This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What are your thoughts on cities versus suburbs?

Feel free to discuss their past, present, or future; their pluses and minuses; their respective roles in American life; or where you choose to live and why. As always, I encourage but do not require answers that draw on your own life experiences, so feel free to opine on specific cities or suburbs. And if nothing immediately comes to mind, perhaps the fodder below will prove inspiring.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

I grew up in the suburbs. And I have lived in the city––in New York City; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Paris; and Seville, plus significant stretches in San Francisco, Munich, and Berlin.

I see the appeal of both kinds of places. My “hometown” of Orange County, California, is about as good as it gets for suburbia: It has the best stretch of beaches in Southern California and a significant immigrant population from Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China, India, which provides cultural diversity—and also better food than many metropolises.. And my 20s and 30s happened to coincide with an urban renaissance that I didn’t see coming as an adolescent in the high-crime 1990s.

Gangsta rap, movies about the crack wars, and the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed were my earliest impressions of city life. Then I graduated from college in 2002 into a country where cities were suddenly safer than they’d been in a generation––and to the surprise of many, they kept getting safer and safer for years.

“No place feels so changed as the city of Los Angeles,” the journalist Sam Quinones wrote in late 2014. He explained:

In 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that gang crime had dropped by nearly half since 2008. In 2012, L.A. had fewer total homicides (299) citywide than it had gang homicides alone in 2002 (350) and in 1992 (430). For the most part, Latino gang members no longer attack blacks in ways reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. Nor are gangs carjacking, assaulting, robbing, or in a dozen other ways blighting their own neighborhoods.

Quinones described the significance of the change this way:

This has amounted to an enormous tax cut for once-beleaguered working class neighborhoods. Stores are untagged, walls unscarred. Graffiti, which sparked gang wars for years, is almost immediately covered up. Once-notorious parks—El Salvador Park in Santa Ana, Smith Park in San Gabriel, Bordwell Park in Riverside are a few examples—are now safe places for families … The changes on Southern California streets over the last few years are unlike anything I’ve seen in my decades of writing about gangs. For the first time, it seems possible to tame a plague that once looked uncontrollable—and in doing so allow struggling neighborhoods, and the kids who grow up in them, a fighting chance.

Unfortunately, homicides in cities across the country spiked with the onset of the pandemic. Additionally, rising homelessness and addiction pose challenges to many city-dwellers’ quality of life.

In the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Uranga captures the consequences in a harrowing article about drug use and crime in L.A.’s public-transportation system:

Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses—more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes—such as robbery, rape and aggravated assault—soared 24% last year...

“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several people whom he refers to as “sleepers,” people who get high and nod off on the train.

“We don’t even see any business people anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice than to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”

Commuters have abandoned large swaths of the Metro train system … For January, ridership on the Gold Line was 30% of the pre-pandemic levels, and the Red Line was 56% of them. The new $2.1-billion Crenshaw Line that officials tout as a bright spot with little crime had fewer than 2,100 average weekday boardings that month … The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported deaths linked to fentanyl rose from 109 in 2016 to 1,504 in 2021, amounting to a 1,280% increase.

Josh Barro argues in Very Serious that such transit-system woes in L.A. and elsewhere ought to be of greater concern to leftists who ostensibly want more Americans to live in cities and take public transportation. He writes:

People on the left have simply grown uncomfortable talking about the idea that crime—even less-serious crime—imposes significant social costs and requires policing and sometimes incarceration to address it. It’s more fun to talk about zoning. But this isn’t a problem that will be fixed with zoning. What’s needed on the subways is enforcement of rules: We need to go back to arresting people for illegal activity on transit, including fare-beating and for public drug use. If you’re using the subway as a place to sleep instead of as transportation, you’re trespassing. The subway is some of the most expensive and useful public infrastructure we have, and moving problems of homelessness and drug use and other disorder elsewhere, even into the streets, is not simply passing the buck—it’s moving the buck to a place where it imposes a lower social cost...

