Kaught up in Kotkin

I think I mostly see what he's getting at, but there are a couple things in Reihan Salam's defense of Joel Kotkin that I'm still not following. First, even if the housing situation in certain American cities resembles that in certain European ones, that hardly outweighs the differences between Europeans and Americans, even urban Americans. Major American cities (and their finer educational institutions) are largely populated by people who either immigrated from Europe or elsewhere, or whose parents or grandparents did. Given my familiarity with the two cities and my relative lack of familiarity with others, I'll stick to NYC and Paris. While a lucky few inherit West Village townhouses or Tribeca lofts, no one is born into an "important" New York family in the way that people are born into "important" Parisian families. New York does not have New Yorkers and foreigners, it has New Yorkers and tourists, whereas Paris has Parisians, foreigners, and tourists. New Yorkers either are or strongly identify with immigrants (xenophobes tend to move away) while Parisians often despise both non-Parisians and the non-French in general. And New Yorkers (and, as far as I can tell, Chicagoans) are a no-nonsense bunch, and work a whole lot harder to stay in the city than do Parisians. Before I stray further into value judgments...basically, what I'm getting at is, similarities in real estate do not make Americans, any Americans, "Euro", with the exception being those dudes rolling their own cigarettes in front of Classics. They can be "Euro-Americans" if they'd like, and they might even be flattered.

By using the term "Euro-American" as he does, Kotkin just serves to further polarize the country, and to suggest that all New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and Bostonians are by definition anti-American. It's lame to dismiss huge stretches of the country, as if there's no national pride or even sense of national identity once you leave the Red States. The 9/11 terrorists didn't see NYC as Europe, and that is the one and only point on which I could have agreed with them.

Next, I'm confused by how keeping out "those with different skill sets" will mean that cities like NYC and LA will lose their draw to "bright young things." "Different" abilities do not create institutions like Conde Nast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, Columbia University, or the fashion industry. Nope, regular old success, that special, timeless, winner-takes-all success, the sort of people who are stunning and brilliant and good at everything they set their mind on, who don't fear asking too much from life, are the people who make cities great. Whatever happened to the (American) conservative love of meritocracy, of people with skill sets that are not different or special but just plain impressive?