The Scrapbook’s eyes fell recently on a piece in the Atlantic by Derek Thompson, which quantifies what The Scrapbook has sensed for some time. Drawing on the work of Jed Kolko, chief economist for Trulia, the real estate website, and UCLA’s Matthew Kahn, it draws a clear connection between politically progressive metropolitan areas—San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, etc.—and the inability of low- and middle-income residents to afford housing. Put another way, in real estate terms: Liberal communities are financially inhospitable to home-buyers who aren’t wealthy.
The Scrapbook gives the author due credit for candor. The title of the piece—“Why Middle-Class Americans Can’t Afford to Live in Liberal Cities”—is admirably straightforward, and Thompson lays out the problem in plain language: “Across the country,” he writes, “rich, dense cities are struggling with affordable housing, to the considerable anguish of their middle-class families.” But he also suggests (this is the Atlantic, after all) that the housing shutout for hardworking, middle-income taxpayers in deep-blue America is largely a consequence of “good intentions gone bad.” To wit, progressives are more likely to impose stringent regulations—in zoning laws and otherwise—to preserve the environment or protect local character and history.
Well, maybe. Certainly The Scrapbook would agree that, in the realm of affordable housing and income inequality, there are many small reasons that add up to a big problem: High taxes and rent control, for example, are prime examples of the unintended consequences of “good intentions” in city government. It is also true that blue cities such as Boston and San Francisco, for example, are located on peninsulas, where expansion is limited, whereas, say, red Texas features miles of flat, open country, ripe for development.
Yet the “good intentions” here are precisely the point. One of the primary differences between left and right in America is the left’s devotion to dogma, regardless of consequences, and the right’s conviction that practical consequences must be borne in mind when enacting new laws and regulations. Whether liberal policies in urban America are well-intended or not, the evidence that they do not work—to the increasing detriment of citizens who aren’t rich—has been so pervasive, and for so long, that even the Atlantic can’t help but notice.
To which The Scrapbook would add one essential footnote. Yes, there are economic and political reasons why America’s blue cities are less hospitable than red cities to middle-class homeowners. But no steady reader of the New Yorker, or the Style section of the Washington Post, or the “soft” features in the pages of the New York Times could fail to discern a certain semblance of contempt, a slight undertone of disdain, a faint echo of NIMBY, when mention is made of the American middle class, its values and customs, its appearance and politics—a sentiment now codified in laws and regulations. So when Democrats talk about “income inequality,” what exactly do they mean?