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America Twenty-One

Exploration

Imagine twenty-one thriving American cities.

An exploratory, resident-centered study of healthy and resilient growth in twenty-one midsize U.S. cities.

Proposed direction · Research before intervention · Learn from people already leading the work
combination image of a dirt road leading to a vibrant city at night

Rebalancing a crucial global nation

The world’s most powerful country has a major global impact. Today, the nation’s population patterns are imbalanced, making it unable to advance popular policies, including many that affect nature and health.

America Twenty-One supports the development of twenty-one cities in rural American states to help them compete more effectively with the country’s leading population centers.

As these midsize cities grow, America’s democracy should increasingly stabilize, potentially improving life outcomes nationally and around the world.

Project brief

America Twenty-One is an exploratory research project about how a set of midsize U.S. cities could become healthier, more welcoming, and more economically resilient. Growth is not automatically good, and demographic change should not be treated as a tool for engineering electoral outcomes. The useful question is whether residents and local institutions want growth—and whether housing, transportation, public services, ecology, and civic participation can improve with it.

Working principles

  • Let residents and local institutions define success; measure wellbeing, affordability, displacement, and fiscal resilience.
  • Favor inclusive infill, safe streets, housing choice, strong public services, and existing neighborhood assets.
  • Treat each city as distinct and keep all political analysis transparent, pluralistic, and nonpartisan.

Organizations and resources to learn from

These independent links are starting points for research. They are not endorsements, funding recommendations, or claims of partnership.

Near-term milestones

  1. Rebuild the city-selection method with current public data and publish the assumptions.
  2. Replace static job and housing-price snapshots with dated, reproducible indicators from public sources.
  3. Pilot one resident-reviewed city brief covering assets, constraints, local plans, displacement risk, and ways to participate.

Current status

Research and relationship-building. Lifeco is not yet operating a field program under this project.

How to help

We welcome residents of the featured cities, local planners and organizers, housing and transportation researchers, public-finance experts, demographers, and civic data specialists. If that is you, contact Lifeco and mention this project.

The Twenty-One Cities

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1. Detroit, Michigan

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2. Lewiston, Maine

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3. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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4. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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5. Anchorage, Alaska

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6. Phoenix, Arizona

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7. Billings, Montana

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8. Sioux Falls, South Dakota

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9. Jacksonville, Florida

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10. Cheyenne, Wyoming

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11. Fargo, North Dakota

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12. Des Moines, Iowa

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13. Charlotte, North Carolina

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14. Salt Lake City, Utah

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15. Atlanta, Georgia

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16. Omaha, Nebraska

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17. Jackson, Mississippi

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18. Boise, Idaho

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19. Wichita, Kansas

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20. Charleston, South Carolina

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21. Charleston, West Virginia

Why?

Because 1) Less populous states have more voting power.

And 2) More populous states have bigger economies.

And 3) These imbalances increase between each election.

So 4) America can’t do what most Americans want.

And 5) Americans in rural states make less money.

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Founding Falters

Protection for small states was part of America’s founding bargain, but it’s reached extremes our nation’s most republican architects would recognize as ethically strained.

A voter in Wyoming has about 60 times more influence on their government than one in California.

By 2040, fewer than a third of Americans may control more than two-thirds of the Senate.

Two of the last four presidents lost the national popular vote, and now five of our nine Supreme Court justices have been appointed by unpopular presidents and approved by unrepresentative Senates.

This is minority rule.

Its political effect is shockingly one-sided—the 51 Democratic Senators serving today represent over 40 million more Americans than their 49 Republican counterparts.

If 1% of blue state Americans lived in purple states instead, our Senate would be ruled today not by a bare majority but a preponderance of Democrats, likely with a strong moderate bloc.

They would have long since delivered broadly supported versions of their most popular policies, from a livable minimum wage to background checks for gun sales to universal healthcare to climate crisis control.

Nonpartisan majorities have repeatedly reported that they badly want these changes, but our foundational imbalance blocks the will of the people, costing millions of lives and even endangering the future of our species.

The tragedy of American politics, it turns out, is not that we’re bitterly divided, but that we agree on almost everything and get almost nothing done.

This is an infuriating, heartbreaking situation—a logical and moral epic fail.

So it bears emphasizing that none of us is doing anything about it.

None of us.

Anything.

Why?

Blue Herrings

The Interstate Compact signed by 15 states and D.C. may someday bring majority rule to the national executive branch and, by eventual extension, those members of the judiciary appointed thereby.

This compact may never take effect, however, and even if it did, would always be subject to changes from state legislatures, which could reverse it at any time.

Worse, even if the compact works, the national Senate will still guarantee an increasingly outnumbered minority the power to veto popular action.

To change that structure, we would need a constitutional amendment, which (Catch 22) we can’t pass without Senators from the majority winning more states than they currently can.

Similar steep barriers apply to more far-fetched plans like splitting California or combining the Dakotas. And were the U.S. to admit all its territories to full statehood (arguably the fair thing to do for residents there), the disparity between voter influence in the least and most populous states would only increase.

Finally, protecting and expanding voting rights (another popular enterprise to which the minority presently objects) can do nothing to address the political imbalance stemming from where voters live.

