Full discoluse: I live in a suburb of Houston.



Overall, I strongly approve of this article. It's refreshing to read about a pragmatic plan that will materially improve people's lives, rather than a proposal for a(nother) sweeping federal bureaucracy to mismanage the economy, or an attempt to blame a social problem on some nefarious group of people who must be destroyed in political warfare before change is possible.



I'm also glad simply to read a liberal on the subject of urban policy. I feel that local politics are overlooked far too much in high-level debates, even though many of the policies that impact citizens most are made in city councils and state capitols.



The main weakness I see in this article is its quick gloss over crime and social order. Crime gets exactly two words in the list of things to do, with "reducing crime" stuck in the middle of a bunch of economic goals. A big draw of the suburbs is that they are safe, sane places that make it easy to raise normal children. Families are afraid of the presence of drug dealers in urban areas, not the absence of sandlots and playgrounds.



I can't say I'm surprised at how crime is overlooked as an important social issue, though. It's a pattern I often see in liberal thought, whether from academics, journalists, or pundits. I hereby predict that somebody, in response to my comment on crime, will first blame movement to the suburbs on racist "white flight," then ignore the problem of crime by alleging it is caused by poverty or racism. Perhaps someone will accuse the police of being racist, as well. In any event, commenters will not be all that interested in the question of how best to find and eliminate criminal elements. Then everyone will go back to the important problem of wondering why middle-class Americans do not seem to trust Democrats to run the army or the police.



Besides that, the article also lacks a more specific agenda - "creating jobs for the middle class" is right up there with Mom and apple pie. Likewise for making government "efficient" and education "improved," nor would it hurt Kotkin's article if he mentioned a specific regulatory barrier or tax that ought to be "reduced." However, Kotkin did put in specifics in his list of things not to do, and as an article in a journal of ideas, it's OK to be general in areas as long as one starts from a solid base of facts. (I don't have time to track down studies and reports myself, and will leave the fact-checking to others.)



Finally, I noticed a flubbed metaphor: "...a strategy that puts the cultural horse before the aspirational cart." If culture is the horse, it is the one providing the horsepower, which is the opposite of the intending meaning. Also, the horse actually does go in front. The correct expression for this class of mistake is "to put the cart before the horse." I'm a pedant, and I need help.

I agree with many of Mr. Kotkin's sentiments. As someone who has lived in Boston and Washington, and then small cities, like Syracuse NY and Altoona, PA, I can agree that a thin veneer of artsy divertimento is not sufficient to bring about a substantial change in the fortunes of cities or their denizens.

Certainly, in places where they doesn't exist, having such cultural amenities is both a way for a city to define itself as unique and provide needed respite for city dwelling, which has more stressors than suburban life.

One thing that has probably held older cities together is the sheer scale and historical force of grand, massive buildings. It is an interesting fact that such real estate is both too expensive to replace in situ and too valuable to tear down. This has forced planners to modify the buildings' original purpose to suit contemporary needs. Our older cities are the mausoleums of the grandiloquent ideas of the past; their libraries, city halls, museums and other monuments to great ideas are uncomfortably durable, in an age of cheap, thrown-up suburban malls. Finding uses commensurate with their grandeur is the most important task for those who seek urban revitalization.

Two thoughts- the first is that cities like Phoenix, Houston, and LA can hardly be thought of as single cities anymore, with dozens to hundreds of little cities chock a block together, some rising, some falling. And amenities like huge medical complexes, look good in the brochures, but are little help to those who cannot use them.



The other relates to boutique places and sections of places like Monitors in Houston, Coconut Grove and South Beach in Miami, Malibu, Sedona, and such places as most readers could fill a larger list.



The Real ones were untrendy, either out of the way or run down, that an artist could both afford and appreciate. The majority were painters, sculptors, potters etc., because their labor was required for each object, and each object had one customer, making their work more labor intensive per customer than other arts.



With this ambiance of galleries selling recent works, feeding local cultural enhancement, these locations became vibrant neighborhoods, the prices went up and nearly all the artists who made the locality were pushed out, to find a new place to start the whole thing over again.



By contrast the fake places start boutique shops selling foreign goods, symphonies, operas, and theaters hiring few and short term out of state artists, and grand museums of works of mostly dead artists. Small wonder the souls of such places smell of astroturf and mothballs.



If one wanted to enhance the cultural life of a city one need merely to enhance their artists. Schools certainly help, especially if open to wide age groups, but also institutions that enhance artist productivity without exploiting them. Developing intelligent mandates and incentives for artistic enrichment in construction can also improve the character of any city.



While the results for the middle class of such things might seem esoteric, they go a long way toward improving the quality of life for all and attracting, businesses and people seeking such.

I'm guessing Kotkin is a young fellow, with no actual knowledge of the 60s and 70s in the American city.



