Suburban Scrawl

The horror of walkable cities

Every so often I bring up Stanley Kurtz, longtime National Review culture warrior and author of one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in a mainstream conservative publication (or so it was at the time, in 2005; in the Trump era it’s more like an Honorable Mention). It was a plan to return America to what was then still called Family Values by the making citizens too impoverished and desperate to live apart from their families and independently; if ending Social Security, Medicare, and other misguided social welfare program forced us all to hovel up together like the Buckets at the beginning of Willy Wonka, Kurtz wrote, “a new set of social values could emerge along with a fundamentally new calculation of personal interest.” This is the kind of B.F. Skinner conservatism that always makes my blood run cold.

Kurtz has written plenty of crazy shit since, but one of his hobby horses has been revived recently. For years, starting in the time of his bete noire Obama’s presidency, Kurtz went on about an alleged plot to “burn down the suburbs” — that is, to promote “’regionalism,’ the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities” and “the ‘anti-sprawl’ movement,” and eventually to “force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas,” with the ultimate goal of “income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.” Then falls Syosset!

Conservative poindexters are always carrying intellectual detritus like that into the MAGA camp, and at one point in 2020 Kurtz’s crackpot idea dribbled out of Trump’s mouth, in relation to HUD’s modest Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program, which requires HUD grantees to “overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities.” As I noted then:

But this is actually a standing conservative position on AFFH. In fact, for years National Review writer Stanley Kurtz has been using that very phrase — he was saying Obama wanted to “abolish” the suburbs (and “annex” them) when the policy was first being floated. Earlier Kurtz also said Obama wanted to “burn down the suburbs,” in case the racist intention of this investigation was unclear.

Now, Kurtz — who, I have been reminding people for years, is a dangerous lunatic — was only talking to conservatives; no one outside The Body was meant to read his shit, nor were they likely to. Their obvious hope was that some Republican weasel would take hold of the idea and make it more, well, politic — you know, say that it does a disservice to both the city and the suburbs, and that both would benefit from a policy that trusted the Free Market to blah blah blah... you know the drill.

I would actually amend that now because, as we have seen, even since 2020 rightwingers have been shoveling the crackpottiest ideas in front of a shocked and disdainful public, and not even trying to make them look good.

The latest warm-up of the idea that liberals are trying to herd honkies into cities with black people appears to be the ragestorm over “15-minute cities” — which to normal observers looks like an anodyne movement to make cities more walkable (that is, make work, shopping, and social venues more accessible without a car), but looks different when you’re suffering from conservatism:

Some conservative commentators and conspiracy theorists are increasingly convinced the concept of a “15-minute city” — an urban design principle recently embraced by cities ranging from Paris, France to Cleveland, Ohio — is the latest nefarious plot to curtail individual freedoms.

“You won’t be able to use your own car on certain roads and highways without the government’s permission and consent,” claimed one Instagram user in a recent video that’s been liked more than 5,400 times. “You will be constantly monitored by surveillance cameras to ensure that you don’t leave your designated residential zone without first being authorized to do so.”

No one has actually proposed anything like the kind of tyrannical panopticon the Instagram user fantasizes, yet when Oxford, England tried to introduce a modest congestion pricing traffic abatement scheme such as has been seen in major cities since the 1970s, thousands of residents went apeshit.

While the anti-15MC people emit plenty of paranoid dystopian fiction, none of them has presented a convincing case that the walkable city schemes currently on offer will lead to Big Brother. So this has become yet another loony rightwing article of faith, like poison 5G vaccines, groomer drag queens, and the Great Reset, that you have to brace yourself for when visiting Uncle MAGA at holidays.

But it has also left a market opportunity for centrist dweebs who like to show how much they care about the common man by castigating elitist liberals, so here’s Michael Lind at the New Statesman who, while admitting conservatives are over the top about it, nonetheless seems to agree with them that it’s a social engineering scheme being imposed against the will of the people:

No matter how much urban journalists glamorise micro-apartments and minimalism, most people in Western democracies prefer commuting to their workplaces and shopping centres and having bigger homes with more room to accommodate children, relatives, pets and possessions.

Credit Lind with getting into a single sentence not only a grand, non-falsifiable assertion about what the proles like (it’s like saying “most people in Western democracies preferred polluted air and water in the 1960s”), but also a sneer at fancy city dweebs and their perversely anti-gemütlich tastes.

Oh, and get a load:

If cars and trucks are banished from the pedestrian village, how are medics in ambulances to get to victims of heart attacks?

LOL. I could go on (Lind blames liberals for bogus “affordable housing” schemes in New York because they led to official lower classes of tenant — which he compares to Morlocks! — rather than because they don’t actually do shit to house the poor; maybe he thinks Maya Wiley, rather than the demented cop Eric Adams, is Mayor of New York?). But I won’t indulge myself.

I will say Lind’s essay offers two significant reminders: First, that, because rightwing ideas are so unpopular, conservatives must appeal to non-conservatives with alternate quasi-populist versions such as Lind’s “snooty reporters have a sad when you drive a truck” bullshit (very much like their anti-vaxx “outreach” on behalf of RFK Jr.) ; and second, that prestige media will continue treat their gibberish as if it’s reasonable. So if you haven’t heard any of this 15-minute city/abolish the suburbs nonsense anywhere besides here yet, wait until the campaign gets rolling — Jake Tapper will be giving it the Questions Remain treatment soon enough.