<v SPEAKER_00>I'm like surprised at your level of knowledge about Boston crime families.

<v SPEAKER_00>Why do you know so much about this?

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_02>This is just the kind of thing guys are interested in, I think.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh but that's but that's a that's another episode.

<v SPEAKER_00>Hi, I'm Jerusalem Demsis.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm Matthew Iglesias.

<v SPEAKER_00>And welcome to the argument.

<v SPEAKER_00>Matt is our first uh recording where you're in Maine for the summer.

<v SPEAKER_00>So uh we're trying out this remote setup, which is a good way to do, I think, our book club episode, which is gonna be The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

<v SPEAKER_00>And Matt and I are urbanists slash yimbys, and so this is like one of the I don't know, Bibles of the uh can can you have multiple Bibles in a in a movement?

<v SPEAKER_00>I think the whole point of the Bible is that there's just like one.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I don't know if we can say one.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, I'm Jewish, so we feel that there's just one Bible.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh you guys seem to have added extra musicians.

<v SPEAKER_00>You don't even have a Bible.

<v SPEAKER_00>What do you mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, we have a Tanakh.

<v SPEAKER_00>Don't you have like a bunch of different things though?

<v SPEAKER_00>You have like a Torah, do you have like a bunch of other things?

<v SPEAKER_02>Oh, there's the Torah, sure.

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay, but you know.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I feel like this really fell apart here.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's one volume.

<v SPEAKER_00>You pick it up.

<v SPEAKER_00>You can just call anything one volume.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's called the Tanakh.

<v SPEAKER_02>Anyway, you know, the Mormons have three.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um people are always adding.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh so yes, this is a foundational text um of American urbanism.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I was surprised by how much I did not like this book.

<v SPEAKER_00>I okay, so you're actually from Greenwich Village, so I feel like you have a different history with it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think I've-off.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, you're too close to it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I read this book for the first time.

<v SPEAKER_00>I must have been like 22, 23 years old.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'd kind of come into Yimbyism and you know, labor market economics in college, and then I pick up this book and I'm like, oh, cool.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like I love cities, but I've never really thought about the mechanics of what about cities I like.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so much of the book is just like as someone who likes cities and dense urban environments, just someone pointing out like various parts of what makes cities enjoyable to live in, and things that like are actually wrong about what would make a city nice to live in.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so uh, you know, I think that this is something that it's there's a genre of content online, which is people kind of walking, urban planners often like walking around cities and like showing you like videos of, oh, look at how this block was designed, and like that's what makes it nice.

<v SPEAKER_00>Off this happens with traffic, they'll show you like streets that like have been like made better or worse through better urban design.

<v SPEAKER_00>And the thing is just like she's doing that, but from like a 1961 perspective.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>So, okay, everything is relative to expectations, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>So we did an episode about Silent Spring, and you know, this was like marketed as the book that launched the environmental movement.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I was kind of expecting to hate that book because I uh have a kind of negative view um of the environmental movement.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I think as we both agreed, Silent Spring actually makes like a lot of really good points.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, um there were elements I disagreed with it, but like I, relative to like what had been handed down to me by the cultural legacy, yeah, like I raised my estimate of Rachel Carson.

<v SPEAKER_02>So I I grew up in Greenwich Village.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, I was born, I think, about a little bit less than 20 years after Jacobs' uh book came out.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so I was raised, it was it was in the ether of Greenwich Village uh writers and intellectuals, like my parents and most of their friends, that Jane Jacobs had saved Greenwich Village.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and near the end of the book, you get to the part where she talks specifically about um Lomex uh proposed highway across Houston Street and the idea of cutting a wide um traffic uh throughway through Washington Square Park.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um I grew up right north of Washington Square Park when I was a little kid.

<v SPEAKER_02>That was where I played in the playground all the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so like Jane Jacobs is the savior of the village, it's really like an iconic.

<v SPEAKER_02>I I don't want to say like her name was on the lips of like every 11-year-old in town, but like I was always interested in these topics.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so like I heard about Jay Jacobs.

<v SPEAKER_02>She talks at one point in this book about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also your parents and their friends are very like artsy people who Yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>They're they're already intellectual people.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but I also like she talks about this iconic courthouse that's in the village, and it's not being used as a courthouse anymore, but it's a neighborhood landmark, and how she and some other people want to turn into a library branch.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like that's the library that I went to when I was a kid, you know?

<v SPEAKER_02>So it's like she's a very influential sort of person.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so I I do appreciate all of that, but at the beginning of the book, like two things really got to me.

<v SPEAKER_02>On I think almost the very first page, she's talking about the north end of Boston, and she's talking about how there isn't like a lot of street crime in the north end, even though you know it has some of these like allegedly bad qualities of like an urban slum.

<v SPEAKER_02>The thing about the north end of Boston is this is a mafia neighborhood, um, controlled by the Patriarch crime family.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I I was like, huh.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because I was thinking, again, I'm from Greenwich Village.

<v SPEAKER_02>Something that I was told in the 80s and 90s before the big crime drop uh in the area, is that the part of the village that was like under the protection of Vin the Chin Gigante and the uh um I think it was sorry, I'm saying Corleone, but that's in the Godfather movie.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um I'm like surprised at your level of knowledge about Boston crime families.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, how do you know so much about this?

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_02>This is just the kind of thing guys are interested in.

<v SPEAKER_02>I think that's a that's another episode.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm forgetting which family, Vin the Chin.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but this was uh a mafia neighborhood, the Genovisi family.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then if you went too far east, you'd be like out of Genovisi territory.

<v SPEAKER_00>Wait, is Genovisi like the same thing like Kitty Genovisi, the woman who was like attacked?

<v SPEAKER_02>I think unrelated.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's just a common Italian name.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's a common name.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um so anyway, like she doesn't talk about that, like like mafia stuff as like a role in these Italian ethnic enclaves.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I'm like, okay, well, fair enough.

<v SPEAKER_02>But then she's going on and on about Greenwich Village.

<v SPEAKER_02>She doesn't mention gay people, which like I think is like a very salient characteristic of that neighborhood.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I like was asking Claude about this.

<v SPEAKER_02>I was like, come on, man.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they're like, well, you know, like the specific part of Hudson Street uh that she's talking about is like several blocks away from Christopher Street and the gay bar hub.

<v SPEAKER_02>You look at it on a map, it's like, okay, it's three blocks away.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they're short blocks, which is like a theme of her book and how you're like exploring the neighborhood.

<v SPEAKER_02>And these two things relate because Claude think why like that why she wasn't uh Well, so they they said she's trying to do like respectability politics, urbanism.

<v SPEAKER_02>And not and not associate it um with this kind of uh nefarious kind of.

<v SPEAKER_00>You want her to do the omni cause and time.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, it's it's it's not that I want her to do the omni cause.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's that A, I mean, so she's writing pre-stonewall.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and to bring this back to the mafia stuff, like the gay bars in the village at this time were all owned by the mob.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, because one of the services the mob could provide is they would bribe the cops to not raid the gay bars.

<v SPEAKER_02>Another thing they would do is they would blackmail more prominent people who would come into them.

<v SPEAKER_02>So I'm just like, I'm right at the beginning, and I'm like, this is a kind of a falsified sociology of the neighborhood, of the neighborhood that it discusses most extensively.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, she talks a little bit, so she talks a lot about Greenwich Village, and then to a lesser extent, she talks about Rinhouse Square in Philadelphia, which I mean I've I've been there, but I don't know anything about it.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh the North End in Boston, which I know a little bit about, and she like Poffius said, she just like glosses over the whole Italian ethnic character of the neighborhood.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um then she talks about this neighborhood in Chicago, um, that I'd never heard of, uh, called Back of the Yards, um, which is like on the near South side.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I I don't know what the deal with that is at all.

<v SPEAKER_00>So you're obviously making like kind of like a distinct point here about how the uh like there are cultural and sociological factors that make neighborhoods distinctive that she does not touch on.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's a critique of Jane Jacobs that's made contemporaneously that she is overreading a working class style of interaction, this idea that people are talking on the street and that like they know they're like grosser and that they have these sorts of ways of interacting in public squares, and that like you can't actually export that to like middle class and upper class people because you know they're not like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't think that's exactly what you're saying, but I do think there's like this like overarching thing where people are like Jane Jacobs does not care enough about like the sociology of the like people that are drawn to and make up cities.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think this is like I actually think the critique is largely wrong because as we're seeing right now, like if you go to like new build developments, what you're finding is that developers, as they're building, especially for for millennials, that they don't want to live in cul-de-sacks.

<v SPEAKER_00>They want to have that kind of like main street with like a coffee shop that they can walk their dogs on.

<v SPEAKER_00>Leesburg, Virginia, really fast-growing uh part of Northern Virginia.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh, tons of the growth of the DC area is basically captured in this one area uh of Virginia.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like there's like a bunch of kind of like townhouses and things off of like main roads, but then there's like these like this downtown where like everyone kind of walks and it feels kind of like kitschy in a way from someone who like comes from like a more organically, you know, created urban environment, but like it's like an incredibly popular part of town.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like people walk down and they want to walk to it, they want to get to it with like a you know, they often drive to it because you are in the suburbs, but there's a level to which I think this taste thing is actually over over determined.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, yes, but I I guess like what I'm what I'm coming to here is that I think the the causal analysis that is in this book is quite shoddy.

<v SPEAKER_02>She is essentially taking a couple places that she likes.

