Joel Kotkin These Mayors Understand How to Run a City Armed with common sense policies, three urban leaders are fighting a patient battle against chaos.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/houston-ft-worth-san-francisco-mayors
Urban leaders have greeted the return of Donald Trump with about as much enthusiasm as they would have for a reprise of the bubonic plague. The National Urban League imagines an “extreme right-wing” administration that will ban abortion, threaten the civil service, and end both immigration and racial quotas. Trump has even proposed building new planned cities—so-called freedom cities—that could compete with the existing urban landscape. Some urban leaders fear Trump’s actions will force them to “go it alone”—to grapple with their cities’ problems without the benefit of federal funding. But perhaps this is less of a problem than it seems. After all, cities have declined over the past four years with a Democrat in the White House. Weaning cities from federal assistance may be just what’s needed to spur change.
Indeed, several mayors seem ready, if not eager, to go it alone. These include Houston’s John Whitmire, Fort Worth’s Mattie Parker, and San Francisco’s newly elected Mayor Dan Lurie. They are seeking to adjust to harsh urban realities by discarding the often-dreamy progressive notions that tend to dominate urban political discourse. They are keenly aware how cities have lost much of their appeal in recent years to fast-growing suburbs and exurbs and are intent on fighting a patient battle against these tides.
As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.
Unfortunately, many were succeeded by progressive mayors like Bill de Blasio in New York, who undermined the reformers’ achievements, notably in law enforcement. The new generation of urban leaders is today epitomized by Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, who is rapidly driving his once-great city, the nation’s third largest, into financial ruin. Johnson’s formula for destruction: borrowing massively to fund big raises for his teachers’ union backers while driving away many of his most productive citizens.
The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, is engulfed in a wildfire catastrophe whose end has still not been reached. Critics across the political spectrum have ripped Mayor Karen Bass for her ineffective and inattentive leadership. But even before the wildfires, Bass, like many of her predecessors in the mayor’s office, had rejected sensible policies, especially the pro-business, pro-public-safety approach of Republican Richard Riordan, who left office in 2001. City government has become progressively dominated by left-wing politicians and divisive ethnic activists, as well as corruption, leading to multiple arrests of city councilmembers and commissioners. Despite massive public expenditures, the city has the nation’s second-largest homeless population and faces a deepening budget hole, while building less new housing per capita than many other large U.S. metros. Its downtown, beneficiary of billions of dollars in spending on transit as well as a convention center, has devolved into something of a disaster zone, including a graffiti-strewn, uncompleted high-rise.
America’s new realist mayors, by contrast, look to restrain spending while focusing on the increasingly stiff competition for companies and workers. They recognize that downtowns in particular have lost almost half their working population in the past three years, a trend that seems unlikely to change dramatically anytime soon. Worse still, the very jobs that cities rely on, such as those in finance and professional services, are also the most likely to be hybrid or fully remote.
Rather than seek help from Washington, the realist mayors are following the old Gospel dictum, “Physician, heal thyself.” Given technological shifts and demographic trends, these leaders recognize the need to develop pragmatic policymaking. As cities compete to attract high-end industries, they need to persuade the kinds of educated people increasingly moving to places like Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Mike Swesey, CEO of the St. Petersburg Area Economic Development Corporation, notes that, for both companies and people, “the flight to quality is about quality of life.”
These qualitative issues define the emerging agenda. In an ever more competitive environment, cities need to burnish their urban appeal with safe streets, walkable downtowns, and cultural attractions. But everything starts with addressing urban crime, still elevated from pre-pandemic levels, particularly when factoring in the drop in arrests and convictions. Recent murders on New York’s subways and random attacks on the streets highlight these concerns. Meantime, in Washington, D.C., police warn pedestrians not to wear expensive jewelry or designer sneakers in public.
The departure or defeat of progressive DAs, their policies closely tied to general lawlessness, has opened the door for many new reform mayors. Voters have turned out a dozen Soros-funded district attorneys, including in Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, and St. Louis.
One promising example has arisen in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. Though Harris County government under Judge Lina Hidalgo (who functions as county executive) reflects the agenda of the progressive Left, including sympathy for defunding police, climate-change initiatives, and DEI policies, Houston’s City Hall itself is generally more centrist, in line with its constituents. More than four-fifths of Houston voters list crime as their primary concern. Turning decisively to the center last year, city voters elected, by an almost two-to-one margin, veteran state senator John Whitmire as the new mayor over left-wing firebrand Sheila Jackson Lee, who had the backing of incumbent Mayor Sylvester Turner, Hidalgo, and Hillary Clinton.
Taking a page from Giuliani and other 1990s reformists, Whitmire has cleared out much of the dead wood left over from Turner’s crony-ridden regime. Whitmire tapped Jay Zeidman, a campaign donor and venture capitalist, as the new chair of the Houston First Corporation, which is responsible for promoting tourism and the city’s public image. But his primary focus has been strictly pragmatic: addressing crime and the city’s poor fiscal condition without raising taxes.
“With Trump in, you need a pragmatic, old school Democrat,” explains Carroll Robinson, a three-term former councilman and head of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats. “Cities have to put their own house in order themselves and with Whitmire, the city will be in good shape. This won’t be like the Biden days, which sent a lot of money to cities. That’s the past.”
