Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Welcome to the liberalism.org show. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies. Today, we have a special bonus episode. 0:15 Political theorist Jason Cannon sat down with Edward Glaeser for a conversation about what cities actually do. 0:22 They talk about why proximity makes us smarter, why poverty in cities is a sign of urban strength rather than failure, and why America has spent the last fifty years quietly making it illegal to build the kind of places that once defined our dynamism. 0:37 They talk about what the YIMBY movement has gotten right, what critics of cities miss, and why the people who organize to stop new housing tend to be the same people who once benefited from it being built. Edward L. 0:51 Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the author of many books, including Triumph of the City and, with David Cutler, Survival of the City. Here's Jason and Edward. 1:07 Ed Glaeser, welcome to Ideas in Progress. Thank you so much for having me on. You grew up in the New York City of the 1970s, where there were shocking crime rates, finances near bankruptcy. 1:21 Those were some of the city's darkest days. What did that teach you about cities? It gave me a sense of the incredible dynamism of cities, the fact that they could change so quickly. 1:33 Uh, I mean, the New York in the era of Taxi Driver was a place of fear, absolutely, and it was a place in which government seemed like it had lost its way. 1:41 It was a place in which, you know, heroin addicts roamed the streets. Uh, I think it was my junior year in high school, there was a triple homicide in the hotel right across the street from my high school. 1:52 So things felt, you know, very wrong. But on the other hand, it was still an amazingly exciting place. I mean, it was a place with an amazingly exciting art scene. 2:00 It was a place in which, you know, finance was sort of changing and getting its way back. 2:04 It was a place with amazing, you know, resources like, uh, the Museum of Modern Art, where my father worked, uh, like the, the music venues. 2:12 I can remember my older sister taking me to Studio Fifty-Four in 1982 when I was fifteen. 2:18 Uh, and so it was, it was endlessly fascinating, and I think it played a role in shaping my lifelong obsession with understanding cities, what they do that's miraculous, and where they go wrong. 2:30 In your book, Triumph of the City, you claim that cities are the greatest human invention. What do we gain by thinking of cities as a technology? So, uh, 2:42 I think the thing that's really crucial about cities is they enable us to work together. They're machines for connecting people. 2:50 At their heart, cities are density, proximity, closeness, the absence of physical space between people. And what's special about closeness is they enable us to be in the same room with one another. 2:59 They enable us to learn from one another, to buy, to sell from one another, uh, to, to, to, to share a smile, to share a, a meal. 3:07 Um, and this is so crucial for our species because we are a profoundly social species, right? We learn from... You know, this is how we be-- get smart. We learn from each other. 3:18 Like, taken on our own, I don't think there are too many human beings who could take on, like, a black bear, let alone a brown bear or, or a polar bear. 3:26 And yet, collectively, we're able to do these absolutely miraculous things, and that's what cities are machines for doing. 3:32 They're m-machines for powering human interactions, and it's those human interactions that are responsible for basically all of humanity's greatest hits. 3:40 Tell us then about the difference between the city as an urban core versus the suburb. So if proximity is where the magic in cities can be found, what happens when we start talking about suburban and exurban spaces? 3:58 So, uh, I think for many of us, we live a semi-urban existence. So I woke up in my suburban home, which is surrounded by an awful lot of acreage of, of woods. 4:09 Uh, and then I came into Cambridge, where I work, and I'm surrounded by, you know, brilliance and energy and love of ideas. And so I think of my, like, my daylight hours as being a very urban existence. 4:24 Uh, and, uh, it's just my nighttime is not like that. Um, and so that's a lot of what early suburbia was. 4:33 Uh, over the course of the, the late twentieth century, there was much more of a move towards exurban things, where people would work in exurban areas as well. 4:43 Um, that genuinely involves a loss of interactions in some cases, or at least a loss of capacity for interactions. 4:49 Um, some of the most successful, you know, peri-urban spaces, like think about the, the sort of Silicon Valley campuses of great tech giants, they certainly manage to be wildly interactive. 