<v SPEAKER_02>She's selectively describing attributes that they have, particularly describing aspects of their built environment, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Of their street design.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then she's attributing the success of those neighborhoods to that built environment.

<v SPEAKER_02>And again, to the to the point about the Greenwich Village and the LGBT community there, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like the specific history of why that specific neighborhood came to be an early hub of gay life in America is interesting.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I don't I don't know that I fully know uh 100% what the answer is.

<v SPEAKER_02>It is something to do with like the artistic community at the turn of the 20th century, and something to do with the mafia.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, the other big gay stronghold, early gay stronghold in American life, um, is in San Francisco, which had to do with um, I believe that in the Pacific theater of World War II, um, soldiers who were discharged from the Navy uh for homosexual conduct were all disembarked in San Francisco.

<v SPEAKER_02>Oh.

<v SPEAKER_02>So you created this like gay agglomeration.

<v SPEAKER_02>Is that true?

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, it's true that they were.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm sure that there's some dispute as to whether that's like how the Castro came to be the Castro.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but you know, these things happen, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>A feature of mid-20th century American life is that like there were these pre-stonewall gay communities in certain towns.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then I think like there's a there's a good book uh that was written.

<v SPEAKER_02>I I forget the author.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, it was called uh There Goes the Gaborhood.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um and it was about the sort of uh decline of of these like gay-niche neighborhoods as a result of toleration and assimilation, things like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um but like gayhoods played a specific role in the urban crisis years of the United States of America, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>At a time when like people in general were fleeing cities, you had this select subpopulation that was strongly motivated to live in like very specific places, typically in big cities, where they were taking advantage of the anonymity of city life, the ability of dense cities to cater to niche tastes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um so I I think my guess, at any rate, is that the the gay anchor played an important causal role in the vital specific vitality of Greenwich Village during this specific moment of urban crisis, and that that is more important than the fact that they are short blocks in Greenwich Village.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like I think that's a coincidence.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she doesn't do any testing of her thing about the short blocks, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like I immediately thought when she's talking about like how you should have short blocks, and I was like, well, and how super blocks are bad.

<v SPEAKER_02>But another urban neighborhood that urbanists love is um Eschampol in uh Barcelona.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation of that neighborhood.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but they that's like an all-super block master plan neighborhood um that's like just really cool and awesome.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, if you go to the north side of Chicago, which these days, I I don't know what it was like in 1962, but like what these days are like the cool good neighborhoods uh north side Chicago have very long blocks, uh, at least in one direction.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they have this other thing that she claims is bad, which is that the streets are very straight and they extend for a really, really, really long time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so I think she's just like anchoring on some specific superficial characteristics of Greenwich Village, and she's attributing its success to it.

<v SPEAKER_02>There's a funny thing in there where she's like, well, you know, she doesn't really use the term gentrification, but what we would call gentrification, she says, has spread east uh from the part of the village that she lives in.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but that it's like it hasn't gone north into Chelsea.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's like, Chelsea is never going to become a fashionable neighborhood because the blocks in Chelsea are way too long.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it is true that gentrification came to Chelsea later.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, even when I was a kid, it was like if you would go 10 blocks north of my house, things got like kind of rough around the edges for no like really clear fundamentals-based reason, like the transportation links and stuff were good there, but it was rapidly gentrifying because it was like a totally good place to live.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like nobody fucking cares about how long the blocks are.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's not important.

<v SPEAKER_00>So obviously, I think there are multiple ways that like, you know, you can walk around a bunch of different kinds of old cities and like they're often feel very, very different from each other, and like you can like tell if you were dropped in like old town Venice versus if you were dropped in old town Tokyo.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's not like confusing that those are different kinds of places.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but at the same time, like, I don't want to like overstate how wrong she was here.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, there's some uh effort to try to like see if her uh um if her prescriptions are correct.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like small blocks is actually the the weakest of the four that you've identified.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um but like But we should explain to people what are what are her four her four principles before I get too hung up on the Before you get hung up on the blocks.

<v SPEAKER_00>So she has mixed use, old buildings, high building concentrations, and border vacuums, and that those things contribute well to urban life.

<v SPEAKER_00>She also has the small blocks thing, which I which is very uh, I think um it's less important.

<v SPEAKER_00>There are the, you know, I think that like she's correct in like a sense of like you kind of want a bunch of intersections of things happening, but like you can do that on long blocks.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, so anyway, I think she's partially vindicated there.

<v SPEAKER_00>They try to they did the study um uh looking at like Seoul Street, Seoul, South Korea.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um they're they're called dongs, these small administrative districts, and she basically trying to figure out like the vitality measures um of these cities, and they do find that these things are correlated.

<v SPEAKER_00>Again, small blocks is the shakiest of them, but like mixed-use old buildings, high building concentrations, and avoiding border vacuums.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh and like that just seems like true to me as like a person who is like walking around.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like if you're in place where there's like a mixed array of uses, like uh uh, you know, one thing I think about all the time is like, you know, you walk through a neighborhood where there's like a school on one side and it's like evening, it feels like kind of dead because no one's at school at night.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so like this concept that Jane Jacobs talks about about eyes on the street of like wanting to live in areas of town where there are multiple primary uses all the time, so that like there are people walking around and it makes you feel safer.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that to me is like very just like obviously true.

<v SPEAKER_00>And they did some research on this, and part of the like uh uh, you know, part of what has been vindicated from her work on eyes on the street is like the crime stuff, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Is that like you do want um high visibility areas and also like a bunch of people walking around because people are just like less likely to do crimes when there are a bunch of other people around, and that's you know, part of the also light literature is just like you want to put street lamps up places because people don't want to do crimes when they feel like they're like in a well-lit area.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so I just think that like it's 1961 and she's like trying to formalize a lot of ideas that like you know haven't been formalized in that way before.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that probably the best critique of her, she starts the book by basically saying, like, this is an attack on city planning, but like a lot of the things she's talking about are actually things that like newer city planners are also making the critique of.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>I just think that like, you know, I think that you, Matt, would dislike living in a city that had a lot of border vacuums and then didn't have a lot of mixed use.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, do we have old building, you know?

<v SPEAKER_02>I I mean, yes, so okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean again, i if the expectations were set in a different way.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>I I do strongly agree.

<v SPEAKER_02>I wrote a piece actually a little bit before I cracked open the book that wound up touching on what turns out to be some of these uh Jacobsian themes, and that I think comes from the same part of having lived in the same neighborhood and appreciated it, which is that I think that a lot of conventional urban planning um undercrowds cities, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>That like in effect, what you do, right, is like you you you you you think about these um renderings of new projects that exist all the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so you always render it on a bright sunny day, sort of implicitly on a spring weekend afternoon, right, where like people are out and about, and then you depict it as like active but not too crowded.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because, and that makes sense.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like if you're drawing a picture of a place and you want the place to look nice, you make the weather be good and you make it have people in it, but not like so many people that it's unpleasant, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>That's that's like good picture making.

<v SPEAKER_02>But if you think about a place, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>If a place is like busy but not too busy under optimal conditions, then like what's it gonna be like when it's raining?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>What's it gonna be like when it's cold?

<v SPEAKER_02>What's it gonna be like when it's hot?

<v SPEAKER_02>What's it gonna be like at night, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's gonna be underoccupied the vast majority of the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And that's bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, right.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like you I, you know, if you go like 14th Street in DC, where I live, is a great street, I think.

<v SPEAKER_02>And if you walk down it on a Friday or Saturday night, because it's mostly a nightlife area, um, on a day when the weather is good, you're like, holy shit, like there's way too many people here.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, like it's genuinely annoying.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, as just like a boring dad, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>If I have to like go to CVS to pick up some paper towels and there's like 90 million people walking around all these bars and restaurants, I'm like, this is annoying, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>But that's good.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like that, that's the success of urban planning, is that like at peak times it's unpleasantly overcrowded, which means that even at trough times, there's like somebody there.

<v SPEAKER_02>And most of the time, there's a reasonable amount of people using the space.

<v SPEAKER_02>But uh where I ended my piece was by saying that like economics is important, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And that if you're like optimizing to draw a good picture, you're using your your scarce resources inefficiently.

<v SPEAKER_02>So uh the mode of Jacobs, where she's critiquing what she calls like the garden city movement and and the radiant city kind of the radiant garden city beautiful movement.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's she's basically mashing together the names of a bunch of different urban, uhurban planning traditions as like a the the claim is that these are actually all the same.

<v SPEAKER_02>These are all like Yeah, so she says the Garden City movement, the Radiant City movement, and City Beautiful movement are all actually the same.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I think that's really insightful.

<v SPEAKER_02>The additional turn I would make, though, is that Jane Jacobs is also doing the same thing as those three people, which is being totally blasé about like supply and demand and actual economic value.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's just picking her idea of like what a good neighborhood is, is more like my idea, you know, than I if I had if I had to pick like a commissar of cities, I guess I would prefer her to Le Cabousier or whoever else, because like we're just more simpatico and we'd like the Jefferson Market Library.

<v SPEAKER_02>But they're all all doing the same thing, which is having this like incredible distrust of markets as like a Means of deciding what to do.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so she'll go off on these like weird jags where she's like, you know, we can't let like the bakery become too large because like small bakeries are good, but large bakeries are bad.

