By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
It’s not exactly a revelation that primary-election
politics are designed to exacerbate intramural tensions and highlight
relatively modest distinctions. But beyond personality clashes and cosmetic
disagreements about which strategy is best for achieving a shared objective,
Democrats are airing the very real grievances they have with Democratic
governance. They just don’t seem to know it.
“Rich people are going to have to allow or be forced to
allow poor people to live near them,” declared former Texas congressman Beto
O’Rourke, adding that Americans have a “right” to reasonable commutes. The
candidate advocated “having cities that are smarter, that are denser, that have
people living closer to where they work and where their families are,” to
ensure that the children of wealthy and relatively impoverished Americans “can
afford to go to the same public schools.” It’s surely a matter of time before
O’Rourke determines that wealthier Americans need to be “forced” to send their
children to public schools for his utopian vision to be fully realized.
Occam’s Razor suggests that O’Rourke has not invested
much thought into this proposal. If he had, he would have confronted the fact
that the primary obstacles to realizing his vision of hyperdense,
automobile-free, classless urban spaces are his fellow Democrats.
America’s urban centers are the locus of much social
tension between upscale liberal residents and the progressive social engineers
who govern them. The median home value in nearly 200 U.S. cities is now north
of $1 million, rendering life in American metropolises a fraught conflict
between renters and commuters and wealthier residents for whom property values
and livability are not academic concepts.
Mobilizing around the slogan “Zoning is a Promise,” residents
of affluent (and overwhelmingly Democratic) Westport, Connecticut, have
organized in opposition to the expansion of affordable housing in their
neighborhood—a display that is, to some, indicative of their racial and
cultural ignorance. A plan to build a five-story affordable apartment block
amid the detached, single-family homes in San Francisco’s Forest Hill
neighborhood has generated similar concerns. “We don’t know if there are going
to be sex offenders living there,” said one concerned resident at a fraught
board of directors meeting. “As a parent, I am concerned about people with
mental illness and drug addictions,” another added. “I want my kids to be able
to play outside — that’s why we bought a house here.”
In 2016, Manhattan residents scuttled a plan for 335
below-market-rate units in the Inwood neighborhood. Baltimore-area locals were
not so successful. “We have worked for years in order to have a house in the
county, and the government is pushing people out here,” said one elderly
resident of the city’s prosperous suburbs who suddenly found himself surrounded
by public housing. “They don’t deserve to have what my family worked hard for.”
And it’s not just affordable housing that’s causing
social tension in American cities. For much of 2018, Seattle’s residents waged
a brutal but successful campaign to force the city to scuttle a planned tax on
city residents to fund additional shelters for the city’s homeless population.
A similar proposal for a complex to house the homeless in Los Angeles was
derailed by city residents, some of whom literally held “NIMBY” (Not in My
Backyard) signs in protest. Wealthier residents in progressive metropolises
have lobbied their cities to block the expansion of bike lanes, light-rail
stations, bus routes, and safe sites in which drug addicts can indulge their
habits.
The problems of affluence in a growing number of American
cities is real. Conservatives are quick to dismiss concerns over the scourge of
urban “gentrification” as the self-loathing lament of the gentry class, but it
is a real problem for long-time city residents who find themselves displaced
amid evolving economic realities.
Market-oriented solutions to the problem of housing
affordability in urban centers—like “upzoning” proposals, which increase housing
density near public transit and commercial centers—do not always yield falling
home prices, as one experiment in Chicago demonstrated. But as that same study
stated, the political privileges of entrenched city aldermen limit the
effectiveness of these reforms. For renters, the trends of “micro-housing” and
communal spaces provide some residential access to the city center, though in
dystopian conditions those with limited historical sensitivities have taken to
calling “camps.” Of course, the simplest solution to the problem of
unaffordable housing in America’s urban centers is an increasingly popular one:
move.
“The biggest U.S. cities are still drawing more people
than they are losing, but the rate is slowing,” the Wall Street Journal
reported this week. “People who do their jobs from home, freelance, or
constantly travel for work are migrating away from expensive urban centers such
as Los Angeles and San Francisco toward cheaper cities including Boise; Denver;
Austin, Texas; and Portland, Ore., according to economists and local
residents,” the dispatch reveled. And though these transplants are taking their
congestion and rising home prices with them, they’re taking their affluence,
too. As genuine as the problem of gentrification is today, the threat posed by
the flight of the tax base to the suburbs is well-known and almost certainly
worse for long-term urban residents.
It is a safe bet that Beto O’Rourke has devoted no time
to the contemplation of these complex and interrelated issues. Whether it is
American race relations, gun crime, or, now, affordable housing, his instinct
is to conjure up “rights” that require the labor of others to realize and to
use the coercive power of the state to “force” Americans to engage in behaviors
he prefers. It is a default cognitive tick he shares with many of his fellow
Democrats, and it’s debilitating. O’Rourke’s technocratic outlook obscures the
real sources of the problems he ostensibly wants to address and ensures that he
will not be the author of their solutions.
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