 Hi everybody and welcome to tonight's episode, I guess, of the Ideas Live. We're going to be talking about what you can learn from a city neighborhood. And I'm here tonight with Dr. Sandy Aquetta from Stuni Purchase College, where he's an associate professor of economics at the School of Natural and Social Sciences, which is a cool sounding place. So thanks so much for being on tonight, Sandy. Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. Me too. I was telling Sandy earlier today when we were talking about going through this that this is the event that one of the events that I've been really looking forward to. And the reason is that I met Sandy a couple of years ago, just as I was starting to read the works of Jane Jacobs. And Sandy is also a big fan of Jacobs. And so I was at a actually I was at a fee seminar. And somebody said, Oh, make sure that you meet Sandy. So he's been responsible for getting me really excited about Jane Jacobs. I'm now reading all of her work. And my favorite thing that I've learned from her is the topic of this webinar, what you can learn from a city neighborhood. So I'm going to let Sandy tell us a little bit about Jane Jacobs and why she's helped to make him an urbanist. So tell us a little bit about one of your favorite people. Yeah, sure. Yeah, she's one of my heroes. My other heroes, of course, are Ludwig Van Mises, F.A. Hayek, Ezra Kirzner. But she really fits right in there because when I read her, her first book, which is the Death and Life of Great American City, there was a residence. It was she was talking about processes, social processes, she was talking about discovery in ways that were at the same time familiar, but also a little bit different because she was reaching a lot of the same conclusions about the failure of central planning, this time at the local level. But using insights that were very similar to that of Mises and Hayek, for example, the failure of planners to take into local knowledge, she used the term locality knowledge, but really the same thing and how difficult it is really impossible for them to acquire that knowledge to the extent that they would need in order to plan the kinds of cities that they wanted to. So she's, you know, arrives at a lot of conclusions that were resonating with the kind of social theory that I was interested in. But Jacobs herself, if you want to know something about her, she's really interesting because a lot of people, not only on the libertarian side, but also on the more leftist side, are inspired by her. Because I think she, for a couple of reasons, one I think is because she was an activist. She fought the kind of entrenched interest and power elites in the New York area who wanted to, Robert Moses in particular, but others who wanted to sort of impose a vision without really understanding how the city works. And so she got on the street, she organized, she knew how to organize, she knew how to talk to people. So that's part of it. She's sort of part of that 1960s, late 1950s, early 1960s activism. And she got in touch with a lot of the local activists, you know, most of whom were on the left. And she's very successful. But at the same time, she preached what she practiced. In other words, she's writing about what she's observing and doing. And the result of that was the life, the death and life of great American cities, which again cast suspicion on central planning, on heavy handed intervention. I mean, she was not a libertarian, but she was hitting on all these, you know, points that were really important to people in the Austrian tradition of economics and a lot of libertarians. So she appeals to both left and right. She herself was not an academic. She attended, she was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But what's that? I've been through there, actually. I've never been there. It's like I should make a pilgrimage. Yeah, I've been to where she lived in the West Village, 55 Hudson Street. But I've never been to Scranton. So she left there after high school. She was a young woman and came to New York, lived with her sister. Actually, I think she lived in my neighborhood, which is Brooklyn Heights, for a little while, and attended Columbia University for like a semester and then sort of dropped out. She didn't like it. So she never got a, you know, graduated from college. There's some suspicion that she may never have actually graduated from high school, which is the kind of person who got bored, you know, in school. Then she got held various journalism jobs, particularly with architectural forum. She married someone who was an architect and so she learned a lot about design and things of that nature from him. And then she met William H. White, people like that, who were doing the sociology of cities and a lot of architects. So long story short, she kind of is an autodidact in terms of studying cities. She once told me that she, her technique was to read everything about a subject, just immerse herself in the literature, but at the same time observe. She considered herself a pragmatist who, you know, was empirical, very empirical in developed her ideas in that way. So that's kind of her in a nutshell. She raised a family in New York when she was writing, death and life. She had children. She was married. She was a housewife also, you know, she worked, and then came to Vietnam War and she said that in order to keep her sons from being drafted, among other reasons, but I think the main reason was that they moved to Toronto. And that's where she spent the last part of her life. And actually that's where I eventually got to meet her. Okay. Yeah. And she's famous for starting or stopping, I should say, a parkway through a really vibrant neighborhood in Toronto. So the activism did not end in New York. No, in fact, well, she was very reluctant to get involved in that again. I mean, she kind of left New York in order, I mean, as I said, to save her sons from being drafted, but at the same time, you