Why Big Cities Are Breaking Down

BACK in 1913, the English sociologist Patrick Geddes theorized that big cities go through five stages:

1. Polis—early city

2. Metropolis—large but healthy city

3. Megalopolis—unhealthy, oversized city with grand illusions

4. Parasitopolis—parasitic city that drains its nation

5. Pathopolis—diseased, shrinking, dying city

Many see cities like New York as having symptoms of the fourth stage, as having already begun to leech strength from the nation. Others fear that aspects of the final stage are also evident. A cancerlike municipal disease—creeping urban decay—is even now shrinking the hearts out of many American cities, as middle- and upper-income families flee to the suburbs.

The populations within the taxable bounds of some American big cities are actually shrinking to “their lowest size in this century,” according to recent census information. “The populations of Boston, Pittsburgh and Jersey City haven’t been so low since 1900. . . . New York’s population is down almost to the level of 1940.”—U.S. News & World Report, September 1, 1975, p. 64.

Driven by a growing distaste for big-city existence, taxpaying citizens, business and industry are fleeing out of the big “central city” areas to noncontributing suburbs and beyond. A sore point in San Francisco’s police strike, for example, was that more than half of those demanding higher pay lived outside the bounds of its taxpaying community. And even though New York’s taxable population has fallen to well under eight million, some estimate that as many as another ten million people living outside the city in some way derive economic benefit from it.

A Vicious Cycle

Hence, a self-perpetuating “vicious cycle” of lost taxpayers, higher taxes, more lost taxpayers, and so on, has developed. When the more prosperous families and industries move out, taking taxes and jobs with them, the poor, unemployed, aged and minorities least able to pay taxes remain. Said Milwaukee’s Mayor Maier: “We, along with other cities, are part of a deepening trend . . . toward an ever-growing concentration of the poor and the relatively poor in the central cities of America.”

Meanwhile, regular city services, as well as programs for the mounting numbers of poor and unemployed, continue to skyrocket in cost. As New York city’s spending for all purposes tripled during the past ten years, welfare costs grew at almost twice that pace!

To compensate, cities raise taxes on remaining property owners, business and industry—an encouragement for them, too, to leave. San Francisco has been forced to more than quadruple average property taxes since 1950—a pace double that of the rise in the cost of living.

But such high taxation makes owning housing a losing proposition for some, and this, in turn, hastens urban decay. New York apartment owners will reportedly abandon an estimated 50,000 dwelling units in 1976, after having abandoned about 35,000 units annually in recent years! Not only are taxes on these properties lost to the city, but gone also are the former residents of block after block of rubble-covered land and condemned buildings—thus feeding the “vicious cycle.”

When highly taxed business and industry choose to leave as well, tax revenue is not the only thing taken. Since 1969, for example, it is reported that New York city steadily lost half a million manufacturing jobs—and taxpaying workers—due to business moves. But the alternative to higher taxes, say city officials, is cutbacks in city services. Such cutbacks make the big cities even less desirable—driving more “middle class” and industrial taxpayers away.

Thus urban problems tend to concentrate in big cities and get driven out of proportion to what higher populations alone account for. But there are other pressures that also enter this “vicious cycle’’ of big-city economic problems. Among them are . . .

. . . Minorities

Big cities tend to stack up minorities and economically deprived persons all together in older, decaying housing and “low-rent projects,” or, in some countries, shantytowns of their own making. The effects of concentrating minorities in this fashion are well known. A report from Sweden, for example, notes that the area surrounding her big-city “urban renewal” projects are “traditionally a decaying slum-zone, where the socially and economically handicapped and newly arrived immigrants are allotted to live. These areas become haunts of alcoholic and narcotics addicts”—as well as a drain on city resources.

The growth of black and other ethnic communities in American cities has created intractable housing problems. Deep-rooted prejudices and fears sped the exodus of whites to the suburbs, creating another big-city problem: de facto segregation. Well-intentioned efforts to give blacks equal educational opportunities by “busing” pupils between the two communities have met with only limited success, while driving many whites even farther into the suburbs and beyond.

. . . Crime

Bad housing and cramped populations tend to breed far more crime, on the average, in big cities than normally affects outlying areas. West Germany, for example, reports an average of nearly twice as many persons affected by crime in densely populated areas as in the country as a whole. Yet almost three times as many police, on the average, are assigned to protect those same city people! Can you see why many prefer to “escape” from the big cities?

Overburdened big-city courts have actually spurred the “vicious cycle” of metropolitan crime problems. The concentration of crime produces so many cases that the process of “plea bargaining” has come to be viewed as an absolute necessity in many U.S. cities. Criminals are allowed to plead guilty to lesser offenses than first charged so that massive numbers of time-consuming trials can be avoided. As a result, criminals—even murderers—are often back on city streets in short order.

