I was so frustrated by this article – as in “of course why do we even need to discuss this” – and then the last paragraph was exactly what I’ve been thinking for years. I live in Cleveland. There are literally miles of empty land between my house and downtown. Crying out for development. The land is almost if not literally free. There are tax incentives. There’s rail transit. Commute to two largest job clusters in the state is less than 20 minutes. Freshwater, arts, restaurants. Yes the weather is not San Diego, but it’s better than Washington DC or New York City.
Now Matt might say markets clear, nobody wants to live in Cleveland. But my response would be markets clear, at what price? If the housing was literally free with no one move to Cleveland? But people suffer through agonizing commutes in East Bay and in Austin? For what? We have tons of thousands of unfilled jobs, pretty amazing wages, especially considering the cost of living. As a great local industrialist is fond of saying, “the second hardest thing is to get people to move to Cleveland, the hardest thing is to get them to leave afterwards.” Why is the market failing so blatantly???
Apologies for the rant. I just can’t wrap my mind around this.
The only thing I see as enjoyable about a Cleveland winter is when the Browns get to force an opponent into a lake effect snow game. But this being the Browns, masters of fucking themselves over, of course now they're proposing a domed stadium in the burbs.
I mean after signing Deshaun Watson, I was pretty done with feeling sorry for anything related to the Browns. The last few seasons have been a big "you got what you deserved". We haven't had much reason to see people or entities get the fate their terrible behavior has deserved since 2016, so I'm happy to see at least one example.
The Browns and Jets used to be at least funny and sometimes scrappy when they did dumb stuff. Now the Jets are just depressing and the Browns are just gross.
It’s about 7° cooler than New York City in my experience. Which means a pleasant 79 instead of 86 in the summer, and winter wonderland 28 versus freezing rain and 35. Definitely far more cloudy, which is a bummer.
Probably lower than in 2004-08 and it was boring low back then. Like ATL would've laughed at our understanding of crime in our back in time loop concurrently.
For a long time, the existing middle class black community could tolerate the "urban enshittification caucus" because they felt their own presence under threat of rising prices and taxes as well, and because the latter's effects were felt most strongly in other parts of the city than those in which they lived.
COVID's insanity put an end to the assumption that they could live with these people; Parker is the direct result of that loose alliance breaking. The same occurred to a lesser degree among wealthier white people; our white "progressives" are both fewer in number and more moderate than they were in 2019.
Parker's coalition is still pretty terrible on some issues, especially the dichotomy between public service efficiency and the interests of public-sector employees, an overreliance on black church-run non-profits, and the number of shackles it wants to place on private land development. But in many ways they're less bad than historically, and the pendulum has swung fully on "policing and public sanitation are good actually". They're also rightfully very skeptical of non-religious non-profits taking city funds.
Hell, one can actually get a response for noise complaints now.
The political shift is pretty stunning to me. Like some spirit of low taxes and business development has seemingly possessed even Kenyatta Johnson.
The coalition has issues for sure, but if 'honest graft' is the price for restarting 'clean & safe' as well as growth machine politics then I think it is a clear step in the right direction.
That said, we've been ticking the wage and business income taxes inexorably downward since Rendell. Parker is the first mayor to pause this, and even that was in favor of hugely increasing the homestead exemption for real estate taxes.
I fully expect that on her heels we're getting a genuine reformist in the Rhynhart vein, and that would be fucking transformative.
Imagine $600M in current excess pension contributions redirected to reducing the highly distorting gross receipts and somewhat distorting wage/business income taxes, $300M in new revenues from the end of a bunch of 10-year abatements going to Parks and Rec, Streets, and improved surveillance, and a thoroughgoing review of the budget producing $200M in pissed-away contractor and non-profit contracts to hand to SEPTA for service within the city limits.
The Sixers needed leverage over Comcast to get a decent deal in S. Philly. If they didn't get that deal and had no backup plan they were headed for Camden, which would have been an *epic* clusterfuck both from a tax perspective and from a transportation one.
Council and Parker either *knew* that they needed that leverage and gave it to them knowing the controversy wouldn't go anywhere and would be forgotten soon enough, or didn't know that the Sixers' preference was to stay in S. Philly and acted to keep them in the city. Both seem fine to me, others clearly disagree.
I thought that the Market East plan would have worked wonderfully and been, in time, a huge boon to SEPTA, but I'll settle for keeping the damned tax take.
On Chinatown in particular, I have way more ties to that neighborhood than basically any other white dude in this city and I can still tell you they are grossly mismanaging the changing demographics and residential locations of the Asian immigrant community. The Arena probably would have boosted foot traffic; without *something* to shake things up, the non-restaurant businesses of Chinatown are in trouble.
I assume big time capitalists know their numbers, but I was a little skeptical you could profitably fill two full size stadiums on all the non sports nights. Sixers play 82 games plus some playoffs, Flyers play 82 games and no playoffs, so you have to find something to draw in 18,000 people on roughly 180 other days a year. Doubling that to 360 days seems like a stretch. I think that's probably why they came to an agreement.
> If it’s like Baltimore and Philly, the “keep this place shitty” caucus has enough power to keep things shitty
I feel there are a lot of cities where this is (unfortunately) the case. Are there any recent counterexamples that can serve as inspiration? Detroit gets mentioned often enough, but I'm honestly skeptical that this will continue, especially with the continued decline of Big 2.5 manufacturing in the US.
That's great to hear. To me the DC renaissance doesn't _feel_ that recent - I was there for the 2009 inauguration and things seemed pretty okay then.
Denver is an interesting one to me - the mountain west always feels like such a boom area compared to the coasts that it's hard to imagine it having previously been in a state of decline, but of course busts come alongside the booms...
I think LA has definitely improved from its pandemic low-point, but I'm not convinced it has a sustainable path forward - California political disfunction is deeply-rooted and the Trump-induced collapse of international tourism plus Hollywood's AI-induced contraction feel like just the thing to tip us back into a prolonged decline.
Part of the problem is that "nobody" else lives in Cleveland. I went to high school there and almost everyone that I found interesting left for university and didn't return. Anecdotally lots of people return in their 30s when they have kids because of the cheap housing in good school districts and high quality of life, but there's a bootstrapping problem for getting cities like Cleveland and Detroit to be popular among younger (especially single!) people. This is exacerbated by the population of "Cleveland" mostly living outside of the city limits. The region has ~3 million people and only 10ish% live in the city.
From my understanding Portland OR became a cool city again because a sufficient amount of cool/interesting young people moved there. I'm not sure why it happened, but I suspect you could get the critical mass required by giving free or highly subsidized housing (as in decent apartments, not free houses that are falling apart) to young musicians and artists and the like to try to make the city "cool".
Yeah, Cleveland is a meds and ed city. The surronding area (University Circle) is extremely nice and has excellent culture, like the art museum and symphony. Real estate in the area is very cheap. I've posted before about how there are houses for $100k within walking distance. It suffers from most people commuting from outside the city (eg Solon) though.
Could a city, with enough resources and acumen, successfully run a campaign that paid some people to move to the city (surreptitiously) and run an influencer campaign that could seriously move the needle?
I don't think it would need to be surreptious. You could openly do it. The kinds of cities that need this treatment have no vision though. Check out Cleveland's waterfront to get a sense of the quality of governance and leadership of the city.
I don't think anyone is moving from California to Cleveland, but there's shouldn't be a reason why thousands of people from Youngstown and Akron and Ypsilanti and Wheeling and smaller cities all over the area wouldn't want to move to Cleveland.
This is most midwestern cities. You don't find transplants from the coasts, you find transplants that grew up in very small towns.
"I went to high school there and almost everyone that I found interesting left for university and didn't return. Anecdotally lots of people return in their 30s when they have kids because of the cheap housing in good school districts and high quality of life"
So long as you get a large enough population returning, why is this cycle a problem?
I was responding to Rustbelt Andy's claim that people not flocking to Cleveland is a market failure. People move there, but the people moving there are mostly older and price-sensitive. My prior is that the demographics of people moving to Northeast Ohio (older and with kids) is why Cleveland proper isn't really growing and why you continue to have lots of empty lots downtown. If you're price sensitive and care about schools, moving to Solon/Brecksville/Rocky River makes a lot of sense but also doesn't do anything for Hough or other distressed / half-abandoned neighborhoods.
A random hypothetical I've asked my friends in the Philly area is, "Would you take a million dollar annual salaried position in Cleveland, working fully in office, and you have to live there full time for 10 years?" I'd say I've only gotten about a 20% yes rate. (Not to pick on Cleveland in particular, and not saying that Philly is Shangri-La... it is more a question of value placed on local friends/family network.)
I have no connections to the Cleveland area, moving there would take me away from friends, and Cleveland certainly seems like a downgrade in terms of recreation. But 1M/year is a lot of money (and I assume the position would also be career-enhancing).
In ten years, given the low cost of living, I think even pretty risk averse investment/saving you’d have ten million dollars saved, and then you could afford a tinyhouse in Boulder
I should probably clarify that my friend group is late 40s with kids in elementary to high school. Increase to $1M is prob 2x to 4x current two working parent income. (Obviously this is a much stupider hypothetical for someone younger and less established in their career.)
Man I would take that in a heartbeat (in a hypothetical where my relevant extended family would also live somewhat near). I think the main issue with moving out to these deserted places is the lack of job opportunities. Once you solve for that, I feel like most of the other things like weather, scenery, local attributes etc are fairly minor.
Yeah, the more I think about it... people take rough work in places less desirable than Cleveland for a lot less money. Think the Bakken Formation, Alaska North Slope, private military contractors, so on.
"If the housing was literally free with no one move to Cleveland?"
It costs money to build housing.
It is genuinely difficult, in Philadelphia, to profitably offer a new-build 2000 sq. ft rowhome for sale for less than $500k in areas where lots are cheap, in the $30-60k range, from developer friends and folks my wife works with.
Our 750 sq. ft third-story build, which included substantial renovations to the 1st and 2nd floors and was specced well above contractor grade, landed around $160k (including soft costs but no financing). And even that was with me self-managing, having done the design and plans development to the point where we could hire an affordable architect to mechanistically enact that vision, directing a bunch of tasks and doing a bunch more myself... I probably did about $80k worth of work between planning, risk mitigation, and actual construction labor.
Had we just done the new-build portion and used worse materials and finishes, we could have brought that down to $120k, which scales to a 2,000 sq ft home including foundations costing around $400k in hard costs.
Trying to extrapolate to Cleveland, a unit of housing of the sort typical in the city proper (call it 1600-2000 sq ft, detached, narrow lot, simple framing plan) probably costs around $300,000-325,000 in hard costs (materials, labor, managerial labor, capital rental or depreciation) to build on a vacant lot with preexisting access to utility hook-ups. Add in financing, marketing/sales, admin/overhead, and other soft costs and you're left with a break-even sale price around $400k or more.
Rehabbing such a unit in uninhabitable state would vary from $100k to $250k, after purchase price. The range is higher than out East or in Chicago, where a much higher percentage of construction is brick or stone masonry. Stick-framed buildings don't age well when unmaintained and not climate-controlled.
So yea, overall it's a catch-22. Prices need to go up to justify residential construction and rehabilitation, but there's no way to make the city attractive enough to justify such price increases absent investment and rehabilitation.
Coming from the Northeast I don't think you can argue the weather of Cleveland is "better" than New York or Washington DC lol. I'm sure your summers are more pleasant but having grown up most of my life in the Northeast I've found the winters pretty rough when I lived in Chicago and Northwest Indiana (I'm sure Cleveland has similar weather). In general most places with colder winters are struggling to compete with the sunbelt, at the moment Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul and Madison seem to be doing the best.
What Cleveland probably should do is really milk every asset it has. Cleveland has well above average public transit, I think the RTA could use a significant expansion. I think Cleveland could also do a lot more to leverage Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. Encourage Ohio State University and Kent State to set up auxiliary campuses in downtown Cleveland. I don't know what Chicago has specifically done but they got Kraft, Mondelez, and McDonald's to move downtown. Cleveland should figure out how to do the same with all the companies based in Northeast Ohio. American Greetings is based in the area and at least historically has owned some pretty solid IP, maybe a small park featuring Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake would be day trip worthy for families within the Rust Belt.
"I'm sure your summers are more pleasant but having grown up most of my life in the Northeast I've found the winters pretty rough when I lived in Chicago and Northwest Indiana (I'm sure Cleveland has similar weather). In general most places with colder winters are struggling to compete with the sunbelt, at the moment Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul and Madison seem to be doing the best."
This is definitely part of it. I've noted for a number of years that for all the talk about the "secret" of Texas and Florida growth last 40 years (is it low taxes, is it YIMBY etc.), you can't get around the fact that both states have benefited tremendously from natural resource wealth. Texas is more famous; oil. But Florida? The natural resource wealth is some of the best beaches in the country.
But the warm weather is a factor for actually a different and more important reason. And it's here that we come to the most important underdiscussed city in this sunbelt migration; Syracuse. Why Syracuse? Because Syracuse is where air conditioning was invented. Which meant suddenly it became feasible to have factories in areas with extreme heat that just wasn't as viable pre air conditioning. Which mean it factories could move south for the same reason factories moved to China; cheap labor and lack of worker protections generally. Specifically unions.
One other item. Think you're idea that Cleveland should do more to leverage Case Western and induce Ohio State to build auxiliary campuses in downtown Cleveland is a smart decision. However, this (https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-towns-economy-macomb-illinois-aae84dcc) WSJ article is worth reading. Prestige schools such as Case and flagship state universities such as OSU are thriving. But lower tier state schools like Kent State? Yeah not so much.
It's an entirely different climate zone. NYC and DC are humid subtropical (though some northern suburbs of NYC do deviate) while Cleveland is humid continental.
"Coming from the Northeast I don't think you can argue the weather of Cleveland is "better" than New York or Washington DC lol. I'm sure your summers are more pleasant but having grown up most of my life in the Northeast I've found the winters pretty rough when I lived in Chicago and Northwest Indiana (I'm sure Cleveland has similar weather). In general most places with colder winters are struggling to compete with the sunbelt, at the moment Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul and Madison seem to be doing the best."
Yeah, if you're north of Kentucky and east of the Mississippi, your winters are usually unpleasant. DC winters aren't as bad as Boston winters, for instance, but they're still not fun.
One aspect that climate change won't solve is that more northern places will have a lot less sunlight in winter (yes you have more in summer but who wants it to be light out at 10 pm) and seasonal affect disorder is a thing.
I’ve been thinking on similar lines. One contributor to this equilibrium is that if you move to Cleveland (or similar city) you are now in the tax base that is on the hook for legacy costs like pensions and infrastructure that needs to be replaced. I sometimes feel like we will have to wait for nature to reclaim the area then discover that it’s available for greenfield development.
I live in the Rust Belt, and would love for the old towns and cities to prosper again. Many have proud histories, and are located on lovely lakes and rivers. However, prolonged depopulation is very tough to turn around. Maintenance gets deferred as the tax base shrinks, and the resulting problems drive more people away. A small example that one might not think of: as buildings age without maintenance, pieces can fall from them, creating hazards. Chicago has a fund to help building owners maintain their facades, but I doubt that broke cities do, though many of their buildings have been abandoned.
That's an engineering and finance problem. Here's a sociological issue: the residents who have stuck with a city through horrible times are likely fairly different from the young dynamos that could try to turn the city around. An example: an effort to plant trees in Detroit met with resistance. Who wouldn't want free trees? Some residents didn't.
I think a big part of why Detroit has been able to start turning around over the past 12 years or so is because of the bankruptcy, which got it out of the fiscal death spiral.
Now I live in Chicago and I am very curious to see how we avoid bankruptcy. My understanding is that there's never been one in a city of this size.
You’d basically need a governor and state legislature willing to amend the constitution (via referendum) to handle the pension crisis. Pritzker won’t do that because he’s, at heart, a machine Dem who’s scared of pissing off the public sector patronage network. You’d also need a mayor committed to good governance…actually, I can’t say that with a straight face given the current clown. Pensions are the biggest single expense item and they won’t get better without state action. This would also allow property taxes to come down, which is another reason IL is losing population.
The governor and state legislature can’t amend the constitution via referendum. They’d voters would need to approve the referendum and I don’t know that there’s votes for that.
There’s also the not small problem that people who worked in Civil Service jobs for the State or City were promised pensions. There’s a moral obligation not to just nope out on those.
Getting it to a referendum is half the challenge, and there’s a moral obligation to not let the state go bankrupt or severely uncompetitive. Other states have restructured pensions, there’s no reason for IL to not follow suit especially given the severity of its issues.