And as a cherry on top of this couldn’t-be-sadder sundae, one lesson of the 2020 election appears to be that higher turnout may anyhow do little to advance majority policy.

In other words, it seems like we have options, but we don’t.

What’s Left

This brings us to the strange but lonely solution to our present state of injurious inequity—we must apply sustained cultural, political, and financial resources to develop thriving urban areas in rural states.

At once too simple and too difficult, this plan may seem fantastical at first, but as Sir Conan-Doyle’s oft-incarnated detective repeatedly reminds us, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

To restore majority rule, we need to reapportion our population.

To change habitation patterns, we need incentives for people to move to the right places, or at least not leave them.

To create these incentives, we need development.

It’s the Ecology

Despite perennial election-season threats to depart for Canada, few people move for ideology.

Opportunity is different.

If a young entrepreneur in Wyoming could join a startup culture in Cheyenne, she might rethink the San Francisco rent.

If an Alaskan drama kid had a theater scene in Anchorage, he might put off packing for Manhattan.

If an aspiring architect in North Dakota knew excited investors, they might envision projects for Fargo instead of Chicago.

We need to supercharge our second-tier centers of industry so they can compete for human capital with the handful of dominant cities luring thousands of Americans away from their home states each year.

As hard as it sounds, we have to move toward a world where the energy and possibility of Milwaukee and Omaha can credibly rival that available in New York and LA.

This path to political parity may strike some as arduous to the point of irrelevance, or at best a sad necessity, but consider the potential benefits.

Like ecologies, economies can derive strength from diversity.

A nation with 100 vibrant urban areas would be more resilient and productive than one with just a few big towns.

A workforce with dozens of avenues to success might be higher paid and more fulfilled.

A body politic with more equitable representation could appoint governments that help more people lead healthier, happier lives.

Our Pie Squared

These economic upsides offer strong bipartisan appeal.

Incomes are higher in heavily urbanized, mostly coastal states, where elite institutions have hauled in far greater rewards from globalization than their famously flown-over cousins.

Accordingly, there’s money to be made in areas left largely behind by ongoing revolutions in technology and trade.

Property values in some struggling spots are an order of magnitude lower than in their highly developed sister cities.

The limited financial opportunity in these places is no more fair than their outsized political influence.

The dual incentives are almost cosmic—blue states need political support, red states need economic stimulus.

This massive win-win cries out for action, packed with so much potential it makes the founding imbalance seem like a brilliant structural boon.

To build the most lasting and impactful version of its vision, the left must accelerate development in rural states.

To maximize opportunity for its core constituencies, the right must do the same.

Not All Politics

This project is about enacting the policies most people want, not empowering one party over another.

It’s about revitalizing America for a global, technological century, and restoring the core ideas of our democratic republic—that everyone should have a voice, and that their communities should flourish freely within a greater union.

More egalitarian representation would improve life for all Americans.

Prosperity could branch out from the walled gardens lining our shining seas to flower on our fruited plains, enriching our shared land more equally.

Diverse populations living closer together could form stronger bonds, deepening mutual empathy as they increasingly interweave.

Environmental degradation could slow or even reverse if growing cities inspire more people to choose bigger buildings over the suburban sprawl that erodes ecosystems.

Just Powers

These possibilities are invigorating, charged with our characteristic national hope, but the deepest calling to this course of action is both more fundamental and more urgent.

To many Americans, freedom seems natural—the automatic privilege of advanced civilization.

In fact, such luxury as we enjoy is rare.

The large majority of Earth’s internet users live under governments that can jail them for what they say online.

Some of our world’s most powerful nations demonstrate brutally and often that open democracy is not a guaranteed or even necessarily likely outcome for humanity.

For all its past failings and current injustices, the free, transparent, accountable system Americans have built—and so far maintained—represents a profound moral accomplishment.

No law of physics makes it permanently safe.

No rule of the universe makes America immune to leaders who lie cynically, seek power for personal gain, and tactically encourage fear and hate.

We’ve come a long way culturally, but human biology changes slowly.

That means humans have the same physical brains we did ninety years ago, when a powerful, prosperous democracy devolved into a fascist atrocity that nearly ended civilization.

Bad things can happen.

Structures can collapse.

The values of societies can fail.

Empowering democracy to secure the blessings of liberty is therefore more than just a noble cause—it’s a moral demand, and one that grows continually more critical as our abilities advance.

Yes We Can Keep It

Rebalancing American habitation will take decades of determined, creative investment.

The results will never be perfect.

But the logic of our values makes this challenge our destiny.

Because the inconvenient facts remain:

1) American majorities want life-saving policies their structurally advantaged minority consistently blocks.

2) The underlying imbalance empowering this minority widens every year.

3) This destabilizing trend will continue until we take action to reverse it—to bend the arc of history together.

If we believe in the promise of democracy, and accept the moral imperative its fragility imposes, we must solve the problem of America’s minority rule.

The alternative is to watch our nation’s bold idea become a sad joke, the value of each vote so heavily weighted by location as to create a government of, by, and for its places, not its people.

America’s in trouble. Let’s address it.

21 Ways You Can Help

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