Things Going Wrong in our State Capital

The city’s roads are riddled with potholes. Jackson public schools often underperform. Crime is rife, and last year our state capital had the highest per capita homicide rate in the country.

This isn’t how cities are supposed to work in a functioning democracy. When those we elect preside over failing public services, democracy is supposed to have a self-correct mechanism kick in; the voters are meant to punish poor leadership, and bad policies are meant to be replaced by better ones.

But what happens if a city is so badly governed that voters simply move away? 

Something similar has happened here in Jackson, which has lost around a quarter of its population over the past three decades. Middle class Jacksonians, both black and white, have relocated to Ridgeland, Flowood, Madison and Clinton.

The effect on a city of losing its middle class is profound, McKay notes. What is left behind is a city that consists of a handful of very rich, and a much larger number of the very poor.

McKay’s hypothesis is that this actually suits some urban leaders in certain cities. Why?

Without a large number of middle class voters, who hold high expectations of what public services they should get for their tax dollars, urban leadership is able to evade accountability. 

The rich are less motivated to act since they are often insulated from the consequences of incompetent city administration. They can retreat behind gated communities, send their children to private schools and provide public services for themselves.

The votes of the poor, writes McKay, “can be bought cheaply” since, he suggests, their expectations are already so low.

Those who rule over the ensuing urban decay, meanwhile, don’t mind – so long as they keep ruling. Far from being punished for their failure to provide public services, the grinding poverty that their policies helped produce entitles them to seek all kinds of federal funding.

Whether you agree with Mr. McKay’s hypothesis or not, I hope we can all accept that for democracy in our capital city to work there needs to be accountability when things go wrong.

What shocked me this week was the determination of the Mississippi media establishment to give the city’s leadership a pass. Multiple articles and broadcasts tried to make out that it was the state Governor who was at fault, despite the fact that it was the state government that came to the city’s rescue.

Instead of starting from the position that Jackson, like every other municipality in America, ought to be able to provide its citizens with clean water, some in the media tried to frame it all in terms of race.

The national media, as Y’All Politics put it, then ‘dutifully piled in’. The Washington Post predictably ran a piece saying that ‘racial politics’ was to blame. In their search to exonerate those actually responsible for Jackson’s water supply, the BBC cited ‘climate change’ as a factor.

Those in the media that try to pretend that Jackson’s public service failures are somehow the fault of the state Governor, or those that live outside the city, should hold their heads in shame. They aren’t simply failing to accurately report a water shortage. They are helping perpetuate a model of municipal government devoid of accountability – and one that has helped put Jackson into a spiral of decline.

What happened this week in Jackson is about much more than water. Are those elected to run our state capital going to be held to account for the state of the public services that they provide?

If not, then responsibility will inevitably end up elsewhere. The state government will run not merely the water supply, but perhaps eventually much of the city’s public administration. Parents perhaps will have to be given more control over their tax dollars.

There is nothing inevitable about urban decay in America. But the first step to tackling it is honesty about where the buck stops.

Have a wonderful Labor Day weekend!