The American psyche has long fixated on the farm and the frontier. Emerson once concluded that cities and their inhabitants would die off without their rural counterparts to sustain them, reasoning that "the city is recruited from the country." When Emerson published those words in 1844, around 90 percent of the U.S. population lived in rural areas.

Even the first novel of the quintessential urban beatnik, Jack Kerouac, was a lament for the quaintness of small town life lost in the tumult of the city. When he published "The Town and the City" in 1950, the rural population had decreased to 36 percent. Today, only one-fifth of Americans live outside cities.

Yet throughout our urbanization, we have acted like a country ashamed of our cities. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has struggled to address cities without belittling their inhabitants or their national importance, even though the New Deal agenda, a historical triumph by any measure, took shape as an urban agenda. Revealingly, the historian Thomas Bender has called Lyndon Johnson "the last president to consider cities and their people an essential part of America." Hopes remain high, though, for the Obama administration, which is filled with Windy City power players like David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett. Obama himself is the first big-city president in generations.

We have forgotten that the story of our cities is actually a great story of American progress: new kinds of housing, new social services, new forms of mass transit, new regulations of employment conditions and many other innovations that boosted living standards for the vast majority of Americans over the past century or so all began as urban experiments. Cities are laboratories of progressive change where government plays an outsized role in improving our daily lives.

Despite this record of accomplishments, American cities have been framed in negative terms across the political spectrum. Even as cities evolved into economic juggernauts and diverse cultural centers, their inner cores were racialized and slandered by both parties as poverty-ridden, crime-infested and ungovernable. Liberals exploited tales of urban decline to justify programs targeted at cities, while conservatives blamed these very programs for the deterioration.

The result is a federal government that functions at a distance from the places responsible for 90 percent of the country's economic activity and 86 percent of its employment. Today, most major areas of federal policy, particularly housing and transportation, favor non-urban areas.

The federal government commits four times as many resources to homeownership as it does to renters, who are concentrated in dense urban areas. The mortgage-interest tax deduction, the government's largest tax break, incentivizes purchases of big, expensive, energy-inefficient homes in the suburban and exurban hinterland. Wealthy households benefit most from the break, but many would have purchased homes even without the government's gift.

At the same time, Washington funnels transportation funds through state governments dominated by rural lawmakers who favor projects in areas where, one mayor recently quipped, there are more deer than people. Tack on a prejudice against public transit in the formula grant that distributes federal transportation funds, and you begin to see why the United States is paved haphazardly with highways instead of interconnected with subways and high-speed rail.

Last year's federal stimulus package also clearly marginalized cities. It assigned cities control over less than 1 percent of funds and disregarded 19,000 shovel-ready infrastructure projects proposed by the nation's mayors. As a result, it did not maximize job creation, and it slowed economic recovery nationwide.

While research shows that government spending on transit creates twice as many jobs as spending on highways, the stimulus overwhelmingly favored roads. Congress bailed out state governments with budget assistance but rejected aid for cities for fear of a backlash if funds were misspent in areas still stigmatized by stereotypes associated with corruption and abuse.

Now facing a prolonged recession and high unemployment, cities are raising taxes, cutting services, delaying infrastructure projects and instituting hiring freezes or layoffs.

The budget deficit in San Francisco is not unique. City budget shortfalls across the country could total $83 billion over the next three years. Yet President Obama's 2011 budget commits only $2.8 billion to its signature programs for cities.

At the same time, as new data compiled by the Environmental Working Group demonstrate, every few years Congress bends over backward to protect billions of dollars in farm subsidies that distort commodity prices, destroy small farms and pad the profits of the very agribusiness conglomerates that have helped create an urban obesity epidemic.

The consequences of Washington's anti-urban bias run deeper than lopsided funding. The "urban crisis" the federal government has tried so hard to manufacture is fictional. Instead, in our cities, challenges appear alongside solutions often unavailable elsewhere: expanded health care coverage, social services accessible to the neediest, transportation systems that encourage affordable and environmentally friendly lifestyles, mixed-income neighborhoods where emerging artists and immigrant entrepreneurs find common ground and are better off for it.

Reorienting Washington toward urban accomplishments and the central role of cities in American life would restore faith in the shared interests and sense of collective purpose that should shape public policy. It would also help rebuild the electorate's trust in government's ability to protect and secure our lives: As more city institutions and agencies are properly supported, more of them can have a positive impact on how we all live and will highlight the value of public goods and services compared to the risks and costs of privatizing the public sector.

The farm and the frontier might still retain their influence over the American imagination. But there is little left to legitimize the myth of rural America: The United States is decidedly urban; the concentration of economic activity in cities will drive our future growth and prosperity.

The question is not whether cities will self-destruct without federal assistance: They have already proved that they can excel and innovate despite Washington. The question is whether Washington can finally dispel its anti-urban bias so that our cities realize their full potential as a crucial part of our nation.

Bias against cities has a long history

The anti-urban bias in our history is very old. Long before Sarah Palin called small towns "the real America," Thomas Jefferson derided cities as "sores." Tracing mistrust of cities all the way back to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, the historian Thomas Bender has written: "Are cities American? Yes and no. Cities and their populations have never been completely excluded from the promise of American life, but neither have they yet been wholly accepted."

It's true that Franklin Roosevelt and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia worked with the Conference of Mayors to make the New Deal into an urban employment program. And Lyndon Johnson's Model Cities program brought the federal government into direct partnership with cities. But even as the country has become more urbanized, recent presidents have largely ignored cities.

The Reagan administration took this to an extreme, arguing that "cities are not mentioned in the Constitution." Federal aid to cities dropped precipitously between 1977 and 2000. The few visible attempts to formulate a national urban agenda were primarily responses to urban rioting and violence. Even Bill Clinton, whom many big-city mayors consider cities' best presidential friend in recent years, was warned by his Housing and Urban Development secretary that his administration was at risk of being caught "flatfooted" by "the anger of the cities."

President Obama created the first-ever White House Office of Urban Affairs after promising to do so on the campaign trail. Yet the federal stimulus funneled money through state governments, and Obama's 2011 federal budget only scratches the surface of the fiscal challenges cities face.

Cities, an essential part of who we are, must be woven back into the fabric of our policymaking.

- Harry Moroz