5:01 It tends to be within firm, not across firm. So you're getting a particular type of interaction, and that is clearly enormously productive in the short run. I don't know if something is lost in the longer run. 5:10 I, I would've normally guessed that it was by having sort of all of our interactions be within Google or within Facebook, uh, rather than a-across. But, you know, time will out. 5:21 Um, uh, and I think, you know, the, the-- just to reiterate the sort of policy conclusion, I see a lot to like in cities, and I think it's important to advise city mayors to try to make them wiser custodians of the spaces that they, they lead. 5:35 I do not think the US government, the federal government, should be artificially subsidizing anything, right? 5:39 I think that we should basically have a level playing field towards different spaces, and I think it's a great thing that America has all sorts of different kind of spaces that cater to people with all sorts of different tastes. 5:48 And, you know, it's, it's certainly not the business of the government to be telling you, you, you've got to live in a city or you've got to live in a suburb or you've got to live in a low-density area. 5:55 So you've presented a rosy picture of what city life can be. A lot of conservatives, when they look at the biggest cities in the country, see something- Totally different. 6:06 So they look at cities and see poverty and crime and drug crises, high taxes, the erosion of traditional culture, the list goes on. They think that cities actually bring out the worst in us. 6:19 What is it that they're missing? So you're right. Cities-- I mean, so let's, let's unpack those things. So poverty, yes. 6:26 You know, it was Plato who wrote in The Republic that every city of whatever size is in reality two cities, one a city of the rich, the other a city of the poor, and they're perpetually at war with one another. 6:35 That is certainly true. But I don't think that's a bad thing about cities. I think, actually think that's a sign of urban strength because cities don't make people poor. Cities attract poor people. 6:44 They attract poor people with better economic opportunity, with more jobs, with, uh, stronger social safety net. And they attract very rich people, of course, by being really fun places to be very rich. 6:54 Uh, as long as cities are fulfilling their historic role of enabling poor people to ride on an escalator, uh, towards opportunity, then I think there's nothing to apologize for in, in urban inequality or urban poverty. 7:07 Now, I think the state of America today, at least my colleague Raj Chetty's work, does suggest that some of our cities are kind of failing to provide those escalators for poor kids, and that is certainly something the city should be worried about. 7:18 Um, I think the primary issue is the schools. Uh, and, you know, I've long been an advocate of school reform in different ways, but, you know, that's, that to me feels like an issue. 7:27 Crime, you know, the big story is our cities are a whole lot safer than they were when I was a kid, right? The larger story is the, is the vast increase in safety. 7:35 Uh, it is certainly true historically that there was more crime in cities. I wrote a paper directly titled Why Is There More Crime in Cities in nineteen ninety-nine? But that gulf has really narrowed. 7:46 Uh, so there's not a sense in which, like, there's some huge urban change between, you know, cities are, are dangerous, uh, low density areas are, are safer. 7:54 More generally, there's a, a puzzle about why Americans remain so concerned about crime given that how much crime rates nationwide have gone down over the last twenty-five years, and that's kind of a disconnect in, in beliefs and reality. 8:05 Uh, but it is certainly true that there have been some foolish things that cities have done, you know, and, and, you know, the conservative critics are not wrong. 8:11 They were particularly, uh, you know, San Francisco, Seattle, you know, a-and allowing open air fentanyl markets in prime urban locations, having the no police zones. I mean, this is not wisdom. 8:25 Uh, you know, cities require-- I mean, there is sort of, uh, uh, like if there's, if there's one element of this sort of conservative rap that I'm gonna just buy into, I, I'll, I'm gonna buy into two. 8:33 One of which is cities actually do require more government, right? 8:36 And, you know, there's a reason why, you know, Hammurabi's code or the, the Ur document, if you will, of legal codes, it's fundamentally dealing with issues of cities. 8:45 Uh, and one of my favorite elements in that code is the fact that if you build a house and it falls down on someone and kills that person, you will be put to death. 8:52 So that counts as one of the first building regulations that, that we have. Um, the second way in which cities are non-conservative is they enable change. 