Why can't large urban areas be conservative?

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Why do large urban areas have to be Democratic?  Can a small city that grows in population to a large urban area be ran by conservatives?

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There are conservatives who don't hunt or own guns, are not religious, some live in the city and have nothing to do with rural life. I'm not sure why people lump certain groups as a whole.

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One reason is the shift of the parties over the last 50 years. 50 years ago the Dems were a party of labor, especially Big Labor. Labor voters were found in both the cities and rural areas, especially when labor interests matched ag interests.

Today the Dem's policies are more about the economics of urban life and social policies that adapt well to living in proximity to a lot of strangers. Urban areas have the greatest economic spread with the most very rich and very poor, and Dem policies address the economics of that situation. Those policies were less about labor and more about wealth transfer and access to government services.

In short, large urban areas are not conservative, because the liberal party (Dems) have adapted their policies to match the needs of the majority of voters in large urban areas.

Lets say, what if majority of the strangers that live in the big city are conservative and there was little to no wealth transfer to the poor citizens or any social programs? Would the poor citizens flock to the rural areas and become nomads? You could still get a large support of voters without government intervention. The rural areas would be Democratic and cities be strong Republican.

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It's a pattern that exists all over the Anglosphere (though not necessarily outside it!), it's just exaggerated in the United States because of race.  And not just because minorities living in cities skew them Democrat on their own, but also because it encourages self-sorting.  White conservatives are the first to engage in white flight and abandon an area as minorities move in, leaving behind an increasingly liberal white population.  And even in urban areas with low minority populations (like, say, Seattle and Portland), liberal colonization has driven white conservatives to the suburbs.  These days, major cities throughout the American North are anathema to conservatives.  Even as property values and cost of living continues to skyrocket in these places, it's white liberals, not white conservatives, who are displacing minority populations and driving them to the suburbs. 

And of course partisan voting, just like any form of self-expression, is colored massively by our peers.  Being surrounded by Democrats makes you almost guaranteed to be a Democrat, and being surrounded by Republicans makes you almost guaranteed to be a Republican.  Throughout the urban North, there are entire neighborhoods with literally no Republicans, and the flipside is true, if to a lesser extent, in rural areas throughout the Mountain West and Deep South.

Property values can be cheaper in urban areas if taxes were kept low, there are less government policies on private property and less restrictions.

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Minorities won't vote for the GOP due to identity politics stoked by Democrats.  That's really the main thing

This.  Most urban areas are too racially and ethnically diverse to have any major strength for the GOP.

The conservatives need to appeal to all races and people of different ethnicity. What have they got to lose, the rural vote?

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Some random economic points to complement the ones already stated, off the top of my head:

It's important to realize how the economics of suburbanization affects politics. We're a suburban country (IIRC, by one measure some 51% of the country lives in areas considered suburban. Don't have the source, as I saw it a while ago). The building of suburban areas supports the automotive, construction, and home supply industries, and all the industries (steel, coal, oil, rubber, plastic, wood, ceramics, parts, etc.) that supply those industries. Suburban sprawl and building out provide quick and easy economic growth and income support in a country where land is plenty, and therefore cheap.

The Republican Party, being the party of business and believing that local governments should be leaders, are naturally going to enact policies that benefit industry (as suburbanization does). The building of the interstate highway system was begun under Eisenhower, after all, for primarily defense purposes but with the secondary benefit of promoting construction of cheap homes (remember, there was a severe housing shortage in the country for much of the late 1940s, and IIRC the early 1950s) and as automotive and other companies made big money, this led to big profits.

Americans are a individualistic bunch and owning land and a home full of nice things is ingrained into our culture. The post-WWI boom combined with wartime shortages to dam up savings to make the economy and the country as a whole ready to finally live out the American Dream of a nice home with a nice lawn with a nice family and a nice car in the suburbs. Cities were crowded, and high land & housing prices meant that you had to live in an apartment or flat if you could'nt afford a stand-alone house. So naturally, people went to the suburbs, driven by their wants but also enabled by government policy.

City housing often dates back to the pre-1940s, so upkeep can get expensive, as can infrastructure costs, so higher taxes are necessary to sustain services. A lot of inner suburbs built before the 1970s have been facing high costs to repair roads, schools, libraries, and utility infrastructure, and these costs resemble urban issues more than newer suburbs that have brand new or relatively new roads, schools, and infrastructure that do not require higher taxes and large, long-term bond issuances. I think that's a big economic factor to inner suburbs shifting Democratic in the 1990s as infrastructure began to show its age, in addition to more affluent minorities moving out of depressed inner cities.

The Republican Party has abandoned cities by virtue of being the party of suburbs and growth, really. There was a time before the 1970s when they and the Democrats focused on cities, suburbs, and rural areas, but as the population has become more suburbanized, that's where the votes lie.

Just let the infrastructure get old and deteriorate, forget about taxes paying for them. It's like a new car, once it gets old and doesn't work anymore, why throw money into it if the costs outweigh the value?

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I've heard it said that suburbanites love cities - provided that they don't have to associate with the people who live in them.

The cultural difference between cities and inner suburbs seems to be vanishing in large parts of the country (though obviously there are many notable exceptions).  The stereotype of the wealthy white suburb and the diverse, crime-ridden city is really outdated, and while the perception has outlasted reality, I think attitudes are beginning to catch up especially with younger people.  There's a reason why so many white millennials are moving to the inner cities.

I'm a millennial, and refuse to live in the city. I'd rather own a home eventually and live in outer ring suburbs and be self reliant. Not all millennials want to live in the city, deal with traffic, crowded areas.

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And even though Blacks have historically suffered at the hands of White-led discrimination in this country, that doesn't mean that anywhere even close to a significant number hold the same kind of animosity towards Whites that a large number of Whites hold against minorities.

Why are black-on-white murders more common than the reverse, then? Doesn't that contradict the notion that whites are more hostile to blacks than vice versa?

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2014.xls

This sort of thing is a prime example of why racial voting polarization will continue. The discussion quickly degenerates into an argument about who has been wronged by whom and who is currently the most underhanded. It will keep people voting the way they currently are.

It all comes down to how a person is raised by their family in a color blinded society.

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The emphasis on minorities in this thread ignores that urban whites are also a solid D group. It's more of a urban culture issue than people are making it out to be.

Urban culture is unsustainable if hell breaks loose, just saying.

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Urban culture is unsustainable if hell breaks loose, just saying.

What does that mean, though, 'if hell breaks loose'? Zombie apocalypse? Nuclear winter?

Yeah, mainly. People living in urban environments can be trained to be self reliant. The Walking Dead TV show sort of plays a role.