Detroit is interesting because it has good infrastructure, the state’s main airport, amenities, museums, suburbs, etc. Like a lamp with a burnt out light bulb, it seems like it would be easy to fix.
You’d need a chart of the 20th century populations of Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee etc vs -Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, Tampa, etc and the 1947 development of the first practical residential AC unit*.
* Fun fact the first widow units went on sale in 1932 at a price of between $10k and $50k - in 1932!
This is missing the forest for the trees. Detroit’s population isn’t in the toilet due to AC. It’s due to racialized sprawl to the suburbs. The Detroit metro area still has 4.3 million people and saw its growth slow not due to the south but due to the decline of its golden goose in autos.
Within the region the city got battered because white people’s dislike of living near black people.
Its more complicated than 'dislike of living near black people', the turning point was the enormous race riot that destroyed 2000 buildings, tons of businesses, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot
As others have pointed out, there is no free housing in Detroit. In fact, there is no such thing as a free housing.
If you want to make a stronger point, you're probably thinking of something like the Rehabbed & Ready program [1] where abandoned homes are cheaply renovated so that they're safe to be occupied. Just eyeballing their listings, they seem to start around $80k --- with many over $200k. (There are a couple at $55k, but they have not been fully renovated.)
The non-renovated buildings seem to sell for $1k but of course would require a lot of money to make livable. Again, there is no such thing as free housing.
So, you could say something like "The $80k flipped houses didn’t induce much demand." Perhaps that's true, but note that Detroit's population does seem to be slowly growing (up 1% from 2020 to 2024 per the census bureau).
I've always thought of Cleveland as the other problem: we have too many cities. If you could somehow mash Akron, Canton, Youngstown, etc. into Cleveland, it'd be much more economically competitive. (Or every city in Central Illinois, or NY State west of I-81...)
The Eastern US pre-war pattern doesn't work really well, and something like Australia's layout refreshingly free of mid-sized cities works better.
I’ve thought the same thing a lot recently in the context of tariffs and free trade. The most grim and visceral effects of free trade that folks point to are the ‘hollowed-out Rust Belt cities’. But I think a lot of that I’d due the unique and fragile nature of mid-sized, one-industry cities in the US.
1. A lot of these small cities are actually close enough to their neighbors to form de facto agglomerations, where everything in the US is much further apart.
2. Until recently, Germany has been much better at maintaining manufacturing industries that work with a more spread out layout.
The too many mid-sized cities problem is also a factor in Northern England and Belgium...
Speaking as a former comedian of sorts -- retired circus clown -- I find LeBron's performance here seriously impressive. Comedy is hard! For a pro ball player, LeBron has real comedic chops.
I'm sorry, I grew up in the midwest and have been to every city around there. I can't imagine any scenario in which I'd move to Cleveland. I'd rather live in Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Dayton, or Cincinnati. Cleveland is depressing AF
Maybe the local government could do an ad campaign? "Let people know about good buying opportunities that they didn't know existed" is the problem that ad campaigns were invented to solve.
Thanks for this. I have only been to Cleveland a couple of times, but I liked what I saw. I have a kid graduating soon who would definitely consider living in Cleveland. I will tell him to cast his net in that direction.
My brother in law is from Cleveland, and he and my sister moved back there (western suburbs) from the Sunbelt recently. Got a really nice house for about a third of what it would've cost on the coasts. And they're a stone's throw from this giant lake.
Yes people just never to fix places like Cleveland and Trenton and not obsess about building these new cities that will be just sprawl . The economy of these towns will improve and the crime will fall 😎
"New cities" strikes me as a right/libertarian version of the topic switching arguments you get from some on the left when you talk about upzoning and they are like "no no no, we need social housing!" that is instead of having the messy fight about zoning derail the conversation with a policy discussion about something that everyone knows deep down will never actually happen.
I think a very important insight in this newsletter is that the best housing reforms is where state legislatures and sometimes city councils pass boring seeming bipartisan reforms to zoning and building codes.
Because housing is now an exciting issue, we're getting these big takes about new cities. But I say Make Housing Boring Again!
Yes the actual good criticism of "Abundance" that everyone is ignoring because they just hate Ezra personally/think markets are just always wrong is that his book's success will just polarize the issue around partisan lines and nothing will get done.
This is basically how I feel about it--in my mind housing is essentially a solved issue. We don't need to come up with tiny houses, shipping container housing, PRT, elaborate land bank schemes, an 8,000 word inclusionary zoning ordinance, seasteads, Central American charter cities, execution of the landlords, hyperloops, etc
You just have to let people build some buildings! We know how to do this already! We did it for thousands of years :(
The charter cities concept has a lot of good research and observations of historical development around the world but unfortunately most of the people actively working in the space are radical libertarian/anarchists who don't appreciate what makes cities actually worth living in. Part of the problem is that the research indicates building new cities from scratch is hard (especially in the modern era) and most successes are in upzoning existing settlements or creating new districts/suburbs.
The thing is in the end, we all know that in order for those places to improve there’s no way around the fact that you’re going to need to displace a ton of low human capital people. And the people who are already there- not leftists- may rather deal with the losers they know than the wealthy people they don’t (who also look different and live differently than they do)
Isn’t accommodating ever marginally-lower human capital people the central point / goal of YIMBYism? The highest human capital people can just win the bidding war for limited housing stock. But YIMBYs think this is a worse equilibrium than having lower housing prices and higher supply and accommodating lower-earning people, right?
Is “high human capital” short for “high-earning human capital”? Cities need people beyond AI engineers—teachers, firefighters, baristas, janitors etc. Forcing these to exurbs gives transportation and other negative issues. I’m sure there’s some activism in YIMBY but mainly it’s about facilitating sufficiently abundant housing that new homes trade at barely above construction cost and existing stock trades lower, such that a variety of income levels can reside in reasonable proximity to a city center.
But people will not want to have bidding wars if there are nnegative externalities continuing from the present population. There’s a chicken and egg situation.
the whole point of YIMBY is to achieve housing prices that are low enough to pull in high-social-capital educated people who will then drive out the low-social-capital uneducated incumbent population, who still can't afford the new YIMBY-enabled prices
No, I'm someone who understands how city politics actually work. If you think that zoning approaches - including YIMBY zoning approaches - aren't fundamentally about funneling human beings of perceived different social and economic value into different geographical spaces, then you're profoundly naive. And, anyway, that is not an argument.
Zoning approaches are fundamentally about funneling different things into planned geographic spaces. De-zoning approaches are not. (Though this sometimes happens as a byproduct of broader market forces.)
High-human-capital[1] Educated people with modest earnings exist, but low-human-capital people with high earnings are extremely rare. If the people putatively being driven out "still" (your word) can't afford the new YIMBY prices then that implies that they also couldn't afford the prices previously, so how are they not driven out already? You're arguing that their incumbency is *less* secure if prices go down? Moreover, by the same token the upper classes in your hypothetical class warfare scenario are already in a victory state -- if your goal is to price out the dysfunctional poor, building more housing can only undermine that goal, so whence YIMBYism?
[1] include high social capital if you wish I guess, although I think social capital is a somewhat different reference class than human capital.
We have created a large class of people who have desirable social capital (educated, orderly, low crime, upwardly mobile, eager to do cool big-city things like browse bookstores and go to bars and galleries and frequent trendy bagel shops) but who are currently priced out of many desirable urban spaces. YIMBYism is dominantly powered by these people; it's a movement of high-education but modest-income white people who are resentful that they don't get to participate in the urban lifestyle of a generation or two ago and want to rebuild it, but also want to ensure that the spaces they occupy are sufficiently gentrified that they don't have to be around too many Black people. This is an absolutely obvious sociological element of YIMBY politics and is exactly the sort of thing that Matt knows but feels he can't say out loud.
The word “displace” is used incorrectly here. “Everyone has a moral right to have everything stay exactly the same” is simply not a reasonable policial (or epistemic) position. Will there be “change”? Sure. Will there be “displacement”? I don’t believe this holds up to empirical scrutiny.
Displace means to move people out who would otherwise not have moved.
At least, that’s how it’s used in the papers I’ve seen on gentrification and displacement- which find that displacement doesn’t happen with gentrification because the people who move are extremely high probability of moving anyway.
This is the core problem that I don’t think YIMBYs are comfortable talking about. Any effort to meaningfully improve the quality of life in Trenton will absolutely entail displacing residents. If Trenton became 20% as desirable a place to live as Princeton, almost no one presently living there would be able to afford to stay.
If you made the schools better, some current Trentonians would get priced out. If you made the streets safer, some current Trentonians would get priced out. If the prospective commutes to NYC and Philly were made more manageable, some current Trentonians would get priced out. If you did all of these great things, the city would be unrecognizable. It would take time, as block by block homes were bought up and renovated for the new, wealthier prospective residents. But the people who live in Trenton because it is affordable would lose their reason for being there, and they would feel embittered and worse off. Because even though they know it’s better, it’s no longer for them.
By the same token, progressive NIMBYs can't admit their plan for affordable housing is just to let conditions be bad enough that nobody new ever wants to move to a city. (Also, completely ignore where locals' kids and immigrants are supposed to live.)
For sure. To be clear, I think it is good when bad areas become good areas. I just think there’s some pain involved along the way. Frankly, I don’t love the usual options for alleviating that pain (rent control, preventing property taxes from rising to account for increasing property values, etc).
Sure, but Vancouver built much more housing than the average North American city over the last 40ish years, and also experienced some of the highest price increases. This is a big NIMBY talking point online. I don't think that x caused y here, but I do think it proves that if your city is highly desirable- that desirability can dramatically outpace the market's ability to engage in large, multiyear capital projects (aka apartment buildings).
Like, 'desirability' can grow almost geometrically, whereas the market's ability to construct multi-unit apartment buildings is bound by the number of potential projects, interest rates, available labor, the broader market cycle, bank financing, etc. So I think OP's point is valid, if Trenton became very trendy that would easily outpace building construction rates
I think Trenton is a particularly bad example because it's a really small area and thoroughly enmeshed into the Princeton area job market. So yes, if you make Trenton nice then you'll need someplace else to put the workforce housing that Trenton currently has, which is of course already under pressure because of the regional housing shortage.
(Is this what Bridgeport is for Fairfield County, Connecticut? I never go up there)
Why wouldn't you just build a new town around the Princeton Junction train station, which is closer to where the jobs are anyway?
To solve the problem of “housing is expensive and we need more of it,” I agree we should upzone dramatically in places that make sense. State and local governments should make investments that alleviate future growing pains.
But Trenton being a terrible place is another problem, and one worth solving.
In a vacuum, that’s absolutely true. I’m a subscriber here, I’m a YIMBY, I know about the AS/AD curves and all of that.
If you believe liberalizing zoning laws and increasing housing supply, coinciding with Trenton becoming a safe city with good schools and good transit links, would have the overall effect of *lowering* the cost of housing then… well, I won’t say anything impolite, but I strongly disagree with that proposition.
I agree that there is probably some sort of combinations of specific changes that could lead to an increase in housing costs of a specific block or neighborhood. But that is a really weird frame to use as the barometer of the common good.
If you think more housing would increase the price of housing across a whole city, I feel like the research clearly shows that not to be the case.
I have great news for you: I never made that claim. I recommend a healthy exercise for you: every time you read an opinion on the internet and have a negative immediate reaction to it, don’t default to assuming that the interlocutor is an evil moron. Just as a starting point. Try to ask yourself if you may be missing something.
Matt writes: "Trenton is a smallish, poor, high-crime city with bad schools that is surrounded by a bunch of richer communities. We have, unfortunately, a lot of these places in the northeast (Baltimore, Camden, etc)."
California Forever is just another utopian project led by dreamers, idealogues, charlatans and would-be messiahs who hope to build a new and better society. They built communes in the 1960s and 1970s, now they want to build techno-utopian cities. All to avoid the easy-to-describe but hard-to-implement solutions to crime-ridden, hollowed out cities like Baltimore, Camden, Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, Milwaukee, Memphis, etc, etc.
We should reject the California Forever people's thinking, not encourage it. Fix what we have. There are real people in cities across the country who are being decimated by corrupt and incompetent governance (Hello, Chicago!). Put the money and energy into fixing those places.
“ Control the coinage and the courts--let the rabble have the rest." Thus Paddy Shaw advises you. And he tells you; "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself; "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"
--Paulie “Trees”: Secret Message to the Caporegimes from "New Jersey Awakening" by ”Princess” Irene Shaw
The phrase I sometimes use to describe utopian, technocratic thinking like this-and I'll admit to having used it to describe your own before-is "lots of bright eyed idealists, not enough cynical assholes."
That's an odd collection of nouns. Many cities and towns in California were developed in roughly similar ways to what CF is proposing, although the scale they are proposing is larger than anything seen in a while. The utopian / charlatan / messiah - led developments tend to be much smaller (e.g., the Icarian movement towns), while the bigger ones (e.g., Irvine, CA, population 300,000+) are planned unit developments created by real estate companies and operated as viable-to-highly profitable businesses. I supposed you could call the Irvine Company "messianic" is some abstract, metaphorical sense, but its leaders were not Joseph Smith at Nauvoo or Brigham Young at SLC.
I like thinking of the Irvine Company as messianic. Have you heard the Good News about a mix of low rise apartments and heavily HOAed single family homes arranged around a collection of strip malls and highly manicured vegetation? Surely we live in the Promised Land.
This attitude is baffling to me. You're saying that because existing cities have problems, no-one should be allowed to found new ones anymore? How about live and let live, instead? Just let people build new cities if they want to.
Not to mention that a significant reason *why* existing cities have problems is because of governance issues, and some governance issues are much easier to resolve upon founding a new government. E.g. the US constitution is by design hard to change, but if a new country government crafted a new constitution, it could adopt a better-designed constitution instead, by making use of 200+ years of additional insight into constitutional design.
I'm fine with the "live and let live" if this is private investment or voluntary association of citizens, but would have zero support for taxpayer dollars to fund a new city that will obviously be a nightmare. It's one thing for citizens to collectively start a new community, and something else for state governments get into the game of "city building".
The reality is that California Forever would turn into more-or-less another suburb in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area. Which desperately needs housing, so don't know what the problem is.
Other areas have different issues, but the problem in California is no longer "hollowed out cities"--it's a failure to allow enough housing to be built.
I mean, I think that being a suburb of that CSA is fairly explicitly the short term goal. I think the medium-term goal is to become another hub of that area -- which is maybe the actual thing we should be trying to do? Like if we do have these metro areas which have clear powerful agglomeration effects, how do we turn them into multi-central areas to keep it possible for them to grow and to reduce transportation congestion.
“… just another utopian project led by dreamers, idealogues, charlatans and would-be messiahs….We should reject the California Forever people's thinking, not encourage it….Put the money and energy into fixing those places.”
Strong agree, and exactly how I feel about the nutters who think we should colonize Mars.
I tend to be on the advocacy side of "useful technology will develop along the way", but there are some Mars-specific challenges that I think really fail the cost-benefit calculus here, and we should just develop useful technologies directly when we identify the challenges they can solve.
For example, it's recently become popularly known that the Martian regolith is sock full of perchlorates, all of it. Martian living would require developing the technology to remove perchlorates from soil at staggering industrial scale. How would this ever be useful on Earth, where perchlorates are not naturally occurring and are, if anything, industrially desirable?
There's also the big challenge of Mars's lack of a sufficient magnetic sphere to prevent solar winds from blowing away a makeshift atmosphere. The solution I here (basically putting in place a big metal plate to re-direct solar radiation) heavily rely on such systems never failing.
A world in which we're actually doing useful shit in space, whether it be resource extraction or refining and zero-G metallurgy, would benefit immensely from having a base of operations with an atmosphere, a shallower gravity well, and a bunch of free rocket fuel.
The less we have to bring out of Earth's gravity well the faster a future in which we can exploit the whole solar system comes.
You're on the record as not caring, fine, but I would like to see us continue to grow even after we've filled the globe.
“…more exciting about colonizing Mars than colonizing Trenton.”
You can’t look at it merely as a destination, a stopping place. It’s a proving-ground, a grand experiment, a way to develop new technologies and methods that could some day take us all the way to Camden.
Of course the Wikipedia article I linked to is about the “Kaliflower commune”.
I think the “success” of this commune is instructive. The commune really did have a culture and ideas that became quite influential. As the article notes aspects of the commune actually still exist. And stuff like food coops became a small (but real) thing.