know, people were asking her to do this and that. She was a real community leader and very effective and she just could, she couldn't write. I mean, that was her passion as well. And so just when I finally did get to meet her, it was through my friend and colleague, Pierre de Rocher, who's there in Toronto, and actually who may be listening, hi Pierre. And we went to her house and it just so happened that she was between books, because when she worked on a book, she cut everything out. You couldn't, you know, you couldn't talk to her at all. But she just finished what turned out to be her last book. And I think she had two more books on the contract. She was in her 80s at the time. So we spent about three and a half, four hours, one afternoon just talking. We're just an amazing, amazing experience at that time. Yeah, she was a very inspiring lady. And if I'd only known, she only passed away, I think in 2003, or something like that, fairly recently. So had I only known, I probably could have met her. It'll be one of my regrets that I didn't. Okay, so moving forward, Jacobs loved great cities. And I know that you do too. You love New York and was, especially Brooklyn Heights, your neighborhood. Sandy gives a great tour of his own neighborhood because he does James walks, which are kind of a tour that tell you about the history of the neighborhood. And I love cities too. There's just something about all of those people working together and the achievements that we can accomplish. So what is so great about cities? Why should everybody love cities? Well, I mean, you can appreciate cities on different levels. I think people just, you know, like the experience of being in a city that that's, you know, I've come to appreciate cities in that way. I guess I've always wanted to live in a big city, a group in a small town in the West, in Southwest, and, you know, finally, just, you know, by luck ended up here. But, you know, my when I really got passionate about cities, was sort of intellectually when I really when I read Jacobs, I, I started to understand why I like them in a way, just at a, you know, at a kind of a visual level, just what experiential level. But like I said earlier, when I read her, she really resonated with this other stuff that I was doing. At the time, I was working on the dynamics of interventionism. That's something I still keep in touch with. And then I think it's Pete Betke, who recommended that I do something on urban interventionism. And Pierre also suggested that I read Jacobs to do this. So when I, when I did it just, it was when I read the book, I think you have the same experience. You read Death and Life, Great American Cities. And it's just, it's a really an eye opener. It's one of those books that makes you see things in a completely different way. I mean, you take things for granted, and you like a city sidewalk, or some, some urban design, some design of public space, and it just, you know, oh, so that's why it's this way. That's why she gave, she gave me a vocabulary and a sort of a framework to understand how things are working. So, so that was sort of the beginning of it. But from that came an interest in social networks, in the concept of trust, and how that's important, in the history of the first cities, going back to like Jericho, Chattahuyuk, and others, the Natufians, who were the first settlers, who had the first settlements in the Middle East, and all of that. Just, it's kind of, she really opened a lot of doors for me. And just intellectually, it's just been a lot of fun. And I'm still interested in interventionism. I'm still interested in economics, obviously. I still consider myself an economist, however, when people ask me, you know, what kind of economics I do, I think I've got an answer down. But I have to pause because I realize it's not a, it's, I'm not an urban economist. That's a certain thing. In fact, you know, truth and advertising here, I've never taken a course in urban economics. And I really never have taught a course, strictly speaking, in urban economics, although my course is on, my course in cities, culture, and economy at purchase, you know, I draw on urban economics. You know, what I do, I guess, is sort of urban, sorry, is economic sociology. I look at cities as a dynamic generator of economic development. I guess that's one thing I have to add to what I was saying before, but why I'm interested. I'm a big fan of Visio Kersner and the idea of entrepreneurship. And what Jacobs did was helped me to see what the mechanisms of entrepreneurship are. And not only that, to see cities as places where people who are, who are interested in market processes really need to study. Cities are embody a lot of the things that economists, whether you're Austrian or whatever, are interested in like markets, prices, money, property rights, public goods, externalities, these things are all urban phenomena. And so if you, if you really want to understand how those work, you have to understand cities. And again, this is sort of on top of the social network theory stuff that I think bring, for me, brings everything together, kind of makes it all cohere. Yeah. If you're, if you're somebody who cares about, I think, the way that people cooperate in human freedom and flourishing, there's a really rich history in cities. My family background is German and Tom Palmer told the story at a seminar I went to a long time ago. And about the German works where they used to put on the, the sign for the plaque over the door to the city, Stadlitz-Machtfri, which is city air makes one free. And it used to be that if you could, if you could, if you were a surf and you could make it into the city for a year and a day, you would become part of the community and they would protect your freedom. It's just kind of that, that cool sense of community. And history, I, I, yeah, it's really, I don't know, there's something about it. You know what I mean? It's really interesting once you get it. I