Life in "Progress" City

Shakes, over at Cesspool of Humanity, linked this blog in reference to my Life in "Progress"City post referencing Detroit.

In his post, he referenced an excellent read from 1998 related to the demise of our once great American cities.

Ten of America’s 25 largest cities have lost population during the 1990s, including Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, and, of course, Detroit. Most of these cities have been steadily losing population for a generation while their suburbs thrive. For example, as Atlanta’s population has declined by 19 percent since 1960, its suburbs have grown by 396 percent. As the table on page 15 shows, this pattern is repeated in many major cities across the country. The decline of these older central cities cannot be attributed to a faltering economy in any of these metropolitan areas. Nor is it due to "white flight," for blacks have also fled the central cities in large numbers. The black populations of Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis have all fallen since 1970. Washington, D.C., has 140,000 fewer black residents than it had in 1970.

Our major cities were once magnets of opportunity for low-income people; now they are places where the poor are isolated from opportunity. In 1960, central cities housed roughly one-quarter of America’s poor. Today they contain nearly half. Urban unemployment is twice the national rate and median household income in central cities is typically half the level of surrounding suburbs. Job growth followed the middle class to the suburbs: Nearly 80 percent of all new jobs today are being generated there. The amount of suburban office space surpassed that of downtown office space in the early 1980s, and is now one-third higher (see chart on page 16). "Most new economic growth," writes Joel Kotkin, an expert on urban affairs, "is inversely related to its distance from the inner city." George Gilder reflects the general popular mood when he writes that "cities are dirty, dangerous, and pestilential."

The overriding cause of the nation’s urban calamity is modern liberal social policy. Big cities, the political strongholds of liberalism, were supposed to be laboratories for the Great Society expansion of the welfare state. Instead, cities became the principal victims of liberal ideology. Three failures of liberalism combined to generate a ruinous urban policy: the failure to nurture the sources of economic growth, the failure to understand urban neighborhoods, and the failure to appreciate the importance of a strong moral order.

A couple of weeks ago I met up with some old buddies from a large CPA firm I worked at in Dayton.

When I worked for the firm, I was just out of school and fabulously liberal. In fact, one of the guys in the firm told me that if the partners ever found out that I voted for Howard Metzenbaum, I'd probably be fired.

None the less, at this reunion, this person found out that I was a recovering liberal and asked me what caused the life change.

In all honesty, what happened was I started questioning my faith in the religion known as liberalism. Namely, I simply asked the question "if liberalism is such a superior world view over conservatism, why are our cities in such a horrible condition".

I've been doing this blog for four years now. I've challenged liberals to answer this question for me endlessly. Not one liberal has ever had the balls or the knowledge to answer that question. Which is why I've come to believe there is something cognitively wrong with any liberal who read these challenges at yet moves on believing in the cult known as liberalism.

What else could it be?