Mayors to Cities: Drop DeadFar-left policies on policing, education, and taxation are pushing Los Angeles, Chicago, and others to the brink.
Joel Kotkin, City-Journal
Rick Cole has spent several decades running cities, both as an elected official and as a planner. He has worked in suburban Azusa, California, and progressive-dominated Santa Monica and currently sits on the Pasadena City Council. Yet as he looks out at the urban future, he feels despair—most particularly, about the city of Los Angeles, where he recently departed as deputy mayor and chief deputy controller.
“The progressives are not focused on governance,” he suggested over sushi in Little Tokyo, a stone’s throw from City Hall. “They prefer virtue-signaling to running a city.” Cole’s is not the complaint of a conservative but someone who identifies as “a pragmatic progressive,” even a “sewer socialist.” The problem, he says, is that today’s progressives lack a “results-oriented approach” that actually helps residents.
Innovation is barely possible at the moment, he says. Los Angeles has a special place in this lifelong Catholic’s heart: he went to college here (to Occidental, like Barack Obama), raised his kids here, and considers L.A. “the most fascinating city in the world.” But his head tells him that progressive mayor Karen Bass and an increasingly far-left city council have failed to address, among other major problems, a swollen budget, decaying infrastructure, and awful schools—to say nothing of their staggeringly inept response to the recent wildfires.
Perhaps never in recent history have American cities so badly needed strong, pragmatic mayors—and gotten so few. Congressional Republicans, with few urban constituencies, won’t be of much help with mass transit or other city services; big cities will have to “go it alone.” But rather than realigning city budgets and working toward self-sufficiency, many mayors favor far-left policies on policing, rent control, education, and taxation that amount to what the late Fred Siegel described three decades ago as “a suicide of sorts.”
This autumn could well see a neo-socialist, Zohran Mamdani, win the mayor’s office in New York. In Minneapolis, a Mamdani clone, 35-year-old state senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the dominant Democratic Farmer Labor Party (later rescinded, following allegations about voting irregularities at the party’s July convention). Leftists have also scored victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo. And Seattle, which suffered some of the most destructive effects from 2020’s “summer of love,” as its clueless then-mayor called it, appears likely to replace the moderates elected in the 2020 aftermath with a new slate of far-left politicians.
Cities cannot afford such choices. Today, major American metropolises constitute a smaller portion of the nation’s population than at any time in the past half century. Employment has steadily shifted away from cities since the 1950s. The production of great office towers, those temples of urban prominence, has fallen to levels a small fraction of those of the 1990s and may soon dip below the rate of spending on new data centers. According to the Financial Times, many global firms are planning to reduce their office footprints by between 10 percent and 20 percent. The industries that traditionally drive high-end employment, like finance and professional services, are also those most often receptive to remote or hybrid work.
Past urban leaders met equally daunting challenges, most recently in the 1990s. A generation ago, major American cities seemed to be decomposing, but reformist mayors managed to slow and even reverse decline in cities as diverse as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Houston. A repeat is not inconceivable: moderate, results-based leaders have recently won mayoral elections in San Francisco and Houston. But for the moment, the tide still runs leftward.
For some pundits, Zohran Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign—based on a rent freeze, free city buses and child care, and city-owned supermarkets—seems to promise a road to power for the hard Left. Rent regulation allows urban progressives to live in their preferred cities rather than face the choice of locating somewhere else. This constituency, Mamdani’s base, understandably worries about how, in New York, one needs to earn $135,000 a year to afford a rent that doesn’t consume more than 30 percent of income—an equation more demanding than in any American city except San Jose, where pay tends to be much higher.
The progressive knowledge class has replaced the traditional, family-oriented urban middle class as the key urban cohort. Middle-income families have been leaving cities for decades. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities shrank from 45 percent to 23 percent of the city as a whole. Job losses for manufacturing and middle-management jobs, notes MIT’s David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets.” In the process, many working-class voters—Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans—moved out of the urban core, too. These were the residents who helped elect reform mayors Rudy Giuliani, Richard Riordan, and Bob Lanier in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, respectively. Today, a new demographic forms the center of gravity in these cities.
Yes, cities continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and culture creators. In New York, for example, while the overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has not yet dissipated. But however much they love the opera, fashion, or Broadway, many cherish their bottom lines even more. Between 2018 and 2022, more than 100,000 wealthy taxpayers left the city for Florida alone, draining an estimated $10 billion from New York’s coffers.
The key constituency for urban socialism is not the working or middle class but the largely affluent young, single professionals who are unlikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites have never married). Marxist campaigners thrive wherever young progressives congregate: parts of Queens, Brooklyn, Chicago’s Near North Side, and trendy parts of L.A. like Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Hollywood. These highly educated, low-income voters constitute the tip of the socialist spear in New York and other cities.
This population feels aggrieved, knowing that it no longer can reasonably aspire to buy an attractive market-rate apartment. Their employment forecast is getting cloudier, even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even in “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.
These highly motivated millennials have allies among those who benefit from ever-expanded government, such as the poor—including immigrants—and those working for the government or the nonprofit sector. In almost all progressive cities, unionized public workers represent arguably the most powerful political force.