think the origins of that is, it's not because people, you know, the, the, the, the burger meisters or whatever were nice guys, but they realized it was these people who were being attracted to cities were really useful. I mean, these are people who are industrious, who want, who had ideas, who were seeking opportunity. And, you know, they didn't have much wealth, but these are what are responsible for the economic development. And I think that this idea that, that, you know, we have a city that welcomes strangers. I mean, it's a nice, it's one of those things, it's, yeah, it's a nice thing, but it has a very practical side to it, right? They wanted, they wanted people to stay, you know, they want, they had to modify the, you know, the, the lords of the manners that we're asking might be concerned about their service. Go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, we're going to talk a little bit more about trust in a little bit, too, because I think it's an important topic. Just one last thing. A lot of the people who moved to the cities, I think this is, I mean, this is particularly true with the rebirth of cities after the middle ages. But I mean, this is sort of true in general, that the growth of cities, the most dynamic part of the cities tended to be on the outskirts, what we would take today called the suburbs, the Fobar, the places where, strictly speaking, we're outside the control of the, of the, of the crafts, gills, and, you know, the, the, the Burgermeisters and everything. So people would settle kind of just outside that district where they could do their own thing. And so, you know, we think of the suburbs today as being kind of the anti-city. And, you know, we'll talk about that later. When they're, when they're artificially accelerated, their growth is, they can be. But historically, you know, the dynamism of cities have really come about as a result of development on the, that, the penumbra of cities, the outskirts. Okay. So very briefly, because I want to give everybody a chance for questions. A lot of people have a bad opinion of cities. Why do you, why do you think that is? I'm saying a lot of people have what? A bad opinion of cities. They don't like cities, if you're like, Oh, I mean, you know, I guess the different reasons people may have had a bad experience. My father, for example, just hated big cities. And he grew up on a farm and all that. So there, there are people who, who don't like big crowds and things like that. Okay. So that's one thing. But I think cities have gotten a bad reputation. People associate it with crime, for example, you know, the dangerous city. They associate it with pollution, for example, congestion, and, and all of that. Now, crime aside, cities are places where, you know, there is congestion. Also, cities are places where you see weird things. You know, people aren't accustomed to, you know, people cross-dressing, or, you know, loud noises on the street, or people selling or approaching you and the kinds of, you know, sex shops and kinds of things that you typically, things you don't see in a small town. Things that you don't see so often in a small town. Well, yeah, that's kind of hidden away in the small town. Cities are kind of out in the open and there's a lot of it and stuff that you can't even have imagined existed. And so that, that strangeness is very scary to a lot of people. And, you know, it's there. It is smelly. It is noisy, congested. You know, that's, so I think that's, that kind of, that side of the city is something that one reason why it gets a bad rep. Now, the crime thing is, is another thing. And that, you know, high crimes is an indicator of a failure of the city. Yeah, which is something that we're going to get to. But I want to pause to give everybody a chance to ask questions. And I'm going to launch one of our polls. If you haven't done an event with us before, I will occasionally pop up one of these. So just let me know how you think there's no right answer or wrong answer. Well, it's kind of discussed it a little bit. And if you have any questions, you can type them at any time, but I'll encourage you to type them now. We have been throwing around a little bit of economic jargon, which is okay. But if you didn't know some of it, for instance, externalities, ask about it, and we will do our best to explain it before going forward, because we don't want you to feel lost. But I haven't got anything about that. So if I don't, I'm going to assume that everything's okay. That's the other thing, you know, people don't like getting lost. Yeah. And often in cities, that's what happens to you, you get lost and it's kind of scary. They're definitely much bigger. Okay, so I don't have any questions yet. And I've got a bunch of people, almost everybody has voted. So I'm going to close the poll. But I will let you know that 59% of people who responded love cities, and 41% can take them or leave them. Nobody hates cities who's on here today, which is maybe a little bit unsurprising. Well, there's a selection bias sample here. All right. Oh, actually, I do have one quick question. Somebody said, what about the high cost of living in cities? The high cost of living? