Why Don’t American Cities Burn? by Michael Katz (review)

The wrenching forces that bore down on American cities in the decades after World War II constitute a familiar story in the social sciences. Deindustrialization, riots, out-migration, increases in crime, racial segregation, and the growth of suburbs are just a few of the changes that have been widely studied. Recent years have witnessed yet more change—massive foreign immigration, intense globalization, economic boom then collapse, crime declines, gentrification, and a return to the city, or at least to some cities. While places like New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are thriving, cities like Detroit and St. Louis continue to hemorrhage. Differentiation within and between cities is profound.

Michael Katz argues that to understand such changes the old urban models need revision. He offers up a synthetic interpretation of evidence with a focus on the plight of African Americans. The book starts with the event that motivated Katz—sitting on a jury panel for a murder trial in his home city of Philadelphia. In a seemingly senseless crime invisible to most of the city, one poor black man was accused of killing another in a dispute over five dollars. Why is this kind of murder an unremarkable event in the context of North Philadelphia? Katz uses the case to encapsulate the larger structural themes of the book.

After the prologue (“The Death of Shorty”), Katz reviews familiar territory in Chapter 1. “What is an American City?” emphasizes the changes that brought about urban restructuring and ultimately to what he calls “The New African American Inequality” in Chapter 2. Here Katz argues that current patterns of inequality no longer result only from official discrimination but also racialized patterns in geographic sorting, civic participation, mass incarceration, occupational change, and gender differences in education. By the twenty-first century, American cities and the black community both became highly differentiated even while there was undeniable progress. By most measures African Americans are better off than in the past and there is a solid if fragile black middle class. But inequality still reigns and murders like the one Katz helped adjudicate continue to impact everyday life in the left-behind communities of African-American disadvantage.

Why then, asks Katz in Chapter 3, don’t American cities burn? This framing is provocative but Katz’s implicit assumption that inequality is the driver of collective behavior has been widely challenged. Despite flare-ups in France referenced at the outset of Chapter 3, even European cities don’t burn very often. Readers may also puzzle over the book’s animating question after reflecting on Chapter 2, where Katz told some good news about American poverty. I would emphasize another point Katz surprisingly did not—the recent decline in violence in American society is staggering and has disproportionally affected African American communities. With homicide the leading cause of death among young black males, a decline on the order of 50 percent in violence since the 1990s is big news indeed. Racial inequality is nonetheless as undeniable as is racial progress, and Katz’s argument for the absence of violent pushback centers on the ecology of power and shifts in political alignments from the Great Migration, the management of marginalized populations, and police repression. Katz further argues that the explosion of immigration has “irrevocably smashed the black/ white frame” (100) that was a central narrative in the riots of the 1960s.

In Chapter 4, which I found the most interesting and fresh, Katz examines what he call the “new technologies of poverty work.” Some of these are well known, such as the deconcentration of poverty in public housing (e.g., tear downs of high-rise projects) and the use of vouchers to encourage residential mobility of the poor to higher income neighborhoods. Perhaps more ambitious are efforts to redefine the poor not as passive victims but as budding entrepreneurs. In a kind of “prospecting for wealth,” Katz reviews enterprise zones, Michael Porter’s market-based model of competitive advantage, and the “microfinance” model of...