But it’s probably not an accident that this commune “succeeded” where it did. In other words the commune probably couldn’t have survived if it wasn’t part of the greater San Francisco community.
In a lot of ways the famously left wing culture of San Francisco owes a lot to these communes. But the economics of why the city exists in the first places really doesn’t have anything at all to do with the economic precepts of the communes.
In the Los Angeles metro, the master-planned communities include places like Irvine (to the south, in Orange County) and Valencia (to the north). These places have plenty of residential but were designed to become commercial hubs as well and also set aside land for industrial uses, so they are regional job centers in their own right.
For that matter, there are even some significant parts of the west side that were still filling in in the late 20th century, as was most of the inland empire to the east.
I’m still finding it hard to understand, even after reading the flood of 50-years-later stories in the Orange County Register last month, how it is that the north edge of Orange County was basically empty land that was able to accommodate a huge Vietnamese refugee population.
I usually agree with most of your comments. This is a rare one that I disagree with. I think we can try both approaches. Let people do what they want with habitable land.
About 50-60 kilometres outside of Adelaide, Australia, is Monarto Safari Park ("the largest safari in the southern hemisphere"). I was curious how it came to be. In 1970 the government freaked out about population growth in Adelaide, deciding it was on a path to become unlivable with 1.5 million people by the year 2000. So they burned a ton of political capital and money acquiring vast amounts of land 60km away to build a satellite city. The plan quickly withered and died for obvious reasons (everyone thinks someone else should move 60km away) and the state government was left with massive amounts of land nobody wanted. Eventually the city zoo agreed to take some and began transferring their large animals (lions, elephants, etc) out there.
Driving out there today one wonders how anyone in 1970 thought this could possibly work.
It’s always better and more valuable to plan for density than to plan to expand. Expansion runs its course and hits geographic limits almost no matter where you are located. Even Houston is now densifying.
We have a zoo membership so we can visit any zoo in the country for free, so we've been out to Monarto with the kids a few times, including for the lion feeding experience.
They have buses that follow trails inside the enclosures, so it is fairly on rails. You can hop on and off the buses but then you're outside the enclosures and the animals aren't necessarily especially close. You can also hike between enclosures if you wanted to do that.
It is okay but you rarely get especially close to the animals, since the buses follow a trail and the animals can go wherever they feel like. It's a good day out with the kids though.
"This sounds great to me… but it’s just Miami!" Just the latest example of the tech-right reinventing something that already exists. God it's exhausting.
One of the many ways in which UK planning discourse is irredeemably cursed is the perennial obsession over 'new towns' - places like Milton Keynes, Stevenage, Telford, Skelmersdale, etc. We built a bunch of these in the 50s-70s, and how successful they were basically seems to be a function of how far away they are from an already-existing, successful city. But because of the green belt and the difficulty of densifying existing cities in a discretionary system, it's the best we can do, so governments keep proposing more of them - Starmer is doing the same thing. It's literally just building houses a bit further away from where the demand actually is for no apparent benefit. Maddening!
It's also quite telling that when we refer to new towns we are almost entirely referring to places built before anyone still of working age was born (i.e. 60+ years ago).
Then there's the most recent effort to make a new town, which fell on its face in black comic fashion.
This kind of development (i.e. a few miles away from a desirable place to live) is also utterly awful for encouraging cycling, walking and public transport - because inevitably to do much of anything you need to travel several miles. Through my work I'm familiar with quite detailed surveys of travel habits by area; and it's not uncommon to have well over 95% of households primarily relying on the car in such places, while the main city to which it is a satellite has a good level of cycling and walking.
If we're serious about growing active travel use we need more people to be able to live in places which best facilitate it.
I would be vastly more impressed by your green belts were they actually anything except privately-held scrub/agricultural land.
It seems you're going to have to collapse at least as far as Argentina relative to the cutting edge of the global economy before someone gets into office with a remit to torch your planning bureaucracy to the ground and shoot the environmental consultants.
I was surprised to learn that the UK has actual policy aimed at preventing distinct towns from growing to combine, because they think this is essential for each town to have its own character. And on Reddit, any thread about comparing population sizes between US cities and European cities ends with a lot of people getting morally judgy about how it’s wrong to count whole urban area populations because they’re technically made up of a bunch of separate cities.
I was chatting with my Brit friends last time I was in London and commented that the reaction to anyone trying to build anything could be summed up as “u wot m8”
Not exactly the point of this article, but to the bit about filling in New Jersey; people like to complain about dying small towns, and I get that. There are a lot of them in the Midwest and Northeast. But it's not true that these towns never reverse their fortunes. It's just that when they do, people complain about that too. The only way to reverse the population decline of a city is either to have the birthrate absolutely explode (doubtful) or to have people move there. I guess the town could improve to the extent that the locals stop leaving. But a town where locals stick around is probably one where newcomers also arrive. The newcomers by definition are usually either immigrants, which provokes one type of backlash, or from other parts of the country, usually from a heavily populated region like California or New York. That provokes a different type of backlash.
I don't really know where I'm going with this besides "people will be mad no matter what." 🤷
The north had a "freedom to leave." The society was built off of fleeing religious persecution, so social norms allowed people to abandon their small town family ties and strike out for greener pastures. But puritan towns were suspicious of outsiders and didn't allow many new people into their communities.
The south had a "freedom to join." It was built off of a shortage of labor, and so they wanted anyone and everyone to come work the fields. But once you were there, slavery, indentured servitude, and sharecropping tied you to the land so you couldn't leave.
With westward expansion, the freedom to join and the freedom to leave finally came together. Boom towns would welcome lots of people in, but once the work dried up, people would migrate somewhere else for a better job. And so American culture became unusually friendly to newcomers, and miraculously, not many people complained. And that willingness to migrate unlocked a long period of economic dynamism and the country became a superpower.
And then around 1970 we decided that the frontier was finally closed and we stopped giving people the freedom to join communities, and here we are.
>the town could improve to the extent that the locals stop leaving
Generally, the only way to do that is to…get more people in to improve the place (eg having people move to Detroit to buy up and fix the dilapidated buildings/vacant lots), but that runs into the other issues you discuss.
Yeah, the only places I can think of where the town grows, locals stay put, and nobody moves there, are religious towns like Kiryas Joel or some polygamous towns in Utah. Any town that is a mainstream American town is going to have to grow by acquiring New residents. At the height of population for cities like Detroit and Cleveland, people were moving there in droves from the Deep South, Appalachia, etc.
When I was a kid, we used to take field trips to Lowell and our teachers would warn us ahead of time that it was a rough town. Then we would get there and it was... fine. Pretty nice if we went in the Spring. As an adult, I found out that immigration from Southeast Asia helped stop the city's downward decline and helped revitalize it.
The other example of new city building is tourist amenity driven. Las Vegas and Orlando basically emerged out of nowhere over the last 50 years because people built reasons for tourists to visit. You could imagine opportunities for 1-2 more of these elsewhere in the country (North Carolina? Texas?)
The Vegas thing is an interesting example — it worked because gambling was illegal everywhere else so there was a specific reason to create a new city in Nevada.
It's wild to me that the Chinese Communist Party is watching Macau do land reclamation and not deciding that it makes more sense to just expand the boundaries of Macau onto existing land.
There must be something I'm missing-- would this be somehow embarrassing to the CCP? Are the areas adjacent Macau resistant to the idea?
It just seems like Macau's advantage is largely its system of governance, and expanding Macau to the north and west increases the land under that governance much more cheaply than reclaiming new land.
Have you ever gone to gamble there? It is really something dystopian with the crumbling casino monoliths, the old, tatty boardwalk, the vacant lots and the occasional local enclave you encounter walking.
I lived in Westfield NJ around 1980 for about a year. I went to Atlantic city when it was still an old school boardwalk town.. and Bruce was still an up and coming punk!!😆
It’s very important that it was directly across a state line, but still close to a huge city! Someone else mentioned Atlantic City, which had to do a more complex regulatory arbitrage to get a location farther from the city than the state border.
As I was typing all this, I realized that some of this is the same phenomenon as how retail chains decide to site outlet malls - it’s important for them to be far enough from the main city for people to price-segregate. Are there any famous outlet malls that have become the site of edge cities that became new urban centers? Could there be?
Hard to see a reason to add more when both NV and central FL still have (relatively) cheap land available. Plus, you get a lot from networks effects. Even if you build a giant resort in the middle of nowhere, TX, people only get to go to that one resort. Orlando has a massively-built-out Disney operation in addition to Universal Studios. Then you've got random hangers-on like Sea World, plus professional sports and nice beaches within driving distance.
Maybe there's a place in TX that's close enough to enough city centers that you could start with driving Texans making up most of your custom (cheaper than flying!), but I'm skeptical.
I will say that Disney's parks seem both heavily supply-constrained and massively popular these days, which does militate towards market opportunities for expansion. But perhaps Disney Cruises are a more scalable, less-risky substitute there?
Orlando and Vegas are doing fine and have plenty of growth ahead of them. But Matt’s topic is how do new cities emerge and if Disney decided to build SuperDisneyWorld near say Fairfield TX or Rocky Mount NC I’m confident a new city would emerge.
The best way to build a new city would be what other countries have done -- build a new national capital. Somewhere between St Louis and Memphis would be a good central location. And the 250th birthday of the US is as good an occasion as any for a project like that.
But other than a brand new city, infilling distressed older industrial cities, perhaps by making them special trade and immigration zones, would be a good idea.
At first I didn’t know what you meant, and then I realized. I suppose I should anticipate a spittle-flecked series of personal attacks that Ben tolerates (even though I would most certainly be banned for much less) such as everything here [1].
I’d give it a 40% chance that I get banned for pointing out this double standard (the easiest thing to do).
Oh, geez, I had zero idea that you guys were in conflict (just perused that thread...OMG!). I was simply aware that the commenter in question is from St. Louis, and zealously defends the honor of his home town. LOL.
It’s funny you bring this up, as this is not a new idea - there were several fairly serious proposals to bring the national capital to the Midwest (and specifically to St Louis) maybe 125-150 years ago.
Denver has IIRC the second largest concentration of federal employees outside the DMV and is much easier to defend from invaders (I shit you not, these two things are related! Even in this day and age). If the government were to relocate, my money would be Denver.
Plus, I mean, St. Louis is a swampy shithole that also has ice storms and tornadoes, Denver is not, and you’d think Congress would have to consent to the move for it to happen.
Geographic isolation is a double-edged sword. We should be copying other examples of successful new designated capitals such as Canberra or Ottawa, not Brasilia.
The first Trump administration moved certain USDA positions from DC to the Midwest (I think Kansas City). In practice, it just meant a loss of institutional knowledge since most of the people who were being moved just quit and they had trouble filling the positions.
In the “Scythe” YA novel series, set in the distant future, the capital of America (the United States doesn’t exist anymore) is Fulcrum City, which the well-educated know used to have the ancient name of St. Louis.
Sea level rise will eventually require the relocation of the US Capital anyway. The 2020 median center of US population was somewhere between Louisville and St Louis...
Instead of buying Greenland, we should buy Baja California and build a beach resort cities there.
There's only about 3 million people living there so we could do it for probably $10k/ person or about $30b. They'd benefit from the cash and from being American, we'd get space for an attractive new city, everyone wins.
I went to a resort in Baja on the Pacific (Rosarito). I figured the water would be warm because it's in Mexico. No, it's basically the same temperature as Maine because of the currents.
The math I have learned since moving to the suburbs is that people care a lot about percentage growth. Locals in my village would freak out if the town grew 20%, and yet that would only be a few hundred units. Versus a city might absorb hundreds of new units easily. Overall I think the future is YIMBY cities that grow plus sprawl at the edges, which is boring but will get us the numbers.
Yeah this seems correct to me — San Antonio will keep sprawling and with some policy reforms in place (including a bill the Texas legislature passed on Monday) keep adding infill as well.
I wish the bill went farther, but this one also seems designed to be hard for NIMBY's to yell at since it doesn't affect existing residential zoning. And also feels like a good solution to some of the WFH changes.
It’s not even irrational – a town of 400 is going to change immensely if it suddenly receives another 200 people, and change has transition costs. Meanwhile, a mid-sized city like Provo accommodates 200 new people per week fairly deftly.
Yes, any manner of municipal services are going to be tailored to the rough order of magnitude of the town population, more so than the specific number. Therefore, percentage-based increase matters more in terms of disruption to the locality.
I live in what was once a new city. Peachtree City, Georgia was incorporated in 1959, 31 miles from downtown Atlanta and well beyond the suburban edge at the time. It was a freedom city for conservative Democrats.
Matt’s YIMBY vs NIMBY frame ignores the value of consumer choice. If you build a good community, people naturally want to preserve its character. Peachtree City is a planned community with large lot sizes, 90 miles of multi-use paths, and abundant shade. Pre-planning allowed residents who wanted this lifestyle to self-select. We have a stronger community spirit here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
Greenfield development is cheaper than infill. My 2500-square-foot home on half an acre with a big pool is worth about $550,000. Families raising successful children on $150k a year know they get a better deal here than in expensive cities.
Today, there’s a new class of remote workers. Many want affordable housing, airport access, and perhaps the option to drive to work occasionally. Greenfield development offers these workers affordability and communities that share their values.
If, 50 years from now, these remote workers like the communities they’ve built and want to preserve their character, I call that success even if Matt thinks it’s NIMBY hell.
I appreciate that you are using a place whose creation explains what the "preserving community character" euphemism is all about to then defend the idea of continuing to preserve "community character" by making apartments illegal.
It’s telling that you are more interested in whether my community has the odor of segregation than whether it delivers good consumer value. Like most Americans, my concerns are more material than identarian.
Yes, I totally agree. HOAs are a seriously underrated problem in American planning, driven mostly by municipalities trying to avoid taking on costs that should be their responsibility, for parks, roads, trash collection, etc.
I'm not entirely negative on that, if neighborhoods want to internalize their costs within themselves, that's OK as long as municipal costs outside of HOAs are still accounted for. Where I stridently oppose them is any restriction of the land use of purely private property, and I think many people (including Matt) really underrate how they can further NIMBYism in a different venue.
The issue here is that if every locale does this there's no where for young people to start out and raise families, which means no kids, which means you and I end our lives dying in a pool of our own filth.
Every community needs to be open to some change, coupled with the stronger law enforcement and professional governance needed to ensure that change doesn't destroy it.
If every wealthy inner suburb had allowed a few more hundred townhomes to be built on brownfield/in-fill sites since 2015, every blighted city had reduced crime rates to those of NYC, and our four superstar cities allowed a bunch of high-rises, nowhere would have been transformed, but our problems would be vastly smaller.
That’s really not true. If you go outside of major cities, there’s a good mix of reasonably priced housing options available. If you can work remote, there are lots of very attractive options.
Young couples (27-37) starting families are the prime demographic of remote workers. They can get cheaper housing in greenfield development than through infill townhouses built on expensive land in prestigious suburbs.
Remote workers make up under 15% of the workforce and slowly declining in favor of hybrid models that still require people to be within commuting distance.
Greenfield development is occurring and has relatively few constraints placed on it throughout wide swathes of the US. If it were enough, it would have been enough *last decade*. It was not.
Remote workers include traditional remote workers, gig workers and consultants working remote, and small location-independent and e-commerce businesses. In toto, that’s not decreasing. They are also supporting secondary development as that increased population drives new businesses in exurbs, towns, and rural areas.
Examples of remote workers I know personally include a commercial real estate developer, a social science researcher, and a systems engineer.
Many/most places have very reasonable zoning rules, and the rules that exist are needed for things like minimum lot size to support well and septic. Realize, nearly a third of households are not on public sewer, and private septic is not feasible on small lots.
Fixing what’s broken is not a great reason to break what’s working well. One size does not fit all.
Greenfield development and infill are not mutually exclusive. Politically, infill should be aimed at the close in areas of big, rich cities. Young, productive workers are not being priced out of Atlanta or Dallas. They are being priced out of Boston and New York City.
I'm not going to make an implicit comment like Sam made downthread, but I will say that anytime I hear about preserving neighborhood character, I will not let that stand, and demand explicit aspects of what people want in their neighborhoods. At least you've cited here that that includes "large lot sizes, 90 miles of multi-use paths, and abundant shade". I say multiuse paths are good, and should be municipally built just like roads and sidewalks are (not walled off by HOA restrictions), and shade is good in parks (public or private), and on public strips abutting sidewalks and curbs. But on one's own private property, I don't think it's good to force people to put up and maintain trees they don't want (yes yes, username doesn't check out), nor to force them to have and maintain a bunch of land they can't use for much else other than just lawn.
