Washington D.C. -- A four-part urban strategy announced by the President has all of the predictable elements: help bring order to urban sprawl, conserve open space and relieve commuter traffic; make downtown urban renewal more acceptable by easing the burden on displaced people; “scatter” low income people in rehabilitated housing rather than concentrate them in dreary public housing projects; and assure better coordination and execution by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The punch line is that this presidential policy declaration was made by Lyndon Johnson in 1966. But these
grand intentions have seemingly been repeated by every administration since.

This policy tape-loop comes to mind as the chattering classes are recalling the 30th anniversary this month of
the Kerner Commission report. That’s the report written in the aftermath of the rolling riots of the late 1960s
that blamed our urban ills on “white racism.” As Charles Murray pointed out in Losing Ground, the Kerner
Commission never offered any serious evidence for this conclusion; it was more of a liberal-guilt mood piece.

Around our office, as you’ve probably heard too many times by now, we’re fond of an old line from Edna St.
Vincent Millay: “It’s not one damn thing after another; it’s the same damn thing over and over again.” Call it
barroom Santayana (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”). Despite all of the talk of “new paradigms” and “reinventing government,” the fact that we’re recycling the same tired platitudes about
fixing our cities shows how little our thinking has really changed.

I’ve lately written a long article on the subject of “Broken Cities” in the pages of Policy Review (available on the web at www.policyreview.com for those of you who are non-subscribers). The first pillar of wisdom on the subject of urban policy, it seems to me, is to stop trying to make water run uphill. A major reason cities were ruined was the hubristic belief that planning could remake the urban order. People who are interested only in how a city “ought” to look are usually disappointed by real cities and clamor for wholesale changes in the way we conceive city life. The best example of this hubris in action is probably Brasilia, a costly centrally-planned city that became a dysfunctional slum the moment the last brick was mortared into place.

Cities are the ultimate spontaneous order, as the great urban affairs writer Jane Jacobs reminds us: “There is a
quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of
pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
This means that policymakers should go back to basics and get the core functions right: fix the roads and sewers, arrest the criminals, and improve the schools. Leave the fancy stuff to Prince Charles.

-- Steven Hayward