next_migration | Urbanization and its discontents

To further my desire to both acknowledge and dispute Eliza Daley’s recent essay on ruralization (mentioned in a previous post), I want to wrap up my thoughts about the unsustainability of our society and economy. If you keep reading you will see me argue repeatedly that giant cities should be avoided, or possibly departed if you already live there, in favor of smaller cities. Partly this is because their citizens are often gerrymandered out of political influence, but partly it is because I think big cities are inherently problematic. Here I’m skipping ahead a bit to explain why I think so.

There is a widespread cultural tradition in America that values the countryside and disdains cities, going back at least to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America as a land of yeoman farmers (with occasional slave labor...). Survivalists have been threatening us for at least several decades that within a year or two, everyone living in cities will deservingly diieeee! or staaaarve to death! because of TEOTWAWKI or when TSHTF unless they rush to move to an all-white rural community with lots of gold, guns, and ammo. But these fantasies and delusions aren’t confined to the ultraright; in the Sixties, a lot of hippies thought (briefly) that setting up rural communes to live off the land would be preferable to living in cities and working half as hard. Cities have been around for a long time, and some have been sustainable enough to last for millennia. Therefore if I claim that today’s coastal megacities are really too big to go on as they are, I have to offer an explanation for why that is more true now than in the past, to make sure that you don’t suspect I’m one of those people just assuming that anyplace where you can’t find a cow barn within walking distance is too big.

A critical indicator of the sustainability of a city is housing prices. First, let’s note that housing standards vary over time, and ours have become artificially inflated. Most urban and rural housing used to be cheap but horrible. City zoning codes first sought to prohibit housing so crowded and squalid as to pose high risks of epidemic disease or fire. Later, they began to prohibit housing modest or just small enough to suggest poverty in a culture that places great importance on the appearance of wealth. (If the kitchen counter in the new house you want to build is required to have an electrical outlet every 18”, it privileges as the norm a lifestyle that uses a lot of gadgets and electricity.) Someone who wants to build a small cottage that would have been fine in 1950 can’t get a mortgage or even, in many cities, a building permit. People who want alternatives such as composting toilets or natural wall materials may have to fight for it for years.

When getting permission to build a domicile requires the use of methods that require professional expertise and lots of money, banks and developers have great control over what gets built, and what they want is maximum profits. In recent decades, single-room occupancy housing has been nearly obliterated because more profit can be made by building luxury apartments that house fewer people on the same land. Our houses and apartments are larger and at least look “nicer” than those of our ancestors, and so they cost more.

However, that pressure towards nicer-looking and costlier housing began in America’s post-war imperial period, when the country was wealthier every year, the rich paid taxes, and even most of the working classes were relatively prosperous. Most full-time workers then could afford housing in their communities. This should always be the case. “Market failure” happens in real life quite frequently, but housing is a critical good. You would expect that if most people in a town can only afford $500 rent, but developers only build apartments that rent for $1000, they will have trouble finding tenants and eventually will be forced to either slash rents or build less fancy housing. Just as a job that pays less money per week than you must spend to eat for a week can’t be sustained, a community that lacks housing that its residents are able to live in can’t be sustained.

Unfortunately, that market failure is a widespread reality in America. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition reported in 2021 that on average, a full-time American worker now needs to earn an hourly wage of $24.90 to afford a two-bedroom rental home without excessive cost burden, whereas barely over 40% of workers make that much money. Worse yet, “In only 218 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide can a full-time worker earning the minimum wage afford a one-bedroom rental home [house or apartment] at the Fair Market Rent.” So Americans are already facing a housing crisis, one that has been and will continue to be worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But this crisis is not evenly distributed. The more demand there is for a scarce good, such as housing in a geographically limited area, the more the price can be raised. Because of the geographic mobility and great wealth of our upper classes (and increasingly of foreign upper classes), people and money flood into the most desirable areas to live, bidding the price of housing up, and up, and up to a point that no working-class person can afford. Over a decade ago, visiting a pleasant part of California, I was horrified to see that typical houses listed for sale in the newspaper, not mansions but modest-sized bungalows, mostly cost $2 million and up. A few asking only $1 million were billed as “starter homes.” One middle-aged scientist who worked in that area spent four hours per day commuting from a cheaper area. The situation is probably worse now, as the investor class is snapping up an ever-increasing share of the housing stock nationwide.