Briefly, the cities were blockbusted, leaving only the non-white population who couldn't move to the suburbs. In the 70s young BabyBoomers began moving into the cities, a population skewed towards those who found suburban life uncongenial- for example, gays, young couples without children, single people, and artists. These were the people who revived neighborhoods, rented or purchased disused lofts, cleaned up city government, and tried to save urban schools.



Going back in time a little, we need to remember that the Irish, the Germans, and many others did not move to American cities to become middle class. They moved there because they would have been killed if they stayed in the Old Country. Prosperous immigrants who wished to improve their status in life often moved to American rural areas.



American cities of the 19th century, like those of England and Europe, were vast pools of labor with living standards being driven downwards by the Industrial Revolution. This is very plainly seen in the records of mortality, the hours of labor, and the living conditions in the tenements.



At the dawn of the 20th century, the importance of the suburbs in the American urban picture was already evident. Los Angeles, in fact, was never anything other than suburbs connected by transit, with a faux city center.



As interesting as Kotkin's ideas for the modern city may be, his look through the wrong end of the telescope at the history that led us here can only arouse a certain amount of "Huh? What?!?" on the part of the educated reader.

While I would hardly consider it to be serious, there is some merit to a "Sim City" model of urban planning. You start off early in the game building residential areas right next to work areas with police stations mixed in.



As the game progresses, you end up with a series of development bands. No one wants to live in the center where all the work is found except for those who have no choice. Therefore, you end up with a center full of economically useless things surrounded by work areas surrounded by high property values on the outskirts of the city.



It's just a game but it suggests something interesting. Most cities are places where people want to visit and work but not places where they want to live. I live in what amounts to a suburb of Wilmington, DE, and I suspect that the population density is actually higher where I live than it is in the neighboring city.



Perhaps cities need to be redefined as centers of culture, employment and mass transportation. It seems as if the ideal model would have people living in highly dense suburbs and using mass transit to commute to jobs in the city.

Mr. Kotkin's analysis on the artificiality of the "boutique" city is in line with what I have observed over my quarter century of adulthood. I have lived in the Fort Tryon district of far Uptown Manhattan (definitely not a botique, rather a stew of a city), on the shores of Peconic Bay in Riverhead, Long Island, and in Omaha when I was working in nuclear power plant operations.

Riverhead was an odd mixture of its rural potato and vegetable past with the vineyards and B&Bs; of the North Fork a few miles away and the beaches and ersatz "class" of the Hamptons equally close, and Riverhead Village providing a sort of commercial center for "real world" needs such as hardware, construction needs, automobile repair, and groceries of the non-gourmet nature.

Omaha was an odd city with a still extant manufacturing base with Campbells Soups and a remnant of meat packing plants still there. It was, a rather pretensious city with an opera company, a fine little art museum (of the classic "hits of the 17, 18, and 19th Centuries" variety) and a rather dynamic theatre scene. My neighborhood was the former independent village of Dundee which I loved. It epitmized urban living to me: walking distance to all the merchants and restaurants I needed, none of them of the chain variety. The sidewalks were brick and the streetlights were of the pawn shop three-balls-on-a-post type. The one drawback was the fact that it was mostly a single family home neighborhood with a handfull of apartment buildings, mostly upstairs over merchants or in my own case, a converted convent/Catholic school.

I had not been there for ten years until I flew into Omaha for a wedding in Des Moines. We went into the city from the airport to pick up another member of the wedding party who lived in the city. I requested that we go through my neighborhood of happy memory.

What I found was that the neighborhood grocery was now a gourmet "shoppe", the hardware store on my block was now closed and was a bike shop (which was acceptable in my eyes) and that there was an over abundance of condos of a architecture that I can only describe as "electic," rather than the bungalows and Tudors that had held sway there ten years previous. There were fast food restaurnats on every block of the former main shopping street! The traffic was horrendous. It had been a neighborhood where everyone walked -- adults, kids and dogs. It seemed to be a hodgepodge of people capitalizing upon its former electic glory.

In short, it did not feel "real."

I feel that the key to real renaissance is not to be found in grand plans, but to foster the independent spirit of growth. To me that means fewer "complexes" and more "space."

Right now I live outide a small old college town close to Huntsville, Alabama ("Huntsvegas" to those of a malicious streak such as myself) on top of a mountain on a dirt road. I love it. I often go into town, Florence, which is close to its 200th anniversary to use the unviersity library, walk the streets and love what the city has done to itself. The neighborhoods are intact, and the old cotton warehouses are beautifully restored as office space. The coffee shops are all indpendent, as are the book stores. The venues are filled with local bands playing to a local and college crowd, and there is an sidewalk art festival every First Friday afternoon with visual art as well as music and farmers' fresh produce. There is even a small film festival that the organizer told me last week had over 200 entries from dozens of countries this year. The one thing that would make it perfect is for the old street car lines to be recovered...and for the the old local department store not to have been converted to a condo/health club!

Meanwhile, I sit in my carriage house, thinking about things...and occasionally putting them to paper (or the electronic equivalent), but I know that even though my street isn't paved, my heart is in a city, for that is where my words are read.