<v SPEAKER_02>Or like elevator apartments are fine, but like if you have too many elevator apartments, like then things are gonna get out of control.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's just like wants everything to be exactly like Hudson Street at one specific point in time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's not thinking about like why is Hudson Street the way it is, or like how would it be the case that anything else like that would be written.

<v SPEAKER_02>She keeps like insisting that the whole Upper West Side is like doomed because it has these like trivial differences.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like the Upper West Side has two subway lines, it's near Central Park, it's near Riverside Park.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's like a booming, thriving neighborhood now, because like the basic fundamentals are good.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she you you keep looking in the book and you're like, like, why is this city here at all?

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes, I mean like what's going on?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like what like what is this about?

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I I think the place where I'm most critical of Jacobs is the place where I most understand why she's the way she is, and that's like she's like completely ignorant of the fact that the main point of a city is that it's an economic engine.

<v SPEAKER_00>The reason why people and firms have agglomerated together in one place is because people and firms working together create innovation and firms will spawn other firms, workers will come there, workers have demand, that demand spurs, uh, you know, creates jobs for other people.

<v SPEAKER_00>They all start moving in together.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's like why cities exist.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like completely ignoring the fact for an entire like, I don't know, 450-page book or whatever, that like a uh the reason why the city is there.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, the the last chapter of the book is literally called the kind of problem a city is.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like the kind of problem a city is is an economic problem.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like that's just like not what she cares about at all.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like part of why I think it is like that is that like in the 1950s, this is published in 1961, 1950s, like cities, New York is not having a price problem.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like people aren't like priced out of New York City at this time.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like she buys her uh home for like$7,000, which I don't know what that actually is in today's dollars, but it's not that much.

<v SPEAKER_00>The how home is like now valued at like six and a half million dollars.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like, and she said famously at some point, like I think the early 2000s in an interview that she could not afford the home that she built, which I think did not spawn the kind of, I think, you know, reconsideration of her ideas that I would like.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I think there's like a sense here where um the problem of cities at the time is that like they were, everyone agreed that they were slums, nobody wanted to live there, and she was like, How do I make people like cities again?

<v SPEAKER_00>And like the entire book is like a how do I get people to love this thing?

<v SPEAKER_00>Because of course, as Matt has alluded to, like, we were they're in the middle of this fight to save Greenwich Village, and like it's very, very hard in that time period to say, like, we're trying to save this like random neighborhood in New York City when everyone's like, Yeah, but New York City fucking sucks and no one wants to live there.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so she has to do this big whole like re-um uh you know, re-explanation of what makes a city beautiful outside of its economic value, because at the time, like its economic value is actually declining.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so I think I like get what's going on there, but I think the one part of uh Jacob's that I really enjoyed is that I think that she she understands the problem of planning, even as she is perpetuating parts of it.

<v SPEAKER_00>So the problem of planning as being like this idea that you can perfectly understand, predict, and constrain millions of people.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, she has this metaphor near the back of the book about like billiard balls, which I thought was really good.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, so she basically just says, like, consider first a simple illustration in order to get the flavor of the idea.

<v SPEAKER_00>The classical dynamics of the 19th century was well suited for analyzing and predicting the motion of a single ivory ball as it moves about on a billiard table.

<v SPEAKER_00>One can, but with surprising increase in difficulty, analyze the motion of two or even three balls on a billiard table.

<v SPEAKER_00>But as soon as one tries to analyze the motion of 10 or 15 balls on the table at once, as in pool, the problem becomes unmanageable, not because there is any theoretical difficulty, but just because the actual labor of dealing in specific detail with so many variables turns out to be impractical.

<v SPEAKER_00>Imagine, however, a large billiard table with millions of balls flying about on its surface.

<v SPEAKER_00>The great surprise is that the problem now becomes easier.

<v SPEAKER_00>The methods of statistical mechanics are now applicable.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like at the very beginning, she sounds like very Hayekian, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>She's like, sounds very much like someone who's understands the problem of information.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like the difficulty uh the problem of central planning is that like it's very difficult to know all of the pieces of information you would need, even if theoretically one could, once they had all that information, like do central planning to connect where individuals want to go to uh where uh you know firms are or whatever it is, and like what kinds of firms should exist and where, what kind of jobs people should do.

<v SPEAKER_00>The problem is that like the fundamental solution that Jacobs posits throughout just not her book, but also her activism in life is that what you need to do then is to devolve power to the local level and to do this kind of decentralized planning in order to take advantage of that local knowledge.

<v SPEAKER_00>And as we know, like as we're sitting here in 2026, like this insight is actually one of the most destructive insights in the history of urban planning.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this insight that you should devolve power to the local level is like almost singularly responsible for the affordability crisis that we're experiencing right now.

<v SPEAKER_00>But so like I don't want to like sugarcoat it, but I I do think that like That's a big flaw.

<v SPEAKER_00>I agree, I agree, that's a huge flaw.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I'm saying like people are often correct about something in their times and then like wrong about something else, and like their victory, their ideological victory in the moment ends up being the thing that is a problem.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like in many ways, like I think, like I know this is like a whatever, this is now, I don't know if it's a cold take or whatever, but like I don't think that there was a problem with attempting to remove slums and give people better lives.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like the problem was like how they implemented it.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think similarly, like I think the idea that someone would look around Greenwich Village and go, this is a fantastic place.

<v SPEAKER_00>We should make more of these, and also they shouldn't destroy it, is good.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then like the implementation of that was like quite bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_02>I guess like my take on life, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>I think that there's a danger of you know, as you bounce around in the political domain, of finding people who you are converging with on some specific point.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, it's important to if you find people you converge with on a specific point to find a way to work with them and get something done.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but if they if they reach that specific point through like a flawed fundamental analysis, there's a danger.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I think that what you see with Jacobs, right, all the way back, she keeps insisting throughout the book that the crisis of mid-century urban America is caused by bad city planning rather than by the invention of the automobile.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I don't think that that's right.

<v SPEAKER_02>All of these ideas, including the bad ones, like if you read, if instead of reading The Power Broker, you read the Robert Moses articles that are uh available on the Atlantic uh archive, it's clear, like his ideas are ridiculous, his like state ideas, but he is trying to respond to the negative shock to urban land values that has been created by the invention of the automobile.

<v SPEAKER_02>And that is just an objective problem that cities sort of need to deal with.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, he had a proposed solution to it that I think had a lot of problems.

<v SPEAKER_02>Oh, there's some benefits.

<v SPEAKER_02>You and I both cut our teeth at a specific moment in time when effective with an A, urbanism, just lined up really well with like a market approach to housing.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because what was happening 10 years ago is that there was a huge increase in demand for city living.

<v SPEAKER_02>That crime fell a lot starting in the 1990s.

<v SPEAKER_02>It turns out that like eyes on the street and stuff are great.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but people also really like just being able to lock their car door and drive around to a privately secured shopping mall when crime is high.

<v SPEAKER_02>But with crime falling and certain information technology industries booming, there was just like incredible demand uh for living in cities that couldn't be met.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so, you know, if we yimbi, like we can all grow.

<v SPEAKER_02>Now, unfortunately, the Yimbi movement, like as politics, has been more powerful over the past few years uh than it at any previous time.

<v SPEAKER_02>But the underlying economics of cities have been dealt a negative shock by remote work, you know?

<v SPEAKER_02>And so every city, um, except for San Francisco, is experiencing like a bit of a crisis from plummeting demand for office buildings.

<v SPEAKER_00>And isn't San Francisco also having that problem?

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, no, no, no.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I mean, San Francisco is having this AI boom.

<v SPEAKER_00>Oh, oh, you know.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's like counteracting.

<v SPEAKER_00>Gotcha.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>So San Francisco is just not having the specific fiscal crisis.

<v SPEAKER_02>Gotcha.

<v SPEAKER_02>That's like impacting everything.

<v SPEAKER_00>They they are, they do have like the highest rate of remote work of like any other city.

<v SPEAKER_00>But yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>If you happen to be at like the white hot center of the economic universe, that can like cover up a lot of other problems.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like something that I think we saw really strongly in the DC mayor's race, um, in the Seattle mayor's race, in other places that are coming, is that there's just a kind of a difference between like when economic problems arise, between being like a city's appreciator and being like a markets appreciator, uh, when these things are going in sort of different directions.

<v SPEAKER_02>And Jacobs, as a city lover, as an urbanist, but as like a real skeptic of markets, is hitting on things that I think are not going to make sense.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like her aspiration, you know, so she in the end, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>She goes off on actually the kind of tirade that I expected to find in Silent Spring, but didn't, where she's like, the worst thing in the universe is that we are building these suburbs where people have uh parking lots that they can go to the supermarket in, and it's destroying our tier one farmland, which is an irreplaceable resource that we'll never recover from.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like, that's not true.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, the like metro area expansion at reducing farm acreage has been totally fine.

<v SPEAKER_02>There's no problem at all with American food production.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, we're producing more food than ever through intensive mechanized agriculture, very, very far from cities.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um in her universe, in which we would have banned these suburbs because she likes cities, like where would the people even be?

<v SPEAKER_02>Because she's not that enthusiastic about infill either.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's the core, it's like, and I think.

<v SPEAKER_00>She thought we could just make more Greenwich villages.

