking industries perform better than the market-driven and spontaneously-organized industries we have today?
Cities require a certain amount of central planning to be viable. That is not a point in their favor – it’s a limitation. Individual suburbs may be planned, but there are many of them and they compete with one another. That means I can find one that meets my own needs. If you must have planning, better it be as local as possible. Then let the market sort it out.
In most cities, particularly older cities in Europe, the most desirable living areas are in the older, original areas that happened pretty much spontaneously. One notable exception is Paris, which was essentially leveled and rebuilt from a grand design by Napoleon III and his architect Georges Haussmann.
I would argue that of all the modern living arrangements, the suburbs are probably among the most planned. They involve road building and infrastructure expansion (which require planning) and a whole host of zoning laws that control how close one activity can be to another. Unlike towns and villages, which mostly arose spontaneously and were built piecemeal by individual business and home owners, suburban housing areas are designed and built by large developers.
I live in the suburbs because where I live, that’s all that’s being built. I would like to see more choice, and many young people -including my own kids – are looking for something more traditional.
Ok, I’ve arrived late. I’ve only skimmed. But Nathan, Casey, Marion and a few others you have made my day. Yes, Given me hope. I addressed this issue, along with Marion, a year or so back and contributed the article titled something like Missing the Boat Again: The Problem With Conservatives is They Are Conservative. They are Used To What They Are Used To.
It wasn’t so long ago that liberals were with y’all in hating on cities. They’ve discovered they were wrong while conservatives, again, are missing the boat. You’re letting liberals get there first. Again.
Btw, many of y’all keep asserting that suburban living is free market and city living is government supported. Ya got that backwards. It’s Carworld, the greatest example of social engineering in America’s history, which has destroyed not only cities but towns, replacing them with the burbs. And Carworld is a govenrment project. An incredibly expensive one. Conservatives shouldn’t be supporting it.
Another btw. There are low crime big cities all over the world. “City” does NOT automatically equal crime. That, too, is a product of this great experiment in social engineering.
Yes, that’s exactly the idea.
Most major cities are Republican free zones and those with a viable Republican party aren’t exactly conservative. We literally have no one making a conservative case. And very few conservatives even exchanging ideas about what a case might be.
If you say you want to stay up to watch Monday Night Football and I say go to bed because you’ll be tired in the morning you are free to ignore me and stay up. But that doesn’t make me wrong about your being tired in the morning.
I’m not saying anyone has to move because I pointed out upsides of the city and downsides of the burbs but that doesn’t that those don’t exist. We need to recognize them and consider them.
As promised – today’s Flyover Country was devoted in large part to this post. Terry and I were far kinder to Nathan’s premise than I have been in the comments.
Give it a listen! Seriously. And comment. That way we can get more exposure on the most popular bar. :)
Just to add my 2 cents. I’ve lived in both, and found that I just don’t like city living. I don’t like paying astronomical prices for very little square footage, and more importantly I really don’t like being utterly surrounded by leftists that constantly make me want to deck somebody. I moved from a big city to a suburb within 10 minutes of downtown Charleston, SC and instantly I had a pay raise. My wife and I could actually afford to enjoy ourselves instead of having to spend half our income on housing and deciding which brand of mac and cheese we would get that week. I also worked with teens in that big city (from relatively conservative homes) and you couldn’t pay me to raise kids there. I see where you guys are coming from but could it be that conservatives don’t live in the city for some other reason than they just don’t “get it”?
I’m not asking this to be snarky, I’m actually curious. What are the objective upsides to the city and the downsides to suburbs? This is excluding the “it’s prettier, nicer architecture,” subjective things that may have value but really don’t matter in the grand scheme of the average person’s life.
Urban living (and I refer specifically to the city I know best- NY) is nearly impossible for anyone other than the uber-wealthy or the young poor right out of college (that would have been me, back in the day). There are no “bad” neighborhoods left in the city in which you can get a bargain apartment- a 3000 sq ft. townhouse in East Harlem could easily set you back $5-10 million dollars. Pre-schools – $20K- and tuition at a decent private high school is as expensive as an Ivy League college. (My cousin who raised a child in NYC was relieved when her daughter went off to Sarah Lawrence thereby saving her money.)
It’s all about supply and demand. People have always wanted to live there and a fair percentage of space is still subject to rent control; this effectively removes 20% of housing from the free market.
Lesserson, it’s difficult to make the case for the upside of cities to Americans for the simple reason that their experience is mostly limited to American cities. And those, along with the wonderful higher density small towns America once had, have been largely destroyed by the massive subsidies and govt planning which have gone into rebuilding America for the smooth running of the car.
comparing govt built burbs to the wastelands left by the car subsidy isnt a meaningful comparison. You have to look only at those limited urban areas which actually work or look at foreign cities to get a sense of the possibilities.
Just to kind of make clear, I currently live in a small non car friendly town in Italy (Charleston is home base) and while it has it’s charms, I wouldn’t really want to transplant it to an American city and live in it. It doesn’t appeal to me to make America more European in that way. What exactly is the problem with cars anyway?
Man, I go to a party and ya’ll go nuts. What I get for trying to have a social life…
The ricochet 2.0 seems to have eaten my older post… This definition of urban includes suburbs. The definition of urban is usually “50,000 people,” but that’s total, not per jurisdiction. New York City has 8 million residents, New York Metro has 20 million (2010) -by math, that’s 12 million suburbanites -all considered urban -and those cities range in size from 800k (Allentown) to 26k (Easton -both in Pennsylvania).
In the US, 60% are suburbanites. Conservative’s problem is that they are losing suburbs like Northern, Virginia.
