By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
I have never understood why West Philadelphia became a
slum. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the real estate: Right in the middle
of West Philadelphia is an Ivy League university; go eight-tenths of a mile
east from the University of Pennsylvania down Walnut Street and you’re in one
of the nicest city centers in the Northeast; go four miles northwest down
Lancaster Avenue and you’re in Lower Merion, the fifth-highest-income
municipality in the country (sandwiched between San Ramon, Calif., and
Brookline, Mass.), where you can catch a polo match or a steeplechase race.
There is terrific residential architecture, from the Victorian rowhouses on
Spruce Street to the stately 19th-century homes spread out on broad lawns as
you approach the city limit.
But in between is a lot of blight and some very bad blocks,
though less blight and fewer bad blocks than there were 30 years ago.
The driving force in West Philadelphia has been the
University of Pennsylvania and institutions related to it. It’s a familiar
story, not dissimilar to what has happened in previously downmarket East Austin
thanks to University of Texas students seeking lower rents. Penn students vary
greatly in their intellectual achievements (Wharton grads to the right,
women’s-studies majors to the exits), but almost all of them can count, and
some of them stick around Philadelphia, where they can buy a nice four-bedroom
home for half of what they’d pay for a one-bedroom condo in Brooklyn. Get a
high enough density of these people and soon enough a fruity coffee shop
appears, and before you know it you’re within spitting distance of a Trader
Joe’s.
Naturally, everybody hates them for this.
Municipal leaders and community activists are forever
soliciting “investments” in poor neighborhoods. Politicians, as I have long
argued, do not know what the word “investment” means. The point of investment
is to increase the value of something — you invest in a new kitchen to improve
your house, both for your own enjoyment and to increase its price in case you
should decide to sell it. A successful investment is associated with higher
market prices. In Philadelphia, this was denounced as “McPenntrification” — a
particularly chowder-headed play on “gentrification” — and self-styled
community organizers worked mightily and continue to work mightily to prevent
investments in poor communities in Philadelphia. U. Penn, which was founded by
Benjamin Franklin, but which has been in West Philadelphia only since the
1870s, was denounced as an “invader.”
The transformation of a community from homogeneously poor
to mixed-income may be painful — it will increase the cost of living — but all
economic change involves tradeoffs. Rising property values are good for
homeowners, bad for renters and would-be buyers. But in poor communities
afflicted by so-called food deserts — broad urban expanses without grocery
stores — and those suffering from a lack of banks and retail services, an
influx of relatively well-heeled neighbors can be an excellent thing. This is
true of public services as well, of course — perhaps even more true: Democratic
theory notwithstanding, city hall does not attune the same set of ears to all
citizens’ complaints. That dynamic is almost certainly part of the reason for
the relative success of densely populated places such as Manhattan: Nothing
magical happens to Fifth Avenue at 96th Street, and if there’s trash piling up
in Spanish Harlem, you can smell it on the Upper East Side.
Being poor is a burden; being poor in a poor community is
a danger. Poverty — individual poverty or family poverty — is difficult enough
to overcome; overcoming it in an environment in which everybody one encounters
is in roughly the same situation (or worse) is much more difficult. One of the
best ways to increase generational income mobility for children born in places
such as the poor sections of Baltimore is — this will not surprise you — to get
the hell out of Baltimore, the sooner the better: The income effects of leaving
Baltimore are more pronounced the younger the child is when he leaves.
But exit is not really going to be much of a broad
solution for places such as Baltimore and Detroit. The white middle class left
long ago; less remarked upon was the dramatic exit of the black middle class
from those communities. In poor urban communities, as in the Big White Ghetto
of Appalachia, most of those with the resources to leave left long ago. Simply
abandoning poor cities is not really much of an answer.
The problem of poor individuals and poor families is
different from the problem of poor communities. Writing in Slate, Professor
Louis Hyman argued that those Baltimoreans who torched the CVS because they
were enraged by police misconduct were perfectly rational to do so, because
they feel exploited by the ghetto economy. They may in fact feel that way, but
we are not obliged to respect those feelings if they are not based in reality.
