Now, this happened in the late 1970s. The rate of crime and violence in Chicago at that time wasn’t any worse than in comparable big cities. My companion was thinking about the 1920s, when Al Capone and a cohort of thugs shot each other on the streets in an orgy of murder tied to the business of bootlegging. His reference was obsolete, to say the least.
But the episode made me think about the perceptions people form about cities and how resistant they can be to change even when the reality changes a lot. Granted, this fellow lived a continent away, but the reaction probably would have been about the same if he had been from a small midwestern town or an affluent East Coast suburb. We make judgments about cities, and they can be very difficult to shake.
I remembered this incident when I came across a recent survey by the polling firm YouGov that asked Americans which of the 50 biggest cities they viewed favorably and which ones they tended to dislike. This was asked of people all over the country, not just those in the cities being studied.
The results were provocative. The best-liked city was Nashville, followed by San Diego, Colorado Springs and Virginia Beach. But when the responses were confined to people who had actually been to one of the cities subject to the survey, the favorite city was Raleigh. Nashville fell to No. 6.
In general, city dwellers tend to have higher opinions of other cities than rural or suburban Americans do, according to the survey. The average net score for the 50 biggest cities — positive over negative judgments — was +19. The average for respondents who had been to one of the surveyed cities was +38. There’s a big catch here, though: Only about a quarter of the people who answered the survey had set foot in the cities they were judging. They were operating mostly in the dark, just like the French man I encountered on that train in the 1970s. The only city that most respondents had visited was New York, and it did pretty well, ranking eighth among city-dwellers.
YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING which cities came out worst in this urban popularity contest. A couple of them may not come as too much of a surprise: Oakland and Detroit. Oakland was famously home to gang militance and violence in the 1960s and 1970s, and that image hasn’t gone away, even though the turmoil mostly has. Detroit went bankrupt in 2013, and that sad event lingers in people’s minds, despite a decade of relative stability and progress. A third one is a little more puzzling: Bakersfield. But that California city acquired a reputation long ago for attracting hillbillies down on their luck; maybe that image has stuck to it. These judgments last a long time.
Democrats like cities quite a bit more than Republicans do. Los Angeles scored a net +45 among Democratic respondents but -47 among GOP respondents. One city Republicans liked was Fort Worth. It came in at +53 among Republicans answering the survey, compared to -5 among Democrats. Tulsa also did well on the GOP side of the ledger: +27. Democrats gave it a score of -8.
There’s another interesting wrinkle. Joe Cortright, the indefatigable Oregon economist, noticed that there wasn’t only a partisan gap in the YouGov statistics — there was a large gender gap. Women gave higher scores to Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Chicago; and Los Angeles. Portland, in fact, rated 31 points higher among women than it did among men. The only cities that men liked better than women did tended to be in the South and Southwest — mostly in Texas and Oklahoma. Overall, women liked most cities better than men did.
TO SAY THAT THIS STUDY raises more questions than it answers is to dust off a cliche that seems unusually compelling in this instance. Why do people like some cities and dislike others? Why do they have strong feelings about places they have never visited, let alone lived in? All we can do is toss out a few speculations.
Since the cities rated most highly tend to be somewhere in the South or West, it might be argued that the key variable is climate. But Nashville and Raleigh don’t really fit in this category, and San Antonio, third among people who have been there, clearly doesn’t. If you have ever spent a summer in San Antonio, it’s a safe bet that you didn’t go there for the weather; the average daily high temperature in August is 96 degrees. It’s a bit like Humphrey Bogart going to Casablanca for the waters.
Well, then, if not climate, maybe it’s scenery. But then again, probably not. Colorado Springs certainly deserves mention in this category, but Nashville doesn’t. I’ve never met anyone who settled in Nashville for its natural beauty, and I don’t expect I ever will.
There’s culture, and it might provide a partial explanation, at least for women. Women’s preferences for Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles seem to be related to the level of cultural sophistication in those cities, but that one breaks down when you start applying it to men. Men liked Dallas, Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, and while all of those cities have invested heavily in cultural amenities in the last few years, you have to doubt how much this has penetrated the general population in other regions of the country.
Crime may be a more promising candidate. Sun Belt cities do, in general, have lower rates of violent crime than older cities in the North, but you would expect women to be sensitive to this issue, as crime and homelessness rates are higher in most of the cities they appreciate. Crime and homelessness have been incendiary issues in San Francisco, Portland and Los Angeles in the last few years. Women still like those cities.
SO WHAT ARE WE DEALING WITH HERE? Admittedly, much of it is a matter of perception, sometimes fairly stale perception rather than reality expressed by respondents who have been to the places in question. But I’m wondering if there might be something else going on. It’s strictly guesswork, of course, but let’s go ahead and throw a couple of guesses into the pot.
If you look at the YouGov numbers, you notice that a disproportionate number of the best-liked big cities are ones whose metro areas have been experiencing high population growth. According to the 2020 census, Raleigh, Nashville, San Antonio and Fort Worth all ranked near the top for percentage population gains during the previous decade. Raleigh ranked second overall, just behind Austin.
There are some good reasons for this. Newcomers to a city tend to rate it more highly than longtime residents, if only to justify the recent decision they have made to pack up and move. Of course, those numbers aren’t large enough by themselves to determine the national result, but I think there’s a spillover effect. Not many people in Baltimore are planning a move to Raleigh or Nashville, but they hear things. They hear about the places others are moving to, and that tends to make their judgments about those places more favorable.
Why are people moving to the highly rated cities? Quite a few are immigrants from other countries, likely imbued with newcomer optimism, but a fair number are coming from older American cities. They are looking for job openings and a more manageable cost of living. Whether most of the new arrivals find them is an open question, but it seems to me that their decisions to look for it go at least part of the way toward explaining why more of them are setting out for cities in the South and West than for cities in the Northeast or Midwest. And also why people throughout the country tend to give those cities higher ratings. It’s not climate. It’s perceptions of opportunity.
Sad to say, my own home city of Chicago doesn’t come out very well in the overall measures of popularity. Maybe it’s the cold winters. Or maybe it’s the job market or living costs. Or maybe Chicago’s “bang, bang” reputation hasn’t quite disappeared a century after it was born. In fact, it seems to have grown in the past couple of years — even as the actual level of violence has come down. It’s one more piece of evidence that urban reputations persist.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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