<v SPEAKER_00>She thought you could just make a ton more of those.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I think that that's that's what like but like it's not clear like how yeah you would make that happen, you know, and because we see like probably the most like Jacobs-pilled place in America is Montgomery County, Maryland, uh, where you're from.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's not Jacobsian in its outcomes.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like Montgomery County has this huge agricultural reserve where, you know, where we've preserved the urban proximate farms.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um it has these nice walkable neighborhoods in Bethesda near the metro stops, and everything is perfectly preserved in amber.

<v SPEAKER_00>And what do you mean, Bethesda?

<v SPEAKER_00>There's tons of building in Bethesda.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, there was at one point in time.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like now, I mean definitely less than you and I would like, but yeah, sure.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, there's just no it it's it's like it's there's no population growth.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's just completely built out.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like it's nice, you know, like as a place, yeah, but it doesn't it doesn't work.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like if every place, if if Fairfax County and PG County were all governed the way Montgomery County is governed, like the regional housing crisis would be 10 times worse.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>Montgomery County famously like if every inner range suburban America, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like if the suburban counties around Dallas and Houston and San Antonio were all like like it would be a catastrophe for the country.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's not because like the aesthetics are wrong.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's because we're like not taking seriously the question of like supply and demand and elasticity and cost and blah blah blah blah blah blah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's true that in the specific moment of 1962, like this was not relevant to I mean, I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't know if I agree with you about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I agree with you about Montgomery County, Maryland not building enough and every all growth in the DC area largely being constrained to Northern Virginia.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that the thing is like Jane Jacobs loves density.

<v SPEAKER_00>She thinks the pro I mean, she has this quote uh and like uh uh I think it's yeah, it's page like 208.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yes, yes.

<v SPEAKER_00>And she starts out this paragraph and she says, what are proper densities for city dwellings?

<v SPEAKER_00>The answer to this is something like the answer Lincoln gave to the question, how long should a man's legs be long enough to reach the ground, Lincoln said.

<v SPEAKER_00>She loves density.

<v SPEAKER_00>At some point she basically just says, I'm only talking about cities in this book because I like cities.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't I don't care about this other shit, these like towns and suburbs or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh I also I looked, I asked Claude about this quote.

<v SPEAKER_00>This quote apparently is not real.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's no evidence that Lincoln actually said this, so I'll put that out there.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think it's a good quote anyway.

<v SPEAKER_00>And and I think her answer, Matt, is that I think she wants density to be the solution here.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think the the other thing here is like I was try I was, you know, trying to flag on this reread, like how often she talks about zoning, which is actually like not really that much that she talked about like zoning qua zoning, but when she does, like the only thing she really endorses to any extent is like height limits.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think this is like probably the part that speaks most to your critique, Matt.

<v SPEAKER_00>She like looked around, sees these like relatively short buildings, and goes like relatively short buildings are good, so we should have height limits.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but I think also she just had like other kind of, you know, 1950s, 60s takes that everyone had at the time, which is that like really tall buildings are bad, even if you like density.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh this actually made me think a lot about um the recent paper by Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla um uh uh about like uh how like, you know, they're trying to measure public opinion on building new housing in different areas.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like the big thing that they find is like people who like cities like are more good with city-like things being around them, but that doesn't actually have anything much to do with like folks' economic analysis or thinking.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's just like, do you like this thing?

<v SPEAKER_00>What is your taste for this type of urban infrastructure and architecture?

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like Jane Jacobs is like a perfect example of that.

<v SPEAKER_00>She looks around, she likes the place she lives in, she wants more of those things to exist.

<v SPEAKER_00>And the thing is about Jane, uh, or Jane, I'm talking about her, like I know her.

<v SPEAKER_00>The thing about Jane Jacobs is that she is uh she's correct that like way more Greenwich villages would be really, really good for society, for the public, and uh the economy, even though she doesn't really talk about that.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I I I think the thing that everybody struggles with a little bit, not everybody, uh, but that urbanists struggle with, is that you know, there is a minority of the population that really likes these neighborhoods that were built before automobiles existed.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's a it's a minority of the population, but it's too many people to like occupy those places.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right?

<v SPEAKER_02>So you you get both this kind of mix where on the one hand, you or I are saying we have like an undersupply of urban density, and then suburbanists are like pointing to pew polls that are sharing most people say they want to live in a neighborhood where houses are further apart.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, even if that means being further away from services.

<v SPEAKER_02>But there's something very specific about these pre-automobile neighborhoods.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, to be clear, I the the polling on this 55% of people want larger and farther apart.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh they want homes that are larger and further apart, but schools, restaurants, stores are several miles away.

<v SPEAKER_00>44% say they want smaller and closer together, uh, but school stores, restaurants are with walking, it's like it's not like a small, it's 44%, it's a lot of people.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm just saying it's it's annoying because it's a minority taste, but it's also under supply.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, so you get into these like snake chasing its tail internet debates about what do people want.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, but if you make this do a collective choice, like we're gonna choose suburbanism, which is what has been happening, but you can't uninvent the car.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so the thing that sort of she wants, right, and that many people think they want or or say they want or do want, but can't make happen, is like, how do we build Central Paris again?

<v SPEAKER_02>How do we build Greenwich Village again?

<v SPEAKER_02>But it's like you don't have a time machine, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>If you built a building the size of a Paris apartment building today, the apartments inside the building would be larger than the ones that exist in Paris because people are richer and it's the modern world.

<v SPEAKER_02>And you would either have uh underground parking or something, you know, maybe not, yeah, it wouldn't be like the suburbs, like two cars for every unit, but like there would be some parking associated with it.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so it wouldn't be the same as old Paris.

<v SPEAKER_02>And if you go to Paris, they do have some new buildings in historic Paris neighborhoods, and they're built to the exact same height as the old Paris buildings, and they have the exact same cornice line because that's like Paris zoning.

<v SPEAKER_02>But they have usually garages, and if you go inside them, the dwellings are much bigger, and rich people live in them.

<v SPEAKER_02>Those are like the most desirable apartments in Paris, not the genuinely old, but the fake old.

<v SPEAKER_02>But if you scale that across the city, like the city would break down because it wouldn't be as dense, right, as it used to be.

<v SPEAKER_02>And if you go to like the village today, uh my apartment building um contains fewer households than it did when I was a kid, uh, because billionaires have bought up units and combined them because there's like a demand mismatch, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And so, you know, there's just like a question of like what can new things be like?

<v SPEAKER_02>And can we get people to open their hearts to them?

<v SPEAKER_02>Because I I feel like like a weird corner of discount.

<v SPEAKER_02>I wrote about this for the argument, but there's this kind of like nostalgia urbanism or aesthetic urbanism coming about where people are like, oh, well, you know, I'd be fine with density as long as we like guaranteed that it had these exact aesthetic qualities that I like.

<v SPEAKER_02>And one problem with that is that people disagree.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it seems like within the 45% who like urbanism, most of those people like Paris urbanism, where the buildings are all samey samey.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um Jacobs is the opposite.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I have always, I've like never understood the Paris thing.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh now that I've read Jacobs, I understand that it's because I live in this very heterogeneous neighborhood where the buildings are all different.

<v SPEAKER_00>Wait, sorry, when you go to Paris, you're not like this is nice.

<v SPEAKER_00>You don't like how it is?

<v SPEAKER_02>I I'm not like averse to it, but I just like I never got.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm like, why should the buildings all be the same size?

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's just because like I grew up in an urban neighborhood where the buildings are different.

<v SPEAKER_02>She like she talks at one point.

<v SPEAKER_02>She's like, oh, if you go to 13th Street between Fifth Avenue and 6th Avenue, and it's like, okay, my grandparents lived on that block and I went to nursery school on that block, and then she talks about my nursery school and how it was on that block, and how like there's a restaurant across the street and also a hardware store, and that's cool.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I'm like, that is cool, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>But like this, you you just you can't do things that way.

<v SPEAKER_02>You can't you can't just pick arbitrary blocks that you happen to feel nostalgic about and just like, well, everything should be like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, because like, why does the first Presbyterian church have both a small graveyard and also a nursery school attached to it?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, it's extremely idiosyncratic.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it's cool that Jay Jacobs and I both know that block, but like, but like who cares?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, what like what what kind of plan is this for the world versus saying we gotta like let people cook a little?

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I I think this, I mean, there's there's obviously I share a lot more of your intuition around like what you know, letting a thousand flowers bloom or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like to an extent you can do that with zoning and housing policy, but to an extent you can't.

<v SPEAKER_00>Right.

<v SPEAKER_00>Because like you do have to like decide where the train line is going to go, decide where the road is going to go, decide where the water lines are going to go, where the sewage lines are going to go.

<v SPEAKER_00>If you're going to have public transportation, like what are the routes going to be, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_00>And there's a level to which like you you truly have to make some sorts of central planning decisions as a result of like, you know, economies of scale and like the cost of like producing a lot of these public goods.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um and I think what's interesting about Jacobs is like her probably the thing she's best known for is really spurring historic preservation as a an idea in American politics.

<v SPEAKER_00>But she like kind of writes like against that.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like she says that the purpose of zoning for deliberate diversity should not be to freeze conditions and uses as they stand.

<v SPEAKER_00>That would be death.

<v SPEAKER_00>Rather, the point is to ensure that changes or replacements as they do occur cannot be overwhelmingly of one kind.

<v SPEAKER_00>This often means constraints on too rapid a replacement of too many buildings.

