Noah Smith is trying to make public transportation and YIMBYism about crime, and I don’t think he succeeds. In short, he says that transit cities and higher housing growth levels would be more publicly acceptable if American central cities were more sensitive to conservative concerns about crime. In effect, he is making public transportation investment not a matter of frequency or network design or reliability or good maintenance or transit priority on streets or low construction costs or any of the other technocratic issues that distinguish the Seouls and Zurichs and Stockholms of the world from the Los Angeleses (which, to give credit, he acknowledges are important), but about crime, conceived as a culture war issue about more police and more police visibility. And in this, he ends up ignoring both the literature on this and what makes good government tick in parts of the developed world that are not the United States.

Now, Noah is a pundit, who’s more pro-transit than the average in his milieu. He’s not the reason American cities are poorly governed or the separate suite of reasons American public transit is so bad and isn’t improving. He writes as a way of trying to engage conservative NIMBYs, I just don’t think he succeeds – and the way he fails is for many of the same reasons American public transit managers fails. Chief of those is American triumphalism, of the kind that will retweet a viral tweet that pretends Europe has no biotech or advanced physics and that uses the expression “europoor” unironically in a flamewar. People who fail to recognize how Europe and East Asia work are not going to be able to learn what works here and how to adapt it; I’m less familiar with Asian discourse, but Noah’s description of Europe is unrecognizable. Even the basic thesis about urbanism and crime isn’t correct in a global perspective. This leads to serious problems in diagnosing how European cities got to have the housing and transportation policies that they do; the solutions are, by the black-and-white polarization of American politics, best thought of as a blue-and-orange spectrum, starting with lack of local empowerment and inattention to neighborhood-scale stereotypes

Cities and crime

The American association between high crime rates and deurbanization is not at all normal. Globally, it’s the exact opposite; Gaviria-Goldwyn-Galarza-Angel find that high risk of violence leads to higher urban density, because of the effect of safety in numbers. Simon Gaviria roots this in the history of his own country, Colombia. In Latin America, crime rates are infamously high. Noah’s post compares the American homicide rate with a selection of European and Asian countries, topping at 6.8/100,000 in Russia (US: 5.8), but in Colombia it is 25.7, and in the 1990s it ranged between 60 and 85. People can’t suburbanize the way they have in the United States, even with a GDP per capita in line with that of midcentury America, because, in a sufficiently high-crime environment, driving to work means taking the risk of being carjacked at an intersection.

Now, public transportation in Latin America is not especially good, not by European or East Asian standards. Most cities haven’t built much recently; Mexico City deserves especial demerits, but Brazil has been flagging as well, and Argentina has no money for anything. Chile and the Dominican Republic are both expanding metros, Santiago doing so rather rapidly, and both have the same order of magnitude of homicide as the US (Chile: 4.5, Dominican Republic: 11.5), rather than that of Colombia or Brazil or Mexico. But this still does not make high crime a relevant factor in deurbanization.

Now, in the history of the United States, people do associate postwar suburbanization with high crime rates. While the crime rate rose rapidly in the 1960s, and remained high until the 1990s, there was little transportation risk. The stereotype of poverty-induced social disorder as seen from a car in an American city, at least in the 1990s and 2000s, was a panhandler coming to the car at a traffic jam with a squeegee, washing it, and expecting payment; jacking was (and still is) more or less unheard of. The stereotype was, safety on the road and in the suburbs, danger in the city. But that is a feature of relatively moderate crime rates. Indeed, the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates; two thirds of the fall in New York subway ridership from its twin peaks in 1930 and 1946 to its nadir in 1982 had occurred by 1960, on the eve of the explosion in the city’s homicide rate.

And to be clear, this is a matter of stereotypes, more than reality. New York is one of the safest large cities in the United States (4.7/100,000 in 2023). San Francisco is even safer: in 2024 through December 10th, the pro-rated homicide rate was 4.3. Texan urbanists outside Austin (4.7) have to contend with higher homicide rates: 15.7 in Dallas, 12.8 in Houston, 8.4 in San Antonio, all averaged over the first six months of 2024 and pro-rated. But Dallas and Houston are perceived as far safer than New York. This can’t exactly be racism – these two cities are nearly as black as New York and considerably more Hispanic. But whatever is causing the stereotype needs to be separated from the reality; the Texan rail advocates I talk to on social media don’t treat crime as a major obstacle for finding more money for public transit, and instead cite car culture, low perceived value of rail, and high costs, and if that’s not a problem there, it shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco.

Stereotypes in Paris

Noah talks about how Europe succeeded in curbing crime rates – and to again give credit, recognizes that New York is safe – and says that this is driving greater acceptance of public transportation and housing growth here.

Except, this isn’t quite right. I don’t have comparable surveys asking people if they find Paris safe, but I do have access to French discourse at hand, and it does not at all say “Paris is safe, people who think crime is a problem there are idiots,” except maybe when an American is in the room and then the point is to pull rank on the American.

In Paris, in French, there are lists of sensitive city quarters, and there are arrondissements that are more fashionable than others. The 18th, 19th, and 20th are usually negatively stereotyped, if less so than the adjacent department, Seine-Saint-Denis, which is extremely negatively stereotyped. The 13th is negatively stereotyped, but this is likely to be missed by Americans – the population there is disproportionately Asian, and negative stereotypes of Asians by white people are worse in France than in the United States. Belleville, straddling the 10th/11th/19th/20th boundary, was listed as a sensitive quarter when I lived just outside its limits and went in frequently to buy tahini – and at the time, I saw either British or American media, I forget which, list these quarters as no-go zones.

