An Urban History of Prosperity’s Menace, and Those Who Sought (and Still Seek) to Tame It

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Regarding Abundance

One of the big topics of conversation among left-leaning and liberal pundits, politicians, and intellectuals so far in 2025 has been “abundance.” The key idea—mostly tied to the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book of that title, but also related to many other claims that have been building for years—is that the United States has forgotten how to build things, and in particular, how to build things for the common good. Making policy changes so as to prioritize the government getting homes built, grids wired, bridges erected, etc., as opposed to prioritizing other, more egalitarian or environmental aims, is the best way to create an electoral constituency for otherwise popular progressive goals, or so the argument goes. 

The data behind the argument is hardly original; libertarians have talked about how America has paralyzed itself through regulations for decades, and socialists have talked about how America’s obsession with profit has resulted in bloated corporations sucking up our inventiveness for just as long. But Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is significant because it uses this data to make an argument that challenges America’s liberal establishment directly (an establishment that both authors are very much a part of). The book itself is open-ended about the direction of that challenge. Is it a call for a return to the New Deal, with the government taking a direct hand in boosting basic industrial and economic projects (but mostly only those)? Or is it a neoliberal apology for big business, who would be happy to lend their productive powers to America’s state capacity in exchange for being released from various democratic restrictions and procedures? (That the Trump administration has gleefully ignored Constitutional process in the name of “getting stuff done” has only complicated the call for, and the costs of, an “abundance” orientation.) 

A Different, Yet Defining Perspective 

Daniel Wortel-London’s superb new book, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981, appears to have no direct relevance to this debate. But indirectly, Wortel-London (whose politics are clearly leftist, and highly critical of the too-common celebration of capitalist development in American life) presents a way of understanding “abundance” that is, I think, of immense value. Like the very best forms of historical research, The Menace of Prosperity uses a particular place (America’s largest and most influential city, New York) and a particular time (the 1870s to the 1970s, a century during which New York City’s citizens and leaders alike saw, celebrated, and struggled against their city’s transformation from a large urban center to a global financial megapolis) to reveal something general—in this case, something essential to the urban landscapes where 80% of all Americans live. By so doing, Daniel-Wortel also provides readers with something close to a defining perspective on how we should think about economic growth today.

Wortel-London takes his title from a line in Lewis Mumford’s 1938 classic, The Culture of Cities: “From the standpoint of decent metropolitan living one might well speak of the ‘menace of prosperity.’” The specific context of Mumford’s comment was the push in the 1930s by a large number of New York City’s power players for “fiscal stabilization.” Following the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the immense debt being carried by American cities led many urban leaders and bodies (though not, it must be said, anything like a majority of New Yorkers) to embrace a surprising mix of local conservation and progressive reform, some of which echoed the premises of early New Deal programs like the National Resource Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Cities, this argument went, needed to restrict speculation and preserve their locally available economic stock (in terms of land, natural resources, material goods, labor, and productive capacities). As Wortel-London puts it: 

At their most ambitious, these entities promoted a truly radical understanding of municipal well-being: one based not on meeting the whims of the wealthy through debt but on meeting the needs of the city’s working people through its existing resources. Meeting these needs, to be sure, might require deflating the speculative expectations and property values that had accrued in more irrational times. But the reward for this deflation would be abundance: cheaper land would enable more sanitary low-income housing, restrictions on development would enable green spaces, and all this would, in the end, save New York from the instability and social costs that “prosperity” had inflicted upon it (The Menace of Prosperity, p. 121, bold added).

What is being pulled out of this particular moment in Wortel-London’s argument is a different understanding of abundance. Rather than focusing on an abundance of produced goods, focus on an abundance of productive land; rather than building an orientation around increasing supply, build an orientation around the collective use of that which has already been supplied—which for cities means the productive locality upon which one stands. This is not low-tax conservatism, nor is it supply-side progressivism; it is conservation for the sake of democratic empowerment. This is my formulation of Wortel-London’s language, and he may not agree with it, but it shows the value of his research to the abundance conversation—and The Menace of Prosperity has a rich historical tale on its side.