In New York City in 2021, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $2570. At that rate, you have to make $31,000 a year, after taxes, solely to pay the rent, without even considering food, health care, child care, clothing, transportation, or any utilities not covered by the landlord. That’s insane. Salaried people in New York offices are usually paid well by national standards, but how are the folks who pour their lattes and mop their floors supposed to survive? If there are so many people in a city that working-class people and students can’t afford basic housing, then that city has gotten too big for its own good, period.

City infrastructure will also become a bigger issue, the bigger the population is. A population of ten million people needs to draw food and water from a much larger area than a population of 100,000. They may have greater population density and smaller residences, so that less electricity, natural gas, street repair, etc. are needed per capita, but the overall quantity of these goods and services that must be provided to a single area is huge. Much more infrastructure is required to safely dispose of so many people’s sewage and garbage, and a failure of those systems can become catastrophic faster. Air pollution is also commonly worse because of the density of sources of pollution, and mostly disposed of through filtering by residents’ lungs, where it causes many chronic diseases: not just the well-documented heart disease and lung cancer, but, according to mounting evidence, Alzheimer’s disease in the old and reduced cognitive abilities in children.

With a huge tax base, if reasonable taxation is politically feasible, it is currently possible for a big city to take measures to protect itself from climate crises and resource depletion. But when crises and depletion do bite, the local scale of the problems will be correspondingly bigger. More electrical capacity blacked out at once, or more homes damaged by a hurricane or flooding, or more daily traffic needing to cross a bridge that’s past its life expectancy and that nobody wants to spend the money to rebuild. As decline progresses, the costs of fixing problems may seem so huge that they are not fixed, or they are fixed at the cost of letting other basic services or infrastructure maintenance slide, so that dysfunction will inexorably increase.

There is another specific problem with large cities: the urban heat island effect once so beloved of people who were being paid to cast doubt on climate change research. Within a metropolitan area, surface temperatures can vary by up to 10°C (about 18°F!), even though the whole area is experiencing the same general climate or weather system. City landscapes with vast amounts of concrete and asphalt hold more heat than a landscape with smaller buildings and more trees and green space, and additional waste heat is generated by human activities.

This problem is worse for people in poorer neighborhoods, who get fewer and smaller green spaces, more pavement, and denser populations. Hoffman et al. (2020) studied over 100 urban areas and found that on average, areas formerly redlined (denied mortgages or insurance because residents were non-white) were 2.6°C warmer than non-redlined areas. There was considerable geographic variation, with relatively little effect seen in the Midwest, much more in the Southeast and West: up to 7°C hotter in redlined areas compared to non-redlined areas of the same city.

Before climate change, the urban heat island effect meant less pleasant summers for city folks, especially those in crowded neighborhoods (leading to more ill temper and violence, at least up to a point), but milder winters. It was seldom directly life-threatening except to the elderly and sickly. Now, it could much more frequently mean death from heat stroke, literally cooking alive in one of those record-shattering heat waves; an extra 10°F inflicted by the built environment is enough to turn a heat wave from miserable to deadly. Most of the victims of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome seem to have been urbanites. Especially if your means are modest, so that in a costly big city you have to or would have to live in one of those crowded neighborhoods, this is something to consider. Every community in America might experience life-threatening effects of climate change, such as tornadoes or monsoon-like rains in unexpected places; communities that certainly will do so sooner or later, and perhaps almost every summer, may be less desirable homes.

