Hot take:
It doesn't matter who wins the LA mayor race, and it doesn't matter if a Mamdani or a Lurie are in charge of a city in 2026.
The contagion that currently dominates American (and global) cities is not driven by politics. It's driven by technology and culture. No person, or system can change this. The decline has already occurred.
Urban power is based on having monopolies on:
1) Retail
2) Education
3) Medicine
4) Technology
5) Culture
6) Employment
7) Government
8) Young people
Retail is completely decentralized. The gap is gone. You can buy anything online and ship it to your door now.
Education has been badly damaged by activist professors, costs, and universities not keeping up with technology. Colleges are now NGO activist farms and mincemeat for the service industry slop economy.
Medicine is becoming increasingly decentralized. Regional surgery centers and suburban hospitals are becoming go-to locations for medical treatments. Telemedicine is cutting traffic into medical districts. Doctors are approaching working-class lifestyles in cities.
Technology has vastly improved the suburban and rural experience. Suburban and rural isolation, once dominant cultural themes in the late 20th century, are nearly gone. High-speed internet, smartphones, EVs, and improvements to the single-family home have made non-urban life extremely livable, with much more improvement on the way.
Culture is drastically shifting away from cities. Urban areas are now dominated with performative, downwardly mobile leftists. Many of them working in journalism and entertainment have completely lost touch with the public. Minority urban culture is seen as increasingly lawless, self-destructive, degenerate, and dangerous. The "cool" factor is gone. Immigrants have gone from hard working anti-communist patriots to scamming economic migrants with no loyalty to the nation.
Employment has never recovered since the pandemic. WFH has won. Countless media depictions in the 1990s of the "miserable commuter / office worker" came to a head. People don't want to ride on trains/busses with homeless people. People don't want to go to office parties or out with co-workers after work. It's not healthy and we all felt that way. There is no reason in 2026 to cram millions of people into a tiny urban sector for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Government, possibly the strongest institution in urban areas, is facing serious crises. 20 of the 25 largest American cities are financially underwater. Corruption has become endemic. Cities are turning increasingly to some perverted form of 21st third-world Marxism while staring at budget deficits and pension liabilities that will cripple them for decades. States are showing significantly less appetites for bailing out urban areas. Cities are now embracing suicidal policies like prison abolition and dramatically cutting police forces.
It remains to be seen if Gen A will buck the trend of young adults moving to cities. Gen Z has continued to move to cities but are choosing mid-size cities and inner-ring suburbs more. Unlike Gen Z, Gen A will be coming up in an era of urban decline. They'll be taught from a young age that cities suck. They'll see the homeless, the costs, and the despair.
Long story short, it's over. I don't pretend to presume what cities will become, but it's not going to be anything like Summer 2016. They'll likely become poorer, isolated, and dominated by crumbling infrastructure and Marxism. Curiosities for sightseeing tourists. Venice for the lucky ones. 1970's Bronx for everyone else.
I think that the Mayor of NYC supporting a person who went out publicly on October 8th and praised the killing of 46 Americans is way, way worse than January 6th.
By an order of magnitude.
Dem alternative media is already crumbling. It's Air America all over again.
Obama bros, Majority Report, Breaking Points, Drop Site, and more all humiliated.
What an epic fail. All for some larping redditor.
So, unless there's something else coming, the big NYT exposé is that Platner was a bad boyfriend to some women but also a good boyfriend to other women?
https://t.co/IkaJnQ8LsR
If you're mainlining tweets about Platner, but not watching him--at town halls, in interviews, in ads, in the short clips he posts--you're not going to understand this race.
Maine voters will see a lot more video than tweets.
Urbanists will never fix the fertility issue. Tokyo is their ideal city, and it is famous for its terrible fertility rates.
There is no point in centralizing people in an era when everything is about decentralization.
@cojobrien Cities are declining across the board in every aspect of life, and they're being held together by an increasingly pressured cabal of Class-A CRE speculators.
Urbanists keep having these struggle sessions about the "suburbia problem" when in reality, we don't care.
If you ban cars and force people onto fent zombie transit, we're just going to come less often and demand WFH (if we even work there).
Cities have no leverage anymore.