Four years of uncertainty ahead for American cities under Trump
Urban centers would have had an advocate in the White House – and political continuity – if Harris had prevailed. The post Four years of uncertainty ahead for American cities under Trump appeared first on MinnPost.
What will the presidential election mean for the future of cities? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
I had a column set to go if Vice President Kamala Harris had won last week’s election. It would have been about the type of infrastructure investments the next president should make to help local government. I was going to point to Safe Streets and Roads for All, a $5 billion federal grant program, arguing that it should be increased twenty-fold to put billions of dollars on the table for bollards, curb cuts, neck downs and traffic calming. Rather than big-ticket, moon-shot investments, the real potential for transformation should be fine-grained and fast-paced, I would have said, taking place at the micro-level where urban street safety has been reaching a breaking point.
Now, Americans will be lucky if automobile safety regulations aren’t completely gutted. The 2024 presidential election seems like a dramatic turning point, where ideas about government could have gone one way, but instead are headed in an opposite direction. For the next four years under a second Donald Trump administration, it seems like uncertainty will be rife in government and on our streets.
Political instability is inherently bad for urban planning. When President Joe Biden was elected four years ago, I wrote about my optimism about the future of American intercity railroads. Given President Biden’s love of trains, I had hoped that the long-dreadful U.S. passenger rail system might see a revival. Under the Biden administration, this began to happen, but these investments take a very long time to happen, especially in this country. Now the outcome is grim, showing how vulnerable meaningful change becomes under political instability.
The case in point is the sad saga of Wisconsin’s high-speed rail funding, a relic of the Obama post-recession era where billions of dollars of federal grant money for high-quality rail transportation was killed, petulantly, by then-new Gov. Scott Walker. The trains themselves were even delivered to Wisconsin, in Badger red-and-white livery, only to be literally discarded and sent to Lagos, Nigeria. (“America first,” indeed.)
The outcome (whose story is told to perfection by Wisconsin Public Radio) illustrates the nonsensical waste of 21st century politics. Instead of train service and a factory in southeast Wisconsin, Walker’s promised replacement “Foxconn” facility amounted to a mirage. Imagine if that train had been completed: it would have been very popular, as the recent success of the Borealis line between St. Paul and Chicago proves.
Multiply this story a thousand-fold, and you get a sense of the bleak future outlook for cities and government in general. Urban planning simply cannot function if, every five years, politicians smash the system.
Why this happened again, faced with such a stark choice, is almost impossible to understand. The best answer I’ve seen invokes a depressing reflection of the public disorder of the last few years, where post-COVID disruptions to public life deeply colored people’s moods.
For example, today’s drivers run red lights in ways that would have shocked me five years ago. I went to a St. Paul Walgreen’s the other day hoping to find cat food, and it looked post-apocalyptic. After a few minutes wandering around aisles of literally empty shelves, I left empty handed. Visible poverty and drug addiction has spiked, and panhandlers post up on urban corners that seem barely habitable, fruitlessly waving cardboard at drivers. All of this has an effect that, combined with a few years of unavoidable inflation, cut into our already fragile sense of collective trust.
Meanwhile, oligarchical power is transparent in ways that are reminiscent of the 19th century, when impossibly wealthy barons ruled the country according to whims and profit margins. Before “reform-era” urban governance, cities simply let the business community decide how to shape our urban landscape. Political structures amounted to little more than patronage and graft. The newspapers were explicitly run by and for the wealthy.
(This is another reason to be thankful for MinnPost.)
Not too long ago, it was difficult to imagine that world, but now we seem to be returning to that model at a good clip. That will mean that cities, especially in “blue states,” seem destined to “go it alone.” Without federal support, it will be a daunting challenge to tackle problems like housing, poverty, public safety, climate change, or a dozen other things and local governments will have to accommodate themselves to “public-private partnerships” in whatever way they can.
The result is that those of us committed to cities need to exercise both compassion and defensive resistance, likely at the same time. Our cities seem destined to become even more of a refuge for the most vulnerable, people with next to nothing and those searching for safety in a hostile political climate. You already hear about parents with trans children moving to Minneapolis, a trend bound to increase. Imagine street fights over deportations or keeping the Planned Parenthood clinic open. I fear we will have to fiercely defend our spaces of refuge from what is likely coming.
I was on the Green Line last week, watching a young white couple seated near me. They seemed out of place: a man in a camouflage American flag hat with his arm around the shoulder of his female companion, looking nervously around the car as it filled with folks from the city. The train carried all kinds, people returning from work downtown alongside folks who were probably living in a shelter, lugging beat-up bikes. I can’t say who the out-of-place couple voted for, but I am pretty sure they were new to taking the Green Line, and I imagined them petrified by the experience.
Nothing bad happened. Everything was fine. The light-rail experience has improved a lot over the past year, partly thanks to the hard work of Metro Transit invention program and partly thanks to a simple return to social normalcy. It’s been a long, slow climb back from the deeply unsettling days of the post-COVID years. Cities and public life are on the mend, for now anyway, but the future seems much less certain.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
The post Four years of uncertainty ahead for American cities under Trump appeared first on MinnPost.
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