Anyone who bought a house in PTC chose to opt into that zoning code. If they wanted a less distinctive community, they could have bought in Newnan, Lovejoy, Hampton, McDonough, Stockbridge, Locust Grove, Conyers, Lithonia, Villa Rica, etc. And that’s just on the south side of atlanta 18-30 miles out. Why not let a couple dozen flowers bloom?
I simply think that there should be very wide latitude on what people can do with land that they own. If someone wants to buy a bunch of land and build a bunch of SFHs that they still own and want to rent out according to their rules, that's fine, but it doesn't seem like there's a huge market for that on a neighborhood sized level.
I was. But it is 25 miles from DC and 20 from Baltimore and quite near I-95, so it’s different. One of the distinctive things about PTC is we are 13 miles from an interstate. The road that connects us to I-85 has an execrable 55 mph speed limit. For the sake of folks who commute to the airport of downtown, we should raise that to 65. A few extended turning lanes would suffice, as they do on SR 16 between I-75 and Griffin.
Specially in the right-wing, I suspect the program of "new cities" has an implicit desire that perhaps those "new cities" could not be democracies, but some kind of corporate entities, or "charter cities", or something
One big advantage of new cities is that you can make them much greener than organicly developing cities, look at Canberra in Australia or the various town built by the Garden City movement in the UK. Being full of parks and relatively upscale means it is less likely that locals will object.
It’s weirder maybe that Trenton and Baltimore (and New Haven) have remained shitty despite best efforts when the last 20 years old cities with research universities have roared back to life.
Trenton may not have a university, but Rochester does.
Another class of city like this is Hoboken, which has been “surprisingly nice” for 15 years.
So Baltimore is kind of an outlier among the cities Matt named here because it’s an awful lot larger - it’s 85% of the population of DC, and is 5-10x larger than Trenton/Camden/Wilmington/New Haven/Reading/insert small-ish distressed Northeast city here. There has been plenty of gentrification that’s gone on in Baltimore for the last 20-30 years, a lot of which has been spurred on by Johns Hopkins and its hospital buying up distressed blocks to expand its campus and workforce housing. Even outside of that, there’s plenty of “organic” gentrification that’s taken place in the historically white neighborhoods that run down the city’s central spine.
The big NE superstar cities haven’t done their big turnarounds on the backs of research universities alone - large companies moving headquarters or opening offices in city limits helps a lot. Baltimore struggles to retain private businesses - it’s much more “eds and meds and nothing else” than even Philadelphia, to say nothing of DC, NY, or Boston. If you really wanted to see the city return to its rightful place as a peer of Boston and DC, there need to be more jobs downtown.
Two things that surprised me about Baltimore when I visited some years are a) a lot of the city actually is pretty nice, but b) the nice parts almost all exist within very close proximity of not-nice parts. In Philly and DC - which have broadly similar crime rates IIRC - there's sort of a 'nice' region of the city and a 'not-nice' region of the city, and the nice zone is large and mostly contiguous, so if you're in that area you don't notice the crime and distress, really. Baltimore felt much patchier, which makes the distress more visible.
Of course having the distress squirreled away "somewhere else" has its own problems (see Chicago). But I do wonder if this impacts peoples' perceptions of Baltimore and willingness to move there.
This is mostly true of Philly but not in full IMO. There are some isolated islands of "nice" hanging out amidst the not-so-nice bits, and a few major problem spots (mostly public housing complexes) in the middle of long-gentrified areas. The frontlines are also pretty damned convoluted, which puts a lot of residents of nice neighborhoods in proximity to less-nice ones even if the former are geographically contiguous.
We also have a band of middle-class black neighborhoods, most prominently along City Ave and Cheltenham Ave, in which the degradation of quality of life is a constant threat because they're isolated from the newer gentrified areas while still being much nicer than the blighted ones.
Layered atop all this, Philly just isn't quite *big* enough to have neighborhoods where you're almost entirely isolated from crime or disorder like you would be in the stretch of Chicago from River North to Wrigley.
Yeah, that's fair - it's why I said the nice zone is mostly contiguous.
Public housing projects tend to create problem spots in any city that has them, I'd say. There are public housing projects in the middle of gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and the streets immediately bordering them always feel kind of run-down, but then you go a block away its all cocktail bars and boutiques and people with expensive strollers.
I agree with that description, it just quite doesn't do justice to how narrow the connections are in many places, such that no matter which nice neighborhood you're in, you're still pretty close to the "frontier" in much of the city.
I'll also note that our murder rate is roughly half of Baltimore's now. We're probably on track for the lowest number of murders in the city since the 1966 in absolute terms or 1969 in per capita terms.
DC struggled with this- problems around housing projects in gentrified neighborhoods- and still does a bit with Columbia Heights and the new section 8 building way up Connecticut- but the mayor is basically trying to bulldoze every project and it’s “working”
PHA is a spectacularly incompetent infrastructure owner, in every phase from contracting construction to late-lifecycle maintenance, and the "projects" model is a miserable failure that concentrates and perpetuates poverty.
I don't even know what to do to replace it; Maybe sell it off and establish a trust to offer a flat rental subsidy to all people who qualify, with a sloowwwww phase-out, instead of the Section 8 "10-year waiting list followed by a lifetime of free rent" model.
Public housing the in the US is just a huge problem. It’s total shit, and our general aversion to paternalism means that there’s rarely- if ever- a way to stop some of the people living in it from turning it into a living hell (I’m not exaggerating, there’s a litany of stories from a single building in the richest part of dc that sound like a horror anthology).
I dunno. Surely there’s a way to build it so people want to live in it without becoming Singapore (which has great public housing that middle and upper middle class people will live in) or what we have now (where you occasionally discover a decomposing toddler on the corpse of her mother who definitely starved to death and whose screams were probably ignored by everyone for weeks)
I will never forget walking from my Baltimore hotel to the Apple Store and realizing that there is a secret map of Baltimore that Google doesn’t know — I ended up walking through some very tough-looking slum blocks before I got to the Apple Store, and took an Uber back.
When/where was this? As far as I know there’s never been an Apple store in Baltimore - there were plans for one at the Inner Harbor maybe a decade ago but they never materialized.
Baltimore still REALLY sucks though. And it seems like the “good” neighborhoods like the inner harbor are losing ground. It’s nearly impossible to raise kids there, which you wouldn’t say for a DC or a New York now but you would have said in the 90s.
It is big enough to merit its own case study. The reason big cities come back seems worth analyzing- Detroit contracted down to almost nothing before bouncing back.
Odd to see that Baltimore has "85% the population of DC," like it's a surprise how many people live there, when Baltimore city was bigger than Washington proper for most of U.S. history (and often by a good margin). The year I was born, 1970, it was about 900K to 750K, and as both cities shrank Baltimore remained larger through at least 2010. But Washington rebounded along the way and Baltimore is still sliding — in 2024 it was 568K vs 702K, quite a change!
Philly does vastly better on private investment and employment than Baltimore, even if we're somewhat over-reliant on 4 large universities and a host of large hospital systems.
If we can use the very large windfall we'll get once we've got the pension system fully funded (IIRC it'll be like $600M a year in reduced contributions) to kill off the gross receipts part of BIRT and lower the business income and wage taxes a good bit, then that gap will become even more pronounced.
We're also due to see something like $300M a year of revenue by 2030 as the various tax abatements on residential development expire, so there should be ample revenues to top up Parks and Rec and Streets, maybe even inaugurate a street sweeping program, without having to spend the $600M we currently spend on catch-up contributions to the pension fund.
It’s a little uncomfortable to talk about, but it seems much less likely for a city to become desirable—notwithstanding its other amenities—if it has a large existing black population. Hoboken has gentrified significantly; it was never particularly black (5% in 1980). Jersey City has improved much more than Newark, which was twice as black in 1980 (28% vs 58%). Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which I think is often cited as a paradigmatic example of gentrification, was similarly more Hispanic than black. Painting with broad strokes here, of course.
Probably true but, seems like it’s worth having the hard conversation here and figuring out why- I mean I even know there’s heterogeneity in that sample, Durham NC has become a lot more desirable and the match- New Haven- hasn’t. I know a lot about why in both places, and yes racism is a factor, but it’s a lot more complicated than that I think in some ways that might be amenable to policy changes
(In Durham, Duke basically bought the whole city with an investment group, and there were decent jobs in Raleigh and chapel hill nearby. Yale has tried with much less success in New Haven)
Who are trying their damndest to move a lot of everything to DC. Bought the Newseum to move most of the business school down.
Is this just a secular shift? Tons of schools are opening DC campuses. Is it punting in Baltimore? Probably not like, all the way. But it does seem like they’re tired of Baltimore’s bullshit.
CSAs are absolutely massive though, they’re designed to cast an almost ludicrously broad net. Better to say that ~90% of NJ is part of the NYC or Philly MSAs.
I was so frustrated by this article – as in “of course why do we even need to discuss this” – and then the last paragraph was exactly what I’ve been thinking for years. I live in Cleveland. There are literally miles of empty land between my house and downtown. Crying out for development. The land is almost if not literally free. There are tax incentives. There’s rail transit. Commute to two largest job clusters in the state is less than 20 minutes. Freshwater, arts, restaurants. Yes the weather is not San Diego, but it’s better than Washington DC or New York City.
Now Matt might say markets clear, nobody wants to live in Cleveland. But my response would be markets clear, at what price? If the housing was literally free with no one move to Cleveland? But people suffer through agonizing commutes in East Bay and in Austin? For what? We have tons of thousands of unfilled jobs, pretty amazing wages, especially considering the cost of living. As a great local industrialist is fond of saying, “the second hardest thing is to get people to move to Cleveland, the hardest thing is to get them to leave afterwards.” Why is the market failing so blatantly???
Apologies for the rant. I just can’t wrap my mind around this.
Isn’t crime pretty high in Cleveland?
And I don't see the weather being better, either. Arguably not worse. But better?
The only thing I see as enjoyable about a Cleveland winter is when the Browns get to force an opponent into a lake effect snow game. But this being the Browns, masters of fucking themselves over, of course now they're proposing a domed stadium in the burbs.
The Browns went from "lovable losers" to "dafuq are you even doing?" so fast.
Seriously, I've even known long time Browns fans that couldn't find any justification to root for them anymore.
I feel seen.
I mean after signing Deshaun Watson, I was pretty done with feeling sorry for anything related to the Browns. The last few seasons have been a big "you got what you deserved". We haven't had much reason to see people or entities get the fate their terrible behavior has deserved since 2016, so I'm happy to see at least one example.
Between Deshaun Watson and Dan Snyder, NFL karma has really been doing its job.
The Browns and Jets used to be at least funny and sometimes scrappy when they did dumb stuff. Now the Jets are just depressing and the Browns are just gross.
Definitely nowhere near the level of disgrace of the Browns, but it was satisfying to see them faceplant during their Aaron Rodgers era.
The climate line has moved about 300 miles since I was a kid. We basically have Southern Kentucky weather from the early 90s.
It’s about 7° cooler than New York City in my experience. Which means a pleasant 79 instead of 86 in the summer, and winter wonderland 28 versus freezing rain and 35. Definitely far more cloudy, which is a bummer.
Probably lower than in 2004-08 and it was boring low back then. Like ATL would've laughed at our understanding of crime in our back in time loop concurrently.
If it’s like Baltimore and Philly, the “keep this place shitty” caucus has enough power to keep things shitty
Philly’s is slowly losing. Painfully, loudly, with the aid of every well-off white leftist the city can muster… but losing nonetheless.
But who wants to lose that classic Kensington neighborhood character am I right.
For a long time, the existing middle class black community could tolerate the "urban enshittification caucus" because they felt their own presence under threat of rising prices and taxes as well, and because the latter's effects were felt most strongly in other parts of the city than those in which they lived.
COVID's insanity put an end to the assumption that they could live with these people; Parker is the direct result of that loose alliance breaking. The same occurred to a lesser degree among wealthier white people; our white "progressives" are both fewer in number and more moderate than they were in 2019.
Parker's coalition is still pretty terrible on some issues, especially the dichotomy between public service efficiency and the interests of public-sector employees, an overreliance on black church-run non-profits, and the number of shackles it wants to place on private land development. But in many ways they're less bad than historically, and the pendulum has swung fully on "policing and public sanitation are good actually". They're also rightfully very skeptical of non-religious non-profits taking city funds.
Hell, one can actually get a response for noise complaints now.
The political shift is pretty stunning to me. Like some spirit of low taxes and business development has seemingly possessed even Kenyatta Johnson.
The coalition has issues for sure, but if 'honest graft' is the price for restarting 'clean & safe' as well as growth machine politics then I think it is a clear step in the right direction.
I have been pleasantly surprised by Johnson, lol.
That said, we've been ticking the wage and business income taxes inexorably downward since Rendell. Parker is the first mayor to pause this, and even that was in favor of hugely increasing the homestead exemption for real estate taxes.
I fully expect that on her heels we're getting a genuine reformist in the Rhynhart vein, and that would be fucking transformative.
Imagine $600M in current excess pension contributions redirected to reducing the highly distorting gross receipts and somewhat distorting wage/business income taxes, $300M in new revenues from the end of a bunch of 10-year abatements going to Parks and Rec, Streets, and improved surveillance, and a thoroughgoing review of the budget producing $200M in pissed-away contractor and non-profit contracts to hand to SEPTA for service within the city limits.
I'm curious about your assessment of the death of the Sixers arena plan. Seemed like a good idea to me.
The Sixers needed leverage over Comcast to get a decent deal in S. Philly. If they didn't get that deal and had no backup plan they were headed for Camden, which would have been an *epic* clusterfuck both from a tax perspective and from a transportation one.
Council and Parker either *knew* that they needed that leverage and gave it to them knowing the controversy wouldn't go anywhere and would be forgotten soon enough, or didn't know that the Sixers' preference was to stay in S. Philly and acted to keep them in the city. Both seem fine to me, others clearly disagree.
I thought that the Market East plan would have worked wonderfully and been, in time, a huge boon to SEPTA, but I'll settle for keeping the damned tax take.
On Chinatown in particular, I have way more ties to that neighborhood than basically any other white dude in this city and I can still tell you they are grossly mismanaging the changing demographics and residential locations of the Asian immigrant community. The Arena probably would have boosted foot traffic; without *something* to shake things up, the non-restaurant businesses of Chinatown are in trouble.
I assume big time capitalists know their numbers, but I was a little skeptical you could profitably fill two full size stadiums on all the non sports nights. Sixers play 82 games plus some playoffs, Flyers play 82 games and no playoffs, so you have to find something to draw in 18,000 people on roughly 180 other days a year. Doubling that to 360 days seems like a stretch. I think that's probably why they came to an agreement.
> If it’s like Baltimore and Philly, the “keep this place shitty” caucus has enough power to keep things shitty
I feel there are a lot of cities where this is (unfortunately) the case. Are there any recent counterexamples that can serve as inspiration? Detroit gets mentioned often enough, but I'm honestly skeptical that this will continue, especially with the continued decline of Big 2.5 manufacturing in the US.
DC! Denver. Though Denver you have to go back to the 80s to what happened with the anti development brigade.
LA seems to be improving pretty rapidly to get ready for the Olympics.
That's great to hear. To me the DC renaissance doesn't _feel_ that recent - I was there for the 2009 inauguration and things seemed pretty okay then.
Denver is an interesting one to me - the mountain west always feels like such a boom area compared to the coasts that it's hard to imagine it having previously been in a state of decline, but of course busts come alongside the booms...
I think LA has definitely improved from its pandemic low-point, but I'm not convinced it has a sustainable path forward - California political disfunction is deeply-rooted and the Trump-induced collapse of international tourism plus Hollywood's AI-induced contraction feel like just the thing to tip us back into a prolonged decline.
Part of the problem is that "nobody" else lives in Cleveland. I went to high school there and almost everyone that I found interesting left for university and didn't return. Anecdotally lots of people return in their 30s when they have kids because of the cheap housing in good school districts and high quality of life, but there's a bootstrapping problem for getting cities like Cleveland and Detroit to be popular among younger (especially single!) people. This is exacerbated by the population of "Cleveland" mostly living outside of the city limits. The region has ~3 million people and only 10ish% live in the city.
From my understanding Portland OR became a cool city again because a sufficient amount of cool/interesting young people moved there. I'm not sure why it happened, but I suspect you could get the critical mass required by giving free or highly subsidized housing (as in decent apartments, not free houses that are falling apart) to young musicians and artists and the like to try to make the city "cool".