Now, these are residential areas. The center of Paris is well to the west of these. But Paris has a low job density gradient within city limits between commercial areas (like the 1st or the 8th) and residential ones, and the Ministry of the Interior, for example, is located in the 20th, close to Nation. People commute to these neighborhoods, usually by the Métro or RER. Nation, at the 11th/12th/20th boundary, is a mixed zone, with features that connote middle-class consumption (like the farmer’s market) and others that connote poverty (like a Resto du Cœur; see citywide map here). The sort of people in France who see a black or Arab person on the street and immediately panic find the area dangerous, including at one point the minister of the interior himself, who professed to being shocked at seeing ethnic food at the supermarket.

And none of this matters to public transportation investment, or to housing. In a country where people treat the entire department of Seine-Saint-Denis as a no-go zone except for football games at the Stade de France, where the RER B has such a negative reputation for passing through this area that two different airport connectors are planned to parallel it, Grand Paris Express is still planned to make stops in Seine-Saint-Denis, and connect it better with the rest of the region, including the wealthy suburbs around La Défense. This was a bipartisan decision – there were differences between the Socialists’ and the Gaullists’ ideas of what exactly to build, but there was core agreement on a circumferential line through the inner suburbs, and it is considered a social policy to connect working-class suburbia with jobs.

Stereotypes and local empowerment

The stereotypes of crime in parts of the Paris region do not affect urban rail investment plans. Where they do matter is at the level that doesn’t matter: the local one. Anne Hidalgo is a committed leftist (and NIMBY), but centrist and center-right politicians in the region have long wanted an urban renewal project around Gare du Nord, which they consider a poor area, not because it’s especially poor, but because it’s where the commuter trains from Seine-Saint-Denis go and thus young black and Arab men congregate there, and the station’s facilities could genuinely use some modernization. Occasionally the negative stereotypes of the station even get to British media. But whether Paris engages in a wholesale renewal project around the station to make it more upscale is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things to either its public transport ridership or its overall level of housing production.

The difference between Paris and New York or San Francisco is not that it has lower crime, although its homicide rate is certainly lower. It’s that it doesn’t derail its social policy discourse by turning technocratic issues into culture wars. Paris has unstaffed sanisettes; in a handful of areas there’s drug use, seen as used syringes. San Francisco, like Paris, has a handful of areas with drugs in its sanisettes, but the moral panic got to the point that the city decided to staff all sanisettes 24/7, with two attendants at night. Paris’s 435 sanisettes cost 11 million € a year to operate, 25,300€ per unit; San Francisco’s annual operating costs are on the order of $1 million per unit because of staffing.

This isn’t because of crime, because San Francisco is not sufficiently more dangerous than Paris to explain this, or even the perceptions thereof. The difference is that European governance is, across the board, better than American governance at disempowering local actors, who are driven by stereotypes. Anne Hidalgo doesn’t want to build housing in significant quantities, but does want to build some public housing in rich neighborhoods to own the libs (French definition of libs), and she’s the mayor and the residents of the 16th are not; Ile-de-France writ large wants to do more transit-oriented development, and so it builds some, even with some local grumbling about how redeveloping a disused factory brings gentrification.

And the way forward is to build institutions that bypass and disempower those local actors. People almost never stay within a neighborhood, but the small minority who do are overly empowered in the system of councilmanic prerogative that governs American cities. This does not involve treating their perception as if it is based in reality; this does involve passing preemption laws at the level where democratic politics is possible, such as the state, and doing much more than the weak bills California allows.

Ideology and reform

I think Noah is uncomfortable with American YIMBY praxis, because the rhetoric in a place like New York or California aims at the median Democrat in the state, to activate liberal political ideology as a substitute for the failures of non-ideological localism. This ideology is not especially radical, but does violate maxims that liberal pundits who specifically pitch to a conservative audience have learned to follow, like the taboo on calling people racist. The mainstream of political YIMBY advocacy has, I think, chosen better, understanding that at the end of the day, an upzoning bill in a safely blue state passes without Republican votes, and cutting deals with state Democratic actors, which can be localist (like exempting certain NIMBY suburbs with low transit-oriented development value) or more left-wing (like bundling with some left-wing elements, like Oregon’s introduction of weak rent controls).

And in a way, this is also how YIMBYism and public transportation investment work here, politically. As of late, social democratic parties have leaned on YIMBYism as a reason for non-pensioners to vote for them, calling for more housing permits; Olaf Scholz even called for redeveloping Tempelhofer Feld. Because it lives within a party, rather than among people who try to acknowledge culture war paranoias, the policy is clear, and sometimes can even be enacted – Germany would have built more housing if interest rates hadn’t simultaneously risen for unrelated reasons (namely, the combination of inflation and the Ukraine war). In France, it was a bipartisan effort in the sense that there wasn’t much daylight between the center-left and the center-right on the need for more housing in Ile-de-France, but the enactment did not involve the sort of horse trading that Noah envisions. This is not too different from infrastructure investments with bipartisan support elsewhere, such as the Madrid Metro, or Crossrail.

I think it’s telling that the greatest successes in the United States have not been in the most liberal places, but in swing states with liberal governance but competitive elections, like Minnesota. The barrier is not that the cities have crime or are negatively stereotyped (suburbanites around Minneapolis have plenty of those against the city), but that safe states have developed such a democratic deficit that they can’t govern. I’m fairly certain Noah is aware of this (Matt Yglesias certainly is). It just implies that this really is about seizing control of state government through ideological persuasion – in other words, reminding the Democrats of safely blue states that they are Democrats – and not about telling people way to the right of the median in these states that they are valid. We don’t do that here and American YIMBYs don’t need to do it on their side of the Pond.