An interview last week with a local official connected with this drive to get more people to move into the City of Lancaster. I asked a bunch of questions, and when I was done, he asked one:

So, what would it take to get you to move into the city?

I laughed and dodged the question. Because the answer is: I would never live in the city.

Which isn’t meant as a slam against Lancaster, per se. Frankly, if I were going to live in a city, Lancaster would be a nice choice. There’s a decent amount of quality housing stock available at a relatively low price. Those who live outside the city like to think the violence which has plagued the city for much of this spring and summer is pervasive, but it really isn’t (Steve Johnson’s op-ed about the relative perils of living near the corner of North Queen and West Lemon streets notwithstanding).

But I live in the suburbs mostly because I like the suburbs. I like the idea of a yard for the kids to play in, one big enough to toss a baseball or a football or a Frisbee. I like the idea of a yard less when the grass does its annual up-and-die, long about mid-July, or when its time trim the evil, thorned barberry bushes. But mostly I like not having to live right up against someone else. I did that much of my adult life, in apartments; the first home I bought was a townhouse. There’s a certain economy to it - as there is to city living as a whole. And I have lived in the city, on Pittsburgh’s Perry Hilltop neighborhood for a spell in the early 1990s. I lived below a drug dealer who had people coming and going at all hours, and once left the bathtub faucets running while he dashed out to take care of an “errand.” You supply the ending. But that’s just one reason I like a little bit of my own space, thank you very much.

In any event - and what a transition - the Atlantic is hosting its Aspen Ideas Festival this week, and some of those ideas come from one Joel Kotkin. Kotkin is not a big fan of downtown revitalization efforts, one reason you’ll probably never read about him in your local papers - and in fact I’d never heard of him, until I came across this dispatch from Ross Douthat, on Kotkin’s talk at the festival:

The notion that Americans are moving back to downtowns in large numbers is a myth, Kotkin announced; instead, they’re moving ever outward, into new exurbs and rural areas. The traditional unipolar urban downtown isn’t going to make a comeback: Young couples with families can’t afford to live there, and aging Baby Boomers don’t want to. The American city of the future will be more of an archipelago of suburbs than the kind of one-downtown organism bred by the Industrial Revolution: “We aren’t creating more New Yorks and Chicagos; we’re creating more Los Angeleses.”

It’s almost sacreligious to say that, especially in a community such as this one which is so desperate to revitalize its downtowns. It isn’t going to work. Well, that’s what opponents of the convention center have been saying for a decade. But while they might have specific reasons this particular revitalization tactic won’t work - and believe other uses of the old Watt & Shand Building could have worked, or could have worked better - what Kotkin seems to be saying is, don’t waste your time, period. History is trending away from the urban core of yore and towards the suburbs:

The suburbs are a triumph, not a torture chamber: They’re the place where “we’ve created the first mass middle class in the history of the world where people own their own land and their own homes,” which is an achievement to be celebrated and sustained, rather than denigrated and abandoned. People love living in them: Suburbanites are happier and enjoy a more vibrant civic life than other Americans, and it’s not just bigoted whites hiding out in gated communities; immigrants, in particular, are voting for the suburbs with their feet, to the point where the best ethnic cuisine in the country is increasingly served way out in the exurbs.

Matt Yglesias responds by saying, look, urbanists aren’t saying everyone must move downtown; what they want are incentives to do so, or rather disincentives:

Quite naturally, the combination of cars being invented, cars being massively subsidized, and governments being successfully lobbied by car companies to dismantle mass transit systems led to a massive shift in the direction of sprawl. But by that same token, if we step away from those policies to some extent we’ll see a rebalancing in the direction of urbaism.

Well, maybe; and to the extent that surburban sprawl, however much people may like or want it, indeed is a huge factor in our dependence upon oil, it stands to reason that the government should “step away from those policies” - though Yglesias’s preferred methods for doing so involve carbon taxes or zoning laws allowing for higher-density development, whereas I tend to think that rather than punishing people for making the choice they want, to live in the suburb, the government might reward those who make the more sustainable choice to live in an urban area, through tax breaks for city homebuyers, not just low-income ones; through, perhaps, the further subsidization of mass-transit designed specifically to cater to urban life - like the much-maligned idea to bring streetcars back to Lancaster.

I still don’t know that this would be enough to entice me back into the city, or at least not until the kids are grown and gone. But perhaps there is a case to be made that the subsidization of amenities within a city - and the convention center would probably not qualify, though Clipper Magazine Stadium would - may indeed provide added incentive for those who might be inclined to abandon the shady ‘burbs for a city row home. There are people on that fence, and who knows; once the kids go and I’m too old to throw a Frisbee, I might be inclined to climb over it myself.