Cities are the physical manifestation of labor markets. They exist to minimize the distance between labor and capital. In their basest form, cities are pools of talent and skill. The city lives and dies by the people who populate it.
As an urbanist and an engineer, my interest in cities has long been focused on the physical—the streets and the buildings. In my formative years as an urbanist, I never gave the people who comprise cities as much consideration as the built environment they inhabit. I was heavily influenced by online urbanism, which is fundamentally a reaction to the ugliness of car infrastructure. American urbanists retain an unshakable belief that if we change the physical characteristics of our cities, we can make them just as nice as any European city.
There’s a nugget of truth to this. We know that people respond to the incentives infrastructure creates for their behavior—for example, wider roads encourage speeding. Absent other factors, a city of massive roads, abundant parking, and spread out buildings will be less pleasant (in a conventional urban sense) than one of narrow streets and intensively utilized land. The design of a city’s infrastructure does influence its livability.
Absent other factors is doing a lot of work there, though. Because human beings drive cars (for the time being), traffic safety is not solely a function of the design of road infrastructure. It is also a function of behavior—whether drivers choose to follow the rules. Theoretically, you could make Houston virtually crash-free if you could ensure that every driver was in the 99th percentile of conscientiousness and defensive driving ability. Part of why we have such a vigorous debate around road design is because traffic engineers design under an assumption of driver rationality. Traffic engineers excel at building roads that make the rules very clear, with abundant signage and consistent lane markings. They remain unsafe because people don’t follow those rules consistently.
If we accept that the safety of our roads—and, by extension, the safety of our cities in general—is at least partially a function of the choices of the people using them, then it follows that much of the quality of life in a city is determined by the behavior of its residents. We can and should design safer streets, but if the city has an unusually high number of people who choose to drive recklessly, then the problem of violent crashes will not disappear. We can build nice things like parks and libraries, but if certain people choose to deface those places, then we won’t get much value out of them. And, indeed, we can try to attract new residents and investment to struggling neighborhoods, but if some people choose to commit crimes and vandalize property nearby, we can’t expect our efforts to result in much change.
The idea that the people who live in a city are at least partially responsible for its success seems obvious, but it’s anathema to many progressive urbanists who prefer to elevate the salience of socioeconomics or racial oppression. This overemphasis on structural factors has blinded us to the true drivers of the malaise and decay our cities struggle with.
As always, this blindness feels particularly acute in St. Louis. City boosters here often wonder why others don’t recognize the city’s greatness. St. Louis has beautiful architecture, great food, renowned parks and museums—what’s not to love? What are the suburbanites in St. Charles missing?
For me, a few years of living in the city has only emphasized that the city’s greatest liability is, bluntly, its disproportionately large population of shitty people. Losers. Deadbeats. People who create countless negative externalities that degrade the entire experience of living in the city. People who engage in behavior that has long been stereotypical of St. Louis:
- Trashing public infrastructure and spaces (e.g., parks, bus stops);
- Squatting in, vandalizing, and burning buildings;
- Driving violently and recklessly, often under the influence;
- Driving extremely loud cars;
- Panhandling aggressively;
- Shooting guns for celebration;
- Getting into explosive fights at bars, clubs, and short-term rentals
Note that I’m not mentioning violent crime, often the first and only point of discussion in conversations about St. Louis’s struggles. I won’t minimize it—violent crime is horrifying and toxic to urban living, and it is an enormous contributor to the city’s decline. But the typical St. Louisian will not be a victim of violent crime. Residents like myself encounter the maladies above far more frequently—in 2023, I felt like I couldn’t leave my house without witnessing an egregious act of reckless driving. These are the little things that chip away at your love for the city bit by bit until you finally accept that yes, you live in a shithole. An endearing shithole, but a shithole nonetheless.
St. Louis has been poised for “revitalization” for decades, and in many meaningful ways, that revitalization is happening. The city is shrinking, but it is getting wealthier and more educated. Prominent vacant properties are being rehabilitated. Neighborhoods that were decrepit in the 1980s are now vibrant. But the persistence of disorder is a massive counterweight that retards this progress. It ensures that every two steps forward will be accompanied by one step back.
If you pay attention to the news here, you see plenty of evidence of how the city’s losers chip away at revitalization:
- Local entrepreneurs are trying to create a new business district along Delmar, but they’re being victimized by vandals.
