The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE OBSOLESCENCE OF THE CITY
The following material should be of particular interest to businesses that 
feel a compulsion, perhaps bred from long-obsolete habits, to locate them-
selves in large cities. We have previously observed that cities evolved (1) as 
places of communal defense and (2) centers of commerce.
The airplane and the ballistic missile made cities into attractive and 
indefensible targets more than 65 years ago. Cantor Fitzgerald’s reward 
for its presence in New York was the loss of two-thirds of its workforce on 
9/11, and its neighbor Marsh & McLennan also lost hundreds of employ-
ees. The Internet has meanwhile made obsolete the function of a city as a 
center of commerce.
There was a time, namely decades ago, that members of the Chicago 
Board of Trade exchanged commodities in person. The author’s uncle 
commuted more than an hour each way from a North Shore suburb for 
this purpose. There was also a time when all stocks had to be sold on the 
floor of the New York Stock Exchange or American Stock Exchange. It 
now possible to buy or sell a stock in literally seconds, and for a nominal 
commission, over the Internet. The server that processes the exchange, 
and the employees who manage it, can be anywhere in the country. There 
is no need to pay for big city taxes, big city office space, or premium sala-
ries to cover the extra cost of living in a big city. Intelligent managers will 
realize the wisdom of Ford’s words: “The modern city has been prodi-
gal, it is to-day bankrupt, and to-morrow it will cease to be.” Ford (1922, 
pp. 118–122) elaborates on this considerably with a chapter called “The 
City: A Pestiferous Growth.”
* * *
Industry will decentralize. There is no city that would be rebuilt as it is, were 
it destroyed—which fact is in itself a confession of our real estimate of our 
cities. The city had a place to fill, a work to do. Doubtless the country places 
would not have approximated their livableness had it not been for the cit-
ies. By crowding together, men have learned some secrets. They would never 
have learned them alone in the country. Sanitation, lighting, social organi-
zation—all these are products of men’s experience in the city. But also every 
social ailment from which we to-day suffer originated and centres in the big 
cities. You will find the smaller communities living along in unison with the 
seasons, having neither extreme poverty nor wealth—none of the violent 
plagues of upheave and unrest which afflict our great populations. There is 

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Why Be Poor?  •  175
something about a city of a million people which is untamed and threaten-
ing. Thirty miles away, happy and contented villages read of the ravings of 
the city! A great city is really a helpless mass. Everything it uses is carried 
to it. Stop transport and the city stops. It lives off the shelves of stores. The 
shelves produce nothing. The city cannot feed, clothe, warm, or house itself. 
City conditions of work and living are so artificial that instincts sometimes 
rebel against their unnaturalness.
And finally, the overhead expense of living or doing business in the great 
cities is becoming so large as to be unbearable. It places so great a tax upon 
life that there is no surplus over to live on. The politicians have found it easy 
to borrow money and they have borrowed to the limit. Within the last decade 
the expense of running every city in the country has tremendously increased. 
A good part of that expense is for interest upon money borrowed; the money 
has gone either into non-productive brick, stone, and mortar, or into necessi-
ties of city life, such as water supplies and sewage systems at far above a rea-
sonable cost. The cost of maintaining these works, the cost of keeping in order 
great masses of people and traffic is greater than the advantages derived from 
community life. The modern city has been prodigal, it is to-day bankrupt, 
and to-morrow it will cease to be.