Are Cities Losing Their Golden Luster?
You watch as the sun dissolves into the earth, the sky illuminating with crimson, ochre, and violet over a sleepy city. The watercolor-esque scene is dazzling, but beneath the liquid gold that overwhelms your vision is a materializing question: should you be captivated or concerned? Those beautiful, hazy colors of the sunset are actually due to smog. Smog, a combination of the words "smoke" and "fog," is caused when sunlight reacts with airborne pollution, including ash, dust, and ground-level ozone. It is one of the many environmental issues that urbanization consistently worsens. According to UN Habitat, cities—these “golden centers of human productivity” which account for less than 2% of Earth’s surface—consume 78% of the world’s energy and produce over 60% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The issues of adequate waste disposal methods and clean water availability add to the environmental threats of urbanization. Because cities are so dense, the movement and storage of waste is not properly monitored, leading to a buildup of trash in unwanted areas. Additionally, water quality is negatively affected by industrial, residential, and commercial activities in urbanized areas.
Urban areas are also a major contributor to dwindling natural green space. According to a study released last year by the USDA, approximately 175,000 acres per year—36 million trees per year—are removed from urban areas in the United States alone. Trees have massive benefits, from purifying air and water to providing natural shade. Without enough trees, big cities experience a slew of environmental disasters, like being more prone to extreme droughts and extreme flooding, which disproportionately affect communities living in poverty. Less affluent communities are more likely to live in neighborhoods that are near landfills and factories, which means their water sources are more likely to be polluted.
The concerns of cities do not stop at the environmental level, but they intensify at a social and economic one. Poverty often occurs in urban areas due to the high cost of housing, which adds to a negative feedback loop of socio-economic hardship. To put it plainly, the rich are getting richer while the poor are staying poor. According to The US Census Bureau, across the 50 states, big-city upper households have increasing average incomes (from $192,000 to $196,000), and big-city poorer households have decreasing average incomes (from $21,000 to $18,100). When housing prices skyrocket, evictions become more common, leading to rising homelessness. Despite the massive wealth gains of the rich, poverty continues to be a growing problem as wealth disparities expand.
San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Miami, and Austin are major cities that are experiencing some of the fastest waves of the nation’s gentrification crisis. When the working class is forcibly displaced to make land available for the upper class, the social makeup of neighborhoods changes. While it is disguised as a socially progressive development providing better roads, better schools, and more public amenities, gentrification instead greatly oppresses poorer communities. These displaced communities are then expected to reside in worse neighborhoods, without any of the luxuries gentrification offers.
This cycles back to an increasing wealth gap disparity. The concept of a golden and gleaming city where individual life quality soars relies on the suffering of those who cannot afford an urban lifestyle. The many economic, social, and environmental issues in urban areas lead to a question of whether or not cities are losing their golden luster—their fading promise of better employment opportunities, infrastructure, innovation, and services. It's easy to be blinded by the idea of bountiful prosperity, but moving forward, we must acknowledge the value of every human life and recognize how cities are major contributors to un
