cities

Let’s face it, our cities are getting ridiculous. They’re way too expensive to live in and too hard to get around in. Places like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong have become so expensive that middle-class people are either forced into tiny apartments or into outlying districts. Only the truly rich can afford to live well in Manhattan or central London. In the nineteenth century, a successful middle-class businessman or professional could raise a family in one of the classic, capacious three-story townhouses of that era. The few remaining domiciles of that sort, in these areas, are now exclusively the domain of the rich. We need to get back to a rational population level in which normal middle-class people can raise their families in this kind of space and amenity.

The so-called ‘megacities’ of the developing world are of course much worse. As people find it harder and harder to eke out a living in the overpopulated countrysides, they flock to these much more densely populated agglomerations of 15-20 million or more people. Life in these places is almost unimaginable to Westerners. In the first place, urban services that we take for granted—water and sewer, trash pickup, public transportation—range from the totally inadequate to the nonexistent. Places like Mexico City, Lagos, Cairo, Karachi makes Dickensian London seem like an urban paradise.

Another result of such concentrated population is a breakdown of social order. As legitimate employment is hard to find, criminal gangs multiply and prey on the general population. And yet for many people this urban life seems preferable to their former miserable, poverty-stricken lives. It’s just an indication of how unacceptable life in those overpopulated rural areas has become.

True, urban life has appeals of its own—the prospect of education for children, the hope for more lucrative employments, etc. The reality, however, is often far worse—and yet they keep coming.