The prospect of ever more radical progressive rule in New York would be a boon for places like Palm Beach, Austin, and Dallas, which is building a stock exchange to challenge Wall Street. Even former governor Andrew Cuomo, running as a New York City mayoral candidate, says that he’s headed to the Sunshine State if he doesn’t win in November.
Some see in this new progressive alliance a road map to reviving the Democratic Party, which faces historically low popularity numbers, but the track records of progressives currently in power offer little to boast about.
Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a Mamdani-like coalition of minorities, public employees—notably, his former teachers’ union colleagues—and the Windy City’s largely progressive white population. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate, even as he pushes through fat raises for teachers and other public servants, leaving the city with cripplingly high pension debt. A situation that was already dire has moved toward the catastrophic.
In a saner world, Johnson would present a cautionary tale for progressives. His poll ratings are abysmal by any measure, dipping below 30 percent in one survey and even below 10 percent in another. Certainly, he makes a poor comparison with Midwest mayors like Mike Duggan in Detroit, a Democrat whose commonsense, centrist governance has helped halt the Motor City’s long decline, with a revitalized downtown and improved public safety. Duggan has recently broken with his increasingly leftist party and is now running for Michigan’s governor’s office as an independent. (See “Detroit—Back from the Dead?”, Summer 2025.)
Urban analyst Pete Saunders, a Detroit native and longtime Chicago-area resident, suggests that the Windy City’s politics have become less pragmatic partly because of the migration of middle-class residents, particularly blacks, to suburbs and the South, while the poor remain behind. Together with the radicalized young and childless progressives, these cohorts would work to defeat any moderate politician who might challenge them. “Chicago is stuck,” Saunders suggests. “We have barely grown for 50 years and there’s no real sign of anything like the comeback in Detroit.”
Perhaps nowhere is the demonstrated failure of progressive urbanism more obvious than in Los Angeles, a city with enormous physical advantages and a history of industrial might. Mayor Karen Bass may be more likable than Johnson or former New York mayor Bill de Blasio, but, as Cole notes, “she’s not an administrator.” That’s an understatement. Bass impressed few during last year’s fires, and the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal. By late July, Los Angeles County had issued just 137 rebuilding permits for the 12,048 buildings damaged or destroyed by the wildfires.
Initially, this failure sparked some opposition, and even a recall drive, financed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ally Nicole Shanahan. But the effort ran out of steam and shut down. Crime rates have recently dropped somewhat, as they have around the country; but under the influence of the city’s militant public unions, Los Angeles suffers from a deepening budget hole.
With Los Angeles lacking a well-organized and influential business community, the public-sector unions get no pushback, notes recently retired L.A. city treasurer Ron Galperin. “The business community has packed it in. They are less organized and engaged,” he observes. “Decisions are made for ideology but not focused on results.” Billions spent on the homeless have been wasted on various housing and rehabilitation schemes, with little to show for it. The city, he suggests, has been “underinvesting in infrastructure” while its budget, he says, is assembled with “smoke and mirrors.”
Like New York, Los Angeles suffers from an exodus of middle-class and aspiring working-class families. Once described by Siegel as “the capitalist dynamo,” the city has become an economic backwater. Progressive critics at publications like The American Prospect want to blame Trump policies—in this case, the administration’s ICE raids—for the economic difficulties. But L.A.’s decline long predates the 2024 election. As the Drucker Institute’s Michael Kelly suggests, had the city merely seen economic growth in line with the national average over the past decade, it could have created 300,000 jobs.
Residents are fleeing a place once known as “the city that grew.” Los Angeles has lost overall population since 2010. If current trends continue, according to the state’s Department of Finance, it will be home to 1 million fewer people by 2060. The young are prominent among the departees; the city is home to 750,000 fewer young people than in 2000. Younger Angelenos, according to one UCLA survey, are even more dissatisfied than older ones.
Left behind are an L.A. version of Mamdani’s progressive college-educated supporters (albeit a shrinking constituency) plus a large, mostly poor population, dominated by more than 3 million immigrants—twice as many as any other county in the United States. Once the cost of living is included, Latino workers do far worse in L.A., Chicago, and New York than they fare in many smaller and Sunbelt cities. Los Angeles now suffers California’s highest poverty rate and one of the worst in the country. Since 2010, Latinos and other foreign-born Americans have been moving to Miami, Houston, and Dallas, while their numbers diminish in Los Angeles.
As the ambitious move, an underclass stays behind. Violent incidents remain commonplace, particularly around downtown, with everything from smash-and-grab attacks on retail stores to random assaults on individuals and gang-related homicides. Delinquents have vandalized Metro buses and stolen copper from city streetlights. Empty luxury high-rises in downtown Los Angeles, never completed, have become notorious among tourists for their elaborate graffiti.
One might think that such failure would disqualify the current political class, but hard times seem only to have reinforced the Left’s political prospects. The city’s decline was already evident in 2022, when Bass handily beat moderate Rick Caruso. Political experts believe that Bass is poised for reelection against likely meager opposition.
