Like Boston, Like Louisville? Probably Not.
Like Boston, Like Louisville?
Boston seems likely to elect Michelle Wu to be its next mayor in November. I don’t live in Boston, but I have followed her campaign and think this is an exciting prospect. Why? First and most importantly, Wu has a lot of bold ideas designed to help people with lower incomes in the city and rein in powerful interests, like real estate developers and the police. She is a break from the dominant mayoral style in the U.S., which is a Democrat but one who is super-obsessed with bringing new businesses to his/her city, which usually means a focus on tax breaks and a large police budget and aggressive police tactics to signal that a city is safe. That approach has virtues (building up a city’s tax base) but it has resulted in a lot of cities with super-expensive restaurants and hotels that most residents of the cities can’t afford while the number of people who are homeless or struggling to pay their bills remains the same. In other words, it’s not that Greg Fischer or Muriel Bowser or Michael Bloomberg have a bad vision for running a city, but rather that we have probably maxed out on that approach and might want to rebalance with mayors less focused on appeasing the police and businesses and more focused on other parts of their communities.
Secondly, Wu is a 36-year-old Asian-American woman. Boston, despite its liberal reputation, has never before had a female or non-white mayor. While I think a politician’s policy views are by far their most important characteristics, it is important to have more people who are young, female and of color getting a chance to lead.
Why am I telling you about the Boston mayor’s race? Well, Louisville is not like Boston, but it’s more similar to Boston than you might think:
Boston’s total population is 692,000, Louisville 770,000
Boston is 45% non-Hispanic white, Louisville 67%
Boston is 25% black, Louisville 22%
Boston is 20% Hispanic, Louisville 6%
Boston is 10% Asian, Louisville 3%
About 50% of Boston residents have at least a BA, about 33% in Louisville
83% of Boston residents voted for Biden in 2020, compared to 60% in Louisville.
Louisville, like Boston, has a history of deep racial tension and has never had a non-white or female mayor.
Boston is more likely to elect a very progressive woman of color as mayor than Louisville, because it has both a higher percentage of Democrats with college degrees (a group that tends to be more left-leaning) and higher people of color than Louisville. But I think a Wu-like figure would resonate with a lot of Louisvillians and the absence of someone like her is one of the more interesting dynamics in our current’s mayor race. Wu is
1. Progressive
2. Young-ish
3. Not a white man
4. Seems like the kind of person who has the chops to run a major city, even for those who aren’t as progressive as her, with a Harvard Law degree and having served several years on the city council in Boston. (I am not sure that having a Harvard law degree means you can run much of anything, but Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign mentioned it constantly, suggesting voters thought that was a credential.)
5. Courted a lot of the major constituencies in the city as an aspiring politician, thereby reassuring even people who might be to her right on issues that they will have access to her if she is elected.
Among the candidates in Louisville, businessman Craig Greenberg has a Harvard Law degree, but doesn’t have any government experience. He is saying a lot of progressive-sounding things on the campaign trail, but his resume and experience largely working with the business community suggest he would govern in a Fischer/Bloomberg style. In fact, for a Fischer-ish mayoral approach, Greenberg is well-credentialed despite having never served in government---doing business deals, wooing the wealthy, etc. And while I don’t care too much about demographic factors, I think many in the city would be more excited about Greenberg if he were female, young or a person of color.
Activist Shameka Parrish-Wright and pastor Tim Findley are black and clearly progressive, but neither has served in elective office or spent years courting all of the community’s various constituencies. And they will suffer from the common and somewhat racialized view that businessmen are more credentialed for leadership posts than people who run non-business organizations, like churches and protest movements.
So there are two paths from here. One, a person with the kind of resume of Wu could enter the mayor’s race. Since I know some Democratic politicians in Kentucky read this newsletter, I want to note:
Only one of you will replace John Yarmuth whenever he retires;
Your chances of being elected statewide are low unless your last name is Beshear;
I”m old enough to remember when the mayor of South Bend, Ind. (population 102,000) was a viable candidate to be the president of these increasingly un-United States. (Pete Buttigieg, 2020.) If you are the person who dramatically improves Louisville, a much bigger city than South Bend and one that was in the national news recently for its racial strife, you can think way beyond Frankfort. And you will have one thing Pete didn’t---a Louisville-based national political columnist telling folks across the country how great you are if you do a good job.
Secondly, and what I think is more likely, is that candidates like Greenberg, Parrish-Wright and Findley take affirmative steps to address the holes in their resumes that I am talking about here. It would be nice if all of them named someone with experience in operating and managing a large bureaucracy as a top campaign adviser and pledged to hire that person if they are elected as essentially deputy mayor for fixing things. It would be useful if Greenberg took a view or stance during the campaign that would clearly show that he will not not align with the powers that be (the police, developers, the rich) on every issue once in office.
The Geography of Louisville’s Black Community
About half of Louisville’s black population of around 160,000 lives in majority-black areas that are broadly in the Western part of the city. It’s closer to 60 percent if you include the Newburg area, which is not in the West but is majority-black. In other words, about half of Louisville’s black population doesn’t live in a majority-black, western part of the city. That’s not shocking when you think about it. But a lot of the discourse in the city implies “West Louisville” and “Black Louisville” are the same thing, and they are not. When you are thinking about churches, vaccinations, mayoral elections and a lot of other things, this dynamic is obviously important--reaching West Louisville is only part of reaching black people in Louisville. That other half of Black Louisville is spread out through a wide variety of neighborhoods.
This is not just a story about Louisville, but about residential patterns happening throughout the country. More Americans live in a suburban county (55 percent), compared to an urban (31 percent) or rural (14) one. The plurality of black Americans in the U.S. live in suburbs, not in the center of a city. There are some areas like Washington, D.C. where lots of people are moving to the center of the city, but the broad trend is that people of all races are heading to the suburbs. The Louisville/Jefferson County merged city/county structure incorporates what would be suburban areas in most places into the broader city, so all Louisvillians live in an urban county. But this suburbanization is happening here too. About 70 percent of the people in Smoketown (an area near downtown) are black, but that’s only about 1,000 black people overall. Only 11 percent of the people in suburban Jeffersontown are black, but it’s a much more populous area, so that’s about 4,000 African-Americans.
It’s worth noting---more black people moving to the suburbs doesn’t mean that integration is happening at some mass scale. America increasingly has suburban areas with a lot of black people (think Shively) and those with very few (Norton Commons.)