This weekend's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) carries an opinion piece by Johns Hopkins Professor Steve Hanke and J.K. Walters, also of the university. Messrs. Hanke and Walters chronicle the decline of the City of Baltimore, with a falling population, declining income, increasing crime--the usual urban story. However, their take on the Baltimore story should be of interest to anyone who cares about large cities and urban issues.
They detail how Baltimore has bet on big, splashy efforts (like the upcoming Grand Prix race) to revitalize the city, while ignoring the boring, yet effective efforts that would attract business owners and young families.
"The [Grand Prix] race exemplifies the city's development strategy: Subsidize big downtown projects with other people's money..." The result of this strategy, they report, is that Baltimore has lost tens of thousands of jobs and residents in the past decade, tens of thousands of homes sit vacant, the poverty rate has risen above the national average, and the murder rate stands second only to Detroit's.
The authors see a political strategy underlying this tale of woe: an effort by the local Democratic machine to ensure long-term dominance by wealth redistribution through property taxes and practicing the art of class warfare. They report,
"It was brilliant politics, as Democrats now enjoy an eight-to-one voter registration advantage and no Republican has been elected mayor in 48 years. But Baltimore's high property taxes have repelled investment in physical capital for decades."
This same story has been repeated in large cities across America, as the Democratic party has followed similar strategies of "electing a new people" to achieve a near or absolute monopoly on political power--but at the price of spreading urban decay. Here in Minnesota, in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, not a single elected official--from school board member to Mayor to Governor to U.S. Senator--serving these communities belongs to the Republican party. The local branch of the Democrats, known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party, owns a near monopoly on elected office, interrupted only by the occasional success of a further-left Green Party candidate.
As a result, both local DFLers and ordinary citizens from Minnesota's largest cities seem to have been taken by surprise about how badly they have fared at the hands of the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. It should not have been a surprise, without a single, local Republican official available to plead the urban case.
Urban Democrats are now victims of their own success. Having achieved total victory, they are now in danger of losing the peace. Liberal/progressive urban policies have led directly to economic stagnation, population decline, and increasing violent and property crime. Elected officials in large urban areas now have been reduced to only three options: continue to preside over decay and decline, seek help from a Republican Congress or non-urban state officials, likely to be Republicans and unlikely to be sympathetic to urban issues, or to seek policy changes to reverse the decline.
Assuming option 1 (more decay and decline) holds little appeal, urban office-holders could choose to seek a bail-out, in an effort to engineer a reversal in fortune. Unfortunately, without competition from another major party, more than two generations of urban politicians are unpracticed in the art of appealing to Republicans, conservatives, or aspirational members of the lower and middle classes. Urban politicians seem genuinely perplexed as to how to communicate with their suburban and rural counterparts.
Assuming the former two options may be either untenable or undesirable, only the third option, policy changes, remains. Whether successful or not, a major change in policy direction will have the consequence of directly threatening their power monopoly. An "old guard" seeking to restore the former liberal/progressive policies may challenge incumbents. In the longer run, policies that successfully attract entrepreneurs, aspirational lower- and middle-class citizens, young families with children, also create new pools of voters who may choose to vote Republican.
My recommendation to the urban voter is to consider the implications of the political monopoly you have granted to Democrats. Have large cities been well-served by creating one-party governments? Or conversely, would some healthy competition on election day produce a broader policy debate that may lead to the revitalization of the urban core? As I have written before, the city of Detroit is not an aberration of urban policy, it is the inevitable result of the portfolio of urban policies that have been implemented from New York to San Francisco. Only be creating real competition for elected office in our core cities are we likely to achieve a reversal in our present course of decline.
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