Abstract
In the epilogue to Unequal Cities: Overcoming Anti-Urban Bias to Reduce Inequality in the United States, economist and policy scholar Richard McGahey recounts how the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath brought existing racial and class inequalities to light. Low-income workers and communities of color reported higher case and death rates stemming from social and environmental factors, including disproportionate employment in low-wage “essential” occupations, and many lacked financial resources to brave through the recession and cost-of-living inflation that followed. While the Trump administration diverted resources from major cities (particularly those in reliably blue states), President Joe Biden’s recovery efforts were stymied by Republicans, and critics charge that they did not go far enough to remedy the economic and political problems that U.S. cities have long grappled with.
McGahey’s epilogue is a postscript to his economic and historical analysis of how changes and disruptions in market segments (like industrial manufacturing), “anti-urban bias,” federal and regional governance, and structural racism contribute to and exacerbate inequality within and between cities and regions—a microcosm of the larger issues that constitute his argument. Against the market-oriented economic theories and policies that prioritize finance, deregulation, and human capital investment as solutions to poverty, unemployment, and related social problems, McGahey points to these four factors and to state and federal policies that hamper equitable urban policy and development. McGahey urges economists and policymakers to consider how these factors mitigate the efficacy of policies primarily informed by free market ideology and economic theory. As the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery efforts show, inattention to the particularities of cities’ economies, the privileging of suburbs by state and federal politicians, and the persistence of racial residential segregation and racial income and wealth gaps inhibits cities’ efforts to manage crises and address social problems while pursuing pro-growth and/or pro-equity policies. Before, during, and after the pandemic, cities are largely left to fend for themselves without sufficient federal support or proportionate political representation and power.
In Unequal Cities, McGahey presents a plea to economists and policymakers to consider policies that take market changes, anti-urban bias, regional governance, and structural racism into account. McGahey appeals to market-oriented economic theory by stressing the central importance of cities for the national economy—as innovation hubs and pillars of state and national GDP—while also pushing against the presumed incompatibility of equity-oriented policies and those prioritizing economic growth. He identifies some common ground between market-oriented economists and their more politically progressive counterparts: both camps tend to oppose targeted subsidies to attract corporate firms, for example. However, McGahey notes that the former tend to discount empirical evidence supporting the claims of the latter: unionization, federal regulations, dense and affordable housing development, and the like can reduce economic inequality. Federal support for broad equity-oriented and place-specific urban policies can operationalize both market-oriented and progressive economic theories, fostering economic growth and reducing racial and class inequality.
McGahey’s nine chapters consist of three devoted to inequality, anti-urbanism, and structural racism; three case studies detailing how federal policies and structural racism shaped and constrained city-level equity and development efforts and economic stability in New York City, Detroit, and Los Angeles; two chapters on economic policy and debate; and the aforementioned epilogue. Central to McGahey’s argument is how state and federal policies disadvantage cities and worsen economic and labor market outcomes, especially for communities of color. As cities face crises and struggle to balance budgets while addressing unemployment and other social problems, they are simultaneously blamed for their failures and denied adequate federal funds and other resources needed to address recessions, pandemics, deindustrialization, unemployment, and the unique needs of city residents like public transit, well-funded public education, and affordable rental housing. McGahey argues that cities cannot solve these problems alone and that the free-market solutions favored by many politicians and economists ignore social, political, and history- and place-specific factors. He proposes a more holistic view of urban problems and solutions to economists and policymakers and extends this argument to unions, environmentalists, community organizations, and others, whose successes and failures hinge upon their coalition-building efforts while they also face constraints from local, state, and federal policies, among other factors, as described in the case study chapters.
Sociologists, political scientists, and lay readers may find McGahey’s discussions of “anti-urban bias” to be of particular interest. He identifies how juxtapositions of idyllic farming communities against the ungovernable masses thought to populate urban centers have existed in public discourse as early as the 1700s and traces how cities, politicians, and activists respond to anti-urban policies and development strategies over time in his three case studies. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrote of their disdain for the growing metropolises of their time. The development of decentralized governance structures disempowered cities as state capitals and legislatures relocated from urban areas to center-state locations. Anti-urban bias underlies local, state, and federal policies pertaining to governance, development, labor, and other areas. Federal investments in single-family housing construction and transportation technologies spurred suburbanization, which contributed to white flight and further spatialized inequality between cities and suburbs. State governments controlled urban growth, tax policy, and financing, and regional planning favored deconcentrating housing and industry. Federal policy institutionalized racial residential segregation and New Deal-era funding provided more impactful development support to rural areas. Home ownership programs funded white suburbia and redlined urban minority communities. Contemporary anti-urban bias includes how the electoral college and allocation of U.S. House and Senate representatives diminishes the political power of urban voters in favor of residents of sparsely populated towns and states, and how the financial contributions of U.S. cities to the national economy subsidize rural and suburban housing, education, and infrastructure developments at cities’ expense.
Though McGahey is clearly writing for economists and policymakers, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to graduate or (advanced) undergraduate students of urban studies, public policy, and related fields. However, some readers would likely appreciate it had McGahey included tables displaying some of the comparative economic and demographic data discussed in the text or cited literature. The GIS maps favored by some spatial analysts could also provide easy-to-understand visualizations of the uneven development and spatial inequalities at the core of McGahey’s arguments. Others may question the choice of New York City, Los Angeles, and Detroit for case study analysis when anti-urban bias likely also contributes to policies, processes, and outcomes in the comparatively understudied cities and metropolitan regions of the U.S. South and Midwest. And how structural and institutional racism shape contemporary policy, state and federal funding distribution, and income, wealth, and other disparities may remain beyond the scope of McGahey’s arguments here. These points aside, McGahey offers an important and compelling argument, and one worthy of discussion by economists, policymakers, activists and advocates, and voters.