https://www.city-journal.org/progressive-policies-urban-dysfunction?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=51ea3ea7e4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_19_03_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6c08930f2b-51ea3ea7e4-1094815453 parts
The Cost of Bad Intentions
Progressive policies threaten a new era of urban dysfunction.
Steven Malanga
Urban America began falling apart in the 1960s, with skyrocketing crime and worsening disorder. Vagrants and drug dealers colonized streets, parks, and other public spaces. Many once-vibrant city neighborhoods collapsed. The crisis had many causes, including the flight of industrial jobs from northern and midwestern cities. But profound changes in attitudes and government social policy played major roles, too. Crucial adjustments to welfare programs, spurred by liberal policymakers’ belief that the poor were victims of an unjust system, discouraged work and undermined families. The 1960s cultural revolution, which endorsed experimentation with drugs, brought more addiction—and more drug-fueled crime. And as the crisis intensified, policymakers lowered penalties for many crimes, seeing lawbreakers, too, as victims of society, so crime got worse still. Though such policies, championed nationally by President Lyndon B. Johnson and locally by mayors like New York’s John Lindsay, were well-intentioned, they helped produce an urban netherworld.
As City Journal readers know well, cities woke up from this nightmare in the 1990s, with smarter and more aggressive policing, tougher criminal sanctions, greater focus on quality-of-life concerns, welfare reform, and other policy changes. Crime plummeted in many cities, and many city economies surged. Some cities, including New York, became models of urban flourishing.
Yet, tragically—and bewilderingly, given such improvements—a new generation of progressive urban politicians seem intent on returning to some of the policies that cost cities so dearly decades ago. They’re pulling back on enforcement of quality-of-life infractions, ceding public space again to the homeless and drug users, undermining public school discipline, and releasing violent criminals back into communities or refusing to prosecute them in the first place. And lo and behold, crime is starting to rise, and the streets of otherwise successful cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and even parts of New York are filling up with human excrement, drug paraphernalia, and illness-wracked homeless encampments. Residents are growing fearful.
Today’s progressives don’t have the excuse of naiveté, as did their predecessors. In fact, arising as part of the resistance to President Donald Trump, they want to overturn the laws and values that support the nation’s bourgeois, strive-and-thrive culture. If their agenda makes middle-class Seattle homeowners, or businesspeople in San Francisco, or downtown merchants in Chicago uncomfortable—too bad.
Dramatic postwar changes in American life upended cities. Henry Ford’s affordable cars allowed families to move to newfangled suburbs, neither rural nor completely urban, and especially from the 1950s on, many made that choice. So, increasingly, did businesses, as interstate highways, displacing canals and ports, made shipping via truck from the cheaper suburbs easy. Cities hemorrhaged jobs—above all, blue-collar jobs—just as a generation of poor Southern b****s migrated to northern and midwestern urban neighborhoods, seeking opportunity. They were followed, after mid-1960s immigration reforms, by waves of poor, uneducated foreign workers. Many struggled to find the American dream, though the country was prospering. Worried about the entrenchment of a new urban poor, America’s political leaders launched the War on Poverty. The Johnson administration’s chief antipoverty warrior, Sargent Shriver, predicted that it could be won in just a decade.
Shriver and like-minded policymakers designed programs far more ambitious than those of the New Deal liberalism that had characterized the Democratic Party since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s e******n in 1932. Though the New Deal vastly expanded the government safety net, it still recognized a connection between work and upward mobility and viewed government’s role as that of a temporary helper when someone was truly down and out. The officials behind the War on Poverty, by contrast, saw the poor as powerless, crushed by economic and cultural forces that could be overcome only with massive government help. Instead of temporary aid, welfare would now be a right, which the poor were entitled to receive, and benefits became far more generous, so that, by the late 1970s, welfare payments and other government aid now brought in about as much money as low-wage work.
Welfare use took off. In New York City, the rolls expanded from 500,000 to more than 1 million people, even as the city’s population was shrinking. Traditional family structure broke down at a rapid rate, with unwed mothers, mostly minorities, treating welfare as a long-term way of life and fatherless children becoming the norm in many inner-city neighborhoods. The removal of stigma for being on relief, together with 1960s-era cultural upheavals that encouraged greater sexual license, formed what City Journal contributing editor Fred Siegel called “dependent individualists,” who assumed that they had “a right to bear children and the state had the obligation to support them.” The result? “An extraordinary t***sfer of responsibility from the family to the state.” For liberal reformers, “the sharpest disappointment was the sudden upsurge in dependency,” Charles Morris wrote in his 1980 book, The Cost of Good Intentions. “The original strategists of antipoverty programs seemed sincerely to believe that the increased opportunities for minorities from Great Society programs and civil rights victories would actually reduce welfare rolls. Instead, something like the opposite happened.”
The widespread destruction in Bedford-Stuyvesant during New York City’s 1977 blackout exemplified the social chaos of the era. (AP PHOTO)
The widespread destruction in Bedford-Stuyvesant during New York City’s 1977 blackout exemplified the social chaos of the era. (AP PHOTO)
Metastasizing crime and disorder accompanied the rise in dependency, with much of the criminal activity associated with fatherless and poorly socialized young males. The nation’s violent-crime rate blasted from 161 crimes per 100,000 people in 1960 to 364 a decade later, reaching a terrifying summit of 758 in 1991. Overwhelmed police departments, some of which had seen their budgets cut in favor of social programs, struggled to cope. During the 1960s, the risk of a perpetrator getting apprehended for committing robbery declined threefold, according to Charles Murray’s calculations in Losing Ground, his 1984 critique of welfare policy and its social consequences.