For Bass, the ICE raids have been political manna. Events in which demonstrators break laws, attack police, set fire to Waymos, and wave foreign flags—as seen in the immigration protests—may be horrifying to most Americans, but that hasn’t been the reaction in Los Angeles. One local political leader even called out the city’s notorious gangs for not joining the fight against ICE. It sounded like an invitation for progressive-approved vandalism on a grand scale. Bass’s fervent rhetorical attacks on ICE agents could help clinch her reelection bid.
Four Democratic Socialists of America members currently sit on the 15-seat city council, including recently elected Ysabel Jurado, a DSA activist who does not just want to defund the police but abolish them. In the left-wing hothouse that increasingly defines L.A. politics, “the numbers don’t support a reform candidate,” suggests well-connected Democratic consultant Dave Gershwin, a top aide to previous mayor Eric Garcetti and Senator Alex Padilla.
Crime has been progressives’ Achilles heel. The recent drop in crime owes much to the rediscovery of the novel notion of enforcing the law. City residents have voted out a dozen George Soros–funded DAs in cities including Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco.
San Francisco, which had drifted relentlessly leftward since moderate Mayor Frank Jordan left office in 1996, may be the surprising epicenter of a new centrist push. A city that had everything going for it, from a mild climate to the presence of elite universities and industries, San Francisco seemed determined for years to create a California version of a Third World city. Homeless people wandered its streets, property crime soared, and the downtown, particularly during the pandemic, became largely deserted.
Now San Franciscans appear to have had enough. Besides turning out far-left district attorney Chesa Boudin, along with some radical city supervisors and school board members, the city last year elected reformist mayor Dan Lurie. Two critical factors—demographics and economics—work in San Francisco’s favor. Its large Asian population (Asians account for nearly two in five city residents) has been moving to the political center and even the right. Though still strongly liberal as a whole, San Francisco enjoys one of the highest per-capita incomes of any city, with a base of affluent families and professionals.
Unlike in Los Angeles, the city’s business elite remain engaged. Himself a scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, Lurie has gotten property and tech executives organized to promote recovery. Most business leaders now see San Francisco, once written off, as primed for a major economic rebound.
The arrival of new AI-related companies has been critical. Open AI, Anthropic, and Inflection AI have all established major real-estate footprints. Lurie has focused on modernizing the tech capital’s poor public safety, shifting the police focus toward petty crime, and taken steps to address the persistent homelessness problem. He has looked to plug budget shortfalls with cuts in staff and services.
Most impressively, the city is seeing sharp declines in overall crime, which has dropped 35 percent. It still suffers from high downtown vacancy rates, but overall economic indicators such as tourism and conference attendance are up. The city is slowly countering its recent dystopic image. (See “San Franciso’s (Partial) Comeback.”)
Another promising model can be seen in Houston. The city is a sprawling and less than conventionally attractive place; but like San Francisco, it has retained a large multiethnic middle class. And where the City by the Bay boasts tech preeminence, Houston retains its status as the capital of the global energy industry, with many firms still domiciled within city limits.
Notwithstanding County Judge Lina Hidalgo, elected in 2018, progressives have never achieved the governing hold on Houston that they have secured in San Francisco. The departure of term-limited mayor Sylvester Turner, a conventional free-spending liberal, opened the door for the city’s business community to boost its own candidate: longtime Texas legislator John Whitmire, who took office in 2024. A key factor in Whitmire’s success is his lack of ideological rigidity, notes longtime Texas political consultant Kevin Shuvalov. Unlike his predecessor Turner, closely tied to public-sector unions, Whitmire has built an alliance with Republicans and moderate Democrats—still a robust presence here—and has stressed job creation and encouraging new residential construction.
“Whitmire has engaged the business community, and that makes a difference,” says Shuvalov. “He is changing the city culture and sees government not as an end but an entity where the business is customer service. He is what we need now. All Biden did was give cities money; but now, you need leaders who know the party is over.”
Progressive socialism continues to pose a grave threat to the recovery of urban America, but a return to sanity in major American cities is possible, and maybe even inevitable. It’s hard to see how the platform of Mamdani’s DSA party, which seeks “the abolition of capitalism” and the “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure,” will play in the real world. People may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “whiter” areas, as Mamdani has suggested, or characterizing the NYPD as “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” as he has done in the past.
As jobs, talent, and investment head to Sunbelt cities or the countryside, some MAGA partisans may cheer the troubles of places like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. But their decline is no blessing for the United States. To see New York, or any of the other great cities, fall victim to the politics of grievance instead of pursuing growth, innovation, and advancement, would remove “a beacon of hope and opportunity for people around the world for centuries,” as the American Enterprise Institute’s Sam Abrams puts it.
Cities are hard to kill—they’ve survived riots, pandemics, and even, in Gotham’s case, Bill de Blasio. But they can’t mount a resurgence unless they abandon their ideological fixations and start meeting the needs of citizens, and at reasonable cost. “Excellence in governance is not impossible,” Rick Cole insists, as we walk through the crowded streets of Little Tokyo. The obstacle? “Cities have an arrogance that is almost nihilistic. People see the iceberg, but they don’t seem to want to avoid it.”
Joel Kotkin is Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas–Austin.
