ROUGHT TRANSCRIPT: Michael Kimmelman
We talk to The New York Times' architecture critic about the paper's evolution, Progressives’ urban failings, and the question of "community" (who counts anyway?).
The following is a rough transcript of our conversation with Michael Kimmelman.
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Adaam: How are you Vanessa? Hi Adaam. Welcome back to a new year.
Vanessa: A new year of uncertain things.
Adaam: Today we have Michael Kimmelman. He's the New York Times architecture critic.
Vanessa: Correct. He is one of the founders of Headway, which is kind of spinoff within the New York Times that does more long form journalism through the lens of so kind of solutions to big problems and challenges and it's outside the paywall, not profit funded.
So he does some really good work there with his
Adaam: colleagues. See, that's why I think it's kind of cool that we are having this conversation to start off 2023 cuz it's a recurring cause of frustration in the uncertain things universe when people get consumed by culture, war, garbage. Take for example, the obsession with Latinx, which we most recently talked about with Angela Eduardo.
On one hand, it's a story of how elitism can completely warp your brain to the point where you lose track of who you are actually trying to, uh, support who you're trying to represent. Who who does your nolis oblig apply to. And on the other hand, it represents the obsession and overreaction on the right with cultural war hysteria on the left.
And the, the, the mutual feedback of this, uh, nonsense leads to absurd results like, uh, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is, uh, currently the governor of Arkansas, outlawing the use of the phrase from government documents, which is, uh, you know, that's not, not the point. Um, let the elites embarrass themselves, but come on anyway.
The point is that all this, um, derangement is distracting people from the things that really matter to living, breathing human beings. In contrast, you have the people who care about what will our lived environments gonna look like in a year from now in 50 years from now? What do our, what will our communities look like?
How will they interact? How will the, the, the, the places where we live, impact our lives. And that's the stuff that occupies
Vanessa: Kimmelman. Right? And I've been following him for quite some time because as we all know, by now, I got my start in urbanism journalism. So I started reading Coleman years ago, uh, and for me, he was a bit of a North star, him and Justin Davidson as well, who we also interviewed.
Um, you can go back and find that one too, but partly why I was so. So admiring of, of Kimmelman and j Davidson and their ilk is because before them architecture criticism had kind of gotten itself stuck in an aesthetic bent, uh, because for so long architecture hadn't been considered an art form. And so the, the critics felt like it was their job to reinstate architecture as a great art.
And so they got very focused on aesthetically what was happening in architecture. And star architects were born and such. And Michael and Justin, others wanted to look at architecture in the context of cities, how architecture plays a part in how cities function and how we live in cities and how, and quality of life and all these kind of bigger societal contextual issues, which I really liked.
I think the first piece actually I read from Kimelman was his Penn station. Peace. He wrote about, you know, the, the, the calamity that was the destruction of the original Penn station. And he had some sort of great line that was like, we used to come into New York, like Gods, now we scurry
Adaam: in like rats and just if people don't know the background search the old Penn station.
Yeah. Google it up and, and if you don't know what looks like now, Google that up. Uh, seriously getting into like replacing Versai with like a, a target with a tar. Exactly what I was thinking with like a
Vanessa: Yeah. Um, so yeah, and his, his new work is, is focused on housing infrastructure. Like what are the things that are impacting.
Lives of regular people. And the reason that we re reached out to him now is actually cuz he just wrote a book called The Intimate City, which he wrote during the pandemic, I think really early on, just sent out a mass email to people saying, will you come take walks with me? Since we can't do very much else these days.
And so each chapter is Michael on a walk with some luminary of architectural urbanism, landscape design, ecology, whatever you name it, going to someplace in New York and just discussing what they see through their eyes. Uh, and then the whole thesis, I guess, behind this book is when you experience your city walking in an embodied way in a, in a time and space that allows you to actually see and observe you not only experience the city in a new way, you see the folds of history.
You see the pre how it interacts with the present. And I think his thinking is even a pa in a pandemic when it feels like the city's a quote unquote about to die. You have a sense of actually the kind of eternity that is in a city, the ever n. The ever permanence of ever changingness of a city. Uh, and so that was, uh, that kind of the excuse to reach out to him.
But we ended up just talking about a lot, a lot more than New York City.
Adaam: And generally the occupation and criticism is, is dear to me. Yeah. Both of us guess met in, in the context of, of art criticism in journalism. And, and I always considered myself to be part of that world, or at least to be deeply appreciative of it.
If my grand crusade is to expunge phrases like in this space or content, um, my small one is to explore and rediscover what the role of a critic is in a world that is completely diffused and has lost any desire for, uh, centrality of opinion on one hand. There's something great about any person being able to establish a platform and, uh, um, assert their voice in the, the debate of culture and art.
Um, on the other, I think it contributes to this sense of oversaturation that sometimes leaves us innovative, especially you and me, Vanessa. We can feel that experience of everything is equal and nothing really matters. That's, uh, the downside of excessive post-modernism and in this new world, trying to discover what criticism can still do or defining a new role for it interests me deeply.
Hmm.
Vanessa: We also got into my kind of pet topics of what is community? What does it mean to serve community? What do we preserve? What don't we preserve? What matters, uh, in cities? So those were topics near and dear.
Adaam: You get to claim themselves
Vanessa: as community. Yes. Yeah, that was a huge part, which I'm picking up on a lot of the threads that we started with Vaan.
Chakrabarti actually. I actually think that that conversation is a nice prelude to this one because he, cuz Vaan gives us the history of how we got to the fucked up place that we're at. And, and Michael starts talking about what are some of the solutions that we can turn to. And if you're
Adaam: interested in more on the question of criticism and art and, and whether or not we can talk about merit in these fields, check out our conversation with Ken Goshen.
And lastly, we also talked with Kim Oman about his own right institution, the New York Times, which has been referenced quite a lot on this podcast. Not always, uh, in a positive context, but we also acknowledge that. Are ongoing frustration with some of its editorial directions in recent years are proof of how much we believe that as an institution it matters and that it matters that we have these big buddies of authoritative knowledge sifting.
in our society. These aren't easily replaceable by diffuse information. Goes back to the criticism conversation. Anyway, Kimmelman was, uh, generous enough to engage us on this topic a little
Vanessa: bit as well. And by the way, I love the way that Michael entered into this conversation about how the times has changed.
Do you remember this detail where he described the physicality of the space, where they used to work versus where they worked? Now this is a metaphor. Yeah, it was, it was actually really effective in my mind. It's like it used to be this shammy. No, no. Spoil. Oh, okay. No spoilers. Listen to the episode. .
Adaam: It starts with a metaphor.
uh, or allegory, whichever description. . Yeah. Literary critics. We are not, yes,
Vanessa: but Shillers.
Adaam: We are Shillers. We are, um, follow us on uncertain.com. Um, we, we got a bunch of new followers recently, so that's very cool. Maybe it's our new TikTok . God, if you wanna support us, Give us a five star review on Apple podcasts.
It helps. We have already a bunch of interviews lined up for 2023, which is kinda exciting. I'm
Vanessa: excited about them. They're starting to line up. It's
Adaam: great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have some, some people that, that we've been wanting talk to for a while. Some people who've surprised us with, um, their availability.
So we are, we are excited. And I guess with that, Michael Kimmelman.
Vanessa: All right. Well, I have like a million questions. Sure. So I figure, because we're literally in the New York Times building, and you just gave us a little tour of the New York Times that we should probably just start there, but I'm curious to know about your experience when you first got to the Times.
What was the culture like? I'm a little bit jealous when we talked to journalists. Like we talked to Matt Taibbi, for example, and he had this whole story. The culture being very invigorating and jokey and mm-hmm. and I never had that journalism experience of like the traditional
Adaam: news bism I grew up at, like in post-internet journalism.
