Is It Time for Cities to Go It Alone?

The Trump administration is attacking cities again — threatening to withhold federal funds if they don’t align with Washington’s new priorities. This is no surprise. In both of his presidential campaigns, Trump denigrated and insulted cities and city leaders, decrying them as violent, corrupt, poor, dirty and full of gangs and illegal immigrants. The main targets of his ire, in his first term and again now, are so-called “sanctuary cities” — those cities that have adopted more protective policies for undocumented residents. Trump re-upped an Executive Order seeking to withhold federal funds from such cities. More prominently, he dangled the dismissal of a federal corruption prosecution against Eric Adams, New York’s embattled mayor, as a means of inducing the mayor to cooperate with his policy of mass deportations. Whatever one thinks of Adams, it is startling to see the lengths that the president will go to make the mayor of America’s largest and richest city his lapdog. The assault on New York has continued with ongoing attempts to cancel congestion pricing.  

To those who care about America’s cities, two messages should be heard loud and clear. The first is that anti-urbanism is now a core feature of U.S. politics, not simply a rhetorical trope. The second is that the federal government can no longer be considered a reliable partner to America’s cities, which over the generations have become (like many institutions in the country) dependent on federal support. 

Cities may well seek to repair their partnerships with Washington. But given that neither anti-urban politics nor federal hostility to cities are going away anytime soon, it’s probably wiser for them to to think about how they can increasingly go it alone. 

Populist anti-urbanism of the Trumpian kind has a long pedigree. Consider the Reverend Josiah Strong’s indictment of the city in his 1885 book “Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis.” Strong’s list of fears included immigration, Romanism and socialism. “The city,” he wrote, is where “each of the dangers… [are] enhanced and all are focalized.” Nativist and anti-immigrant voices have long associated the city with unsavory and un-American elements.

But these are not the only flavors of anti-urbanism. Anti-urbanism also shows up in all those schemes meant to fix or improve the city, from Victorian-era slum clearance to urban renewal. Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” still stands as the most incisive indictment of those moralists, planners and bureaucrats who, in every age, believe that the city needs to be rationalized, rebuilt or deconcentrated — and who treat urban residents (and especially the urban poor) as pieces in a puzzle to be deployed to create an idealized image of what the city should be. In reviewing the results of a generation of urban renewal, highway building and public housing developments from her vantage point in 1961, Jacobs concluded: “This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”

Indeed, federal support for cities has been both a blessing and a curse. At the height of the New Deal, mayors had a significant voice in national affairs through the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), which was established in the early 1930s and was an important political component of the New Deal coalition. Fiorello LaGuardia, the first president of the Conference, was a close personal friend of Roosevelt, and that connection meant that cities exercised influence in the administration of New Deal programs and the flow of federal resources to the cities. Coming out of the Depression, cities helped to create the post-war social welfare state and the urban liberalism that defined a generation.

But federal monies have also underwritten the destructive projects that followed: highway building, slum clearance and systematic suburbanization. Urban renewal, with its massive displacement of working class and minority residents, was spurred by federal funds; federal highway dollars financed the infrastructure that destroyed urban neighborhoods, induced white flight and made the suburbs possible; federally backed mortgages promoted suburbanization too, and were accompanied by redlining; federal housing aid helped build low-income housing, but also public housing projects that collapsed when federal maintenance support dried-up. Urban-focused federal policies meant to do good contributed to the decline of the mid-century industrial city. 

Today, the threat is both broader and more direct. The Trump administration is targeting the social safety net, and these cuts will have disproportionate effects on cities. It is seeking to send home millions of immigrants who are a huge net positive to the economic and cultural lives of cities. Its trade policies are especially punishing to places that thrive on imports and exports, like New York. Its K-12 education policies are a threat to big cities, and the administration is essentially at war with institutions of higher education. The administration is also seeking to attach conditions on federal funding in a number of areas, including housing and public safety. Unless one bows the knee to diktats on purging DEI or otherwise falling in line, those monies may stop flowing. 

The deeper reason behind all this is political economy: Cities are not where Republicans get their votes, and Republican candidates don’t seem to need urban residents to win elections (though ironically, Trump improved his standing in many urban areas in 2024). Put differently, anti-urbanism has become a tenet of the Republican Party. And efforts to punish, penalize and immiserate cities are part of a larger national, conservative program to reduce or eliminate the New Deal social welfare state.

Cities are suing to stop the federal tap from turning off, as they did during the first Trump administration. The district and appeals courts previously held that it was illegal for the administration to condition federal grants on immigration enforcement cooperation — so the most obvious precedent already favors the cities, who should win their lawsuits again. But this does nothing to address the long-term unreliability of federal support, which needs to be confronted. 

Cities should rethink their dependence on federal monies and administrative favor — indeed, city leaders should assume a hostile federal administrative state going forward. 

Can they afford to wean themselves off of funds from Congress? Not entirely, of course. Federal social safety net programs are hugely important to city residents, and removal of federal funds would blow large holes in local budgets, including New York City’s. 

But cities can take this opportunity to become somewhat less dependent. They have done so before. Prior to the New Deal, cities had to build whatever social welfare apparatus existed using mostly local resources. More recently, cities have acted in the absence of congressional action to adopt local minimum wage ordinances, anti-discrimination laws, tenant protections and minimum basic income provisions. New York City, for example, regularly sends more money to Washington than it receives, per capita, though temporary COVID-19 funds have flipped that relationship in recent years.   

The conventional wisdom has been that local redistributive programs will fail as capital flees efforts to tax it; if redistribution isn’t happening at the national level, then it can’t happen at all. But I have made a sustained argument that this is incorrect, at least for those cities enjoying a decades-long urban resurgence. Cities have more leverage to redistribute than is commonly assumed, if they are permitted to do so.

That is the rub, however. A city can try to wean itself from federal money and the strings attached to it but still be stymied by “preemptive” federal and state laws. Indeed, Trump is learning from the anti-city playbook that red state legislatures have been using for years now: simply pass state laws that prevent cities from doing anything. A city adopts a minimum wage ordinance? — just have the state legislature override it. Cities adopt tenant protections, a budget that shifts money from the police to social services, a wage theft ordinance to protect migrant workers, a sales tax to fund social services? — just tell them they can’t. From the cities’ perspectives, the best they can expect from hostile state legislatures and a hostile Congress is that they both do nothing at all. 

City weakness is built into our constitutional foundations. 19th-century state constitutions limited the representation of urban counties in state legislatures — a deeply anti-democratic feature that was not declared unconstitutional until the 1960s. Two 19th-century legal doctrines remain potent to this day, however: the federal constitutional rule that cities are simply creatures or convenient instrumentalities of their states and the general principle that cities can only exercise the powers that states see fit to grant them. 

Cities in our federal system simply do not have enough constitutional heft to resist entirely; they must always be in a bargaining relationship with their states and with the federal government. But they can and should realize that the halcyon days of the New Deal are not coming back.  

And so, city advocates should be pushing for city independence, not federal favor; city autonomy, not oversight; city fiscal freedom (to tax and spend), not financial dependence. Some reliance on federal support is inevitable. But the city is vulnerable to the strings attached to federal aid, and though the nationalized social welfare state has been an essential tool in the fight against urban poverty, the influx of federal funds to cities in the second half of the 20th century did not prevent urban decline. 

Cities’ need for local own-source revenue is essential, and cities should zealously guard it. This principle can be applied to city power more generally: Those of us who want to see cities do well should protect local power, even if it is sometimes exercised poorly. The independence of American cities is a necessary precondition for democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. We should not be surprised again when federal or state support turns into hostility.