I was coming home from an event in D.C. a few weeks ago, and got off my Metro train at my home station out in Fairfax County. There’s a long pedestrian walkway over VA 267, the toll road, over which the station sits.

As I walked to the exit and the parking garage, I noticed dozens of little cards strewn about on the ground. In the garage, there are these little cards in a small holder by the elevator, with the floor and section of the garage you’re in, so you don’t forget where you parked. Somebody had taken all of them and thrown them everywhere.

I muttered to myself something like, I guess if you put enough people in one space, one of them will do this. And then I realized that I sounded like the people who say density necessarily breeds crime and social disorder. That these are numbers games, and reducing density is the surest way to reduce the statistically small but potentially numerically large number of miscreants.

Is this true? Was I being honest with myself then, in a way I am not when I consciously think about these things? Well, not really—so I like to think—because plenty of aggregations of people turn out just fine. And why should there be anything inherent in cities that causes bad behavior?

True or not, people think this. In fact I think urbanists overlook how deeply many people hold this as a matter of doctrine, as it were. It’s not often stated explicitly. Maybe not even understood explicitly. But many suburbanites effectively understand density—i.e., people—as a nuisance.

If a luxury apartment building goes up and a crime occurs, they feel related. If a growing area suddenly has one or two homeless people, then building must cause homelessness. If some idiot tosses the find-your-floor cards everywhere, maybe public transit causes anti-social behavior. These pretty much baseless suppositions—at most, correlation rather than causation—feel true to a lot of people, and influence their attitudes on these matters.

I’ve made a version of this point a lot lately, but I’m going to make it again. Some people—self-sacrificing environmentalists, anti-urban NIMBYs—seem to view urban life and its discontents as “eating your vegetables.” As if a certain amount of unpleasantness and outright criminality is just the bitterness in broccoli.

So that raises two questions. First, is it true that we have to “eat our vegetables”; that urban problems and urban amenities are almost metaphysically inseparable? And second, if we do have to “eat our vegetables,” is it worth it? Is the downside the tax we pay in order to get a much bigger upside?

Maybe. But it’s hard to sell cities to skeptics by telling them that a little crime and nuisance is okay. And it’s even harder when the perception—I’m thinking here of older conservative suburbanites in particular—is that the people trying to push city life are the same people whose attitude to crime is “Deal with it, suburbanite.”

I’ve discussed this with some progressives. And what they’ll say—and I have no reason to disbelieve them—is not what conservatives think they’ll say: crime is great, disorder is part of the “grittiness” of the city, all fear of crime is rooted in racism or privilege or suburban fantasy.

What they’ll say, rather, is that they do care about crime and public order. But they look at the people who champion these things, and see those legitimate concerns “bundled with” an almost gleeful cruelty towards the least fortunate. They see—for example—people who are really barely stopping short of declaring that homeless people who behave oddly in public may be rightfully killed. And they recoil and refuse what they see as a deal with the devil. I won’t pay the tribute to the unnecessary cruelty in order to get the serious approach to crime.

Conservatives, on the other hand, feel that cities are “bundled with” a lax approach to urban crime and disorder. And so they reject the city. And you can see how these two attitudes reinforce each other.

Simply recognizing this pattern strikes me as useful and important. But there’s still the guy taking the helpful cards and throwing them on the ground. The sort of thing that doesn’t happen, or doesn’t feel like it happens, in small towns and quiet low-density suburban neighborhoods.

So what do you do with that? Is there a humane way to enforce “good behavior” that doesn’t turn normal annoying people into criminals? Probably, because cities in Europe are often cleaner and neater than American cities, without any particular “tough-on-crime” approach to policing. (Indeed, a greater sense of general livability exists alongside a fair amount of mostly non-violent petty crime.)

Is it culture—Europeans just do cities better? Is it the social safety net—America’s urban problems arise mostly out of poverty? I don’t really know. But I think it suggests that what a lot of suburbanites think of as urban problems or density problems are, well, American problems. And while that might not make you want to wave your flag, it does mean they can be solved, doesn’t it?

Related Reading:

Crime and Housing

Decorative Benches?

Public and Private

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