Yeah. Mm-hmm. , right in the, in the content phase of journalism, .
Vanessa: So we'd never got to experience that culture. So I'm curious what the culture was like when you arrived here and how it's evolved or shifted. If it has, I assume it has.
Michael Kimmelman: Oh, dramatically. Yeah. Um,
so I arrived when the Times was not in this building. It was a couple of blocks from here. Mm-hmm. on 43rd Street, and it occupied, a really shabby space, with orange carpets and drop ceilings and you'd know visible windows. And it felt, um, was there like
Vanessa: smoke in the air? I'm imagining
Michael Kimmelman: smoke in the . Yeah. I mean, they'd stopped the smoking, but there was still some spittoons I think that they kept as mementos.
It felt like you really, like you were climbing into the cockpit of the world really. I mean, it was very um, exciting to walk in because, uh, first of all, when you're very young and you go into the times, it feels like you've suddenly sort of crossed into, you know, a, a palace of a sword that the fact that the palace was So how old were you when you started?
I started ready for the Times in my mid twenties. So it's, you know, as a kid, and, but the thing is that it was, it, was it ? It was the shabbas intentionally, I think shabby palace in the world. Mm-hmm. . And that had something to do with the ethos of journalism then too. This kind of, it retained even for a place like the Times, uh, this working man's, you know, uh, street savvy kind of culture.
It was predominantly male, though. There was a really strong and very important group of women who, uh, had been working at the Times and had come to define it and were already reshaping the notion of gender, um, equity within the newspaper. They were active. Uh, brilliant. And, um, so it was not entirely like a men's clubhouse.
Um, and I think that there was something aspirationally democratic about that ethos of the newsroom, which I really liked. Um, you know, I I I was intimidating to be in the times in the beginning, especially when you're a kid. Um, or it was for me then, but there were
Vanessa: a lot of bullying type of editors
Michael Kimmelman: that No, but I was gonna say it was not a, no, it was never, I never have experienced the times that cliche of, you know, this sort of dog eat, dog, uh, environment that there were, um, and as there are, I think in any office, uh, different personalities and there were strong ones then, um, uh, but I think that I have always felt that the gap between the image people have of the newsroom and the actual.
Kind of, uh, culture has, has been partly the product of a desire, even by the times to perpetuate some idea of power. There's something about that image which is marketable in some way. I'd like to tell you that I'd have a whole storehouse of, you know, horrible stories. And I think, you know, I, I've had a charmed career here.
Um, I know that people have not universally said that, what I'm saying now, but I think on the whole, the times has been a place where people, um, have wanted to work together and work together well. Um, and the times now while we're in this renzo piano building, it's like being, you know, in a insurance bureau in Turin.
It's extremely elegant. It's kind of quiet. Um, it feels very posh in a way. Um, , the times has changed quite a bit. Um, and most of that I think is great. Um, some of that was born of the fact that, you know, the newspaper institute was collapsing and as a matter of survival, the times, um, decided to both double down on a certain kind of journalism and on certain people.
Um, but also on, you know, on projects like film and, um, podcasting and, uh, graphics on, you know, digital graphics and things like that. So the times for me, the palette of possibilities of, you know, uh, doing my work as broadened infinitely. Um, and I, that also put me in touch with a whole different range of people, many of them generationally.
you know, different than me now. It's very weird to be the youngest person in the newsroom and suddenly to be , you know, a senior person in the newsroom. It just, it happens to everyone. Um, but I enjoy working really with lots of, um, young people here and who have skills that I can learn from too. So I, I feel like the culture has, you know, changed, but basically it's an exciting and, and decent place to work. Um,
at least that's my experience.
Adaam: We have heard with, with several people that are talking about the change in journalism in general, but I guess especially in the more established camps like the New York Times or some of the other, you know, great names that the change from something that is. As you put it, aspirationally democratic to something that becomes more like the citadel of journalism.
Mm-hmm. , um,
Vanessa: or think in the Trump years, you saw that a lot like that, that was a, a marketing push, right? Mm-hmm. , it's like in, in this time of, of, of craziness, we, we provide you the truth. Yes. Quote unquote.
Adaam: Yes. You, you, we are the thing that you can clinging to, to, to kind of tell apart the noxious bullshit from the Oh yeah.
You can curse the other bullshit . Yes. Um, and, uh, no, no. Just, uh, I just wonder how that kind of like translates from the inside. I don't know if that's something that you encounter in your, um, corner of the,
of
Michael Kimmelman: the office. Yeah. I mean, I do think that the Trump years were transformational, uh, in the way that people, um, consume the news and the way the news.
Um, leaned into, uh, a role as the kind of fortress in, in the midst of, of this storm. Um, and I think there are definitely downsides to that. Um, one of the reasons I, I think, created headway was, um,
Vanessa: to, and just for someone who's not familiar, if you can just ex describe
Michael Kimmelman: what Headway is. Yeah. Headway's, um, a non-profit funded department here within the times that I created exists outside the Times paywall.
Um, and it's, uh, our slogan is something like, you know, we are focused on big global challenges and paths to progress. Um, by which I guess you could say we are attempting to get away from both the 24 hour news cycle, um, and from some of the sort of prognosticating and doom scrolling culture that's. Um, that has been so marketable, um, not just for the times to try to cultivate a constructive conversation around difficult issues.
Um, and so the, the sort of stepping back and also looking at things with a very different, um, notion of time. So a lot of what I think you're describing is that for lots of reasons or not, certainly not all to do with Trump, right? The,
the sense of time has shifted the, the notion that you need news every second and that net news has to be delivered and can be consumed in a multiplicity of platform. that created a kind of frenetic,
I mean, look what happened. We're talking not so long after, um, the midterm elections, um, which seemed, you know, beforehand to be, you know, we were marching toward the abyss and I never bought into this myself. And then, you know, the elections happened and then were analyzing why.
Nobody seemed to know that, cuz nobody was really paying attention. All this kind of frantic and covid was this too? Right? What's happening next? What's happening next? Um,
I think there's a real desire to have a conversation at a different time scale when one looks back on, um, how, what we predicted, um, why we, where we saw how things happened in the past to take us to this place and where things may move in the future. Not, not necessarily 24 hours from now, but, you know, uh, over time. Um, the, to get a little breathing room, uh, mental and, uh, , you know, and emotional as well. Um, you know, and you, I to, to the enormous credit of the times as well, they, they, uh, embrace this project and, um, so they understand. I think that there is a desire by our readership as well to have other kinds of forms of engagement.
Um, my hope is that headway, uh, can also cultivate relationships with audiences which are not based on clickbait and, you know, stellar numbers of readers, but on, uh, community building, you know, so I,
Adaam: I want to get into detail of how we even go about that. But even before that, when you approach it as a business model and you pitch that idea of something that we are gonna create, I don't even wanna use the word content.
We're gonna, we're gonna do news in a way that is not about creating dependency. Is that something that can only exist when you have a patron like the times. , um, that already sustains itself on a combination of a subscription model and some clickbait and a lot of other offerings like from the, like games for instance, and then be able to channel some of that to do longer term and a different time horizon type of content.
Or is, is, is is the way that you go about it, is something that can be then replicated and done outside of this kind of behemoth of, uh, enterprise?
Michael Kimmelman: Yeah, no, I, you know, I, I totally understand the question and I, and I don't know how to answer because, um, . I mean, I can give you an answer, but the, but what's really asking was, does headway only, can it only exist within an organization like this?
And my answer to that I think is no, but it would be a different beast if it, if it did exist on its own, first of all to raise philanthropic money. Um, you know, it's obviously, um, you know, an attraction to foundations looking for a places to invest that the New York Times would be a place that can amplify the work that they're supporting.
