Urban Living Would Be Better if Big City Governments Were Less Incompetent

Unions and other special interests seem to get what they want before many urban residents get basic services.

One of the silliest things about the urbanism movement is its insistence that suburbanites abandon single-family homes, spacious yards, and placid neighborhoods for the excitement of big-city living. In those cities, we can supposedly experience more "community," reduce our carbon footprint, and take a bike to buy overpriced groceries at a bodega rather than drive our SUV to Costco.

By all means, developers should be free to build whatever the market demands—including characterless multi-family box housing. I dislike zoning and couldn't care less that my single-family suburban house is near duplexes and stores. But I often wonder why advocates for urban living rarely grapple with a main reason many people won't live in cities: the incompetence of urban governments.

In a recent column, the Los Angeles Times' Steve Lopez looked at a most basic area of municipal governance: sidewalk maintenance. Los Angeles, he reported, has created an online process for residents to request help to fix mangled sidewalks, but found it can take City Hall a decade to get to it "if you're lucky." He's conclusion is spot on: "Your first and best option is to pack up, sell the house, and move out of town."

That's years after, he noted, the city agreed to spend $1.4 billion on the problem after a lawsuit. City governments vary, but the bigger the city, the less likely its officials will respond to citizens' run-of-the-mill concerns about quality-of-life concerns such as dangerous intersections, impassable sidewalks, gang activity, etc. Suburban cities can be incompetent too, but the last time I emailed an official in mine I received a polite response within the hour.

By contrast, I own a rental property in a larger Northern California city and spent months simply trying to get anyone to even answer my simple question about pruning a city-owned tree. I finally gave up trying. Here in supposedly wretched suburbia, my neighbor called the police department to complain about speeders and a motorcycle cop set up a patrol the next day. Go figure, but people rather live in places where the government is at least responsive.

Local governance varies greatly, but bigger cities are dominated by public-sector unions that are more interested in spending money than providing quality services. They exert their power whenever a politician gets out of line and starts worrying about constituent concerns rather than just boosting the budget for those services and the pay for those who provide them.

Is it any wonder it took many months and more than $1 million for San Francisco to build one toilet (Google "toilet-gate") in a park—and that was after private companies donated the structure and the labor?

By the way, I added up the annual total compensation for Los Angeles' superintendent of buildings, five deputy superintendents, and six assistant deputy superintendents and it totaled more than $3.3 million. The city's top public works official earns more than $430,000 in total annual compensation. The head of the LA's Department of Disability earns more than $230,000 in total pay. I'm guessing perhaps the sidewalk issue isn't primarily about money.

In big cities, the resident is not the actual constituent. Instead, the unions or special interests are the voices elected officials are most concerned about placating. Even smaller, suburban, and conservative cities suffer from that problem, but it's more pronounced in bigger cities. Smaller cities are rarely dominated by a local Service Employees International Union (SEIU) branch, but few small-city council members can stand up to the police or fire unions and survive. Even smaller school districts in California are dominated by teachers' and staff unions.

So good luck promoting education reform under those circumstances.  Poor-performing urban schools are yet another disincentive to embrace urban life. Not that all suburban schools are good (most are mediocre, actually), but who is going to trade a decent school in Orange County for one run by Los Angeles Unified? Not surprisingly, "world-class" cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have largely become childless thanks to poor schools, a high cost of living, and crime concerns.

In a 2016 paper for Chapman University, Rice University professor William Fulton noted that most cities "reflect the prevailing wisdom at the beginning of the last century, which held that municipal systems (sewers, parks, police) could be more efficiently delivered at a large scale" but that they are now "viewed as hidebound and bureaucratic—responsive, perhaps, to public employee unions but not to the residents or the businesses that inhabit those cities."

That's spot on. Some urban thinkers argue for "smaller" and "more nimble" cities, Fulton added, but I think it's time that our nation, which still views itself as an innovator, considers private solutions that give residents a choice. Competition is the only way to lower costs and improve service. Even urbanists should recognize that waiting 10 years for a sidewalk repair only makes their cause more daunting.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.