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that that can be a problem, you know, for cities to be incubators of ideas and, and sort of engines of economic development, there have to be opportunities for people without a lot of money, but with good ideas to to live in or near cities. And so, yeah, the high cost of living high price of real estate is a problem. Now, in most cities, there are districts that are not high price. These are places that may not have good transportation. They may have a bad reputation. They may in fact be dangerous. Or they may feel insecure. And that's where typically people tend to move who don't have much money. You know, the docklands in London, which are now fabulously expensive, were not so much like 20 years ago or 25 years ago here in New York, Williamsburg, right? I remember when I was a graduate student, many, many years ago, looking for a place to live, I checked out Williamsburg and it was a, and still is a very large, acidic Jewish community there and not much else. And now, as, as you know, it's like the center of hipster. So things like that happen. So, I mean, and New York is kind of a weird case because it really is difficult in the city to find affordable housing that's not, you know, subsidized by the government. Strange enough, you can find housing that subsidized privately for, you know, development. That's a little bit weird. There are places in the outskirts, Brownsville and Brooklyn and elsewhere and Queens and the Bronx that are still relatively affordable. But yeah, that is, now the thing is cities are not monolithic. I guess that's the point I'm trying to make, that there's some neighborhoods and districts that are economically vibrant and therefore you see the real estate prices rising in other places that aren't. And so over time, you see this, this kind of shift from one to another, the prices rising and falling and then falling and then rising elsewhere. Okay. So I have a couple of questions, but knowing where the conversation is going, I think that we might handle them a little bit later. So if everybody will bear with me, I am not forgetting about you. I just, we're going to move forward and I will ask your questions in a little bit. So before we go any further, I just wanted to quickly talk about a subject that I think is kind of the root of the insights that you can gain from a city. And that's this topic called spontaneous order is the sort of jargony name for it. Emergent order is another term that people like. And the technical definition is it's an order that comes about as a result of human action, but not as a result of human design. So a bunch of people are all going about their own business and a sort of order emerges. And for me, when I read Death and Life of Great American Cities, I had, it was just this amazing, she didn't, Jacobs didn't know what spontaneous order was. She didn't use that word. No. And I don't think, well, maybe she had heard it, but she, she didn't, she wasn't using that jargon. But that's what she was describing in the way that her neighborhood works. So do you have anything that you want to say about spontaneous order that might be useful to the people listening before we go forward? And then we're going to jump right into talking about what makes a good city neighborhood work. Yeah, it's an important concept. I think it holds the key to understanding a lot of, you know, about society, about the social order. But I think what some people find confusing about it is that at some level, there's always some conscious planning. It's not spontaneous. At some level of some social order, you know, if you take a, if you take a city, for example, people always say, well, you know, it is a manmade creation because it, you know, these buildings were designed by an architect, and they were constructed according to fairly meticulous plans and, you know, it was very well fought out. And so that's, that's certainly true. Moreover, they'll point out that, well, there are highways, there are roads, you know, who will build the roads? There's infrastructure there that is definitely the result of somebody's overarching plan. But that's undeniable. The question is whether you can have a city, a vibrant city without that kind of central planning from, you know, top down. You know, that's one issue. I think more germane would be to ask, you know, given, given we have some central planning, we have a government that governs these things. To what extent is that a hell or a hindrance? I guess we'll talk about that in more detail later. Let me just say that even where the government, the local government plans an infrastructural thing, like subways, for example, that over time is also a spontaneous order. For example, when the first subways in New York were established in 1904, I don't think anyone could have foreseen exactly how it would have not only developed but how it would have affected the city. I wrote about this in a column not too long ago, how the subways were an attempt to create urban sprawl. That is to say, the, the Lower East Side and places like that where they were working, working people tended to be very overcrowded. And one of the justifications for the subways at the time was to allow people to live outside the city and commute to the city, right? So they wanted to subsidize suburbanization or at least go out to the outer boroughs, you know, outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, et cetera. And so the subways would go out to where people weren't. And it was, it was kind of like the interstate highway system, you know, in a small scale. You're deliberately trying to, to lower the density of the cities. And what happened was then that the city built up around the transport hubs, built up around where the subways stopped. And the city infilled to the point now where, you know, it's the subway runs in some of the densest places on earth, or at least in the United States. So, I mean, nobody predicted that would, well, no, somebody might have predicted it, but I don't think the planners were intending for that to happen when it was initially designed. So that's an example of a pattern that is a result of human action, but was not, it's a stable pattern that nobody had intended to create. Yeah. And we have, I have a lot of resources on spontaneous order that I'll make available to everybody afterwards. So if you're hearing this and thinking, oh, that's interesting, but I don't quite get it, or you think this sounds great, and you want to learn more, I'm going to try and make a lot of, a lot of resources available to you. So, what can we learn from a city neighborhood? This is the question that I've been so excited to ask. So first, let's talk about cities at their