I realize that sounds cold, but letting homeless people and addicts take over the subway does not address problems of homelessness or addiction. It would be great if LA could move everyone without a home into permanent supportive housing, but the city has been unable to translate billions of dollars of taxpayer funds into an effective solution to the problem of homelessness. The immediate options facing LA are that it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are willing to ride, or it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are unwilling to ride. So far, the city is choosing the latter.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where I have personally had my car window smashed while it was parked overnight, S.F. local Snehal Antani took to Twitter last week to complain about how a colleague was treated while visiting the city:

A teammate visiting San Francisco for an offsite called me frantically last night. After dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf they came back to a smashed car window and 2 stolen backpacks. $10K in gear lost, passports gone, etc. … “Laptop bags were in the trunk, nothing visible from the street”, a typical description of a smash & grab, yet thieves were able to find the specific car and knew to pull the rear seat down and reach into the trunk… how?

I explained, “these aren’t homeless [randomly] smashing windows. These are professionals using blue tooth [sic] scanners to find laptop bags. And idle iPad, Bose headphones, etc all emit Bluetooth. And let me guess, it was the rear window facing the street, because thieves drive up to the car, open their door, then smash+grab. A witness must be directly behind the thieves [to] see anything, all other views are blocked.”

My teammate said his companion was on the phone with the police, to which I said, “they don’t care. Maybe they’ll show up in a few hours, they’ll likely make you go to the station, but this happens thousands of times per week.” [Editor’s note: According to San Francisco crime data from across 2022, thefts from vehicles averaged less than 400 a week last year.] So now I need to include a pre-visit security brief to people traveling San Francisco. This is a big reason I’m hesitant to open an office in the city versus keeping a remote team and occasionally meeting up at a location to whiteboard. And my teammates will be scarred forever, being robbed hits you at your core, especially when it’s thousands of dollars of loss. There is no downtown recovery without an aggressive push for safety @LondonBreed. The next mayor will win by running on a simple platform: 1, safe neighborhoods; 2, Clean Streets; 3, great public schools

In a series of replies (some of which have since been deleted), John Hamasaki, a former San Francisco police commissioner and a current district-attorney candidate, wrote:

Interesting. Would getting your car window broken and some stuff stolen leave you “scarred forever”?

Is this what the suburbs do to you? Shelter you from basic city life experiences so that when they happen you are broken to the core?

I’ve had my window broken 2x when I was living paycheck to paycheck. It sucked financially, but it had zero impact on my sense of public safety.

I can’t even imagine the world one must live in where this would be the most traumatizing incident in their life.

Again, not to say it doesn’t suck. But maybe city life just isn’t for you. It’s not the suburbs. There is crime.

I’m grateful most of it is property crime instead of violent crime. But I’ve always felt safe in San Francisco, even after being on the wrong side of violent crime.

Hamasaki also wrote, “Name a big city in the US where you can just leave 10k worth of stuff in your car? It’s not San Francisco these people hate, it’s cities.”

In UnHerd, Joel Kotkin suggests that, contra the wishes of urbanists, the suburbs are once again the future:

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles—these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottmann described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times’s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

… Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

The fading allure of the big city—further undermined by the post-pandemic shift to remote work in many sectors—is also taking place against the backdrop of an urban economy that has increasingly rewarded the few ... almost a fifth of residents in the 50 largest US cities live below the poverty line. Contrast this with the historic role of cities as engines of upward mobility. Even the addition last year of a few thousand migrants forced New York Mayor Eric Adams to declare a state of emergency; in other words, New York, a city largely built on the labour of newcomers, now seems too weak to house and employ a substantial number of immigrants. Amid this failure, perhaps it’s unsurprising that migrants and minorities are heading to America’s suburbs, sprawled sunbelt cities and smaller towns. So what is the urban future? The answer lies less in the central business districts than the suburbs and exurbs.

And this presents a nightmare for the traditional urbanist.

Is he right, or is another urban renaissance ahead?

Provocation of the Week

At a press conference hosted by the Internet Archive, its founder, Brewster Kahle, addressed Hachette v. Internet Archive, a Supreme Court case that addresses digital lending and copyright. Kahle argued that digital libraries ought to be free to operate much as brick- and-mortar libraries do:

The Internet Archive is a library I founded 26 years ago. This library has brought hundreds of years of books to the wikipedia generation, and now 4 massive publishers are suing to stop us.

As the world now looks to their screens for answers, what they find is often not good. People are struggling to figure out what is true and it is getting harder. Digital learners need access to a library of books, a library at least as deep as the libraries we older people had the privilege to grow up with.

