Vishaan Chakrabarti (ROUGH TRANSCRIPT)
In which we discuss the history of housing, Progressives' failures, and the legacy of Jane Jacobs.
The following is a rough transcript of our conversation with Vishaan Chakrabarti “How Progressives Ruin Cities.”
Please note that this is a full, rough, unedited transcript. If you’d like us to polish and edit these transcripts, please consider supporting Uncertain Things as a paid subscriber!
Adaam: Hi Vanessa.
Vanessa: Hi Adaam. How are you doing?
Adaam: Note to self, make sure we press record before starting to talk.
Vanessa: It's the bane of our existence. I need to get like a cross stitch or something that just says, Press record and I'll hang it on my wall and look upon it every day.
Adaam: How many times did it happen to us? Have we started a thing without recording?
Vanessa: With a guest or just you? And you and me
Adaam: with a guest? I think it only happened once.
Vanessa: I think it only happened for real once. Cause one time we caught it. We never did a whole interview without it.
Adaam: No. No. Thank God, God.
Vanessa: Oh. Anyway, you and me. I think this is, this is not our first time in this, uh, not recording rodeo.
Adaam: So,
Vanessa: so today we have the Vishaan Chakrabarti, someone I've wanted to talk to for a while. One of, uh,
Adaam: hey, that's my line. I
Vanessa: know one of the urbanists and thinkers in this realm, uh, that I admire most. He is an architect, founder and creative director of practice for architecture and urbanism, and he was also recently the dean of an architecture school out on the west coast. And so we originally wanted to bring him on to talk about progressive policies and progressive, uh, politicians and cities and why they're leading them astray, like why everything's going amuck in cities run by progressives.
Adaam: Yeah, so the conceit was how progressive policies not only have failed to accomplish the outcomes they set out, but sometimes even led to worse outcomes. See, San Francisco for instance.
Vanessa: Yes. We spend a lot of time talking about San Francisco, New York, Boston, like the kind of coastal cities that are run by progressives.
Adaam: And there are differences too. Yeah. And then how this also leads to a growing disaffection with the power of government to do anything, something that is happening across the board. It's a line that I always come back to that moving to the US turned me moral libertarian than I expected. Mm-hmm. seeing local governments, that should be the model for what big government can do. Completely failing and by their own standards.
Vanessa: And Vishaan pushes back on on that cuz I, he's a big believer in the, the power of government to get things done.
Adaam: I to totally open to be convinced, but when you just look at what's happening in some of the, uh, the great American cities, your heart breaks. Mm-hmm. , especially if you're somebody who loves cities, who wants to see cities thrive, who doesn't want them to turn into a libertarian. Wild west, but what we've got right now in many progressive run cities, not all of them, but most of what's happening now just isn't working yet.
Vanessa: Right. And we get into this conversation kind of, I would say like maybe halfway through the interview, I think we spend the first half of the, of the interviewed a little bit like kind of like defining terms a little bit and just like easing people into the urbanism conversation because my background is architecture and urbanism journalism, so I've been thinking about these things for a while. But I'm cognizant that most people who come to uncertain things are probably here for, you know, the politics and the culture war stuff. And so we try to ease people in, There's not, essentially gives us like a little history of American urbanism and housing and why everything's gotten so fucking expensive. Which I think is really interesting and very, and kind of sets the, sets the stage for the rest of the conversation so that you can get into the nitty gritty with, once you understand the kind of basics of what the fuck's happened in cities these days,
Adaam: and then we get into. Conversation that I slip into other talks every once in a while, and that's how your built environment and the city that you encounter in your day to day influences your personal individual wellbeing, but then also can have cascading effects on your politics. My theory that living in a miserable city, which could sometimes start with just bad design choices and bad local policy choices, can. Compound with loneliness, alienation, and ultimately an escape from the real world into the, the virtual world of radical politics that people engage in online. Mm-hmm. . And I think there's such an underappreciated connection between living in, uh, happy making environment and behaving in like a normal person in the public sphere.
Mm-hmm. . And that's something that Vishaan actually talks about, right? And I love that.
Vanessa: Yes. You kind of, you two agreed on that score. What you didn't agree on is, Interestingly enough, the, the, the importance of beauty, which I found kind of funny because he's the architect and he obviously considers beauty when he designs. But he, he's kind of evolved in his thinking that beauty matters less than kind of uniqueness or belong or the placeness of something like how much it belongs in where it is. And that's his become, his new defacto, um, criteria for how, how good a building is essentially. And so that was a fun back and forth between you two as well, because you you were saying, No beauty matters and we should, we shouldn't ignore it. And he's,
Adaam: I think his challenge was, what is beauty? Define beauty.
Vanessa: If you can't define it, then like, let's use this as our, as our measure, which was interesting.
Adaam: I really love this conversation and I recommend people that don't think they are into urbanism. Also, who are you if you're not into urbanism, But, but fine. But if you're here for being challenged and, and seeing the world in a slightly different way, Vishaan is. The guy,
Vanessa: I also liked that he was very able to put himself in the shoes of somebody on the left or the right. Like he, I wasn't expecting that necessarily of him as a guest, which is something we do really seek out that quality in our guests, but we don't expect it, Especially if you're not here to talk about
Adaam: if that's not your thing, if you're not David French.
Vanessa: Right. If that's not your lane. Right. Um, but he, he was very open to, to getting in, in, in the perspective of the, the, the liberal or the conservative and how they would approach cities policies. Um, he was very, very game, which I thought was cool. Um, yeah. And, and if people do like this conversation and they discover they have an urbanism image they didn't know they wanted scratched, um, they can actually check out my other podcast, Urban Roots because Vaan was generous enough to talk with me there again.
Um, and so we're gonna release. Kind of essentially a, kind of a follow up to this conversation where we get a little bit more into the weeds of, of the history of racism in planning and architecture and into kind of the future of, of preservation and what it means to, to build cities today. So if you haven't gotten enough, Vishaan by the end, there's, there's more out there. Shameless plug for urban Roots
Adaam: speaking of shameless plugs, Uhhuh, we also started a newsletter. Oh yes.
Vanessa: I, I'm very happy about this.
Adaam: We realized that at the end of these, uh, behemoth conversations that we have on uncertain things, we rarely get a chance to sit down and digest. So we are pushing ourselves to confront or revisit the, the talk that we just had and see if there's a highlight or a thought that stuck with us a week later. And we're gonna release these segments on our sub stack on uncertain.stops.com. Every other week because we publish is, you may have noticed mm-hmm. , we try to publish our episodes biweekly. So in the betweens we're gonna expand our thoughts mm-hmm. over, over the newsletter, as well as sharing some updates on what we're working on and some of the, uh, secret episodes that we are sending out to paid members. Oh. And you know, also do the newsletter thing of recommending some, some good reads.
Vanessa: That's right. And that, that newsletter's called uncertainty. I think if you're, if you're a subscribed to us on Subec, you'll get it automatically, I believe. Right Adam?
Adaam: I believe so. We've put our faith in subec
Vanessa: in the technology. Good. So rate us on Apple. Give us five stars.
Adaam: Give us five stars on apples, cuz that really helps us get around and share us with your friends and Emmy. Tell people about us if you like our, our work. And, um, with that,
Vanessa: Vishaan chakrabarti
Adaam: Vishaan thank you for joining us.
Vishaan: Sure, my pleasure.
Adaam: Uh, so I am going to probably be mostly playing second fiddle maybe, maybe third Viola, I dunno. But the, the Vanessa is gonna lead this. But I just want to leave this conversation with at least two areas that I'm, um, I'm, I feel very, uh, passionately about, very angrily about. And those are the questions of why are cities one of my favorite things in the world? Why are cities. So fucking expensive. And why are cities, modern, cities so fucking depressing? So if you can lead me through these mysteries, I'll be, i'll, I'll feel my time is, uh, has been well served.
Vishaan: Okay. I wanna hear more about the second one and the first one, I, I, I, we can, we can talk about that for sure, but I wanna know why you find them depressing.
Adaam: So we'll make sure to get to that as well. But Vanessa, take it. Okay.
Vanessa: You. You sure you okay? That's good. It's like we have the, um, what do you call it? The gun and that we plant in the beginning of the scene. Exactly. Come back to
Adaam: it. We have a Chekovian question here.
Vanessa: Yes. Right. Um, okay. So yes. So I do wanna level set for, because a lot people live in cities, they understand they're feeling the crunch, they're feeling the pain of high rent, high prices, but they don't necessarily understand what are the drivers that have led us here.
And I think one of the biggest misconceptions for people is they don't necessarily understand that the lack of supply is one of the biggest drivers in terms of lack of affordability in high prices. So I was wondering if we can kind of start there, Shaun, someone who is an expert in this, in this field, uh, is, well maybe let's just start with the, this assumption is supply one of the main drivers of affordability. And if so, why?
Adaam: And as you answer this, if you can also address some of the misconceptions. Us normal people have about why housing is so expensive. Because you know, in a lot of cities, the conception is that the housing market explodes when tech companies move into the neighborhood inviting tech bros that then bring the prices up and send the local community scattered to the winds.
That's the circle of gentrification. What's wrong with this story?
Vishaan: So I could give you like fairly short answers or we could go back into history a little bit to kind of understand how we got here. Let's go back. We love history. A woman in Catherine Bauer basically invented public housing in this country and she advised several presidents wrote the National Housing Act for fdr.
There was a whole sense into the, in the 1930s that we should be building housing for people. Uh, and you know, remember what lived, run under the context, you coming out of the depression, et cetera, right? There was also this sense that cities were still a good idea. Right. And that the American dream, it's really interesting.
The American dream was a phrase coined by a historian, John Trussel Adams in 1931 or on the same period. And it spoke nothing about material possessions. It was not about a house or a car or a lawn. It was about equal opportunity across, actually remarkably ahead of his time across races and gender. It, it really defined this notion of America as this place of equal opportunity for all.
Ok. What happens? World War II happens. There's this enormous industrial machine build for World War ii. There's also a Cold war that emerges outta World War ii. And so, you know, by the time you hit the mid fifties, the industrial machine is retooled to make cars and like basically mass produce a lot of consumer goods.
