Urban Improvement

Which cities have improved the most - and what does that mean?

In today’s piece I want to offer and extend this discussion to you from Nolan Gray, an excellent housing advocate and policy guy:

I’ll get to some of the answers in the thread for discussion here, but first a few of my thoughts. It seems to me like almost every mid-sized and large city I’ve visited in recent years is in better condition than it used to be. (Small towns seem not to have ridden the urban wave quite as much, but of course my impressions are anecdotal.)

One fellow made this point, in fact: “The bolder question is which city has stagnated the most over the past 15 years. The urban fabric of pretty much every U.S. city is way better than it was in 2010.” I think that is probably true. (One person offered San Francisco as a counterpoint. I loved San Francisco, but it’s not a bad answer.)

At least, a story of improvement is what you hear—for most cities I have no point of comparison. I have heard anecdotes, though: like a friend’s rowhouse apartment in D.C. on a quiet, well-kept street being in a neighborhood that was severely blighted 20 years ago. I’ve also seen long-vacant lots finally getting built on, and other things like that.

My own memories of cities from my childhood are probably exaggerated, but cities really were a different ballgame back then. I remember them feeling dirty and loud and chaotic, which I guess they felt like to a kid who lived in suburbia outside a little small town. And I remember a kind of distressed, rundown look.

Another thing. By “improve,” we could mean two things, and it’s interesting which of these two I defaulted to. We could mean “stopped being a hellhole” or “climbed out of the 20th-century urban slump” (which is the one I thought of, but obviously I would put it the latter and not the former way). Or we could mean “Went from being a legacy city to a more forward-looking and truly urbanist city.”

While this does not answer Gray’s question—because it isn’t a U.S. city—Montreal is the city, of all that I’ve visited, that most struck me as being both. That is, it feels like a traditional, historic city, but enlivened with elements of modern urbanism. (I wrote about it here, with some pictures.)

Urbanist-ish planning in the suburbs often feels a bit uncanny: apartment buildings on stroads next to car dealers or strip plazas, attempts to retrofit over-wide roads to be more pedestrian-friendly, mandatory bottom-floor retail that sits empty for years. Maybe what I call uncanny, though, is just unfamiliar, and on measure this is no worse, and probably better, that what it’s replacing. But the great thing about a “real” city is that there isn’t this self-consciousness in being urban. It’s just part of the landscape.

I bring that up because I wonder how strong a case you could make that the answer to Gray’s question isn’t a legacy city at all, but either a more recent city or a suburban jurisdiction that has really led on housing or land-use reforms.

Anyway, here are some good answers from the thread, and I encourage you to check it out.