The Cities We Need
Date Posted: May 24, 2020
Posted In: COVID-19 Updates, Discussion, Ideas,
From the New York Times Editorial Board: In the first half of the 20th century, the students at Boston’s best public high school, Boston Latin, included a brash kid named Leonard Bernstein, who would one day compose “West Side Story”; another boy, named Thomas L. Phillips, who would build the Massachusetts manufacturer Raytheon into a bulwark of American defense; and Paul Zoll, who would pioneer the use of electricity to treat cardiac arrest while working as a doctor at a Boston hospital.
Most any American city of that period could produce a similar honor roll of kids raised on its streets and educated in its public classrooms who went on to leave a mark on the world. Back then, cities supplied the keys for unlocking human potential: an infrastructure of public schools and colleges, public libraries and parks; public transit systems; and clean, safe drinking water. The very density and diversity of urban life fostered the accumulation of knowledge, the exchange of ideas, the creation of new products.
American cities were the hammering engines of the nation’s economic progress, the showcases of its wealth and culture, the objects of global fascination, admiration and aspiration. They were also deformed by racism, bled by the profiteering of elites and fouled by pollution and disease. But in their best moments, they offered the chance to slip the bonds of prejudices, second-guessing and limited horizons. They offered opportunity.
Well before the coronavirus pandemic posed its own threats to the life of American cities, they were struggling. Over the last half century, their infrastructure of opportunity has badly decayed. Their public schools no longer prepare students to succeed. Their subways are reliably unreliable. Their water runs with lead.
Our urban areas are laced with invisible but increasingly impermeable boundaries separating enclaves of wealth and privilege from the gaptoothed blocks of aging buildings and vacant lots where jobs are scarce and where life is hard and, all too often, short. Cities continue to create vast amounts of wealth, but the distribution of those gains resembles the New York skyline: a handful of supertall buildings, and everyone else in the shade.
The pandemic has prompted some affluent Americans to wonder whether cities are broken for them, too. It has suspended the charms of urban life while accentuating the risks, reviving a hoary American tradition of regarding cities with fear and loathing — as cesspools of disease, an image that all too easily aligns with prejudices about poverty and race and crime. Even New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has described New York City’s density as responsible for its suffering.
Some have left for second homes, and the crisis has prompted a flurry of fantasies about abandoning cities altogether, rooted in the idea that we’d all be better off at least a little farther apart — social distancing as the salvation of society.
This is dangerously misguided.
Our cities are broken because affluent Americans have been segregating themselves from the poor, and our best hope for building a fairer, stronger nation is to break down those barriers.