best. When you're walking around a neighborhood, and it's a, you know, the kind of neighborhood you want to walk around, it's vibrant, it's safe, there's a lot of stuff going on. People are generally pretty friendly, although people have different definitions of what that means. Like you said, some people don't like being attacked could be friendly. Yes. Right, right. So what can we, what can we learn when we look around a neighborhood like that? Well, you know, the main indicator is are there people around, right? That's the first thing. If there aren't, that's the first thing you notice, right? If you go out down to the street, say, you know, you land in an airport, you get in a taxi, go to a hotel, and then, you know, you get unpacked and you go outside the door, and you look around, there's nobody. You're surrounded by tall buildings and, you know, parking garages and things of that nature. And you walk, where the heck is everybody? You notice that when a city or neighborhood is not functioning, there just aren't many people. On the other hand, you know, if you leave your hotel and the people walking on the sidewalk, it's something you don't notice. You kind of take for granted. And you walk, okay, this, you just sort of feel, oh, well, the other people, and you kind of move around with the travel, with the foot traffic. Obviously, there's vehicular traffic too, but it's mainly the foot traffic that would attract you. Okay, let's, let's see if I can find a restaurant, came nearby, and, you know, where there are people on the street, typically there are restaurants that you can find that aren't too far away. So, you know, that's probably the main indicator is, you know, whatever it is you go out of the hotel, whether it's in the morning or afternoon or after dark, there are people there. That gives you a sense of security and comfort that then frees you to explore, to find kinds of alternatives or find things that you, you know, might not have expected. Yeah, for, and this is, I don't know if it's silly, I definitely noticed since reading Jacob, she calls them eyes on the street, and they're kind of like an unofficial security source. The fact that you know that there are people around who are seeing what's happening is a way that we make each other safer. Yeah, I'll just say the heavy lifting of, of, of security. See, the thing is, the main thing is you have to feel secure. Yes. Clearly, there has to be security, but if there's security, when you don't feel secure, then it's no good. You have to sort of feel comfortable. And one of the things that does that is, is seeing other people, and, and, you know, they could be ignoring you, they don't have to be friendly or approach you or anything like that. But just the idea that, that somebody is watching, you know, not the creepy kind of watching where there's this sort of staring at you. But, you know, if you were to fall or somebody bumped into you or you lose something, somebody would actually see that. That is, so I think what Jacob means by eyes on the street, you, the heavy lifting of security is done just by having people on the street. You know, and on the margins, you need to have some sort of enforcement of the local rules or things like that. But as she said, if in, if in order, as Jacob said, if in order to, to maintain a sense of security, you have to have a police moment in every corner, that's a, that's an indication of failure. Yeah. And I don't think it feels safe when you have a policeman. No, not at all. It seems like something's wrong. Yeah. I mean, if there's a uniform person there, whether it's police or military is, we're seeing more and more military people in, you know, fatigues and things. It, you know, it's like, you know, on one hand you think, okay, maybe I feel secure, this guy's got a gun. I think he's on my side, whatever. But I, it's a little strange. It's not, you know, what you're used to seeing in a comfortable environment. Yeah. And I mean, that's what's really interesting to me is it's, you can't, you said you don't notice when there are people on the street. And it's a lot of stuff that you don't notice, I think is what made, or at least unless you know to look for it, you don't notice things. One story that I like to tell is I used to jog down, I live in Ottawa in Canada, and I used to jog down the canal. There's a big canal that goes right down the middle of Ottawa in the winter. It's the world's largest outdoor skating rink. It's a fun fact that you all now know about Ottawa. And you go through very different neighborhoods, excuse me. And the things that you notice are kind of when there's only one sort of thing, when there's just homes, there's not really very many people out. They might be out in the evenings or they might be out in the mornings, but during the day and at night, nobody's outside. If the sidewalks are very straight and there's not stuff going on, there aren't too many people out. But if there's a kind of, you know, just little things like just the sidewalk curves, there's more likely to be people. And then especially when you get into the city and there are different, you know, there's a restaurant and a shopping and a bar. And especially in the summer, there are houseboats parked along the canal as well. So you've got people really out at all times of day. And that's the stuff that I never knew to look for. And I think it's cool. And I really like the way that you said it that you probably don't notice it. And yeah, if it works well, you probably don't notice it unless you know to look. And it's such a cool story when you know to look for it. At the time, Jacobs wrote her Death and Life of Great American Cities, her target was a certain kind of urban planning, which emphasized separating uses, sort of zoning in a very strict sense. You had residential, you had commercial, you had like manufacturing, etc. And these things had to be kept separate. Why? Well, because it was some person's idea that these