And, uh, the largest. Infrastructure Act in the country has passed the Federal Highway Act under Republican Dwight Eisen. And it was really done for two reasons. Um, the arms race and race. Um, so you have the arms race where there was a very concerted idea by the federal government that said we need to diffuse the population in the United States.
So if you look, most American cities were much denser in hundred than they were in, right? Because the government actively wanted to densify our cities. This is coupled with. A movement that comes along, not su, not too far after that. So if 54, the National Highway Act passes right by the early 1960s, the original Penn Station is torn down because in New York, because, um, People have stopped taking, uh, interstate rail, right?
Because people are now driving and then, you know, flying starts to happen, uh, by the mid sixties in a widespread way. But the other big thing that happens by the time you get in the sixties is of course the civil rights movement. Can,
Vanessa: can I pause you one second there for Sean? Cuz I, I think the, the second, Well, what you're about to get into, I'm more familiar with, but I wanna just circle back really quickly to, one thing you said was that the arms race was actually part of the reasoning for the, the government.
Absolutely. So they wanted to densify cities as like a safety precaution.
Vishaan: Yes. Huh. I mean, I don't, I don't think we sitting here today, you know, I'm a generation that remembers, you know, my, my kids have to live through shooter drills. When I was in school, we lived through, like these nuclear drills in the eighties.
Like, and I never understood what, what's sitting under your desk was gonna help you with, with a nuclear war . But, uh, for some reason we were told to do this , but sure. I don't think we understand the amount of fear there was about this, Right. That this could actually happen. Right. And you know, the reason the bridges in the highways are so tall at about, you know, the, that 14th clearance, it wasn't for trucking.
It was to, uh, be able to move intercontinental ballistic missiles around. Wow. So the, the 54 Act is called the National Highway and Defense Act. So the highway, the whole federal interstate system.
Adaam: And that's not just part of those naming gimmicks when people try to pass their grassy pork filled bills.
Vishaan: Yeah. They didn't do that back then.
Adaam: Traffic and Freedom Act. Right.
Vishaan: remember. Right, exactly. I mean, remember Dwight Eisenhower is our most decorated general coming out world Wari, Right. You looked at in, in warns about the military. Like there's, there's a whole thing about the military in the fifties. It's really critical to understanding suburbanization, right?
That you know, that there is this notion that you diffuse the population, but also look it, it's, it's the perfect storm. It's three things at once. It is the Cold War. It is the, uh, the post World War II industrial machine that wants people buying things that, all this stuff, the factories that get built during World War ii, we now have to not just produce cars.
But lawn mowers and you knowers and like all this stuff that's part of a consumer economy. If you, if you move from an apartment to a house, all of a sudden your number of material possessions will just explode. Right? Like, uh, and, and so, you know, and the, the consumer economy was built around that. So that's the second factor.
And then the third big factor is race. Because you then have a group of Americans who say we are equal to everyone else. And demand what, uh, uh, equality means, which is like, just remember in the sort of pre Reagan Prefare world of America and before the civil rights move, There people didn't talk about welfare for white people.
Right. Like, so the GI bill and the highways and the mortgage interest deduction and like, just all sorts of government spending that everyone thought was like perfectly fine and normal until the civil rights movement happens. When civil rights movement happens, all of a sudden there's pressure to say all those black and brown people out there, they deserve these entitlements as well.
Right. And to me, the, the, the again in mag is not about going back to Reagan and Thatcher and having no subsidies. It's about going back to this era, this pre-civil rights movement era of when white people were on the dole and black people got screwed.
Vanessa: Hmm. And when you're talking about being on the doll, that's with a specifically suburban.
Agenda. Right. It's about,
Vishaan: it's whole notion of like, we're gonna build the American middle class. Well like, okay, great. That sounds great. It sounds like great political rhetoric, but what does it really mean? It means that like it's taking the pre World War II depression era population and saying, how do we give them the infrastructure?
And I'm not, this is a wrong idea, I'm just saying it needs to be a widespread idea. How do we give these people the infrastructure to be prosperous? And they did that, but just for a certain, you know, segment of the population. Right. And like our, like all of, like most, like most wealth and equity in this country is built around the assumptions and the underlying policies of this period.
Right? So you, So we do that mm-hmm. , and then there is what's known as White flight, which I'm sure Vanessa, you're very familiar with. Right. Which is, so by the time you get to the late 1960s, So now you've built all these highways, you've torn highways through communities of color in cities, and you know, you've basically incentivized white people to move out into the suburbs and actively subsidized them to do this.
So the suburbs are cheaper. So going back to one of the questions like, why are cities expensive? So, we'll, we'll, we'll get to this because we've artificially made the suburbs cheaper. We made, we've spent a bunch of government money doing that. We've made the school systems, uh, uh, uh, better and, and more affordable as the public school systems and suburbs.
So this whole bunch of things happen that, you know, we can then get to the current day, but that sets the framework by the time you get to the mid seventies at least. Okay.
Vanessa: So let's, let's pause there because I think some people listening maybe somewhat skeptical about the fact that this, this subsidization inherent in suburbanization was only for.
White people. Um, and I mean, I, I mean, I obviously most Americans understand that there's like a history of racism in this country, but I think a lot of people don't realize, like kind of the specificity of it and the, and the ways that black and brown people were excluded from
Vishaan: it. There's plenty of really good literature on this.
I mean, one of the best books about this called The Color of Law, it's about redlining, mortgages. I mean, it's very well known stuff. This should not be controversial, Right. To be able to understand that, you know, even middle class black families could not move to most of these suburbs in the fifties and sixties.
There were so many restrictions that would prohibit that from happening. And so you ended up with, you know, a, a country by, by the late 1960s that has this huge racial segregation going on much more than what it existed before. Right? And then of course you get this new thing that happens, which is de-industrialization.
So if you look. Probably the most famous housing project in the country. Pru. I go right? Yes. There's a great movie called the in St. Louis. Is it St. Louis? Yes. SA St. Louis, Designed by Yamasaki. The same architecture designed the World Trade Center site. A lot of his buildings are rather ill faded. Um, destroyed in the seventies and has become a kind of icon for why public housing doesn't work and public investment in housing doesn't work except that, um, totally uh, uh, kind of white washes.
What the real story is, there's a great documentary called the I Go Myth that was made by a former resident who interviews the residents. And you know, now we look at tower in the park housing and we say, I was warehousing the poor, how terrible it was. But in the beginning it was actually quite glorious.
It was middle class, it was mixed race. It was mixed income. St. Louis goes through a couple of things all at once. It goes through white flight, it goes through massive de-industrialization. People lose their jobs who are left in the cities. Crime rate starts to spiral up the St. Louis housing authority totally mismanages the housing passes a bunch of racist and pretty misogynous policies against residents in Prgo.
Adaam: And so for, for instance, just to understand what, what kind of like policies are being passed that, that directly affect
Vishaan: housing? So, you know, black women are told that their husbands can no longer live there. Um, like there, there are, you know, there are all sorts of rules. They start to pass. They start, they stop picking up the garbage.
They stop, uh, they stop, uh, maintaining the elevators. So now the stairwells become like incredibly dangerous, right? Like there's, there's this whole pullback of government money. Right in those things. At the same time, we're still, but the biggest housing expenditure of the country still makes is around the mortgage interest deduction.
Right? Which yes, is now available to people of all races and colors and available to people who buy condos in the middle of cities, but is still largely used by wealthy suburban homeowners. So there's a lot of housing expenditure going on. It's just going on towards a certain race and class of people, where in the meanwhile, after building public housing, we stop maintaining it.
And so of course it's gonna spiral into this sort of vicious cycle. Right? And so, and you can, like, if you watch the wire and you sort of see like,
Adaam: I do want it cuz I, I, this is something I think that is so valuable to understand an entire housing project gets abandoned in a way that disparately affects blacks and Hispanics.
Can we understand what's going on with decision makers at this point? Like, do we know what's happening in city hall? Is everybody just rubbing their hands, twirling their mustaches and cackling how, let's do racism? Or, or is it more complicated?
Vanessa: I, I, I would imagine it's also, it's not just city hall, right? Vishaan, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm imagining it's, it's the conversation at the federal level versus the local level as well. And where does the funding come from? Well,
Vishaan: so remember at the federal level, Robert Moses has huge impact federally, right? And so, you know, this notion, uh, like there is a war on communities color.
If you look at Oakland, California, if you look, you know, there's community after community where they, they're driving these highways through, you know, if you read Richard Berman's book, all that Solid Melt to Air about the Cross Bronx Expressway. So, you know, there's this kinda active war going on. Look, I, I can't speak to exactly what's happening in City Hall at that moment, but of course, in addition to structural racism, I mean, having worked in city government.
What, what, what both progressives and, um, conservatives need to understand, especially at the municipal level, is at the end of the, you know, there's this old saying in, in city politics that picking up the garbages and partisan, you know, there is, there is a, there is a basic budgetary concern that every mayor and her, his staff has to have.
And when you got a de industrializing city, and you therefore have, you know, you have people in the stretch, you have crime on the rise, you've got this really vicious circle going on where you don't have industry paying taxes and you don't, you know, you have a pressure on the tax base for, for, you know, for crime and for police and for firefighting and like all of that stuff, right?
Which is very expensive stuff to do. And yes, there's a whole racist underpinning to that as well. But all I'm saying is that, you know, City government, like a lot of it's just like bubble gum and shoestring. You're, you're just trying to hold things together when your city's in distress, right? And so a lot of bad things happen during that bubble gum and shoestring period.
It's not like, you know, because city government is always, always, especially in this country, um, subject to the whims of state and federal government, and most cities dispense way more out in taxes, uh, to federal and city, uh, as federal and state governments than they get back in tax receipts, right? So, you know, they, they're always on the back of their heel in terms of just trying to make anything work.
And
Adaam: so, so, so the impression that cities are basically subsidizing state expenditure is basically, and, and sometimes, uh, federal expenditure is pretty much
Vishaan: true. Absolutely. I mean, it depends on the city, but, uh, certainly our big wealthy cities today, New York, San Francisco, Boston, they're all pouring way more into federal.