<v SPEAKER_00>In principle, zoning aimed directly at building ages and building sizes is a logical tool.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is like a really confusing set of sentences for me because like she starts out and is like totally correct.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, zoning to freeze conditions and uses they stand is a terrible idea.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like that is literally what she becomes best known for, which is that like Greenwich Village, I mean, I think Yoni Applebaum's book Stock does like fantastic work here.

<v SPEAKER_00>I I loaned mine to someone so I could only go back to the uh to the Atlantic article, which is an excerpt of his book for this for this podcast.

<v SPEAKER_00>But you know, he talks about how Jacobs and her allies basically asserted this kind of proprietary right to control their neighborhood.

<v SPEAKER_00>And if you look at Greenwich Village now, like as Matt, you're like a uh, you know, I don't have like strong familiarity with Greenwich Village, so I'm just going off of your takes and like my my brief Googles and about this.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like it's really rich.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's not the same thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's not this like Bohemian set of individuals who can just all come together and like do art and like you know be gay and everything like that together.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like there are still gay people in Greenwich Village, to my understanding, but it's a different uh it's a different uh income mix than there was in the Well I a lot of a lot of gay men became very successful real estate investors because they happen to have bought homes in this neighborhood and it took off.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I mean that's amazing, but we're not anti-uh gay developers, we're pro-gay developers.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um but I do think that uh something that I think people often misunderstand, not just Jacobs, but also just I think people who are concerned about their neighborhoods changing, is they underrate how much of what makes cities great is the people and not the actual buildings.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there are a lot of like people who are different that come together and decide to like, I don't know, make art or make a different kind of small business or you know, decide to work and uh, you know, make the community garden pretty or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that's really the thing you want to preserve, which is often like a very diversity of income types.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think that like I my sister moving to Philadelphia has made me much more aware of like Philadelphia and its benefits.

<v SPEAKER_00>And Matt hates that when people talk about how great Philadelphia is because he's just like, how could it be underrated?

<v SPEAKER_00>Why don't none of you live there if it's so underrated?

<v SPEAKER_00>But but I Matt nodded for our listeners.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but I do think that uh one thing that's really into my Philadelphia is when I visit my sister, she'll like show me to these kinds of shops, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>That are like we went to this like CD and cassette tape store that was like massive.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was like bigger than like any cafe in DC.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like, the economics of this are only possible because of like cheap commercial rents.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's a dense place with cheap commercial rents and the Eastern Corridor, which is basically like no place.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like Philly and like Baltimore, I guess, qualify for this.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that means that you can have like weirdos who in 2026 still are able to have like massive cassette tape collections and sell them for pretty cheap.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um and I was able to buy a bunch of CDs as a result.

<v SPEAKER_00>For like what reason?

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>I have CDs now.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that this is something where um, you know, obviously this is kind of circling back to what we were saying earlier about the the economics, but she seems to both understand but the problem of planning as not allowing for the freedom of choice of every individual and firm or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also she can't let go in a very human way, I think.

<v SPEAKER_00>She can't let go of not wanting to lose Greenwich Village as it is there.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, as someone who like grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, and like I had this reaction really where you're like, Bethesda hasn't changed much.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like, I went back to Bethesda, where like the thing me and my friends would do because we had no money is we would ride the Bethesda circulator for hours because it was free, and like we would walk around and like we'd go to the Barnes and Noble that no longer exists there, or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>I go to Bethesda now and I'm like, what the fuck?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, where is everything?

<v SPEAKER_00>Why does it look so different?

<v SPEAKER_00>Why does it feel so different?

<v SPEAKER_00>And like I'm like a huge Yimby, and yet like this human feeling of just like sadness that like the building form feels different, the types of things like the now they have like this gray facade in this one area that used to be this like dark green anyway.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm getting two in the You got in the weeds on Greenwich Village, so I get to get in the weeds on like Bethesda.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um that's what we're doing here.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I just think that like I I get it, I get why Jane Jacobs is like the way she is.

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay, but I I think this Philadelphia point is really important though.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because as you say, like Philadelphia is really great, you know, it from a from a consumption urbanist standpoint, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Philadelphia, more than any other American city right now in 2026, like represents the ideal because it is a traditional old-fashioned East Coast city, but it is in terms of its built environment, but it is much more affordable than New York or DC or Boston, uh, but it's more prosperous than Baltimore, you know, and like less like ravaged by crime and stuff like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Now, of course, if you go to Philadelphia, there's actually large swathes of Philadelphia that have that kind of like bombed-out Baltimore vibe, but it just started much bigger.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And so there's something really great about neighborhoods that have this specific characteristic of being the most vital remaining part of an old city that is in a state of kind of structural decline.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, no, no, but you know, but like this is a real thing.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, if you go like uh, this is probably not to your uh demographic, but like in the in the early aughts, there was this like incredible boom of indie rock music coming out of Montreal, Canada.

<v SPEAKER_00>What?

<v SPEAKER_00>Why is this not my demographic?

<v SPEAKER_00>I love indie rock music.

<v SPEAKER_00>I love Montreal, Canada.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm sorry, I'm not sure.

<v SPEAKER_00>You're this biological essentialism on the stereotyping, stereotyping too much.

<v SPEAKER_02>And you know, and it's because uh Quebec adopted language laws that sort of wrecked the economy of Montreal by driving uh a lot of their largest businesses to relocate to Toronto.

<v SPEAKER_02>And it created this like like the buildings existed, but they became cheap due to this kind of like economic, you know, self-harm.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so it was like a great place for artists and musicians, especially in Canada, because you'd universal healthcare and other kinds of things like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, the heyday of like when people say like keep Austin weird, yeah, the time that they're referring to is it was this huge building boom in Austin associated with the savings and loan crisis.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then there was this collapse.

<v SPEAKER_02>So you had this college town and state capital that had a lot of physical building capital that like became super cheap.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um or post-unification Berlin, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Where you had this like East my favorite, my favorite world city, Berlin.

<v SPEAKER_00>You're getting all the Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Five seven seven.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like that stuff is cool.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, that's a really good sociological observation.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like the question of like, why aren't we all moving to Philadelphia is like a real and important one.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because Philadelphia, even as everybody talks about how great Philadelphia is, and I like, I'm like really not here to bash Philadelphia to like Philly fans, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Because Philadelphia really is great from the standpoint of like consumer urbanism.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like large corporations are not relocating to Center City Philadelphia.

<v SPEAKER_00>I considered starting the argument in Philadelphia, and then I was convinced that the labor market was not gonna let me do that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>And when I worked at Vox Media, I was in Philadelphia, like we had, you know, our two biggest offices were in New York and DC.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And because of the transportation logistics and the low cost of living, and the fact that our CEO uh went to college in Philadelphia and likes Philadelphia, he had like a big all company summit in Philadelphia.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I was walking around Philadelphia with him, and I was like, Jim, like maybe we should move the whole fucking company to Philadelphia.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like everybody loves Philadelphia, and he's like, maybe we should.

<v SPEAKER_02>But then he didn't, you know, and I don't think that's because like you were blundering, and also Jim Bankoff was blundering, and also every CEO in America is blundering.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, there's some of it, right, is labor market lock-in and agglomeration stuff.

<v SPEAKER_02>But also companies do relocate all the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like a bunch of big companies have left Chicago in the past 20 years, and none of them have moved to Philadelphia.

<v SPEAKER_00>You know, um I don't how wait, isn't it didn't Comcast move something big to Philadelphia?

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm not just Well, Comcast is in Philadelphia.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, that's that's their biggest, um, except for except for meds and eds, that's like their big corporate uh employer, but they're not new to Philly either.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's true.

<v SPEAKER_00>You're right, you're right.

<v SPEAKER_02>And so if you really care about Philadelphia, if you really care about any city, yeah, you have to be curious about these economic fundamentals.

<v SPEAKER_02>That like Austin, we get to have a keep Austin weird movement because after the boom and the bust, there was a new boom in Austin.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they have like a really thriving underlying economy.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I would be curious, I would love to like unfreeze the 1962 Jane Austen and show her contemporary Austin.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because I don't think sorry, not Jane Austen, Jane Jacobs.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, I would be fascinated by what Jane Austen thinks about Austin, Texas, but different question.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh because Austin has a lot of the things that urbanists like in terms of you were saying that it's like people are what matters, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>And so like Austin, Texas has a good mix of people.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, Austin's not super walkable though.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes, but it doesn't have any of the built environment factors.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I think it is closer on a vibes level to Greenwich Village in the 90s than contemporary Greenwich Village is.

<v SPEAKER_00>Where in Austin are you hanging out?

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I mean I've only been to Austin a couple times, so maybe I don't have like a deep insider knowledge of it.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I my my my big uh indicator about Austin is I was walking on the side of the road to go someplace, but I was like wearing like business professional clothing, and so someone stopped and went, like, are you okay?

<v SPEAKER_00>Because like Yeah, that's eyes on the street.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was someone in a pickup truck.

<v SPEAKER_00>It wasn't, I don't guess that that is your eyes on the street.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, no, but I mean I'm agreeing with you.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's it's very different in its form.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like Austin is a really good place to like start a business.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like you and and there's all these like people will start a food truck.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I will go ahead and say this.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that like we don't have to wonder what Jane Jacobs would think about Austin.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that she would not like it and it would prove your point about um who she is.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, I mean, probably.

<v SPEAKER_02>I I mean, but I just don't know, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>Because she has all these payons to you know, she she says like we need old buildings, quote unquote, in cities so that people can get cheap rents to start businesses.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like that's not right.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like the causal analysis there is wrong.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like correct because old buildings tend to be cheap, but old buildings can also be expensive.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, if you prohibit old buildings, new buildings, then the old buildings get expensive.