Case-Western and the Cleveland Clinic are pretty good draws for young people. My niece went there for grad school and stayed.
Yeah, Cleveland is a meds and ed city. The surronding area (University Circle) is extremely nice and has excellent culture, like the art museum and symphony. Real estate in the area is very cheap. I've posted before about how there are houses for $100k within walking distance. It suffers from most people commuting from outside the city (eg Solon) though.
Yes , my niece moved out to Olmsted Falls
Could a city, with enough resources and acumen, successfully run a campaign that paid some people to move to the city (surreptitiously) and run an influencer campaign that could seriously move the needle?
I don't think it would need to be surreptious. You could openly do it. The kinds of cities that need this treatment have no vision though. Check out Cleveland's waterfront to get a sense of the quality of governance and leadership of the city.
I don't think anyone is moving from California to Cleveland, but there's shouldn't be a reason why thousands of people from Youngstown and Akron and Ypsilanti and Wheeling and smaller cities all over the area wouldn't want to move to Cleveland.
This is most midwestern cities. You don't find transplants from the coasts, you find transplants that grew up in very small towns.
Chicago is a bit of an exception to this, a decent number of people do relocate from the coasts
"I went to high school there and almost everyone that I found interesting left for university and didn't return. Anecdotally lots of people return in their 30s when they have kids because of the cheap housing in good school districts and high quality of life"
So long as you get a large enough population returning, why is this cycle a problem?
I was responding to Rustbelt Andy's claim that people not flocking to Cleveland is a market failure. People move there, but the people moving there are mostly older and price-sensitive. My prior is that the demographics of people moving to Northeast Ohio (older and with kids) is why Cleveland proper isn't really growing and why you continue to have lots of empty lots downtown. If you're price sensitive and care about schools, moving to Solon/Brecksville/Rocky River makes a lot of sense but also doesn't do anything for Hough or other distressed / half-abandoned neighborhoods.
A random hypothetical I've asked my friends in the Philly area is, "Would you take a million dollar annual salaried position in Cleveland, working fully in office, and you have to live there full time for 10 years?" I'd say I've only gotten about a 20% yes rate. (Not to pick on Cleveland in particular, and not saying that Philly is Shangri-La... it is more a question of value placed on local friends/family network.)
How wealthy are your friends? A million dollars per year is a lot of money, and there are some nice parts of Cleveland. I would take this deal.
They are comfortable but not millionaires. (Please chalk the question up to complete ignorance of Cleveland.) Where do you live now?
Denver-Boulder corridor.
I have no connections to the Cleveland area, moving there would take me away from friends, and Cleveland certainly seems like a downgrade in terms of recreation. But 1M/year is a lot of money (and I assume the position would also be career-enhancing).
In ten years, given the low cost of living, I think even pretty risk averse investment/saving you’d have ten million dollars saved, and then you could afford a tinyhouse in Boulder
I should probably clarify that my friend group is late 40s with kids in elementary to high school. Increase to $1M is prob 2x to 4x current two working parent income. (Obviously this is a much stupider hypothetical for someone younger and less established in their career.)
Man I would take that in a heartbeat (in a hypothetical where my relevant extended family would also live somewhat near). I think the main issue with moving out to these deserted places is the lack of job opportunities. Once you solve for that, I feel like most of the other things like weather, scenery, local attributes etc are fairly minor.
Yeah, the more I think about it... people take rough work in places less desirable than Cleveland for a lot less money. Think the Bakken Formation, Alaska North Slope, private military contractors, so on.
To your point I remember at least looking at job listings for Haliburton truck drivers in Iraq in like 2003.
Relevant extended family would not live nearby in the hypothetical... that is part of the calculus.
"If the housing was literally free with no one move to Cleveland?"
It costs money to build housing.
It is genuinely difficult, in Philadelphia, to profitably offer a new-build 2000 sq. ft rowhome for sale for less than $500k in areas where lots are cheap, in the $30-60k range, from developer friends and folks my wife works with.
Our 750 sq. ft third-story build, which included substantial renovations to the 1st and 2nd floors and was specced well above contractor grade, landed around $160k (including soft costs but no financing). And even that was with me self-managing, having done the design and plans development to the point where we could hire an affordable architect to mechanistically enact that vision, directing a bunch of tasks and doing a bunch more myself... I probably did about $80k worth of work between planning, risk mitigation, and actual construction labor.
Had we just done the new-build portion and used worse materials and finishes, we could have brought that down to $120k, which scales to a 2,000 sq ft home including foundations costing around $400k in hard costs.
Trying to extrapolate to Cleveland, a unit of housing of the sort typical in the city proper (call it 1600-2000 sq ft, detached, narrow lot, simple framing plan) probably costs around $300,000-325,000 in hard costs (materials, labor, managerial labor, capital rental or depreciation) to build on a vacant lot with preexisting access to utility hook-ups. Add in financing, marketing/sales, admin/overhead, and other soft costs and you're left with a break-even sale price around $400k or more.
Rehabbing such a unit in uninhabitable state would vary from $100k to $250k, after purchase price. The range is higher than out East or in Chicago, where a much higher percentage of construction is brick or stone masonry. Stick-framed buildings don't age well when unmaintained and not climate-controlled.
So yea, overall it's a catch-22. Prices need to go up to justify residential construction and rehabilitation, but there's no way to make the city attractive enough to justify such price increases absent investment and rehabilitation.
Coming from the Northeast I don't think you can argue the weather of Cleveland is "better" than New York or Washington DC lol. I'm sure your summers are more pleasant but having grown up most of my life in the Northeast I've found the winters pretty rough when I lived in Chicago and Northwest Indiana (I'm sure Cleveland has similar weather). In general most places with colder winters are struggling to compete with the sunbelt, at the moment Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul and Madison seem to be doing the best.
What Cleveland probably should do is really milk every asset it has. Cleveland has well above average public transit, I think the RTA could use a significant expansion. I think Cleveland could also do a lot more to leverage Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. Encourage Ohio State University and Kent State to set up auxiliary campuses in downtown Cleveland. I don't know what Chicago has specifically done but they got Kraft, Mondelez, and McDonald's to move downtown. Cleveland should figure out how to do the same with all the companies based in Northeast Ohio. American Greetings is based in the area and at least historically has owned some pretty solid IP, maybe a small park featuring Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake would be day trip worthy for families within the Rust Belt.
"I'm sure your summers are more pleasant but having grown up most of my life in the Northeast I've found the winters pretty rough when I lived in Chicago and Northwest Indiana (I'm sure Cleveland has similar weather). In general most places with colder winters are struggling to compete with the sunbelt, at the moment Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul and Madison seem to be doing the best."
This is definitely part of it. I've noted for a number of years that for all the talk about the "secret" of Texas and Florida growth last 40 years (is it low taxes, is it YIMBY etc.), you can't get around the fact that both states have benefited tremendously from natural resource wealth. Texas is more famous; oil. But Florida? The natural resource wealth is some of the best beaches in the country.
But the warm weather is a factor for actually a different and more important reason. And it's here that we come to the most important underdiscussed city in this sunbelt migration; Syracuse. Why Syracuse? Because Syracuse is where air conditioning was invented. Which meant suddenly it became feasible to have factories in areas with extreme heat that just wasn't as viable pre air conditioning. Which mean it factories could move south for the same reason factories moved to China; cheap labor and lack of worker protections generally. Specifically unions.
One other item. Think you're idea that Cleveland should do more to leverage Case Western and induce Ohio State to build auxiliary campuses in downtown Cleveland is a smart decision. However, this (https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-towns-economy-macomb-illinois-aae84dcc) WSJ article is worth reading. Prestige schools such as Case and flagship state universities such as OSU are thriving. But lower tier state schools like Kent State? Yeah not so much.
I also found this comment strange. I think the weather in NY / DC is about the same as Cleveland.
It's an entirely different climate zone. NYC and DC are humid subtropical (though some northern suburbs of NYC do deviate) while Cleveland is humid continental.
New York is right on the fringe of Cfa/Dfa.
"Coming from the Northeast I don't think you can argue the weather of Cleveland is "better" than New York or Washington DC lol. I'm sure your summers are more pleasant but having grown up most of my life in the Northeast I've found the winters pretty rough when I lived in Chicago and Northwest Indiana (I'm sure Cleveland has similar weather). In general most places with colder winters are struggling to compete with the sunbelt, at the moment Chicago and Minneapolis-St Paul and Madison seem to be doing the best."
Yeah, if you're north of Kentucky and east of the Mississippi, your winters are usually unpleasant. DC winters aren't as bad as Boston winters, for instance, but they're still not fun.
One aspect that climate change won't solve is that more northern places will have a lot less sunlight in winter (yes you have more in summer but who wants it to be light out at 10 pm) and seasonal affect disorder is a thing.
I’ve been thinking on similar lines. One contributor to this equilibrium is that if you move to Cleveland (or similar city) you are now in the tax base that is on the hook for legacy costs like pensions and infrastructure that needs to be replaced. I sometimes feel like we will have to wait for nature to reclaim the area then discover that it’s available for greenfield development.
I live in the Rust Belt, and would love for the old towns and cities to prosper again. Many have proud histories, and are located on lovely lakes and rivers. However, prolonged depopulation is very tough to turn around. Maintenance gets deferred as the tax base shrinks, and the resulting problems drive more people away. A small example that one might not think of: as buildings age without maintenance, pieces can fall from them, creating hazards. Chicago has a fund to help building owners maintain their facades, but I doubt that broke cities do, though many of their buildings have been abandoned.
That's an engineering and finance problem. Here's a sociological issue: the residents who have stuck with a city through horrible times are likely fairly different from the young dynamos that could try to turn the city around. An example: an effort to plant trees in Detroit met with resistance. Who wouldn't want free trees? Some residents didn't.
I think a big part of why Detroit has been able to start turning around over the past 12 years or so is because of the bankruptcy, which got it out of the fiscal death spiral.
Now I live in Chicago and I am very curious to see how we avoid bankruptcy. My understanding is that there's never been one in a city of this size.
You’d basically need a governor and state legislature willing to amend the constitution (via referendum) to handle the pension crisis. Pritzker won’t do that because he’s, at heart, a machine Dem who’s scared of pissing off the public sector patronage network. You’d also need a mayor committed to good governance…actually, I can’t say that with a straight face given the current clown. Pensions are the biggest single expense item and they won’t get better without state action. This would also allow property taxes to come down, which is another reason IL is losing population.
The governor and state legislature can’t amend the constitution via referendum. They’d voters would need to approve the referendum and I don’t know that there’s votes for that.
There’s also the not small problem that people who worked in Civil Service jobs for the State or City were promised pensions. There’s a moral obligation not to just nope out on those.
Getting it to a referendum is half the challenge, and there’s a moral obligation to not let the state go bankrupt or severely uncompetitive. Other states have restructured pensions, there’s no reason for IL to not follow suit especially given the severity of its issues.
https://www.nasra.org/pensionreform
“ If the housing was literally free with no one move to Cleveland? ”
Ever been to Detroit?
Isn’t Detroit having a resurgence?
Detroit is interesting because it has good infrastructure, the state’s main airport, amenities, museums, suburbs, etc. Like a lamp with a burnt out light bulb, it seems like it would be easy to fix.
A few areas, yes. The greater metro, not really.
What's interesting is that while the MSA population has grown barely at all since 2020, it's no longer losing people (unlike NYC, LA, Chicago - and Cleveland): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
Yes it is. It's very neighborhood-specific but real estate investors have been paying attention.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/investors-cashing-detroits-real-estate-113322544.html
Detroit is growing again after 70 odd years. Cleveland is still shrinking as of 2024 (per estimates).
I have, and I don’t get what is happening there either.
You’d need a chart of the 20th century populations of Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee etc vs -Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, Tampa, etc and the 1947 development of the first practical residential AC unit*.
* Fun fact the first widow units went on sale in 1932 at a price of between $10k and $50k - in 1932!
This is missing the forest for the trees. Detroit’s population isn’t in the toilet due to AC. It’s due to racialized sprawl to the suburbs. The Detroit metro area still has 4.3 million people and saw its growth slow not due to the south but due to the decline of its golden goose in autos.
Within the region the city got battered because white people’s dislike of living near black people.
Its more complicated than 'dislike of living near black people', the turning point was the enormous race riot that destroyed 2000 buildings, tons of businesses, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot
Detroit is honestly a way more enticing city than Cleveland
Housing is cheap but the property taxes on those cheap houses are absolutely not cheap
Yes, and?
The free housing didn’t induce much demand.
As others have pointed out, there is no free housing in Detroit. In fact, there is no such thing as a free housing.
If you want to make a stronger point, you're probably thinking of something like the Rehabbed & Ready program [1] where abandoned homes are cheaply renovated so that they're safe to be occupied. Just eyeballing their listings, they seem to start around $80k --- with many over $200k. (There are a couple at $55k, but they have not been fully renovated.)
The non-renovated buildings seem to sell for $1k but of course would require a lot of money to make livable. Again, there is no such thing as free housing.
So, you could say something like "The $80k flipped houses didn’t induce much demand." Perhaps that's true, but note that Detroit's population does seem to be slowly growing (up 1% from 2020 to 2024 per the census bureau).
[1] https://buildingdetroit.org/ready-to-occupy
It has, though. Real estate investors have noticed.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/investors-cashing-detroits-real-estate-113322544.html
What free housing?
As you just being an ass or do you actually not know?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have not heard of any “free housing program” in Detroit. I googled “Detroit free housing” and found:
1. A voucher program, similar to Section 8
2. 0% loans for home renovations
3. Public housing
4. Down payment assistance
None of which are “free housing”.
I've always thought of Cleveland as the other problem: we have too many cities. If you could somehow mash Akron, Canton, Youngstown, etc. into Cleveland, it'd be much more economically competitive. (Or every city in Central Illinois, or NY State west of I-81...)
The Eastern US pre-war pattern doesn't work really well, and something like Australia's layout refreshingly free of mid-sized cities works better.
I’ve thought the same thing a lot recently in the context of tariffs and free trade. The most grim and visceral effects of free trade that folks point to are the ‘hollowed-out Rust Belt cities’. But I think a lot of that I’d due the unique and fragile nature of mid-sized, one-industry cities in the US.
"The Eastern US pre-war pattern doesn't work really well, and something like Australia's layout refreshingly free of mid-sized cities works better."
Why? Germany seems to have reasonable success with the model...
Germany has much higher density, and also some really great navigable rivers.
Australia is spread out along the coast and the inland is nearly uninhabitable.
Good point! My guess is:
1. A lot of these small cities are actually close enough to their neighbors to form de facto agglomerations, where everything in the US is much further apart.
2. Until recently, Germany has been much better at maintaining manufacturing industries that work with a more spread out layout.
The too many mid-sized cities problem is also a factor in Northern England and Belgium...
Metro areas for the win!
How dare you! My attachment to Dolton IL is the foundation of my identity!
LeBron trying to sell Bill Hader on moving to Cleveland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zie94YV7W4Y
Speaking as a former comedian of sorts -- retired circus clown -- I find LeBron's performance here seriously impressive. Comedy is hard! For a pro ball player, LeBron has real comedic chops.
I'm sorry, I grew up in the midwest and have been to every city around there. I can't imagine any scenario in which I'd move to Cleveland. I'd rather live in Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Dayton, or Cincinnati. Cleveland is depressing AF
Maybe the local government could do an ad campaign? "Let people know about good buying opportunities that they didn't know existed" is the problem that ad campaigns were invented to solve.
Thanks for this. I have only been to Cleveland a couple of times, but I liked what I saw. I have a kid graduating soon who would definitely consider living in Cleveland. I will tell him to cast his net in that direction.
My brother in law is from Cleveland, and he and my sister moved back there (western suburbs) from the Sunbelt recently. Got a really nice house for about a third of what it would've cost on the coasts. And they're a stone's throw from this giant lake.
Yes people just never to fix places like Cleveland and Trenton and not obsess about building these new cities that will be just sprawl . The economy of these towns will improve and the crime will fall 😎
"New cities" strikes me as a right/libertarian version of the topic switching arguments you get from some on the left when you talk about upzoning and they are like "no no no, we need social housing!" that is instead of having the messy fight about zoning derail the conversation with a policy discussion about something that everyone knows deep down will never actually happen.
I think a very important insight in this newsletter is that the best housing reforms is where state legislatures and sometimes city councils pass boring seeming bipartisan reforms to zoning and building codes.
