Large cities are more politically isolated from state capitals and Washington today than at any time in recent memory. Like her Democratic predecessors, Hillary Clinton won big cities by huge margins, carrying the District of Columbia, for example, with 93% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. Deriding inner cities as “disasters” caused by liberal urban policies, Donald Trump won small towns and rural areas by record margins. The Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the presidency and will probably soon have a reliable majority on the Supreme Court. With the exception of talk about a large infrastructure program, Republicans have proposed no major programs to aid cities. Only six states have a Democratic governor and Democratic control of both houses of the legislature. The Republicans enjoy that advantage in 25 states. It is not a good time to be a big-city mayor.

William Goldsmith and Lori Riverstone-Newell have written books that provide guidance as to how cities can make progress under such discouraging political conditions. They each do a skillful job of synthesizing the scholarly literature on their topics. In combination with Richard Schragger’s City Power (2016), Saving Our Cities, in particular, provides an overview of a surprisingly robust array of progressive urban policy experiments around the nation. Goldsmith contends that if we look more broadly at the policies that are “urban”—policies that especially impact cities but are not necessarily targeted at them—we can see that there are many ongoing successful local policy experiments that could blossom into a national progressive urban policy movement. Renegade Cities argues that cities can take official actions that serve as visible protests in order to heighten public awareness of antiurban public policies.

Riverstone-Newell documents how cities, especially since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, have gradually been shut out of federal policy. Federal aid as a percentage of local revenue fell from 17% in 1978 to 3% today (p. 51). No-strings-attached revenue sharing died in 1986. The pattern now is just the opposite of revenue sharing: Higher levels of government push unfunded mandates onto cities so that they can claim credit for addressing issues without having to raise taxes. Local governments get the responsibility without the authority or the resources. Not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution is that, legally, local governments are “mere tenants at the will of the legislature” (Dillon’s Rule, p. 34). But as Riverstone-Newell points out, one lever that cities do possess is the ability to appeal to the deeply held American belief in local control.

Renegade Cities focuses on “local activism,” defined as “official acts of defiance [by local governments] that can reasonably be understood as deliberate attempts to spotlight unfavorable higher laws and policies in order to engage the media and ‘expand the scope of conflict’ to the public” (p. 2). Essentially, city governments engage in civil disobedience, enacting protest policies in order to win political allies and get relief from unfavorable state and federal laws. Riverstone-Newell documents 1,443 acts of local activism since 1980. They range from acts that are clearly illegal to acts in the gray area of law—pushing back against unfavorable state and federal laws. She argues that local activism is on rise. Liberals more frequently use local activism, but conservatives have used it, too—as when local governments passed laws requiring landlords to report illegal immigrants.

Local governments have stepped into the vacuum created by the federal government’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The sanctuary city movement has pushed back against federal laws seeking to deport undocumented immigrants. Riverstone-Newell reports that 162 cities have passed local laws or executive orders in support of immigrants, for example, by forbidding local officials to disclose the immigration status of individuals to the federal government. Sanctuary city laws are clearly illegal; courts have ruled that the federal government alone makes immigration policy. But this is not a legal challenge; it is a political challenge. President Trump has promised to “cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities”—threatening a confrontation between cities and the federal government—that has the potential to greatly “expand the scope of conflict.” Where such a confrontation would end up is anybody’s guess.

Goldsmith’s idea that policies not specifically targeted to cities should be viewed as “urban” is not new. In the past, these have often been referred to as “stealth” urban policies. But Goldsmith has taken this idea a big step further, focusing less on the negative effects on cities and more on uncovering political spaces where progressive, stealth urban policies could lead to reinforcing cycles of political feedback, expanding the urban coalition and leading to further progressive change.

One of the more interesting parts of his book is Goldsmith’s critique of the “austerians,” a term borrowed from Paul Krugman. Goldsmith observes, correctly, that big cities are heavily reliant on public services. Other things being equal, per capita municipal expenditures increase as city size increases. This has to do with the pervasive spillover effects of urban agglomerations, the higher cost of living, and the presence of large poor populations needing social services, among other factors. The ideology of austerity, the idea that cutting taxes and shrinking government is the answer to most societal problems, has been especially harmful to cities. Goldsmith maintains that bringing more goods and services under democratic control enhances democracy. Austerity, therefore, has shrunk our democracy.

