King Utopia and Mayor Dystopia
King Charles and Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, both believe in Utopia. Different versions. And like other utopias, neither is ultimately sustainable.
An estimated 300 billion people, including my better half, arose at all hours of the day and night worldwide on May 6th to watch the first official coronation of a British monarch in 70 years.
King Charles III, the 40th monarch since the 1066 coronation of the first, William the Conquerer - a Norman who spoke French, not English - won’t likely befall the same fate as his namesake 17th Century predecessors, who were beheaded (Charles I) or, in the case of Charles II, left no heir, despite having 12 illegitimate children via several mistresses. No wonder he was called the “Merry Monarch.” His brother, King John II, succeeded him. And given who Prince Harry - the “spare” - is married to, we hope Prince William and his family employ food tasters.
About a month earlier, on April 4th, nearly 300,000 Chicago voters elected Brandon Johnson as their new mayor. He won a tight runoff election against the city’s former school chief, Paul Vallas, on the strength of outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s best precincts. Given Lighfoot’s failures, Johnson’s inheritance of her dwindled support network suggests they want the new mayor, like Joe Biden, to “finish the job.”
With a pillow. Until the city stops breathing.
King Charles is head of state for 14 Commonwealth nations, including the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Add Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Jamaica (for now), and several other small Caribbean and Pacific Island nations. But his role is largely ceremonial, unlike his namesake predecessors - Charles II infamously dissolved Parliament and largely ruled without one. Charles III will have no such power. The Brits like their tradition in its place.
Now that he's the monarch, Charles appears likely to forgo his famous policy activism of past years, including climate change, food, and environmental sustainability. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t already had an impact.
Meet Nasledan, a Cornish community planned to Charles’ specifications, on land he donated as the Duke of Cornwall (which has now fallen to the Crown Prince, William). The 540-acre property - less than one square mile - will be “sustainably” built with local artisans and construction materials. Nearly nine years ago, then-Prince Charles laid out his philosophy for the new utopian enterprise in Architectural Review magazine. You can paint your front door any color that Charles approves, akin to Henry Ford’s retort to color choices for his Model T - any color, so long as it’s black.
I have lost count of the times I have been accused of wanting to turn the clock back to some Golden Age. Nothing could be further from my mind. My concern is the future. We face the terrifying prospect by 2050 of another three billion people on this planet needing to be housed, and architects and urban designers have an enormous role to play in responding to this challenge. We have to work out now how we will create resilient, truly sustainable and human-scale urban environments that are land-efficient, use low-carbon materials and do not depend so completely upon the car. However, for these places to enhance the quality of people’s lives and strengthen the bonds of community, we have to reconnect with those traditional approaches and techniques honed over thousands of years which, only in the 20th century, were seen as ‘old-fashioned’ and of no use in a progressive modern age. It is time to take a more mature view.
You will own nothing, including a car. And you will be happy. And stop making babies, you plebians; you’re scaring the King. Nobody tell Charles that “old-fashioned” families had lots of babies.
I wonder how much Cornish farmland Charles gave up for his utopian urban vision. No word about whether the tampons provided will meet Charles’ “sustainable” vision for them.
In fairness, then-Prince Charles, almost exactly 12 years ago, gave an interesting “Future of Food” speech at a conference in Washington where he detailed his vision. He wasn’t entirely wrong about intensive farming methods, food insecurity, food waste (more a problem with date-labeling of food products), and the bias of US farm subsidies towards intensive crops like corn and soybeans versus minor crops such as fruits and vegetables. But he laments large food production facilities and cheap food. He suggests we might “value” food more if it costs more.
Easy for him to say. From his 2011 speech in Washington, DC:
Food is now much cheaper than it was and one of the unexpected consequences of this is, perhaps, that we do not value it as once we did. I cannot help feeling some of this problem could be avoided with better food education. You only have to consider the progress your First Lady, Mrs Obama, has achieved lately by launching her “Let’s Move” campaign – a wonderful initiative, if I may say so. With manufacturers making their “Healthy Weight Commitment” and pledging to cut 1.5 trillion calories a year from their products; with Walmart promising to sell products with less sugar, salt and trans-fats, and to reduce their prices on healthy items like fresh fruits and vegetables; and with the First Lady’s big drive to improve healthy eating in schools and the excellent thought of urging doctors to write out prescriptions for exercise; these are marvellous ideas that I am sure will make a major difference.
As for those big food manufacturing facilities, they operate with efficiencies, including reduced carbon footprints, efficient transportation networks, and other elements that a massive network of smaller facilities can’t match. And has anybody seen Walmart or any other retailer lower the cost of fruits and vegetables lately? Asking for a friend.
His praise for then-First Lady Michelle Obama’s programs may sound good until you realize that her top-down and highly prescriptive changes to school nutrition programs resulted in massive increases in school food waste - kids discovered that new standards for foods like pizza tasted like cardboard, and they threw them away. The Trump Administration, under then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Purdue, relaxed utopian (that word!) standards to give local schools more flexibility. It worked. It turns out that schoolchildren like tasty foods as much as adults do.
But good luck to the fine people of Nasledan - Cornish for “broad valley” - and their new utopian enterprise. I’ll be eager to see how “sustainable” it ultimately becomes.
As for Mayor-elect Johnson - he assumes office on May 15 - he has a different utopia in mind. Successful homeowners and most other middle-class Chicagoans had better be ready to experience this scene from National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978).
From a terrific Substack post by Mary Williams Walsh, writing for “News Items” by John Ellis (you should subscribe):
By taxing the rich, of course. Johnson has called for a “mansion tax” on home sales over $1 million; a “big banks, securities and speculation tax” on trading; a “Chicago jet fuel tax” on the big airlines; a $4-per-employee-per-month “head tax” on large corporations; and new user fees “on high-end commercial districts frequented by the wealthy, suburbanites, tourists and business travelers.”
Initially, he also called for taxing the suburbanites who ride the trains to jobs in the Loop “to earn their disproportionately higher income.” But there was an uproar and that idea was shelved.
Still, you can see the thinking. There’s somebody out there with “disproportionately higher income,” and Mayor-elect Johnson thinks they should fund his blue utopia.
But you can’t tax the rich if the rich are leaving. Last year four large companies left Chicago: Boeing, Caterpillar, Tyson Foods, and Citadel, the big hedge fund. With them went hundreds of taxpaying employees and millions in philanthropic dollars.
McDonald’s has so far stayed put, but its CEO, Chris Kempczinski, recently told the Economic Club of Chicago that high taxes and rising crime were making it hard to recruit.
“There is a general sense out there that our city is in crisis,” he said.
All those taxes are passed on to, if not directly borne, by everyone. Those sounds you hear are the U-Hauls and moving vans leaving Chicago east and west on I-80, I-70, I-74, and south on I-55 towards the free states of Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and elsewhere. The Heritage Foundation:
From July 2021 to July 2022, more than 142,000 people moved out of state than moved in. Only New York state experienced a faster rate of population decline.
To put that loss into perspective, consider that about 127,000 Illinois residents died in that same period. In terms of state population change, Illinois’ emigration problem effectively doubled its death rate.
Here in America, we have no history of beheadings. We conduct ours through elections. Just ask outgoing Chicago Mayor Lightfoot. And if history is any guide, if anyone is left in Chicago over the next four years, Mayor Johnson is likely to experience a similar fate. As for population loss, maybe Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Johnson are counting on “replacements.”
The exodus to lower-tax states is about to accelerate. And that will make for an interesting reapportionment of congressional seats in 2030. By then, Democrats will be grateful that every state has two United States Senators, including the ones they’re destroying, as red states see their US House delegations grow.