The Patriot Post® · Why Can't America Have Nice Things?

Last summer, a coworker showed up to work late. This is hardly a big deal, especially in the scientific research world, where researchers have flexibility with their schedules. But behind this tardiness was an alarming explanation. On her commute, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) stopped and forced all passengers off the train. The next day, reporting from local news revealed why: there had been a murder on board.

This stuck with me.

For the past month, I have been taking a summer class in Lyngby, Denmark, a small town outside of Copenhagen. Between writing two 30-page lab reports a week for this four-week course, I have been able to experience the many wondrous offerings of this country — from well-maintained public libraries to waterfront parks to easy navigation using public transportation. The contrast with American cities could not have been sharper.

During my travels, it became clear to me why public amenities and infrastructure in America’s cities are lacking: the unwillingness of city governments to keep crackheads and delinquents from turning existing amenities into crime scenes or places of public disorder.

The story of my coworker is just one example of a broader anxiety that many city dwellers, especially women, carry with them daily: the fear that one day it will be them who gets mugged, assaulted, or, worse, murdered.

This sort of fear originates not because there is a statistical justification for worrying about your life every time you ride the CTA. In fact, the chances that an individual will be murdered on the train are very slim. Rather, it’s because you will invariably see at least one of the following each and every time you take the train:

• Someone jumping a turnstile.
• A crackhead shouting at bystanders. (A man once shouted at me, “I will beat you up, boy.”)
• An unkempt man walking through each train car asking for money.
• A man in disheveled clothing, smoking a joint.

Even if you aren’t being mugged or the one being shouted at, these constant low-level disruptions erode the trust, comfort, and feeling of safety that one deserves when going to work. This is why many people begin to feel that riding the train is simply not worth the anxiety, harassment, or smell of marijuana.

In Denmark, my public transit experiences could not have been more different. The train was calm, quiet, and reliable. No young men were playing loud music or behaving boisterously. And most importantly, no one was shouting unwarranted threats at me while I waited for the train to arrive. Instead, I could hop on the train, park my bike in a designated train-car without fear of it being stolen, put in my headphones, and relax until I arrived at my destination. In fact, the only disruption I ever experienced was a ticket check, which happened only twice out of at least 60 train rides.

Furthermore, every car also had a posted code of conduct. Among the rules:

• The staff has the right to order people off the train if they are behaving noisily or recklessly.
• You are to always follow directions given by our staff.

Notably, violence was the least of the Transportation Authority’s concerns. Instead, its focus was on maintaining order at the lowest levels, which not only enhanced riders’ experience but also prevented disruptions from escalating into threats to safety.

In a recent article at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Daniel Di Martino describes what Chicagoans experience on a daily basis as Third Worldism — or “the idea that you can do whatever you want, no matter how it affects others” — and boldly links the importation of people from poorly developed countries to the rise in Third Worldism.

However, Di Martino omitted a crucial point: why Third Worldism has grown in the United States and not in Denmark. It is not because of illegal immigrants, a convenient but incomplete explanation. It is because our nation’s elite believe that enforcing basic public order — clean streets, quiet subways, and vagrant-free spaces — is racist.

For example, when New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced new measures to increase safety on public transportation, multiple left-wing groups denounced it as racist because studies have shown that black Americans are cited for fare evasion at higher rates than other demographics. The assumption was clear: Any policy that produces unequal outcomes across groups must be unjust.

Should city governments and police precincts decide to crack down on low-level public behaviors, it is highly unlikely that different demographic groups will be equally represented among offenders. Elderly women will not be cited at the same rate as young men. Asian men will not be cited at the same rate as white men. And white men will not be cited at the same rate as black men. However, despite these differences, city dwellers of all backgrounds will equally be able to enjoy the benefits of enhanced public safety.

Refusing to make peace with the disparate outcomes of neutral law enforcement is in part responsible for why public transit has not been developed to the same extent as in other countries like Denmark. Voters in cities do not feel it is important to expand public transportation when existing public transit sacrifices their comfort and safety for social justice. Consequently, citizens of all backgrounds do not get to experience the utility of trains that run more frequently and with expanded routes.

This dynamic, where policies that benefit the greater good are overlooked or reversed because they do not seek to ameliorate or instead exacerbate economic, carceral, or academic racial disparities, is present in nearly all policy debates today. If illegal migrants to America were majority white, the enforcement of immigration law would not be considered racist. If elite primary schools were majority black instead of Asian or white, there would be no calls to dismantle them. And if the absolute number of people incarcerated in America did not change, but the proportion of black inmates fell below 13%, discussions about our so-called “mass incarceration” problem would vanish.

Despite Denmark’s flaws, its commitment to maintaining order in public spaces shows what’s possible when a society values the everyday comfort and safety of its citizens. America, by contrast, too often chooses paralysis. Instead of building transit systems that people want to use, we let fear of unequal outcomes prevent us from keeping our existing ones comfortable and safe.

The result is that everyone loses. The wealthy retreat into private cars and gated neighborhoods, while ordinary people are left with broken buses, unsafe trains, and a sense that public life is something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

If we truly want “nice things,” like clean parks, reliable subways, and safe streets, we must first accept an uncomfortable truth: Neutral rules will not yield equal outcomes, but they will make shared spaces livable for everyone. Until we confront that reality, America’s cities will remain places where public goods are rationed not by scarcity but by disorder.

Disorder is not progress. It is surrender. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the more we guarantee that nice things will remain out of reach — not because we can’t afford them, but because we refuse to defend them.