Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ned Lamont put on his starched wig, wrestled with his speech notes, written with a quill pen, and offered up a weird urban strategy cha-cha last month, suggesting that Connecticut’s cities could and should be restored to their glory days.
You often hear similar nonsense from other candidates for statewide office in Connecticut.
Standing with Ned and offering up his own version of the magic kingdom was New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, who has long been a savvy mouthpiece for every dreamy urban planning memo written in the past 20 years. DeStefano is lucky enough to be mayor of a city that is home to Yale University, which is unlikely to transform itself into a textile mill and move to South Carolina or China.
Ned suggests that Connecticut was at its best when its cities were “some of the most prosperous” in the country — which makes for a good sound bite, but ain’t necessarily so.
Ned lives among the rich Wall Street types in Fairfield County and it would not be outlandish to suggest that Connecticut is at its best as a home to office towers, suburban office parks, a healthy Wall Street, and a fond farewell to an economy in which Harford had typewriter factories and Waterbury had brass mills.
Again, Lamont is not alone in his preposterous vision of the middle class streaming back into the cities, of heavily-subsidized “incubators” spawning a generation of employed urban pioneers whose checks won’t bounce; of mass transit on the order of spaceships, rewarding the congested urban folks with easy access hither and yon.
This is the urban planning mantra of late across the land, but what is run away from by those who argue for it is an explanation for why it is important to distort market signals, ignore consumer preference, and subsidize cities that are less and less relevant to modern life in Connecticut and across the country.
We’ve heard it over and over again; “You need a healthy city to have a healthy region.” But it simply isn’t so.
It’s nice to have a “healthy” city; it’s in some ways slightly more convenient in an infrastructure sort of way to have a “healthy” city as your core — but is it essential? No.
The city cheerleading has an almost-religious fervor that suggests there is something unholy about shrugging your shoulders, packing your bags, and moving to leafy, happy, competent jurisdictions far from the downtown core.
Even assuming that unfortunate racial anxiety plays a role in the decision to leave the cities, where is it written in the Bible that a lawn, a basketball hoop on the driveway, good schools, and oodles of retail shopping malls and convenient industrial/office parks, are such a terrible thing?
Minorities are now moving to the suburbs with greater speed than the middle-class whites who preceded them.
What is particularly disturbing about the Lamont version of paradise — of time and money and psychic energy spent pretending that the cities will ever be as relevant as they once were — is that it distracts from more realistic objectives for the urban core.
Rigorous voucher/school choice options that encourage a true educational marketplace for some of the brightest city kids, trapped in lousy schools? Privatization initiatives that improve the quality and cost of city services? These are the kinds of initiatives that cities need, but they are the very things that the urban cheerleaders don’t support.
Be patient. Typewriters are going to make a comeback and the Hartford factories will be filled with well-paid workers, who will shop at the big, downtown department stores.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