had to be separate. Somebody's notion of order that they were trying to impose on a city. What Jacobs' basic argument was, that's not the order that's important in the city. The order that's important is the one that emerges as a result of people having contact. And if you look closely enough, you can see these patterns. And her argument was the very things that you try to do to maintain this artificial order, destroy the emergent order, she didn't use that term, but this order that comes about as a result of unintended consequence, that is really the life of the city. She says, when you think of a city, typically your impression is gained at the street level, what you see going on at that level. And that's a spontaneous order. She says that the book is about the interaction between the design of public space, streets, sidewalks, plazas, that sort of thing. Public spaces I define as places where you would expect to see strangers. We're seeing a stranger is not a weird thing. So the design of those spaces and the social interaction that goes on in them. And that was a big point in her book. She was saying that the way that planners of her era imagined a city should be were at odds with that kind of order that emerges spontaneously. But if you read more deeply into that, I think what she was opposed to was the idea that architects or planners could impose any kind of order. It's the imposition of a particular vision that's the problem because cities are much more complex than an individual mind. Cities are the result of many minds operating. And so when you try to impose a particular plan, even if it's in some geniuses plan, it's just a single mind. It's like a market, right? Market functions because a lot of people who are operating in it and are able to use their, not only their intelligence, but their local knowledge. And so, I mean, that's something she definitely emphasized. Yeah, so, you know, this emergent order that we're talking about earlier is really a central theme in that book and really in all her work. Can I just say one thing? Oh yeah, of course. You know, I asked her once what she thought her main contribution was, and she answered immediately the fractal. Okay. And what she meant by that, I think, is that things scale up. The principles that operate at the level of the neighborhood operate at the level of the district, operate at the level of cities, at the level of regions, and then the relationships between cities. The same kind of complexity that she was writing about and analyzing at the neighborhood level that generate diversity of land use, that encourage diversity of knowledge and skills and tastes. Those things scale up. You know, the idea of a fractal is, you know, you see the earth, you see the coastline, you zoom in, you see the coastline, and it's all sort of jagged, and you look at the beach, you come and zoom in at the beach, you know, at the microscopic level, it's all jagged, and you zoom in again. So, this same kind of principle of some sort of patterns emerge. And so, she was sort of, she thought she'd done that, discovered something at the social level that these things do scale up. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. I would never have thought of putting it that way. I'm going to jump ahead just a little bit. We were going to talk specifically about trust, but I hope that we've sort of covered that. We can come back to it if we have time, but I have a lot of really great questions, so I want to give people a chance to ask them. So, well, one that kind of, you've talked a little bit about zoning now, and we were talking about housing prices before, Tate asks, how much do zoning laws affect housing prices? How much do you think that factors into the expensiveness of cities? Zoning, that's a very complex issue. Zoning tends to exclude, right? And sometimes that's their function. Other times zoning is not enforced. And so, it's a way of handing out political favors at the local level. I know this because I have some, not direct personal experience, but I know that this sort of thing goes on, that you petition the zoning board for exceptions and things of that nature. But if you think of zoning as it's supposed to be, as it's supposed to be practiced, it's usually, as I said, it sort of excludes people or uses that you don't like. So, let me give an example of my own neighborhood here, Brooklyn Heights. It's actually beyond zoning. It's a landmarked district. That means that if you want to change anything on the exterior of your building, for example, let alone if you want to build a new building, it has to get permission from the Landmarks Preservation Commission here in New York. And the result of that is that this is a very pretty neighborhood. Most of the buildings were built pre-civil war. Sorry, I should say a lot of them. Townhouses built pre-civil war. It's a charming, charming. You've been here, right? Yeah, I can recommend Brooklyn Heights to anybody who wants a cool place to go in New York. Yeah, it's a little bit like, I guess, you know, a second museum in a way, a museum with restaurants. So it's nice for people who live here. But the prices as the questioner is indicating tend to really, really go up. On the other hand, you have places that are zoned industrial and those, you know, tend to be, you know, their exception to this, of course, those tend to be low-value real estate. And not only that, but the places that are around them, because of the sort of what Jacobs would call a border vacuum, because you have a massive single use in these industrial districts. So that there are a lot of people there, let's say from nine to five, but after that, there's nobody. They tend to be kind of dead zones, not only inside, but surrounding them. And that tends to bring down real estate values and just economic activity in general. That concept of border vacuums I think is very important to understanding a lot of what goes on. Well, so yeah, it can go both