Tales of Two Cities

Tales of Two Cities: What Chicago and Charlotte Say About the Future of America

Sometimes disparate events bring portents (and sometimes not). I read the news about Chicago failing in its bid for the 2016 Olympics and the management malpractice at Bank of America and reached one conclusion: America will build no more great cities.

Chicago became a great city despite barriers that would seem formidable, especially its manic orientation toward commerce (as opposed to the Paris built by Haussmann) and its decades of racial strife and white flight. And yet a great, global city did arise, celebrated by poets, novelists and academics. Chicago had great bones because it came of age during a time of great architecture and civic design (its most celebrated, Daniel Burnham, said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood…”).

Chicago (Photo: Hisham F. Ibrahim/Getty Images)

Blossoming before the car, it enjoyed urban concentration. Perhaps most it all, it bred a different class of robber barons, for all of Dreiser’s contempt for them. The Chicago business titans wanted to show their wealth by building a great city. By the time of city destabilization of the 1950s, a critical mass had been established that would even allow Chicago to build Millennium Park in 2004.

The best hope to show that America was capable of still building great cities might have been Bank of America’s hometown of Charlotte. The North Carolina city was a middling Southern metro until about 15 years ago. Then a combination of competing business leaders and a moment in history — rather like Chicago, albeit on a smaller scale — turned Charlotte into the nation’s second-largest banking center, drew a population larger than Seattle and seemed on the brink of showing how automobile-age America could still build a real city.

Chicago, of course, will remain a great city in what may well be a diminished and declining America. That Rio de Janerio would win the 2016 Olympics seems obvious to anyone who has been paying attention: Asia and Brazil are on the rise, which will inevitably send America into relative decline. Yet some trends threaten to send the United States into the absolute decline of empires: a hollowed-out economy replaced by financial plays, overstretched and costly military commitments, deep debt to the world. Also, government paralyzed by political gridlock over spending and incapable of making forward-leaning investments for the new century. And businesses yoked to capital markets that demand profits to an atomized world of untethered wealthy and anonymous shareholders rather than allow for city building.

For American metropolitan areas, the results will at best mean a freezing in place of circumstances. Thus, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Portland, et al, will remain interesting cities capable of attracting talent and capital, largely because they are living off the legacy of their past and the critical mass they have been able to generate. Critically, they will build deeper economic and social ties with the world. For the Sun Belt metropolises, especially Phoenix, they will be left with the ugly lookalike sprawl of the late 20th century — yet another moment in history, marked by cheap gasoline — but they will not build real cities. They will face increasing stresses because of their scale and sprawl. There will be a cruel threshing among cities of the old Rust Belt, most of whom have good bones but many will still follow Detroit into terminal decline. It is a criminal waste.

Real cities — with high concentration of population, walkable neighborhoods, transit, lovely civic design, high quality of life and numerous assets — will have a much better future in a world of expensive energy, global competition for talent and capital, and the increasing stresses and costs from sprawl’s environmental and social degradation.

Europe is enhancing its cities while Asia is building new ones. America is frozen in place.
That’s where Charlotte comes in.

Downtown Charlotte, N.C., from Marshall Park.

(Photo: Jill Lang/Shutterstock.com)

With two money center banks and the urbanist leadership of Bank of America’s Hugh McColl Jr., Charlotte built a sparkling downtown from nothing in little more than a decade. McColl could have put B of A’s corporate center (pictured below) out in a suburban office “park,” as has happened all over America, as its cities have cratered. Instead, he located it in one of downtown’s most blighted areas, transforming it. He created delightful downtown neighborhoods. Bank of America and First Union (which took the name of an acquisition, Wachovia) competed to build skyscrapers and then civic assets. Their support was essential to the completion of the first light-rail line in the South. Admittedly, it is a sterile downtown, lacking gritty urban character and its culture sector was yet to really develop. But Charlotte held the hope that America, particularly the car-centric Sun Belt, could rediscover good civic design and build cities again — especially in a place so rich, thanks to its banks.

Now Wachovia is gone, a victim of the greed and bad bets of its executives. Bank of America has been badly wounded in the banking mess, particularly its acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Now CEO Ken Lewis has suddenly announced his resignation with no succession plan. A bully who pushed out talent that intimidated him, Lewis has done further damage to the nation’s largest bank. Worse, he didn’t share McColl’s deeply personal passion to build Charlotte as a great city, yet he was the last major bank official with a tie to the city. It will be very hard for BofA to avoid the gravitational pull of New York as the capital of America’s capital markets. A successor could likely begin a slow — or fast — move of the headquarters north. This pressure will only be intensified by the consolidation and restructuring going on in finance now.

A city of boosters, Charlotte would of course put the best face on it. Charlotte would retain many banking jobs, regional offices and the leftover wealth of having been the nation’s second-largest banking center. It has a beltway and endless suburbs like everyplace else. But it won’t be a great city. Now the fear is palpable. A 50-story condo downtown tower sits unfinished. Wachovia’s incomplete headquarters will be taken over by Duke Energy, the only other major downtown headquarters.

It is a bit of tragic payback. Charlotte grew fat by acquiring the banks of other cities, depriving them of their leading corporate citizens and downtown employers. The increasing concentration of industries, lack of antitrust enforcement and favorable tax treatment for mergers have decimated the headquarters of America’s cities. And, as Charlotte showed, it matters where the CEO lives.

Life will go on, of course. Many will prefer suburban living, until the costs become prohibitive. Alas, government paralysis will make retrofitting much of suburbia for a non-1965 world impossible. Others will move to the remaining real cities, while others, still, will make what they can of their spaces. Immense treasure will be spent trying to revive the house-building machine of sprawl, failing. But, as Pericles said, “All good things come to the city because of the city’s greatness.” This will be reinforced by the realities of the 21st century. Alas, America’s capacity for city building has passed.