9:01 They enable intellectual, and that's the sort of traditional social values that you're talking about. They, they enable change. But that change doesn't always go in one direction, right? 9:10 You wanna think about a, a great urban moment. Think about the meeting of St. Augustine and St. Ambrose in Milan tw-twenty-six hundred years ago, right? 9:19 That's also an urban moment that had, you know, where did those traditional values come from? They came from urban interactions too. 9:25 So I'm not gonna, you know, yes, cities are agents of change, but they don't necessarily all flow against religion or go, or flow against, uh, various moral values. 9:34 So today, even the fastest-growing American cities like Houston grow by around two percent per year. Compare that to Chicago in its heyday in the eighteen hundreds when its population was doubling every five years. 9:50 How fast should American cities be growing today? 9:54 So if we even grew our housing stock at the rate we did between nineteen eighty and two thousand, if we had done that over the last, over the twenty years from two thousand to twenty twenty, we would have fifteen million more houses, 10:04 and America would be a lot more affordable. So I think a lot of it, you don't have to go back to eighteen fifty Chicago. 10:11 Like, you go back to nineteen seventy-five Phoenix, and you're doing a heck of a lot better than you are now. Uh, and the point is not growth for growth's sake. 10:20 The point is, in general, w-we've locked our, our country in fetters. We've prioritized insiders over outsiders. 10:28 We've put up land use regulations that have made it far too difficult to add density where density is demanded. 10:34 We've made it far too difficult to build new forms of infrastructure because of a variety of, of over-regulation. And so this really sort of freezes us in a way that's sort of fundamentally anti-American, right? 10:44 I mean, like, this is a place of astonishing dynamism through, you know, the nineteen eighties even. 10:49 And it's just the last thirty years have been just very, very static years, at least in terms of the physical footprint. I mean, we've done amazing things in cyberspace. 10:56 We've done amazing things in terms of stuff that doesn't need a permit. 10:59 But the stuff that actually does need a permit, whether or not it's, you know, new grocery stores in urban areas or, uh, new forms of, of infrastructure, that, that's been a lot harder. 11:10 So what was it in the twentieth century that stopped the dynamism that was allowing for so much growth in cities in that period? What, what have we lost that we once had? 11:22 So from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen seventies, the, there were these series of Sun Belt superstars, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Miami, that were just explosive growth centers, just enormous. 11:38 And, you know, they built at low density areas, they built at medium density areas, they built at high cost areas, they built at low cost areas. They just built. 11:46 And they built more in places where density was lower, and they built more in places the density was w-where prices were higher, right? Which is what you'd think would happen. 11:54 Over the next fifty years, that process really stalled. And you see places that are-- It's not that, you know, they got overbuilt. 12:02 I mean, holding, whole density constant, like we're building much less in the neighborhoods of, of Greater Phoenix now than we were in nine- in nineteen seventy, right? 12:10 And you see places like Scottsdale or Buckhead that Places that looked like that in 1970 were building like crazy, and now they're not building very much at all. It's, it's a, it's sort of a big change. 12:20 I, I think it's, you know, the people who moved into these areas are, you know, prosperous, well-educated people, and one of the things that prosperous, well-educated people are really good at doing is stopping growth. 12:29 And so you had, m- you know, you had the migration. When these areas were dominated by, you know, landowners, they weren't gonna stop growth. Growth was profits. 12:38 But the mo- once you start having residential communities of well-educated, uh, people, that's how growth ends. 12:43 And it gr- ends in a thousand different ways, from little and local environmental regulations to minimum lot sizes that are draconian to all sorts of things. 12:51 The human imagination is miraculous in its ability to figure out new regulations to protect the status quo. 12:59 So suppose that somebody accepts the economic grounds for growing cities, but they're concerned about the other non-economic factors, so the way that economic growth affects homes and neighborhoods and communities. 