Building a Conservative Urbanism

The concept of “civilization” is based on the economic and cultural exchange enabled by cities. However, the American “inner-city” has become a euphemism for dysfunction, exacerbated in the last decade by the “Great Awokening.” Those urban areas not rendered uninhabitable by crime and possessing the rudiments of urban cultural amenities and attractive architecture are often unaffordable, hindering young Americans in building wealth and starting families. Furthermore, many major cities are bastions of the radical left, substituting Neo-Marxist anarcho-tyranny akin to Orwell’s Barcelona for the rule of law and abusing their jurisdiction over so much of American life for lawfare. However, policies such as school choice and zoning reform could help to foster red-state cities as an alternative to the Scylla of urban anarcho-tyranny and the Charybdis of philistine suburbia, enabling conservatives to overcome their present marginalization as pagani and shape the future of American civilization.

I. Why We Need Conservative Cities

Why are American cities so left-wing? There are three main reasons.

First, Anglo-American culture has traditionally been oriented to rural or small-town life (the former especially among the Scots-Irish and the latter among Yankees), which can be traced to the Teutonic folkways of feudal Europe in contrast to the Mediterranean’s poleis and later monarchical and ecclesiastical empires. Indeed, even as Britain and then America precociously industrialized, WASPs chased a Romantic pseudo-rural ideal, exemplified by country clubs. As America spread West, new States, inspired by Jeffersonian ideology, purposefully separated their state capitals and college towns from emerging commercial centers. Notably, the metropolitan area where conservatives have recently shown the most strength, the “Gold Coast” of South Florida, is heavily populated by middle-class Latin Americans or other immigrants (in particular Jews from the former Soviet Union) from cultures where urban life has traditionally been prized.

Second, crime, public disorder, public sector union parasitism, the racial spoils system in public services, burdensome taxation and regulation for productive citizens, and ideologized education have driven out middle class families (starting with the ethnic-Catholic working class), mostly leaving the underclass, bureaucrats, gays, and young transients rebelling against their parochial upbringing. While this process may be devastating for a city’s long-term prospects, it often serves individual politicians’ interests by expelling the base of potential opposition, a phenomenon known as the “Curley Effect” after Boston’s Irish mayor, who through his policies and rhetoric encouraged the replacement of the city’s WASPs in the early and mid-20th century.

The third reason is that the remaining viable cities and neighborhoods are unaffordable for middle-class families aspiring to American norms of personal space and financial independence. This is exacerbated by restrictions on market-rate construction, with building geared to the high end or “affordable housing” set-asides. These rules exist for reasons ranging from historical or environmental preservation and neighborhood stability to politicians’ interest in the corruption and social engineering enabled by discretionary control (a “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition). In local politics, “NIMBY” concerns about concentrated disruption will generally prevail over the diffuse benefits of lower rents; it should be noted that this collective-action problem also implies that zoning is not a collective conspiracy of homeowners, many of whom also have an interest in affordability if they have more children than houses and a “bequest motive.”

However, even well-intentioned policies preventing land from being put to its best use lead to the nationwide externality of pricing workers out of the metropolitan areas where agglomeration economies enhance productivity and wages. Doubtlessly in part because of their high cost of raising children, America’s most dynamic cities are also often low-fertility “IQ shredders” with negative effects on future social dynamism. The gratuitous difficulty of homeownership and family formation has also certainly exacerbated young voters’ political radicalism, with the UK representing an extreme example of this phenomenon. However, conservatives can also benefit if they credibly seek to remedy this problem; Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives appear set to win the youth vote in the next Canadian election, in part by promising pro-housing policies.

The flight of middle-class families (the bulk of the conservative base) to the suburbs has come with high costs. The suburban lifestyle is expensive, both in terms of inefficient land use and mandatory automobile ownership. Indeed, it is intentionally expensive to the extent that affluent families, regardless of political ideology, seek to price out the underclass and, in particular, ensure a safe environment in local schools. This can lead to an exclusionary-zoning Prisoner’s Dilemma which results in a mostly unchanged socioeconomic geography, albeit more strictly stratified on the margin and with many promising low and middle-income students having less access to good public than private schools, but with more expensive housing for everyone. Additionally, the suburban lifestyle, with its lack of walkability and high emissions, harms both human health and the environment.

Furthermore, suburbs cannot provide the same cultural opportunities as cities and have usually been built with little concern for aesthetic taste, with a few exceptions such as Ohio’s New Albany. As the Bronze Age Pervert has argued, suburbs are a kind of “longhouse” in which “free-range parenting” is impossible (as, of course, it is in unsafe cities), working mens’ lives are allocated between their bosses and wives, contributing to male anomie, and indispensable cultural and political territory is ceded to the Left.