Because housing is now an exciting issue, we're getting these big takes about new cities. But I say Make Housing Boring Again!
Yes the actual good criticism of "Abundance" that everyone is ignoring because they just hate Ezra personally/think markets are just always wrong is that his book's success will just polarize the issue around partisan lines and nothing will get done.
This is basically how I feel about it--in my mind housing is essentially a solved issue. We don't need to come up with tiny houses, shipping container housing, PRT, elaborate land bank schemes, an 8,000 word inclusionary zoning ordinance, seasteads, Central American charter cities, execution of the landlords, hyperloops, etc
You just have to let people build some buildings! We know how to do this already! We did it for thousands of years :(
1. “We don’t need upzoning, we need public housing/100% affordable housing mandates for private developers”
2. “Why don’t you live in the hood?”
3. “Why don’t you live in rural Nebraska?”
4. “We should be building new cities instead”
5. “Look at all this [dilapidated] vacant housing [in Detroit], why don’t you live there?”
Precisely. It’s a “let’s not upset my coalition” gambit.
New cities also known as charter cities. Another terrible urban dystopia ! 😎
The charter cities concept has a lot of good research and observations of historical development around the world but unfortunately most of the people actively working in the space are radical libertarian/anarchists who don't appreciate what makes cities actually worth living in. Part of the problem is that the research indicates building new cities from scratch is hard (especially in the modern era) and most successes are in upzoning existing settlements or creating new districts/suburbs.
So "Gentrify Trenton" is a highly appealing message to me, but it obviously runs into the stupidest strain of left wing politics imaginable.
The thing is in the end, we all know that in order for those places to improve there’s no way around the fact that you’re going to need to displace a ton of low human capital people. And the people who are already there- not leftists- may rather deal with the losers they know than the wealthy people they don’t (who also look different and live differently than they do)
Isn’t accommodating ever marginally-lower human capital people the central point / goal of YIMBYism? The highest human capital people can just win the bidding war for limited housing stock. But YIMBYs think this is a worse equilibrium than having lower housing prices and higher supply and accommodating lower-earning people, right?
Is “high human capital” short for “high-earning human capital”? Cities need people beyond AI engineers—teachers, firefighters, baristas, janitors etc. Forcing these to exurbs gives transportation and other negative issues. I’m sure there’s some activism in YIMBY but mainly it’s about facilitating sufficiently abundant housing that new homes trade at barely above construction cost and existing stock trades lower, such that a variety of income levels can reside in reasonable proximity to a city center.
I think that’s probably the fuzzy model but I doubt anyone has stated it so explicitly (and it’s a good framing!)
But people will not want to have bidding wars if there are nnegative externalities continuing from the present population. There’s a chicken and egg situation.
oh you sweet summer child
the whole point of YIMBY is to achieve housing prices that are low enough to pull in high-social-capital educated people who will then drive out the low-social-capital uneducated incumbent population, who still can't afford the new YIMBY-enabled prices
You're such a paranoid weirdo.
No, I'm someone who understands how city politics actually work. If you think that zoning approaches - including YIMBY zoning approaches - aren't fundamentally about funneling human beings of perceived different social and economic value into different geographical spaces, then you're profoundly naive. And, anyway, that is not an argument.
Zoning approaches are fundamentally about funneling different things into planned geographic spaces. De-zoning approaches are not. (Though this sometimes happens as a byproduct of broader market forces.)
Is the YIMBY zoning in the room with you right now?
High-human-capital[1] Educated people with modest earnings exist, but low-human-capital people with high earnings are extremely rare. If the people putatively being driven out "still" (your word) can't afford the new YIMBY prices then that implies that they also couldn't afford the prices previously, so how are they not driven out already? You're arguing that their incumbency is *less* secure if prices go down? Moreover, by the same token the upper classes in your hypothetical class warfare scenario are already in a victory state -- if your goal is to price out the dysfunctional poor, building more housing can only undermine that goal, so whence YIMBYism?
[1] include high social capital if you wish I guess, although I think social capital is a somewhat different reference class than human capital.
We have created a large class of people who have desirable social capital (educated, orderly, low crime, upwardly mobile, eager to do cool big-city things like browse bookstores and go to bars and galleries and frequent trendy bagel shops) but who are currently priced out of many desirable urban spaces. YIMBYism is dominantly powered by these people; it's a movement of high-education but modest-income white people who are resentful that they don't get to participate in the urban lifestyle of a generation or two ago and want to rebuild it, but also want to ensure that the spaces they occupy are sufficiently gentrified that they don't have to be around too many Black people. This is an absolutely obvious sociological element of YIMBY politics and is exactly the sort of thing that Matt knows but feels he can't say out loud.
What's the proposed mechanism of ousting incumbent Black residents by building more housing? Just dilution? Different business establishments?
The word “displace” is used incorrectly here. “Everyone has a moral right to have everything stay exactly the same” is simply not a reasonable policial (or epistemic) position. Will there be “change”? Sure. Will there be “displacement”? I don’t believe this holds up to empirical scrutiny.
Displace means to move people out who would otherwise not have moved.
At least, that’s how it’s used in the papers I’ve seen on gentrification and displacement- which find that displacement doesn’t happen with gentrification because the people who move are extremely high probability of moving anyway.
Exactly.
And even if they are “displaced”, does that mean they are worse off? Have they suffered a harm that we have a moral responsibility to remediate?
They will likely move to a nicer unit than they left (even if it is not nicer than the unit thier old, shitty, unit was replaced by).
Even poor people like nicer things.
This is why I wish gentrification could focus on 8+ story buildings instead of 3 storeys. Less displacement (amongst other things).
It would be the opportunity of gentrification. It would be investing in the communities and not displacing residents per se
This is the core problem that I don’t think YIMBYs are comfortable talking about. Any effort to meaningfully improve the quality of life in Trenton will absolutely entail displacing residents. If Trenton became 20% as desirable a place to live as Princeton, almost no one presently living there would be able to afford to stay.
If you made the schools better, some current Trentonians would get priced out. If you made the streets safer, some current Trentonians would get priced out. If the prospective commutes to NYC and Philly were made more manageable, some current Trentonians would get priced out. If you did all of these great things, the city would be unrecognizable. It would take time, as block by block homes were bought up and renovated for the new, wealthier prospective residents. But the people who live in Trenton because it is affordable would lose their reason for being there, and they would feel embittered and worse off. Because even though they know it’s better, it’s no longer for them.
By the same token, progressive NIMBYs can't admit their plan for affordable housing is just to let conditions be bad enough that nobody new ever wants to move to a city. (Also, completely ignore where locals' kids and immigrants are supposed to live.)
For sure. To be clear, I think it is good when bad areas become good areas. I just think there’s some pain involved along the way. Frankly, I don’t love the usual options for alleviating that pain (rent control, preventing property taxes from rising to account for increasing property values, etc).
It needs to happen in tandem with a lot of construction so that homes aren’t just renovated but added.
Sure, but Vancouver built much more housing than the average North American city over the last 40ish years, and also experienced some of the highest price increases. This is a big NIMBY talking point online. I don't think that x caused y here, but I do think it proves that if your city is highly desirable- that desirability can dramatically outpace the market's ability to engage in large, multiyear capital projects (aka apartment buildings).
Like, 'desirability' can grow almost geometrically, whereas the market's ability to construct multi-unit apartment buildings is bound by the number of potential projects, interest rates, available labor, the broader market cycle, bank financing, etc. So I think OP's point is valid, if Trenton became very trendy that would easily outpace building construction rates
I think Trenton is a particularly bad example because it's a really small area and thoroughly enmeshed into the Princeton area job market. So yes, if you make Trenton nice then you'll need someplace else to put the workforce housing that Trenton currently has, which is of course already under pressure because of the regional housing shortage.
(Is this what Bridgeport is for Fairfield County, Connecticut? I never go up there)
Why wouldn't you just build a new town around the Princeton Junction train station, which is closer to where the jobs are anyway?
To solve the problem of “housing is expensive and we need more of it,” I agree we should upzone dramatically in places that make sense. State and local governments should make investments that alleviate future growing pains.
But Trenton being a terrible place is another problem, and one worth solving.
This is the (empirically incorrect) thinking that brought about the housing crisis in the first place.
Repeat after me:
New housing supply decreases prices.
New housing supply decreases prices.
New housing supply decreases prices.
(Louder! With feeling!)
New housing supply decreases prices!
(You got it!)
In a vacuum, that’s absolutely true. I’m a subscriber here, I’m a YIMBY, I know about the AS/AD curves and all of that.
If you believe liberalizing zoning laws and increasing housing supply, coinciding with Trenton becoming a safe city with good schools and good transit links, would have the overall effect of *lowering* the cost of housing then… well, I won’t say anything impolite, but I strongly disagree with that proposition.
I agree that there is probably some sort of combinations of specific changes that could lead to an increase in housing costs of a specific block or neighborhood. But that is a really weird frame to use as the barometer of the common good.
If you think more housing would increase the price of housing across a whole city, I feel like the research clearly shows that not to be the case.
I have great news for you: I never made that claim. I recommend a healthy exercise for you: every time you read an opinion on the internet and have a negative immediate reaction to it, don’t default to assuming that the interlocutor is an evil moron. Just as a starting point. Try to ask yourself if you may be missing something.
Matt writes: "Trenton is a smallish, poor, high-crime city with bad schools that is surrounded by a bunch of richer communities. We have, unfortunately, a lot of these places in the northeast (Baltimore, Camden, etc)."
California Forever is just another utopian project led by dreamers, idealogues, charlatans and would-be messiahs who hope to build a new and better society. They built communes in the 1960s and 1970s, now they want to build techno-utopian cities. All to avoid the easy-to-describe but hard-to-implement solutions to crime-ridden, hollowed out cities like Baltimore, Camden, Detroit, St. Louis, Newark, Milwaukee, Memphis, etc, etc.
We should reject the California Forever people's thinking, not encourage it. Fix what we have. There are real people in cities across the country who are being decimated by corrupt and incompetent governance (Hello, Chicago!). Put the money and energy into fixing those places.
I think dreamers and would-be messiahs can be good!
"...would-be messiahs can be good!"
You've clearly never read the "Dune" novels.
Trenton needs an immortal god emperor
Trenton Makes, The Spice Flows.
“ Control the coinage and the courts--let the rabble have the rest." Thus Paddy Shaw advises you. And he tells you; "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself; "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"
--Paulie “Trees”: Secret Message to the Caporegimes from "New Jersey Awakening" by ”Princess” Irene Shaw
Potential crossover book titles. Sopranos inspired:
Made Men of Dune
Subtitle: Blood oaths. Spice flows. Never rat on your fremen
Woke Up This Morning... and Saw a Sandworm
And Jersey Shore inspired:
Gym, Tan, Melange
Subtitle: The holy trinity of survival on Arrakis
The Situation on Arrakis
Spice Snooki
Subtitle: She's small, loud, and slightly prophetic
You deserve more likes.
I clearly have never read them, and yet even I can recognize that this comment deserves an instant upvote.
👏👏👏👏👏
“He’s not the Messiah; he’s a very naughty boy!”
Someone had to say it.
You are a better person than me, I confess. 😀
The phrase I sometimes use to describe utopian, technocratic thinking like this-and I'll admit to having used it to describe your own before-is "lots of bright eyed idealists, not enough cynical assholes."
That's an odd collection of nouns. Many cities and towns in California were developed in roughly similar ways to what CF is proposing, although the scale they are proposing is larger than anything seen in a while. The utopian / charlatan / messiah - led developments tend to be much smaller (e.g., the Icarian movement towns), while the bigger ones (e.g., Irvine, CA, population 300,000+) are planned unit developments created by real estate companies and operated as viable-to-highly profitable businesses. I supposed you could call the Irvine Company "messianic" is some abstract, metaphorical sense, but its leaders were not Joseph Smith at Nauvoo or Brigham Young at SLC.
I like thinking of the Irvine Company as messianic. Have you heard the Good News about a mix of low rise apartments and heavily HOAed single family homes arranged around a collection of strip malls and highly manicured vegetation? Surely we live in the Promised Land.
This attitude is baffling to me. You're saying that because existing cities have problems, no-one should be allowed to found new ones anymore? How about live and let live, instead? Just let people build new cities if they want to.
Not to mention that a significant reason *why* existing cities have problems is because of governance issues, and some governance issues are much easier to resolve upon founding a new government. E.g. the US constitution is by design hard to change, but if a new country government crafted a new constitution, it could adopt a better-designed constitution instead, by making use of 200+ years of additional insight into constitutional design.
I'm fine with the "live and let live" if this is private investment or voluntary association of citizens, but would have zero support for taxpayer dollars to fund a new city that will obviously be a nightmare. It's one thing for citizens to collectively start a new community, and something else for state governments get into the game of "city building".
The reality is that California Forever would turn into more-or-less another suburb in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area. Which desperately needs housing, so don't know what the problem is.
Other areas have different issues, but the problem in California is no longer "hollowed out cities"--it's a failure to allow enough housing to be built.
I mean, I think that being a suburb of that CSA is fairly explicitly the short term goal. I think the medium-term goal is to become another hub of that area -- which is maybe the actual thing we should be trying to do? Like if we do have these metro areas which have clear powerful agglomeration effects, how do we turn them into multi-central areas to keep it possible for them to grow and to reduce transportation congestion.
“… just another utopian project led by dreamers, idealogues, charlatans and would-be messiahs….We should reject the California Forever people's thinking, not encourage it….Put the money and energy into fixing those places.”
Strong agree, and exactly how I feel about the nutters who think we should colonize Mars.
That would at least produce useful spinoff technologies along the way.
And interesting reality TV if they ever succeed in planting a dozen people there, I guess?
I tend to be on the advocacy side of "useful technology will develop along the way", but there are some Mars-specific challenges that I think really fail the cost-benefit calculus here, and we should just develop useful technologies directly when we identify the challenges they can solve.
For example, it's recently become popularly known that the Martian regolith is sock full of perchlorates, all of it. Martian living would require developing the technology to remove perchlorates from soil at staggering industrial scale. How would this ever be useful on Earth, where perchlorates are not naturally occurring and are, if anything, industrially desirable?
There's also the big challenge of Mars's lack of a sufficient magnetic sphere to prevent solar winds from blowing away a makeshift atmosphere. The solution I here (basically putting in place a big metal plate to re-direct solar radiation) heavily rely on such systems never failing.
The usual solution I hear is "everyone lives in a cave every minute of their lives, forever", which frankly doesn't sound very fun to me.
Isn't that just a shitload of free rocket fuel?
That, to me, seems to make the whole endeavor more desirable rather than less.
I mean, the rocket fuel is only useful to get your ass back off of fucking Mars.
A world in which we're actually doing useful shit in space, whether it be resource extraction or refining and zero-G metallurgy, would benefit immensely from having a base of operations with an atmosphere, a shallower gravity well, and a bunch of free rocket fuel.
The less we have to bring out of Earth's gravity well the faster a future in which we can exploit the whole solar system comes.
You're on the record as not caring, fine, but I would like to see us continue to grow even after we've filled the globe.
To the next destination. We shall colonize NEPTUNE!!
A shallower gravity well, chemical propellants aplenty, and it's a bit farther toward the Belt anyway? A couple small moons? Could be something there.
There's something cooler and more exciting about colonizing Mars than colonizing Trenton.
“…more exciting about colonizing Mars than colonizing Trenton.”
You can’t look at it merely as a destination, a stopping place. It’s a proving-ground, a grand experiment, a way to develop new technologies and methods that could some day take us all the way to Camden.
I'm fully ignorant of CA urban history. What communities did they build in the 60s-70s ? Are those communities successful now?
You have heard of one very famous one; San Francisco. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliflower_Commune
Of course the Wikipedia article I linked to is about the “Kaliflower commune”.
I think the “success” of this commune is instructive. The commune really did have a culture and ideas that became quite influential. As the article notes aspects of the commune actually still exist. And stuff like food coops became a small (but real) thing.
But it’s probably not an accident that this commune “succeeded” where it did. In other words the commune probably couldn’t have survived if it wasn’t part of the greater San Francisco community.
In a lot of ways the famously left wing culture of San Francisco owes a lot to these communes. But the economics of why the city exists in the first places really doesn’t have anything at all to do with the economic precepts of the communes.
In the Los Angeles metro, the master-planned communities include places like Irvine (to the south, in Orange County) and Valencia (to the north). These places have plenty of residential but were designed to become commercial hubs as well and also set aside land for industrial uses, so they are regional job centers in their own right.
