Should We Let Cities Die Their Natural Deaths?
There was once a need for cities — they brought together capital, equipment, the market, expertise, culture, and organization into close proximity and benefited everyone. Now, cities are unneeded relics of a bygone era, and we should not subsidize cities or parts of cities to fund their activities. Cities should sink or swim on their own merits. Does sending billions of dollars into cities to prop them up make city governments lazy about making sure they are attracting residents and businesses.
Imagine if you could just call on the federal government to deliver a few billion dollars of grant money to fix up abandoned homes, fund a traffic study, subsidize the development of housing or a new arts center. Your decision then would be to take the grant and do what it was that was required of the grant money regardless if it benefited anyone in your city — the money would create jobs and some new building. The government might also fund public transportation to bring people to your city — you would not object, just take the money. That is the way many cities operate today — they would not function without these state and federal grants.
Cities need to make themselves attractive to citizens and businesses by making neighborhoods safe, providing adequate services, creating and maintaining good schools, and keeping taxes low. Without these conditions, a city will lose population, neighborhoods will decline, and businesses will flee the city. Federal aid to cities based on population or lobbying or political favoritism skews city activities to target those free grants rather than serve the cities’ citizens. Often those federal grants are given to fight a symptom of decline rather than the cause of the decline.
One example of such waste is federal aid to cities to fix up abandoned houses. Billions of dollars in the stimulus bill was earmarked for cities so they could fix up abandoned homes. A home is abandoned — i.e. it could not be sold nor is it worth some simply taking it over from the city and paying the taxes on it — because of some underlying cause: crime, poor schools, high taxes, or a combination of such causes. Federal grants to cities to fix up these houses is not going to solve anything. It is government waste.
Another example is federal, state, and city spending for convention or performing arts centers. The city fathers may enjoy the events hosted in those facilities, but those projects do not address long-term issues for cities. Furthermore, many of those projects are quaint anachronisms of a bygone era — people do not need to visit such entertainment venues as they did the past. People are entertained in so many different ways in modern society that the utility of cities spending funds on buildings to house entertainment can be wasteful.
Cities and their citizens have so many needs now — many more than many suburbs. It used to be that cities had a lot to offer, and people wanted to live in a city because professional standards were high, entertainment was available, and there were plenty of jobs, in a safe, low tax environment. If a city cannot create a city culture designed to make city living enjoyable and affordable, then any city that cannot do that, should see declines in tax revenue and population, and the federal government should not bail out the insolvent city.
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