The Real Threats to America’s Cities
After years of revival and resurgence, the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are now being squeezed by external threats and an internal eruption along their deepest fault line—one that could fracture their political influence in the years to come.
America’s cities have already faced almost four years of persistent hostility from President Donald Trump, who has reviled them as dirty, chaotic, and dangerous and pursued many policies contrary to their interests. Then this winter, the COVID-19 pandemic hit hardest within dense population centers, including not only central cities, but also their inner suburbs.
Now the nationwide protests and disorder following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have clearly exposed the crack in the foundation of cities’ new prosperity: the persistence of racial inequality and segregation amid that economic revival.
The past quarter century has brought “a steady hyper-concentration of business activity in a short list of big, dense, often coastal hubs,” says Mark Muro, the policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. But those same economic forces, he adds, have “been widening the disparities within those same hubs—and now we’re seeing some of the impacts of that.”
These challenges to cities from without and within create inimical political pressures. The Trump threat has driven central cities and their inner suburbs closer together, solidifying a Democratic alliance that has reshaped the 21st-century are much more critical of his handling of the coronavirus outbreak than Americans in rural parts of the country.