And state coffers, then they get back. And generally speaking, the blue sp the blue states put much more money into the federal system than the red states. The red states tend to be federal recipients, especially of welfare dollars. Of course, that violates everyone's stereotypes, right? But that, I mean, there's a lot, again, there's a lot of facts around this.
Like it's not, it's really not that hard to prove. So, you know, um, so look, so this becomes, and so you remember famously by the late seventies for Ford says to New York, Drop Dead, you know, cities, cities are a hot mess, . And I always find it interesting that like, there seems to be a whole group of white progressives that like to, um, uh, uh, uh, kind of, um, romanticize.
Cities of the late cities seventies and the eighties and like now cities are bougie, chain ridden, all of that other stuff as opposed to what they were in the seventies. I mean, what I, I mean, sure it must have been fun if you were white and at NYU in 1978, but if you were black and living in bed sky and trying to raise a family, I don't think 1970s New York was that much fun.
Adaam: That's the time when you, when you would get flyers from the N Y P D when you landed JFK telling you, well, your life is at your own
Vishaan: hands. Really? . I mean, I mean, look, I lived here in the late eighties and things were pretty tough still at that point, and I'm not in any way trying to justify, you know, the policing policies that then ensu, but.
So, so, okay, so let's go back to the question that was asked, the first question. At least. Why are cities so expensive, Right? Okay.
Vanessa: We left off at, at public housing not getting, not getting funding, not being maintained. So how do we get from there to, to the current expensive
Vishaan: problem? Well, so, so two other historical things then, then we can get to the current day.
Remember that Reagan in 1984 wins every state, but Minnesota, his opponents, uh, home state. So 49 states, There were no, there were virtually no blue states at that point. Massachusetts, California, uh, New York, every one of these states votes for Reagan on the heels of that incredible mandate with that kind of wind in his back, Reagan passes 86 tax.
Completely alters the public housing system in this country to this system of tax vouchers, right? Which is what developers use today to build quote unquote affordable housing that all Stu stems from Reagan's tax reform in 86. And then added to that by the mid nineties in the Clinton era, there's this thing called the Fair Cloth Amendment that basically makes it illegal for the government to build public housing.
Adaam: So ca, before we go even deeper, can you just give a quick primer about
Vishaan: voucher programs? Well, so there's two different kinds of, there's, there's vouchers for public housing residents. And so the idea there is that rather than the government building public housing, that a public housing resident gets a check that they can use towards housing expenditure.
Um, But often that check is nowhere near large enough to actually cover the housing
Vanessa: expense. Sure. That's, And people don't accept them cause they their taboo and everything.
Vishaan: Right. Right, right. Exactly. So there's, so, so it's
Adaam: both that the, that the actual money involved is, is too low and that there is a stigma.
Vishaan: Yes. Correct. Right. And, and the, the, uh, the other part of it is the developer financing part of it, which is basically the government. And this happens to this day, provides, uh, low interest rate financing to developers in exchange for building affordable housing that hits target income levels. And that depends on, you know, different projects or different, there are some virtues to that system that tends to build mixed income housing as opposed to, you know, kinda singular bands.
But it's all left to developers. A lot of people on the left, uh, are very critical of that system because they think it puts a lot of money in developers pockets. Mm-hmm. . Um, and, but, When you are in cities like New York and you hear the affordable housing debate, it largely centers on that system that was set up in the, um, late eighties and nineties to build affordable housing because that was the replacement for what used to be our public housing agenda.
Right. So
Adaam: basically the, the entire, it's not even just overton window, it's the, the, the, the realm of possibility around affordable housing has moved to the
Vishaan: right and shrunk. Absolutely. And I do think there's an Overton window thing there because the Overton window thing there, it has to do with, so like I worked in city government for three years and I would meet like some progressive man bun sporting person at a party, and they would say to me, Oh, you work for the government, you must leave work at four 30.
Yeah. To me, the most central victory of Reagan and Thatcher is convincing everyone on the right and the left, that government is inept and out to get you. Right. That is their most central victory because it is such a widespread. Right. And so this belief that the public can't build anything if, you know, like if there's 2% corruption, that's just crazy.
But if there's all this corruption in the private sector, everyone kind of ignores it like, like it's, it's, but it, to me, that's the Overton window. The Overton window is the
Adaam: way in, That's the market's corruption. That's, that's the, that's the tasty
Vishaan: kind. But, but the thing is, is to me, the Overton window is how much the left got convinced that the government is a much of a problem as the right to Right.
And so, okay, so now let's get to why, see, these are so expensive.
Adaam: And by the left you mean Clinton, like the Clinton
Vishaan: era? No, I mean everyone, I mean, I mean, I mean young millennials and Gen Z people that I meet. Mm, I, you know, like I, Because
Vanessa: with it's like a lack of faith in institutions, including the
Vishaan: government.
Exactly, exactly. So everything's supposed to be diy. No,
Adaam: and to be fair, I'm, I'm Israeli, uh, country that. Is challenged by its, um, socialist infrastructure, but also has, gets a lot of things right. I'd say our healthcare system is strained, but good. When I moved here bearing a lot of, let's call it, um, socialist baggage and living in New York for seven years, I, I keep joking, has turned me into a, a rabid libertarian be in terms of my, the degree to which I have lost faith in institutions.
I'm not really a libertarian, but the level of incompetence that you encounter in, in the city was shocking to me as somebody who mostly lived his life in, in Israel and Europe. Yeah.
Vishaan: And you know, I think the limitations of those comparisons is we live in a very large, we, no, I mean, we just live in a very large polyglot society.
We are not Denmark. Right. Uh, where they can just put all the brown people off in some peripheral suburbs somewhere. Like we, we, like, we live in a big fractious democracy. To me, the more AP comparison to Canada. Mm-hmm. . And like when you look at Canada, you know, it's really interesting, like we've been doing this, this project in downtown Niagara Falls in New York, which is not a very, you know, um, wealthy place historically has an extraordinary history.
But the reason it's so relevant in this conversation is Niagara Falls in the United States has a sister city Niagara Falls in Canada. So here it is like, like a lot of demographics that are similar climates the same, you know, so there's a lot of control variables. And yet look at every metric on the Canadian side of ni, Niagara Falls in terms of educational attainment, healthcare statistics, uh, mortality rates, asthma rates, like you name it, right?
So clearly, you know, there's, there's pretty strong proof. Just across the border that different policies get you better results. But it requires an activist government is my point. Right? That's not just DIY community groups figuring it out. It, it requires an activist government, a national healthcare system, uh, you know, like, like things that have to like, be functional at the government level.
And that is harder in a big polyglot democracy, but like, that's what we've gotta figure out, right?
Vanessa: If Canda can do it, we can
Vishaan: too. That's right. That's right. Goddamnit.
Adaam: Um, well, well, I guess we'll leave the question of, of to what extent Canada can do it in certain areas, but Right,
Vishaan: right, right. Yeah. And Canada has all sorts of problems too.
I mean, like, say, I mean, they can't build any mass transit. Like they, they've got all, they got all sorts of problems too. All right. So why are cities so expensive? You know, with the knowledge of that history, you then have a remarkable thing happen during the nineties, you know, uh, where, and to me, I believe in cultural forces as much as kind of economic forces and Yeah.
Vanessa: You're talking a dom's language. There he is. Mr. Culture matters .
Vishaan: Well, like, you know, suddenly you have, Cause like you think about the depiction of a city in the 1970s, you know, good times, right? Like people living in public housing suddenly, you know, I mean maybe it's the Cosby Show that shows like a middle class black family living in Brooklyn, but then, you know, you get Seinfeld and sex in the city and um, and friends and like, so suddenly like it's cool to be in the city.
Right? And you know, and, and this of course is, is it comes simultaneously with this pretty tough policing policies that get adopted under Giuliani, especially in New York City where, you know, crime is considered to be something that has to be controlled now. There are a lot of really far out theories about why crime comes down so much that it's not just policing.
There's a lot of different ideas about what happens. Yeah. It's, it ranges from
Adaam: broken window to lead. So
Vishaan: Oh, and including and Roe versus Wade. Oh, in Freakenomics, they make this whole argument that the legalization of abortion is what leads to a drop in crime 20 years later. Like, I'm not saying I buy that argument, I'm just saying there's a lot of out there arguments about why crime drops and, and I
Adaam: know having this discussion with a lot of smart people on, on the left end the right, that there is a consensus, that there is no consensus, that there is no, there's no grant theory, unified theory that explains the, the changes in crime pattern across the country.
That's
Vishaan: right. That's right. And I think that's exactly right. I think it's fair to say there is no consensus and there, I mean, we may never know, but something shifts and, um, so suddenly it's like, You know, all these young people move to cities and cities become super attractive again. And they get rediscovered by, you know, frankly, by a lot of white suburban kids who are college graduates.
Um, and this starts pushing up housing prices. This starts pushing up housing prices at exactly the moment when, you know, we, so we can't build public housing anymore, right? It's illegal, right? We have fairly limited transit infrastructure in most cities. It's not like transit infrastructure is expanding.
And so most, so if you look at at, at land values, you know, housing is expensive. The closer you get to the center of the city, this is obviously pre pandemic, free, Zoom, all this other stuff, which we can get to. But like the, you know, so there is this kind of devil's brew in terms of, you know, cities and then, you know, like I work for city government right after nine 11.
And right after nine 11, no one was talking about gentrification or very, I should, No, I, I should retract that. Very few people are talking about gentrification, right? After nine 11. People are worried that people aren't gonna return to cities. We don't know. Just, just like Eisenhower is afraid of nuclear attacks, you know, in sitting there in like the middle of 2002, we didn't know how many terrorist attacks were coming.
Right? Right. And so everything was, was like about taking what limited tools we had in city government to say, how do we get the city back up on its feet again? How do we keep, like, keep our companies here? How do we keep residents here?
Vanessa: And, and just to quickly back up to the, to the nineties when people are arriving, like what's the state of the development scene at that point?