A longtime leader of moderate Democrats in the Texas legislature, Whitmire also focused on the city’s beleaguered budget, scaling back elaborate plans to expand Houston’s underused transit system. In many ways he is, in the words of longtime Houston blogger Tory Gattis, “the second incarnation of Bob Lanier: focused on running a good city, not caught up in the urbanist dogma.” Like Lanier, Whitmire comes from hardscrabble roots, embraces the traditional pro-business approach of centrist Texas Democrats, and works well with Republicans, both in the city and in Austin. (Lanier, the ultimate pragmatist, was such a successful a politician that he was reelected in his last term with an astounding 83 percent of the vote.)
One sign that Whitmire is making progress: he has been repeatedly attacked by the Houston Chronicle, a paper whose editorial stance seems more appropriate to an Ivy League campus than to the capital of the oil and gas industry. The paper has dinged Whitmire for attacking “anti-car activists” who protested his moves to expand lanes closed on a busy thoroughfare. The snooty Texas Monthly also called him a “20th Century Mayor in 21st Century Houston,” berating him for not expanding the expensive, and woefully underused, Metro system. Apparently, Bayou City voters aren’t chomping at the bit to see their city become the next Portland.
A similar practical streak can be seen in the rise, far north of Houston, of Ft. Worth’s Republican mayor Mattie Parker. At 41, she presides over one of the country’s fastest-growing cities, has established good relations with Democrats, and, like other realists, focuses largely on quality-of-life issues critical to keeping businesses and middle-income residents in the city. (Despite high vacancy rates, more than $2 billion in new projects are underway downtown.) Parker’s big initiative has been to preserve open spaces, a common concern for rapidly expanding cities.
Now running for a third term, Parker represents the kind of commonsense leader who could make Republicans relevant again in urban centers. She has also shown skill in working with Democrats and now serves as the chair of Texas Big City Mayors, a bipartisan group representing more than 8.5 million Texans. “At a basic level, governing is about taking care of businesses and families,” she explained to me recently. “It all comes down to raising the quality of life.”
Parker’s centrism conflicts with the hard-right stance common among Texas Republicans. But her outlook may well represent the wave of the future as the state urbanizes and attracts more socially liberal millennials, suggests Steve Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at UT–Austin. Similarly, West Coast mayors also need to move away from the far Left if they want their cities to thrive.
By nature and history, no cities are better positioned than those on the West Coast. Located in spectacular settings, these cities—Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco—benefited in recent decades from increased trade with Asia, migration of skilled professionals, and a business climate that nurtured the lion’s share of the world’s dominant tech firms. It took a kind of malevolent genius to turn them into the poster children for urban dysfunction. Homeless camps, street crime, drug nests, and dirty streets have managed to reverse the steady flow of talent to these places; all have been losing residents to other U.S. cities.
Yet common sense could be making a coming back. Over the past two years, progressive prosecutors have gone down to defeat in all three cities (in San Francisco, radical-left school board members got turned out as well). Tech firms also appear to have shifted toward the center, notably in San Francisco, as have increasingly conservative Asian voters. Similar dynamics are visible in Oakland, San Francisco’s poorer cross-bay cousin, which in 2024 removed both its progressive DA and its far-left mayor, Sheng Thao.
Oakland’s problems are deep-seated, and its resurgence, notes Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, the region’s most influential business leadership group, will require a recovery of San Francisco’s office market, which remains deeply depressed. In Oakland, no clear reform leader has yet emerged, and the city’s voting base may not be able to elect one. Many suspect the leading candidate is Barbara Lee, a perennial far-left congresswoman with strong local roots.
San Francisco presents a more hopeful picture. In recent years, national businesses like Safeway, Old Navy, Anthropologie, Whole Foods, Nordstrom, and H&M have fled scenes of almost Dickensian lunacy. But there’s now optimism that the new mayor, Daniel Lurie, heir of the Levi Strauss fortune, who spent $9 million of his own funds to win the race, will assemble an administration less connected to the city’s progressive nonprofits and powerful public-employee unions.
Critically, Lurie is an outsider: he’s not part of the same incestuous machine that has produced a few bright lights like Willie Brown along with predictable mediocrities like Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and the now-deposed London Breed. In 2024, Wallet Hub deemed San Francisco the country’s worst-run city, with high crime rates and an immovable bureaucracy, accompanied by relentless virtue-signaling on race, gender, and climate change.
Wunderman, who in the early 1990s served as chief of staff to San Francisco’s last centrist mayor, Frank Jordan, suggests that the city could be poised for a substantial recovery—once conditions on the streets improve. The burgeoning artificial intelligence industry, he notes, is centered here, and Mayor Lurie has recruited business advisors including Open AI CEO Sam Altman. AI companies could bring the city, with its one-third office vacancy rate still ranking among the nation’s worst, some much-needed economic stimulus. “San Francisco is going to be a great place for companies and innovation,” Wunderman predicts. “It will be a great bargain.” But it’s not just the nerds and venture capitalists who matter. To thrive in the future, San Francisco needs to nurture a broader-based economy and accommodate middle-class workers and families.
“The city needs to stand up to the interest groups and agree on a growth agenda that is more than tech,” Wunderman suggests. “We have to start appealing to people who are seeking opportunities and better jobs. That’s what great cities do.”
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