They also, I know, want to and need to look at local journalism and smaller organizations. I would say that they're not mutually exclusive and that what we are doing can model forms of journalism. And we have a fellowship to. And we will do this more to train and, um, turn journalists that we work with headway out into other organizations.
We already did that and we're not even completed our first year, someone working now for the Texas Tribune. Um, so, you know, the Times can play a special role in this. For me, the interest was in using the Times as platform as a global platform, but making it open to everyone and then using it as a place that people might even as it were, share by, um, not just writing some comments back into an article, which goes nowhere, but actually building, you know, relationships around certain subjects which we pursue.
Um, and those people can, you know, uh, be geographically and in other ways very diverse. Um, precisely because the Times has such reach. But I would get back to one thing I said earlier and you know, I don't, I really don't mean to sound like a company man or something, but I do think because the Times had to change to survive and because that led it to become a much more improvisational and experimental place that was willing to throw stuff at the wall.
It was. To me suggesting this, um, and, you know, raising money and trying it out. Um, there are other things we've started, tried out and they haven't worked. Um, we did that at a time when we were not as financially stable as we, you know, or at the moment. Um, our status both requires, but also this was, to me the crucial thing that we exist outside the paywall.
So we have, essentially, we're a barnacle on this ship, but we are not only accessible to subscribers. Um, but that is also helped by the times, um, which leverages a lot of its own resources, uh, to help us out. I'm on staff at the New York Times. I'm not paid by headway. So, um, you know, I, it's a difficult question.
I thought about it a lot because I also. We want to make what we are doing replicable and at a time when local journalism is in, you know, in dire straits. What we want to do is make sure that our work dovetails with, collaborates with, and ultimately helps cultivate, uh, stronger local journalism.
Otherwise, you know, we're not, um, doing the mission that I had imagined. Can you gimme an example
Adaam: of, uh, uh, I guess a success story of, so, of a case where you can see that kind of interaction with a, a local community and the back and forth between the, the journalistic side and the, the outside engagement?
Michael Kimmelman: Yeah, so I, again, I will remind you we're talking less than a year after we launched the first piece, and there's a lot of stuff to do. We've done stories from, uh, Congo and Scotland and Ukraine and Puerto Rico. I did a huge thing on homelessness in Houston and we've done stuff in Anacostia, in Washington, DC We've produced a lot of.
stuff with a very small team, and we're trying to figure out how the, what I call the public square, what we call the public square works. So this is going to take some time and it's outside. The office
Adaam: is of Elon Musk, you mean? Correct. . Yes,
Michael Kimmelman: exactly. . But I will say we, we've done, we have done a few things.
So first, as I said, uh, the fellow who was originally working with us, Lucy Tompkins now works for the Texas Tribune. We fund that, um, position that she's producing remarkable journalism around homelessness. Continuing that conversation around housing in Texas. Uh, we did a story around Anacostia, as you know, very poor, historically African American neighborhood in dc.
Um, talking about what, how to essentially, Anticipate and offset the effects of new infrastructural developments. A lot of concern in neighborhood like Anacostia about what the effects of such developments like Highline would be. So we not only wrote about that, but we have begun organizing community events in Anacostia.
We had the most un timesy event probably ever, which was in the Anacostia Arts Center a couple weeks ago. Organized with local community groups involving local residents there, and we will continue to do that. So that's working with, you know, dozens of people, not hundreds or thousands in order to build relationships.
and stories and work, work with local news organizations in Anacostia. Mm-hmm. , not just in dc Parentheticals is
Adaam: the essence of our show. So I just have a small parenthesis there. Anacostia, that's where, uh, I think a year and a half ago, um, Jamie Diamond made a big to-do about, oh, starting a, a branch. I think of Chase there.
Where is that? Right? I, if I'm, if I'm not, if I'm not, that's, if you're fact live fact checking , I'm looking up. Uh, I think, yeah. Cause I remember. , I'm pretty sure that we interviewed him at the, at the Anacostia Art Center at the time with Axios. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I was actually wondering at the time when I was working on that interview about that idea of, um, this being a big event to open chase.
Hmm. An enormous chase branch in Anacostia. And it was part of a project by Chase to, um, to actually create, uh, banks where the, their normal model of, of expansion doesn't. and there is a, some something that for the, for the Pressy New Yorker in me that was like so weird about it because I just, like in New York, you blink in the shop that you just looked at turns into a chase pad.
And the idea that, you know, there is a shortage of them is, is like, so, is so foreign. But obviously, you know, you have, you have most urban communities experience a, a shortage of the basic, um, retail opportunities and availabilities that, that New Yorkers, most New Yorkers are used to, even if neighbors in New York that actually lack those suites of businesses.
But I was just wondering if you think that that, that kind of. Um, action from the side of business, which I'm sure comes with their self promotional interests. But do you think of those things that actually make a dent in the, the, the real experience of neighborhoods? Or is this laying the groundwork for, you know, future displacement?
Yeah,
Michael Kimmelman: look as I, so I don't, I'm not familiar exactly what, what Chase is doing. I will say that I have, you know, uh, written about many neighborhoods where the arrival of, uh, Duane Reed, where CBS is a transformative thing. Mm-hmm. Um, that things that we think are not just ubiquitous, but sort of annoying actually are enormous benefit and a sign of.
Dignity and normalcy for in many poor communities, and that includes underserved areas of New York
Vanessa: dollar stars are also very controversial in this. Like, are they helpful or hurtful
Michael Kimmelman: to communities? Right. I mean, so the, the, I don't know about the chase door and what kind of financing they plan to provide to people in community like Anacostia.
Adaam: The actual services probably matter more than the branch itself,
Michael Kimmelman: right? Quite a bit. The general concern, and this is why we got interested in Anacostia too, is, you know, how does one, how does what meaning a community at the same time sort of evolve? And some of that evolution may include and should include new developments, new businesses, a new bridge or park or whatever, without losing what it values most, which is the sense of home, the ability of residents there to remain where they live and.
That includes the businesses that are there. In other words, this, this, you've mentioned displacement. This is of course always the question and how much is the arrival of a Chase, a Harbing Jun? How much is it a bo? Which comes down obviously to the extent to which these organizations work with the communities and have the interests of the communities.
First in mind, this is why we wrote about that bridge because a group called the Highline Network having, um, seen the unintended effects of the Highline was created to essentially advise other cities,
Adaam: especially that's, let's just open it up quickly, but what are the unintended
Michael Kimmelman: effects of the Highland?
Well, the Highland line was, for those of your listeners who don't know, the Highland was, uh, a disused vi railway via duct that ran along 10th Avenue in Manhattan. Um, for a couple of miles and, uh, was converted into a park, an elevated park. Um, and this happened over some years, but fundamentally under the Bloomberg administration, um, with the idea that in, uh, an area where there were not a lot of, uh, parks, this would also benefit the, uh, thousands of public housing residents who.
housing along the line of the high line along 10th Avenue or near it. Um, and
Vanessa: it's financed in great part by selling the sky rights right to the buildings along the, the high line
Michael Kimmelman: there. Well, the city financed the upfront. Mm-hmm. , then there was rezoning that was done mm-hmm. so as to allow the high line to happen when that, that's another story.
Okay. . But the fact is that
when the Highline was undertaken, it wasn't seen as a kind of, you know, turbocharged engine for luxury development. And it was hoped that it would become, provide open space for people in, people like those living in the public housing projects. Instead, what happened was it became, you know, an instant tourist magnet, um, and a place where, uh, largely black and brown people in those housing projects did not feel welcome. Um, and play became a, you know, a place where wealthier New Yorkers sometimes went. Or they liked to pretend that they never went. Um, but it was definitely not what you would call welcoming to everybody. It didn't seem that way. And it wasn't
Vanessa: just the park itself. Right. It's, it's the impact that, because it became a tourist magnet.
