Iowa Roots, Urban Rot: Why America's Cities Lost Their Vision
America's cities are in trouble. From Portland to Seattle, urban centers that once served as economic engines are now struggling with crime, homelessness, and declining populations. The question is simple: what happened to the vision that built these great American cities?
As someone who grew up in rural Iowa and now lives in the Alaskan countryside, I've watched this decline from a distance. But it matters to all of us, even those of us who prefer the clean air of the Susitna Valley to the crowded streets of our nation's urban cores.
What Made American Cities Great?
Historically, cities grew and prospered because of their location near rivers, ports, or natural resources. They were often capitals of great empires, religious centers, or home to vital institutions like universities, museums, and industry clusters.
In the modern era, a new factor emerged: a compelling urban vision. This vision focuses on four central ingredients: people, businesses, leaders, and capital.
- People: Industrious individuals with drive and vision
- Businesses: Employers and investment opportunities that build the economy
- Leaders: Elected officials who foster business growth and attract the right people
- Capital: Investment brought in by people to start businesses that make cities prosper
Too many of our urban areas now lack these essential elements. The result is what some call the Great Sorting: excessive taxation, overregulation, and lax justice systems have driven productive people out, and they've taken their businesses with them.
The Portland Example: A Vision Gone Wrong
Aaron M. Renn's essay in City Journal presents a compelling case study: Portland, Oregon, the home of Antifa.
Portland once had a clear vision. The city limited sprawl through its urban growth boundary, promoted walkable density, and supported light rail. It cultivated a culture of locally owned businesses, regional agriculture, and cutting-edge restaurants, coffee, and beer. The city prized good design, the outdoors, and a quirky, bohemian sensibility.
Then came the summer of 2020.
That was the summer when the nation exploded into riots, fueled by the death of a career criminal in Minneapolis. That was the summer when Antifa goons actually took over a portion of Seattle, claiming it as an autonomous zone that became an autocracy ruled by an armed warlord.
That was the summer the Great Sorting began in earnest.
How COVID-19 Accelerated the Decline
The pandemic forced productive, industrious people to work remotely for a year. With no incentive to remain in crowded and expensive cities, many fled to the suburbs or smaller towns where crime rates are lower, housing is cheaper, and taxes are more reasonable.
Businesses followed the people. Look at Seattle today: closed stores, windows covered with graffiti-daubed plywood, homeless encampments everywhere. Crime rates in many cities are climbing again, with street takeovers and other mob events appearing in the news weekly.
The leaders of vision left with the productive. Now these cities are electing socialists and outright communists who accelerate the decline by implementing policies that drive out the remaining people and businesses. Only the dependency class and a few leftist elites remain.
And those people of enterprise took the capital with them. The socialist leaders will, in time, find themselves with nothing left to tax.
Can American Cities Be Saved?
The concept of an urban vision is a good one. We could examine several compelling examples, not least of which is New York under Rudy Giuliani. The four elements required are still present in our country. But they are leaving the cities, and chaos is all that remains.
Before these people will return, bringing back enterprise, prosperity, and the capital necessary to fuel them, there will have to be new, radically different leadership. The open-air drug markets and homeless enclaves will have to be cleaned up. Taxation will have to return to being a tool used only to obtain necessary funds for essential services, not as a cudgel with which to bludgeon the productive. Regulation will have to be minimal, ensuring certain standards in things like building codes.
Most of all, these city governments have to return once more to their core purpose: protect the liberty and property of the citizens. All of the citizens.
What Does This Mean for Iowa?
Iowa has its own urban centers, from Des Moines to Cedar Rapids. The lessons from Portland and Seattle should serve as warnings. The values that built Iowa's communities, hard work, self-reliance, and common sense, are the same values that built America's great cities.
If our cities are to survive, they need leaders who understand that government's role is to protect liberty and property, not to manage people's lives. They need policies that attract industrious people, foster business growth, and keep capital flowing.
In the epic film Gladiator, Richard Harris as Emperor Marcus Aurelius said:
There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile. And I fear it will not survive the winter.
That was an urban vision, of sorts. And it's appropriate; the dream of our cities as they were did indeed prove fragile. All it took was crime and communism to bring them down. Until these cities have new leadership, leaders of vision, matters in our urban areas will only continue to deteriorate.
Without that, our cities will not survive the coming winter. And it's already getting cold.