It's not just Los Angeles. In New York City, a woman was burned to death on the subway, one in a string of gruesome subway attacks and murders. In Chicago, the mayor initiated the firing of the CEO of the local public schools because he refused to issue high-interest debt to fund teacher raises. The mayor, Brandon Johnson, formerly worked for the Chicago teacher’s union. Shoplifting has turned into an epidemic in San Francisco and Washington, with videos of robbers brazenly walking into stores with black trash bags and looting the shelves going viral on social media.
These recent problems come on top of longstanding issues with high housing prices, difficulty in construction of new housing, high construction costs for transit projects and more. For each of these, city defenders have a retort. But this only reinforces in people’s minds the idea that leaders don’t get it.
Let’s be clear: talk of the death of cities from an “urban doom loop” in the wake of the pandemic is overblown. Cities such as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles remain attractive and powerful draws to residents, businesses and visitors.
But the governance problems are real. And even if they don’t fully undermine urban life in these places, they have already gone a long way to discrediting progressive leadership at the national level. They ended up helping Donald Trump get elected last November.
Urban leaders need to take a step back and refocus their efforts on doing an effective job dealing with their core responsibilities: public safety, service delivery, infrastructure, administering health and safety regulations, and planning and zoning.
For many years there’s been a drumbeat of celebratory coverage of mayors and cities and how they are positioned to solve many of our society’s toughest problems. Call it the “if mayors ruled the world” mindset.
But in reality, cities are chartered to do specific jobs dealing with police, fire, parks and transit. When those basics are working well, urban leaders can look to do more. But right now, we are far from that point, either in reality or public perception.
Many cities in America are financially strapped, have limited powers, and are part of regions with many independent suburbs and other jurisdictions with separate leadership where the majority of the region’s people and businesses are located. This weakens the hand that even excellent mayors have to play. Cities often struggle to deliver on their core services due to a lack of cash. They are even more poorly positioned to do larger things.
So social justice and climate change need to take a back seat in urban politics to the bread-and-butter municipal functions people care about and cities are specifically chartered to deliver. The best way cities can actually promote equity and social justice is to deliver high-quality public goods and services to all of their residents. The best thing cities can do for the climate is to ensure they are attractive places to live with ample reasonably priced housing so that people don’t move to the exurban fringes.
It's easier for cities to say that they are going to focus on core responsibilities than it is to actually do it. They face a lot of difficult problems that the public expects leaders to address, notably homelessness. There’s no realistic alternative to engaging with them. But cities have definitely over-engaged or over-corrected on some matters. The de-policing and decriminalization agenda has been a failure. There has been too much focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives over delivery of city services. Even where this has been more marketing than reality, those very marketing efforts become the face of the city to its critics when things go wrong.
In short, there are things cities can do to redirect energy and policy choices towards effective delivery of their core functions. And that’s exactly what they should do.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