Also, people say “urban” they envision New York. The median city in 2010 was Akron, Ohio. Adjust visions accordingly.
If you like “urban living,” (which has many meanings), that’s fine. If you like Seaside, Florida, that’s fine. Just remember that Andres Duany is a businessman, and he is selling you something. If you want to buy it, that is not my concern. When you want to force the rest of us to buy it, then it is our concern.
And I repeat, the image of the suburbanite who only lives in his suburb and works downtown has been anachronistic for 5 decades. It only really existed in any real numbers for about a decade immediately after WWII (no earlier than 1890 if you want to include inner-ring neighborhoods as “suburbs,” but they weren’t independent jurisdictions). Suburbs have been developing full economies and social worlds -becoming independent urban cities since the late 50s, and something like half of suburbanites now work in other suburbs, or even their own suburb. The caterwhaling you hear from cities is because -like Atlanta -they spent the last 50 years ruling the CBD with an iron fist, driving out everyone else. And now they’re broke, and trying to drag back in the people who escaped to create new cities.
That’s exactly right. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit and much to the amusement of some of my friends who still live there, I continue to whine each time I visit, “Why wasn’t it this fabulous when we were in high school?”
I now live in a 40,000 population “resort” town where one walks to the beach but I’m also a three minute drive from a very large and thriving Saks/Nordstrom, a community theatre featuring off-Broadway plays, numerous art galleries, two museums, our very own hockey arena (amateur), three universities, a Heritage Foundation forum and a world class symphony. We used to drive down to South Beach for the action, but who needs it?
I’m a mid-size city boy who dreamed of living in the suburbs, too scared to consider roughing it in rural country, but I like being not far from it.
Now before I get down to being non-violently civil, just one point: WHAM!! That was the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith smacking you upside the head.
I enjoyed my early school years growing up in the city (Camden NJ), having the church, the school, the organized activities, the nearness of Philadelphia with its architecture, museums and amusement parks. But Liberal and Progressive policies — both local and national — ruined the experience of living in a city. To have a decent life, no matter what your skin color, you have to leave. Or you have to suffer every day the failed and idiotic policies of Liberal/Progressivism.
I will take it that you mean more conservatives, not every conservative, should live in or closer to cities. If only that could be true. I gave you the Invisible Hand slap as a friendly reminder: don’t forget agriculture and all the small town industries that make our extended order work. They are the root of our prosperity.
Lesserson, hope you don’t mind. I took your question, What’s the matter with cars, anyway?, and made a whole new thread out of it. On this new thread I hope, like Ray, to smack a few people upside the head with the hidden hand of Adam Smith!
AMEN!!
I’m glad there are conservatives who want to live in dense urban centers, since I’d hate to cede a whole territory to the Left, but it’s just not for me. I wish I could leave it at that, but this sneering disdain for any other way of life irritates the heck out of me.
First of all: “city” != “urban center.” Lots of cities…most cities, even…are small enough that they don’t have much housing that’s any more compact than an old suburb. Is there the same disdain for living in a small city and having a yard?
Next: Jobs are not all in these urban centers. I’ll stick my neck out and guess that *most* jobs are not there. So living in an urban center only gets you close to a few jobs. For any other job, you’ll drive or take a bus. erhaps a *looonnnng* bus ride. And so many jobs are near a suburb. Eew! So living in an urban center to avoid a dreaded commute only makes any sense for a minority of people. In places like New York, I’m sure it works. Not everywhere, though.
[con’t]
The apparent dread of the “commute” needs to be quantified. How long can a commute be before the rest of us get told,”You’re doing it wrong”? Half an hour? An hour? Or is it the mileage? If you’re trying to commute into the sainted urban center of a megalopolis, an hour won’t get you far at rush hour. I commute a little under an hour and go fifty miles, through three states, down the beautiful Ohio River Valley, to get to the campus where I teach. My wife could walk to work (we’re in a 1920’s subdivision in the city), but it would take her about 45 minutes. I, on the other hand, take a camera with me in the car every day, becaus there’s often something beautiful or interesting to see on the way.
How many urban center dwellers walk to work? How many have long bus commutes? Is sitting on a bus for a given time more noble than driving your own car?
[con’t.]
What have I done!? :)
I would argue they matter they matter tremendously but that argument had no place here. (I’ll let Aaron post something beautiful about that.)
The suburbs are an inefficient use of resources. We build new homes and schools and roads and leave behind perfectly perfectly fine homes and schools and roads. We then need to buy more cars to transport us and use more fuel and build more roads. We build new shopping centers and gas stations to follow the population. There’s a lot of redundant activity there.
This is where I have the disconnect. It’s only an inefficient use of resources when you think of those resources as something to be managed from above. Individually those resources are being used to fulfill the wishes of a bunch of different people who want different things. I’m not against people who want to live in a city from wanting a good plan to the city, but when you tell me that wanting a house and a yard and not be living on top of one another is just plain “inefficient” so we shouldn’t do it throws up a red flag. Do you know what I mean?
There’s also this cost to conservatives as we spread ourselves thin. (The Great Divorce) As we move away from each other we engage each other, and non-conservatives, less. More time is spent in our enclaves and in our cars and less time mating ideas.
I’m an introvert and my ideal life would be spent on a private Island. I’m not particularly keen on interacting with people. But my time in the city has altered my suburban conservatism. Much for the better I think.
Yes, but (I think this is Matty’s point) the burbs are not the result of free markets. The near burbs might be. But then the politically connected beyond lobby for a new Highway, give tax incentives to developers, freebies to retailers, etc.
Most people and business would not locate in these areas without that subsidized infrastructure.