Because you said there's no public housing happening, but surely developers are trying to like, fill the gaps
Vishaan: here. Yeah. No, I'm really glad you asked this question, Vanessa, because it, it, it, it pertains to then what happens in the odds in the nineties. First of all, developers are a relatively, like, there are developers historically, like in New York City, like West End Avenue, and the Upper West Side was developed by developers.
There are developers, but development is an industry, doesn't really mature until like the 1980s, you know, uh, remember the savings and loan crisis. There's a lot of, like, there's a lot of developers that come through the 1980s and by the eighties and nineties, what developers are building in cities like New York are largely, uh, uh, uh, rental housing.
Mm-hmm. with lots of small studios and one bedrooms in them. Right. And they're largely for people who are single people, maybe a ly married couple before they move off to the suburbs and maybe some empty nesters who wanna live around Lincoln Center. Right. Like the, like, Right.
Vanessa: The assumption is still that people go to the suburbs for most of their life.
Right.
Vishaan: And that, you know, find. Find a four bedroom apartment that, that's original from like 1995 in New York City. You could find townhouses, but those, that's a whole different piece. Developers didn't build townhouses for the most part. So in, in an apartment building, there are very, very few because there's just no demand.
No one raises their kids in the city still. Right? That doesn't happen until the s right. And so what happens is after nine 11, right, we, in the Bloomberg administration, we turn up every dial we can to say, how do we keep the city alive, right? How do we, you know, keep our companies here? How do we keep residents here?
Uh, a lot of investments in public parks, in infrastructure, um, you know, things like the highline, right? At the same time at the federal level, right? There's a recession going on and quantitative easing starts. So they start lowering interest rates. And a bunch of young new developers enter the scene and they're like, We don't care about rental housing.
Like these older school developers, we wanna kind of get rich quick. And, you know, so they start building condos. So like I the luxury, luxury
Vanessa: high
Vishaan: end condos, So like I worked on the rezoning, uh, with a number of other people at the city around the Highland. Mm-hmm. , that rezoning called for 30% affordable housing.
Meaning that we assume most of it was gonna be rental housing because that's what the market built. And that, um, we had mechanisms in place to make sure that there incentives for developers using those bonds that we talked about earlier, that, you know, from the eighties to build as much affordable housing as we could pass.
So even though gentrification wasn't the watch work, there was still plenty of people concerned about affordability. What happens. At that same moment, clearly
Adaam: they just didn't take enough into account the, the grave needs of people to launder money and have tax
Vishaan: havens . But, but, but you gotta take a step before that, which is again, at the federal level, that's quantitative easing, totally changes the real estate market at the local level.
Hmm. So there are all these people who now see great value in building condos. The other thing that happens, and the architect in me has to make this point, is the World Trade Center rebuilding Right. Starts putting world famous architects in the front page of the New York Post. Right.
Vanessa: We talked to Justin Davidson about this actually.
Yes. We did an episode about nine 11 in the, the memorial. Mm-hmm. .
Vishaan: Yeah. And so suddenly it becomes cool to hire big name architects to hire con uh, to build condo buildings. And so you see all these condos come up, not just around the Highland, but all over the city. They're still going up. People pay crazy prices.
Yes. For various reasons, as was just pointed out. But, you know, one of the big reasons was that with crime down so much, a lot of those young couples that became, and I'm one of them, not anymore, but like when we were a young couple, Right. You know, we had kids and we wanted to stay in the city. And so there's suddenly this demand for three and four bedroom apartments, something that was unheard of in the nineties, right?
Mm. And so now, you know, all these people wanna raise their families in New York City now and cities all across the country. Right. Especially the big high performing cities, meaning San Francisco, Boston, you know, uh, we can get to the, the industrializing cities later, like Detroit, but so what does that do?
So all of this comes together to form this massive affordability crunch that we're in today. The problem today is now, you know, sure, you can critique the right for not having the, uh, the, whatever you want to call it, the compassion, the philosophical belief system, whatever it is to figure out how to recreate truly public housing and public infrastructure in this country.
Right. But at the same time,
Adaam: and, and it, and it's most charitable, let's call it an honest disbelief in the power of government to build.
Vishaan: That's absolutely right. That's if we're charitable, right? That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. But here's the thing. I'm not sure the left has that belief either.
And you know the problem. Look, think about all the cities I just named New York, Boston, San Francisco, Austin, Texas. I was just in Austin, Texas. These are largely progressive, you know, whatever it is. 90% blue. Right. And as your client, of course has been talking about this ad nauseum for a year now, about the ability, the inability of progressives to build.
Yeah. The fact that, I mean, I think part of the problem, honestly is that for a lot of progressives, they just don't believe in supply and demand. They just don't believe in it. Mm-hmm. , Right? They just don't, They think that that's a right wing. Hmm. Right. And
Vanessa: I'm sorry. And to clarify like the, the lack of supply that we're talking about, like as, as you've described, there is no public actor trying to safeguard the creation of housing that people can afford.
There are private actors working, but the vast majority are targeting a high end market because that's where they know that they will recoup their investment. And so then that leaves a, a complete lack of any housing options for those who are somewhere in the middle and then that drives up pricing. Is that what you're saying when you're saying lack of supply
Vishaan: demand?
The only thing I would dispute in what you just said is I think there are public actors. Look, if you look across, just taking New York for a second, if you look across the Bloomberg de Blasio and um, and Adam's administrations, there's not a lot of daylight in housing policy across those administrations.
You know, the fact, the matter is there are very good civil servants who've worked in all of those administrations trying to build more housing and more affordable housing, which by the way includes market rate. Cause you've got create market rate supply. That's the only way you're gonna bring down pricing.
And the left refuses to believe this. And I can't tell you. So I can't tell you how many I've been involved in, like, so like Domino, the domino, uh, Sugar Refinery and the waterfront. Right. So I demo, I I helped run the master plan. You just describe that, the development. So I helped to run the master plan for that project.
We're designing, we're, we're my architecture firm's actually designing the sugar refinery, which is the kind of creative office building at the heart of it. But, you know, we're building thousands of units of housing. A certain percentage is affordable, A certain percentage is market rate. And public meetings.
I mean, I remember having this discussion with a woman. I said, Listen, you need to think about this at the broader level, which is, you know, we have all sorts of people who wanna live in this city. We have newcomers who wanna live in the city, They need housing. And just even think about it from a climate perspective, if we, if we shut the gate and say, the door's closed, you're gonna force people into sprawl.
And she looked at me and she said, I don't care. Right. Because, you know, and so, So talk to people in the Blassio administration about their attempts to cite homeless shelters in progressive neighborhoods in this city. Right, Right. So, We have this huge problem, right? In most of our, and, and frankly, more progressive cities.
I mean, if you saw, uh, Michael Kimmel's article about how they're tackling homelessness in Houston, it's really interesting. I mean, like, like, you know, in some ways one of the most interesting things that could happen politically in this country is all of the crazy anti housing policies and anti-business policies in California may push so many Californians to Texas, that Texas might swing blue.
That might be actually the most ironic. Like victory. The progressive score is cuz their own misguided policies in California might turn Texas blue. Right.
Vanessa: So, yeah. I wanna, if I can, I'd like to read you, so I shared with Adom, um, an article by Nellie Bowls. Maybe you sagged him out
in
Adaam: June. Oh, I was just gonna quote, I was just gonna quote
Vanessa: that myself.
Uh, I don dunno if you've read this article for Sean, but it's just basically about like what the, what the hell happened to San Francisco. It's excellent. Very well written. And I just wanted to read this, this quote that I have. I mean, I guess Aam, you could also read a quote if you'd like. But, um, she says, I used to tell myself that San Francisco's politics were wacky, but the city was trying, really trying to be good.
But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting or at least ignoring devastating results.
Adaam: And I think at a point that she's making there and that, I'll, I'll tack onto it cuz I think this is kind of understanding what we're talking about when we're talking about progressive policies or the delta between intention and results we're, she's call, she called it, um, she called it laing at progressive policies.
And, and, and I think
Vanessa: that is key live action role, role playing, if you know that phrase. I
Vishaan: don't, I'm too old. Clearly . It's basically
Adaam: like playing d and d only
Vishaan: with costumes. Oh, I see, I see, I see her point
Adaam: being that they talk about. Equity and, and they talk about, you know, climate change and they talk about all the right values, but what they do is perform allegiance to the ideas rather than to actually achieving these as results.
And so doing, they close their eyes to what's actually happening to people in the
Vishaan: city. That's right. I mean, look, I, as you may know, I was dean of the Architecture School of Berkeley. I had to step down from family medical reasons, but I was there during the pandemic. I went to Berkeley as a student, and that was a long time ago.
The Bay Area. Um, if you're a student of cities and regions, what you see in the Bay Area is the precipice of what happened in Detroit in the sixties and seventies. Uh, you, first of all, you see, uh, one industry dominate the Bay Area. That industry. To me, the biggest problem with the tech industry in the Bay Area is their lack of any kind of geographic loyalty.
So as much as your , more progressive listeners don't wanna hear this. One of the things I found incredibly refreshing when I moved back to New York recently was how much New York City's business community believes in New York. They feel that they're fate as a business community. So you know, like JP Morgan Chase is building a 3 billion headquarters on Park Avenue.
I'm Par, I'm working on the project, full disclosure, and you know, Jamie Diamonds, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, it took him a week to like in the middle of the pandemic to say, No, we're staying right. All of our employees are. You know, the tech companies in California are having a heyday with, well maybe we just moved to Texas or Idaho, or maybe we don't even need an office anymore there, You know, because part of the problem varies.
You also have this thing of like why people live there in the first place. You know, there's so many San Franciscos you could talk to who like live there because they can go kayaking somewhere an hour and a half away. It's not like how many major cities you go to where people live there because they can get out easily, right?
Like that's not, you know, so you have that as a kinda underlying cultural kind, uh, dynamic. And then it's everything you just said. You know, the policies, the policies around homelessness are kind to be cruel. Um, the housing policies are absurd. The mass transit policies are absurd. Everyone's still in their car, um, and the fires are getting worse and worse.
