The ghost of Ancient Rome haunts America
unherd.com
unherd.com
I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Probably the biggest factor in the deterioration of urban schools is white flight to those suburbs that Kotlin likes so much and the resulting loss of tax revenue.
Edit: I don't see why people are getting so irritated at my using the term "white flight." As far as I can tell it's the only recognized shorthand for this demographic trend.
Especially since it's overwhelmingly due to failed social policy and our pathetic social safety net. Neither of which can really be laid at the feet of progressives (though, to some extent, is Democrats' fault! Disastrous '90s welfare reform was done with the support of Clinton and other dems, and they spent a long time supporting the also-disastrous drug war)
At this point, "progressive" in the context of education means everything from a Montessori education, to the re-animated body of Paulo Freire teaching a critical pedagogy curriculum as he attempts to brain wash the next generation of Red Guards.
Those are two vastly different things, yet they would both be called "progressive" in today's language. Also alarmingly, the people advocating for the latter are the most likely to dress in "progressive" clothes.
To be fair, the article is not a criticism of the left. And someone on the left shouldn’t feel too defensive - virtually all major cities have liberal leadership. The source said of any failed policy is going to be a liberal policy.
It's also hard to paint a gloomy picture since there are probably 10s of millions of Americans who would move to NYC in a heartbeat if an exodus of families really happened and brought with it a corresponding drop in rents.
My pet social theory is that an unbelievable amount of our societal woes stem from this false dichotomy in the American mind, and the cities we end up designing because of it.
Agreed, it's a failure of imagination. Americans, for whatever reason, cannot make that leap in their mind's eye.
What ends up happening is that things mostly change, to the point of being hard to recognize. The Roman Empire is not completely gone, Latin and the Christian faith are extremely influential still.
Or just more simply,
> The Empire never died
Are some very big Philip K Dick vibes (quotes) I was lucky to receive at the right time. On these topics.
Path dependence is such a wild thing. PKD creating such a psychotronic connection across time & ideas was such a moving & powerful influence.
To your first point, I think this is a case of trying to predict when, not if. The article calls out the year of Edward Gibbon's book: 1776. An Englishman in 1776 would be right to recognize their empire was in decline. Looking to Rome's decline makes sense. But from 2023, we mark the end of the British Empire as about World War II, which makes this smell like analysts predicting a market crash will come without an argument for when.
And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :)
It was not particularly pleasant for most people during the empire. Dickensian London was not particularly great. It was not great either for the rural poor in England, or the locals in India. Or the slaves and small farmers in the Roman Empire. We rarely think about the losers when we idealise an empire.
> And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :)
And Latin was spoken for centuries after the end of the western Roman Empire, even as the eastern part completely reverted to Greek. These things tend to lag a bit.
This is also reflected in the text. It seems rather like the preferred future of the author than a thorough analysis.
Over time, he's always shifting the supports of his thesis. For the longest time, it was that urban development was inherently more expensive compared to single family homes. Then it was that the market showed a revealed preference for suburban housing because there was more suburban development (points at sunbelt). Now it is the collapse of urban office real estate. Five years from now it'll be something else.
I like the part where they're not the suburbs. Dreadful places those. Can you imagine living in a cookie cutter house surrounded by a useless plot of land that you aren't even allowed to use and where every other person is just a cookie cutter version of yourself? Dreadful.
Cities feel alive. It's great.
How long do we have to wait for that? Going on 120 years here, still doing okay.
How it looks in practice is a fun rabbit hole to go down.
Oh come now. Not a single little tax evasion, domestic dispute, custody case, HOA rules violation, improperly maintained vehicle, or DUI in 30 years? Not even a noise violation from a motorcycle with after market exhausts? I don’t believe it.
Then... don't? Many of us live in suburban cities that do not match that description at all, and love it. If you want to live in a dense urban environment, go for it. I think all the noise and human waste would be dreadful, but I can't speak for you.
Yep. And most city neighborhoods don’t at all match the charicature that people in these discussions imagine every city to be.
