Ryan Streeter explains how cities offer useful information to policymakers.

Cities have been the most surprising source of useful insights for policy-makers over the past few years — not that the political class has noticed.

From the appearance of cities in Donald Trump’s “American carnage” 2017 inaugural address and his warning of urban threats to the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” to the prolonged misinterpretation on the political left of what was happening in U.S. cities during the pandemic, urban America has been more central to political discourse recently than it has been since perhaps the mid 1990s. But it has almost always been more caricatured than understood, to the detriment of policy-makers. …

… But today, after decades of successful urban reforms, the ungovernable-city hypothesis has also become a caricature. For proof, you just need to look at any of the fastest-growing cities in America over the past 25 years. Houston, for example, is now America’s fourth-largest city, and set to overtake Chicago for the third position in the not-too-distant future; it also appears to be, well, pretty governable. Other top-ten cities such as Phoenix, Dallas, and San Diego are well-governed by almost any metric. Chicago is as ungovernable as New York was in the 1980s, which is to say it is badly governed but fixable — although Chicago’s new mayor-elect has ideas for the city that suggest it still won’t be fixed for a while yet. …

… American cities are the brightest indicator that people prefer normalcy in policy and politics these days, not the ideological goals that political elites on both sides of the aisle are prone to foist upon them. A desire for normalcy — which largely accounts for GOP culture warriors’ underperformance in the 2022 election, the failure of Biden’s ambitious social-spending plans, and Trump’s loss in 2020 — explains much of the migration to and from cities that has gotten a lot of coverage the past several years.