The dr and so the whole suspended disbelief thing around what made California this kind of extraordinarily special place, I think is really starting to crack, and especially in the Bay Area. But I think this is, I think it's really important to talk about this. Mm-hmm. because at the national political level, we have such a complete manifold disaster in the form of Trump and his takeover of the G O P, that it makes it fairly easy to ignore problems within the progressive part of the country.
And I don't, I think we do that at our peril, because if you're gonna win over the rest of the country, you have to have policies that you can argue worked, and like that. We, we really do have a problem. And like, I'm not talking about Tucker Carlson, Diatribes about San Francisco. I'm talking about being truly introspective about what is not working about progressive.
And a big part of that is our inability to build
Vanessa: housing. So let's, maybe let's talk about like the two sides of the progressive problem as I see it, and let's, let's see if you agree. But it's, it is both the policy makers, the, a lot of people who maybe got, uh, elected in on the wings of anti-Trump rhetoric that are trying to push progressive agendas that maybe aren't being functional.
And then there's also the progressive, lame person, uh, that is incredibly anti any new development. We've kind of talked about both of those streams. I guess let's, I wanna first ask you, which is the more important. Driver of the lack of supply and the, and the lack of affordability? Is it the g the policy or is it the backlash or some combo?
I
Vishaan: don't think it's the, I think it's much more the local problem really. Because, look, here's the thing, whether you talk to, and I don't talk to any of these people, but if you look at the housing plans of Elizabeth Warren or, um, or the Biden administration, the, the, the federal go, You know, I was at the aia, the American Institute of Architects National Convent.
I was a keynote speaker a couple weeks ago and Obama did the last talk and Obama literally talked about this cause he was in front of the aia. He talked about what a huge problem sprawl was for he, he got every single issue. He understood what a huge problem sprawl was for both the environment and for, you know, social division that we needed to build more density in our communities and that, And he called it out by name and he said, Listen, the problem we've got is in my party.
He said it that way in my people don't build in their local neighborhood now. So like I think, I think we're gonna see an interesting moment where a presidential candidate, they might not stay it on the debate stage, but in their policy platform somewhere, is going to be something about local zoning overrides, just like they tried to do in California with SB 50 because, Where the pendulum, where things went terribly, horribly wrong is the, not Jane Jacobs herself, but the aftermath of Jane Jacobs.
Meaning that, like, I think Jane
Vanessa: Jacob being one of the great urban writers death, right?
Vishaan: Who fought and defeated Robert Moses, famously,
Vanessa: what is it, Death in life of Great American cities fought Robert
Adaam: Moses. When, when we talk about Robert Moses, I was, I introduced him as the arc villain of the Jane Jacob saga.
Vishaan: Right? But the problem is that binary. Mm. The problem is how, uh, how vaed that binary has become and how useless it's become to the problems we face, especially climate change. Because, you know, so what, what became important about Jane Jacobs for too many progressives wasn't the ideas she fought for, like mixed use density, things like that, but her methods, right?
It was the David and Goliath. I can, I can like muster local community groups and stop things. So, But wait, before in
Adaam: case people don't know the, the basic narrative, Let's tell like the Passover story of, um, Jane Jacobs, her famous work, The Death in Life of Great American Cities is, uh, screened against the state of urban development, perceived wisdom during the sixties and and fifties, which thought of affordable housing as something that you isolate from the center of the city.
Something that you develop as sort of a self-contained utopia or our self-contained suburb on the outskirts and in part gave us what we now know as the projects. And one of our many arguments was that this approach ignores completely the elements that make a city safe and thriving. And those are the interconnectivity, the fact that you can move around easily, the fact that you see other people, and where you get all those ideas like the, uh, sidewalk ballet and the eyes on the street.
And in contrast, Robert Moses was this, um, barren of development that basically wanted to put streets through everything believed in cars, highways, no matter what community gets de in the process. And the story of those two figures comes to a head when, um, Jane Jacobs fights to protect Washington Square from being turned over, uh, by, by Robert Moses's plans.
And this is where. What seems like Jacobs's commitment to community and the betterment of the human condition ends up defeating foils. The plan of Robert Moses to destroy it, I don't remember exactly what, uh, Moses' plan
Vanessa: was probably put a highway through it. That's, that was usually his mo. Yeah. Moses
Vishaan: was trying to put the lower Manhattan expressway through Lower Manhattan.
Now remember, this is after Moses is successfully put highways through all sorts of communities of color and all sorts, but then, Right, but then Jacobs to save lower Manhattan, you know, basically, you know, look, Jacobs is a brilliant observer. She's a journalist. She's also a neoliberal economist. Most of her books are actually about neoliberal economics.
Kind of interesting. But she, you know, when she's anti planning, she's anti planning, she's anti top down regulation and she thinks the top down planners are idiots and that they don't, as you say, they build things that segregate the city. And she's saying, Look, cities are really these fine brain things, right, with doorways and small blocks and mixed uses.
But what I'm saying is, is that I think so many of the accts of Jacobs, rather than focus on the substance of what she was observing, focused on, Jacobs knew how to organize communities to fight city hall and fight the big power. Right? Right. And so look at how that power's used today. So look at like, she became
Adaam: a symbol for the newly energized.
Left leaning
Vishaan: urbanist community for localism. Mm. Right. She, she for localism. So look at the 14th Street Busway, which I think is a brilliant thing, right? Mm-hmm. . So 14th Street over the course of the last few years was converted into like no private cars. It's only there really for buses, bikes cetera, and deliveries.
And what did the same West Village community that Jane Jacobs from, what did they do? They used Jane Jacobs methods to sue the city. Right? Say, No, no, no, no. Cause of course what's happened in the InterMet time, West Village has become incredibly wealthy. Even the people who live there during the Jacobs era have the enormous equity in their townhouses and all of that.
They all drive around big cars and they want to be able to drive their cars on 14th Street. So, so instead of learning the lessons of Jacobs about, well, you know, really it's about a walkable city and all of that, they're saying, No, no, no, no. We're gonna use the methods of Jacobs to fight City Hall on this bus way.
That to me, is the kinda archetypal story of what's happened in the progressive arc around these kinds of politics. And so I do think we're gonna see a moment in like, like California is usually the canary in the coal mine of the stuff where you're gonna start to see state and federal government saying these local communities are out of control.
And what they're gonna do is they're gonna say, We will give you blocks of money to build affordable housing, to build you infrastructure and so forth. But you're gonna have to override local control. Because local control is always gonna fight it.
Vanessa: So maybe let's talk about the origins of, of that local control, because I think this is one of the things, like if I ever write a book, it's probably gonna be about this because I would love to live in a world where you as an individual can have influence on the neighborhood that you live in, the community that live, and that what happens and how it shapes around you and serves your needs and desires.
And I think the original intention of giving control back to local communities to say, in order to say no to certain projects was again, well intentioned, right? I think it came from a lot of the result of a lot of racist top down planning that completely decimated communities. And I think the idea was like, let's reform the system so that people can push back.
But of course, what's happened now is that it's running wild and people are acting in their, in small self-interest in a way that doesn't serve the public good. So what , what is your feeling about the, the ideal way to bring in community engagement when it comes to development?
Adaam: Also just noting that a community engagement has, uh, a much longer tradition in, in American culture, that that precedes the, the good, the, you know, the, the more rose tinted version of, of wanting to, to empower local communities.
Mm-hmm. to redress racism. You know, it goes back to I think the Puritan Hmm. Of New England, the idea that you govern
Vishaan: locally. So here's the thing. I believe in local control. As long as there is true representation of the community. And that's, so there's been a lot of studies done around the fact that community board meetings tend to attract their mainly wealthy, white, older residents because that's frankly the people of the time to sit through a three hour community board meeting on a Thursday night.
What I'm finding that gives me hope on this entire topic is that the pandemic opened up something that wasn't really that much of a thing before, which is most community board meetings are now on Zoom. And what that means is, is that what I'm starting to see is a much broader range of participants in these meetings and people who want housing in their neighborhood showing up.
And you know what's interesting is a lot of those people maybe couldn't have come on Thursday night for three hours, but they can, they can log on for 40 minutes from their home. Right, while they're still, you know, if they've got a sleeping kid or they're taking care of an elderly parent or something, they can still do that while they're, uh, participating in the public discourse.
Uh, and I think that is a groundbreaking development that's really gonna shift the course of this whole conversation. Um, because community participation prior to the pandemic, I think was something that was largely, um, the province of the privilege. And I think now it is being opened up to something that's truly something that's public and like that I think is a very welcome change.
Here's
Adaam: where I'm not convinced that this is an optimistic sign based on. What you've been saying actually, because part of the problem isn't just that people make choices that are, you know, ultimately, oh, this is the first time we're using this word, nibi. Uh, uh, nimby is stick, um, nimby flavored. It's, it's also that people don't necessarily understand how their choices translate to results.
And the problem that, that Nelly Boles was describing was that people truly think that, um, two contradictions coexist in the realm of it is more equitable to prevent this new tower from rising in the middle of my neighborhood, but also we need more affordable housing. But to quickly go back to your anecdote, you were describing your experience of trying to highlight this contradiction to people you work with and you recall the person saying, I don't care.
So what's behind that? I don't care.
Vishaan: Well, so here's the thing. I think when you say people, you gotta be really careful because Sure. I am finding, and I hate to be so binary about this, but there is a big, big difference between wealthy white progressives who fight these things and, um, you know, black and brown communities that I work in where I find a fundamentally different attitude.
A lot of it's an attitude that's a difference between owners of real estate in the city versus people who rent, right? Uh, because renters tend to want more supply. Right. They get it. They get that if there's more rental housing, their rent has a chance of creeping down that, that there needs to be more subsidized rental housing.
Mm-hmm. . So for, let me ground it in an example. So we're working out in East New York, uh, for a big 2000 unit, all affordable housing. It's a hundred percent affordable housing project, uh, for a pastor. We are going through the community board process. It's been a five year process that I wish it wasn't so long, but we got a very positive, uh, resolution from the community board to go forward with the project.
And I think that's incredibly important. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the voices who are participating. Are a lot of people who are lower income people who are renters and saw the need for more housing in their community, as opposed to basically, you know, someone who lives in the West Village, they own their townhouse, they got theirs.
