American cities are coming back, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says

WASHINGTON — “We are better than this.”

That was the message Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms delivered on May 29, 2020, as cities across the country convulsed with protest and unrest over the murder of George Floyd. As a Black woman governing the most forward-looking city in the South — Atlanta was famously “too busy to hate” during the 1960s — Bottoms could forget neither who she was nor what her constituents required.

In that day’s remarks, she embraced the tension in uncommonly forthright terms. “I wear this each and every day, and I pray over my children each and every day,” she said of the racism that Floyd’s killing put on such grotesque display. But, she added, “when Dr. King was assassinated, we didn’t do this to our city.”

A year later, with the coronavirus pandemic seemingly on the wane and Donald Trump no longer stoking racial divisions from the White House or on Twitter, Bottoms surprised Atlanta, and the Democratic establishment, by announcing she would not seek a second term. “Just because you can do it doesn’t always necessarily mean that you should do it,” she said at the time.

Her next job would be in Washington, where earlier this year Bottoms, now 52, was appointed a senior White House adviser on external affairs. Once having been considered a potential running mate to Joe Biden, she now joins an administration rife with former mayors, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (South Bend, Ind.), Labor Secretary Marty Walsh (Boston) and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge (Warrensville Heights, a Cleveland suburb).

Speaking to Yahoo News earlier this month, Bottoms reflected on how far American cities have come since 2020 — and how much further they have to go. “We know that a recovery takes time,” she said, in a plea for patience difficult to make in a nation that is restless after two years of restrictions, lockdowns and shortages. “The American city really is reflective of where we are as a country.”

Tourists have returned, as a quick survey of the crowds in Times Square in New York City or the National Mall in Washington confirms. Office workers haven’t. Some restaurants are thriving. Others are not, with 159,000 eating establishments having closed across the country in 2020 alone. This includes famed spots like the Plum Tree Inn, a mainstay in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, and the iconic City Tavern in Philadelphia, not to mention casual downtown eateries that were unable to compete with corporate chains or reorient deftly to delivery-first tastes.

“People are very eager to get out and about and get back to some type of normalcy,” Bottoms said. This is inarguably true, but inflation has raised the price of many social experiences, making a 2022 staycation potentially as pricey as traveling. The once innocent pastime of enjoying a baseball game, for example, costs an average of $204 for a family of four in 2022 — and likely much more in major markets like Boston or Chicago. Cities had become unaffordable long before the pandemic, but the pandemic, with all its attendant economic woes, has put that unaffordability in stark relief.

Then there is the fear of crime, which has dovetailed with lingering fears of the coronavirus to foster the feeling — exaggerated, but rooted in reality — that lawlessness now pervades. The most recent report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association shows that in the biggest American cities, murder and rape dropped in the first six months of 2022 compared with 2021 — though the frequency of both remains far above 2019 levels. Both robbery and aggravated assault showed steep rises in 2022 relative to 2021.

Unlike some other Democratic leaders, the politically astute Bottoms did not join calls to “defund the police,” instead arguing that Atlanta was already doing the work that criminal justice activists have demanded. She remains careful in how she talks about crime, as does President Biden, who finds himself caught between his own long-standing support of law enforcement and a Democratic base demanding reforms that moderates would likely resist.

“We know that communities want to have safe interactions with police. And we know that police, by and large, want to have safe interactions with communities; everyone wants to return home safely at the end of the day,” the former mayor told Yahoo News. Most officers, she argued, “want to be guardians, and not warriors, in the communities.”

Biden has signed an executive order restricting the flow of surplus of military equipment to federal law enforcement. But the militarization of police — pioneered in Los Angeles by controversial chiefs William Parker and Daryl Gates — has always been a local issue, one that Congress would have to address.

Bottoms notes that the president has called for an assault weapons ban. Though such a move would be symbolically significant, military-style rifles account for a small fraction of the guns used to commit crime in the United States.

The day he tested positive for the coronavirus, Biden was to travel to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to tout a "Safer America" plan that devotes $37 billion from the president's proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year to hiring police officers, increasing funding to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and supporting criminal justice reform programs that have shown promise. If the plan satisfies neither progressives nor conservatives, it has on it the fingerprints of an administration that favors a deliberate and unshowy approach to advancing policy goals, which it has recently done with some frequency.

For the most part, violent crime affects poor people of color, young Black men in particular. But those are rarely the crimes that receive press coverage. The most high-profile homicide in Atlanta in recent memory is that of Katie Janness, a white woman who was fatally stabbed while walking her dog in Piedmont Park. Fearful of crime, the Buckhead district — a bastion of white wealth that stands as a gateway to Atlanta’s coveted northern suburbs — has tried to secede from the city, in an effort that has echoes of midcentury attempts to avoid school integration by creating all-white suburban school districts.

The fall of 2022 will be a test for how resilient cities are. And that resilience hinges on factors that remain, in part, beyond the control of mayors, governors and even the president. A new variant of the coronavirus could disrupt schooling. A spike in gas prices could frustrate return-to-office plans, which would in turn put new pressure on small downtown businesses while leaving streets and public transit systems empty.

But for now, Bottoms is hopeful. “We've made it to the other side,” she told Yahoo News. “And we're still standing.”