Big City Political Machines

Most large cities in America have been under the control of bureaucratic political entities since the end of the 19th century in the case of our oldest cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago. In nearly every case in the United States, the machines were local Democratic parties. The nascent machine organizations were aptly characterized as highly inefficient, corrupt, and undemocratic. People grew predictably acrimonious at the presence of political machines stymieing progress and lessening the influence of those lacking political clout. These frustrated sentiments manifested in broad political support for civil service reform that had taken root at every major level of government by the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as president. Unfortunately, the Progressive Era reforms aren’t the end of the story for big city political machines.

Successful Operations

Well after the Progressive Era, these organizations still existed in the familiar forms the had held previously. The most infamous example is the Cook Democratic party in Illinois that represents people in Chicago and the outlying towns surrounding it. Through much of the 20th century, they used patronage in the form of awarding lucrative government jobs to loyalists. Public corruption was and still has been in recent times quite rampant; the last high profile case was that of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who wanted to be paid off for filling then President Obama’s vacant Senate seat. Many other members of the Cook Democratic party have been found guilty of nepotism, corruption, and fraud.

The ineptitude of many cities to deal with key issues affecting major cities (some of which still persist today) like housing shortages, public health, infrastructure, etc led many people with greater means to exit cities, which have contributed to a worsening of these issues with marked lack of investment in making new infrastructure and revitalizing old infrastructure.

In the Modern Day

Chicago’s own University of Illinois-Chicago recently commissioned a report earlier this year that asserts Chicago as the most corrupt city in the US. Chicago is hardly alone though; Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, and DC were all in the top 5. Regarding states, the report finds that Illinois is the third most corrupt state with the second and first place slots going to Louisiana and the District of Columbia (which is functionally a large city). In the case of Chicago, a number of the recent corruption charges are related to malfeasance on the part of local law enforcement.

The murder of George Floyd on May 25th of this year is another tragic event in the saga of police brutality in America. It doesn’t take a perspicacious individual to realize that this is a systemic problem with a legacy that has been enabled by the quiescent disposition of so many big cities. Like so many other apparati of city government, the police department have bought and paid for the city councils of our biggest cities. The conduit for these funds is the police union, which has flooded money into the coffers of city council members’ election funds in exchange for highly favorable union contracts that give undue protections to law enforcement, as I’ve talked about before.

Minneapolis is no stranger to police brutality, but they’ve failed to address the issue of making policing more transparent and judicious largely in part because the rule of law cannot be enforced when law enforcement plays by a different set of rules and city government has little to no interest in vitiating that contract or more radically, eliminating the union completely. There is a great deal of lip service to “defund the police”, but it’s about vanity rather than going after the pernicious source of this plight. For example, the Minneapolis Police Union successfully lobbied the state legislature in eliminating the city’s police-review board, which was made by the city itself. They’ve also aided previous municipal candidates in the past like former Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak, but then campaigned against him when they felt he wasn’t a sufficient conduit for their agenda. This isn’t just limited to public safety unions; United Teachers Los Angeles refused to reopen unless certain state wide policies completely unrelated to schools were enacted at the state level.

What we have to do

These public sector unions need to be labeled as what they always have been: state sponsored shadow governments that often times have an agenda that conflicts with the maximization of resident welfare. At a minimum, we need a grassroots movement committed to significantly curbing their power and/or changing how they’re structured and operated so there is more citizen oversight and input in contracts with the city. This extends beyond police unions wielding their power to deteriorate the rule of law and give officers a different set of rules they play by; transit unions often enable ballooning labor related costs to crowd out investment in transportation infrastructure. Among a plethora of other reforms, a start might be allowing part time workers where they’re prohibited now (really looking at the NYC TWU).

Another pressing issue specific to most machine controlled cities is their dearth of housing due to highly restrictive zoning rules that burden developers with a myriad of archaic standards regarding how buildings can be built; this drives costs up substantially. A 2015 paper found that housing restrictions lowered aggregate national growth by over 50% between 1964 to 2009. This has had the effect of lowering wages and crippling social mobility among other adverse affects. The worse offenders are New York City and San Francisco. Even cities that have tried making some progress such as Minneapolis and Portland need to do much more liberalizing. Cities must liberalize zoning rules considerably through reducing the total number of zone classifications, allowing for multi-use zones, increasing floor spacing index, removing arbitrary height limits, and removing parking requirements among other things. To expound further, the plethora of licensing fees for housing related developments should be considerably reduced or even eliminated and the review process should be streamlined and capped at 28 days.

It’s also imperative that cities become bastions of a more refined political process. We need leaders who will advocate for better voting systems and a more transparent process. I’ve already spoken to this in my recent whitepaper.

Increased automation and digitization of local government services for all non-labor intensive functions should commence immediately. The machine is incredibly opposed to such a proposition. All relevant government forms should be searchable online, all licenses and permits should have a one stop application shop that can be submitted and automatically improved in most cases. Furthermore, there should be an online ticketing system for all infrastructure issues the municipality is responsible for as well as livestreams of city council meetings with moderated live chat where people can submit comments and questions without having to be present in person (likely subject to some identification system to prevent spam and abuse).

Finally, cities must end the flagrant waste of tax payer money on “economic development” subsidies. The most atrocious appropriations are for financing the construction of sports stadiums, which are frequently subsidized further through being exempted from property tax. In general, these stadiums are an awful deal for tax payers as it doesn’t help the local economy. More broadly, other forms of subsidies (typically in the form of tax breaks) are associated with reductions in spending on other budget priorities like education, infrastructure, and human services.