Of course, the insights which history reveal to us will never remain static, and Wortel-London’s careful, sharply detailed unpeeling of NYC’s fiscal evolution demonstrates this well. The particular moment of urban reform which Mumford sought to build upon unfortunately passed, as all moments of reform similarly come and go, some leaving lesser or greater improvements in their wake, but all contributing to the constantly evolving struggle which American cities face. The key point of that struggle is presented at the book’s beginning as the repeated realization by multiple generations of New Yorkers that “the costs of elite-driven growth outweigh its benefits” (p. 2). But why is that a lesson that never sticks?  

The Dilemma of Cities Over Time 

Cities are places of expansion and experimentation. They have been imagined as such in the Western world ever since their emergence as centers of commerce and education in the late Medieval era, promising opportunity and freedom—“Stadtluft macht frei”—to all who relocated there. That such opportunity and freedom were entwined with alienation and poverty was, of course, also understood by many; hence the abiding Jeffersonian preference for an agrarian life. But the specialized material promises of city life—the occupational and social variety, the artistic excellence that even Jefferson admitted to, the tolerance, and the wealth they provide a social space for—have nonetheless continually drawn the masses of humanity into urban environments, meaning that the governance of such cities is always centrally about responding to the demands for growth, and then managing what Wortel-London refers to as their “social costs” (p. 3)—economic stratification, disinvestment in marginalized neighborhoods, community breakdown, and that old Jeffersonian concern, dependency. 

The history of American cities following the Civil War, as the American economy came to prioritize large-scale manufacturing and trade over agriculture and small-scale artisanship, became a history of capitalizing upon land—the land that city-dwellers were moving to occupy, the land that entrepreneurs wanted to place factories upon, the land that investors realized would increase in value. This search for capital was driven by both voters and speculators—and since cities were Constitutionally-defined non-sovereign entities, subject to state and the national governments, that capital could mostly be obtained in only a few ways. Slowly, through taxation, which has never been a popular revenue stream; more quickly, through debt-financing, the easiest and most fiscally devastating stream that cities have relied upon; or most directly of all, through transfers from other jurisdictions and governments, which is the stream they have the least amount of control over. (The additional possibility of cities running, on behalf of their citizens, profit-making public utilities to generate funds has been, as Wortel-London details, sadly reduced as a viable option.) The latter two methods qualify as “elite-driven”—and redirecting these methods of raising capital towards actual democratic, broad-based uses, as opposed to following elite development preferences, was (and is) something rarely accomplished.

The Menace of Prosperity’s hundred-year survey of the “fiscal imagination” of NYC’s (and, across America, other urban) leaders is essentially a remarkable recitation of attempts at this kind of redirection. The pattern is similar: the costs of elite-driven growth are recognized, are responded to with reforms, and those reforms, successful or (more commonly) not, eventually become embedded in the continuing evolution of the city, such that they develop their own constituencies and become a new basis for demands of, again, elite-driven relief. That may sound like a hopeless cycle, but it isn’t presented as such. With each response to every fiscal crisis in New York City’s history, Wortel-London shows us individuals thinking creatively to craft solutions that will improve the life of the city—though he also shows us how the “sunk costs” of previous efforts to tame elite-driven growth and make the productive possibilities of urban spaces more available to all city inhabitants add up over time.

In the 1880s and 1890s we see Henry George and his “fiscal republican” followers fight to institute some version of a land-value tax, one that would “by taxing land at 100 percent of its value….force landlords to either lower land prices in the hope of attracting productive enterprises to their property and making some kind of profit, or to sell their land to those who would….[thus] liberat[ing] urban real estate markets from the distortions of the speculator…[and] making it easier to establish businesses and freeing cities to reach their economic potential” (p. 36). The failure of the Georgist campaign was a great loss—one unfortunately tied to its unwillingness to consider cooperative alternatives, with its hyper-focus upon real estate development undermining its own constituency “once opponents of fiscal republicanism provided alternative policies for acquiring property ownership and achieving local growth” (p. 51).