- The owner of Crown Candy Kitchen constantly deals with reckless drivers on his street and break-ins.
- Street infrastructure in the Grove is being destroyed with no replacement.
- Despite efforts to rehabilitate Downtown’s image since the pandemic, large homeless encampments keep appearing and quickly turn violent.
- Pedestrians keep getting killed in horrifyingly violent crashes.
What would St. Louis look like if it could free itself of this population of deadbeats? If business owners and developers could invest in the North Side without fear of their property being ransacked or destroyed; if residents could enjoy the city without being exposed to deranged behavior and a trashed public realm? The growth of the city’s safer neighborhoods gives us a clue.
The hard truth is that St. Louis and its peer cities will not grow again until they rid themselves of the disease of antisocial behavior. In St. Louis, this will happen in one of two ways:
- SLMPD gets the resources, political support, and quality of leadership needed to aggressively enforce quality of life crimes.
- The city’s poorest neighborhoods continue hemorrhaging residents until there are so few people left that crime evaporates.
The latter approach is what’s happening now. It’s the default state, the Detroit method—absent state intervention, residents of North City and southside neighborhoods like Dutchtown will move away from violence and disorder, leaving behind places so depopulated that there’s nothing left to vandalize and nobody left to victimize. The city lives and dies by the people who inhabit it, and if those people are disproportionately shitty and noxious, then the law-abiding, working majority will exercise their right to decamp to greener pastures. (The dysfunctional minority will generally follow.)
What we are witnessing in the ongoing depopulation of St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and other formerly prominent major cities is the slow abatement of a multigenerational disaster: the collapse of urban order in the mid-20th century. Our cities were put in an irredeemable position when huge numbers of deeply disordered people migrated to them after World War II at the same time that liberal criminal justice reforms sharply reduced the effectiveness of the criminal justice system. It was never reasonable to expect cities to weather this one-two punch of surging crime and inept enforcement. What has followed since the 1960s is an agonizing effort to put the pieces back together.
Time heals all wounds, including the broken heart of St. Louis. The wealth and education gap between blacks and whites will shrink, the neighborhoods will desegregate, and the amount of disorder in the city will revert to society’s mean. But this slow healing takes multiple generations and creates an immense amount of suffering and injustice along the way.
We don’t have to passively live through the death and rebirth of our cities. We could invest in high-quality policing, give poor neighborhoods the public safety services they deserve, and break the cycle of heavy-handed mass incarceration. Sadly, the progressives who lead our most troubled cities are not interested in proactive solutions because they sympathize more with criminals than their victims. They prioritize the city’s worst people over the law-abiding, working majority. This sounds hyperbolic, but I struggle to find another rationale for policies that consistently allow repeat offenders back onto the streets and permit the proliferation of antisocial behavior.
I hope that the citizens of our great cities soon wake up and realize that urban living is not tolerable without order; that a city cannot survive if its most violent and unstable residents are allowed to act with impunity. The urban shift toward Trump in the election suggests a growing acceptance of this basic truth.1 We may finally be moving past the insanity of the post-Ferguson era, which has undone so much of progress in our cities by eradicating enforcement of quality of life laws.
As the transcontinental railroad advanced westward over the Great Plains in the 1860s, towns like North Platte, Nebraska and Cheyenne, Wyoming were established along the route. At their founding, they were occupied by a “Hell on Wheels” band of profiteers who followed the end of the line seeking to extract as much of the workers’ wages as possible. These shady entrepreneurs flooded these towns with brothels, saloons, and gambling houses, selling vice for a handsome profit.
Unsurprisingly, towns full of drunk, transient men, subject to no law enforcement, became depraved cesspools of violence. Murders were common and no property was secure. Order wasn’t established until the railroad moved further west, taking the Hell on Wheels with it, or the railroad or military intervened.
The character of these towns was determined by the people who inhabited them. A town of unscrupulous vice-peddlers cannot be made orderly without force or removal. No amount of cleaning the streets or redesigning the buildings would have changed the character of these places. Time after time, the solution was to remove or subdue the troublemakers.
Today’s cities bear only a slight resemblance to the boomtowns of the Wild West, but the fundamental truth remains the same: a city of shitty people will be a shitty place to live. Choose your neighbors wisely.
- I did not vote for Trump—but it was satisfying to see voters deliver such a strong indictment of poor urban governance.