Flint, Michigan Meet San Jose, California

If you think the problems in Flint and other struggling cities are entirely the fault of local leaders and not a reflection of fundamental problems with the U.S. economy and how we fund and support cities, you really should read this story about San Jose in The Atlantic. Even if you don't agree with it, the article provides a sobering overview of the issues affecting American cities. It's focused primarily on Prop. 13 and other issues specific to California, but it illustrates some distressingly common themes —dwindling tax revenue, infrastructure needs, and reduced city services.

Alana Semuels writes:

One would think that the richest city in America would have better roads. And more police officers. And more adequate housing for the poor. 

And yet, San Jose, which has the highest median household income of any major city in the country, at $77,000 a year, and is home to billion-dollar companies such as Cisco and Adobe Systems Incorporated, also has some of the worst roads in the country, a shrinking police department despite a growing population, and, until the city shut it down, one of the largest homeless encampments in the nation.

Staying Put in Michigan

Map by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute
using U.S. Census data.

Everyone and their brother seem to have moved out of Michigan, yet it has one of the largest percentages of native-born residents in the country. In The Atlantic, Richard Florida writes:

More than three quarters of the people in Louisiana (78.9 percent), Michigan (76.6 percent) and Ohio (75.1 percent) were born there, as opposed to just 24.3 percent of Nevadans, 35.2 percent of Floridians, 37.2 percent of the residents of Washington, D.C., and 37.7 percent of Arizonans. A high level of home-grown residents is also indicative of a lack of inflow of new people.

There is a distinctive “stuck belt” across the middle of the country running from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, down through West Virginia and into the Sunbelt states of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Mobility is largely a bi-coastal—plus Rocky Mountain state—phenomenon.

Emotional Rescue

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is writing some interesting things about gentrification, which happens to be one of the few urban conflicts that's not an issue in Flint. But I thought his ideas still apply to the emotional attachment Flintoids, both past and present, have for their city. He writes:

I grew up in West Baltimore at the height of the Crack Age. I spent more time negotiating violence than I did negotiating my studies. I got jumped by some project kids when I was nine, and until I my senior year I either got jumped or fought every year. But I loved West Baltimore -- so much so that when I went off to college, I was intent on coming back. My old middle school was shut down a couple of years ago, after a student was stabbed to death. The school likely needed to be shut down -- but I was still sad. The point isn't that violence is a good thing. It simply means that every day, normal human beings develop feelings for people and places that go beyond the work of economists, sociologists and self-styled reformers.

He started the topic with Our Technocratic Overlords, then continued with Our Technocratic Overlords, Cont, A Hard Look At Gentrification, A Hard Look At Gentrification Cont. and A Harder Look At Gentrification Cont. They're all worth reading, as are the reader comments.