Forty years later, the once-Georgist homeowners and local producers in New York’s outer boroughs, who had learned to organize—in good local democratic fashion—on behalf of the debt-financed integration of the city’s periphery with the downtown through subways, bridges, and more, were now the key opponents to the aforementioned “fiscal stabilizers.” In the view of reformers, the public sector—which “was not as committed to pursuing speculative profit”—was crucial to the development of an “economically self-sustaining” housing market which could cool the fluctuations of New Deal-era urban economies (pp. 115-116). In one of his more insightful arguments (in a book filled with them), Wortel-London details how elements of the New Deal’s conservation orientation were compromised by its sincere attempt to include “local governments and civic bodies,” with the result that “rather than seek out new solutions,” many in the Roosevelt administration “attempted to supplement older approaches with new financing, standing ready to pick up the municipal slack for assisting realty along the same lines local governments had.” The result—“federal support for suburban homeownership”—predictably “worked against efforts to restrict peripheral growth” (pp. 134, 136). Public housing couldn’t compete with such subsidized expansion. 

By the 1970s, as movements in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment reached their peak, suggestions in response New York City’s latest crisis over growth were perhaps more radical than they had been in nearly a century. While the city’s liberal establishment embraced the post-WWII logic of corporate growth and redistributive taxation, others, inspired by visionaries like Paul Goodman and Jane Jacobs, started to push for rebuilding the city’s economy through decentralization, a move towards empowering neighborhoods and communal associations through “close-grained tax allowances” and the loosening of centralized zoning rules, without reliance upon “cataclysmic money” from the national government (p. 177). For the first time in the city’s history, non-Caucasians had a major presence in these arguments, as many Black activists came to see the “lack of local economic control” as a central concern (Wortel-London reports that as of 1960, “four-fifths of Harlem’s commercial and residential properties were owned by non-locals” and “four-fifths of the Harlem workforce was employed outside the community”—p. 183). But the immense momentum enjoyed by New York elites—both governmental and corporate—who bet on making the city a center of the globalized economy gave them resources to finance Jacobsian-style reforms in the city’s built environment, all while ignoring the fiscal imagination of these cooperative radicals: 

At their most ambitious, groups holding to this [cooperative, localist] vision claimed that New York’s existing development strategies—recreating the city in the image of its most powerful and profitable enterprises—was both unjust and uneconomic. And at their most radical, they argued that the economic health of neighborhoods could only take place through outright community ownership. Nonetheless, most of these “fiscal communitarians” lacked the agonistic edge that earlier fiscal reform movements held. While White brownstoners were eager to preserve some of the city’s existing housing stock, they had little inclination to displace the white-collar enterprises where many of them worked. And many in the city’s Black neighborhoods were less interested in empowering their communities than in empowering their own enterprises within those communities. Ultimately, New York’s liberal policy-makers were able to meet these demands while further accelerating the city’s white-collar development…. Oblivious to the costs of private growth and unwilling to imagine alternatives, New York’s liberal establishment would keep their faith in the city’s white-collar economy (p. 192).  

An Abundance of Urban Alternatives, If We Can See Them 

 In the end, Wortel-London believes the history of New York City’s repeated reforms of, and frequent failures in redirecting the consequences of, elite-driven growth, teach that “we cannot frame the fiscal dilemmas of local governments in simple terms of economic development versus economic decline” (p. 225). The assumptions of NYC’s elites—that subsidies can provide fiscal solvency, that wealth generation can pay for welfare—unfortunately continue to obtain throughout American cities, despite concerted efforts to show the long-term financial costs and liabilities of expanding infrastructure, and the equally devastating social costs of centering city life around the cult of business development. Growth, very simply, should not be entirely about expansions of supply or increases of goods. Partly because those expansions and increases depend too often upon the exclusionary capitalization of spatial resources that urban communities nominally offer to everyone who relocates to them, and partly because such capitalization invariably cannibalizes itself, requiring the process of seeking elite investment and debt-financing to continue unabated, perpetuating the crises which The Menace of Prosperity expertly details. 

