An accident or a decline?

From "People moved to coastal cities because that’s where the good jobs were.... This went on so long that the appeal of central cities..." by Ann Althouse.  She is quoting from an article, U.S. cities are failing to address the remote-work revolution by Megan McArdle.

McArdle is a very good journalist of the old school.  Strong research, commitment to empiricism, logic and clear arguments.  Good at marrying theory with empirical evidence.  I have been reading her work for years, from the time of her blog, Asymmetric Information, to The Atlantic and on to the Washington Post.

I used to subscribe to the WP for a couple of decades but dropped them after they had drifted so far from empiricism and relevancy into indulgent vanity ideological pieces.  I even renewed my Washington Post subscription when she moved over there.  I continued to enjoy her articles but they were insufficient to reverse the tsunami of cognitive pollution in the rest of the paper so I let the subscription lapse again.  

I follow McArdle on twitter but her posts don't seem to pop up in my timeline all that much for whatever reason and I haven't read anything by her for many months, perhaps more than a year.

So this piece being quoted by Althouse is my first revisit in a long time.  

And what a disappointment.  It reads as if it were a first draft piece, unrevised and unedited.  There's that simple confusion when she refers to coastal cities in one paragraph and central cities in the next, suggesting that she is talking about cities in flyover country in contrast to coastal cities when in fact she is talking about the downtown of cities.

Her central point is that mayors have a window of opportunity.  Cities were significantly affected by Covid-19, the lockdowns, the school closures and the George Floyd riots.  Together these four forces drove residents out of cities and into the suburbs, exurbs, or simply elsewhere.  

As a consequence, people and companies got accustomed to Work from Home and many employees and companies found that Covid-19 pandemic was the catalyst to different work patterns which might be more desirable for employees (no commuting) and more desirable for companies (reduced need for expensive commercial space).  

McArdle is arguing that now, when cities have reopened but before populations have returned to their pre-pandemic levels and pre-riot levels, that mayors ought to be focusing on improving city services and meeting the needs and expectations of residents.

I don't disagree.  There was a pandemic and riot induced disjoint.  Residents, employees and companies have choices that they were not confident in before.  

McArdle argues that mayors need to focus on services and focus on getting people back.  

But compared to just about every other article I have ever read by her, this one is notably weak.  She doesn't document just how deep and widespread the exodus from cities has been, even though the data exists.  She doesn't really delve into the debate as to whether and to what extent Work from Home is a real and enduring issue.  She doesn't talk about rising urban crime post George Floyd riots.  She doesn't talk about how focused cities have been on issues (DEI, ESG, Climate Change, Critical Race Theory, Income Inequality, Housing First for the homeless, etc.) which contribute nothing to the central concerns of residents (being traditional urban services delivered faster, cheaper, better, and safer) and frequently make city life worse.

She makes broad assertions which seem unsupported by data.  Washington, D.C., where she lives, has grown healthily over the past decade but that has not been true for all or even most big cities.  

I would speculate that this was an early draft of an opinion piece which simply slipped through and therefore is unrepresentative of her work as it used to be.

That is the far more desirable conclusion than the alternative which would be that her tenure at the Washington Post has substantially eroded her journalistic quality.

Thinking I was perhaps merely petty or cranky, I read the comments to Althouse's post.  Several other readers seem to have the same reaction as do I.  We agree that city mayors need to make the case in order for their cities to lure back residents and that part of that argument has to be a marked improvement in city services, especially public safety and security via effective policing in combination with an effective judicial system.