Correct. Then that changes the, the development landscape of the neighborhoods near it, near
Michael Kimmelman: it, along it. Right now the truth is that, um, you know, that neighborhood, so I used to be the art critic at the times, and I remember when the galleries started to move from Soho to, um, Chelsea because they were being priced out of soho.
And Chelsea still was a place where you had, you know, taxi garages and the sort of spaces that could be converted, um, into, into galleries, and they started to arrive. And then there was also the beginning of some kinds of, you know, new restaurants and, uh, A different crowd was moving to the neighborhood, the Highline, so that things
Adaam: were already, uh, pretentious
Michael Kimmelman: before the Highline.
Yes. And that's the same by the way, in a place like Bilbao for instance, it's often said that, you know, the opening of the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gerie sort of completely changed the nature of the city. And in fact, it was of course a very, um, impactful Right. Um, thing. But, but
Vanessa: Right. What developer is gonna take a risk on a, on a location that doesn't already show signs of revitalization.
Michael Kimmelman: Right. Well, Bilbao had, had lots of, the Norman Foster had done, I think the, the, the railway station. There, there was a lot of other things that had been happening in Bilbao.
So what, yes, what happened in, in, uh, the case, the Highline was you had all this luxury development sort of. ,
it's supercharged, as I said, the, the pace of change there. Um, and I think that, I know that the founders of the Highline regretted, um, that for instance, more people did not feel welcome and so began to go back to communities, like the people in the housing projects there and say, well, what did we get wrong? They had held endless community meetings, but clearly they weren't listening. Um, well, how, what could they do to make the park a different place? And they realized that because every other city saw the recuperation of a defunct viaduct as a gigantic money maker and started to look at every, you know, bit of railway or unused highway or whatever it was, as a source of money. The highline started to do consultations with cities and one of the places, um, that they, the network worked. It was in Anacostia where the threat. Is profound to people in that neighborhood. Now, I just wanna say one other thing about that, and it gets back to your point about Chase. You know, when we talk about gentrification and displacement, when we talk about these kind of changes, we tend to do so in very cavalier ways. And we feel like we're often speaking about communities, we're speaking on behalf of communities, we're really speaking at them, and we are not of them. So, you know, in a place like Anacostia, if there is enormous amounts of new investment and new people moving in, that gentrification can be a good thing. Uh, how do we know that it won't benefit the predominantly African American owned businesses who are there and allow them to expand it? It can't be presumed that it's only going to turn every neighborhood. , uh, you know, Soho or Chelsea for that matter. And
Vanessa: if there are black owners or or low-income folks who happen to already own property there, then they do stand to benefit from
Michael Kimmelman: Correct, correct.
But is that also true? True of, you know, people who are renters? Is it true, uh, people who are running shops who don't necessarily own, you know, the buildings are in? So the question really is me always about displacement and the protections upfront. How, what kind of conversations does a community have?
What kind of protections does a local government provide so as to make sure that the people in that community can remain and benefit from change? Change itself is not necessarily a threat of cities change. They're organic. That's the very essence of what a city is needs to be. And the question is, how much of that.
Who does that change benefit?
Adaam: Right. So actually you are touching on two, two ideas that we talk about that, that just come up when you have those conversations about things like gentrification and I think require a lot more, I guess defining,
you talk about community, how do you even understand what the community is just in, in passing on this idea, you said, are we talking about the owners, are we talking about the renters? There are already completely different class interests involved there and you can divide it by, you know, by ethnicity, race, gender, by length of time lived or by property owned or by um, even access, like people who have been frequenting, uh, that neighborhood or enjoying some services in this neighborhood that might lose their services but don't necessarily live there.
Are they part of the community?
Michael Kimmelman: That's a really super good question and it's really it that, that question was at the heart of the. The first story that Headway published, which I wrote about, uh, the development of the East River Park redevelopment of East River Park. After the flooding that happened with Super Storm Sandy, the housing projects there, public housing projects flooded along the East River because, um, the waters came in over the park and across the FDR Drive flooded these public housing projects and other places as well.
And so the idea was, well, we have to do something to renovate the park or build some sort of barrier to protect these communities. But what we want to do, this was part of a, a federally funded program called Rebuild by Design under the Obama administration, which, um, when Sean Donovan was the head of hud, what, uh, the idea was we want to build protections, but we want to build protections along a Dutch model, which was to make sure that they worked in tandem.
With, uh, other kinds of community benefits. Um, so in the same way that the Dodge will build a dyke, but put a park on top, um, or design a public square, that can be a, you know, retention pond, but also, you know, a basketball court, uh, that there's just some attention not just to infrastructure, but to the community needs.
That was the idea behind Rebuild and behind the East River Park. And so there were hundreds of community meetings, and this was going to bring the community together around this project and the renovation of the park and all, blah, blah, blah. And to make an incredibly interesting but extremely long story, just slightly longer, um, that actually blew up.
Turned out that exactly what you're saying them is there is no community, there are communities and they are often at odds. And in fact, the process revealed. , these, these, um, separations, these, these ruptures in the community, these class distinctions and racial distinctions too. And you had lots of people speaking for the, and sometimes
Adaam: maybe just more, uh, you know, uh, prosaic distinctions of
Michael Kimmelman: interests, correct?
That's right. You actually had on the whole white, wealthier, better educated people who were not in flooded buildings who wanted the park to remain as it was. And you had people in the housing projects who were like, well, we're gonna be flooded again. And they were predominantly not wealthy and white. Um, and so I think that question of who is the community who represents the community is a really, really profound an unexamined question.
Which a lot of people on the left, I think progressives like to think that they speak for or know, but often they're speaking for themselves,
Adaam: which is in reference, this is a lot of what vsan, Chira was ta talking about the, the idea of misrepresenting your own interest as the interest of a community. But I think sometimes the problem is even deeper than that, cuz sometimes it's not just about camouflaging your own, your your own interests, but sometimes.
Truly failing to diagnose the idea that there is no such thing as the voice of the community. I think some of the fallacy there is the, it, it is more of a left thing, but I think now it's like, especially post-Trump, it's a, it's very much a, a right nationalist thing that there is this thing of the voice of the people.
Yeah. It's like a, kind of like an intellectual fallacy that is, or a epistemic fallacy that is just leading people to, to assume that it's, even if you, if you do push them and say like, who truly represents the community? They would still look for the authentic voice of that community. Okay. This person is, is, you know, enough of a representation of what I understand to be a community.
The problem is that there is no such thing as an authentic voice of. A one group. There are many interests and sometimes even within those interests, they can be Yeah. Fractured. Yeah. Yeah.
Vanessa: This is something I've, I've been thinking about a lot because, uh, well, for multiple reasons, but I, I have another podcast called Urban Roots, where we look at urban histories, um, and we try to tap into local communities and collaborate with local, uh, organizations, an attempt to tell the story of quote unquote, the community.
And every time we write a script, our script editor would be like circling the word community and like big red letters, like what community, which community are you talking about? And, and trying to get specific on this is really tough because I, one of the reasons we started that podcast is because, um, my CO is a historic preservationist and she's seeing this movement in the preservation field away from building preservation and toward community preservation.
This idea that, Preserving the physical artifacts of the building is actually less important than preserving the communities in place. And yes, having a connection to the past is vitally important, but so is safeguarding a path to the future. And so this is something that I'm thinking about all the time.
It's like, who, who is the community we're trying to preserve? And I think it's, I do think it's a noble mission that we have, but it's also a complicated one because we don't, you can't, you can't preserve everyone. Right. And cities change and do evolve. So I don't know. I, I, I, I'm assuming that you also think a lot about this issue of who is community and how, how do we preserve people in place
Michael Kimmelman: if we can?