13:14 And many folks who are concerned along these lines worry that unchecked growth creates gentrification, displaces the poor, and creates the kind of equalities, inequalities that cut against these other values. 13:29 What do you think that view gets right, and what do you th- wish that those critics understood? So it is certainly true that growth disturbs the status quo, and that they're right by. 13:42 But there seems something sad to me in an America in which we think the status quo is so precious that we can't contemplate the, uh, the promise of change. Um, uh, and so that's what it gets right. 13:56 I think it gets mar- much more wrong than it gets right. Um, you know, the problem with gentrification i-i becomes a lot less severe if we make it easier to build everywhere, right? 14:07 You think about the sort of neighborhoods that are currently kind of low-income neighborhoods that are getting gentrified. 14:12 Many kinds, the people who are moving there would much, much prefer building in already wealthier places, but they can't, right? 14:19 And so allowing more growth in the places which are sort of c- more core areas for upper middle class people would severely reduce the amount of, of gentrification in poor areas. 14:30 Also, it's, you know, I think we have in general sort of a fear of change that, uh, gets things wrong. 14:39 So, you know, it's a well-known psychological fact that people anticipate some negative event will cause them deep amounts of unhappiness for the rest of their life, right? And it generally doesn't. People adapt. 14:49 They're remarkably... And you know that, that new high-rise building, yeah, it'll annoy you while the construction is going on, uh, but once it's done, you won't notice it. It'll, it'll-- And you know what? 14:59 Your kids may make friends with, with kids who live in that area, and there will be new stores that will open up that you will like because there are new customers, and there will be all these positive things that occur that'll offset whatever the slight negative things are as well. 15:11 And I think that's, that's a lot of what, what's gotten wrong. But I think the larger thing I just wanna push back against is really let's not be a country that's ruled by fear. 15:21 Let's, let's be a country that's, that's ruled much more by hope. What one piece of advice would you give the YIMBY movement that it hasn't already learned? That's a great question. 15:34 Focus on one i- one issue and find a, as broad a set of allies as you can. You know, I have a very strong view. There are a whole bunch of topics like foreign affairs that I have no opinion on. 15:44 Other, other than I-- my only opinions, for example, on, on the Middle East are that I would like to see easier building, uh, conditions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. 15:52 I would like to see a, a reduction in the number of, of land use regulations. Um, but, you know, d- I don't have opinions on topics that are away from that. I don't have opinions on, on social issues. 16:02 I have opinions on urban issues. 16:03 And that's-- I think the more that the YIMBYs focus on, like, we're about just providing space for America to find its future, I think that's, that's a strengthening aspect to the movement. 16:14 Why has the YIMBY movement been so successful in gaining allies from across the political spectrum? 16:21 Uh, I, look, I, I think, I-I think it's amazing, like, that, that this thing has occurred, and I, I am, you know, so happy about it. 16:28 You know, when I started working on land use regulations twenty-five years ago, there was basically, like, one libertarian economist who thought I wasn't wasting my time. 16:35 And I can remember with great pleasure receiving a note from Thomas Sowell in two thousand and three that I might be onto something. And that was, that was really quite meaningful. 16:44 Uh, and you know, twenty years later, twenty-one years later, Barack Obama is talking about local land use regulations on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. 16:53 On one level, that's kind of amazing to have a topic that you thought that was important twenty years ago, you know, then be part of a national movement and then to be sort of embraced by the abundance, uh, movement. 17:03 On the other hand, the reason why it's been so successful and it's built is 'cause I've made absolutely no progress at fixing this thing over twenty-five years. 17:10 So, like, we've gone backwards on this, and that's why it's become intellectually successful is because I've become politically com-- it's a complete failure so far. 17:17 We'll see what, you know, what comes out of the YIMBYs. 17:20 But I would say even now, like, even though there is counter-success, right, there are sort of affordable dwelling units, there are things that are going on in the California State Legislature, there's the Road to Housing Act, there are things that are positive. 