Our Cities are a Billboard for the Democratic Party

We ignore urban disorder at our peril

Human beings possess two minds.

There is one built by modernity. It’s the mind of abstract thinking and seeing scale. It’s the mind that guides us into a metal tube that hurtles through the sky or that says no to dessert because we’re trying to lose 10 lbs.

There’s also the ape mind that followed us from the Great Rift Valley. It’s the mind that engages your fight response to an errant driver or your flight response to an incoming Slack.

The latter mind is one not built for the modern world, yet it’s the mind through which we do our most consequential thinking. This ape mind guides our votes and our most important purchases. It’s pulled by lust and pushed by fear.

We who wish to build better cities ignore the ape mind at our peril because the ape mind is what guides the average human through an urban space. This ancient way of thinking and perceiving has a direct line into our limbic system—home of our emotions—and thus cuts the deepest memories. Our perceptions of urban spaces are built not by spreadsheets, but by the sights and sounds of the city itself.

Crime is judged by the modern mind. Who is to say whether a city is more dangerous than another except to compare statistics? There were 573 murders in Chicago last year, but there were also 2.6 million people living there. So when you think of one number in the context of another, there are relatively few given how many more human beings live within the boundaries of that city.

Disorder is judged by the ape mind. Dallas feels relatively safe because you experience it through a car window and a parking lot. Sure, you are far likelier to catch a disgruntled bullet in a Dallas bar than a Manhattan sidewalk, but the overwhelming crush of humanity in the latter presents a multitude of threats your ape brain must scan for.

Unsheltered homelessness is a massive threat to our political project because it makes the ape mind scream. To that end, here are some statistics that do not appeal to the ape mind at all:

• West coast cities have the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness in the nation and are also America’s safest.

• Unsheltered homelessness is primarily driven by high housing costs.

• The vast majority of homeless individuals do not have mental illness issues.

• Homeless people are far more likely to be a victim of violent crime than a perpetrator.

We are correct to feel extreme levels of empathy for the homeless given what a miserable and dehumanizing experience homelessness must be. In Los Angeles County, about seven homeless people die on the street every day. That’s a statistic I need to look up constantly because when I first started using it for my lectures on housing policy back in 2021, it was three people per day.

At the same time, a tent on the sidewalk is a sign of disorder. Worse still, a person having a mental health episode in a park is a sign to many that the park is unsafe. Worse than that even, someone exposing themselves on the bus can convince the victim to never to step foot on public transit again.

There are some who celebrate disorder as some amenity of urban life. To them, it is sophisticated and urbane to ignore aggressive, anti-social behavior because you’ve seen it all before. If these experiences are unpleasant or frightening, then you belong in the suburbs with all the other losers.

This is a great posture for Twitter and DSA meetings. It’s also entirely accurate because many people do in fact decamp for the suburbs. When they leave, they take their tax dollars with them. And because this is America, they’re another vote for tearing up our urban spaces to make room for the cars they drive into the city each day for work and play.

Republicans have bear-hugged the issue of urban disorder and that’s bad because they have a point. Gavin Newsom will never be the president because his Republican opponent can just travel to 6th and San Pedro in Los Angeles and turn on the live stream. Though our cities are far better than theirs in almost every regard, the homelessness crisis that the housing crisis begets negates all of it in most people’s eyes. You maybe absorb crime stats, but you never forget the time you almost came to blows with an aggressive homeless person.

Homelessness is a housing problem and it’s by far the most visible failure of California cities. As such, it needs to be a priority for urbanists. While loosening land use regulations will staunch the flow of vulnerable people into homelessness, there are over 180,000 homeless people in the state right now—two-thirds of whom are unsheltered. We need to prioritize the construction of supportive housing and ensure the same interest groups who block market-rate housing do not reach into their tool box to block these new projects. We also need to develop ways of caring for people who cannot care for themselves—including involuntary commitment. Finally, we need to take security and rule-enforcement a lot more seriously on mass transit. This means cutting funding for expensive and ineffective law enforcement partnerships and developing separate security agencies for trains and buses that include armed guards and unarmed support personnel.

Our cities are more than just the places we live. They are—or they should be—a living testament to prosperity and human flourishing that liberal democracy brings. When we confuse apathy for tolerance, we fail not only the suffering people sleeping on our streets, we prove to others that we cannot govern. Failure is not progressive and the stakes right now are far too high.