The problem is the city itself and electing socialists doesn't change this

Socialists win because, for all its stupidity, their platform offers hope (at least until they fail). The alternatives in city leadership simply offer technocratic, managerialist fixes.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City has been presented as a seismic event in US politics. This is an understandable hyperbole from the American left, so cruelly bereft of anything looking like electoral success in recent times. But I also recall that Bill de Blasio was elected to the same job in 2014 on an overtly left wing platform focused on free childcare, the ‘de-escalation’ of policing and efforts to get more affordable housing. This is simply the most effective programme if you want to get elected from the left in any large city. Mix in cool talk about being a socialist, campaign on some international issues, go on some marches or protests, even get arrested, and the route to the mayor’s office is opened up.

Mamdani follows in this noble tradition, following not just de Blasio but other mayors of great western cities: Anne Hidalgo in Paris with her anti-car, tax the rich, 15 minute city, Ada Colou’s similarly green campaigns in Barcelona mixed there with a classic housing campaign built on rent controls and banning Airbnb rather than building any houses. This pattern is repeated from city to city: Manuela Carmena in Madrid, Ken Livingstone in London, Elke Kahr in Vienna and Philippe Close in Brussels. The essential aim of the typical left platform is to mitigate and ameliorate some of the problems with large, densely populated cities and especially housing and transport costs. For many of these left wing mayors the route to power wasn’t through resolving the actual problems (we are seldom given any explanation as to why the rent’s too damned high and the subway is expensive, overcrowded and inefficient) but through channelling people’s anger at high costs then directing that to the existing city leadership and to vague strawmen like ‘capitalism’, ‘billionaires’, and ‘corporations’.

The problem, often exacerbated by leftist mayors being seen as soft on crime, is that these exciting, radical, change-making programmes just don’t make any difference to those core problems - housing, transport, education, childcare - that got the socialist mayor elected in the first place. And the reason isn’t merely that socialism is stupid and that ‘solutions’ like rent control and subsidising transport always have negative outcomes. More significantly, this simplistic retail politics fails to respond to the central problem, the city itself. The “Great City of the West” with its powerful mayor and a studied independence doesn’t represent the realisation of humanity’s dream but rather leads us to a childless, crowded, unhappy dead end.

“There’s no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those ‘Great Cities of the West’. Indeed, they’re filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We’ve the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there’s a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city’s economy but can’t get a stake in the city, can’t find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.

If this, ‘The Great City of the West’, is the future of mankind then it isn’t a future, it’s a dead end. Because the great mass of the city dwellers can’t afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don’t provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up. But this is a false perspective - even the gradual rising of economies results in reduced birth rates so the city cannot win if it does not breed.”

You have to admire the persistence of socialist city ideas given how unsuccessful they’ve been in resolving the problems of the city. Probably because those problems are inherent to cities. There’s more competition for land so rents are higher, there’s only so much space and looking after infrastructure is expensive so fares go up. And to add to this cities are dirty, unsafe, unhealthy and crowded. It is hard to blame the residents of cities (the ones who can be bothered, only four in ten New Yorkers actually turned out to vote) for choosing socialists when the wider world seems to actively deny them the opportunities they want. Urban growth boundaries, environmental regulations, the urbanist desire to ban family housing; all these things stand as barriers to a better life for the urban poor. Socialists like Mamdani, Hidalgo and Khan offer a short-term comfort blanket of cheaper rents and fares plus an assortment of freebies and this is, while no sort of long term solution, better than carrying on trying to make ends meet in an undersupplied housing market serviced by a creaking transport system.

Across the west, starting in Britain and Germany as far back as the early years of the 20th century, the evolution of urban living took advantage of better transport to spread out, creating suburbs. This process accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s but, after WWII, places (other than those in central Europe devastated by that war) turned their back on the idea of spreading out. Cities across America, in Britain, Italy and Spain, began to introduce limits to growth and green belts. At the same time development in the city itself was capped by height limits, conservation and heritage protections, environmental rules and affordable housing mandates. In European cities social housing systems - essentially rent control - developed, matched in the US by similar rent controls of one sort or another. Every city saw housing become more scarce, more expensive and increasingly under de facto political control.

Meanwhile legacy transport systems became dominated by producer interests, trade unions and planners. Improvements were slow and expensive, ridership declined especially on bus and tram networks, and high value users relocated out of town. Dense, transport-focused cities like New York, London and Barcelona, unable to expand (mostly because of policy rather than physical constraint) became by-words for crazily expensive housing, dirty, inefficient public transport and levels of crime high enough to make visitors and residents wary and uncomfortable. The socialists don’t offer a real solution to these problems but rather a policy elastoplast of rent controls and fare caps. Plus, of course, a convenient bogeyman in “the rich” or “capitalism”.

And the socialists win because, for all its stupidity, their platform offers hope (at least until they fail). The alternatives in city leadership, whether in London, New York or Paris, simply offer technocratic and managerialist fixes often dependent on large injections of public funds. These city booster approaches still ignore the fundamental reasons for the city’s problems because that would mean admitting that the model of the huge, dense, high rise city is failing because it focuses exclusively on the economy - capitalism as the socialists would say - not on how to have urban policies that allow people to better their own lives without the need for city hall to subsidise the rent, looking after kids and the trip to work.

The most successful urban places in the coming century will be those that allow people - and the city - to grow. The “Great City of the West” will continue to suck goodness from everywhere else and its residents will carry on flipping back and forth between showboating radical socialist mayors to solid, data-driven managers overseen by ‘competent’ centrist politicians. The successful future places don’t look like London, New York or Barcelona.