Yeah. You've raised a bunch of different issues that I should hasten to say when I talked about, for instance, the preliminary work we're doing at Anacostia, one of the questions is who is the community and who's, you know, and you have to be open to letting people tell you. Yeah. Um, and not trying to, you know, um, , go in with an assumption that you know the answer to that and, and let that evolve.
So that's one thing. Then you raise another issue too, which is then what is one preserving when one is preserving a neighborhood or a building or whatever. Uh, you know, uh, for me this has been, I've written a bunch about historic preservation issues and preservation in general, and this has always been at the heart of my own interest because, you know, I think
when people talk about preservation in many places, what they want to preserve is the, is is the life that revolves around a thing. Um, so therefore they, I think people were concerned about losing the coroner bodega. They're lose concerned about losing, you know, uh, gem Spa , yeah. Gem Spa. Um, and, and not concerned so much about, you know, the really beautiful bespoke, and again, this is a class, um, and often a racial distinction too. You know,
think about the Stonewall Inn, for instance. The Stonewall Inn is a, you know, ridiculous building. It was, it's, it has no architectural merit whatsoever. And, and the Stonewall end when it was a gay bar in the 1960s, seventies was a dump. I mean, there's no, you know, from a preservation perspective, our laws, um, are not set up really to protect it. It's designated odds on the National Historic Register because of what happened in and around it, because it represents.
something meaningful about the village and to a community. But the building itself, by the way, the preservation laws don't even protect it as a bar. So it can be turned as it was at one point into a nail salon. Um, it was a nail salon. I did not know that. Yeah. There's no, we don't have the mechanisms to do that.
We, we will even preserve, I'm getting a little off track here, but for instance, the Pepsi sign along the East River is preserved, but, but we, you can't preserve it as a Pepsi sign technically, um, because the, there's no legal jurisdiction for controlling content, as in you can't control the bar, but you can sort of designate that the, that whatever that sign were to be, it has to have certain shapes involved or something like this, because it preserves the design.
Right, right. But it's vague. Well, my point is,
we haven't established really, I think the, the terms or even thought through the problem of what we really want to preserve when we're talking about preservation and therefore what it is that, that a community values and considers its identity. I think it's easy with architectural, you know, buildings essentially to say this is more or less historically important. You can debate that. But once you get into the much more, to me rich and complex and meaningful territory that involves, as I said, place like the corner bodega, we're not prepared to think our way through it. Even in San Francisco there are, there's a fund I think put aside, which small businesses which have been around for X number of years can apply for some sort of a grant if they are just marginally below breaking even so that they don't shut down.
But fundamentally, we, because we are a capitalist system and don't though everything about the system is profoundly unfair. We don't want to admit that some businesses benefit more than others. We can't subsidize the bodega. We may subsidize Citibank in various ways, but we can't subsidize the bodega, at least not indefinitely.
So it cannot be part of a kind of historic preservation. This may sound odd, but I mean, I think this is where you are describing thinking is going. Um, and rightly so. Mm-hmm. , um, Pompe is a wonderful place, but it's definitely not a living community. But by, but I'll push
Adaam: back also that part of the problem of not being able to preserve the bodega, I think, is that, let's say that you have the state mechanism to decide or allocate certain businesses as integral to the integrity of the community, right.
And,
Vanessa: which I think some cities are starting to, to do.
Adaam: No, but, but, but I'm saying that even if you do that, how, like, do you go back every five years and test. Is it still integral? Is it still important? Did it change character like or is now okay for, we've just basically decided that for the next 50 years, there shall be a bodega in this corner.
Long past its utility. Maybe the entire community around it has changed. The big sea community has completely changed, is making no use of this bodega or at least not deriving the same kind of, um, community Right. Glue that it used
Vanessa: to give. Right. And then somebody says, what if I put some housing here and then a bunch of people say, Hey, we need a lot of housing cuz there's a housing crisis going on and a small, I actually need
Adaam: a law in order to just bring down this
Michael Kimmelman: one bodega.
Right. And I don't disagree with that at all. Of course. And of you're absolutely right that the, you know, this what I meant by cities of all and they, they need to do. So it, it's a complicated question. Um, and I think it's. It, it's been in a sense distorted, um, by the, you know, housing crisis, this portable housing crisis, because that has created a culture of fear around any sort of change, and it is created very curious allies.
VHA may or may not have talked about this, but we, you know, I to these things too, that you have essentially a kind of nimby contingent that now often allied with, uh, tenant activist groups who are representing people who fear displacement and neither of them want new development for extremely different reasons that that's an incredibly toxic alliance because it basically, , um, prevents almost anything from happening.
I, I, I feel like
Adaam: every time we need to just explain what Nimmi is, is briefly
Vanessa: is okay. Not in my backyard. Thank you, .
Adaam: Um, but the, but more importantly, the, that kind of alliances lead to weird perverse situations where, for instance, the idea of vem bism Yes. In my backyard is perceived by often, uh, progressive activists as a guise for corrupt development or for like Republican policies, rather than something that, you know, actual might have progressive outcomes.
Progressive outcomes are more equitable results.
Vanessa: Yeah. Oh, I'll let you respond to that then I have
Michael Kimmelman: a follow up. No, no, of course this is true. I mean, it doesn't, uh, so
you have very strong NIMBY contingents in extremely progressive places. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Metro, Metro of New York City. It, it doesn't break down to like gibes are all. Republicans and reservations are all progressive. That's a absolutely not true. Um, and so it is complex. Um, I guess it comes from a certain personal disappointment that people who describe themselves as progressives have often been up the major obstructionist to changes which would benefit underserved, uh, people.
Uh, and doing it in the name of either environmental, uh, legislation or historic preservation. Um, you know, it's, this is blasphemous to say, but some of the most obstructionist actions have happened because of environment. Well, the way environmental laws have. Um, empowered. Empowered, yes. Thank you. People who say that they're trying to act on behalf of progressive causes, it's just, you know, this is really something I think that had not been anticipated.
But could have been construction
Adaam: to development. That could
Michael Kimmelman: be more, a hundred percent. I mean, I'm not saying I, obviously, I need to be quite clear. I'm not saying we don't want rigorous environmental legislation and historic preservation and other kinds of preservation laws, but, but you go back to the beginning of the environmental movement in the first passage of those laws in the seventies and eighties, and, and you can already see the whole point was to stop things from happening.
Some of those things in retrospect, uh, would've been probably good. And many people now would look back on them as something that, um, was a missed opportunity at the time. They were triumphs of, you know, the environmental movement. So, you know, I'm glad we're having this part of the conversation because it, I think, gets to the, the, you know, wonderfully complex and adamantly uncategorizable aspect of, uh, cities and urban development.
But it also, it also speaks to what is, I think, um, at the heart of our society gets back to your first question, which is, you know,
we have become very divided in many ways and resistant and fearful. And, you know, and a lot of this is because alliance have been drawn and drawn more and more sharply by legislation and, um, activities by groups, um, who, who fundamentally don't really want to compromise or don't want to give up what they have.
Mm-hmm. , uh, and that is true of people, whether they are ranchers in Montana or people in Palo Alto or on, you know, in Soho.
Vanessa: Yeah. I think, I mean, vsan kind of put it in the terms of. People have taken the tactics of Jane Jacobs and weaponized them and weaponized them for non jacobian outcomes. But I think, so one thing that I think is very clear about our current moment is that we have learned how to say no.
We know how to say no to development very well. People have created whole organizations around now that had know how to do it. We don't yet know how to say yes. And my question to you is, how do we know when to say yes? And is it your job to tell
Michael Kimmelman: us ? Well, partly, I suppose in, in some cases it is. Yeah. Um, but I can't do that alone.