For that matter, there are even some significant parts of the west side that were still filling in in the late 20th century, as was most of the inland empire to the east.
I’m still finding it hard to understand, even after reading the flood of 50-years-later stories in the Orange County Register last month, how it is that the north edge of Orange County was basically empty land that was able to accommodate a huge Vietnamese refugee population.
There were still orange groves in the 90s, if not early 2000s!
I usually agree with most of your comments. This is a rare one that I disagree with. I think we can try both approaches. Let people do what they want with habitable land.
It’s too bad these projects are never being championed by people who just want to play SimCity in real life.
Okay, but if fixing those intractible problems turns out to be intractible, what then?
As an aside, it struck me that the quoted line from the article is kind of the obvious pro-NIMBY argument hiding in plain sight.
Don’t dis chi town buddy
The mayor becoming a laughingstock seems bad for PR
Breezy Town! The City of Thick Necks!
About 50-60 kilometres outside of Adelaide, Australia, is Monarto Safari Park ("the largest safari in the southern hemisphere"). I was curious how it came to be. In 1970 the government freaked out about population growth in Adelaide, deciding it was on a path to become unlivable with 1.5 million people by the year 2000. So they burned a ton of political capital and money acquiring vast amounts of land 60km away to build a satellite city. The plan quickly withered and died for obvious reasons (everyone thinks someone else should move 60km away) and the state government was left with massive amounts of land nobody wanted. Eventually the city zoo agreed to take some and began transferring their large animals (lions, elephants, etc) out there.
Driving out there today one wonders how anyone in 1970 thought this could possibly work.
Let me introduce you to Xiong’an New Area!
It’s always better and more valuable to plan for density than to plan to expand. Expansion runs its course and hits geographic limits almost no matter where you are located. Even Houston is now densifying.
Have you been to the safari park itself? How is it?
We have a zoo membership so we can visit any zoo in the country for free, so we've been out to Monarto with the kids a few times, including for the lion feeding experience.
They have buses that follow trails inside the enclosures, so it is fairly on rails. You can hop on and off the buses but then you're outside the enclosures and the animals aren't necessarily especially close. You can also hike between enclosures if you wanted to do that.
It is okay but you rarely get especially close to the animals, since the buses follow a trail and the animals can go wherever they feel like. It's a good day out with the kids though.
That is a brilliant story!
It appears my aging, failing memory is to blame. I checked their website and they actually say "largest safari outside of Africa".
You didn’t mean it the way that came out, surely
"This sounds great to me… but it’s just Miami!" Just the latest example of the tech-right reinventing something that already exists. God it's exhausting.
"...the tech-right reinventing something that already exists."
Are you sure Miami actually exists? I've heard it's mostly vaporware.
Miami is the original concept of a plan.
I think you're confusing vaporware with vaporwave
https://open.spotify.com/track/7HUr1R8en1yWAstHHDxy5Q
Thanks! Had not encountered vaporwave before.
So convenient that Miami and vaporwave are adjacent aesthetics!
“…adjacent aesthetics!”
Betting on the existence of Miami, a.k.a. pastel’s wager.
Been there. It exists 😆
Well, Miami more or less won’t exist in approximately 100 years due to climate change-related rise in sea levels, so we’ll need a replacement.
I hope they pick higher ground than .. Guantanamo Bay
One of the many ways in which UK planning discourse is irredeemably cursed is the perennial obsession over 'new towns' - places like Milton Keynes, Stevenage, Telford, Skelmersdale, etc. We built a bunch of these in the 50s-70s, and how successful they were basically seems to be a function of how far away they are from an already-existing, successful city. But because of the green belt and the difficulty of densifying existing cities in a discretionary system, it's the best we can do, so governments keep proposing more of them - Starmer is doing the same thing. It's literally just building houses a bit further away from where the demand actually is for no apparent benefit. Maddening!
There's a bit of discussion about new towns here https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-britain-doesnt-build/
It's also quite telling that when we refer to new towns we are almost entirely referring to places built before anyone still of working age was born (i.e. 60+ years ago).
Then there's the most recent effort to make a new town, which fell on its face in black comic fashion.
https://bsky.app/profile/roadscholar.bsky.social/post/3lh456nlgws2w
I read the replies. Oops.
Indeed - Northstowe has also gone very badly AIUI.
This kind of development (i.e. a few miles away from a desirable place to live) is also utterly awful for encouraging cycling, walking and public transport - because inevitably to do much of anything you need to travel several miles. Through my work I'm familiar with quite detailed surveys of travel habits by area; and it's not uncommon to have well over 95% of households primarily relying on the car in such places, while the main city to which it is a satellite has a good level of cycling and walking.
If we're serious about growing active travel use we need more people to be able to live in places which best facilitate it.
I would be vastly more impressed by your green belts were they actually anything except privately-held scrub/agricultural land.
It seems you're going to have to collapse at least as far as Argentina relative to the cutting edge of the global economy before someone gets into office with a remit to torch your planning bureaucracy to the ground and shoot the environmental consultants.
It’s not the environmental consultants, it’s the Tories who live in those nice towns and don’t want anyone to join them.
Porque no los dos?
Seems like the obvious point here.
I was surprised to learn that the UK has actual policy aimed at preventing distinct towns from growing to combine, because they think this is essential for each town to have its own character. And on Reddit, any thread about comparing population sizes between US cities and European cities ends with a lot of people getting morally judgy about how it’s wrong to count whole urban area populations because they’re technically made up of a bunch of separate cities.
I was chatting with my Brit friends last time I was in London and commented that the reaction to anyone trying to build anything could be summed up as “u wot m8”
It's true
England : where new towns have old names.😳
Not exactly the point of this article, but to the bit about filling in New Jersey; people like to complain about dying small towns, and I get that. There are a lot of them in the Midwest and Northeast. But it's not true that these towns never reverse their fortunes. It's just that when they do, people complain about that too. The only way to reverse the population decline of a city is either to have the birthrate absolutely explode (doubtful) or to have people move there. I guess the town could improve to the extent that the locals stop leaving. But a town where locals stick around is probably one where newcomers also arrive. The newcomers by definition are usually either immigrants, which provokes one type of backlash, or from other parts of the country, usually from a heavily populated region like California or New York. That provokes a different type of backlash.
I don't really know where I'm going with this besides "people will be mad no matter what." 🤷
This is the thesis of "Stuck" by Yoni Appelbaum.
The north had a "freedom to leave." The society was built off of fleeing religious persecution, so social norms allowed people to abandon their small town family ties and strike out for greener pastures. But puritan towns were suspicious of outsiders and didn't allow many new people into their communities.
The south had a "freedom to join." It was built off of a shortage of labor, and so they wanted anyone and everyone to come work the fields. But once you were there, slavery, indentured servitude, and sharecropping tied you to the land so you couldn't leave.
With westward expansion, the freedom to join and the freedom to leave finally came together. Boom towns would welcome lots of people in, but once the work dried up, people would migrate somewhere else for a better job. And so American culture became unusually friendly to newcomers, and miraculously, not many people complained. And that willingness to migrate unlocked a long period of economic dynamism and the country became a superpower.
And then around 1970 we decided that the frontier was finally closed and we stopped giving people the freedom to join communities, and here we are.
>the town could improve to the extent that the locals stop leaving
Generally, the only way to do that is to…get more people in to improve the place (eg having people move to Detroit to buy up and fix the dilapidated buildings/vacant lots), but that runs into the other issues you discuss.
Yeah, the only places I can think of where the town grows, locals stay put, and nobody moves there, are religious towns like Kiryas Joel or some polygamous towns in Utah. Any town that is a mainstream American town is going to have to grow by acquiring New residents. At the height of population for cities like Detroit and Cleveland, people were moving there in droves from the Deep South, Appalachia, etc.
When I was a kid, we used to take field trips to Lowell and our teachers would warn us ahead of time that it was a rough town. Then we would get there and it was... fine. Pretty nice if we went in the Spring. As an adult, I found out that immigration from Southeast Asia helped stop the city's downward decline and helped revitalize it.
The other example of new city building is tourist amenity driven. Las Vegas and Orlando basically emerged out of nowhere over the last 50 years because people built reasons for tourists to visit. You could imagine opportunities for 1-2 more of these elsewhere in the country (North Carolina? Texas?)
The Vegas thing is an interesting example — it worked because gambling was illegal everywhere else so there was a specific reason to create a new city in Nevada.
Macau more or less boomed for this same reason.
It's wild to me that the Chinese Communist Party is watching Macau do land reclamation and not deciding that it makes more sense to just expand the boundaries of Macau onto existing land.
There must be something I'm missing-- would this be somehow embarrassing to the CCP? Are the areas adjacent Macau resistant to the idea?
It just seems like Macau's advantage is largely its system of governance, and expanding Macau to the north and west increases the land under that governance much more cheaply than reclaiming new land.
Ketamine Valley here we come!
Yeah, and then Atlantic City followed!
At least Springsteen wrote a good about it 😆
Have you ever gone to gamble there? It is really something dystopian with the crumbling casino monoliths, the old, tatty boardwalk, the vacant lots and the occasional local enclave you encounter walking.
I lived in Westfield NJ around 1980 for about a year. I went to Atlantic city when it was still an old school boardwalk town.. and Bruce was still an up and coming punk!!😆
A crumbling rather than thriving gambling establishment is a good thing? Unless of course they're just betting online :(
Not for the city.
It’s very important that it was directly across a state line, but still close to a huge city! Someone else mentioned Atlantic City, which had to do a more complex regulatory arbitrage to get a location farther from the city than the state border.
As I was typing all this, I realized that some of this is the same phenomenon as how retail chains decide to site outlet malls - it’s important for them to be far enough from the main city for people to price-segregate. Are there any famous outlet malls that have become the site of edge cities that became new urban centers? Could there be?
Hard to see a reason to add more when both NV and central FL still have (relatively) cheap land available. Plus, you get a lot from networks effects. Even if you build a giant resort in the middle of nowhere, TX, people only get to go to that one resort. Orlando has a massively-built-out Disney operation in addition to Universal Studios. Then you've got random hangers-on like Sea World, plus professional sports and nice beaches within driving distance.
Maybe there's a place in TX that's close enough to enough city centers that you could start with driving Texans making up most of your custom (cheaper than flying!), but I'm skeptical.
I will say that Disney's parks seem both heavily supply-constrained and massively popular these days, which does militate towards market opportunities for expansion. But perhaps Disney Cruises are a more scalable, less-risky substitute there?
Dallas may get a casino resort sometime in the next decade given the Adelson’s involvement with the city.
In DFW you can see a million billboards for one by the Oklahoma border.
Orlando and Vegas are doing fine and have plenty of growth ahead of them. But Matt’s topic is how do new cities emerge and if Disney decided to build SuperDisneyWorld near say Fairfield TX or Rocky Mount NC I’m confident a new city would emerge.
Matt please find and replace each instance of Solana with Solano County, it's making me crazy.
2020 Solution: Solanx County
^ comment of the day
sorry about that! Weird because there is also a man named Solana referenced in the piece. But changes made.
Thank you!
Matt hasn't spent much time in Vallejo, California, a lovely exurb with a salubrious summer climate and a county fairgrounds.
Nope - everything from now on will be referred to by its crypto-equivalent name...
The best way to build a new city would be what other countries have done -- build a new national capital. Somewhere between St Louis and Memphis would be a good central location. And the 250th birthday of the US is as good an occasion as any for a project like that.
But other than a brand new city, infilling distressed older industrial cities, perhaps by making them special trade and immigration zones, would be a good idea.
Putting the new capitol in St Louis feels like a twofer.
I think it’s cruel and unusual punishment to make government employees (or anyone) live in St. Louis.
There's a dude with quite a few vowels in his name who's not gotta like that comment one little bit.
He's got just as many vowels and syllables in his name as Matt has in his full first and last name, and that's not even counting Y as a vowel.
At first I didn’t know what you meant, and then I realized. I suppose I should anticipate a spittle-flecked series of personal attacks that Ben tolerates (even though I would most certainly be banned for much less) such as everything here [1].
I’d give it a 40% chance that I get banned for pointing out this double standard (the easiest thing to do).
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/monday-thread-224/comment/114811048
Oh, geez, I had zero idea that you guys were in conflict (just perused that thread...OMG!). I was simply aware that the commenter in question is from St. Louis, and zealously defends the honor of his home town. LOL.
I’ve been there, and my assessment is “Detroit with even less charm and more crime”.
Marion had the telecom infrastructure already!
Though it’s a hellish climate, at least for me. Weather is terrible.
It’s funny you bring this up, as this is not a new idea - there were several fairly serious proposals to bring the national capital to the Midwest (and specifically to St Louis) maybe 125-150 years ago.
Metropolis!
Denver or KC would make the most sense IMO.
Denver would make no sense. St. Louis is near the center of population in the US and could probably be revitalized by being designated a capital.
Denver has IIRC the second largest concentration of federal employees outside the DMV and is much easier to defend from invaders (I shit you not, these two things are related! Even in this day and age). If the government were to relocate, my money would be Denver.
Plus, I mean, St. Louis is a swampy shithole that also has ice storms and tornadoes, Denver is not, and you’d think Congress would have to consent to the move for it to happen.
Geographic isolation is a double-edged sword. We should be copying other examples of successful new designated capitals such as Canberra or Ottawa, not Brasilia.
Wasn't that the idea for Metropolis, Illinois?
Imagine what an absolute hellhole DC would become. It would be worse than Detroit.
For some guidance on where to put it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_center_of_the_United_States_population
It's always fun to see how that path starts going south when the air conditioner became widespread.
The first Trump administration moved certain USDA positions from DC to the Midwest (I think Kansas City). In practice, it just meant a loss of institutional knowledge since most of the people who were being moved just quit and they had trouble filling the positions.
In the “Scythe” YA novel series, set in the distant future, the capital of America (the United States doesn’t exist anymore) is Fulcrum City, which the well-educated know used to have the ancient name of St. Louis.
Is this the same Scythe with the dieselpunk communist mechs?
No, it’s a futuristic utopia ruled by an all-powerful benevolent AI
Relatedly, force ESPN to re-locate to Omaha. I'm tired of the sports media east coast bias!
Peyton Manning keeps yelling about that city, after all! Bristol does seem like a dreary place to live.
Sea level rise will eventually require the relocation of the US Capital anyway. The 2020 median center of US population was somewhere between Louisville and St Louis...
Instead of buying Greenland, we should buy Baja California and build a beach resort cities there.
There's only about 3 million people living there so we could do it for probably $10k/ person or about $30b. They'd benefit from the cash and from being American, we'd get space for an attractive new city, everyone wins.
That would conflict with turning Baja into a new Palestinian homeland though.
whynotboth.gif meme
Imagine the Jack Nicholson nodding and smiling GIF here, but instead of Nicholson, it's William Walker and he's wearing a kaffiyeh.
I think we should buy up all of northern Mexico. Plenty of maquiladoras there, and we are supposed to bring back manufacturing…
That would go against the logic of wanting Greenland, as a hedge against global warming.
“…as a hedge against global warming.”
Planning for the obvious isn’t a hedge. The real *hedge* move is to plan for global cooling.
Absorbing Canada makes much more sense for that, doesn't it?
Canada needs to absorb the USA obviously 🙄
Agree - we would get parliamentary democracy and all the fresh water we can drink in one fell swoop.
Greenland is a hedge against Russia
Why not directly buy Russia?
It costs more than Greenland
You gotta spend all the tariff money somewhere
I went to a resort in Baja on the Pacific (Rosarito). I figured the water would be warm because it's in Mexico. No, it's basically the same temperature as Maine because of the currents.
Buy? Conquer!!!
The math I have learned since moving to the suburbs is that people care a lot about percentage growth. Locals in my village would freak out if the town grew 20%, and yet that would only be a few hundred units. Versus a city might absorb hundreds of new units easily. Overall I think the future is YIMBY cities that grow plus sprawl at the edges, which is boring but will get us the numbers.
Yeah this seems correct to me — San Antonio will keep sprawling and with some policy reforms in place (including a bill the Texas legislature passed on Monday) keep adding infill as well.
I wish the bill went farther, but this one also seems designed to be hard for NIMBY's to yell at since it doesn't affect existing residential zoning. And also feels like a good solution to some of the WFH changes.
It’s not even irrational – a town of 400 is going to change immensely if it suddenly receives another 200 people, and change has transition costs. Meanwhile, a mid-sized city like Provo accommodates 200 new people per week fairly deftly.
