In her recent Next American City article, “An IPO for Cities”, Diana Lind proposes employing the financial mechanisms of Wall Street to fund urban development and maintain public infrastructure. This would be fundamentally dangerous to already fragile municipal finance systems.
Is it possible that, now four years in, we still haven’t learned anything from Depression 2.0? Is Wall Street, the cause celebre of our financial system’s downslide, really a good model for funding our cities? Would this go over well in Europe?
Cities are struggling, but raising capital through a financial tool designed to infuse cash into corporations is not the answer. Cities neither function like publicly-traded corporations nor were they intended to perform in such manner.