One of my big interests is the area of urban planning and design. My present love of cities would have been totally unpredictable even ten years ago. I was raised outside of a small city of about 26,000 on an ample piece of land where children didn’t have to worry about how loud they (we) were and we still drank well water (as my mom still does today).

Something changed somewhere in the last couple of years, though, after living in Columbia for a good amount of time. I lived on campus, and downtown was always just a short walk away, and I loved being able to go to the places I would have gone anyway without having to drive. Most of the time I lived on campus, my car hardly moved. Everything I needed was close by. That’s where I finally realized the ideals of city living—a far stretch from my youth when we had to drive a few miles just to buy a loaf of bread. And in my ever-increasing environmental awareness, the concept of not driving definitely appeals to me.

Where does Libertarianism fit into this? Soon, I promise.

See, now that I love the city lifestyle so much, I want to live in the city, where all the happening stuff is. Unfortunately, many cities are not the kinds of places people want to live anymore. They do not function the way they were originally designed, with good public transportation, tight-knit neighborhoods, and the old corner drug stores. And that is a real shame. So I have been reading everything I can on the subject of America's cities--their decline, what went wrong, and what it would take to make them liveable again.

The last book I read concerning cities and urban planning was Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival, by Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio. The basic premise behind the book is that, after decades of urban flight and an almost national belief in the evils of America’s inner cities—places of intense crime, poverty, decay, despair, and hopelessness, many cities are turning around and actually becoming attractive places to live again. And it’s about time. The book examines what has been happening in cities across the nation in the past twenty years to make this turnaround possible, and postulates on what can continue that trend (and even speed it along). It is one of the best books I have read on the subject, because instead of taking the view that one thing is responsible for the decline of cities and will be the key to their revival, it looks at many variables that have to work together for success to be realized.

Chapter 11 of this book is titled ‘The “Third Way” in City Hall,’ the third way being a phrase taken from Tony Blair’s campaign with the New Labor Party for Prime Minister. This third way was conceived as a fusion, or middle ground, between orthodox Toryism and welfare-state socialism. Bill Clinton had a similar ideal, but his concept of “triangulation” wasn’t as catchy. However, the idea of a middle-ground between two major schools of thought had already been born and working wonders in American cities by visionary mayors who stopped thinking along party lines and started thinking—get this—about the good of their cities. And it wasn’t such a bad idea to do something different. Years of business as usual by politicians was not helping cities at all—it was actually making things worse. Things such as subsidizing suburbanization and building ever-growing highway systems along with the “grim immovables” of welfare, public schools, and public housing had put cities in their dire positions, and maintaining the status quo would not help matters.

So what has worked? The cities that have made tremendous comebacks, like New York City, Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago, have experimented with decentralizing control of public services, and even privatizing them and allowing competition, which has resulted in better quality and lower costs; rethinking school systems by allowing charter schools and vouchers, steps that might lead to the breakdown of the monopoly public schools now have in inner cites and is currently a huge deterrent to middle-class families moving there; they are redesigning public housing and not lumping poor people with other poor people, and indeed many have made the case that there is no longer a need for public housing as it is today, that the market can take care of people better than the government (imagine that).

These are just some of the steps that are improving center cities, and of course not all of the improvement is due to city halls, but to local private, non-profit groups who have vested interests in their communities and really started the process of turning cities around in the first place. But in the cities where mayors have worked with such groups, the changes are dramatic. In other cities (unfortunately one being our near-and-dear St. Louis), change has been slow. But these mayors, who “blurred the lines between Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal” and “do not want bugger checks from Washington; they want the freedom to solve their cities’ problems in their own way”, and who more and more are leaning to smaller governments and increased support of private services taking care of the problems—do they not sound like Libertarians?

Somewhere between conservative and liberal, smaller governments, privatization in former government-provided services, and a belief that the market will take care of itself? Sounds Libertarian to me. So why do they have to hide behind the guise of a so-called “Third Way”? It just seems sad that politicians cannot associate with the party that actually seems to most fit their ideologies. If more people knew that the cities that have improved the most over the last twenty years have been guided by Libertarian beliefs, imagine the gain in popularity the party could realize. Too bad people just don’t seem to realize who they really are, or are too scared to be associated with a third party. In my opinion, most people realize that neither Republicans nor Democrats have had the answers to our biggest problems, but they also do not know that the Libertarian thought can be the answer because the biggest possible proponents for the cause are not recognized, nor do they recognize themselves, as Libertarians.

But we know better.