Mm-hmm. . And so sure they can, To go back to your, uh, uh, what is it? LARPing? LARPing. Yeah, LARPing. Sorry. Right. To go back to your LARPing thing, they can be rhetorically as progressive as they. Right. They're sitting on all their equity, Their kids are in college, you know, they like, they like, and so they can prole away and have all the bumper stickers on their car that they drive through the West Village and all of that stuff.
There's just, there's an enormous distinction in the public in those two, you know, kind of groups. And again, I know I'm being purposefully, I, I'm, I'm making characters simplistic now, but, and I know I'm being simplistic, but I think that it's important to understand these differences that are out there before you take us
Adaam: to a smarter, uh, point.
And I'm just gonna say, say a very dumb, um, observation that this is almost always the case that ideological purity is the, the purview of. Rich people and almost always comes with a, with a NIMBY flavor on whatever topic. Nimby, um, to anybody who's not, was not, you know, reading, I dunno. Gothamist is, um, not in my neighborhood, Not in my backyard.
Not in your backyard, sorry. Not in my backyard. Um, emphasis on my, and usually the idea is that the same people who would talk about the importance of certain policies would not give ground in, in things that they care about. Yeah, sure. We need this, this new development. And not in my backyard, but, but I don't, but, but don't block my view.
Right. You know, we were just talking about foreign policy with, uh, Walter Russell, Me Any makes a point in his book The Arc of a Covenant about Jewish immigration that surprisingly maps onto this discussion all throughout American history. It was the position of the conscientious, uh, progressive. And this is, we're actually talking about some of the origins of progressivism back to, uh, Elena Roosevelt.
That we you, that you want to embrace, that you want to take care of the needy of the world, and that you want to see, um, the, the Jews currently under persecution in Germany, um, taken care of. But of course, of course, we're not gonna allow hundreds of thousands of them to immigrate into the United States, nor are we going to pressure anybody to do something, um, around the world that contradicts our geopolitical interests.
But we do. But we, we would like to see it happen.
Vishaan: We, it would, it would make us feel good
Adaam: if this happens, and we can very vehemently expect o other people to do the work that we will never do. Right. Don't
Vanessa: ask me to take care of it, but it would be nice if Sure. Nice of it happened. And you're seeing the same
Adaam: thing happening right now with I immigrants from the border where liberal city like New York are happy to talk about being a sanctuary city until, um, Abbot and, um, I was gonna say the Stella, what's the name?
Uh, uh, DeSantis decide to pull. And admittedly ugly troll and just bust dozens of migrants to those cities and suddenly those cities change their tune and say, Oh no, sorry,
Vishaan: we're full. Right? And in that process, what you've basically done is loaded the gun of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, , Right.
I mean like that. You know, That's the thing. I mean, it's just you have become your own straw man. Yeah,
Vanessa: exactly. Well, I, I do wanna like throw in like two confounding elements, I think to the, to the binary that you gave, which you admitted is simplistic. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw in what I think are kind of confounding elements here.
I think on the one hand you, there it is very understandable that someone who grew up in a system where they were told that you have to like, buy your property, accumulate your wealth, and then and tie everything into it, into that property value, is going to be incredibly guarded about preserving that because the whole system has been set up for them to, to hold onto it for dear life, no matter the consequences.
So that's like thing one. Thing two, I do think that there have been unusual alliances. Going on between the privileged view, holding onto their property value or their perception of what will increase their property value and lower income people, generally activists, uh, housing activists, people of color who are so, uh, holding onto their ideals so tightly that they won't, they won't compromise a smidge if it's not a hundred percent affordable.
I don't want it, it must be everything or
Vishaan: nothing. Well, actually these days a lot of hundred percent affordable stuff is still going down in city council. I mean, that, like, that, that's where it gets really, you know, amazing that, you know, that happens. And so you're, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.
But that's the thing. And I think it goes back to a Don's point. I mean, like, people have become very, very fixed. But here's the thing, I just have a lot less sympathy look. I'm old enough to grow, to have grown up in that, like, you should buy a piece of property. Right? And like, you should build your equity.
That doesn't mean, I mean sure it's your property. I still believe in that, but like, that doesn't mean you do everything you can to enhance your property value at the expense of everyone else. Mm-hmm. , I mean, it's sort of like saying that, well, because I never used to recycle. I shouldn't Now , I mean, like, you, you've gotta evolve as a human being, right?
And so, I, I just look and, and let's, let's take it out of the binary for a second into like, we were working on a big planning project in Queens and you know, this young woman with kind of greenish hair stood up at a meeting and said, Well, I wanna need new housing. I just moved here from Austin. Mm-hmm.
And I, I'm witnessing the gentrification in this community and like I'm standing there with like, like a lot of people who have been through like the front lines of these wars for 20 years and this person is the poster child for gentrification. Right? Right. And has absolutely no introspection about it.
And so I think whoever it is, right? Like, I just think introspection and self criticality is really important if you're gonna convince others of your position and pull broader segments of the population along with you on your journey to whatever success you're trying to create. Because we, we just, you know, Like at the na I've driven cross country four times, and you're not gonna convince people in the middle of the country with the ideological purity test.
You've got the middle of just succeed from the, like, That's okay. That's their prerogative. That's, I don't know, I just, I, I just don't feel enough of those qualities of introspection and, and, and, um, self criticality going on to convince others.
Adaam: By the way, the, um, the gentrification, cognitive dissonance, if anybody is, is amused by these characters.
Google something like, Gentrification guilt or should I feel bad about being a gentrifier? You'll find dozens of op-eds that try to quell the anguished heart of the bleeding liberal saying, Yeah, you are gentrifier. But you know, if you do it with enough respect to the local community, it's fine. And respect to the local community means you, you say good morning to the, to your
Vishaan: local baker.
I, I mean, it's nuts. I've always lived in incredibly boring neighborhoods in New York because those tend, like, so for instance, like, you know, there are parts of the Upper East Side that are cheaper Hmm. Than the gentrifying parts of Brooklyn. Hmm. But people wanna live in the gentrifying parts of Brooklyn cause they're cooler.
Right? Like, I don't care how much respect you have for the local community, that is not cool. Like, that's not okay. That's that. You have to think. Right. Like before you sign that lease. And so I, I don't know, I just, I just think it's always easy to point the finger at the other person. Right? And so, um, anyway, but, but hopefully that answers your question of why cities are so expensive.
Yeah.
Adaam: No, but let's go at it from the other direction. Also, we are in, uh, in a reality where, as you pointed out, one of the dynamics is, um, re urbanization. So demand density is at a high crunch. And one of the reasons people move to cities, um, beyond job opportunities is available culture and connectivity.
And when a city makes it difficult to get from one side to another, like we live in Queens, our friend Bacha lives in the depths of Brooklyn. And getting to her takes me almost twice as long as it currently takes me to go from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in
Vishaan: Israel.
Um, yeah. And that's because a third of the land in most cities is road bed is street right? Like a third of New York City Street. We dedicate the vast majority of that to private vehicles. Right. Because I mean, when you look at that, when you look at that on Google Maps, right? And you look at that trip you're talking about aren't you astonished at how little the distance is mm-hmm.
the distance is nothing. Yeah. So a high speed bus running on that street with no private cars on it is gonna get you there in no time flat. Right. Especially in a post pandemic lattice. Kind of an idea of a city where central business district is really kind of a little bit of an, uh, of anachronism.
Right where you're gonna see we're flattening out across the geography and territory of the city. Doesn't it make sense to take out most of the private cars and have a network of high speed buses that are electric, that are running people all over the place so that you, you know, so that trip you're talking about should take no time at all.
This is not, you know, like Detroit is a much, much bigger city than New York geographically, yet the travel times are crazy here. We've just taken it for granted that people should be able to drive, you know, 4,000 ton, 4,000 pound vehicles across our city streets to drop their chubby kids off at school.
And
Adaam: here's the crux of the matter, and then this is what I need your help understanding. If we move away from, you know, scoffing at the, uh, green eyed hipster girl, green hair. Oh, so green hair, she
Vanessa: up in green eye of. Figuring hair was more noticeable as a detail. Yeah, that makes sense. ,
Adaam: when she's signing her lease.
Okay, sure. Part of it is I wanna be in the coolest andous place in the city. That's okay. That's dumb and people are dumb. But maybe she's thinking this is, this is only 20 minutes away from all the fun stuff that I wanna do in the city, and this is what I'm gonna get. Now, if the city doesn't make options of, of, of, of, you know, easy transition available to them, and as newcomers come, unless, unless we limit immigration across cities, um, this is, this is always gonna be a problem.
So it is back to an institutional problem and it back, it's back to the question of why
Vishaan: cant cities build things? No, no. But hang on a. Who's the city in your story? They're responding to the populace, right? I mean, this is the thing.
Adaam: No, no. But city instead, governments can plan ahead. They can develop
Vishaan: things.
I look, first of all, there's no voice for future New Yorkers or future city residents in the Democratic system, right? There's none. Right? So that's, that's like, that's the first kind of issue with the, the, the, the picture you're painting is that most people out there, like that woman was talking about, they don't care about the future person.
They're saying, Look, I have, and I'm not, I'm not totally faulting them for that. They're saying, Look, I have needs, I, I'm trying to raise my kids here. I'm trying to do whatever I am here, right? And now you want me to worry about this future? Right.
Adaam: So we we're going to the question of long termism, is there no system, Is there no mechanism in the city or the state to say we see these immigration trends?
And I guess part of it is because immigra, um, movement into the city has been so convulsive over the years, um, and uncertain. But can't they see, say we are seeing the trends, we can anticipate maybe an increase of, of, of a million people over the next decade. Shouldn't we plan for this and, and grid the city with light rail and buses
Vishaan: or whatever?
So look, all you have to do, whenever these stories pop up in the New York Times, read the comment section. Mm. and in the comment section you'll immediately see there's a basic, no, there's a basic kind of, uh, dynamic that's going on in this country, which is conservatives are saying the country is full, and progressives are saying the cities are full.
