No Cities Matter

Shortly after Houston (below) got flooded by Hurricane Harvey, messages and memes on Facebook suddenly cropped up linking the flood to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Come again?  Here's the deal.  To show how it doesn't make sense to answer the insistence that black lives matter with the retort that "all lives matter," folks have shown messages and memes saying, "I'm going to pray for Houston, but I'm also going to pray for (insert other city here), because all cities matter.  Now, see how stupid that sounds?"

No, I don't.  Because all cities do matter, or at least they should . . . except that in America, cities don't matter.

Look at the past sixty years of how we've treated cities in these United States.  We've denied them necessary federal funding,  we've imposed on them so-called "urban renewal" schemes that ruined their downtowns, uprooted whole neighborhoods, and replaced many established sections of cities with hideous university campuses, soulless housing projects and modernist office complexes, we've destroyed their public transit systems to make room for cars,  we've promoted car-based suburban development in the open spaces outside the cities that drained them of their middle-class populations, and we've rammed freeways through once-proud places like the Bronx and the West Side of Chicago.  We've treated our cities like they're irrelevant, and with a couple of obvious exceptions like New York, I guess they are.  But there was a time when even New York didn't matter, like when President Gerald Ford told New York in no uncertain terms that it would receive no federal help to get out of its 1975 financial crisis.  Look, I've seen my grandfather's old neighborhood in Philadelphia, and it looks like no one has cared enough to take care of it since he left for northern New Jersey in the fifties.  Did I not just comment on the twin fiftieth anniversaries of the major riots in Newark and Detroit and illustrate how those cities haven't mattered since?  Both cities still have a long way to go before they get back to where they once were. 

Houston, ironically, has been undone by its own growth; now the fourth-largest city in the United States, it's become a sprawling collection of suburban-style neighborhoods that have been built on the very land that was needed to remain undeveloped in order to absorb rain water - hence, the flooding.  No serious effort has been made in Houston to build storm water systems to alleviate floods, and no one there has dared challenge the idea that sprawl is the best way to grow and sustain a city.  But that's just another example of how a city in this country doesn't matter.  Houston's chef economy - oil refining, which led to the abundance of cheap gasoline, which led to the car-based living pattern that has destroyed other cities - led to its current predicament, with all of those refining facilities blowing up and causing environmental damage.  Shouldn't that at least matter?

As for older cities, the highways that were pushed through them became what James Howard Kunstler called "Chinese walls" that separated the cities from their suburban satellite communities, where all of the economic development relocated, and created in the central cities a "pathological ghetto culture" (Kunstler's phrase) that now includes rap "music," crumbling infrastructure, high crime, failing schools, deteriorating buildings, in the most extreme cases, dying downtowns.    

Do I have to show you pictures of abandoned skyscrapers in Detroit again?     

So, yes, I'm going to pray for Houston. And Detroit, which has needed a prayer for five decades.  And Newark, New Jersey.  And Newark's neighbor East Orange, a four-square-mile town of 65,000 residents that is bisected by two expressways and has been left to fend for itself against all the urban ills associated with larger cities.  And Baltimore, and other cities, because in a country that doesn't value any of its cities, these places need all the prayers they can get.  It is ridiculous to say that all cities matter, because, again - in America, no cities matter.

And while we focus on the flooding from Harvey, Hurricane Irma is churning out at sea, and the next city we'd better pray for could be Miami, or Charleston, South Carolina . . . or Norfolk . . . or maybe . . . New York. :-O

More on Irma soon.