The Internet Archive has worked with hundreds of libraries for decades to provide such a library of books. A library where each of those books can be read by one reader at a time. This is what libraries have always done.

We also work with libraries that are under threat. We work with many libraries that have closed their doors completely—libraries with unique collections: Claremont School of Theology, Marygrove College of Detroit, cooking school of Johnson & Wales Denver, Concordia College of Bronxville NY, Drug Policy Alliance’s library of NYC, the Evangelical Seminary of Pennsylvania. I have looked these librarians in the eye and told them that we are there for them.

They entrust their books to us, as a peer library, to carry forward their mission. Most of the books are not available from the publishers in digital form, and never will be. And as we have seen, students, researchers and the print-disabled continue to use these books for quotations and fact checking. And I think we can all agree we need to be able to do fact checking.

Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased. Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.

The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed.

This is horrendous. Let me say it again—the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed.

And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do. This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community’s libraries—gone.

The dream of the Internet was to democratize access to knowledge, but if the big publishers have their way, excessive corporate control will be the nightmare of the Internet. That is what is at stake.

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Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”

[Trent McNamara: Liberal societies have dangerously low birth rates]

In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.

Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.

But human societies have proved repeatedly that they can escape the Malthusian trap. Indeed, agricultural productivity has improved to support a British population seven times larger than in Malthus’s time and a global population eight times larger. As a result of these stubborn facts, most Malthusian imitators haven’t come out and said they’re Malthusians. And instead of focusing on famine, they have tended to emphasize humanity’s destruction of nature.

The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has been the world’s leading overpopulation hawk since the publication of his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich did warn about food shortages, but as an entomologist and a conservationist, his primary concern was our influence on the natural world. “The progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than the food-population gap,” he wrote.

In a description of a trip to New Delhi, he was vividly forthcoming about his distaste for the living, breathing individuals who make up a population:

People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.

If people, people, people are the primary threat to the natural world, what is the solution? Uncomfortable as it is to say, conservationist and eugenicist theories have long been intertwined. Indeed, in his newly published autobiography, Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics, Ehrlich credits the early-20th-century thinker William Vogt, whom he calls “a liberal conservationist,” as inspiration for his work on population. Here is how Vogt explained his proposal to offer “sterilization bonuses” to the poor:

Since such a bonus would appeal primarily to the world’s shiftless, it would probably have a favorable selective influence. From the point of view of society, it would certainly be preferable to pay permanently indigent individuals, many of whom would be physically and psychologically marginal, $50 or $100 rather than support their hordes of offspring that, by both genetic and social inheritance, would tend to perpetuate the fecklessness.

In the beginning of the previous century, there was simply no contradiction in being a “liberal conservationist” and being a eugenicist. Vogt was the national director for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which has recently reckoned with the eugenicist commitments of its founder, Margaret Sanger. The Sierra Club, which was initially led by a number of avowed eugenicists, commissioned Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb and for decades operated a program focused on ways to reduce fertility and immigration.

Now 90 years old, Ehrlich still takes pride in the work he did turning population growth into a global concern, even though the mass famine and pestilence that he predicted in the ’60s never came to pass.

“I must admit,” he writes in his autobiography, “that in 2019 I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thinking of the planet as a whole and anticipating its future.’”

And Ehrlich remains a venerated figure. In January of this year, CBS featured Ehrlich on an episode of 60 Minutes on species extinction. The climate scientist Michael Mann called the memoir a “wide-ranging, wondrous, and pleasantly amusing account of his amazing life—as a scientist, thinker, communicator, influencer, and champion for a sustainable world.”

Intellectual descendants of Ehrlich’s in the environmental movement continue to sell old Malthusian wine in new bottles.

Oreskes draws attention to the same problem that Ehrlich did in his day: biodiversity loss associated with high-fertility, low-productivity societies caught in the Malthusian trap. Because subsistence farms have low yields, and because the farmers tend to rely on wood and other biomass for energy, they remain a major driver of deforestation, land-use change, and wildlife extirpation.

In Oreskes's recent Scientific American op-ed, she acknowledges that her ideas have a tarnished legacy. “Population control is a vexing subject,” she writes, “because in the past it has generally been espoused by rich people (mostly men) instructing people in poor countries (mostly women) on how to behave.” Her workaround is to emphasize educational opportunities as a “reasonable” way to “slow growth.” In an email, Oreskes said that she does not consider herself a Malthusian and that she focuses on education “because we know that it can work, and unlike some other approaches it is good for women, and non-coercive.”

