next_migration | Recent examples of the war against cities (Reply)

I wish to make another brief digression from the book text to comment on a current issue. Paul A. London wrote a column in 2021 about the Republican “war against cities,” which I cited in my last post. He noted that the cultural phenomenon of rural hostility towards diverse, wealth-generating cities has a long history (as does the opposite phenomenon of urban contempt towards rural areas). At the moment, the Republican Party is deliberately using its power to make life harder for urbanites, “especially,” London says, those in Blue regions “that vote for Democrats and have large minority populations.”

London mentioned anti-urban federal tax policy changes as an example of the “war on cities.” He might also have mentioned the effective nullification by conservative judges of the Voting Rights Act and acceptance of vote-suppressing measures that hit more populous counties harder. But these official acts are just meant to make city residents poorer and more voiceless in state legislatures. They wouldn’t go so far as to seek to put urbanites’ lives at risk, as extreme factional polarization encourages, right? Well, I’m afraid that can no longer be counted on.

We’ve all read about the water catastrophe in Jackson, Mississippi, in which residents have undrinkable brown toxic water or no water at all. This is not due, it turns out, just to the recent flooding, but to decades of post-white-flight starvation budgets and malign neglect by the state, including a disastrous privatization effort. Last year, the Mississippi Times reported, when the city asked the state for $47 million to fix the water and sewer systems, it got $3 million—out of $356 million in planned infrastructure projects statewide. What’s more, the legislature forbade the city to allow its voters to consider imposing an additional 1-cent local sales tax to be used to fix that essential infrastructure.

Would the citizenry of Jackson be willing to pay less than 1 percent extra at local stores in order to have drinkable water? Evidently the highly white- and rural-dominated legislature thinks they might, but it so completely doesn’t care what the citizenry wants that it doesn’t even think they should get to express their preference. Now, the governor is talking about another coerced privatization. Jackson is 80% African-American, and its residents aren’t the people whom the state thinks deserve a voice in the political process. (Consider the comparisons to the poisoned water in Flint, Michigan—this will come up later when we discuss that state—which was inflicted on a majority-black urban area by an outside white GOP manager, imposed by a white GOP state government ... to save money.)

The state of Louisiana, which famously now has a total abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or skull-less first-trimester fetuses, is similarly withholding access to financing for an infrastructure project that would protect New Orleans from storm flooding. Why? The NOLA city council passed a resolution deploring the abortion ban and requesting local law enforcement not to use tax dollars to collect reports of women who might have had abortions or miscarriages or to surveill women in efforts to generate such reports. Resolutions don’t have the force of law, and this one had a codicil: “except to the extent otherwise required by state or federal law.” But merely the expression of ethical defiance was enough to anger the state’s ultraright attorney general, who encouraged the supermajority-Red State Bond Commission to block access to financing for needed infrastructure in Orleans Parish to punish those uppity Blues.

Of course, the excuse was NOLA’s supposed “defiance of state law,” regardless of the mentioned codicil. But we know that the GOP doesn’t really care about that as a principle. If they did, they would do something about all those “constitutional sheriffs,” mostly in Red states, who announce that they, as ultimate overlords of their respective counties, have chosen not to enforce any state or federal gun laws. Don’t expect any of those counties and their taxpaying residents to have essential infrastructure funds cut off!

This situation must be of particular concern to the residents of New Orleans because the last time their city went seriously underwater due to storm flooding, local law enforcement, known for its racism, shot at and killed Black citizens attempting to cross bridges on foot. (Driving civilians back into a disaster zone is actually a war crime, by the way.) Meanwhile, heavily armed police and National Guard troops forced flooded-out families, at actual or effective gunpoint, to throw their pets into the gutter and get on buses; the media was dinged for describing Black people salvaging food from abandoned stores as “looting” while whites were “finding food”; and racist lies about refugees were spread by internet. And that was in 2005.

Factionalization has now reached a point where many extremists would like to see the other half—“their enemies”—dead, or at the very least crushed and immiserated. In the Red superfaction, the extremists are increasingly the people in control of the party and holding high offices. If you live in a Blue urban high-risk zone, and the people who rule your state are Red extremists, it could increasingly become the case that they will not just not care if you are killed or impoverished by a disaster, but actively work to prevent your city from taking its own action to avoid or pre-emptively mitigate the disaster, because they hope you’ll suffer or die.

Please remember that you’ll be equally hung out to dry if you’re a Republican living in that city: God will protect you, or sort you out after you die. Or something. And what happens when the disaster comes—will the state then do everything in their power to facilitate your evacuation and resettlement? Don’t bet on it! Aside from the inherently unsustainable nature of very large cities, which almost always would make me advise migrants not to move to the largest metro area(s) in a given state, this issue is a second, entirely distinct reason why I would strenuously discourage them from moving to the largest, bluest cities in any red or purple state.

Further, if this behavior spreads and worsens, it ought to increase the sense of urgency felt by urban residents in some of the high-risk zones that I have evaluated as slightly less immediately at risk than the Southwest. St. Petersburg, Florida should last for decades longer than Las Vegas. But if it should chance that St. Petersburg, with its majority-Democratic population and large LGBTQ community, got smashed by a hurricane next year, are residents really confident that the increasingly autocratic and fanatical Ron DeSantis would rush to aid them? If not, that might rationally make some people speed up their plans to seek greener, or higher-elevation, pastures elsewhere.