17:32 I would still say, like, if you counterweigh that with the ongoing sort of down zoning, zoning in the, uh, suburbs or the Sun Belt, I would still say we're heading as, in a nation in the wrong direction. 17:44 I would still say we haven't, we haven't un-- we're still not moving in the right direction, even with the positive, uh, shoots. But then again, I, I don't wanna end on a negative note at all. 17:52 I wa- you know, my-- I, I wanna go back to the old line, you know, when you see a dog playing chess, you don't ask how he'd do against, uh... In the old days it was Bobby Fischer. 18:01 Uh, but, uh, I guess you'd sort of say Magnus Carlsen or something like that do today. But, but, and the fact that we even have a YIMBY movement at all and it does get successes is just amazing. 18:11 It seems like many of the problems that we're facing with growth are endemic To anglophone countries in ways that many developed Western countries are facing, but these are common problems in England, in Canada, in Australia. 18:29 It seems like other cultures may be doing better on some margins, although it seems like it's a struggle in a lot of places around the world. 18:37 What is it that different cultures get right about this that might, or worse, that may allow for them to have a, a sort of better resilience in this way? So we have strong traditions of local control, right? 18:50 I mean, th-there-- that's, that's I think the starting point for this. Um, even, I mean, England has... So the difference between us and England is, uh, sort of a de facto versus de jure. 19:01 In the U.S., there's no constitutional means that I know of that the national government has of changing local zoning, right? 19:09 It can add incentives around the margin, it can do small amounts of things, but, like, c-cities and localities are not federal entities. 19:15 They're, they're, they're creatures of the states, and so each state would have to overrule it. In the UK, Whitehall could change zoning for the country on a dime, right? 19:24 They can, like, the, the UK Parliament can enact whatever they want, it would change everything. So de jure, they're in a much better position to work change. 19:31 De facto, they've, you know, have centuries of respect for local, local councils and their ability to make decisions, and so that comes very slowly. Um, although it's, it's, you know, hope springs eternity, eternal. 19:45 By contrast, you know, Japan has much more centralization, both de facto and de jure, and Japan has zoning. They have nine national zones. Nine, okay? 19:56 Which means that you can, you can choose your land to be in one of those nine zones, but you can't make up your own rules, okay? You've gotta be in one of those nine zones. 20:04 Uh, and what that means is they have a thriving, uh, prefabricated housing industry because you know that if this house, this house works in this zone. 20:12 And so you can sort of go nationwide, wherever you have the zone, you can put this type of house here. It just makes things much more efficient. 20:18 In general, the sort of centralized nature of East Asian countries tends to mean that they're much more accommodating of growth and much less likely to allow local opposition. In general, older European 20:29 countries often have limitations on growth that are linked to historic preservation. 20:33 I tend to be more sympathetic in a place like Rome, uh, about the need to protect a certain amount, so I, I-- that I do, you know, in, uh, Cleveland. 20:43 So it's, it's a, it's a-- Not that there aren't beautiful buildings in downtown Cleveland, but in general, it's not, it's not the Eternal City. 20:49 Um, the, uh, the, the other thing that's slightly different, particularly again, anglophone countries, is the very strong ability to litigate, right? 20:58 And so the fact that our courts are accessible means that, you know, if you, if you have, you know, access to good attorneys, you have the ability to cause pain to a lot of projects. 21:08 Taking the Japan example for just a moment, does the value of centralization for streamlining in those cases cut against some of your libertarian priors about decentralizing power? You bet. You bet. 21:24 Um, now, I want it stressed 21:27 that, uh, you know, everything that I'm arguing for is fundamentally libertarian in the sense that, like, what-- when you're arguing against local land use control, you're arguing for the right of a landowner to do what she or he wants with their own land. 21:39 So what I'm fundamentally arguing for is, is on the side of liberty, not against it. Um, but it is certainly true that localities often, you know, when given power, often tend to restrict that. 21:53 I guess I don't see a problem in having limits on how much localities can take away individual liberty, right? 