What can Trump do to stop inequality?

Joel Kotkin writes at Daily Beast,

...Racial and class inequality is very much alive even in the most “progressive” cities. In New York, the poster child for urban revitalization, poverty and homelessness have worsened, in large part due to soaring housing costs. Since 2007, median rents in the city have gone up 8.5 percent while median renters’ incomes have gone down by 6.8 percent. Particularly shocking have been rent rises at the edge of gentrification, in places like Brooklyn’s Williamsburg—where rents have risen 80 percent since the 1990s.

...Overall, the outer suburbs and exurbs, home to more than 40 percent of the metropolitan population, have added population at more than five times the rate of urban cores.

...Bottom line: The suburbs and exurbs disdained by most urbanists and Democratic politicians continue to add residents and jobs as inner cities continue to languish.

In fact, roughly 80 percent of all job growth since 2010 has been in suburbs and exurbs. And tech, supposedly newly focused on the urban core, still concentrates largely in dispersed, suburban environments from Silicon Valley to Austin to Raleigh.

Increasingly, at least in the centers of the greatest hipster infestation, minorities and working class families are being driven into less desirable areas, often further from work locations. This helps create new social tensions and, in many places, notably Chicago, more social unrest, and now the most murders in more than two decades. Overall, the rate of violent crime in urban cores remains almost four times higher than the national average, according to FBI data. The worst violence, and the sharpest upticks over the decade have been in cities with large black populations, including Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Cleveland, and Atlanta.

Left out of the urban revival, minority and poor communities face diminishing opportunities while others prosper. This is true not only in places like Chicago, notes researcher Daniel Hertz, but also in New York where class and race inequality are much higher than in the rest of the country. Generally speaking, it’s the bluest and largest cities that suffer the worst levels of inequality.

Indeed despite the media spin, in the core cities of the 51 metropolitan areas, 81 percent of the population increase over the past decade was under the poverty line, compared to 32 percent of the suburban population increase. Despite talk about “suburban ghettos,” the poverty rate in the suburbs remains roughly half that of urban centers (20.9 percent in core compared to 11.4 percent in the suburbs as of 2010). Crime rates in core cities, meanwhile, remain over three times higher than in the suburbs.

No surprise that discrete and genteel “ethnic cleansing”—in the form of HUD “affirmative action” or taxpayer funded redevelopment—appeals to many urban boosters. In contrast, the much sought after hipster and wealthy childless adults thrill developers and mayors; they love a population that will pay a premium to live there and that doesn’t need good schools or working-class jobs.

...Certainly, the new HUD should abandon its agenda of redirecting populations, or forcing high density on reluctant communities, whether in the poorer urban neighborhoods or the more comfortable suburbs. But there needs to more. One hopeful sign—particularly for cities in the heartland—would be attempts to keep industrial jobs in what’s left of the manufacturing economy, the loss of which has devastated cities such as Milwaukee. Similarly Trump’s stand against H-1B visas could help keep some white-collar positions in the hands of citizens residing in our cities, including on the coasts.

Other steps could be taken to reawaken the grassroots economy, particularly in hard-hit poorer neighborhoods. This might include such things deregulating some businesses, like in cosmetology, and making it easier for new restaurants and shops. Yet these things cannot be mandated from Washington; it will take some rise in the level of business savvy of our elected leaders in cities. Perhaps most critical will be addressing the escalating crime rate in many cities, where by far the vast majority of victims are minorities, as Trump himself pointed out.

Other parts of the potential Trumpian urban agenda, such as charter schools and vouchers, long supported by his Education Department nominee Kathy DeVos, could help address poor urban education, arguably the biggest reason why families don’t stay in cities like Chicago with their dysfunctional schools. Federal support for educational reform is vastly preferable to the kind of anti-charter agenda that, for example, Hillary Clinton, with her incestuous ties to the teacher unions, would have promoted.

Similarly, a shift away from “one size fits all” transportation policies might allow communities to build public transit options, ranging from bus rapid transit to innovative dial-a-ride services. Under the old regime, money tended to go into light rail and trolley projects designed to appeal to upscale riders and developers; a better focus on inner city needs might be actually helping working class people actually get to work as quickly and easily as possible, at reasonable cost rather than building dedicated lines that tend to push land prices up, and existing residents out.
Even if Carson can concoct such an agenda, this is unlikely to make Donald Trump popular among the retro-urbanist chattering class who have thrived under the current urban regime. But it is to be hoped that such a new approach, at very least, could finally make progressives, who control America’s big cities as virtual fiefs, reconsider policies that have led to tragic levels of impoverishment, violence, and inequality across our great urban centers.

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