Jane Jacobs once declared: “Downtown is for people.” As Fred Siegel saw it, cities were for the middle class. Siegel, who died this past May at 78, had wide-ranging interests, but his anchoring themes were urbanism and bourgeois values. For Siegel, cities should not, and need not, devolve into communities controlled by the very rich and very poor. Resisting that outcome was his life’s work.
Many self-styled proponents of “families” and “the middle class” populate the urban scene these days. But in progressive parlance, those terms rarely mean more than redistributionism. The defining values of Siegel’s bourgeois urbanism were government that works, public safety, and responsibility. Like many intellectuals who began on the left and wound up on the right, Siegel was voluble on the Democratic Party’s failings. But he also has much to teach political conservatives who have given up on cities and believe that everything is always downhill in modern America. That belief is belied by New York City’s renaissance starting in the mid-1990s. Siegel was its leading chronicler.
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