But Wortel-London doesn’t leave his readers without hope. On the contrary, in the book’s final pages he affirms that we can build upon the history of America’s cities, as so many reformers have done before. It’s been more than 40 years since the end of The Menace of Prosperity’s story, and fiscal struggles remain; why not turn again to considering how it is that “locally oriented firms with alternative ownership structures…can provide more public revenue, with less public costs, than seemingly ‘wealthier’ firms,” and that “lodging the ownership and operation of economic enterprises within [a city’s] most marginalized communities….[will] provide these communities with much needed resources while expanding their political autonomy,” thereby working to democratize the finance structure under which all of us who live in cities depend (pp. 225, 227)? 

In a recent essay, Wortel-London looked at the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, as the latest potential participant in this ongoing struggle. Many may dismiss him the moment they hear him self-identify as a “democratic socialist”—but for city-dwellers who want (as they should) to take the lessons that The Menace of Prosperity laid out seriously, Mamdani’s talk about municipally owned grocery stores, rent freezes for qualifying tenants, and loan forgiveness for small businesses, ought to provide some food for thought. Financing these programs is the problem, as always—and yet those with urban faith might look to cooperatives, land trusts, public banking, and other innovations (all of which have drawn upon the same lessons this book reveals) as routes to explore. 

The faith that something cooperative, something Jeffersonian, can be built into the operation of urban liberalism may seem a faint hope. But for close to 1000 years, people have come to urban centers looking for opportunities, carrying with them new ideas, hoping for the freedom to build upon them. The wealth of America’s cities are immense; the most important lesson of Wortel-London’s magisterial history is that, if tens of thousands of city residents over the years have seen, in their time and in their particular context, a means to tie that wealth less to elite use and more to abundant employment, why shouldn’t we join those who are continuing to seek to realize, in today's context, this vision once more?

Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.

Songs of '83: "Billie Jean" (Also: Michael Jackson, MTV, and the Year some Comparatively Cosmopolitan Brits Urbanized American Pop Radio)

Forty years ago yesterday, Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," the second single off his early-80s-defining album Thriller, entered the Billboard chart. By March it hit #1, and it stayed there for nearly two months. We all remember the song, and the video, and deservedly so; it was a game-changing song, at least insofar as mainstream American pop music consumption was concerned--and that consumption can tell us something important about 1983, I think. So listen and watch it again, but stick around afterwards for the commentary.

Thriller--and, most particularly, the enormous demand which "Billie Jean" generated--was a crucial player in MTV finally putting music by Black artists into regular rotation, which 18 months into its existence at the time still mostly conceived itself as serving a national FM-radio-style audience for White rock 'n' roll, pop, and heavy metal acts, and not much else. That story has been often told, but I want to look at another angle--one that was made explicit when (again, forty years ago this month), David Bowie, promoting his soon-to-be-released album Let's Dance, asked some pointed questions of the new network:

You can read a transcript of the key, concluding part of the interview here. Mark Goodman's flailing effort to make sense of his employer's decisions by way of regional distinctions ("we have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or [the] Midwest--pick some town in the Midwest--that would be scared to death by Prince") is easy to mock, given that Prince Rogers Nelson was himself a Midwesterner from Minneapolis, Minnesota. But it does make me wonder what more could be said about the nation-wide infatuation with Jackson's brilliant song and video, a song and video rooted a large variety of music and technological trends...but most of which, I think, really could be associated with cities (and urban activities and an urban imaginary tied to places ) like "New York" and "Los Angeles" in particular way. What was changing by 1983 was, among other things, perhaps that "London" needed to be added that list, and perhaps that helped to make the difference.

Ten years ago, I wrote a 4-part series on my memories of listening to pop radio as a young person and young adult, focusing on 1978, 1983, 1988, and 1993. And just about exactly five years ago, I kicked off a year-long series reminiscing about my favorite of those four years, musically speaking: 1978. My opinions haven't fundamentally changed; from an even greater distance today, I still think the swampy, often campy, often ridiculous mix of rock and country, blues and metal, folk and disco, which characterized that year made for some of the greatest popular music of my entire life. But as the 40th anniversary of 1983 arrives, some different ideas dominate my thinking, and I feel like I'm seeing something cosmopolitan, something comparatively multicultural and, lacking any better word, something genuinely (if however vaguely) "urban" as the best descriptor of how musical sensibilities, significantly due to MTV (even against some of its own founders' wishes), were changed that year.

