American cities, once economic and social launch pads for their
residents, are all too often plagued by poverty and decay. One need only
to look at the ruins of Detroit to see how far some once-great cities
have fallen, or at Boston and San Francisco for evidence that such
decline is reversible. In Boom Towns, Stephen J.K. Walters diagnoses
the root causes of urban decline in order to prescribe remedies that
will enable cities to thrive once again.
Arguing that commonplace explanations for urban decay misunderstand the
nature of our towns, Walters reconceives of cities as dense
accumulations of capital in all of its forms--places that attract people
by making their labor more productive and their leisure more
pleasurable. Policymakers, therefore, must properly define and enforce
property rights in order to prevent the flight of capital and the
resulting demise of urban centers. Using vivid evocations of iconic
towns and the people who crucially affected their destinies, Walters
shows how public policy measures which aim to revitalize often do more
harm than good. He then outlines a more promising set of policies to
remedy the capital shortage that continues to afflict many cities and
needlessly limit their residents' opportunities. With its fresh
interpretation of one of the American quandaries of our day, Boom
Towns offers a novel contribution to the debate about American cities
and a program for their restoration.