Oh exactly! And the concerns about overfilling the local schools are not unreasonable. Or overloading the volunteer fire department.
Yes, any manner of municipal services are going to be tailored to the rough order of magnitude of the town population, more so than the specific number. Therefore, percentage-based increase matters more in terms of disruption to the locality.
I live in what was once a new city. Peachtree City, Georgia was incorporated in 1959, 31 miles from downtown Atlanta and well beyond the suburban edge at the time. It was a freedom city for conservative Democrats.
Matt’s YIMBY vs NIMBY frame ignores the value of consumer choice. If you build a good community, people naturally want to preserve its character. Peachtree City is a planned community with large lot sizes, 90 miles of multi-use paths, and abundant shade. Pre-planning allowed residents who wanted this lifestyle to self-select. We have a stronger community spirit here than anywhere else I’ve lived.
Greenfield development is cheaper than infill. My 2500-square-foot home on half an acre with a big pool is worth about $550,000. Families raising successful children on $150k a year know they get a better deal here than in expensive cities.
Today, there’s a new class of remote workers. Many want affordable housing, airport access, and perhaps the option to drive to work occasionally. Greenfield development offers these workers affordability and communities that share their values.
If, 50 years from now, these remote workers like the communities they’ve built and want to preserve their character, I call that success even if Matt thinks it’s NIMBY hell.
“… incorporated in 1959, 31 miles from downtown Atlanta….It was a freedom city for conservative Democrats.”
Thanks, David — best laugh I have had all morning.
The police museum there is worth a visit, especially the historical uniform section. Don’t see many Capirotes in the United States
But some in that part of Georgia and the South more generally.
I appreciate that you are using a place whose creation explains what the "preserving community character" euphemism is all about to then defend the idea of continuing to preserve "community character" by making apartments illegal.
It’s telling that you are more interested in whether my community has the odor of segregation than whether it delivers good consumer value. Like most Americans, my concerns are more material than identarian.
I am skeptical that new communities in suburban Atlanta in 1959 reflectee a non-identitarian set of concerns.
Congratulations, you win today’s SB Polite Euphemism Award.
Meanwhile, we always know who's in charge of the dysphemisms here.
"...in charge of the dysphemisms here..."
I love my fellow creatures -- I do all the good I can!
Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!
And I can't think why!
Single family homes now, single family homes forever!
Fortunately Newnan is just down the road.
I like my community’s character.
I recommend acquiring title to the whole thing then, so that you can ensure that it doesn't change.
You mock, but HOAs effectively do hijack all of the titles in a given neighborhood to inject their nasty CC&Rs into them.
Yes, I totally agree. HOAs are a seriously underrated problem in American planning, driven mostly by municipalities trying to avoid taking on costs that should be their responsibility, for parks, roads, trash collection, etc.
I'm not entirely negative on that, if neighborhoods want to internalize their costs within themselves, that's OK as long as municipal costs outside of HOAs are still accounted for. Where I stridently oppose them is any restriction of the land use of purely private property, and I think many people (including Matt) really underrate how they can further NIMBYism in a different venue.
And the only people who like them are the people who serve on HOAs. It's like if we decided to make a Twitter thread a form of semi-governance.
lol
The issue here is that if every locale does this there's no where for young people to start out and raise families, which means no kids, which means you and I end our lives dying in a pool of our own filth.
Every community needs to be open to some change, coupled with the stronger law enforcement and professional governance needed to ensure that change doesn't destroy it.
If every wealthy inner suburb had allowed a few more hundred townhomes to be built on brownfield/in-fill sites since 2015, every blighted city had reduced crime rates to those of NYC, and our four superstar cities allowed a bunch of high-rises, nowhere would have been transformed, but our problems would be vastly smaller.
I wish more people made the connection that the housing you are blocking could be for you or your neighbors' kids and grandkids.
Yeah, the "where are you kids going to live when they grow up" question is one of the best arguments for YIMBYism.
That’s really not true. If you go outside of major cities, there’s a good mix of reasonably priced housing options available. If you can work remote, there are lots of very attractive options.
Young couples (27-37) starting families are the prime demographic of remote workers. They can get cheaper housing in greenfield development than through infill townhouses built on expensive land in prestigious suburbs.
Remote workers make up under 15% of the workforce and slowly declining in favor of hybrid models that still require people to be within commuting distance.
Greenfield development is occurring and has relatively few constraints placed on it throughout wide swathes of the US. If it were enough, it would have been enough *last decade*. It was not.
Remote workers include traditional remote workers, gig workers and consultants working remote, and small location-independent and e-commerce businesses. In toto, that’s not decreasing. They are also supporting secondary development as that increased population drives new businesses in exurbs, towns, and rural areas.
Examples of remote workers I know personally include a commercial real estate developer, a social science researcher, and a systems engineer.
Overall population shifts are towards smaller cities, exurbs, and rural. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america for a nice discussion of the census data
Sure, and those places *also* need to liberalize homebuilding!
Everywhere does. It's really that simple!
No, they really do not.
Many/most places have very reasonable zoning rules, and the rules that exist are needed for things like minimum lot size to support well and septic. Realize, nearly a third of households are not on public sewer, and private septic is not feasible on small lots.
Fixing what’s broken is not a great reason to break what’s working well. One size does not fit all.
Greenfield development and infill are not mutually exclusive. Politically, infill should be aimed at the close in areas of big, rich cities. Young, productive workers are not being priced out of Atlanta or Dallas. They are being priced out of Boston and New York City.
Did you even read my original comment?
yes
I'm not going to make an implicit comment like Sam made downthread, but I will say that anytime I hear about preserving neighborhood character, I will not let that stand, and demand explicit aspects of what people want in their neighborhoods. At least you've cited here that that includes "large lot sizes, 90 miles of multi-use paths, and abundant shade". I say multiuse paths are good, and should be municipally built just like roads and sidewalks are (not walled off by HOA restrictions), and shade is good in parks (public or private), and on public strips abutting sidewalks and curbs. But on one's own private property, I don't think it's good to force people to put up and maintain trees they don't want (yes yes, username doesn't check out), nor to force them to have and maintain a bunch of land they can't use for much else other than just lawn.
Anyone who bought a house in PTC chose to opt into that zoning code. If they wanted a less distinctive community, they could have bought in Newnan, Lovejoy, Hampton, McDonough, Stockbridge, Locust Grove, Conyers, Lithonia, Villa Rica, etc. And that’s just on the south side of atlanta 18-30 miles out. Why not let a couple dozen flowers bloom?
You can have all the flowers you want on your land. Forcing your neighbor to only plant the flowers you like doesn't seem like freedom to me.
Let a hundred flowers bloom! As long as they are the pre-approved species and aesthetics hand chosen by your local commissar, I mean, HOA.
Actually, I can’t grow cucumbers or tomatoes in my front yard and si do feel oppressed by that.
I simply think that there should be very wide latitude on what people can do with land that they own. If someone wants to buy a bunch of land and build a bunch of SFHs that they still own and want to rent out according to their rules, that's fine, but it doesn't seem like there's a huge market for that on a neighborhood sized level.
I had heard Columbia, Maryland was a planned community. Looks like 1967 - and now the second most populous city in the state.
I was. But it is 25 miles from DC and 20 from Baltimore and quite near I-95, so it’s different. One of the distinctive things about PTC is we are 13 miles from an interstate. The road that connects us to I-85 has an execrable 55 mph speed limit. For the sake of folks who commute to the airport of downtown, we should raise that to 65. A few extended turning lanes would suffice, as they do on SR 16 between I-75 and Griffin.
As a former PTCian, I wish the original vision for a community based around boating and aquatic transportation had come to fruition.
Specially in the right-wing, I suspect the program of "new cities" has an implicit desire that perhaps those "new cities" could not be democracies, but some kind of corporate entities, or "charter cities", or something
One big advantage of new cities is that you can make them much greener than organicly developing cities, look at Canberra in Australia or the various town built by the Garden City movement in the UK. Being full of parks and relatively upscale means it is less likely that locals will object.
Irvine definitely has that going for it.
It’s the Thiel-ist desire for a modern American system without any democratic input.
Peter Thiel turned into Andrew Ryan so quickly that everyone noticed.
It’s weirder maybe that Trenton and Baltimore (and New Haven) have remained shitty despite best efforts when the last 20 years old cities with research universities have roared back to life.
Trenton may not have a university, but Rochester does.
Another class of city like this is Hoboken, which has been “surprisingly nice” for 15 years.
So Baltimore is kind of an outlier among the cities Matt named here because it’s an awful lot larger - it’s 85% of the population of DC, and is 5-10x larger than Trenton/Camden/Wilmington/New Haven/Reading/insert small-ish distressed Northeast city here. There has been plenty of gentrification that’s gone on in Baltimore for the last 20-30 years, a lot of which has been spurred on by Johns Hopkins and its hospital buying up distressed blocks to expand its campus and workforce housing. Even outside of that, there’s plenty of “organic” gentrification that’s taken place in the historically white neighborhoods that run down the city’s central spine.
The big NE superstar cities haven’t done their big turnarounds on the backs of research universities alone - large companies moving headquarters or opening offices in city limits helps a lot. Baltimore struggles to retain private businesses - it’s much more “eds and meds and nothing else” than even Philadelphia, to say nothing of DC, NY, or Boston. If you really wanted to see the city return to its rightful place as a peer of Boston and DC, there need to be more jobs downtown.
Two things that surprised me about Baltimore when I visited some years are a) a lot of the city actually is pretty nice, but b) the nice parts almost all exist within very close proximity of not-nice parts. In Philly and DC - which have broadly similar crime rates IIRC - there's sort of a 'nice' region of the city and a 'not-nice' region of the city, and the nice zone is large and mostly contiguous, so if you're in that area you don't notice the crime and distress, really. Baltimore felt much patchier, which makes the distress more visible.
Of course having the distress squirreled away "somewhere else" has its own problems (see Chicago). But I do wonder if this impacts peoples' perceptions of Baltimore and willingness to move there.
This is mostly true of Philly but not in full IMO. There are some isolated islands of "nice" hanging out amidst the not-so-nice bits, and a few major problem spots (mostly public housing complexes) in the middle of long-gentrified areas. The frontlines are also pretty damned convoluted, which puts a lot of residents of nice neighborhoods in proximity to less-nice ones even if the former are geographically contiguous.
We also have a band of middle-class black neighborhoods, most prominently along City Ave and Cheltenham Ave, in which the degradation of quality of life is a constant threat because they're isolated from the newer gentrified areas while still being much nicer than the blighted ones.
Layered atop all this, Philly just isn't quite *big* enough to have neighborhoods where you're almost entirely isolated from crime or disorder like you would be in the stretch of Chicago from River North to Wrigley.
Yeah, that's fair - it's why I said the nice zone is mostly contiguous.
Public housing projects tend to create problem spots in any city that has them, I'd say. There are public housing projects in the middle of gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and the streets immediately bordering them always feel kind of run-down, but then you go a block away its all cocktail bars and boutiques and people with expensive strollers.
I agree with that description, it just quite doesn't do justice to how narrow the connections are in many places, such that no matter which nice neighborhood you're in, you're still pretty close to the "frontier" in much of the city.
I'll also note that our murder rate is roughly half of Baltimore's now. We're probably on track for the lowest number of murders in the city since the 1966 in absolute terms or 1969 in per capita terms.
DC struggled with this- problems around housing projects in gentrified neighborhoods- and still does a bit with Columbia Heights and the new section 8 building way up Connecticut- but the mayor is basically trying to bulldoze every project and it’s “working”
PHA is a spectacularly incompetent infrastructure owner, in every phase from contracting construction to late-lifecycle maintenance, and the "projects" model is a miserable failure that concentrates and perpetuates poverty.
I don't even know what to do to replace it; Maybe sell it off and establish a trust to offer a flat rental subsidy to all people who qualify, with a sloowwwww phase-out, instead of the Section 8 "10-year waiting list followed by a lifetime of free rent" model.
Public housing the in the US is just a huge problem. It’s total shit, and our general aversion to paternalism means that there’s rarely- if ever- a way to stop some of the people living in it from turning it into a living hell (I’m not exaggerating, there’s a litany of stories from a single building in the richest part of dc that sound like a horror anthology).
I dunno. Surely there’s a way to build it so people want to live in it without becoming Singapore (which has great public housing that middle and upper middle class people will live in) or what we have now (where you occasionally discover a decomposing toddler on the corpse of her mother who definitely starved to death and whose screams were probably ignored by everyone for weeks)
News link for the curious:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/28/mother-daughter-dead-dc-apartment/
I will never forget walking from my Baltimore hotel to the Apple Store and realizing that there is a secret map of Baltimore that Google doesn’t know — I ended up walking through some very tough-looking slum blocks before I got to the Apple Store, and took an Uber back.
When/where was this? As far as I know there’s never been an Apple store in Baltimore - there were plans for one at the Inner Harbor maybe a decade ago but they never materialized.
That he might have accidentally found an illicit apple store makes the story even better.
Baltimore still REALLY sucks though. And it seems like the “good” neighborhoods like the inner harbor are losing ground. It’s nearly impossible to raise kids there, which you wouldn’t say for a DC or a New York now but you would have said in the 90s.
It is big enough to merit its own case study. The reason big cities come back seems worth analyzing- Detroit contracted down to almost nothing before bouncing back.
Odd to see that Baltimore has "85% the population of DC," like it's a surprise how many people live there, when Baltimore city was bigger than Washington proper for most of U.S. history (and often by a good margin). The year I was born, 1970, it was about 900K to 750K, and as both cities shrank Baltimore remained larger through at least 2010. But Washington rebounded along the way and Baltimore is still sliding — in 2024 it was 568K vs 702K, quite a change!
Philly does vastly better on private investment and employment than Baltimore, even if we're somewhat over-reliant on 4 large universities and a host of large hospital systems.
If we can use the very large windfall we'll get once we've got the pension system fully funded (IIRC it'll be like $600M a year in reduced contributions) to kill off the gross receipts part of BIRT and lower the business income and wage taxes a good bit, then that gap will become even more pronounced.
We're also due to see something like $300M a year of revenue by 2030 as the various tax abatements on residential development expire, so there should be ample revenues to top up Parks and Rec and Streets, maybe even inaugurate a street sweeping program, without having to spend the $600M we currently spend on catch-up contributions to the pension fund.
It’s a little uncomfortable to talk about, but it seems much less likely for a city to become desirable—notwithstanding its other amenities—if it has a large existing black population. Hoboken has gentrified significantly; it was never particularly black (5% in 1980). Jersey City has improved much more than Newark, which was twice as black in 1980 (28% vs 58%). Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which I think is often cited as a paradigmatic example of gentrification, was similarly more Hispanic than black. Painting with broad strokes here, of course.
Probably true but, seems like it’s worth having the hard conversation here and figuring out why- I mean I even know there’s heterogeneity in that sample, Durham NC has become a lot more desirable and the match- New Haven- hasn’t. I know a lot about why in both places, and yes racism is a factor, but it’s a lot more complicated than that I think in some ways that might be amenable to policy changes
(In Durham, Duke basically bought the whole city with an investment group, and there were decent jobs in Raleigh and chapel hill nearby. Yale has tried with much less success in New Haven)
*cough* Johns Hopkins *cough*
Who are trying their damndest to move a lot of everything to DC. Bought the Newseum to move most of the business school down.
Is this just a secular shift? Tons of schools are opening DC campuses. Is it punting in Baltimore? Probably not like, all the way. But it does seem like they’re tired of Baltimore’s bullshit.
A lot of those campuses were already in DC for decades (partly due to the Cold War), just in different neighborhoods.
Hoboken seems different in kind since it’s essentially an NYC exurb.
Hoboken is across the river from Manhattan and has frequent subway service via PATH. It's not an exurb, its Brooklyn Heights except in New Jersey.
I know what you're saying but please -- Hoboken wishes it was Brooklyn Heights
A lot of New Jersey commutes to Philly and NYC- a real surprise to me when I had a fly out in Philly and everyone lived in Jersey.
Most of New Jersey is suburbs of NYC and Philly. Never been a surprise to me, but I grew up in metro NYC so I always was aware of it.
Literally 100% of that state falls in either the Philly or NYC CSAs.
Didn't Ben Franklin describe NJ as "a barrel tapped at both ends"?
CSAs are absolutely massive though, they’re designed to cast an almost ludicrously broad net. Better to say that ~90% of NJ is part of the NYC or Philly MSAs.