Urban Travelers Meet in Clash of Perceptions

Re “The Urban Divide,” Opinion, Sept. 2: Does Joel Kotkin really expect us to believe that it’s better to be poor in Houston than in Rotterdam or Paris? Immigrants in Holland’s suburbs go to schools as good as those in wealthy neighborhoods in the United States. The French can visit private physicians on a couple of hours’ notice and pay $20. In Copenhagen, Iraqi immigrants, many of them torture victims, receive inexpensive housing, free language instruction and free medical and psychiatric treatment. In Paris, every social class uses a great public transportation system whose fares are regulated. The list of inclusive services could go on and on.

Racism is as serious a problem in Europe as it is in the U.S., but Europe’s sense of public provision helps bring people together while also helping the economy. Kotkin mistakenly describes Europe’s different form of capitalism while wrongly encouraging us to accept bad working and living conditions as the price of prosperity.

Chris Newfield

Santa Barbara

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Gee, I’m so glad Kotkin set me straight! Here I thought I was going to a great place when I went to Amsterdam. I thought I was coming in through one of the world’s best airports (with express train links all over the country) to a nation that trades more of its goods internationally than the U.S. I thought I was seeing a vibrant, cafe-clogged multiracial city full of lively mixed-income neighborhoods served by excellent transit. I thought I saw a city that was building furiously, building whole new in-town neighborhoods. I thought I saw a city where the social--affordable--housing could only be distinguished from market-rate housing by quite subtle clues.

But having read Kotkin, I realize that it was actually a postindustrial wasteland riven by racial tension of a kind which, of course, doesn’t exist in the U.S. I only wish I’d gone to downtown Houston for a real taste of urban life, as Kotkin advised me.

Nathan Landau

Berkeley