Is there an urban cycle of growth, decay and then regrowth again?

A timely piece, What Progressives Did To Cities by by Michael Anton.  It is actually a book review of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger.  Shellenberger is a progressive with a sharp critique of blue urban mayors.  Anton is definitely on the right.  There is a surprisingly large overlap between them, though, in general, Anton would go much further than Shellenberger is willing to consider.  

But the opening of Anton's piece addresses a theme I have been pondering the past year or two - the echoing similarities between the urban riots of the mid- and late-1960s and those today (2015 and 2020).  

There are some marked similarities in that race and purported racism run through both.  They are also similar in terms of the extensiveness of property loss and loss of life.  The 1960s were worse but only by a factor of 2-4.  

But they are materially different as well.  The 1960s riots were in the context of a near two-decade run of prosperity.  The suburbs were just beginning to boom as commercial and residential alternatives.  The civil rights acts of the sixties were still being passed and therefore past and even ancient racist practices were still real and visible.  The black family was still intact (but in decline as demonstrated in the Coleman and Moynihan reports).  And even though America was the richest country in the world, it was still not then as prosperous as the US is today.  The complaints and concerns about inner city life were real and was reflected in the fact that the riots were a continuing issue spreading among cities for half a decade.

The 2015 riots (Ferguson) and the 2020 riots (Floyd) were far more constrained in their origins.  Specific police encounters with specific criminals under ambiguous at best and at worst false narratives.

The 1960's riots destroyed so many city centers and provide excess growth conditions to exurbs and suburbs.  Real causes, real distress and real destruction.  Anyone traveling among our great cities during the 1970-1990s could see both the destruction and the difficult recoveries.  Things came to a head in the mid and late 1990s when citizens finally insisted on security and many, not all, of those great cities began magnificent recoveries.

What I have been pondering is the parallels.  Are we seeing an inflection point in a cycle of urban regrowth and then destruction, and then regrowth again?  Are Ferguson and Floyd merely distant echos or are they real harbingers of the return of the destructive cycle?

I don't know, but I am thinking about it and Anton's piece covers much of that ground with good commentary, observations and some data.

I was born just after the beginning of what left-wing San Franciscophile David Talbot has described as that city’s “Season of the Witch”: the decade-and-a-half of insanity that began (more or less) with the Summer of Love and carried through the early days of the AIDS epidemic. In between saw the Zodiac murders, the Zebra murders, the Moscone-Milk murders, Jonestown, the Hearst kidnapping, innumerable other acts of New Left violence, plus several attempts at revolution, some serious, most LARPy, but all disruptive—and meant to be—of ordinary civic life.

I also happen to have made my first trip to New York in 1977, that city’s widely-acknowledged nadir (the only competitor for the honor might be 1990, the peak of the crack wars, when the five boroughs logged an astounding 2,245 homicides). Granted, I didn’t see much—we stayed at the Plaza, about as insulated from mayhem as one could get—but just having been there in that poisoned year remains a perverse point of pride, like I was, however peripherally, a part of something big.

I actually lived in Manhattan when David Dinkins was mayor and in the District of Columbia when Marion Barry was. I was up north during the L.A. riots, but family was there, and—having spent part of every year in the Southland for more than a decade—I knew enough to be worried for them. Two years later, I would move down myself.

But by then everything had begun to change. Not just in L.A., and not just in the other three cities mentioned above, but throughout urban America. Or at least those parts of it that the ruling class cares about (i.e., not Detroit). City-dwellers, apparently, had finally had enough. They elected crime-fighting mayors across the land—Rudy Giuliani, above all, but also Richard Daley in Chicago, Richard Riordan in L.A., and Anthony Williams in D.C. Even San Franciscans got so fed up with a semi-permanent homeless encampment on Civic Center Plaza that they threw out the dopey liberal mayor Art Agnos (who years before had actually been shot by one of the Zebra killers and apparently learned nothing from the experience) and replaced him with the police chief.

The great American political and policy story of the 1990s was the spectacular drop in crime and concomitant rise of urban order. Cities and neighborhoods long considered ungovernable came back to life. People moved in, businesses opened (or reopened), property values rose, and the streets were packed—with, I hasten to add, law-abiding folk going about their business.

Worth a read as is the review of Shellenerberger's book which Anton eventually gets to.