American cities are facing a looming crisis as multiple long-term threats — from financial to climatic to social — collide with expiring federal funds and congressional dysfunction.
In the U.S., life is overwhelmingly urban: More than 80 percent of the country’s population lives in a city or town, according to U.S. Census data.
These cities vary wildly in size, capacity and urban issues. While 86 percent of Americans live in or around cities of more than 50,000 people — think Dayton, Ohio — more than three-quarters of American towns are smaller than 5,000 people, on the order of Dayton, Wash.
But virtually all of them face the same tapestry of troubles, worsened, though not created by, the COVID-19 pandemic. Downtown stores and office buildings sit shuttered. Lingering opioid crises kill more than 100,000 people per year — the population of Boulder, Colo. A decades-long mental health crisis has driven deaths by suicide to an all-time high.
Homelessness rates are at record levels, with the approximate population of Washington, D.C., living in U.S. shelters or on the street. More than 1.3 million people (the population of Dallas) face foreclosure or eviction.
Worsening every threat are the rising seas, temperatures and rainfall: an assortment of unnatural stressors that is sapping power grids, fueling fires and worsening deadly heat waves. All of those are risks made more powerful by the legacy of a century of American planning, which in the face of global heating is turning some cities into a Swiss cheese of abandoned blocks.
And undermining everything else is rising inequality that fuels the broader slippage identified by Gallup in Americans’ trust in key institutions like schools, health care and the police — trust that Pew found had been falling for years.
These crises, one expert contended, come together in the widespread and mistaken American belief that crime rates are up. But this perception, she argued, reflected a common experience, as seen in the vacant windows and rising off the baking concrete, of all not being well.
None of this means that cities, as a whole, are in any danger of going extinct, regardless of COVID-era worries. The human race “will continue to be an urban species regardless of the pandemic, regardless of climate change,” Yale University urbanist Karen Seto told The Hill.
Seto pointed to a long list of cities that faced collapse and experienced revival: London and Chicago from devastating fires; Lisbon, Portugal and San Francisco from earthquakes. Far more recently, Detroit — long a watchword for fiscal collapse and urban decay — has emerged as “a real estate boomtown.”
Census data shows that many big cities have experienced population growth since 2023, reversing pandemic-era dips, or are losing residents at a slower pace than before.
“I wouldn’t bet against places like New York City or San Francisco,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at The City University of New York Graduate Center. “They are still places that creative, dynamic people want to be.”
But for small and midsized cities, the situation can be more dire. Those municipalities are home to twice as many Americans as big cities are and are also more likely to “have seen better days” than their larger counterparts, as John Jay College sociology professor Richard E. Ocejo put it in an article recently published in Princeton University Press.
In addition to more immediate crises like COVID-19 and the influx of newcomers it brought, Ocejo noted, those cities face decades-long economic changes like the decline in manufacturing, mining, fishing and other traditional industries.
In combination with everything else, these raise the threat of what researchers have called the “boring apocalypse” caused by a constellation of more humdrum harms, which work together “drag down and undercut” a society’s ability to meet bigger threats.
To survive, cities will have to adapt on all fronts — and take advantage of federal resources before they run out.
Coming out of COVID
For America’s cities, many of those crises, from homelessness to heat, come down to a shared root: inequality, which is most apparently reflected in ordinary Americans’ access to affordable homes.
The current affordability crisis has a clear inflection point: the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Yonah Freemark, research director of land use at the Urban Institute.
The pandemic, and the rise of remote work it enabled, helped millions of white-collar workers move out of the cities, leaving municipal governments with a smaller tax base.
And that movement was part of a long trend of metropolitan areas steadily sprawling into farmland, creating new clusters of suburbs.
That sprawl worsens the risk of heat, fire and flooding. It also disproportionately leaves behind low-income people, shrinking cities’ ability to raise the tax revenue they need to function, according to Freemark.
COVID-19 accelerated this transition, as an estimated 2 million people moved out of the nation’s biggest cities between 2020 and 2022. Some relocated to their city’s suburbs, while others moved to the Sun Belt, which by 2022 hosted a dozen of the country’s fastest growing cities.
For cities that drew pandemic-era residents, the influx of disproportionately white, wealthy and remote-working residents was a double-edged sword; it brought in much-needed money and tax revenues, but it also put upward pressure on already skyrocketing rents and home prices.
“Affordability used to be a big city problem,” said Michael Wallace, the legislative director for housing at the National League of Cities. “It’s an every city problem right now.”
Take Warwick, N.Y., a small town of about 6,000 people an hour and a half outside of New York City that boomed after a wave of newcomers from the city moved in during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s more crowded now and home prices have skyrocketed, driving people out who have been there for generations,” former resident Elan Gabrielle, who now lives in the larger and less-expensive Albany, N.Y., told The Hill.
Falling affordability also eats away at a city’s vitality, two researchers from the Urban Institute told The Hill. In cities with high rent prices or other high costs of living, critical community members like teachers, first responders and other service workers are forced to move elsewhere, compromising the quality of schools and services and driving up unemployment, they added.
When houses are unaffordable, more people end up on the street. Between 2021 and 2022, the last year for which there are statistics, the number of people finding themselves homeless for the first time shot up a record 25 percent.
The affordability issue also collides with the climate crisis. Demand for cheaper housing or better services sends suburbs sprawling into wildlands around the city, and new developments may trap heat, block floodwaters from seeping into soil and more frequently catch fire.