“A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle,” James Q. Wilson and George Kelling warned in “Broken Windows,” their seminal 1982 Atlantic article on the myriad factors contributing to urban breakdown. “A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off.”
Wilson and Kelling’s vivid essay became one of the turning points in the battle to conquer chaos. Slowly, public officials in a few cities stopped ignoring the small acts of disorder that cumulatively undermined neighborhoods. Police in New York started arresting fare-beaters in the subway, dispersing aggressive panhandlers, and sweeping drug dealers out of parks and streets—and discovered that the minor offenders were often wanted for graver crimes. Prosecutors, recognizing that a small percentage of lawbreakers accounted for much of an area’s crime, worked to keep repeat offenders off the streets. New kinds of neighborhood groups, including business-improvement districts, cleaned up parks and other public spaces, re-creating order. Welfare reform got a majority of recipients off the dole and back to work.
Crime began falling quickly in New York, and then elsewhere, as other cities took up the ideas. Since 1990, violent crime in Gotham is down by nearly 70 percent, with the murder rate down 80 percent. Nationwide, violent crime has fallen nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, while crimes against property have dropped by 55 percent. The effects have been most visible in neighborhoods that had suffered the most. Brooklyn’s Bushwick, a former blue-collar neighborhood torn apart by social disorder, has watched its formerly battle-scarred landscape of vacant lots and empty buildings t***sform into a thriving community. The devastated South Bronx has been renamed SoBro, where residents fleeing Manhattan’s stratospheric prices have been snapping up townhouses and condos. Similar revivals have occurred in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood, Northern Liberties in Philadelphia, and Detroit’s midtown, among other formerly blighted areas.
Ironically, it is these very successes that have created the conditions for the current backsliding. The remarkable revival of neighborhoods in many cities, along with surging, tech-driven urban economies, has lured a new generation of educated young singles and well-to-do families to become city dwellers, and they’ve got the progressive beliefs typical of their demographic. The disorder of the 1960s, the drug wars of the 1970s, the brutal gang-murder sprees of the 1980s—these are little more than sensational headlines from a barely imaginable world for many of these new urbanites. And with this changing demographic has come a resurgence of progressive urban governance. After two decades of mayoral rule by a moderate Republican, Rudy Giuliani, and a centrist Democrat, Michael Bloomberg, New Yorkers in 2013, for example, elected Bill de Blasio, a l*****t Democrat. Other successful cities, such as Seattle and Portland, which had escaped the worst disorders of the 1960s and now bustle with technology workers, similarly moved leftward, mirroring the elite progressivism of their workforces.
The influence of the new progressives is most evident in recent debates over policing. The shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, officer Darren Wilson in August 2014 (later found by a grand jury to have been justified) ignited a national wave of recriminations about police use of force against black men. The narrative, picked up by progressive politicians and elite media outlets and amplified by the activism of the Black L***s M****r movement, claimed that proactive policing was a mortal threat to minorities—despite ample evidence that police use of force had plummeted over the years, including against minority suspects. Since 1991, the peak year of crime in New York City, to take the most striking example, the number of yearly shootings by the New York Police Department has declined by two-thirds—a testament to the force’s professionalism and to the impact that major crime declines have had on the need for cops to use their weapons.
Baltimore’s grim recent experience shows what can happen when the new narrative takes hold. In April 2015, Freddie Gray, an African-American in police custody for possession of an illegal knife, died a week after falling into a coma in the back of a police van. Following the incident, which set off extensive r**ting in Baltimore’s minority neighborhoods, the city’s progressive leaders harshly criticized the police department, charging it with being abusive toward minorities. Though one Gray witness—a fellow prisoner—told investigators that the handcuffed suspect had been smashing his head against the side of the van as he was t***sported, local prosecutors indicted six of the officers involved. (Juries acquitted three of the cops, and prosecutors dropped charges against the rest.) Hostility to the police went right to the top of Baltimore’s political hierarchy. In December 2016, more than a year after Gray’s death, police brass gathered to discuss an alarming spike in carjackings, with new mayor Catherine Pugh in attendance. (Pugh resigned this past May.) After listening to the police officials discuss crime-fighting strategy, according to one account, she grew agitated, castigated the cops, and declared the meeting a waste of time. The police should seek to get minority kids (suspected of committing the carjackings) jobs or into after-school programs, she said, and then they wouldn’t need to steal cars—a perfect evocation of the once-discredited 1960s-era attitude.
Demoralized by the lack of political support—indeed, by the outright opposition of the mayor’s office—police abandoned proactive enforcement, and Baltimore descended into anarchy. In 2011, with the police fully engaged, murders in the city had fallen to 197—the first time in decades that Baltimore had seen fewer than 200 k*****gs in a year. Since the Gray incident, Baltimore has had four straight years of 300-plus murders, and 90 percent of the victims were black. “In 2017, the church I attend started naming the victims of the violence at Sunday services and h*****g a purple ribbon for each on a long cord outside,” wrote one columnist. “By year’s end, the ribbons crowded for space, like shirts on a tenement clothesline.”
Continued.