Also, education sucks everywhere. I wish I had more experience with charter schools. I demoed one a few years back and it was radically different than anything I've seen. Kids were moving, listening to music, reading. It was nuts and this was in the Austin area, a neighborhood I'd consider ghetto. I'd imagine I'd of thrived in that environment.
As for crime, again, it's an optics thing. There's been a surge of certain crimes and one offs but the only times I've been victimized in the city was because I was being a privileged idiot like being oblivious on the Green Line, getting off the Blue Line on Cicero and walking around or being confrontational.
Other than that, I've always flown under the radar and was never once victimized in Little Village.
As for over regulation, will all the changes I've seen in the city, it's hard to say what regulations you're talking about. If it's the Wrigleyville hotel you're thinking, good. Screw that. Soldier Field should have also not happened. Glad that the George Lucas museum never happened. I think all Chicagoans can agree on this.
As for expense, it's expensive everywhere. I know I can't get a good haircut outside of the city so at least when it comes to food and haircuts, I get my money's worth.
Parking we can blame on Delay for the next 100 years.
It's your fault for being victimized because... you let down your guard for a bit, and you walked around in a place?
edit: seriously if there's an area you can't walk around in safely, it's a problem with the area, not with you.
If at any point you're being victimized for "existing in a part of the city", that's a problem! The bar doesn't need to be so low that as long as you aren't murdered it's "just an optics problem".
In the end Sparta allied with the Persians to defeat the Athenians and thence Athens was a superpower no more. Then the Thebans wiped the Spartans from the face of the Earth. Then the Alexander and his Macedonians wiped the Thebans from the face of the Earth, and that was the end of ancient Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
The analogies to the Peloponnesian wars aren't great if you pick nits about the order of events (Athens and Sparta fought the Persians before they fought each other, but the U.S. fought the USSR and we're in a sort of cold war with the CCP now), but otherwise the resemblance it's truly uncanny. Not that it helps predict the future, mind you, but that so far the resemblance is something else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/books/review/edward-j-wat...
It's always seeing a point and drawing a curve. It's absurd to think that you could make any predictions based on a single point of comparison -- even if that comparison was actually well-informed, which it rarely is.
So I wouldn't even go looking for that article comparing the US to Rome. If you're interested in sociology, you'd want to compare it to many nations over many centuries, and seeing what actual patterns form. Anything less than that is just going to be exhibiting somebody's bias about what they thing the bad things are, and cherry-picking an illustration.
There is nothing of substance in that essay. He paints the cities as criminal socialist nightmares and suburbia as carbon-free utopian bliss, which is exactly what he claims “the urbanists” do except with the roles swapped. Yes, urban sprawl is terrible for a lot of reasons. (Some) people like it because they want massive tacky houses but it is still terrible. And it will get more and more terrible as fuel prices increase. It’s also a form of ghettoisation where poor people are stuck in their run down neighbourhoods for a lack of free time, money, and public infrastructure, which leads to the exact problems he pins on evil liberals (concentration of poverty in some areas, crime, lack of investment, etc). He bangs on about crime, putting London and Paris in the same situation as Los Angeles and Chicago (lol), without any thought about long-term trends in crime statistics.
I wish Americans could look outside their borders at what is done in the rest of the world instead of wringing their hands as if they were the only ones on earth grappling with this sort of problems. Particularly someone who’s ostensibly paid to think about urbanism for a living. You can have moderately-sized cities that are perfectly liveable, ideal for remote working, with not that much crime and without that endless, soul-destroying suburban sprawl that buries entire countries’ worth of natural ecosystems under asphalt and concrete. It’s not even that difficult.
“Rome was once mighty and fell; New York is mighty and therefore will fall” is a tired trope, a non sequitur, and not particularly clever. No argument is given as to how the latter could happen except “the liberals” increasing crime somehow. Rome was sacked several times. New York won’t be eternal, but it is more at risk of rising sea levels and increasingly dangerous storms than barbarians at the gates. Or indeed liberals in the city.
Yeah, while modern cities are full of life and color!
That was copy pasta from the by line in the article.
Doesn’t make it right, but it at least explains the source.