Walkable city lifestyle turns into culture war conspiracy

I have an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. It’s a very densely populated area — according to census data, the area within a 1-mile radius of my place has around 100 residents per acre, or more than 60,000 per square mile. This dense (and, to be honest, affluent) population supports a huge variety of businesses: restaurants, groceries, hardware stores, specialty shops of all kinds.

In effect, then, I live in what some Europeans — most famously Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris — call “a 15-minute city.”

It’s a catchy if slightly misleading name for a concept that urbanists have long advocated: walkable cities that take advantage of the possibilities of density.

Modern politics being what it is, alas, it’s also a concept that has been caught up in the culture wars and become the subject of conspiracy theories. And as usual the people who yell loudest about “freedom” are actually the ones who want to practice coercion, preventing other Americans from living in ways they disapprove of.

What people who haven’t experienced a real urban lifestyle generally don’t get is how easy life is. Running errands is a snap; because you walk most places, you don’t worry about traffic jams or parking spaces.

You might think that the price of this convenience is coping with constant noise and teeming crowds of strangers. But while the main north-south thoroughfares are fairly noisy, the side streets are much quieter than you probably imagine. What about crime?

In his speech Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump asserted that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

Yet the reality is that New York is one of the safest places in America.

Am I proselytizing?

Well, yes. Most Americans have a distorted sense of what urban life can be like. But few promoters of the 15-minute city would advocate imposing that lifestyle on the population at large. It’s more a matter of making it possible for people to live that way if they choose.

Which is where the culture wars and conspiracy theories come in.

I’ve noted before that there’s an unwritten rule in politics that it’s OK for politicians to disparage big cities and their residents in a way that would be considered unforgivable if anyone did the same for rural areas.

Trump’s false claims about crime weren’t that unusual. There seems to be a widespread sense that only people living a car-centered lifestyle, or a pickup truck-centered lifestyle, are real Americans.

And this feeds into conspiracy theorizing. Making walkable cities possible requires both loosening and tightening restrictions on urban development: Localities would have to allow more construction of multifamily housing and multistory buildings, while restricting car traffic in certain areas.

The right manages to view both looser and tighter regulation as leftist plots.

The budget document popular among House Republicans takes time out to support local bans on multifamily housing, contending the bans help preserve our “beautiful suburbs.”

As for traffic restrictions, some people on the right have managed to convince themselves that they’re a plot to lock people into their neighborhoods. Slightly less crazy commentators, like pop philosopher Jordan Peterson, call traffic restrictions a plan by “tyrannical bureaucrats” to dictate where you’re allowed to drive.

For what it’s worth, there are many places everyone agrees you shouldn’t be allowed to drive — for example, across planted farmland — because doing so would impose costs on other people. The costs you impose on others by driving into an urban area and thereby making congestion worse are every bit as real, but somehow placing limits on urban driving is tyranny.

Of course none of this is about rational argument.

Now, I don’t know how many Americans would choose the walkable city lifestyle if it were widely available, but surely many more than are living it now. Unfortunately, urban planning — for cities are always planned, one way or another — is yet another casualty of the politics of grievance and paranoia.