The End of the American City

Here are a couple of graphics that might be interesting for those of you who have not seen them before.

In 1961, New York City commenced a new urban plan that included massive downzoning. To give a sense of how much urban growth has been stunted compared to previous trends, before the downzoning, Manhattan had 7 Congressional districts. Today it has 2.5.

Here is a graphic showing the population potential for the city. At the time, there was zoned capacity in New York City for 55 million residents and the current population was just under 8 million.

The zoned capacity was reduced to 11.8 million in 1961.

Over the course of the 20th century, our city leaders decided they didn’t want cities any more. From 1890 to 1960, the population of New York City increased from 1.5 million to just under 8 million. After the downzoning, growth stopped. New York City has roughly the same population today that it did in 1960.

Over the course of the last 100 years (Next year will be the 100 year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that cities could consider apartments to be nuisances.), every city in America implemented similar plans, and so for the last several decades, in the aggregate, we are only able to build suburbs.

This is at the heart of every economic problem we have. Cities are, more than anything, valuable for the poor - both defensively and aspirationally. That’s why the new arrivals went from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side. It’s why, after we made new homes and densifying neighborhoods illegal in our central cities, increasing numbers of Americans choose to live in our central cities, even without homes.

Why has stress built up in the American economy since the mid-20th century? Why do wages and living standards for our poorest workers seem like they don’t keep up with the rest of the country? To a first approximation, it’s this.

Aspirational poor workers and families who need social support use cities, and we decided - literally made a policy choice to stand athwart history yelling “Stop” - that we weren’t going to have them any more.

Why? Deep down in the bowels of the emergent political processes that made cities illegal, I believe that the fact that they hold value for the poor is the key reason for their demise. Nobody had to necessarily think of it that way or speak of it that way. There were just a lot of problems that we were trying to get rid of, and many of those problems are correlated for one reason or another with the presence of poor people. Maybe poor families were causing some of those problems. Maybe they were just forced to live near those problems because they lacked the means to escape them. But, over the course of a century, “get rid of the places poor families value and live in” became an approximation of the policies that emerged to get rid of those problems.

Cities are the growth engine of the modern economy. They are the pathway to income mobility. And we banned them. Literally. That’s not even rhetorical license. You can see it in the graphic above. In 1961, New York City voted to put a lid on the future. And it stuck.

Here’s a similar graphic for Los Angeles, where it happened between 1960 and 1990.