Yeah, that's the basic dynamic that's going on in the country. Now. There are exceptions to that and the Greg
Adaam: Abbot thing of busing migrants to, Yes, to New York. New York and Eric Adams saying, Sorry, we are full is a perfect encapsulation
Vishaan: of that. No. So look, here's the thing. There is this kind of shuffle going on.
The shuffle was going on before the pandemic. It's accelerated after the pandemic. Smaller cities in America are growing as a consequence of how expensive and San Francisco and New York have become. Detroit's on the upsurge. Kansas City, Nashville, you know, San Antonio picking up a lot of the draft from this is happening cuz people want that urban life, but they want a place that they can afford.
And now, you know, remote work has opened up new possibilities and you know, and look, I actually think that's all a good trend as long as it stays dense and transit oriented.
Adaam: You know, to me.
Vishaan: What I don't think we sufficiently talk about or realize in this country is that we have a national political dialogue that goes on and has been going on my entire lifetime.
That what regardless of party does not talk about how people live. It's like a third rail, right? So no one talks about how people live, right? And that if we lived a different way, maybe we wouldn't have the amount of national malaise that we have. As I see it, there are two large kind of, uh, existential crises we have, right?
There's climate change and there's social division that comes and everything that comes with social division, structural racism, the rise of fascism, all of the things, social media bubbles, all of the things that are part and parcel of social division violence. Right. Violence. And so to me, both of those issues are joined around this issue of how we live.
And so when, where I get great hope is when I see like, like people moving to Kansas City and saying, I want to build an urban life here, because that's much better for the environment. If it's a truly urban life. It's truly transit walking, bike oriented, and they're living in apartments and not huge suburban homes.
Right. But I think the other thing that's enormously important about it is those are the places where the red pixels meet the blue pixels and there isn't this amount of group think about everything from housing to infrastructure. And I see a lot of really interesting things happening in those communities that have less of the paralysis that San Francisco, uh, or New York have.
Right. And so, I just wish that there's a way to take the urbanest conversations that happen and the national political conversations that happen and merge them more. Right? And hopefully that's starting to happen a little bit. You're
Adaam: literally giving voice in a much more articulate way to one of my most obsessive rants about the, and this is something that we keep coming back to on this podcast.
That idea that's, there's this conversation that is dominating our minds, that is dominating our, our news consumption habits, and then also guiding the way we vote and even judge people around us. But that has close to zero connection to our day to day lives and to the things that really affect our happiness and good living.
It's, and it's insane. It's infuriating and there are way too many, um, machines that unfortunately are on autopilot benefiting from this. Yeah. And it's not, that's not in a conspiratorial way, obviously, just in, in the way that our political and media class as they are right now, have no incentive to talk about people's real lives and.
By extension Urban. But
Vanessa: I will say, I will say though, but Shaun is one of the few people where we can point to who is collaborating with journalists and media in a way that is counter to what you're talking about. Because I think when we, when you and I usually talk about the media, we're talking about people peddling stupid narratives, divorced from your everyday experience, and I thinkan the way that you've collaborated with journalists in the past with the Penn Station, reimagining with the, like the Manhattan Without Cars.
It's like, let us use this vehicle of journalism to put in front of people's spaces how our world could be, how our day to day life could be improved if we could just start bringing some of these basic principles of urbanism into the discourse.
Vishaan: And thank you. I appreciate that because the visualization aspects of those stories especially is meant to convey this thing of.
This is not like eat your spinach, tighten your belt. It's gonna be horrible. But we've all gotta give for the cause. Instead, it's trying to say, we can live more joyous lives, right? In this more collective space. Right. And the, so we can
Adaam: be less miserable in our day
Vishaan: to day. And what that could bring us to is actually James Trio Adams version of the American Dream, which is the original version of the American Dream, which is this notion of equal opportunity, not this American dream.
That's about the collecting of stuff. And like that I think is, is cause I think you're starting to see the knives out. Like there is a progressive movement, clearly building around housing density and mobility. Right? You see that there are groups now that are fighting for these things that we've been talking about.
And the knives are coming out about that notion that these, these people, and they're usually, they're young people, these kids, they're attacking the American dream. And they're not, they're actually going back to the, the true seeds of what that idea was not kind of the post 1950s version of it. And I think we, as a, whatever you wanna call it, I consider myself a, a kind of a different kind of progressive.
I think that band of Progressive has to like, run into that story about like, what is a better, more joyous, more equitable version of the American dream.
Adaam: Mm. Well that was beautiful. I it was and not only that, it's, it actually is one of those rare occasions when we actually do the, now what part of everything's broken now what Yes.
Mission that we've, um, of our tag ourselves.
Vanessa: But I think what I think from there though, I think from, we should go from the joys to the fucking depressing, don't you
Adaam: think? No. So before, so before the depressing, I just wanna step one point and, and I wonder how you think of it as somebody who actually.
Comes in contact with the, um, with, uh, uh, government u usually all my fire goes at media the way it makes us think poorly. My worry about getting to that level, to, to the point where this new kind of progressive, this, this density minded progressive, um, to have real effect. It does need some, um, bipartisan buy-in and it needs to be able to work with people in the red who are, um, who are about cutting zoning regulations, right?
It needs to somehow work together to, to actually get traction. Is there, is there a world where this is happen?
Vishaan: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting because the, again, then the San Francisco New York comparison, you know, one of the things I immediately encountered on my move back to New York was there is this civic infrastructure here that is a legacy of what happened in the late 1970s where, you know, the business community really said, Look, if we don't save this place, no one's going to, it's, it's gonna fall apart.
And remember things did, I mean, Detroit fell apart like, and Detroit was a major wealthy, industrial powerhouse of the city. People don't fully understand what the collapse of Detroit and its subsequent Renaissance means in urban history. Like it's extraordinary what happened. And New York could have fallen by the same.
Were it not for the fact that there were local people, not just the business community, but local people who said, We're gonna save this place. And you know, like I'm on, uh, there's a new New York committee that was appointed by the state and the, uh, I mean,
Adaam: thank God Trump was there single handedly saving the woman rink.
What? Yeah,
Vishaan: right. Of course. Uh, oh, the, the skating rink.
Vanessa: Oh,
Vishaan: yeah. And, and putting out full page ads against five innocent black kids, , you know. Um, but like, so, uh, the governor and the mayor have appointed a committee. I'm on it with about 55 people from all walks of the city's, uh, kind of civic life to think about how the city recovers post pandemic.
And I do think, I mean to call it bipartisan. I mean, I don't know how many true Republicans there are on that committee. Probably not very many, but there's certainly a lot of representatives of the business community and, um, I think there's a shared sensibility among, uh, that, like on that group that we need to build more affordable housing across the city.
We need better social infrastructure and mobility infrastructure across the city. I really missed that kind of civic infrastructure when I was in San Francisco. To me it was gaping obvious, you know, as the dean of the architecture and planning school, that was the most significant architecture and planning school in the region, if not the state.
Right. Um, that there wasn't that kind of civic infrastructure. And like, so I, so I'm, I'm always kind of bemused when people look at stuff like that and they say, Oh, that's just like a bunch of rich business interests and their, their, uh, cozy relationship with City Hall. It's nothing further from the truth.
I think it is a bunch of really concerned citizens, people who've been around the, the struggles of leadership in this city for decades who are trying to make sure that this place. Survives these like, look, we survived the seventies. We survived nine 11, now we have to survive this. The pandemic is an existential threat to the idea of the city, and I believe that the idea of the city will, uh, meet and challenge and surpass that threat because human beings want to be social creatures.
And, but I think you're seeing that manifest much more in New York than other cities. And I do worry about San Francisco. Hmm.
Adaam: So be, I just wanna throw this at you because I can imagine this question coming from Progressive who might wanna show some caution about your, your call for cooperation with the business side.
I can imagine somebody pointing to all the pencil towers that just shut up around New York City and say, Look, we know that. They're mostly vacant. These are either, uh, financial instrument or nobody, just, nobody was able to afford it. How can you tell us that we are lacking housing? That it's a supply problem, but it seems clearly to be a business slash uh, city choices problem?
Vishaan: Oh, this one's too easy. Come on, . I mean, I mean, this is the pro, This goes back to the notion that this is all, that's a symbolic, rhetorical conversation that is not a real conversation. The pencil towers on 57th Street, I'm not a fan of them, but how many units of housing do you think they are? In a city of 8.8 million people.
I'm gonna say it's like a, it's like a house per floor. There are a few thousand units of housing. And what, And, and, and, and, and lemme get the, get the argument straight. We're gentrifying Central Park South. That's where the epicenter of the gentrification problem is. Central Park South. Right. Like clearly all of the displacement.
That's no. This goes back to our earlier conversation. The displacement that's happening is in Brownsville and Crown Heights and East New York and long like, come on, let's be real about where these issues are. Cause it's just, that is such an easy and stupid punching bag. It like, okay, there should be some zoning reform.
And some of them are ugly and like Yeah. But like the notion that that somehow is a policy indicator doesn't hold the slightest bit of water. And like that's the problem with progressive politics. It's just become too rhetorical. It's just about like, it's about these easy stupid targets that missed the mark time and time again.
And again, you're just loading the gun of the Wall Street Journal editorial board when you talk about like, this is not the problem. And, and look, I mean, business interests people have. I mean, I don't think we have the time to talk about the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the pros and cons of capitalism right now.
But like, I'm not, I'm just not ready. I, I have built what I consider to be a, a really, um, well, we, we set out an aspiration and I think we are fulfilling that aspiration as a social impact practice. I have 30 people were doing really interesting work. Do you think a brown guy whose parents came here with $32 could do that in Copenhagen?
It's outta the question, right? So there are things about this country that I am always gonna treasure for all of its wart, right? And so for people to put all of that in this bucket of business interest, I'm sorry, it's just too easy. Mm. Like it's just way, way too easy, right? And so I just think we've gotta be much more intelligent in the battles we pick.
There, there's your problem.
Adaam: Intelligence. Asking for intelligence. Yeah. Asking for intelligence. Um, this was, uh, and if somebody does want to get more about the pros and cons of capitalism, listen to our conversation with Rebecca Henderson. Yes. . I, I I just wanna close the loop on, on San Francisco. What do you see happening?