And I don't know how many people listen to me. I mean, I. So there will, some people will be listening to this and say, well, this is insane. I mean, New York is just in the hands of big developers. Mm-hmm. and things are happening all the time. And what is this idea that, you know, the, the, the situation is complex.
It depends on, uh, individual cases. You can't generalize about anything. That's the, again, the nature of a city. It's a big complicated organism. Up in Inwood, some years ago, there was a, you know, a site of, I think it was, I don't know, a garage or something. It was just abandoned. A developer came in, wanted to build some apartments there.
The mandatory inclusionary zoning rule had just been enacted. That is says the developments that, um, request, uh, some variance, some some exception to the current zoning envelope on the site. Um, must provide X amount. I think it's, uh, maximum of 20% affordable housing. A very. Vague term, which is itself a problem, but the developer said, actually, I want to do 50% affordable housing.
Um, we wanna build slightly outside the zoning envelope, but I'm happy to add a lot more affordable housing than that. And the neighborhood people were literally out in the streets protesting this, saying, over our dead body, will we have one more market rate apartment in the city. So it never happened.
I'm not saying that project was the best project, but that tells you something. Each project is different, and we have to, you know, Hudson Yards is a calamity. Um, on the other hand, that's a minor calamity too, that we're not getting more housing on a site like that. When you have a developer who's willing and actually anxious to provide more affordable housing than the legislation requires, which isn't enough.
Where is this coming
Adaam: from? Is it the, I mean, my, my cynical brain is people just expect things to happen. on their own. Like the idea that the only reason that things aren't better or that things aren't more available, more affordable is because people are greedy and they're not releasing the back held of supply as opposed to consider that maybe economy eco economics is a complicated field.
Yeah,
Michael Kimmelman: yeah, it is. And you know, again, this word in deep waters is a long conversation about why, for instance, there isn't enough affordable housing in New York. Why don't they want change? Because I think, you know, there's certain things we, um, we want what we want and, and we don't wanna lose what we have that we like.
Uh, it's not, it's a, a lot of, it's very emotional. Um, and some of it let's say, isn't emotional, you know, some of it is, uh, frankly, um, classist racist. I don't mean to say that everybody who resists new development, I'm not a ybi. I, I think the whole point of. thinking our way through these things is that we have to be specific and cases are different.
And that's, that's the nature of it. But I, you know, I do think that, um, one comes across many examples when you just have people who tell themselves they're doing this to protect a neighborhood, but you know, it so happens that the people that are trying to keep out are not like them. Um, I don't know what, I don't know how else to describe that except to say that it's maybe unconsciously exclusionary.
Vanessa: Um, I mean, I wanted to ask a question a little bit more on the lines of the, the previous question in terms of your, your role as journalist, critic. I think one of the wonderful things about being an architecture critic is that you get to have conversations like these and think about things like these that go beyond the scope of just aesthetics.
But I'm, I'm curious to what extent. You, can you draw lines between activism and journalism? Because I think, I mean, going back to our very first questions, I mean, there is a strain of journalism now that is going very strongly activist in nature, which has potential drawbacks to the profession. I've heard you say in an, in an interview previously that you do actually consider yourself somewhat of an activist in terms of promoting good urbanism.
And so I, I wanted to get your thoughts on how you approach the work and to what extent you need to be a proponent of a certain way of doing things, creating cities, building buildings, um, and where are, where are the lines that you
Michael Kimmelman: draw? Yeah. No, it's a good question, and I know I've said that. I mean,
I think a critic has a responsibility in this field to try to explain why things. It should be one way or not another. And when you're writing about and talking about the built world, you are not only talking about aesthetics, you're talking about, you know, how we live the communities and neighborhoods we make. And I suppose that sort of tilts over into a territory that people often think of as activists, because it's not just saying that I think this proposal is prettier or less attractive than, than that one.
But I also, I'm, I'm not uncomfortable with my particular role having some function in, in, in around the political conversations that take place, um, in urban affairs. Is headway at activist thing? I mean, yes, I think, I think so. A lot of the work I happen to do is, is reporting and in-depth reporting. Um, but it is towards an end.
When I wrote about homelessness, I was, you know, the idea that we would like to find ways to end it, not simply to point out all the ways in which, um, people fall into homelessness and. And the problem seems to be getting worse in many places. So I, you know, I see that as a responsibility also that I have as a result of my incredibly fortunate job.
If I have this particular soapbox, then I can use it to try to direct people towards, um, things that might help and try to point them away from things that seem inequitable or unjust. Um, but I don't mean to make myself seem heroic. I mean, I don't, I don't know that the line is really that, um, important to draw.
What you have is the quality and of your voice and the, your ability to do, you know, in my case, I hope, you know, reporting that's, um, that's sincere and thorough enough to earn people's trust. And this least interesting aspect of a critic's job is a thumbs up. Thumbs down. Everybody has opinions. Most of our opinions about most things are.
Meaningless and stupid. So that's not really a very interesting aspect of the job. It's about the extent to which you can stimulate useful conversations and lead people to do something better. ,
Adaam: I wanna talk about homelessness, but just, just ride to this point a little longer. The question of thumbs up, thumbs down, down goes into the bigger point of critic as gatekeeper and in, in a way, this is actually bringing up the, what we were talking about, the, the times as the citadel of, of truth or of journalism.
How much is the general loss of gatekeeping? How much does that you think? creating a richer way to approach both social and aesthetic matters of judgment, and how much are we losing something by not having a, a more authoritative place where you can trust, okay, I, I have put together a lot of hours and work into telling you why this project, I mean, even if I'm not telling you whether it's good or bad, but I'm, I've put a lot of work to tell you why this project is gonna lead to these outcomes and those outcomes, and maybe they're, you know, disconnected from what you think they are, et cetera, et cetera, from the social side and from the aesthetic side telling you like, you know, , this artistic trend is kind of bullshit, or this artistic trend is actually developing a new idea.
Here's how you can approach it in a meaningful way. You know, I don't want gatekeeping to just be reduced to thumbs up, thumbs down. That's why, that's why I'm going to the effort. But gates keeping can still draw lines that are not just thumbs up, thumbs down, but still require a more authoritative position to exert
Michael Kimmelman: it.
Yeah. Look, I think you're asking a few questions at once and one is at least, yeah. one I think is years ago, you would have a very few, um, places to turn to for opinion. You had, you know, the, these incredibly powerful and seemingly remote figures who were critics of the times or, uh, or the New Yorker, Mumford and so forth.
And now you've got like everybody basically. So, uh, what I think you're asking partly is have we lost something by having this cacophony of voices? Frankly, it's not a question I'm particularly comfortable answering because, um, if I say yes, we definitely need, you know, authorities, it seems unbelievably self-serving.
And if I say, you know that no, we just want to complete cacophony of voices and everyone, it's exactly the same. I'm not telling you the truth. Um, or you're out of a job . Well, it's not even that. Yeah, maybe, but it's also, it's still, you know, let's face it, it's, it's not true. We all do feel, I think, overwhelmed by this sheer noise and I don't know what the answer to that is.
I, I keep feeling that we are passing through a moment and maybe you and I are talking, we're all talking at the, the midst of Twitter's implosion and, you know, maybe some of that is, uh, you know, maybe it's not gonna iode and, and so forth, but. That we, you know, we've had this dramatic and very rapid change, which has made possible, um, what on the surface is profound and fixed.
Fantastic, which is just this profusion of voices and places to turn, and the possibility of people speaking up and reaching much, much wider audiences than, than actually the times ever had in its, in its history. Uh, historically, at the same time, I think we do feel that the, the noise level is really not good.