We might also think in broader terms about the development of cities and where our hyperurbanization has led us. Because any reasonably organized city is too densely populated to produce most of its own food, cities are inherently dependent on the surrounding countryside for resources (food, fuel, fiber for clothing) extracted from nature or agriculture. They are only possible because farmers have a surplus, which they send to the city either because they wish to trade it for resources available from the city, such as manufactured goods, specialized services, or fertilizer material, or because the local government forces them to hand it over as taxes or tribute. The more surplus each farmer can produce and trade or sell, the more people can live in cities and specialize in economic activities other than farming. (Remember, complexity is correlated with net energy per capita.)

In the early days of agriculture, done with hand labor and draft animals, and with highly bred plant varieties and sophisticated organic farming methods unheard of, each farm family was able to produce little more than they needed to support themselves and the local rulers. For every family living in a city, there had to be several farm families whose surplus supplied their food and fiber. In the early 20^th century in America, with better techniques and some mechanical devices, about a quarter of the population lived on farms, providing most of the food for the other three-quarters of the population. By the year 2000, the USDA reports, only about 3.19 million people in America, 1% of the population, were employed as farmers (including unpaid family members) or farm laborers. A single American grain farmer, using huge machines made and powered with fossil fuels, can now produce enough calories to feed hundreds of people (or, more often, cows that then feed people).

This extraordinary post-Green Revolution productivity not only enabled the vast majority of Americans to abandon farms for cities; it effectively required them to. And most farmers want it that way, no matter what hostility they may voice towards soft-handed city-zens. If yields per unit of labor were half what they are today, then twice as many farmers would be necessary to produce the same amount of food, and more people would stay in rural areas to farm. But surely few farmers wish that their productivity would plummet, even if that might revitalize their small towns!

Contrarily, what would happen if more people farmed in the present high-productivity era? Most land that’s really good for farming is already being farmed, increasingly by very large landowners (since those giant tractors only make sense if you have a lot of field to plow). But suppose that a few million more new farmers could bring much more land under productive cultivation, flooding the market with far more corn and soybeans. Prices on those commodities, already often so low that farmers barely break even, would decline further. Farmers surely wouldn’t want that, either. Even less would they want the percentage of the population who are able to farm to be increased by the redistribution of the huge acreages of farmland owned by corporations or individual rich men.

A parallel might be drawn to the British Enclosure Act in the early industrial era, which stripped peasant farmers of access to land, forcing them to move to squalid cities where they would be captive labor for factory owners. In the late 20^th century, America’s subsidization of highly mechanized farming, coercion to “get big or get out”, and deliberate campaign to take land away from hundreds of thousands of African-American farmers combined to force millions of rural residents who could no longer live as farmers to move to cities where they might find jobs.

Towns and cities are where providers of specialty services, such as medicine, are trained and work. They used also to be centers of manufacturing; while there has always been long-distance trade in luxury goods or regional specialties, most basic goods were made in numerous communities for local or regional sale. But there is little manufacture of that sort in most cities now. Plentiful fossil fuels have made it “more efficient” to manufacture goods in huge quantities at a central location and ship them great distances. In late stage global capitalism, the goods are made more cheaply, and corporate profits increased, by outsourcing the manufacture from anywhere in this nation to factories in poorer countries whose people can’t demand what Americans consider a minimal wage.

Therefore, far fewer urban Americans now have the option to work in a factory, which, for all its downsides, had at one time provided many less educated people with a decent wage. Most urban jobs in America today are service jobs such as retail and fast food, corporate office jobs, or things like phone sales and ruthlessly exploitative “gig work” that didn’t even exist until recently. As cities grew larger, the number of residents employed in less essential service jobs had to increase. A city only needs so many teachers, doctors and nurses, police and firefighters, auto mechanics, accountants, grocery clerks, trash collectors, and so forth. Throw in those whose work caters to residents’ felt emotional needs: brewers and bartenders, ministers and therapists, even tattoo artists and sex workers. How are the remaining adults not employed in even semi-essential professions to survive? By necessity, they take jobs or start businesses in non-essential fields: catering to tourism, working in casinos or in stores selling stuff nobody really needs, serving as nail techs or giving fish pedicures, playing video games on the internet for money. Or they become petty bureaucrats.