The Overpopulation Project (TOP) also highlights education, arguing that governments in every country should “make population and environmental issues and sex education part of the basic educational curriculum.” Likewise, Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth, which Ehrlich co-founded in 1968) develops “K-12 curricula and secondary education materials for teachers and professors so they can easily incorporate population studies into their classes.”

Access to education—in general, or to sex ed and “population studies” in particular—is certainly preferable to Vogt’s forced sterilization. But what about solutions to environmental decline that emphasize better growth instead of slower growth? Solutions such as modern energy infrastructure, high-productivity agriculture, and access to global markets?

Proposals of this sort, which Oreskes refers to derisively as “cornucopianism,” are the alternatives to Malthusianism that have proved effective across history. Rough contemporaries of Malthus, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, argued that improvements in economic productivity would allow humans to grow enough food to meet rising population levels, and they were right. Vogt’s pessimism lost out to the ingenuity of, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning agronomist Norman Borlaug, as the historian Charles Mann recounts in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. Borlaug’s innovations in wheat and maize cultivation helped stave off the famines Vogt and other eugenicists had predicted. Ehrlich, infamously, lost a bet with the libertarian economist Julian Simon over resource scarcity. (Simon goes completely unmentioned in Ehrlich’s autobiography.) And “cornucopianism” can do more than fend off famine; it can serve conservationist ends. Thanks to innovation and technological decoupling, an average American today is more than twice as wealthy as an average American was the year The Population Bomb was published, yet generates 30 percent fewer carbon emissions and uses 50 percent less land for their diet.

Like Oreskes, the scientists at TOP and Population Connection insist that their proposed solutions to the population “problem” are noncoercive. They just want to nudge people in the direction of fewer people. Another of TOP’s priorities is to “reduce immigration numbers” to developed countries with low fertility rates. Additional ideas include proposals to lower government support for third and fourth children and for medical fertility treatments.

But Ehrlich said the same thing. “I’m against government interference in our lives,” he told an interviewer in 1970. How that sentiment squared with Ehrlich’s demands in The Population Bomb for “compulsory birth regulation” and “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children” remains unclear. And it didn’t stop powerful institutions from taking his warnings about overpopulation literally as well as seriously. As Betsy Hartmann recounted in her 1987 exposé, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, the Population Council, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and other organizations funded fertility-reduction programs that, in tandem with sometimes coercive government policies, led to millions of sterilizations in China, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. China’s one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome’s famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.

When the problem is defined as too many carbon emissions, the solutions will be optimized to reduce emissions. When the problem is defined as too little education and bodily autonomy, solutions such as schooling and birth control make intuitive sense. When the problem is defined as too many people, the “solutions” will surely once again go far beyond the gentle, humane approaches that the neo-Malthusians emphasize. As The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas put it, “Enough with the innuendo: If overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you’ve got to defend the implications.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The people who hate people]

Fortunately, much of civil society has gotten wise to the new, friendly Malthusianism. Ehrlich’s appearance on 60 Minutes was met with widespread condemnation. Last year the Sierra Club shut down its long-standing population-control program, writing, “Contraception and family planning are not climate mitigation measures.”

And these concerns are being raised at a peculiar moment in human history. The total population of human beings on Earth is expected to peak and decline later this century, not because of war, famine, or disease, but because of secularly declining fertility. The challenges that nations including Germany, Korea, Japan, and even India and China are dealing with today is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Migrants, particularly those who are young and skilled, will be crucial to generating economic growth in these countries. This makes the neo-Malthusian dismissal of technology, infrastructure, and growth particularly troubling. Supporting an aging population will require an economic surplus that has traditionally been supplied by a favorable ratio of younger workers in the labor force to retirees. As that ratio reverses, it is not clear how infrastructure maintenance and social-services financing will fare.

Given that the Malthusian dream—a peak in global population—is already in sight, one might think that single-minded efforts to further suppress population growth would wane. But the old population-control movement is still alive and well today.

A magnitude 6.5 earthquake was felt across huge swathes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of India on Tuesday night, forcing people to spend the night outside.