Our Paradoxical Relationship with Cities

 

By Frank Filocomo

Americans have always had a rather uneasy relationship with urban life. 

On the one hand, many of us relish the cultural and ethnic diversity of cities, their bustling night life and venues for entertainment, and their seemingly limitless opportunity. On the other hand, we take issue with their atomization, libertinism, filth, and lack of community. 

This latter strain of hostility toward city-living has existed since the birth of the nation. 

In Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt writes that anti-urban sentiment is ingrained in our country's ethos. 

He emphasizes Jefferson's agrarianism and disdain toward the industrializing North. 

Southerners - not all, of course - have always seen the North as being privileged and indifferent to the plight of rural America. 

When I was writing my master's thesis on the history of U.S. trade policy, I noted the hostility between the agrarian South, which preferred trade liberalization, and the industrializing North, which favored protection from imports vis-à-vis tariffs. 

There was always a feeling that Northerners weren't a part of "real America."  They were big city cosmopolitans, uprooted from tradition and the land, and concerned only with profit. 

The cities, in other words, were soulless places, devoid of community. 

From the article:

All of these resentments were being expressed at a moment when millions of European immigrants were flocking to urban areas throughout the country and young people were leaving the farms to seek a more fulfilling urban life. That only made anti-city views more strident and anti-city politicians more resolute. When the 1920 census showed cities overtaking small towns in population, states refused to reapportion their congressional and legislative constituencies to reflect the change. 

Today's populist movements sound very similar, expressing a disdain for the elitism of city folk. 

Do you recall when, during one of the many GOP primary debates in 2016, Ted Cruz accused Donald Trump of having "New York values?"

"The values in New York City," Cruz remarked, "are socially liberal, are pro-abortion, are pro-gay marriage, and focus around money and the media."

New York City, in other words, is basically an unmoored urban experiment, separate from the rest of the country.  

I was recently in an Uber, and my driver, a very affable Bangladeshi man, told me that New York is not "real America." I knew what he was saying: us New Yorkers are not nearly as communal or family-oriented as in other states. 

In his culture, you still have multi-generational households and societal and familial obligation. 

I hear these contentions, and I don't dismiss all of them. 

Ehrenhalt doesn't dismiss them all, either. He does, however, rightly note that America's cities, despite all of the bad press, are still booming:

Young Americans have not lost their attraction to living in city centers, despite the decline in city population ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. Downtown populations in many places have been going up in the last couple of years. Meanwhile, developers have been engaged in urbanizing the suburbs, designing Main Streets and re-creating many of the elements of central-city residential and commercial life in communities that began as refuges from that life.

We may not be fond of admitting it, but we are drawn inexorably to cities, even as we like to complain about them. That has been true since Thomas Jefferson’s day, and it is not going to change anytime soon.

Kind of hard to reconcile these two realities, right? 

I often complain about New York City, where I was born and raised, but, I can't imagine calling anywhere else home. 

I'm reminded of the LCD Soundsystem song, "New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down."