As such, red state urbanism should be a conservative priority for several reasons. First, it could promote a cultural renaissance; it is a disgrace that a wealthy city like Midland, Texas, has not converted its fiscal windfall into something akin to the Manaus Opera House. Second, it could at once promote male blue-collar employment in construction, help young middle-class families build wealth, and allow conservative “elite human capital” to have careers in cultures that reinforce their values. Finally, new commercial centers with a more balanced local electorate and jury pool, in addition to a conservative state judicial system, might also deter the left’s use of urban venues for lawfare. It should also be emphasized that well-designed urbanism a la Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham need not conflict with a traditional WASP affection for nature and activities like hunting or horseback riding that satisfy the thymotic element in man. Modern suburbia’s claim to offer a synthesis between urbanity and nature usually fails to adequately deliver either, and conservatives’ exurban escapism is poorly adapted for either preserving traditional culture or shaping modern civilization.

II. Policies to Promote American Urbanism: School Choice and Zoning Reform

How can conservatives reform American cities? In my view, school choice is the most powerful tool. Of course, this is not the main reason for enacting school choice, which all red states should adopt to expand opportunities for better, more tailored, and more classical education. However, no longer requiring urban middle-class families to pay twice for a good education would make city living far more viable for conservatives, while weakening the teachers’ unions that are a significant base for the urban far-left. This could begin a virtuous cycle, in which a better-run and safer city attracts more middle-class families. School choice could also attract highly-educated conservative blue state emigres who desire both urbanism and a classical or religious education for their children, and balance out any statewide political consequences of urbanization. Red states’ adoption of universal school choice (without restricting selection, income, or tuition as in Cleveland and Milwaukees’ previous schemes), covering urban areas including South Florida, Phoenix, Tampa Bay, Charlotte, Orlando, Raleigh-Durham, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, will be an experiment in urbanism as well as in education.

It is also imperative for red-state urbanism to promote an affordable cost of living for middle-class families. Anti-density rules are generally counter-productive for this purpose, as demonstrated by the Bay Area and Southern California; reserving land for detached single-family homes may reduce their relative cost, but can increase their absolute cost when apartments and townhomes to satisfy singles, empty-nesters, and small families are scarce. Some on the Right may claim that immigration restriction is sufficient to lower housing costs, but this conflicts with both pro-natalism and building red-state economic and cultural centers receptive to internal migration. Zoning reform, especially mixed-use “form-based codes” like Miami’s that recognize the synergy of commercial and residential uses, in concert with beautification (I like Rio de Janeiro’s sidewalks as a model for Miami) and mitigating the “urban heat island” effect in the Sun Belt, is essential for fostering the economies of scale and scope to challenge the coastal megalopolises.

Since our cultural and political system can’t be expected to produce urbanist philosopher-kings a la Baron Haussmann (and, in addition to its expensive land use, in my view even Paris is diminished by its monotony) the ideal system for America would be to eliminate zoning in favor of privatizing neighborhood development and maintenance, broadly similar to the pre-zoning development of London by aristocratic landowners and Saint Louis’ private places, with parks and boulevards ensuring sight-lines to neo-Classical or Art Deco public buildings. Houston is the closest contemporary American analogue, and while its policies have hardly ensured universal high-quality design, it has combined rapid development and densification in parts (ensuring affordability) with the option to settle in stable HOA-regulated neighborhoods. Of course, Houston is not an urbanist utopia, and the costs of its sprawl should be mitigated through market-based policies like congestion pricing.

Nevertheless, there are valid objections to simply imposing “YIMBYism” nationwide. Many neighborhoods were developed on the premise that homeowners would be able to control zoning through local politics, and developers would have otherwise incorporated the deed restrictions and HOAs ubiquitous in zoning-free Houston. Therefore, homeowners could complain with justice about a simple ex post abolition of zoning laws, since the number of property owners in most neighborhoods is too large to plausibly engage in Coasean bargaining to attach new restrictions with unanimous consent. Furthermore, historic districts do help to preserve the cohesion and beauty of many urban neighborhoods, and, albeit rarely, some (usually old-money) towns’ zoning policies do ensure basic standards of architectural taste and coherence.

