Perhaps never in recent history have American cities so badly needed strong, pragmatic mayors—and gotten so few. Congressional Republicans, with few urban constituencies, won’t be of much help with mass transitor other city services; big cities will have to “go it alone.” But rather than realigning city budgets and working toward self-sufficiency, many mayors favor far-left policies on policing, rent control, education, and taxation that amount to what the late Fred Siegel described three decades ago as “a suicide of sorts.”
This autumn could well see a neo-socialist, Zohran Mamdani, win the mayor’s office in New York. In Minneapolis, a Mamdani clone, 35-year-old state senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the dominant Democratic Farmer Labor Party (later rescinded, following allegations about voting irregularities at the party’s July convention). Leftists have also scored victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo. And Seattle, which suffered some of the most destructive effects from 2020’s “summer of love,” as its clueless then-mayor called it, appears likely to replace the moderates elected in the 2020 aftermath with a new slate of far-left politicians.
Cities cannot afford such choices. Today, major American metropolises constitute a smaller portion of the nation’s population than at any time in the past half century. Employment has steadily shifted away from cities since the 1950s. The production of great office towers, those temples of urban prominence, has fallen to levels a small fraction of those of the 1990s and may soon dip belowthe rate of spending on new data centers. According to the Financial Times, many global firms are planning to reduce their office footprints by between 10 percent and 20 percent. The industries that traditionally drive high-end employment, like finance and professional services, are also those most often receptive to remote or hybrid work.