<v SPEAKER_02>Anyway, it's just to say, like, I don't think that there's like a workable theory of how to grow your city in this because she's so derogatory to the like basic like she keeps going on, she she's talking about parks in Philadelphia, and she's like, Rindhouse Square is great because we have this like mix of uses, but then there's this other park, which she says is used exclusively by perverts.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, that's her word.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh what she meant by that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Washington Square.

<v SPEAKER_02>I don't know, but she's like, the problem is there's too many office buildings near this park, so there's no like moms taking their kids there, so the park is taken over by perverts.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I don't totally know who the she doesn't describe the perverts in great detail.

<v SPEAKER_02>But I can want to be like, okay, but without the office build without the office district, there is no city.

<v SPEAKER_00>No, but I mean what are we doing here?

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I think that like I've grew up in DC, so my my framework for this is DC, like downtown DC, uh, like especially places near the White House, um, gets very, very dead at night.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like as a teenager, when you were trying to like live cheaply, like you'd go down to the National Mall, maybe you go to a museum or something like that, and you'd like hang out with your friends somewhere that was free to be in that physical space.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then like in the evening, like it was sketchy as fuck because like the office people were gone.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, to me, like, I think it would be not like on the national mall, maybe, but but I think it would be good in that general area if you had like more residential, which is what they're trying to do, and is to repurpose a lot of the commercial buildings for residential.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I think that would be good.

<v SPEAKER_00>Do you not do you think that that's wrong?

<v SPEAKER_02>No, no, I mean I agree.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean the first time, second time I guess I came to DC, I stayed in a hotel near Franklin Square.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I, I, you know, I I arrived late morning and I like got out of a the metro.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I was like, oh, cool, you got the metro that goes to the airport in DC?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, what a what a city.

<v SPEAKER_02>Is this the city of the future?

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and Franklin Square Park looks nice.

<v SPEAKER_02>I was like, this is nice.

<v SPEAKER_02>And then later, like me and some other teenagers were like, all right, let's like walk out of our hotel and like let's go see what's going on here.

<v SPEAKER_02>And the park um was full of bums, uh, or the unhoused, uh, but we called them bums at that time.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, not perverts, although there may have been perverts there.

<v SPEAKER_02>And yes, it's because this like office building monoculture leads to like a bad vibe at night.

<v SPEAKER_02>But the question is like, what do you do about it?

<v SPEAKER_02>Right today, that like demand for office space is plummeting, saying like we should encourage office to residential conversions, like, sure, great, like that's a no-brainer.

<v SPEAKER_02>But Jane Jacobs is she's there in 1962.

<v SPEAKER_02>Cities all around the world are collapsing due to suburban computers.

<v SPEAKER_02>But back then, it's not just that we didn't have Zoom, we didn't have email.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, like the agglomeration externalities were like really big.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, I um when I was an intern at Rolling Stone, one of the things I would do was like run documents over to other offices or get them and run them back.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like in midtown Manhattan, the offices were close enough to each other that you could messenger things relatively quickly.

<v SPEAKER_02>And even just being on Wall Street was like you were like out of the messenger zone.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and if you were in Philadelphia, Chicago, like a fucking office park in in White Plains, like forget it, it would take many, many hours, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>So, so this stuff mattered.

<v SPEAKER_02>And like it's true that downtown DC as it existed in 2001 was like a kind of boring, shitty place.

<v SPEAKER_00>You're you're you're you're aging me too much.

<v SPEAKER_00>I was six in 2001.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm talking about like 2010.

<v SPEAKER_02>The fact that it was there is like why the city could exist.

<v SPEAKER_02>And DC is a little bit of a unique case because you can't tax federal buildings and stuff like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like that commercial real estate revenue is like keeping all of New York aloft.

<v SPEAKER_02>And she's so like She saw the iPhone coming.

<v SPEAKER_00>You're mad.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's too she's too much of a visionary.

<v SPEAKER_00>She knew we weren't getting used to agglomerate.

<v SPEAKER_02>There was this there was this famous tweet, uh, infamous, uh, that um this guy Nilo did, and it's it's since been deleted.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but but Matt Darling uh reposted it.

<v SPEAKER_02>And he said, cities are not about fun.

<v SPEAKER_02>They're places where people where people get together to sign contracts and research vaccines.

<v SPEAKER_02>And he got eaten alive for that tweet.

<v SPEAKER_02>I forget.

<v SPEAKER_02>Right.

<v SPEAKER_02>Because he's he's trolling, because the urbanism discourse is dominated by people who enjoy the urban consumption experience.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I am one of those people.

<v SPEAKER_02>But it's true that like cities exist.

<v SPEAKER_00>Cities are for work, not fun.

<v SPEAKER_00>I agree.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's not it's not it's not that cities aren't for fun, obviously, but that the urban infrastructure uh requires an economic rationale to exist.

<v SPEAKER_00>So the place that I actually feel like the strongest about this, and the place where I agree with Jane Jacobs is her like okay, her anti-park stuff.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like she says, quote, too much is expected of city parks.

<v SPEAKER_00>I I am a dog owner.

<v SPEAKER_00>Matt hates dog owners, so like, you know, this is how we're coming across across the aisle to to still talk to each other.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um we're able to overcome these differences.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I have two dogs, and that means I walk my dogs a lot, less so now because I'm married and that's you know someone else's job.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I walk my dogs a lot before.

<v SPEAKER_00>And that means, especially at night, you know, you get your dogs out late at night.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I lived near Logan Circle.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, uh, and I would go there all the time.

<v SPEAKER_00>I was there many times the day.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was always like shocked, I mean, you know, how few people were ever in the park.

<v SPEAKER_00>Logan Circle in DC is like one of the nicest um like park areas in the city.

<v SPEAKER_00>It has like, it's pretty big um for an urban park.

<v SPEAKER_00>It has like, I mean, it's nowhere near like, you know, Central Park or like Rock uh Rock Creek or whatever, but it's like a it's a good size neighborhood.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, it's a it's a neighborhood park.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, and it's a good sized neighborhood park.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh, you know, it it it like on a really nice day, like you'll have some people doing picnics or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like I was I was often there with my dogs alone at like normal times of day, at like 11 a.m., at like 7 p.m.

<v SPEAKER_00>at like 9 p.m.

<v SPEAKER_00>Normal times of day when it wasn't raining, and then if it was colder than average, it wasn't even like a question, I'd be alone in the park.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I found this like bizarre because I loved this park existed.

<v SPEAKER_00>I was glad that it was nearby.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's nice to have you know a place to go with your dogs or just try to walk around, it's like beautiful green space.

<v SPEAKER_00>I want it to exist.

<v SPEAKER_00>DC has like the highest parks per capita, I think, of any city in the entire country.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um uh followed by the city.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, but when was this?

<v SPEAKER_00>This was a couple years ago.

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm gonna explain.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I I but even now, like I live now in your grant circle, it's a much less like densely populated place, but even now, like, you know, you have almost no one is there all the time to the point where like, you know, you can, you know, unleash your dogs and there won't be anyone there to like bother you or to have a problem with it.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I I think this is like one of those things where people think of what makes a good city, and they're like, oh, the real problem is there isn't enough green space, and we need to have this park put here.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, if you just had this park, then it'd be okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was in Minneapolis doing this, uh, you know, it I was doing some reporting on on another piece a while back, and I would run into these people who were, you know, opposing some housing development.

<v SPEAKER_00>They were like, we really want to keep parks because we know that parks are really good.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I'm like, none of you use this park.

<v SPEAKER_00>This isn't even real.

<v SPEAKER_00>I was in Denver doing another project, and I walked around the entire proposed, like, you know, this defunct golf course that people wanted to keep for public space or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, very few people were using this space for and I just think there's like a there Jane Jacobs was correct about this sort of creation of an ideal standard in people's minds about what is beautiful, and then trying to impose that on reality, despite the fact that like nobody actually lives that way.

<v SPEAKER_00>And one of these like apocryphal stories that people will tell, I've just realized I thought this was like a just a just a thing that happened at my university, but apparently a lot of universities have this like urban myth.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, Thomas Jefferson went to William and Mary, where I went to college, and there's a story that I was told that, you know, he observed as he went to school these desire paths which would form, which are these like paths in the in the grass or the dirt where people are taking the most um direct route between two places because the actual path is actually indirect or doesn't actually get you where you want to go.

<v SPEAKER_00>And he observed this and he was like, oh, when I start my own college, UVA, which is the college that he founded, I'm going to like use desire paths to actually figure out where to lay the real paths.

<v SPEAKER_00>This apparently is not true for various reasons.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's not true because A, like a bunch of other colleges have this myth, but also like UVA is like the opposite of like an emergently designed path place.

<v SPEAKER_00>If you've been there, it's like very much like, you know, rigidly uh constructed.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um so anyway, but I I think this is like one of those things here, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Where like there's so many things like this that I think Jane Jacobs gets correctly about like what is good about life in a city, because even though cities are economic engines, people also have to live there and it can be nicer or less nice.

<v SPEAKER_00>And all of these expectations that urban planners create in their like pre-sim city game universe where they draw these, these, these, these, these designs of cities in the clouds on on paper and then assume that life should have to conform to that rather than cities conforming to human life is I think like her most profound and central insight, which I think continues to be correct to this day.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, I yeah, I I super endorse her perk skepticism.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um which which I think is good.