A more promising path than doctrinaire YIMBYism would be for states to permanently exempt newly developed agricultural land from future zoning regulations (at least for developments exceeding a certain acreage); if deed restrictions or HOAs increased a parcel’s long-term value, developers have the incentive to include them. To encourage existing cities to allow more development, states could create a fund financed by an earmarked sales tax and distribute the money to localities to partly replace property taxes while tying this distribution to the net rate of construction for localities with high per-capita non-agricultural property valuations (ie. high demand). This would in effect be a penalty for the negative externalities of exclusionary zoning; however, it’s important to emphasize that in contrast to the federal AFFH program, these state policies would focus on multi-use market-rate construction rather than socially-engineered affordable housing.

III. The Fallacies of “Georgism”

Another policy frequently associated with YIMBYism that of replacing real estate taxes and other forms of local and potentially even national taxation with a (possibly confiscatory) land value tax, termed “Georgism” after the economist Henry George.

Proponents of LVTs advance two main arguments; first, the supply of land has been basically fixed since the closing of the frontier, so under certain conditions LVTs are perfectly efficient and merely transfer revenue from landowners to the government, while traditional property taxes reduce investment in structures and are mostly passed on to renters and businesses (assuming that marginal supply is not constrained). However, LVTs are only perfectly efficient if land values are exogenous to landowners’ actions; this condition mostly holds if local infrastructure investment and planning is conducted by the government, which is likely if private land ownership and control is fragmented; but large landowners, developers, and HOAs (which cover the vast majority of new American developments) do heavily capture the spillovers of their investments and activities. Therefore, an LVT could deter private activities to increase land values, especially in cities that follow a free-market land-use policy.

Hence, under an optimal planning regime, a maximally efficient LVT would be set far below confiscatory levels. Additionally, the priority of incentivizing farmers to maintain their land (essential for national security) would favor a low LVT on agricultural land. These factors imply that an LVT would raise significantly less revenue than is usually believed by Georgists. The ethical and political problems of retroactively confiscating Americans’ savings in the form of home equity, which suggests that only the future “increment” of land values should be taxed, further dramatically reduces the potential revenue yield of an LVT.

The second main argument for an LVT is that since land prices are responsive to mobile demand from potential residents and businesses, a municipal LVT taxes the passive beneficiaries of good local government. However, individuals and businesses are not fully mobile between jurisdictions (especially in the case of large cities) due to local networks and other fixed assets, and to the extent they are mobile, all kinds of local taxes are capitalized into land prices. Since the benefits of local government are shared between residents, businesses, and landowners (not just captured by the latter), it makes sense to levy taxes (such as on sales, income, and property) for which the incidence is similarly shared between residents, businesses, and landowners. This is especially the case in large cities where landowners do not electorally predominate, since paradoxically the economic efficiency of an LVT in that context may aggravate the danger of enabling local governments to confiscate home equity for the purpose of socially wasteful spending. Thus, I am skeptical of Georgism in theory and practice.

However, tax policy may have a role to play in promoting conservative urbanism; for instance, allowing cities to grant more generous homestead exemptions could shift local taxes from resident homeowners to renters and commuters in jurisdictions such as large cities where the latter are plentiful. This could encourage middle-class homeowners, the conservative and centrist base in urban politics, to move into cities.

Conclusion: A Time to Build

Of course, any family-friendly urbanist program presupposes law and order, especially to make amenities like public transit viable. To this end, red state governors should assert control over their legal creatures, exemplified by Ron DeSantis’ removal of leftist DAs, and increase criminal penalties. States should also preempt cities from imposing unduly burdensome or ideologically-driven taxes and regulations (DeSantis himself has had a mixed record on this score, opposing Gainesville’s upzoning but also encouraging affordable housing). While political incentives have traditionally militated against spending political capital on urban issues, the GOP and other centrist forces in urban politics have shown growing promise with non-traditional (especially immigrant) voters when focusing on issues such as crime, public order, and education. Finally, if urban cultural institutions have been captured by the Left, conservative elites should endow parallel institutions like the University of Austin instead of continuing to give to captured almae matres, both for its own sake and to showcase conservatism as an attractive cultural alternative for elite-aspirant youth.

Where it proves impractical to transform existing cities into hospitable environments for conservative-leaning middle-class families, another potential path is for conservative investors to build neo-traditional mixed-use family-friendly communities. In addition to New Albany, notable examples of New Classical urbanism that could serve as models for larger future projects include Carmel outside Indianapolis, Florida’s “Redneck Riviera” from Seaside to Rosemary Beach, and Guatemala’s Ciudad Cayala.

Regardless of which path is taken (or both), conservatives must get in to cities if they want a role in building the future of American civilization.