1983 is usually seen--thanks to mainstream coverage it received--as the high-watermark of the Second British Invasion, of what was called, in the sort of limited pop-music conversations I was able to access as a 14-year-old, "synth-pop" or just "New Wave." Any attempt to confine a multifaceted musical movement(s) to a single calendar period is ridiculous, of course, but still, it's not wrong to see 1983 as a culmination of sorts. If punk music meant anything, it meant that rejecting a rock 'n' roll style which had become ponderous and loud and Americanized in a particular post-WWII way (as the English guitarist Martin Simpson put it in the liner notes to his blues album, Smoke and Mirrors, growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s essentially meant living on a giant U.S. aircraft carrier), and which had been embraced by thousands of English, Scottish, and Irish English-speaking musicians in the 1970s. (This was true, by the way, even if the ideological content implicitly conveyed by that style was harshly attacked; think of the righteous anger at, yet also the total dependency upon invoking, various America-shaped economic, sexual, racial, and historical memories and norms in Pink Floyd's The Wall.) By 1983, as punk had given way, as the racial diversity of the cities of the United Kingdom brought reggae and glam and dance music into post-punk acts, and as these musicians began to do more with the drum machines and synthesizers that had begun to appear throughout Western Europe in the late 1970s, they had done it; they'd conquered American radio (throughout the year, there were regularly more British acts on any given week's Billboard top ten than American). The music of these artists was often technologically unique, and their sexual and aesthetic style--magnified by the visual element to making pop music which was by then well-established in Britain but still new to the U.S.--left the (White) pop music bad boys of the previous two decades far behind. I'm not sure how you can see all this and not see an urban, multicultural, polyglot, sexually experimental perspective at work.

Maybe it didn't have to happen in the UK; there was still the racially charged craziness of New York City and Los Angeles which MTV programmers were worried about, after all. But think about that, and about the way the larger pop radio establishment in America initially resisted it--the anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ, anti-urban undercurrents of Disco Demolition Night were real, after all. Something David Byrne wrote about those mid-to-late 1970s days in the liner notes to the first disc in the 1992 Talking Heads collection Popular Favorites, 1976-1992: Sand in the Vaseline might provide some perspective here:

I wanted my guitar to sound thin, clean and clanky. Not chunky, distorted and macho, like a lot of what was around. My philosophy at the time being that this puny sound was in the true nature of this instrument....the first truly modern instrument. The first scientific industrial instrument...clean, metallic, precise, yet funky and African...the first instrument to embody our young culture...."American" cool-African-futuristic-trash-aesthetic....[T]he beauty of this "American" aesthetic is that it belongs to anyone who claims it...who grooves on it...who sees the deep zen poetry in James Brown's lyrics, in a juke box, a suburban split-level, a wild hairdo, who sees the hope for the future implicit in the shape of an electric guitar (a hope that was becoming a nostalgic joke). So here it was, waiting...do it yourself art/poetry/sex/life/bullshit that anyone could make possibly reach a sizeable audience without compromise. God, everything we were hearing on the radio was either nostalgic or mired in compromise...at least on "Rock" radio. Disco culture was a radical alternative, as much a cool hip subculture with integrity as the little alternative (punk) rock world we inhabited. We liked it...The Jackson Five Get it Together L.P. rates with Sgt. Pepper in my mind.