<v SPEAKER_02>Although again, I think if you want to try one reason that I keep coming back to this economic stuff, right, is that I think a struggle that we have is that many people, but not most people.

<v SPEAKER_02>Have this kind of affection for cities and urban neighborhoods.

<v SPEAKER_02>If you want to win, and we see polling, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>You you referenced Chris Elmendorf's polling about this, where in practice, a lot of people are not thinking about the policy stakes when they make these decisions about land use and zoning.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's just people who like cities are like, sure, you should be allowed to build an apartment.

<v SPEAKER_02>And people who don't are like, no, apartments should be illegal.

<v SPEAKER_02>So something that we are need to do and have been doing in some states to some extent is winning democratic political arguments in the context of a country where most people do not share this preference for urbanism and do not have Jane Jacobs' aesthetic affection.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's fun to sort of wallow in agreement with Jacobs' aesthetic preferences.

<v SPEAKER_02>But we need to marshal arguments that can move people.

<v SPEAKER_02>And arguments about property rights, markets, etc., even with regard to the parks, that it's like, look, it might be great to have more parks or like bigger parks or like lots of people like green spaces, or people who don't like this neighborhood might like it better if it had a bigger park in it.

<v SPEAKER_02>But look at the price of the land.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like it's just really high.

<v SPEAKER_02>The opportunity cost of urban parks is either astronomically high, or it's the south side of Chicago, which has all these giant parks.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they're great parks, quote unquote.

<v SPEAKER_02>But it's not making people want to live in the south side of Chicago because the fundamentals on the south side of Chicago have all these problems: economic, transportation, crime, schools, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

<v SPEAKER_02>If these became super desirable places, the parks would be very wasteful.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and the parks themselves don't make undesirable urban neighborhoods desirable.

<v SPEAKER_00>Let's be clear, like the optimal number of parks is not zero.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, it's it's not zero.

<v SPEAKER_02>Back to Logan Circle.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, if you 10 years ago, that park was incredibly much more heavily trafficked.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, the reason it was much more heavily trafficked is that there was a fence around uh the statue of John Logan.

<v SPEAKER_01>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>And dog owners would let their dogs off their leash in the fenced area around the thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And there were huge crowds of off-leash dogs there anytime the weather was decent.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, and little kids would come.

<v SPEAKER_02>I would take my son, who was a toddler at the time, and he would just like come and gawk at the dogs and come and play with the dogs.

<v SPEAKER_02>And once he got knocked over by a dog and got really upset, and then he was afraid of dogs for two years.

<v SPEAKER_02>Oh no.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, but he got over it.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know what I mean?

<v unknown>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, this is a perfect Jacobs anecdote.

<v SPEAKER_02>And this here I will come back around to her.

<v SPEAKER_02>The National Park Service just like decided that this was bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>That this was not like what the park was for.

<v SPEAKER_00>Isn't this like the glacier take though?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like fuck the dog parks.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's not.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, no, no, no, no, no.

<v SPEAKER_02>But this is what I'm saying.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like it wasn't a dog park.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Like this was like a gorilla dog park.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, no, no.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm not I'm not even saying what I do and don't like.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm just saying the National Park Service was like, this isn't what we want.

<v SPEAKER_02>We don't want toddlers and off leash dogs running around.

<v SPEAKER_02>This is meant to be like a vacant space for appreciation of our statute.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they made people stop having their dogs there.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they just like turned it into a dead place because it just because they won't the National Park Service will not allow playground equipment to be installed on the NPS designated parks.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And there's like really only two users of urban parks, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>It's little kids and people who want their dog to be off a leash.

<v SPEAKER_02>And if you decide that the park can't be used for either of those things, what you get is single 20-somethings picnicking on weekend afternoons when the weather is gorgeous.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>And Logan Circle is busy.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like at that specific time.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>But it's like empty all the rest of the time.

<v SPEAKER_02>And that is this like insane planner hubris.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, I agree, I am not like the number one fan of off-leash dogs running around, but that is a thing that people want to do.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, whereas this other thing where people are supposed to sit in silent contemplation of the equestrian statue of John Logan, like that's fake.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like nobody is doing that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I've done that, and I I love John Logan, our uh Civil War hero.

<v SPEAKER_00>I what okay, one thing that I did.

<v SPEAKER_00>A great man.

<v SPEAKER_02>Forgotten to the test of history.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, Frederick Douglass had a great quote.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, he was the scourge of rebels and the friend to freedmen.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like, he's great.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago, though.

<v SPEAKER_02>A lot of very long blocks.

<v SPEAKER_02>So clearly gonna be a huge failure.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay, one thing that I didn't bring up earlier, which I wanted to say, which is like about gay boods, which obviously like DuPont Circle in particular in DC is like this, but like Grudge Village, like you were talking about, is like this.

<v SPEAKER_00>People have a nostalgia for these moments in history where there was a lot more kind of like dense like ethnic community in these enclaves, whether it was, I mean, gay people is not ethnicity, but like or or you know, immutable characteristics.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like gayhoods, but also like African-American neighborhoods used to be much more income uh diverse in center cities.

<v SPEAKER_00>You had middle class and uh working class African Americans living together.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like it's often seen as like a very bad thing that like that no longer exists, but like the was the reason for this, right, is because discrimination went down.

<v SPEAKER_00>So middle class African Americans were able to decouple from working class African Americans and move to the suburbs.

<v SPEAKER_00>In DC, that's people moving from across Anacostia into like Prince George's County.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, and so you have a lot of the depopulation of black Americans in DC is actually middle class African Americans moving to the suburbs just like white people did.

<v SPEAKER_00>This creates a lot of like weird, kind of perverse things.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like in Prince George's County, it's really hard for them to upzone because you have like African American like uh homeowners saying, like, how dare you like take away this thing that we just got after you had like decades and decades of being able to build up wealth.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so it's actually like almost it's like very, very the politics in a liberal area of upzoning one of the only African-American uh uh wealthy enclave is like very bizarre and and weird.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think like this gets at this other question here, which is like how much do like the kind of people matter who live in cities?

<v SPEAKER_00>I think when a lot of people imagine, like cities that they are, you know, and you're thinking about 1900s, New York or Philly or whatever, you often imagine these sort of like ethnic enclaves in neighborhoods and a Jacobsian insight, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Is it like neighborhoods or like um localities being the center of political power in cities is really important.

<v SPEAKER_00>And that's because like I think she's still living in a time where there are these ethnic and also unnamed gay enclaves where that political power is like there are like central organizing beliefs of those communities based on the fact that they're receiving this kind of discrimination that overrides all other um you know political considerations largely.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so they'll all kind of agglomerate together.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's interesting, like I too kind of have this kind of like sense of nostalgia when I watch like these like older movies, and I'm like, oh man, like you know, I I don't know if you're supposed to have good nostalgia when you're watching The Godfather, but like, you know, I kind of get it.

<v SPEAKER_00>People are like, oh, that's kind of cool.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like they're all the Italians are living together and they have this sort of Italian, you know, restaurants and markets and vibe or whatever.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like I like hearing different languages, like that's kind of fun.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but like that would actually be really bad if that was happening right now.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, if that was happening right now, like that would genuinely mean that people do not have like the individual freedom or feel like they have the individual freedom or safety to like move to places with economic opportunity.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so there's like this like weird tension, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's really, really hard to have these kinds of ethnic enclaves that maintain across decades if there's not like some sort of like pressure keeping those people there.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, but we have immigrant I I mean, we we don't have Italian and Jewish and Irish enclave neighborhoods, but we we I mean we have like But they break up almost immediately.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like they I feel like those actually don't are not that stable in most places.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I don't know, Ethiopia, uh I thought you think about a little Ethiopia in in DC, for instance.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I mean Adams Morgan area used to be like a place where there was tons of Ethiopians living there, and then like another wave, like my wave, which was much later, it's like the 90s, like a lot of people moved to Montgomery County, Maryland.

<v SPEAKER_00>So there's tons of people, particularly in Silver Spring.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like when people talk about the Enclaves as like all of Silver Spring, which is like a massive city.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like it's not like, oh, these five blocks are like basically Chinatown or like little Ethiopia.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that doesn't really exist anymore.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, but like, I mean, uh 9th Street south of you used to be Little Addis Ababa.

<v SPEAKER_02>But not anymore.

<v SPEAKER_02>No, I know, but I mean I lived there when it was, and it was it had that quality of like you had several different Ethiopian air trade restaurants, but also you had ethnic markets, but also you had like regular markets that were just run by East African immigrant people, and you had the Eritrean Cultural Center, and you had, you know, somebody trying to explain to me what the difference uh between these uh countries is, which I forgot, and you attempted to re-explain to me.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um I won't do that on this pod, but I do think that like, yes, like when people immigrate, there is often like an enclave people agglomerate together because you're like, maybe there's language barriers, you're just like living near your family or whatever it is, but like that breaks up pretty quickly.

<v SPEAKER_00>This idea of this, like you would have like a place over time remaining the Italian section or the Ethiopian section or whatever, would indicate that like not only when immigrants moved there that it was an enclave, but that their children felt like they had to stay there.

<v SPEAKER_00>They couldn't like go to college somewhere else or get a job somewhere else.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so I actually think that like, I don't know, maybe there's a place we would disagree, but like I just think that like these ethnic enclaves are not stable if there is pot uh equal opportunity in other places for people to go.