ways. It really depends on how the zoning is done. I've got one more question. And while I ask it, I'm going to run my second poll. So I'm going to launch it. We'll disappear for a second for everybody. But the second question that I've got, it's an interesting one from Thomas says, I'm watching this webinar with my five-year-old son who recently informed me that what wants to be when he grows up is a guy who decides where skate parks are built. With that in mind, what insights can you give with regard to cities that master their community recreational spaces and those that allow community members to develop them on their own, such as the Burnside Skate Park in Portland, which I'm not familiar with, but it's... I'm not familiar with that either. But I guess, you know, Jacob said things to say about parks and things of the nature. She called, she described parks as volatile, as volatile places. And she said that parks, as a rule, draw their life from cities, and that parks do not give life to cities. You know, parks by nature are empty spaces, or that is to say where there's no commercial or residential use there. And that means that if you plot this empty space in an area that is already kind of troubled, where people don't go, or that's just sort of on the edge, you know, thinking maybe, well, what these people who live here really need is open space in a park, which is something that Robert Moses did a lot of, and Jacob's complained about, is it can really bring neighborhood down because these places can be very scary. That is to say, you know, what we're saying earlier about people eyes on the street, people attracting people, if there's no reason for people to be in the park, then people aren't going to go there unless they don't want to be seen. And, you know, such people tend to be, you know, criminals or gangs or things like that. And so they can, that's the volatility of parks. Now, if you put a park where there's already, you know, residential commercial, there's a diversity of uses of space, then they could be successful. And, you know, she gave you an example. You know, if you take a, say a park is put in a residential area, put a skating rink in a residential area, where there is no commercial development, say, then, you know, there's no restaurants, there's no McDonald's or anything like that. What happens when you have to go to the bathroom? Right. Maybe you know somebody next door, you knock on the door and say, excuse me, can I use the bathroom? That's a very difficult thing to do. You'd never do it, unless you're into a stranger, unless it's like an emergency or something. So, you know, your stay would be short term and it would discourage you from going. Whereas, or if you get thirsty and you want to drink or something, you go, and you have to walk several blocks to get to a place to get a drink or a hamburger or something. If the park is surrounded by not only residential, but also some commercial place and get a bite to eat and maybe use the bathroom, then people will hang around the park. People stay there, though. So, this diversity of land use was very important to her as a principle of attracting people to those spaces, making them feel comfortable, and in turn laying the foundation for economic development. So, yeah, I think skating rinks are great. I don't skate myself. Actually, I fall. But you have to be very careful, okay, five-year-old, that you put those skating rinks where they're going to be used and where people who use them are able to feel comfortable and have good bathrooms. So, I'm not sure, but he also may have been talking about skateboarding. And if he was, then I have kind of a story. My old neighborhood, I used to live in Windsor, which is right across the river from Detroit, Michigan. But I was in Canada. And there was a park where kids were skateboarding. They would all get together and they would skateboard. And so, they put one of these, I don't know what it's called, but you can skate back and forth on it. And everybody was there all the time. It was right in the neighborhood where people already were. And now I live in Ottawa. And in Ottawa, there's a skate park. And it's kind of, they've obviously tried to take the kids on the skateboards out of the neighborhood and put them somewhere else. And I only ever see kids skateboarding there on the weekend. It doesn't seem like you can just go out and skateboard really quickly. You have to make a special trip. So, I think that there's a role for taking cues, like looking for hints in the neighborhood for what people want already. So, if you do become somebody who decides where skate parks go, maybe try to keep those things in mind. Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, if you're going to build a skating rink or a skateboard place, you know, in a purely residential area, then you have to supply like a snack bar. You have to supply bathrooms. These are additional expenses, which may discourage you from doing it in the first place. I don't know if you've been to London, the South Bank of London near, I guess, it's near the National Theater. Anyway, there's this place that's underneath an overhang. And there's like a cement bench that was put there by the architect. And it's kind of out of the public. And what happens is it's, you know, 24-7, there are guys on skateboards going up and down this ramp. It's probably, I don't know, but it's not that big. And the police sort of let that happen. I saw the policeman reprimanding one skateboarder for, I don't know, playing music or something. He says, you know, you're not supposed to do the skate, but don't do that. So, there are these rules, these sort of unwritten rules that they can do. And it's right there. And it's really, you know, people go to London, they know this, but it's, you can see some really fantastic skateboarding there. And why? Well, because there's like a cafe nearby. It's just a lot of people. It's a nice setting. Anyway. Yeah, I should say