So I see it as my role to be clear, selective and, um, and earn the trust that the institution bestows upon me by association. That's really the key. I, I need to constantly reestablish. Why you would want to listen to me. And you know, I leave it to readers and others to decide whether my voice is useful to them or not.
And as for gatekeeping itself, there's a certain influence that one can have when you have a megaphone. But in the end, you know, a critic is not a really a gatekeeper. I mean, at least not in the fields that I've operated in. If you're the theater critic or a restaurant critic, or another critic of consumer goods, then you're fulfilling a specific role.
Someone wants to know, should I pay money to go to this movie? Should I buy, should I go to that re. , um, that's not what I do. And no one's going to sort of say, well, he didn't like the way this building looks, so we're gonna give up this billion dollar project, because it just isn't it, it's about a different thing.
And I don't particularly care about the consumer aspects of my job. Um, I don't have to. Um, I think you could ask that question of gatekeeping more sort of directly of somebody who's like, uh, a food critic or a restaurant critic. But I think it's
Adaam: almost too easy to ask it of them because obviously a food critic you turn to precisely because you want to know yes or no.
But I think the, the more subtle version of gatekeeping, which my instinctively I think is still important. is in, in is even in the field that you do. And to some extent, even what we are doing, it's not gatekeeping in the sense that we're saying that this is anathema or this is a place that you shouldn't go to.
This is something that you shouldn't do. But we are drawing attention to things that we think this is wrong and we are trying to make a strong case.
Michael Kimmelman: Right. No, look, I not disagree with that. And I think that I could answer it another way too, which is that, um, it is what you do write about and don't write about.
That is a form of gatekeeping in and of itself. Right. And, um, of course I, you know, it is a fundamental journalistic role, right. To shed a light in dark places. And so that's part of my job too, to shed a light where people have not been paying attention, but which deserve light. Right. And I took over this job with the intention of doing it differently than it had been done.
Vanessa: Right. And it might be worth just unpacking the kind of, The paradigm shift a little bit because I think traditionally architecture criticism was much more in line with art criticism. Right? Like that I do think that when you came in, you kind of shepherded a bit of that shift towards a more, um, contextual understanding of, of buildings as opposed to a more purely aesthetic.
Michael Kimmelman: Yeah. I mean, this was a very, you know, intentional thing. It grew out of my own interest. It wasn't calculating in a, you know, in some, a nefarious or entirely self-serving way. It was, um, I, you know, I grew up in the village. I, I've always seen urbanism and, um, politics and social affairs and architecture is all part of.
You know, Bulia bass and, but also not very many people have had this job. It was, it was, uh, created by Ada Louise Huxtable, who I grew up reading, um, back in the sixties. She started this job and the intent at that time was to establish architecture as a, as an art form journalistically equal to all the other arts that were covered in the culture section of the New York Times and to retrieve it from the real estate department.
Mm-hmm. , um, . That's so interesting. . Yeah. And I mean, of course, you know, even having to make that argument seems insane. And so she was rectifying something that was obviously, uh, not just an oversight, but a complete, um, misunderstanding of the history of architecture. And, you know, before I took over this job, there was, uh, a real emphasis on certain kinds of, um, architects and certain kinds of buildings material.
And formal invention that created the notion of the, um, star architect and made certain architects at household names, which they had not been before, that had, uh, some beneficial and some very detrimental effects, I think, on the profession of architecture, making stars out of some people, but also spreading a notion of architecture as something that was entirely about the creation of, you know, large scale sculptures, um, for an incredibly small number of people.
And also misrepresented the, I think, incredibly complex and moving, um, job that architects have to do negotiating not just with some wealthy client or some, you know, uh, remarkable visual thing, but negotiating with governments, with neighborhoods, with engineers. There were a lot of ways in which buildings.
and that happen and buildings live on streets. Mm-hmm. , um, and those streets are, and they're real estate and, and they're real estate and they, you know, there's a whole universe of things that happen to create those streets and neighborhoods and communities and so forth. And so, yeah, when I started, I think it was a shocking thing for some people.
Um, I began by writing about a, uh, an affordable housing project in the South Bronx. And I tried to raise some of those issues in the first article about, uh, how do we measure the value of aesthetics and what is the value versus cost and, and so forth. I took it as my job and this I think was what was most sort of shocking to some people, to use the limited resources I have to turn that spotlight away from the characters who were getting a lot of attention and on to people.
Who were not getting attention, people who were doing affordable housing projects, people who landscape architects, who were redesigning cities to focus on environmental issues. And this is a gatekeeping aspect in a positive sense. The one thing I have is that ability to, as it were, tell the world that this kind of thing has value.
And that in turn, I think encourages students and others to, to feel that that is something that will bring them mm-hmm. , attention, dignity, and maybe, you know, success, fame even for what that's worth.
Vanessa: Yeah. And, and a dumb one was, had one of these questions, uh, in, in mind, but. To what extent does cities copy each other?
And I would, I would say a lot, cities do copy each other quite a lot. And when you highlight something that you think is an ingenious solution to a thorny problem, that is potentially quite impactful because in other cities are gonna say, oh, how would we do the same? A dam's question, follow up question.
When we were preparing for this was, has that diminished because of our given political climate, are cities not copying each other as much because they are getting caught in, well, that's a blue city or that's a red city and therefore I, I don't want to copy replicate
Michael Kimmelman: that model. No, I don't think so. I wrote about homelessness in Houston because, um, it's, it reduced homelessness.
Two-thirds it. Um, it has housed, you know, tens of thousands of people. Um, that's not where the mainstream conversation or journalistic focus had been, but also because it's a blue city in a purple county, in a red state, um, it isn't necessarily where people might expect that to happen. And since that article came out, I know that many cities across the country have gone to Houston to see what Houston's doing and consult with the people there.
Some of them come from red cities and some from blue, and some of them are going to do things based on whether they are red or blue. You're absolutely right about that. Nonetheless, they, or at least having a conversation. I
Adaam: mean, I would say that probably precisely the fact that it's a blue city to purple, uh, county in a red state makes it more palatable to people, and especially because it's a weird city.
Like it's, it's not a progressive city in terms of its ma many of its policies, zoning policies, for instance. I mean, we saw it during Covid that n cities wouldn't look across, um, partisan line for advice on how to deal with the crisis. The, the solutions were mostly divided along political ideology, right?
Regardless of results. New York would not look at Miami. That's a problem. But, um, specifically with Houston, so what, what,
Michael Kimmelman: what was going on there?
Well, I mean, I did choose Houston because I was aware that it would obviously have a different resonance. Than Portland or Seattle or San Francisco or, uh, which by the way have not, um, been able to reduce homelessness.
And I think that was very much on my mind too, like how, what would be a place that would not immediately turn people off, but that demonstrates a, a point, you know, can't be too big, can't be too small, can, but, but it should be pretty big and pretty complex. Houston's an odd city because to, to New Yorker of course.
It just, it's all highways and just seems really so anti-urban. Um, and uh, I think to many people in other parts of Texas, the rural parts of Texas, it seems like it's, you know, the upper west side of Manhattan. So what is it really?
It has a quality that is, um, very hard to define, but clearly at the heart of its ability to tackle a problem like this. And that is a kind of, um, it sounds weird and weak, but
it has a kind of can-do sort of. Ethos, which comes something from its corporate background. We are a place that gets things done. Um, and while that sounds sort of like bullshit, it, it's sort of works, uh, tackling a problem like this in a, in cities like Seattle.
I guess in the same way
that
Adaam: the New York ethos of being New York brave just allows the city to get away with being shitier and shitier because well, people will just take it, it's part of the experience
Michael Kimmelman: of living here. Yeah. And also New York's sort of like worse people stand up and say, well, we believe this.