Saving Our Cities stresses that structural pressures on cities can make it very difficult to address pressing urban problems. Consider education. Persistently high levels of racial and economic segregation, taken together with the reliance on local property taxes to fund K–12 schools, means that inner-city and many inner-ring suburban schools are at a huge structural disadvantage. Even if they had equal funding, high turnover rates, disabilities, and more children with English as a second language would cause them to underperform. As Goldsmith concludes, “Against these neighborhood difficulties, school reforms can achieve little” (p. 103).

As he does throughout the book, however, Goldsmith documents examples where reforms have made a difference. Recent pushbacks against the war on drugs are good examples. The war on drugs has had a disastrous effect on inner-city, African American neighborhoods. As a result of nonviolent drug offenses, men are pulled out of families and neighborhoods, suffer degrading abuses in prison, and then return to society unable to work or vote. The author reports that the cost of keeping residents in prison for a single city block frequently exceeds $1 million, and in some Brooklyn blocks exceeds $5 million (p. 174). Goldsmith invites us to think of how this money could be better spent to educate these victims of the war on drugs or bring jobs to the neighborhood. Short of legalization, he shows how politicians are waking up to the catastrophic costs of the war on drugs. In recent years, the prison population has finally begun to shrink, and many localities are experimenting with programs to rehabilitate not just individuals but whole neighborhoods. These programs are saving lives and taxpayers’ money.

Both books inject a note of optimism into a discouraging time for cities, but they are not always forthright about their limitations. In particular, their analyses are more pertinent to global, knowledge-intensive cities than to older industrial cities, shrinking cities, smaller cities, and distressed suburbs. Riverstone-Newell is very upbeat about city government leadership: “Left to sink, most local governments have learned to swim, becoming fiscally self-reliant, competent managers, and creative advocates for the jurisdictions they serve” (p. 9). She does not present any evidence for this sweeping generalization. My sense is that it often does apply to booming global cities on the two coasts. Their land values are increasing so fast that they have little trouble achieving “fiscal self-reliance.” New York City’s economy is so successful that it can now fund its own social-democratic welfare state, making full-day pre-K available for an additional 50,000 students and generating hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units through inclusionary zoning. The situation is very different in cities like Detroit, Youngstown, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. Their tax bases are stagnant, pension obligations are exploding, and local leadership is often flailing about looking for answers. It is worth noting, as well, that the three areas addressed by the author in Renegade Cities—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, immigration, and foreign policy—are more attuned to the concerns of cosmopolitan, booming, knowledge-based cities than to the economic, fiscal, and land-development issues facing shrinking cities.

A concern I have about both books is that they fail to address the rapidly growing problems of suburban poverty. More poor people now live in suburbs than in central cities. To his credit, Goldsmith consistently mentions disadvantaged suburbs in the same breath with inner cities. With the exception of education, however, he has little to say about the special challenges facing smaller, distressed suburbs. Nearly all his examples of progressive policies come from large central cities. The fact is that austerity has hit disadvantaged suburbs much harder than central cities. They were formed as low-tax, low-public-service jurisdictions, catering to privatized lifestyles. Low-income and minority households, who depend on public goods and services, now find themselves marooned in service-poor suburban municipalities. More importantly, they lack the civic and governmental capacity to build their way out of their dilemma. Goldsmith has little to say about where disadvantaged suburbs will acquire the capacity to implement the sophisticated urban policies he rightfully highlights.

The key to Goldsmith’s analysis is what he calls “nonreformist reforms,” a term borrowed from the European New Left theorist Andre Gorz. The basic idea is that the local reforms, which are able to make progress within the interstices of deep structural determinations, set in motion positive political feedback effects that broaden support for more reforms, eventually undermining the structural forces themselves. Similarly, Riverstone-Newell argues that local activism can generate positive political feedback. I think they are both on to something. Most liberal welfare programs have tended to suppress political engagement rather than promote it. Recipients of welfare, even Obamacare subsidies, often feel ashamed and undeserving. On the other hand, local actions designed to protect human rights or that are based on extensive local civic engagement and collaboration are sources of pride and can stimulate more political engagement. Despite their many virtues, neither Renegade Cities nor Saving Our Cities provides us with the analytical tools to think critically about the difference between mobilizing and demobilizing local political reforms.