Contra Professor Hyman’s account, those living in the Mondawmin section of
Baltimore have not been abandoned to the check-cashing shops and other ghetto
financiers; there are ordinary commercial banks in the area, and while their
services are not free, neither are those of the check-cashing houses. In many
cases, conventional banks’ checking services are free or effectively free — one
of the banks in the area waives charges for those with any sort of regular
direct deposit of $250 or more, including government benefits. (The majority of
small businesses nowadays, and practically all large businesses, use direct
deposit for their payroll.) For those without direct deposits, the expense of a
checking account runs from $0/month for students 23 years of age and younger to
$8/month at one of the major banks in the area to $12/month at another.
Professor Hyman, who learned all about poverty at prep
school (McDonogh, $26,000 a year) and Harvard, is of course correct that $8 can
mean a great deal to a very poor person. But the CVS-torchers in Baltimore are
nonetheless wrong to resent the commercial establishments that serve them, and
Professor Hyman is wrong to endorse their stupidity. A poor black man from
Baltimore, or a poor white man from eastern Kentucky, would have to jump
through a great many hoops before he would be granted a job interview with
Professor Hyman’s former colleagues at McKinsey or his current colleagues at
Cornell. But a man with $10 in his hand is the same as any other man with $10
in his hand, regardless of race, background, or accent, when he is standing at
the register at Walmart or Target. And unlike entities supported by government
“investments” — like Atlanta’s schools or Baltimore’s police — Walmart reliably
keeps its end of the bargain: You pay Walmart $20 for a pair of shoes, you get
the shoes.
There are many variables in the success and failure of
cities, but one stands out. It isn’t race — Philadelphia is a minority-majority
city, as is New York. And it isn’t affluence, either: Rank U.S. metros by
income and Los Angeles barely cracks the top 50. But each of those cities has
enjoyed a measure of success in recent decades by improving the material
conditions in poor neighborhoods through the sort of commercial development
bitterly denounced as gentrification. The streets of West Philadelphia are not
nearly so mean as they used to be. New York City’s transformation in the
Giuliani years was dramatic not only for the well-off precincts of Manhattan
but in the rest of the city, too, with development even in places such as the
South Bronx, once written off as a total urban loss. Los Angeles, which
experienced a much worse version of the Freddie Gray riots in 1992, is a
different city today. Economic policy is of course a piece of that, though not
so big a piece as the economic-policy wonks like to think — does anybody
remember what Rudy Giuliani’s tax plan was?
These cities are now safe — that’s the difference. New
York City may be backsliding under its new Sandinista regime, but there’s still
not much of the old menace there. Downtown Los Angeles feels like Arlington
with better weather, and it has a lower rate of violent crime than Portland,
Ore. Philadelphia still has a high rate of violent crime compared with
similar-sized cities such as Houston and Phoenix, but it is dramatically lower
than the rates in the urban basket cases. Philadelphia’s murder rate, though
still very high, is barely 60 percent of Baltimore’s. Baltimore’s violent-crime
rate is twice New York City’s and three times Los Angeles’s.
There are two straightforward ways to improve the
material conditions of people living in the poor parts of Baltimore: Move them
out or move capital in. There is a little something to be said for moving
people out of dysfunctional communities; I have in the past argued for a kind
of reverse incarceration for young men convicted of serious crimes in gang
cases — i.e., that during probation or parole they could live anywhere in the
country they liked, so long as it was more than 200 miles from their home town.
But that’s a narrow question. The real issue is moving people, businesses, and
resources into poor neighborhoods — which is not going to happen when the
locals are assaulting people, burning down businesses, and destroying
resources. Lawlessness and violence convert assets into liabilities — all those
boarded-up houses that once were homes are attractive nuisances on a massive
scale. Somebody, somewhere, wants to sell things in those abandoned Baltimore
storefronts, but no one can, because it is not safe.
And that’s the horrible irony here. If Baltimore wants to
get its economic act together, it has to get something else right first:
policing.
So far, neither the police department nor the people of
Baltimore have shown any particular capacity for keeping the peace.
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