You, you, you describe it as on the precipice of
Vishaan: being the next Detroit. I say it could be, it could be, you know, Look, first of all, it needs to be, you know, I, I, I think the answer lies not just in the major universities, but in the community colleges. Like they, they, they've gotta, they gotta practice what they preach in terms of figuring out how to make the edges and meds out there, be the driver of the economy behind the tech c beyond the tech companies.
Beyond that, though, I, I don't think people who are not living out West understand just how bad this, the, the, the, the, the climate change problems are. Right. Um, and. Like, I lived through that San Francisco Red Sky day. That was one of the weirdest, scariest days in my life. And, you know, you know, Berkeley, California has a hundred degree Fahrenheit days regularly now in the summer.
Just didn't happen when I was a student in the nineties. And so there is a real, like, there needs to be like a, a like, something like hard New York Recovery committee that includes the major universities, includes community groups that really talks about the future of that city where they can build housing, how they stop driving out to nature constantly because they love it so much they're gonna kill it.
Um, you know, and how to like really think about density and transit in a new way that is, you know, climate change resilient and meets their population demand. It just seems like a far stretch from happening because again, there is this kind of suspended disbelief of like, Oh, it's just a bad fire season.
Mm. Really? Um, the fire seasons that now happen in the winter. Mm. You know, like, and so I, I think, I think that the Bay Area has a long way to go from where it is right now. So I'll,
Adaam: for a final question, I'll ask you about my, my other pet topic. Um, and Vanessa wisely relegated it to the end because this was, I gotta say, one of the most fascinating in conversations that we've had.
I think it was great, um, just being a spectator to YouTube going back and forth, but, um, mostly a spectator, um, heckling, a heckling spectator, um, I, I, I asked at the beginning, Why do, why are city so fucking depressing? And I mean, there are many things that we can get into, but I want to limit it just to the aesthetic.
Vishaan: Okay. Uh, this is, No, no, this is great because for the vast majority of this conversation, we've talked about the contents of like kinda the underpinnings of my first book, Country of Cities. Um, you, that question gets to my second book, which is, uh, I just submitted my, uh, manuscript to my publisher at Princeton Press.
Woo. Um, does it have a title? It's called The Architecture of Urbanity. Uh, and it is about this exact topic. Uh, it is about why what we build in cities is so awful and why that is hurting the policy issues that we've been discussing in terms of people wanting density in their communities and so forth.
Um, And, you know, a few years ago I gave a TED talk about the, um, the homogenization of our cities. The fact that we build them largely using the same, same means and methods all over the world, to the point where no one knows when they land in an airport, whether they're in Shanghai or Mumbai or Dubai anymore.
Um, the fact that, you know, we have handed the reigns over to developers who are, most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, lowest common denominator players. Right, in terms of what they build
Adaam: as opposed to community input, um, city or
Vanessa: even higher end
Vishaan: materials. I mean, you're, you're asking a very architectural question, right?
Right. Because you're saying why is it aesthetically so depressing if I'm understanding the question? Mm-hmm. , and so Sure. Community input's important like that, that all affordable housing project that I'm talking about, like that was a community where local electives, the community board really wanted to see this project, which is like about 11 buildings largely built out of brick.
Now they don't look all the same like the, you know, the towers from the sixties, but, you know, there's, I think there's a reason, you know, brick is a material that's about the same size as most human beings hands. There's a human scale to it. And if it's detailed properly, if it's not this brick as wallpaper stuff, but like real brick, there is a kind of human connection to it.
But that's not to be nostalgic or historicist. These buildings don't look like they're from the 19 hundreds. They're still modern buildings. Um, You know, I don't think there are a lot of people who are fans of, like out my window, I can see that blue glass middle finger that was built in Madison Square Park
Right. And that is like a middle finger to all of lower Manhattan. Right. And I, I don't know, I've never met anyone who likes that building. In fact, even like the architecture firm to design that building doesn't like that building. And so, like, you know, that is part, partially it's some modernization of materials.
Partially it's just we need to demand better architecture. And I think, you know, look, a lot of this is also just, it goes, goes back to the fact that we don't live in a culture that's very educated or cares very much about the, I'm gonna go beyond aesthetics to the experience of the built environment.
Mm-hmm. , right? So people on a regular basis move out to suburban areas where like, you know, you can't tell the street corners apart cuz it's the same four chain stores and parking lots. You know, it's a big, beautiful country when you get away from all of that strip mall stuff. Yeah. And so what I argue for is an architecture that responds to climate, to community and to local construction techniques.
Like we've got a project in Mongolia that's completely like, even though it's a totally modern project, is trying to respond to, um, local building techniques, colors that people are familiar with, materials that people are familiar with. So even though it's a modern building and probably a different scale than what people are used to, at least there are things with which people can find residents.
And I think that the pro, what you're calling depression, I call it on newi, I think it is this kind of sense that we are losing, You know, Harari talks about how our species is made unique by the notion of narrative. Right. The narrative is what drives us as homo sapiens, and I think we are losing our narratives in what we're building because these are becoming so homogenous.
Um, and to me, that's what I interpret in your question about like the, the parts of cities becoming depressing and I don't think they have to be that way. And I think there's a group of a new generation of architects who looking at the material, we're looking at vocabulary and expression. And again, without mimicking context or trying to be.
Trying to do this act of interpretation and archeology about those narratives and how those narratives can manifest in modern buildings, um, and, and modern public
Adaam: spaces as just a random person living in a city. How do I go about demanding better architecture,
Vishaan: demand better architecture? I mean, you know, here's the tough part.
Who, what institution,
Adaam: Where do I need to hang that 95 thesis? ,
Vishaan: the mayor, the City Planning Commission. Here's the tough part. I have never seen a world where it works well to try to regulate it. This is an aesthetic thing, you know, like San Francisco has a quote, unquote, they call it the beauty contest, and all it's done is actually given San Francisco its own form of homogeneity, like almost all the multifamily housing.
The little there is of it that goes up. It's all like, it has to be five colors with lots of like little punches and like it all looks the same. You can't regulate good design. You have to take bad design with good design. But what you can do is there needs to be more public discourse about people demanding this.
And again, not just cuz it's an aesthetic elite thing,
Adaam: but because no, because beauty makes us happier and feel more connected and feel like our, our day to day, um, landscape is meaningful and not just, uh, that doesn't make us zone out and wanna go and play a computer game because it looks breier there.
Vishaan: So I wanna focus on your words connected and meaningful. Cause that's what comes back to this notion of narrative. Beauty is a really hard, mushy thing to get your hands around. No, it shouldn't be.
Adaam: You are contributing to the problem by, by relegating beauty outside of the conversation,
Vishaan: I think, right? Like so I beauty's something that we respond to.
Well, right. But what is it? I mean, so, you know, like we try to practice something I call connect like porn note when you see it. , Well, I, we try to practice something called connective design, which is this notion of how like, so like our domino sugar, That can't be anywhere else. It can only be where it's cited like, so that's one of my key litmus tests is we look at a new project, we're designing the expansion of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland famous IMP building.
We're designing, its big expansion and I wanna see it and look at it and say, This can't be anywhere else. It's one of my key tests for a thing, because that means that we're somehow creating connection to the local narrative and the place and the history. And it's out of that, that I hope people find their own sense of beauty.
Cause my sense of beauty is gonna differ from your sense of beauty. Mm. But if you can create something that people feel connected to, they will take care of it and love it and want it to be in their neighborhood. And that, I think, to me, for me, is the test. That's a great, How do,
Adaam: what's your name for it?
Connective
Vishaan: design. I just call it connective design. Connective design. It's just this notion that it's connective because, you know, look, it's pretty easy to do. It's like you look at these blue glass buildings that go up and if, if, if it can be anywhere else, it's failed the test. Mm-hmm. , that's
Adaam: a great, great, great point.
I, I really look forward to this book. . Um, Vanessa, do you want to ask the, the blind spot questions? I actually interested.
Vanessa: Um, do you have time for two more minutes, Han? Yeah. Question, our quicker question that we like to ask all of our guests. Um, and I'm curious to get your take. Um, what are the biggest blind spots on the left and the biggest blind spots on the right?
Adaam: Wow.
Vishaan: Um, biggest blind spots on the right is a lack of belief in the public. I mean, I think that there is a, you know, undergirding traditional conservative philosophy is this jian worldview that people are basically out for their own self-interests. And I think that time and time again, people prove that that is not their only motivation or even their prime motivation. And I think that is just their biggest blind spot. I think the biggest blind spot on the left is, um, is just really understanding. The value of like individual entrepreneurialism and the notion that like, you know, we, you know, it, like, to me it's interesting that a lot of immigrants from formerly socialist countries get turned off by a lot of the rhetoric of the left because, and especially like if you're a person of color and you've experienced kind of like a, a, a, like a dominant government that kind of tries to create a nanny state around everything.
Vishaan: You know, like I, I think sometimes the biggest blind spot on the left is that there's, there's, there's insufficient regard for the freedoms of this country, right? Like, like, and I like, and again, I really focus on this notion of entrepreneurialism. Like I, I, I think entrepreneurialism is an incredibly empowering thing, and especially like speaking as a person of color, Like I think it's freed me from a lot of the horrible things that I experienced in a lot of my other workplaces.
And it's very hard to explain to people on the left sometimes that like, I couldn't have done this in so many of the countries and societies that they admire so much. Mm. I wish I could find a more like pithy or articulate way to say what I just said, but. That's what it is.
Vanessa: No, it's good. It's, we live in uncertainty here on uncertain things, so it's the, the men intellectual processing is, is part of the jam.
Adaam: also, we astute ness on this podcast, .
Vishaan: That's also true. .
Vanessa: Shaun, thank you. This was so great. Thank
Adaam: so much. I, I love this conversation. It was really my pleasure. It
Vishaan: was a lot of fun. Thank
Adaam: you for listening to Uncertain Things. We're uncertain dots.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Share us with your friends and enemies. Check out our newsletter and share with your friends and enemies. Next time. Stay sane.
Vanessa: Good Lord. What is even happening with this microphone?