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, I mean, I think that's because um I mean, I I think immigration from Ethiopia and Eritrea is a relatively small group of people.

<v SPEAKER_02>I mean, there's certainly persistent uh Latino neighborhoods um in different parts of uh parts of the country.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh so I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_02>I I feel like ethnic uh ethnic enclave neighborhoods still exist.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm going to admit though that this is probably something that there has been empirical study of and that I'm not um actually super duper familiar with that that literature, um which I think is a great transition to doing some peer review research.

<v SPEAKER_00>Great.

<v SPEAKER_00>All right, so today we're talking about a paper called Keys to Upward Mobility, Typewriter Adoption and Women's Economic Outcomes by Mayara Rashid.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um Mayara, I'm sorry if I'm saying your name wrong, uh, is uh uh an economist at Northwestern University.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh this is a really fun paper, actually suggested to us by friend of the pod, Dylan Matthews.

<v SPEAKER_00>Dylan, if you're listening, um we will now know because you'll text us if uh you did actually hear this.

<v SPEAKER_00>But the paper basically shows that the introduction of the typewriter uh changes women's labor force uh outcome.

<v SPEAKER_00>So it draws white women into labor force doing kind of secretarial, um, kind of other office administrative roles.

<v SPEAKER_00>And the impact of that is that it reduces their fertility rates.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, one of the impacts of that is that it reduces their fertility rates.

<v SPEAKER_00>The secondary impact is that as we white women are drawn into these kind of secretarial roles, um, it also draws black women into household services.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like white women who are staying at home, you know, taking care of their children, cleaning, housekeeping, like whatever, um, now need someone else to do that labor.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so they are now hiring black women to do that labor too.

<v SPEAKER_00>This does not affect um black women's marriage rates in the same way it affects white women's, but it does reduce their fertility.

<v SPEAKER_00>One thing is uh that I thought was really interesting is that it has this effect on inequality in that it allows white women to interact with men at a higher level of income.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like the white female secretary meeting her boss at the office and then getting married, and that helps with upward mote mobility.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh this is actually something I've been thinking about because there's a paper I read a while back about assortative mating, um, which basically means uh people matching on like to like rather than like versus unlike.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so um what you're seeing with the invention of the smartphone, with the invention of dating apps, et cetera, is that people are more able to sort for people who are like them.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so you're actually seeing a uh increase in inequality because rich people are marrying rich people instead of rich people kind of quasi-randomly running into like middle class or working class people and marrying them.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so this sort of like relationship where, you know, a guy in the office, like sort of like madmen-esque, like, you know, uh, what's his name?

<v SPEAKER_00>The guy with the Roger, white hair guy in Mad Men?

<v SPEAKER_00>Roger.

<v SPEAKER_00>Roger Sterling.

<v SPEAKER_00>Roger Sterling marries uh, what's her name?

<v SPEAKER_00>I forget the the I didn't actually see the show.

<v SPEAKER_02>I just know that his character is Roger Sterling.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay, Roger Sterling marries some brunette secretary in his office who comes to the office for the explicit purpose of like finding a guy.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like many of the secretaries end up marrying or dating other men in the office.

<v SPEAKER_00>And uh what's interesting is in contemporary world, I mean, obviously that's considered wrong for various reasons, but also like the impact of kind of meeting people in these algorithmic um ways, especially in ways where you can sort on did you go to college, where did you go to college, uh, do you have a postgraduate degree?

<v SPEAKER_00>You can sort on these things that you have like versus like.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I this is actually something that I was like unexpected for me.

<v SPEAKER_00>I thought that dating apps would increase a level of meeting people that were different from you.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then I met my husband where I was like, you know, yeah, we're super different.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, he's like, you know, he's Jewish and you know, he's a single, he's an only child.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like I was like, cool, we're very different.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then I found out that we grew up like, I don't know, a couple miles away from each other and like attended the same school at different times.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I was just like, oh shit, like, you know, how different are we really?

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um one of my favorite, there's there's a great chart here showing um typewriter exposure and husband's expected income.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, showing a really neat screen.

<v SPEAKER_02>There.

<v SPEAKER_02>I just guess it's both to relate it to our prior book club episode about the feminine mystique.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um I felt that Betty Friedan was a little downplaying of like material and technological changes in shaping social outcomes.

<v SPEAKER_02>This paper is definitely, you know, looking through the other end of the telescope on that, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>The claim here is that the invention of mechanical typewriters generated this um turn of the 20th century boom in female employment.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, she is now looking back sort of nostalgically on that era as this like heyday that she wants to go back to, um, something like that.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh, but you know, there's there's more than just ideas and takes happening here, driving things.

<v SPEAKER_02>Also to the point about Jane Jacobs, it's like it's important to, you know, this paper, like most good empirical economics papers, has these like really annoying discussion where they're trying to explain why they think this is a causal relationship and not just a correlation.

<v SPEAKER_02>As is often the case with these papers.

<v SPEAKER_02>I'm not as convinced as the actual authors of the paper that they have gotten this 100% right.

<v SPEAKER_02>That's that's the yin and yang of life.

<v SPEAKER_02>People trying to get their paper published are like, I've done the causal identification correctly.

<v SPEAKER_02>The rest of us are looking at it, they're like, eh, life's always more complicated than that.

<v SPEAKER_02>But they are trying.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, there's like a real good faith effort.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's not just, you know, guy pointing at the screen and being like, typewriters.

<v SPEAKER_02>A lot of ladies typing, a lot of ladies typing.

<v SPEAKER_02>And Jacobs' book, which is not just on her, it's totally I have learned as we've gone through the great works of mid-20th century uh takes literature.

<v SPEAKER_02>She's like making no effort at all to do this kind of causal identification work, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>She's just like you could be saying that like women are causing typewriters, that you know, falling marriage is falling marriage rates are causing typewriter adoption.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um I think you actually hear a lot of contemporary conservatives doing this, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>They're obsessed with like email jobs.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>And they think that like liberals have invented email jobs in order to employ like the girl bosses who we're trying to keep away from their vocation as wives and mothers.

<v SPEAKER_02>And, you know, this paper is just reminding us that versions of this have been occurring in different ways all throughout time.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's pretty clear that like 1880s leftists did not invent typewriter jobs in order to get women out of the home and to create, you know, uh today it's like illegal immigrants.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh at this time it was African Americans doing the domestic work.

<v SPEAKER_02>But like, no, like technology happens.

<v SPEAKER_02>Like these email jobs happen for a reason.

<v SPEAKER_02>The typewriter jobs happen for a reason.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um, technological change, you don't need to like everything that's downstream of it, although in this case it seems, you know, mostly benign.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um but, you know, just like shit happens, the world changes and you got to deal with it, um, including in its built environment and its uh impact on gender roles.

<v SPEAKER_00>One thing that I think is said even now in contemporary discourse is that it's bad to uh talk about household tasks as labor, that like doing the work of making your family food or cleaning up after your family, this sort of thing is not like labor in the same sense.

<v SPEAKER_00>And it's not treated as labor in a lot in like an economic sense, stuff it is not.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's like unpriced work that people are doing in in the home.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think what this paper like often uh actually illustrates quite well is that like clearly people do think this is like and like it's like in a world where like you yourself can't do it, like you will hire someone else to do it.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I actually really like uh like this paper as a as a proof point for for why we should um treat that as uncompensated work that mostly men women are doing.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, well, but I think you're I think you're miss uh misconstruing what the what the invisible labor is, even.

<v SPEAKER_00>What do you mean?

<v SPEAKER_02>Well, it's it's not just the I I'm gonna I'm gonna be the You're gonna be woke for us, okay.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah, it's it's it's not just the literal performing of the household tasks, right?

<v SPEAKER_02>It's the it's the project management aspect.

<v SPEAKER_02>It's somebody has to be the one who remembers, yeah, even if you have help and this like who remembers what everybody's schedule is.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_02>You know, and pays people.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's just another I didn't say invisibility.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's a different, you're just oh okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>Why are you mansplaining household labor to me?

<v SPEAKER_02>I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_02>I don't know why I am.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um you saw an opportunity to outwoke me and you took it, and then look where we are now.

<v SPEAKER_02>I've been I've been seizing the day.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um I've been I've been I've been doing some some solo parenting this week, and it's uh there's a lot.

<v SPEAKER_00>And now you're all in on invisibility.

<v SPEAKER_02>There's a lot going on.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um yeah, there's a large invisible emotional burden um that is taking place.

<v SPEAKER_02>And I I acknowledge that.

<v SPEAKER_02>I hear you, I see you, everybody who's out there.

<v SPEAKER_02>Um and it's challenging to outsource because you know it just sort of inherently has to be done.

<v SPEAKER_02>Uh someday I guess AI will take care of it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm gonna be honest with you, as someone without children, uh, you can throw this in my face one day, but I feel like you could outsource a lot of this stuff.

<v SPEAKER_02>All right, let's let's record that one for posterity.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, guys, thanks for joining us.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh we're we haven't picked our next book yet, so if you have uh if you have thoughts on what book we should read, um, then you should definitely shoot it our way, either on on Twitter, on email.

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh, but definitely subscribe, tell your friends about the podcast.

<v SPEAKER_00>We're still growing, and uh, we'll see you next week.

<v SPEAKER_00>Bye.