San Francisco should be profitable—instead property owners are

Georgism almost cured American cities, then the Gilded Age screwed them up.

This is part of “Let Cities Build Utopia,” an 11-part series on the future of cities. Collect the complete series as a print pamphlet, digital pamphlet, or audiobook.

At the same time that Bournville was establishing an idyllic hamlet for factory workers, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were competing to power America’s first urban district: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Tesla won the contract, and when Chicago debuted the fair’s “White City” across the waterfront, it became a spectacle of light. Twelve massive Westinghouse generators powered 100,000 lamps, lighting up canals, plazas, fountains, and buildings. More than 27 million people traveled to see it.

Source: Tesla Science Center

What followed was a revolution in utopian city building, but an altogether different one from England’s. If the European movement was about economic justice and the welfare of the working class, the American movement was more about private property and the aesthetic vision of industrialist capitalists. Developers used steel to build the world’s first skyscrapers, and Elisha Otis invented elevators that would take people to the top. Edison and Tesla powered our buildings, Bell Labs created telephones that connected them, and Ford mass-produced automobiles that allowed faster travel time between cities.

Cities were being improved, not by government reform, but by corporate innovation!!!

By the time the labor movement arrived at the turn of the 20th century, there was a utopian faith that technology, more than politics, would solve worker welfare. American companies were producing washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators that promised to liberate women and give them more leisure time. Automobiles made it possible for workers to live in a pastoral suburb far away from the sooty city. Radios and eventually movie theaters made entertainment more accessible to everyone.

Industrialization might have been the problem in England, but it was also the solution in America, and that came with a very different set of ideals.

We can see this contrast plainly when reading two utopian novels of the period, one written in 1888 Boston, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and another written in 1890 London, William Morris’ News from Nowhere. Both novels imagined the year 2000, but the English one imagines a nostalgic Garden City aesthetic, with tranquil boat transportation, and no factory in sight; while the American one features architectural grandeur, music piped from central orchestras into every home, and Amazon-like warehouses providing for our every need.

If London dreamed of an anti-factory, anti-metropolis, pastoral paradise, Boston dreamed of a pro-progress, post-scarcity, techtopia!!!

My great-grandfather spent 50 years inventing lightbulbs for Edison and my family still has his paychecks, signed by Thomas Edison, hanging on our walls—it’s his wife’s wedding ring I wear. There was a mythos then, passed down to us today, that Americans could create a better future with our own ingenuity—with companies and research labs and governments that funded innovation rather than social welfare. Even after the Great Depression hit, the government used its money to fund ambitious highway projects, the Hoover Dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge—feats of engineering and skill that would keep people employed, rather than housed. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, General Electric debuted Futurama, a near future model city with a vast highway system, automated cars, and modern cities.

These ideals bettered American lives, but they didn’t build better cities.