Europe's "law and order" urbanism. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

12 - 16 minutes

I love walkable cities with mass transit and traditional urbanism, but I actually don’t love huge cities.

In the United States, these things tend to go together. New York City is gigantic and accounts for a huge share of America’s transit usage, and the other cities with meaningful transit ridership also anchor really large metro areas. Something that I always enjoy about visiting Europe is the prevalence of small city urbanism. We spent a few days earlier this summer in Juan-les-Pins, a small beach town full of mid-rise apartment buildings. You can walk to restaurants and supermarkets and the beach, and a train station nearby offers frequent service to other Riviera towns, as well as Nice and Marseille.

Beyond public policy, there are historical and economic reasons why the United States doesn’t have a lot of places like that. But it’s cool.

We also went to Lyon, which is beautiful, and a real city but not a gigantic one. The metro area has 2.3 million people, comparable to the Pittsburgh MSA, rather than the 6.3 million in D.C. or 20 million in New York. On a single day in Lyon, my son and I rode the metro, a funicular, a tram, and a city bus, plus walked around a bunch. It was lovely.

But it’s also striking that cities in France, and European cities more broadly, are incredibly safe by American standards. In Paris, our family and another we were traveling with stayed in an apartment in Ménilmontant, a kind of grungy immigrant-heavy neighborhood. We loved it — immigrants are lot kinder about my iffy French than the typical Parisian, and the food was fantastic. Unlike some of Paris’ more affluent neighborhoods, it was afflicted by problems that are familiar to residents of American cities. One morning, for example, I was walking to the bakery and walked by a gentleman passed out on the street.

But the homicide numbers are staggering.

There were 948 murders in all of France last year, which is approximately the number that took place in Louisiana alone. But Louisiana has 4.6 million people and France has 67 million, which adds up to a murder rate of 1.3 victims per 100,000 French people — lower than Maine’s 1.7 per 100,000. The upshot is that in France, you can enjoy a level of personal security that we associate with life in a small town in the United States while living a walkable urban lifestyle. And I think a substantial portion of liberals’ Europe envy comes down to this fact (universal health care is a big deal, too, of course, but that’s not something you generally enjoy on a visit). The combination of ubiquitous urbanism and public safety makes for an incredibly enjoyable time.

Marseille, the most dangerous city in France, has a murder rate of about 3.5 per 100,000.

That’s more dangerous than Maine, but safer than Nebraska (3.6), Montana (4.4), or Connecticut (4.8). A lot of conservatives like to blame American crime on “blue cities,” so consider that Marseille was dramatically safer last year than Oklahoma City (12.5) or Jacksonville (12.2), the two largest GOP-governed cities. And, again, this not some random French city. It’s poor by French standards, the most dangerous city in the country. You might compare it to a low-income, high-crime city like Baltimore (56) or Cleveland (28).

More affluent French cities like Paris (1.9) and Lyon (1.1) are safer than Marseille and, indeed, safer than totally homogenous rural American states.

But I do think the Marseille comparison is particularly relevant because it’s an outlier. Back in March, during my University of Chicago fellowship, I was supposed to go downtown for dinner one night. Curious about the state of things on the “real” (i.e., non-Hyde Park) South Side, I asked a receptionist at the hotel if she thought it would be safe to take the 20 minute walk to the 51st Street Green Line station on the other side of Washington Park. She told me not really, but I figured what the heck and did it anyway. What you find directly adjacent to a mass transit station, two blocks from a giant park, and 20 minutes from a major university campus is… derelict buildings and a vacant lot.

People use “gentrification” as a dirty word, but big swathes of the South Side of Chicago would clearly benefit from an influx of residents and real estate investment. And many of these neighborhoods have characteristics that most progressive-minded Americans say are desirable in terms of a traditional urban built form and decent transit access. Heck, they also have plentiful parking. And of course they’re cheap — hardly anyone wants to live in these neighborhoods and the population is falling, largely because of high crime.

At a minimum, I feel confident that if Baltimore experienced a 70% drop in the murder rate, plenty of people who like cities but don’t want to break the bank on rent would find themselves living there despite the very shaky public school system. And the influx of people would help stabilize and improve the schools. The same is true of Philadelphia. Or Cleveland, which as I noted in a prior post, actually has a small metro system. There’s a lot of essentially “shadow” housing inventory in American cities that’s de facto ruled out by anyone with other options due to crime concerns. Unlocking this inventory wouldn’t solve all of America’s housing problems or obviate the need for regulatory reform. But it would be a big boost, and in particular a big boost for people who have a lifestyle preference for urbanism, because to an extent historic city cores have virtues that can’t be replicated in brand new neighborhoods.

Racist Twitter is obsessed with the idea that demographic variation explains everything about crime. But demographics can’t account for why Florida has so many more murders than New York, and they certainly don’t explain the incredible scale of the U.S./France murder gap. The Economist actually did a big data visualization project a couple of years ago showing that both the murder rate and the incarceration rate for white Americans is far higher than for Europeans, and life expectancy is lower. There are both social justice-themed and racism-themed ways of drawing attention to the racial gaps in American life, but either way, they don’t fully account for the disparities between the United States and Europe.

The prevalence of firearms ownership in the U.S., by contrast, seems to explain a lot.

