Human Scale Cities
A lot of commentary about people leaving large cities during the coronavirus pandemic has focused on the excessive costs, declining public safety, and endemic homelessness in large coastal cities, and rightly so. People were leaving large metro areas for these reasons long before Covid arrived on our shores, and the pandemic served as a kind of accelerant to the trend when more people had the freedom to work remotely. The fastest-growing large metro areas in America are the inverse of the trend, as many commentators have noted, attracting migrants because of their relative affordability, safety, and services.
Digging a bit deeper into these inter-urban reshuffles reveals something else at work that has received less attention: the appeal of human-scale living. We often talk in terms of a human scale when we talk about “a sense of place.” When we are proximate to the most functional and meaningful places in our daily lives, and we play a meaningful role in them, life has a certain coherence and harmony that is missing in more atomizing urban and suburban settings. Running into someone at the grocery store whom you know from the park down the street where your children play, or being able to walk to a café to meet a friend down the street from your house, creates a sense of place that driving from a large residential enclave to a big box store does not.
Small cities, which have made news over the past year as outbound pilgrims from large cities have decamped to smaller places (sometimes driving up housing prices to the chagrin of the locals), serve up some interesting lessons on this front. While the vast share of migration out of large cities has been to surrounding suburbs, a considerable number of Americans have headed for smaller cities, which holds some important clues about how many people define “quality of life” in ways beyond mere affordability or safety. Finding a place that feels like an actual place matters a lot, which is worth the attention of civic, business, and policy leaders who care about the competitiveness of their cities and suburbs.
In new, unpublished national survey data from the American Enterprise Institute, we find that residents of small cities tend to experience life on a human scale more commonly than people living in large cities, suburbs, and even small towns. For instance, compared to 27 percent of suburbanites and 23 percent of town residents, 36 percent of small city parents can walk to their kids’ schools. Forty-four percent of small city residents live close (defined as walking distance or a 5-10-minute ride) to their favorite form of entertainment such as a movie theater or concert venue. More of them live closer to local parks or recreation areas than big city, suburban, or small-town residents, and equal shares of them live as close to grocery stores and libraries as big city dwellers, something suburbanites require longer car rides to access. In terms of proximity to the things that give form and substance to our lives when we are not at work (or school) or home, small city life recommends itself.
Proximity to amenities and neighborhood institutions is not merely a matter of enhanced daily convenience. It also contributes to a stronger local civil society. When Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus famously wrote about the essential institutions of civil society in To Empower People in 1977, they considered the neighborhood as one of four basic mediating structures necessary for successful democratic life. There wasn’t much social science to back them up back then, but it now looks like they were right: neighborhoods produce some of the same civil society features as other mediating structures. Living close to a mix of neighborhood institutions and amenities, such as stores, parks, libraries, and restaurants, boosts communal interaction and has been shown to increase our positive views of our communities and to increase our trust in others.
This can be seen especially in small cities. Residents of small cities are more likely to report talking with strangers in their community and trusting their neighbors than people living in big cities or suburbs. They express a greater willingness to help neighbors in need and have a higher view of houses of worship than big city dwellers. They are considerably more likely to recognize people at regular neighborhood haunts like bars and cafes than big city or suburb residents. On some important questions, they resemble suburbanites more than big city residents, such as their more positive view that people can get ahead if they work hard. And when it comes to the most important issue facing communities, small city residents’ concerns about crime and homelessness are lower than big city residents and more in line with how suburbanites view the issues. They are significantly more likely than big city residents to trust their police and support more housing for low-income residents in their community.
Small cities are in many ways a microcosm of America (and in fact, they are demographically quite consistent with the nation as a whole). They combine certain qualities we associate with village life with urban dynamics we associate with bigger cities. There are a lot of lessons in that observation for policymakers and civic leaders who hope to make their cities more attractive to those looking for a new home.
Ryan Streeter is the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