It's all there: a discontent with an American rock 'n' roll style seen as nostalgic and utterly unwilling to embrace the irreducible plurality and wildness of the musical/technological/urban frontier, which is "American" only in the sense that it is revolutionary and weird, not in the sense of that it carries the presumptions of a superpower. (I love his description of the guitar as simultaneously "metallic" and "African.") What Black and LGBTQ and other populations were bringing into the discos of New York (and London, and Paris, and Berlin, etc.) is part of what I see the whole Second British Invasion as bringing to American radio, building upon and making nationally dominant what earlier post-punk bands and emerging house and dance beats in Black and multi-racial communities had done in dense urban corners of America. Michael Jackson probably didn't need an invasion to get MTV to change its mind, but it certainly didn't hurt that videos from various racially and sexually mixed musicians and bands from the UK and Western Europe had been piling up on their desks for a year and a half before Thriller hit.

The subsequent popularity of many of these dance-music-inspired artists in thoroughly White college campus cultures--the "college radio" of the 1980s--has given some New Wave music a bad reputation, I think; musicians more proximate to the post-punk moment of the mid- to late-1970s--the Talking Heads or Blondie in the United States, the Police, the Pretenders, Joe Jackson, or Elvis Costello and the Attractions in the UK--are more likely to be respected today than the supposedly frivolous and superficial New Wave acts from England that came later. But I don't think that's fair. I would argue that the racially mixed make-up of many of these bands, and the way Black (including Afro-Caribbean), disco-oriented and other international musical styles were electronically interpreted by many of them, speaks against their subsequent, mostly undeserved, American reputation. And frankly, the fact that these artists brought into the mainstream of American pop music consumption--brought into my radio as a teen-age listener in Spokane, WA--the sort of sexual, racial, and material associations which disco had always flirted with arguably helps put the weirdness of much of American popular culture in the 1970s into perspective. Maybe that weirdness (Cher with Greg Allman! Cillia Black with Marc Bolan!) was partly a side-effect of the American media establishment trying to make sense of--and thus contain--all the urban unpredictability which Byrne made mention of above. And maybe, just maybe, in some very indirect, deeply structural way, the manner which the White rock 'n' roll and metal acts which had been MTV's bread and butter responded to the rise of Michael Jackson and the New Wave can be put into the same story as well.

Years ago, the critic Stephen Metcalf, while writing about Morrissey and the Smiths (a band that might best be described as a 1960s-style rock 'n' roll band that skipped punk, went post-punk, and never evolved further), wrote something that has stayed with me ever since:

1983, the year of “This Charming Man,” is the year the ‘80s became the ‘80s. Up until that point, Thatcherism in England and Reaganism in the United States had been little more than hollow promises. Then interest rates fell, the two economies thawed, and spandex was everywhere. It was the year of Flashdance at the box office, of “Every Breath You Take” and Thriller on the Billboard 100; the year of Risky Business and The Big Chill. If this list doesn’t make you want to crawl into your bolt hole--well, you are probably not a Smiths fan. I think the word that best captures the times is heartless, as evident in the stupid rictus of Sting’s face, circa 1983, as it was in Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts. No wonder Morrissey’s voice sounded so fresh, so slyly subversive. As much as he publicly avowed a hatred of Thatcher, culminating in “Margaret at the Guillotine,” it was Thatcherism that made Morrissey. The Iron Lady represented a hardness of purpose, a pitilessness that would allow England once again to produce winners. But also, inevitably, losers.

I think about this passage today, in light of a deeper awareness of the racial history of the Western world than I had even as recently as five years ago, when I wrote my tribute to the songs of 1978, and I wonder if one might not also see 1983 as being a year when a certain kind of determined backlash to the multi-racial and androgynous dance mixes and synthesized beats that had spread so deeply in Western cities (though possibly not, at least according to MTV, to Poughkeepsie) took root. Can you imagine someone turning on Friday Night Videos (which premiered in 1983 and was my gateway drug, by the way; we didn't have cable) or just the radio, listening to or watching Culture Club or Lionel Richie and realizing "Good grief, we didn't stop disco: it's everywhere!"? I don't know what kind of "response" such a hypothetical realization could have given rise to; it's not like you can separate musical trends from those of other media, to say nothing of the politics of Reagan's America and the final decade of the Cold War in general. All this stuff comes together, after all, with cross-influences going every which way. But still--the fact that 1983 was the year KISS took off their make-up, the year that Metallica and Mötley Crüe released their first albums, the year Def Leppard went head-to-head with with Black and New Wave and similarly influenced pop artists for Billboard dominance...well, it makes me wonder. Not that you can code New Wave and dance music as liberal and heavy metal and hard rock as conservative (if anything, I'd have to think about what was happening to country music in the 1980s to make any of this actually plausible). Still, to see 1983 as a watershed year, with the divides over winners and losers becoming more culturally explicit, such that the majority of White, straight, suburban radio-listeners like myself became aware of them for the first time? There may be some sense to that, I think.

