Joe Cortright's latest dispatch from City Observatory cuts through the noise of daily headlines to expose a dangerous disconnect: our collective imagination of American cities is not only wrong, it is actively gendered and divorced from reality. In a week where policy debates often feel stuck in gridlock, this piece offers a rare, data-driven clarity on why we fear our cities more than they actually are, and how our mental maps are being drawn by stereotypes rather than street-level experience.
The Gendered Geography of Perception
Cortright opens with a startling revelation from a new YouGov survey of over 2,000 Americans: the way we view cities is deeply split by gender, often in ways that have nothing to do with actual visitation. "Women rate Portland a remarkable 31 percentage points higher than men—the largest gender gap among 50 major cities surveyed," he notes, highlighting a cultural divide that defies simple explanation. The data reveals a West Coast preference among women and a Southern tilt among men, yet the most damning statistic is that these opinions are formed almost entirely in the abstract. "These perceptions largely come from Americans who've never actually visited these places—only New York City had been visited by a majority of respondents," Cortright writes, exposing how our "mental maps of American cities are deeply gendered."
This framing is effective because it shifts the blame from the cities themselves to the media ecosystem that feeds us secondhand impressions. We are living in a "cultural geography where women are metaphorically 'from Portland' and men 'from Oklahoma City,'" a construct that has real consequences for migration, investment, and political will. Critics might argue that perception is all that matters in real estate and politics, but Cortright's point is that these perceptions are increasingly unmoored from the physical reality of safety and opportunity, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of decline where none exists.
The Myth of the Rising Murder Rate
Perhaps the most urgent argument in the piece concerns our collective anxiety about safety. Cortright tackles the "extreme cognitive dissonance" of a public that believes crime is soaring while the data screams the opposite. "By every measure, but especially by murder rates, crime is vastly lower now than it was in the 80s or 90s," he asserts, grounding the argument in decades of FBI data that shows a steady decline. Yet, the public narrative remains stuck in a loop of fear. "A majority of Americans think the murder rate is up. Only about one in five know that murder rates are down substantially," he observes, pointing to a crisis of information that is far more dangerous than the crime itself.
The core of his argument is that this fear is not just a statistical error; it is a policy poison. "The truly scary thing about murder in the United States is the fearful and deeply wrong notion that we have that our cities have become more dangerous, when the reverse is actually true," Cortright writes. This disconnect fuels support for punitive measures and diverts resources from actual solutions. While one could argue that local spikes in disorder post-pandemic justify some concern, Cortright rightly emphasizes that the macro-trend is one of improvement, and the national conversation is failing to reflect that progress. The belief that cities are becoming more dangerous is a "sign of the times perhaps that belief has become so unmoored from facts."
The Highway Funding Reckoning
The commentary then pivots to infrastructure, where the stakes are financial and environmental. Cortright uses the Allston, Massachusetts, freeway project as a case study for how the loss of federal funding might force a necessary correction. The Biden Administration had awarded a $327 million grant for the I-90 project, but the "Big Beautiful Bill" clawed it back, forcing the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) to reconsider an eight-lane expansion. "Our charge to the engineering consultant will be to maximize the transportation and other benefits within available resources," MassDOT Director Luisa Paiewonsky told stakeholders, signaling a shift toward efficiency over excess.
Cortright sees this as a rare opportunity for course correction, contrasting it sharply with the situation in Oregon. He argues that the federal funds were often used to enable "even larger projects, with more lanes, more traffic, and more pollution, rather than mitigating the negative environmental effects of freeways." The situation in Oregon serves as a cautionary tale of institutional inertia. "ODOD is basically your kitchen remodeler from hell," Cortright quips, describing an agency that "tear[s] up your kitchen, and then... say[s] it's going to be two times or three times what they said it was." While the Oregon Department of Transportation faces a $1.5 billion gap and is laying off staff, it appears "to be trying to blunder forward with exactly the same bloated project," refusing to downsize despite the fiscal reality. This refusal to adapt highlights a dangerous rigidity in state transportation agencies that prioritizes megaprojects over community needs.
The truly scary thing about murder in the United States is the fearful and deeply wrong notion that we have that our cities have become more dangerous, when the reverse is actually true.
The Supply-Side Solution to Rents
Finally, Cortright turns to housing, dismantling the idea that new construction drives up rents. Citing new research from the Pew Charitable Trusts, he reinforces the counterintuitive finding that building more housing is the only proven way to lower costs. "The key to keeping housing affordable and avoiding displacement is building more housing," he states, summarizing the study's findings on rental inflation from 2017 to 2024. The data shows that in markets where housing stock increased the most, rents actually declined, particularly in older, less expensive units.
The mechanism is simple but often ignored: new supply reduces competition for existing units. "The large declines in class C reflect the interconnection of housing markets: building new units... lessens the competition for Class B and Class C units, and helps push down (or hold down) their rents," Cortright explains. This effect ripples outward, with the study finding that "new construction has about four times as much positive impact on regional rents as on local rents." Critics might argue that new luxury units do not directly help low-income families, but Cortright's analysis of the "trickle-down" effect on older buildings provides a compelling economic rebuttal. The argument is that affordability is a regional market dynamic, not just a local zoning issue.
Bottom Line
Cortright's strongest move is weaving these disparate threads—gendered perception, crime statistics, infrastructure bloat, and housing supply—into a single narrative about the gap between American myth and American reality. The piece's greatest vulnerability lies in its optimism that data alone can shift entrenched political narratives, particularly regarding crime and highway expansion. However, the clarity of the evidence presented makes it impossible to ignore: our cities are safer, more affordable, and more inclusive than the stories we tell ourselves suggest, and fixing that story is the first step to fixing the cities themselves.