Naturally, there are many intermediate categories of labor that are not strictly essential, but far from frivolous. Most past civilizations, so far as we know, had no such art form as the novel, but we wouldn’t say that ours would suffer no loss if nobody ever worked as a writer again. And nobody should feel free to sneer at the nail techs. They are supporting themselves in the best way they can given the range of jobs for which their skills and credentials give them any hope of competing. The problem for them is that in hard times, a specialty service that could easily be foregone by almost all of its customers will lose income much faster than a more essential business. (For most face-to-face businesses, how long they were shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic may provide a rough estimate of how essential—or not—they were perceived to be.) Smaller cities, with smaller and less wealthy populations, can support fewer luxury services. There are also fewer jobs in general in smaller cities, but if you can get one, the likelihood that it will be providing a service residents consider valuable enough to pay for in tough times is probably greater.

Government officials such as police, social workers, inspectors, etc. are more numerous in urban areas, both because densely populated areas have more need to keep a rein on behavior that can harm others and because a larger tax base can support a greater diversity of bureaucrats. This can reduce citizens’ quality of life. Bigger cities generally have more crime per capita, so they need more police, but more policing can make residents who face biased policing less safe and more stressed, damaging their health.

Militarization of the police has increased greatly in the last thirty years, between transfers of military equipment, military-style combat training, and coerced hiring preferences for veterans. These send the message to urban police in particular that their role is like that of an occupying army. The occupied “hostiles” are to be met with outrage and violence if they assert a right to influence the rules of engagement, and if a few civilians who can’t be smeared as insurgents get shot, that’s tolerable collateral damage. It’s easier for police to adopt this attitude when virtually all of the citizens they encounter are strangers to them. White Americans have usually shown little concern for taxpayer-funded violence when it was directed at Black and brown people, but it’s getting to the point where even white parents who think of calling 911 over an autistic child’s temper tantrum had better think twice if they like the kid. The brutal small-town sheriff is a classical American stereotype based on real examples, but most of the really egregious recent police killings of random innocent men and maimings of journalists have been reported from cities.

Edwards et al. (2021) recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that in the 20 most populous US counties, the median rate of children’s contact with Child Protective Services was 41.3%. They discovered great racial inequities, with a minimum of 43% to a maximum of 72% of all Black children in a county being subjected to CPS contact, and with minority children much more likely to be taken from families. Maricopa County, the location of Phoenix, AZ, whose fundamental environmental problems we have already seen, was said to have “uniquely high rates of late-stage CPS interventions.” However, in every one of the 20 largest counties, they found that the rate of CPS contact was over 20% for white as well as Black and Hispanic children. When you hear a horror story about a mother being arrested or having her children dragged away because she allowed a school-aged child to bicycle to school or walk alone to a park, it’s probably from a suburban or urban area. Small-town cops aren’t usually that stupid.

So, while I may argue that Chicago is far more sustainable than New York City, the implication is not “If you now live in New York City, you should move to Chicago.” Any city the size of the Chicago metropolitan area is a phenomenon of the fossil fuel era. With our huge populations, urbanization rates, and mass long-distance commerce, the U.S. and other populous nations have produced cities of a size rarely seen before in human history. Megacities are a living environment that we have not evolved to tolerate, which inflicts numerous and increasing health risks, social pathologies, and psychological burdens, and which will be very hard to support economically after the fossil fuels dry up. China is by one measure much farther along in this process than the U.S., having hundreds of cities with millions, or tens of millions, of people each; I have heard an urban Chinese person refer to a sprawling city of well over a million people as “a small town.” I don’t know what will happen in China as the fossil fuel era winds down, but it isn’t likely to be easy for them. So I wouldn’t insist that people who are now happily living in Chicago ought to move away, but if you’re a young person looking for a future home, pick a more modest-sized metro with less concrete and crowding and you’ll be doing yourself a serious favor.