This year, I'm going to do a "Songs of '83" series, like I did five years ago. None of them will be as long as this one, I think. But I see something in the history of pop music that perhaps I didn't before, and as the Billboard chart of 1983 brings songs to my attention, maybe I'll point them out, for whomever is interested. I kind of am, if no one else. For now, though, thanks Mr. Jackson; thanks for making MTV cave into the popularity of an urban-centric, technologically changing, post-American Century musical reality which they'd been surrounded by since they'd begun (MTV's very first video was the New Wave band the Buggles with "Video Killed the Radio Star," after all), but hadn't accepted the racial consequences of yet, perhaps. My youthful radio-listening and tv-watching habits are in your debt.

Eight Inter-Connected Observations about Complexity, Liberty, and the City of Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

1) Cities are complex systems—that is, they are places where different groups of people organize, worship, trade, celebrate, work, and simply live in close proximity to each other, all in different ways and with different goals in mind. In other words, cities are pluralistic, with different sectors and levels all interacting in complex ways. Obviously not all cities are equally pluralistic and complex—the size of the city matters, its economic and racial and religious and regional history matters, and the way it is governed matters. Still, the one common feature of every modern city--meaning every built community that isn’t a rural village and exists in the wake of the democratic and industrial revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries--no matter what its relative size or history or location or politics, is simply this: its day-to-day operation is a complex, and by no means necessarily automatic, matter.

2) That doesn’t mean a large portion of what happens in any given city on any given street on any given day isn’t significantly automatic, because in a healthy city an awful lot of it will be. This was the crucial insight of Jane Jacobs, probably the most famous observer of cities in the 20^th century: that in the midst of the “seeming disorder” of the city, you actually have “an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”  But Jacobs also insisted that the natural emergence of this “orderly whole” depended on putting in place (or removing out of place) the basic tools (or the basic obstacles) which cities require (or inevitably, unfortunately, produce). Call it a matter of putting in place, or enabling city residents themselves to put in place, good “infrastructure,” broadly defined, and get rid of the bad.

3) However, a lot of Americans, including a lot of Kansans, and perhaps especially a lot of Wichitans, have an ideological resistance to complex operations. They tend to believe that dealing with complexity, with the problems of good and bad infrastructure (the construction and renovation of roads, the maintenance and evaluation of schools, the expansion and restriction of police departments, etc.), is always going to result in someone, somewhere, capturing some resource that will enable them to limit someone else’s choices. This isn’t entirely incorrect: while the economic and social opportunities of city life have long been empowering and thus freedom-expanding to many, it’s also true that people under complex systems are often subject to--in the words of Louis Wirth, an early 20^th-century urban sociologist--“manipulation by symbols and stereotypes managed by individuals working from afar or operating invisibly behind the scenes.” In other words, when things get complex, it’s easy not to know who is really making decisions, or to think that you’re in control of your choices when actually you’re not. So any society that takes individual dignity seriously has to recognize this, and work to make certain that the liberties provided by cities don’t crowd out those of the other type.