21:58 I, I, I see there as being sound constitutional reasons why you might want to say to a locality, "You can't go and beat up your local landowners and tell them that they can't, you know, do anything with their land." 22:08 And so that's the way that I think about it is, is there are lots of areas in which I think localities should be free to innovate and do their own things and, and do lots of stuff. 22:15 But, you know, I do think they, they need to be limited in different ways, which is totally in line with the, the Bill of Rights, with the American constitutional tradition, that they need to be somewhat limited in what they can actually do, uh, with their police power. 22:28 Objectively, what's the world's best city today? Oh, I'm not gonna answer that. That's like asking me who my favorite child is. Um, uh, there, there are better-run cities. 22:40 Uh, so if you just want governmental quality, there's a lot to love about Singapore, there's a lot to love about Seoul, there's a lot to love about Tokyo. These are very well-run cities. 22:49 Um, uh, Singapore is just a little bit too orderly for my taste, as much as I, I deeply admire it. Uh, you know, Dr. 22:56 Johnson famously said that when a man is, uh, is tired of London, he is tired of life because there is all in London that life can afford. He was right then, he's right now. 23:03 There's lots of, lot to love about, uh, London and, you know, there's a lot to love about the, you know, the, the grandeur of, uh, cities like Cleveland. I'll come back to Cleveland. 23:14 There's a lot, lots to love about these cities which, yes, they're in, you know, they're in a, uh, experienced many decades of decline, but the bones there are very solid and very good and very interesting. 23:22 So, um, I think Cape Town is one of the world's most beautiful places. I, I, you know, see a lot to love in, in, uh, many developing world cities as well. What's your favorite city? Whichever one I'm currently in. 23:35 [laughing] That's fair. All right, our final questions. What are you working on now? Right now, I'm working on a paper on, uh, the nature of the university 23:48 and which is somewhat timely with, with my longtime co-author David Cutler, uh, which asks the question: How is it that this bizarre organizational form has survived and thrived for a thousand years, uh, giving us geniuses like Galileo or f-- and Fleming, uh, and their innovations, uh, educating hundreds of millions of people, uh, and, you know, uh, 24:14 and helping America win World War II? 24:16 At the same time, why is it that universities are so fractious, so likely to start faculty war with faculty, faculty war with administrators, everybody wars with the government, right? It's, it's a-- And, um, 24:28 you know, what, what do we think on net universities are doing for the, for the world? 24:32 And I think the view, uh, the view that we're pushing is that the special thing about universities is they tend to sort of be this knowledge-related firm that just provides core faculty with lots of autonomy, and that tends to attract somewhat interesting people. 24:46 It also tends to attract people who can be a real pain in the neck. 24:48 And so that's the, the-- that sort of combination is what gives you the sort of like the, the thing that universities do that are, are kind of magical and things that universities do which are exasperating. 24:58 What's the last truly great book that you read? Truly great book. Oh, let's go with Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo, just because we've already mentioned Augustine one. 25:10 This is a biography that was published in nineteen sixty-six by Peter Brown, who may be the world's greatest historian. He's certainly one of any list. He's, I think, in his nineties now. 25:18 Um, but it's, it's an extraordinary rethink of both Augustine's life and more generally, and I think it's the, the leitmotif of Brown's work, rethinking late antiquity and seeing vastly more dynamism in the fourth and fifth centuries than, let's say, we got from Gibbon or many traditional historians. 25:39 When you think about the future of cities, what gives you hope? 25:44 I try in my cities class to sort of make the case that the vocation of caring for the cities in the twenty-first century, especially developing world cities, is one of the great twenty-first century vocations. Um, 25:56 when I look out to that, my sea of young faces, I see that resonate. And the fact that there are young, talented, ambitious, altruistic people who sort of get the love of cities, that's what makes me hopeful. 26:12 Ed, thank you. Thank you. This is fun. 26:17 If you enjoyed this conversation between Edward Glazer and Jason Cannon, you can find more like it, along with original essays from contemporary liberal scholars, at www.liberalism.org. 26:29 [outro jingle]
