The Reasons US Cities Are Grittier Than Foreign Ones
Tucker Carlson is the latest in a long line of commentators to point out that overseas cities often outshine those in America. He’s not entirely wrong.
Since the 1980s, US cities began to recover, but not all of them shared in the renaissance.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
I’ve never been to Moscow, but I’ve heard that it has become pretty snazzy over the past decade-plus (“Moscow’s Makeover Swaps Soviet Grit for Urban Sparkle” was a Bloomberg Businessweek headline from 2017). I have been to many other cities in the developed world and can testify that they tend to be cleaner and safer and have better-maintained infrastructure than American ones.
So I’m not going to join in the chorus of derision aimed at conservative infotainer Tucker Carlson after his claim at a conference in Dubai last week that Moscow, which he had just visited to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin, “is so much nicer than any city in my country.” Instead, I will try to answer his questions.