France had 31 guns per 100 people in 2006 and cut that by about 50% over 10 years with an amnesty/buyback campaign paired with increasingly stringent registration rules. By European standards, French gun rules are actually pretty lax and British conservatives speak about them admiringly — but what that means in practice is that it’s relatively easy to get a license to use a gun for sport purposes. That means either hunting or shooting at a club. If you’re out and about with a gun, that’s a crime, and all your guns need to be registered to minimize diversion of legal guns to the illicit market:

    You are obliged to keep your guns under lock and key except when traveling to the range when they must be kept in a locked boot of the car. The gendarmerie might visit at any time, to check your guns are correctly registered and that storage conforms to the rules. There’s no open carry or concealed carry of weapons unless you can demonstrate an overwhelming need.

This is, of course, a pretty standard progressive point — a society awash in guns has problems. But note that this is not the gun control of progressive fantasy where whole categories of weapon are made illegal and therefore non-existent. It’s a set of rules about who is allowed to buy guns and how they are allowed to carry them that only works to the extent that it is enforced. The enforcement is not perfect, and though France’s homicide rate is very low compared to the United States, it is higher than the U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, or Belgium.

But evidently the enforcement is pretty good! The set of rules on the books is, on paper, fairly intrusive, and they seem to be doing something to get people to mostly follow the rules. And as best I can tell, the thing they are doing is policing.

As everyone knows, taxes are much higher in France and public services are accordingly more generous. That’s most notable in the field of health care and retirement security, but it extends to child poverty and college tuition and other areas, as well.

France has, for example, about 150,000 members of the Police Nationale, plus another 100,000 members of the Gendarmerie. They are supplemented by a Police Municipale in the cities that’s about 20,000 strong, and there are apparently about 1,000 rural guards. That’s about four officers per thousand people, while the FBI says the United States has between 2.4 and 3.4 law enforcement personnel per person, depending on how you count. The fact that French police are overwhelmingly employed by national-level agencies also seems relevant. I wrote once about the spatial misallocation of police officers in Washington, D.C. with too many cops in rich low-crime neighborhoods and too few in poor high-crime neighborhoods. But the misallocation within cities is trivial compared to the misallocation between urban and suburban jurisdictions. If you had a comprehensive national look at the deployment of law enforcement personnel, you could send a much larger share of them to where the most serious crimes are happening and save lives.

I don’t know exactly how French police deployment decisions are made, but Ménilmontant was policed very aggressively in the wake of the rioting that happened just before we arrived in France.

Those riots were set off by a police officer killing a teenager during a traffic stop. The officer was arrested, and President Macron and his cabinet denounced the cop in question but also took advantage of the nationalized nature of French policing to move much more aggressively than the Trump administration or any governor to quell rioting. The situation was totally calm by the time we arrived in France, but still, weeks later during the Bastille Day celebrations, police barricaded the streets and searched fireworks spectators because they were worried about disruptive crowds or people using the noise as cover for mischief.

I also had my eyes peeled for evidence of fake or improper license plates on French cars and I didn’t see any anywhere. Correspondents across Europe seem to be in agreement that this simply isn’t a thing there. Which means that if you did start driving around with fake tags, you’d be caught.

There is much more to Europe’s superior traffic safety than strict enforcement of the license plate rules, but as with the guns, I think it’s important for American progressives to acknowledge that rules aren’t magic.

The health care policy status quo in the United States is insane, and no European political party would be so electorally suicidal as to suggest implementing an American-style system where you’ll lose your health insurance if you lose your job.

That can create the impression that Europe is systematically to the left of America, which I don’t really think is true. French public opinion is less individualistic than American, which leads to more acceptance of broad-based taxation but also, in some respects, more of a “law and order” orientation. I was surprised in Paris to see a small homeless encampment under the Charles de Gaulle Bridge over the Seine, since I didn’t recall seeing those kind of tents on previous trips to the city. But during the 15 minutes or so I was waiting by the riverbank, police showed up and cleared the camp. Central Lyon has a number of big pedestrianized boulevards, including the very large Rue Victor Hugo, which is the stuff American urbanist dreams are made of.

But it’s also covered in surveillance cameras, and signs telling you about the surveillance cameras, because that helps maintain it as a nice public space.

In the United States, of course, we actually have lots of broad pedestrian boulevards, they’re just inside of shopping malls where we take it for granted that a high level of surveillance and minimal tolerance for disorderly behavior will rule the day. But, as we’ve seen with improper license plates, American cities tend to be much more influenced by a sense that it’s bad to have rules or bad to enforce them.

That’s not to say everyone in France is in full compliance with every law. But at a minimum, enforcement is good enough that people make an effort to follow them.

All of which is just to say that while I think most American urbanists really enjoy how mainstream urbanist lifestyles are in Europe, to an extent they miss the inverse of this — European cities are governed by mainstream values rather than leftist ones. There are 1,200 fare enforcement personnel working in the Paris Metro. If people don’t agree with ideas like having surveillance cameras and lots of police officers and actually enforcing fare rules, that’s fair enough. But if you’re an American who enjoys European cities, I do think it’s worth taking the time to consider that maybe some of what you enjoy about it is the atmosphere that results from a more tough-on-crime approach.