The Socialist re-election in Paris, accompanied by pictures of a garbage-strewn historic colonnade on the ultra-chic Rue de Rivoli, suggests that big city governance is plunging further into Stygian depths yet unplumbed. Others of the world’s major cities suffer from the same problems, notably London and New York but also Los Angeles and Berlin. This has been a fairly recent development; in 2000 all of New York, London and Paris were clean and decently run. The implications for the metropoleis concerned are economically dire. However, there is a political solution that would probably greatly alleviate their problems.

Big cities have never been paradise, yet they are necessary for many activities that require intense personal interaction between high-level service providers. Thus, the largest banks, investment banks, top-level consultancies and film producers (for example, among others) have most of their staff in big cities, and people who wish to make careers in those well-remunerated sectors are forced to live in those cities in their early working years, thereby greatly compromising their lifestyles. The junior staff who work 100-hour weeks in investment banking are physically unable to spend much of their time commuting, and so must live in the megalopolis where their investment bank is located.

In past decades, this was only a moderate hardship. Rents and real estate prices were excessive, but not so excessive as to be completely unaffordable for those in good careers. Domestic services were abominable, because the service providers could not afford to live anywhere near the customers, but a certain amount of domestic squalor was an accepted part of a yuppie lifestyle until he or she became successful enough to throw money at the problem. The tradeoff between rapid career advancement and domestic comfort was clear. Once you settled down and started a family, you moved to the suburbs or into the country and sold your now finely honed skills to a non-megalopolis entity that would pay less but allow you a suburban or rural location and a decent lifestyle.

Cities themselves were better managed before 2000. In London, between 1986 and 2000 there was no central authority, which offered multiple advantages that I will discuss below. In Paris, a central Mayor was instituted only in 1977, but for the first 18 years the Mayor was the conservative Jacques Chirac, and it was only in 2001 that the socialists took over. In New York, the city came close to bankruptcy, squalor even worse than today’s and mass exodus in the mid-1970s, but real costs then were much lower than today. After January 1978 the capable and apolitical Mayor Ed Koch was quickly followed by the superbly reforming Rudy Giuliani and the only modestly backsliding (if overspending) Mike Bloomberg, so only in 2014 did the city resume its decay, this time with an infinitely higher level of costs.

The poisonous interaction between real estate costs and excess immigration is responsible for much of these cities’ decline. “Funny money” interest rates – the attempt by the Ben Bernankes of this world to suppress debt costs far below where they would settle in a free market – inevitably cause an endless spiral of real estate prices that pushes big city dwellings far beyond the means of ordinary people. The follies of globalization ensure that innumerable foreign predators with stolen billions enter the local real estate markets to push top-end prices up still further.

At the low end, grossly excessive legal and illegal immigration, mostly poor quality, both wreck the supply/demand balance for real estate and cause the crime, filth and other social pathologies of big cities to soar. With poor control of illegal voting, the entering riff-raff rig big-city elections perpetually in favor of the left, which causes the “salt of the earth” blue collar workers to leave the cities and move to somewhere else less expensive and more civilized – unlike an investment banker, a plumber has no employment reason to continue battling the pathologies of New York, London or Paris. The result is a death spiral, steadily worsening and irreversible without structural reform.

There are some solutions available to alleviate the problem. De-globalization will reduce the wealth of international criminals and shysters, leaving them only enough to ruin their own countries. Higher interest rates will reduce top-end real estate prices and crash stock markets, thereby redressing the balance between capital costs and wage income that has become so artificially distorted in recent years. As the Trump administration is blessedly proving, solid immigration enforcement with rejection of the leftist special interest bleating and lawsuits will reduce population pressures and crime problems. (Reducing excessive legal immigration, for example by abolishing the U.S. H1B/H2B visa programs, would both increase wages and reduce demand for big city real estate, further lessening the structural cost problem.)

There is however an additional political step that must be taken, more important than all the others, and that is to remove the central administration of the big cities and devolve them into their component parts, which can then compete with each other to improve services and reduce costs for their voter-residents. Centralization of city government under a single “Mayor” allows leftist tyrants to become embedded, building their empires of excess bureaucracy and imposing additional levies upon voters in the form of “congestion charges” and fines for politically disfavored behavior.

In London, for example, after centuries of local self-government, a central body, the London County Council was created in 1889; in 1894 the great Lord Salisbury described it as “the place where Collectivist and Socialistic experiments are tried; the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms.” In one of her finest acts of statesmanship, Margaret Thatcher abolished its successor body, the Greater London Council, by the Local Government Act, 1985. From then until 2000, London grew in prosperity as it never previously had since 1889, while crime and social pathologies steadily declined.