That also cause can cause a lot of fractiousness. Which, which is really works against compromise and therefore right. Stops a lot of things. I mean,
in Houston, um, what really has worked is the ability of literally, you know, uh, a hundred or more organizations to come together and agree to work together and to share resources and so forth, um, around this issue along with local and county governments. Um, In, in, you know, other cities like Portland and elsewhere, they, they won't even meet to talk. Um, and that, that kind of fractiousness is a source of pride. Um, so what do you call that? I mean, it's do, it's not conservative, it's not liberal, it's just pragmatic. Um, it's a desire to take a problem and try to find some way towards fixing it. Um, it's a very difficult lesson for other cities because they're perfectly aware that groups, nonprofits, profits, and different levels of government do not want to work together. Um, but still, that's the only way this progress happens, it turns out. Um, so why, why do we have to fall back into the categories? Progressive, liberal, whatever. You know, Houston's just obviously, at least for the moment, been able to find a path forward. And that's the thing that cities need to copy.
Every time that we
Adaam: talk to an urbanist or somebody who's dealing with urbanism, I feel like this is, I, I'm reinforced in my instinct.
This is where the good things are. When you're thinking in these terms, get away from the doing real things in real places. You focus on the real things because of you, you actually have problems that people need solved now and, and you need to figure out how to do that rather than being fixated on some abstract political culture.
War, culture, war. Yeah.
Michael Kimmelman: Some bullshit. Yes. It's also, I think the time scale that you have to think in is beyond tomorrow or tonight's headlines and often it's beyond your own lifetime. Um, because things take time. , uh, especially big projects that you're building or trying to get going. Some of them very long.
So I think interesting. It also
Adaam: encourages more long, long-termism. Correct. Because you, you're thinking not just about yourself, you're thinking about like, where my family gonna live in three generations from
Michael Kimmelman: now. Right, exactly. And I think the conversation has to therefore take into account what are the carrots of change now that will produce goods later, or what are the sticks now that one has to, you know, bear in order to achieve something later on.
Adaam: Okay. Give us just an example of one of the things that Houston did
Michael Kimmelman: well, I mean, uh, you know, well, what
Adaam: came out of these corporations. In, in practice you
Michael Kimmelman: have a lot of organizations created to deal with one or another aspect of this problem. They need to raise money to support themselves and their metrics of success are based on their own internal numbers.
If you are, for instance, a food bank, then you are feeding people who are often homeless and you are, you want to be able to tell your funders that you fed 500 people last month, but this month you've fed a thousand, and next month you plan to feed 2000. How much are you helping the problem ?
Adaam: So you get a perverse incentive to actually, yeah, I say you're, or at least you're not incentivized to see the problem reduced
Michael Kimmelman: the underlying problem.
It's not that, right? You don't share a, a strategy or you're not, you're not sharing pooling resources. There are people, there was an organization in Houston I mentioned there, uh, which was trying to do a whole panoply of different things on its own housing and counseling and, and it was racking up debt and right.
But if it can work within this larger group and find its role and just focus on casework, then first of all, it eliminated its debt. It could hire more case workers, which you need, and suddenly it was playing a crucial role in this larger geography of, of organizations. It, it's the way any team works, but it isn't necessarily the way our system is set up around big problems like this.
So you need a whole system to help, to organize, bring together all these moving parts and capitalize on opportunities. Um, no organization can do that on its own and somebody just doing one little piece of this as well, intended as they are, and as good work as they may do, are not going to, you know, is not gonna be able to solve the problem in, in the same way that organizations can work in collective.
Vanessa: Mm-hmm. . Um, so you were talking earlier about time scales, and I
this morning as I was reading your book, I sent this quote, which as unfortunately not you, but is you quoting someone else . Um, you were quoting Milan Canera in slowness. Yeah. There's a secret bond between slowness and memory, just as there is between speed and forgetting.
And I think you were referring to it in the context of walking, walking through the city and experiencing it on a time scale. Um, and so, I don't know, I kind of, I kind of like that as potentially a, a, a thing to close on and talk about, which is like, as you experience a city having different time scales in your mind and how that can influence a perspective that is a bit more holistic, rather than get stuck in all the petty squabbles of what do we need to keep and what do we need to demolish and what do we need to build? And if w. I don't know if that's, how do you attempt to think about cities in that longer timescale, in a more embodied, way?
Michael Kimmelman: Yes. One of the reasons that I, um, I did this project during Covid was to find some constructive work that I could do. And, um, but also was to get away from, um, this sort of, um, you know, hour by hour panicky, sort of doom scrolling and, you know, the city's dead.
Yeah. All of this, no one's coming back, so, right, exactly. So, I mean, I think
there was a desire to look at something that was longer lasting than ourselves, certainly longer lasting than the epidemic. And, and the city itself was that thing. The city has recovered from many crises before and many epidemics, um, and capitalized them.
To me, this is a little bit at the heart of headway too. Um, crises are opportunities if one approaches them correctly. , um, which isn't always easy to do. So I, you know, there was, there was a timescale element. Can we look beyond, you know, this, this moment or even, you know, the next few hours? And then
the way we experience the city, I think is if we walk , w a, a collection of histories, uh, which you can read in the buildings, um, and in the streets. Um, and those are personal histories as well as larger collective histories. Um, you know, I was walking with somebody the other day through the village and showing him how my life had evolved as a child in the village, and then, but also how the village got its physical makeup as a result of a lot of different histories, geologic, um, economic, um, and, and so forth.
I, I love that quote because I do think
we have become, in so many ways, a thoughtless society. We've allowed ourself to be consumed by a certain kind of, Pace and way of thinking that we are absorbing information and news, um, which excuses us from doing the kinds of thinking, um, breathing even that, seeing, observing and seeing and observing that come from, uh, it's, it's not about being slow. It's about taking some time. In my other life, I'm a pianist and you know, I, I play classical music and if you're playing very great complex works of art, they take really a lifetime to learn. Um, they aren't about something you just do in an instant. And allowing yourself to be absorbed by something longer lasting yourself is a really, um, it's not even humbling. It's, it's an uplifting thing. And
the city I think, represents our greatest aspirations. Um, and of course it's a place full of frustrations and problems. , but it is also reads in CVS and so forth. But I also think it's, I don't, I don't say this as a platitude. I, I think it is, you know, our really, our greatest experiment, um, in, in what it means to be civilized and in what a civilization is, um, city like this.
So, yeah, I, I, that was, that was trying to take the time to do something, um, at a moment when the world seemed both to have stopped and to be going at a pace that was totally out of control. Mm-hmm. , if that's possible.
Vanessa: I just saw straight line crazy. I assume you saw it. I did, yes. Yeah.
Um, and in fact, I saw Ray Fines
Michael Kimmelman: about two hours ago.
Oh, did you really? Yeah. Did
you interview him for a No, no, he was
just, just he stolen by the time, sir. He was, no, we were just the same restaurant, so Oh, funny. We chatted
Vanessa: funny. Um, so I just saw that play and I think Jane Jacobs has a line there. Like, I got into this work because I figured there's only two things that last cities and song I couldn't sing for a lick.
So . Yeah. It's as city as it was. There you go. But you, you can
Michael Kimmelman: do both. So , , no, I would definitely don't sing. That wouldn't be a good idea, . Um, it's been a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you so much,
Vanessa: Michael, for taking the time. Really
Michael Kimmelman: appreciate it. No, I'm really happy to do it.
Adaam: Thank you for listening to Uncertain Things.
We are@uncertain.substack.com or wherever you get your podcast. We got a lot of great interviews coming up, so if you wanna support us, give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and, uh, or give us some schickles on the tack. And, uh, until next time, stay sane oh, and share us with your friends and enemies.