4) In our city, however, this structural dynamic is often flipped on its head, with those urban forces that push for the expansion of economic and social opportunities—including those involving environmental sustainability, civic health, democratic accountability, and more—having to prove themselves again and again against a less-complex, more libertarian default. Since Wichita is, in fact, a genuine metropolitan (if mid-sized) area, and simply isn’t—despite the convictions of many of its residents—a small town where (as my city councilmember, Bryan Frye, optimistically but, I think, incorrectly put it) everyone is only “one degree of separation” separated from everyone else, the reality of pluralism, and the need to deal with its complexities (whether through parties or procedures or some combination thereof) cannot be denied. Still, such denial is common, and thanks to the influence of major city players like the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Policy Institute, and most of all Koch Industries, it is likely to continue to form a conceptual stream that those who engage city issues will have to struggle with.

5) That struggle has taken and will take many forms; I don’t mean to suggest that this is the secret history of every and any city controversy. (To believe that—that is, to believe, for example, that Charles Koch alone is solely responsible for Wichita’s profoundly underfunded street repair and public transit systems, despite evidence which might support that conclusion—would in itself constitute another form of denial of Wichita’s ideological complexity.) Depending on the issue and context, the disposition of so many in Wichita against urban complexity and in favor of a simplistic historical or market liberty may be more obvious or less so. On the more obvious side, you have the anti-government responses whenever city leaders suggest encouraging transportation alternatives or citizen groups advocate against the overuse of non-recyclable plastic bags. Or you have the fact that, when confronted with declining tax revenues or questionable management, the privatization of city resources—golf courses, the ice rink, or Century II itself—always seems to be preferred, as opposed to re-organizing or cutting back on the sort of services typically more valued by those with a property-centric libertarian perspective.

6) A less obvious manifestation of this perspective might be the way in which concerns about democratic accountability (that is, the ideal that anything the government does will reflect something that at least some portion of citizens actually want to have done), whether expressed in the context of political parties or city regulations or national polls, seems like a needless complication, an additional demand that gets in the way of simple, individual liberty. This is probably a stretch on my part, but when I look at a recent attack upon a fairly anodyne column of mine, it’s what first comes to mind.

7) To focus on that attack just for a moment (click through and read it if you’d like; I’ll wait), consider: why would implying, as I did, that challenging the use of the term “democracy” when thinking about the legitimacy of governmental actions was a distraction itself constitute “a disgraceful attempt to get people to accept [my] version of reality”? The version of reality which the author insists I am foisting upon my unsuspecting students and the reading public is that version wherein a constitutional republic like ours, one with elections, representative legislatures, and the bedrock principle that it is “We, the people” (the demos) who ultimately govern, is a “democracy” in the same way that a Starbucks Caffè Misto is a “coffee” and a walking, talking American citizen is a “human being.” In other words, unless the author is operating under a serious terminological misunderstanding, one which leads him to confuse fundamental categories with their particular types (I wonder if he believes that, because the United Kingdom has a monarchy, no one is ever actually elected to Parliament?), I suspect that he wants to push back against the case I made for acknowledging concerns over “democratic legitimacy” simply because, frankly, it is frustrating to have to admit that the people, pesky creatures that they are, might have mutually contradictory views about what they want those whom they have elected to do. Invoking the majesty of the U.S. Constitution has its place, surely, but doing so in a way which suggests that the pluralistic interests of the many different sectors and levels of America’s democracy can be cleanly resolved through a few lawsuits is, I think, once again, engaging a simplistic kind of denial.

8) My point in all these observations comes down to this: here in Wichita there is a strong tendency by many to deny the almost inevitable liberal fundamentals which, sooner or later, quickly or slowly, emerge in cities. This denial isn’t universal, but it is common; it scales all the way down to neighborhood arguments and all the way up to presidential elections. Don’t read too much into that “almost inevitable” bit; Wichita is far more divided than it is blue, and likely to remain that way for a good while yet. Still it’s simply impossible, I think, to be both honest about our city and simultaneously insist that its pluralistic reality can and should be reduced to a simple set of libertarian lessons, wherein urban needs and disagreements resolve themselves naturally in the marketplace. For better or worse, we’re bigger and more complex than that. Doubling down on that reduction only makes the already difficult task of managing Wichita’s infrastructure even harder, and leaning too hard on the “small town” ideal only ends up excluding some of those who came here looking to enjoy freedom and opportunity as well. Let’s not do that, shall we?