In cities, lower-income neighborhoods tend to have far more heat-trapping asphalt and far less water, plants and shade — features that undercut both economic and civic life. Extreme heat drives up rates of domestic violence and violence in general, while wrecking residents’ mental health.
As much as it threatens their physical and economic infrastructure, Seto told The Hill, climate change undercuts cities’ “social infrastructure — their vibrancy and well-being.”
What, she asked, is a city where people can’t gather? “What happens when it’s so hot that people can’t be outside? When they can’t work, and they can’t commute?”
For America’s big cities, the COVID exodus — and the shift to remote working by those who remained — also starved urban transit systems of money.
Now those bus and train systems face a precarious future in which a lack of funds risks forcing service cuts that drive users onto clogged, aging roads or create a hardship for residents who rely on public transportation.
Cities have to “keep bus service timely, reliable, safe and clean,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee’s transit and housing subpanel, told The Hill. “Once you start taking one of those aspects … you don’t get people coming back.”
That downward spiral looms just a year or two away for many big-city transit departments, he added, something that “has really scary possibilities.”
Partisan woes
Affordability and its consequences aren’t just a coronavirus-era problem or just an urban one.
“It impacts rural America as well. Some of the little towns that I used to represent haven’t had a new home built in 15, 20 years,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), senior Democrat on the House Financial Services subcommittee on housing, told The Hill.
In April, Cleaver sat down with U.S. mayors, a constituency he called “far, far, far, far, less partisan than this group [Congress],” he told The Hill, because they can’t afford partisanship. But partisan divides originating in Washington undercut their ability to act — particularly around affordable housing, a term that Cleaver told The Hill he had urged them to stop using.
Decades of GOP-led funding cuts to federal agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), he argued, had created an environment where HUD and low-income housing as a whole are politically toxic in many of the communities where new construction is most needed.
Even where funds exist, cities often face a nearer obstacle in accessing them: their own state governments, which in many jurisdictions are moving to “preempt” spending decisions by cities they don’t like.
In Texas, site of sweeping laws restricting the power of cities, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has sued Houston for a proposed basic income program using American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Paxton has also sued Austin over the financial mechanisms used to fund a new light rail system — even though the federal government is picking up most of the tab.
Preemption isn’t just an issue for blue cities in red states. Oregon has passed affordable housing laws that steer cities toward building denser apartments, rather than single-family homes, something the National League of Cities argues doesn’t consider local needs.
Grab funds while you can
All three of the researchers from the Urban Institute who spoke with The Hill said that one of the best things cities can do to improve themselves is to better address inequality and ensure that people of different backgrounds and incomes can have access to the same resources.
At the local level, that means “creating public spaces for people of all ages and incomes to come together,” Freemark told The Hill. It means investing in public infrastructure like creating more affordable housing, according to two other Urban Institute researchers.
Big cities like New York are committing billions to affordable housing. Minneapolis stands out for innovative steps like removing requirements for every home to have individual parking and permitting more duplexes and triplexes on single family lots. Cities across the country are reimagining their transit systems to meet post-COVID ridership patterns.
But there are serious limits to what cities can do on their own.
“Cities will continue to struggle without considerable support from states and federal governments,” Freemark said.
In the case of the federal government, there’s good news: Three enormous stimulus packages passed by the Biden administration contained hundreds of billions of dollars for cities that can be claimed now.
The COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act, for example, contains billions in infrastructure money for cities to spend on projects from new parks or clinics to downtown revitalization. This was followed by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed largely by Democrats, and the all-Democrat 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act contain billions to help adapt infrastructure to meet the impacts of worsening floods and rising heat.
In a separate but related vein, cities and counties are eligible for almost $10 billion in funds from the lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies that can go toward opioid treatment.
These funds offer a huge opportunity for cities, said Christine Baker-Smith of the National League of Cities. It’s a chance to pour money into the kind of capital improvements such as new parks, downtown revitalization, emergency vehicles, or other hard infrastructure that can help attract people back or turn things around.
Baker-Smith recommended that cities use those funds to pay for capital costs, not employment, to avoid worsening the fiscal cliff when they run out.
And she also recommended that they move quickly: While American Rescue Plan Act dollars are guaranteed to cities, they must be spent by the end of 2026 and be “obligated,” or committed, by the end of 2024.
Congressional Republicans have pointed to unused funds from the act as a means of paying for other party priorities they would otherwise need taxes or debt to fund. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) in May proposed using the funds to pay for a border wall.
That is money that groups like the National League of Cities argue would come almost exclusively from small cities and towns, because big cities, with their large bureaucracies and grant-writing operations, long since claimed their share.
But there’s a bigger problem with these funds, the organization argues: They’re going to run out long before the current assortment of urban crises is resolved.
That’s by design, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee’s subpanel on housing and transportation, told The Hill.
“We warned them [stimulus] was all empty promises,” he said of mayors. For Republicans, stimulus money, which the party associates with inflation, is the source of the problem rather than its solution.
Asked if more money was coming, he said, “Of course not. There never was.”
House Democrats like Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.) have pushed to spend more to help keep cities affordable. Her Housing Crisis Response Act of 2023 would seek to create more than 1.5 million new affordable homes and help 300,000 people afford rent at a cost of $150 billion.
Decision in November
But any such package, representatives interviewed by The Hill acknowledged, would have to wait for a new Congress.
“Everything we do comes down to what happens in November,” Quigley, the Appropriations Democrat, told The Hill. “Most policy problems have political solutions, if we win back the House and keep the White House, my goal would be to help [cities] meet this crisis. That’s a nonstarter if we’re in the minority.”
Mike Lillis contributed.
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