CITIES, RENDERED LESS HABITABLE BY PROGRESSIVE POLICIES?

I started the year with a question wrapped inside an observation.

Regional economics is always about balancing centrifugal and centripetal forces, isn't it?  So it was with the river towns bypassed by the railroads, so it was with the frontier towns that the railroads didn't build to, so it was with much of the railroad-based metropolitan corridor by the early 1980s, so it might be with the shopping malls that were still all the rage in the early 1980s, and it remains to be seen what will come of the edge cities (does anybody even write about edge cities any more?) and in the ongoing tussles over gentrification and congestion pricing in densely populated cities we see precisely the tensions Romans dealt with two millennia ago.

Now comes Power Line's Bill Glahn with an edge city arising in the Cities.

St. Louis Park is actually located in Minnesota, sitting immediately to the west of the Minneapolis city limits. It’s where the movie director Coen brothers (Fargo) come from.

The West End development is easily accessible from two major freeways and features plenty of free parking. Other than bus service, there is no mass transit available.

A large movie theater, restaurants, shops, office buildings, apartments, and hotels fill the complex. Crime in the area is much lower than the adjacent big city.

That last observation is key to the point he subsequently makes.

Neither crime nor taxes are mentioned at all in the article.

No, since at least the 1980’s, the future exists in Edge Cities. An Edge City is exactly how I’ve described the West End. The classic example of the type is Tyson’s Corner, outside of Washington, DC.

Urban hellscapes like Minneapolis can no longer support retail and office space, due to high taxes and high crime. Residential uses will be the next to go.

Twenty years ago I suggested big cities might be obsolete, and that might not have been correct.  More recently I proposed that edge cities with expressway interchanges and the pretense that parking is free are a consequence of the automobile convexifying space.

Put more precisely, the automobile convexifies space and time in such a way that the second-, third-, and lower-order central places are no longer tied to the waterways or the railroad lines the way those late-nineteenth-century towns were.  At the same time, though, the opening up of those hinterlands affects the shape of the rent gradient, and while it is possible to build parking decks in cities, the parking decks and the expressways and arterial streets that connect them to the hinterlands clog.

I also had a pessimistic reflection on the third-worldization of the Cities.

There was emergence in St. Paul's urban form; and I can't help but wonder whether I should have a gloomy moment.  "I wonder if we're not one looted convenience store away from some jurisdictions again becoming sundown towns."

That's on Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg's mind, and moreso on some of his commenters.  "My faith in the social cohesion of left-wing cities is thinner than the social cohesion of left-wing cities – but hope sprang eternal, and until 2020 history obliged."  Thus do the dealers in Executive Boxes and sport-utes continue to make their money.

No doubt, Minneapolis and St. Paul mayors will use the same language about "disinvestment" that Chicago's current mayor likes to use to deal with what Mr Glahn sees coming.  "In the Twin Cities, we are creating an urban donut, with commercial and civic life carefully avoiding the hole in the middle."