Alas, Tony Blair could not forbear to meddle, as he did everywhere else, so in 2000 a new Mayor of London was created, supposedly with very few powers, the first being the ineffectual leftist Ken Livingstone. Needless to say, once the Mayor existed, he found ways to increase his power and revenues, until now Sadiq Khan, hard-left Mayor since 2016, is arguably more important than the feeble Keir Starmer, and has found infinite ways to add illegal immigrant voting fodder to London’s welfare rolls and drain the wealth from its remaining productive citizens.

Paris acquired a Mayor only in 1977, before which it had been controlled directly by the central government, with each of its 20 arrondissements having its own mayor and handling local matters. Only for periods of less than six months in 1848 and 1870-71 and five years in 1789-94 did a Mayor of Paris exist. In 1789-94 the office was a poisoned chalice, with three of its five incumbents dying violently, two by the guillotine and one by suicide to avoid it – presumably after 1794 they could not find anyone to take the job. As in London, devolution to the 20 arrondissements is thus entirely feasible, and not without historical precedent.

New York is the most difficult case of the three, since the five boroughs were amalgamated as long ago as 1898. Nevertheless, the fact that the world’s richest city was close to bankruptcy in the 1970s is a strong indication that centralized government has worked little better in New York than in London or Paris.

In all three cities, the best administrative solution is to remove the centralized superstructure with its politician Mayor and devolve administration to the local level. That would give 20 arrondissements governments in Paris, each with its own Mayor, possibly with a few centralized authorities for strictly limited shared facilities such as transportation. Similarly, London could administratively be divided into 32 boroughs plus the small “City of London” financial district, as between 1985 and 2000, with the Lord Mayor of London having jurisdiction only over the City of London, but acting as ceremonial representative of the other boroughs for the Lord Mayor’s Show, presenting the Freedom of the City to foreign dignitaries, etc.

In New York, devolving into five boroughs leaves each unit administratively too large, and would allow Manhattan to dominate the other units, economically and governmentally, since most of the city’s wealth would be generated there. Instead, a split should be devised to give each neighborhood self-government, perhaps into about 20 divisions, as in Paris. Given its economic importance, Manhattan might have 8-9 divisions, while Staten Island on the other hand might be unitary (since it is politically fairly homogenous, and distinct from the rest of New York). Within Manhattan, the Wall Street financial district might be separate, like the City of London, since its population is limited and its financial strength great, while the other districts’ boundaries would be roughly equal in size and distinctive in political/social composition. The other boroughs would be divided similarly, perhaps 5 divisions for Queens and 3 each for Brooklyn and the Bronx.

With the cities so subdivided, it would become impossible for leftist central authorities to impose damaging economic and social policies on the entire city. Instead, each individual division would formulate its own policies, and they would quickly become distinctive. In Paris, the 19th, containing the Boulevard Stalingrad, would follow the strict Marxist principles of the Soviet Union’s terrible heyday, while the 16th, containing Avenue Foch, would be a “paradise” of gentry liberalism. Somewhere among the other arrondissements, havens would grow up both for young careerists and for blue-collar social traditionalists, none of whom would have to leave the city to find an arrondissement it liked.

Similarly in London, Islington would be a paradigm of gentry liberalism, while Bromley would retain its traditional middle class outlook on life, with much lower taxes and no congestion zones. If the Islington government wished to attract legal and illegal immigrants aggressively, it could do so, albeit at the cost of repelling the local upwardly-mobile professional class.

In New York, the various Manhattan districts would sort themselves politically, probably mostly following the general views of current Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens would sort themselves into a wild variety of ethnic groups and policies, with upwardly-mobile career professionals finding several alternatives, even within the city of New York, where mildly progressive policies would be combined with varying levels of tax and regulations. As for Staten Island, it would become a refuge for New York’s blue-collar population and the cleverest of the young professionals, who would find the modest commute to Wall Street on the Staten Island Ferry a small price to pay for social conservatism, low taxes, better services and affordable real estate.

In all three cities, taking a job with the most exciting large employers would no longer mean subjecting oneself to a lifestyle Devil’s Island, as it does today. Except for a few Leninist ghettoes, those cities would flourish as they have not for the last quarter-century, providing the rest of their countries and the world with the blessings of their wealth and enterprise.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)