. . . Militant Public Employees

As crime mounts and cities decay, more police and firemen are needed, as are more employees to take care of swelling welfare and other programs. Before recent cuts, for example, the number of New York city employees had grown from about 200,000 to over 300,000 in fifteen years—yet the city’s population had hardly changed!

Public-safety employees such as police and firemen, and even garbage men, in order to compensate for the increased dangers they face, as well as to offset the rise in the cost of living, have used the absolute necessity of their services as a powerful bargaining tool to gain higher wages and benefits. The mere threat of chaos without their services has usually driven their wages up far faster than those of most other workers. For example, while living costs rose to about two and a quarter times their 1950 level in twenty-five years, wages and benefits of San Francisco police and firemen multiplied to about seven times their 1950 level! Many other cities have been just as liberal—but someone has to pay the bill.

. . . Pollution

Those who flee to the suburbs to escape pollution and other city problems have actually added to the problem. Traffic moving into the big cities for work is becoming “heavier and heavier, moving slower and slower,” notes a recent report from Sweden that is typical of many cities. Mass-transportation schemes have accomplished little to check pollution. “The persistent traffic tie-ups shatter a dream of urban planners—that rapid transit would ‘get people out of their cars and off the freeway.’”—New York Times Magazine, October 19, 1975, p. 84.

A National Academy of Sciences report notes that even though U.S. federal standards have brought some improvement, country air still remains ‘far superior to most city air.’ The concentration of industry adds much to big-city pollution. But cities need industries for jobs and revenue. To survive, many recession-plagued businesses are seeking a slowdown of costly-to-meet air-quality standards, thus keeping pollution in the “vicious cycle’’ of city decay.

. . . Dehumanizing People

Squeezing humanity together in great masses seems to accentuate the worst in many people. Rather than close quarters bringing them together in warm personal relationships, just the opposite is too often the case. A report from London tells of “sick and elderly people dying alone in their apartments and not being found for weeks afterward, because no one ever visited them.” The report adds: “This would have been absolutely impossible twenty years ago.” Other big-city dwellers know that London is not unique in this matter.

Cooped up in cramped apartments and narrow city streets, children, too, suffer. They lose much of the joy of openness, discovery and interacting with nature found in more rural environments. Destroying, crushing and breaking things are often the way they satisfy the need for excitement and experience. The consequent vandalism and graffiti bring further deterioration to the cities, and more seeds of crime are planted.

Thus many of the world’s big cities are caught up in a vicious cycle of degenerating forces that seem to feed upon themselves, ever worsening. But are not the big-city governments working to improve matters?

City Government

“No American big city is well-governed today,” asserts Milton Rakove, professor of political science at the University of Illinois, “and it is unlikely that any big city could be, given the kinds of problems confronting our cities, the demands being made on their political and governmental systems, and the inability of those systems to cope with those demands.”—New York Times, October 23, 1975, p. 39.

Lack of permanent, stable leadership hampers many big-city governments. Says Business Week of one floundering city: “It is directed by elected officials who, because of the nature of politics, often have a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ philosophy of management.”

Such transient leadership may even have a corrosive effect on the habits of municipal employees, whose productivity is said to be below that of other workers. Extra workers have to be paid to get the same job done, further draining city finances. Why? An official of one of the largest municipal-employee unions in the U.S. put it this way: “When the municipal worker discovers the city isn’t interested in how he does his job, he loses interest too. . . . We want to feel we’re disciplined. Discipline means somebody cares. What we need is leadership.”

Rather than truly caring, the tendency of many politically motivated officials is to “throw money” at city problems in the hope that they will go away. Failing to get to the heart of the problems, their superficial, money-oriented programs often swell to huge proportions and suck the lifeblood from cities. The disastrous consequences of such policies are now being felt in a number of the world’s big cities.

Even so, most national governments stand ready to “bail out” cities in trouble, thus transferring the strain to the entire nation. So it would be an exaggeration to say that all big cities are facing imminent economic collapse. Some may even appear to be coping with matters. But time is not on their side.

The plight of many big cities today might well be described by this report on the condition of those in Britain:

“Their fabric is tattered and torn. Their services generally are diminishing in scope and effectiveness at a time when more is being demanded of them. It is unlikely that the national government will refuse to ‘bail out’ cities which become as bankrupt as New York. So it seems likely that the cities will struggle on, with ever less effective services at an ever greater cost. Standards of living will continue to fall as will life values in the cities. Life in the cities, like the traffic, will likely grind on slower and slower.”

Does that mean that the pathopolis of Patrick Geddes’ theory—the diseased, shrinking, dying city—is the only course that lies down the road for today’s metropolises? Is there no solution for the big cities?