T here is much to like in Joel Kotkin’s well-written polemic against the latest fashion in urban revitalization circles ["Urban Legend," Issue #2]. Dismayed by what he pejoratively deems the "rise of the boutique city," Kotkin criticizes its promoters for focusing on art galleries, coffee-houses, museums, and other "yuppie accoutrements" as vehicles for urban salvation. Although he soft-pedals the origin of this advice, he is really taking aim at George Mason University professor and ∏ber-consultant Richard Florida and his best-selling book of four years ago, The Rise of the Creative Class. Powered by an admirable belief in cities as places for "a broad spectrum of people to improve their lives and that of their families," rather than places increasingly populated by extreme haves and have-nots, Kotkin dismisses urban vogue and stresses a back-to-basics approach to city governance.

Like Kotkin, I would like contemporary U.S. cities to be places that accommodate all people rather than only the very rich and the serving poor. A sandwich composed of bread and little else cannot nourish the body, let alone the soul. And like Kotkin, I seek policy prescriptions that would stimulate the appetite of his preferred demographic, middle- and working-class families, to stay in or return to central cities. However, the principal problem today is not a myopic addiction of certain mayors and governors to the seductive calls of "boutique" pushers. The distressing downward drift of mostly Northeast and Midwest Rust-Belt American cities has a decades-long and far more complicated pedigree than that. By introducing the proverbial straw city of the boutique, Kotkin misrepresents today’s urban policy environment and unnecessarily trivializes his legitimate back-to-basics reminder...