in Windsor, the skateboarding park was across from the All You Can Eat Diner, or not All You Can Eat, but breakfast all the time diner. So there were some things nearby. I mean, there are these complementarities that exist in cities that were unplanned, right? This is the spontaneous nature of cities again, that you get this complementarity that is, you know, promotes comfort and eventually, hopefully, economic development. I'm going to fold a couple of good questions in. I want to talk about poorly functioning neighborhoods. And a couple of questions might help with that. So somebody asked about extreme poverty and crime and projects with poor schools and poor children, for poor children, and larger cities don't seem to care about them. Is this inevitable in great cities? And the other question is, what is your view on the self-destruction of diversity, which is a little bit of Jacob's jargon? She kind of says that cities that are doing well are destined to become too expensive to be diverse or have other things go wrong, and they can lead to neighborhoods that used to be good, but no longer function well. So let's talk a little bit about neighborhoods that don't function terribly well. And then I've got a tough question for you, and we're going to wrap up. Okay. Yeah, poor people are attracted to cities. You go to any great city today, or throughout history, there'll be a lot of poor people, which is, you know, Ed Glazer, who published a book in 2012 called The Triumph of the City, says that that is actually a sign of success in the city, where you see poor people. Because that means, well, of a certain kind, that there are poor people without much money, immigrants maybe from outside the city, they could be from foreign countries, too. We see opportunity in cities, and so they move there hoping to do better. Jacob distinguishes between slumming and unslumming neighborhoods. That is, she says not all slums are the same. Slums are basically where poor people live. Okay, live in one place because the rents are cheap. But there are neighborhoods that are slums that are vibrant and that are on the way up, and then there are neighborhoods that are slums that are dying. And there are certain indicators you should use. You know, she has fairly specific indicators of which and when you tell one from the other. But that's an important distinction to make between not all slums are the same. Now, why are some slums persistent? By the way, Harlem in a day day was a slum, and it was one of the most creative places on earth for a long time. Maybe not so much anymore, but it's actually on its way back up. So, you know, what happens is, you know, there's a combination of all kinds of government inventions that contribute to this redistribution, which, you know, I'm not saying I'm not making any broad statement against redistribution or the welfare state and that thing here. Yeah, no, I mean, let's not fool ourselves that this has not had a disincentive effect or an incentive effect on people not being able to to emerge from the slum. All kinds of public policies, public schools, as opposed to private schools, you know, exacerbate the problem. I mean, if you look back in the history of cities, as I say, there always been poor people, there always been slums, but the sort of great society welfare programs, subsidized housing, other kinds of interventions with respect to wages and that kind of thing didn't exist and, you know, maybe that would have helped in some cases. But, you know, New York rose to be a great city without those things. New York probably is heyday. Maybe it's golden age was 1930s, 40s, and 50s in terms of creativity, economic dynamism. It also reached the zenith of its population at that time. It's approaching that again. But anyway, this is before the great society programs. This is before massive housing projects. So that's something to consider. Okay, so yeah. Oh, sorry, you want me to say a little about self-destruction? Yeah, if you if you've got a little bit. Just very briefly, I know we're in short of time. But the idea behind that is that the neighborhood becomes so successful that real estate values, for example, are skyrocketing, that only large firms and very rich people can live there. Something like New York Soho is a good example of that, which was Light Industrial in the 1950s, then it kind of declined. Artists moved in, and now it's like Madison Avenue. And Jacobs' complaint about that was that we're not complaining. Her observation was that because only the wealthy, both businesses and residents can live there or operate there, the kind of experimentation, kind of diversity that is necessary for these tools of resources that are necessary for innovation and dynamic growth disappear. And so she says, well, they will leave, they will go someplace else. They might go to Dumbo, or they might go to, she didn't mention these names, but to Williamsburg or to some other place, Silicon Alley. And so it's sort of a cycle that happens. And I mean, this is where she said there may be a role for government policy that, you know, is mainly kind of government staying out of the way that you allow neighborhoods where there are possibilities for people to move in that haven't done so, that haven't become vibrant yet. At least don't do, you know, don't build massive projects there. Don't create wide streets that would block the flow of traffic and cut off the social networking that's necessary. You know, maybe if you're going to plan something, plan for there to be more intricate streets and things of that nature there where people could run into each other and this move more complicated than that, but she had some role for government planning to help foster this kind of natural cyclical development that occurs in cities. Yeah, she had a tough question. Very complicated ideas of how to deal with this. I really recommend Death and Life, Great American Cities to anybody who's interested in this stuff. It's a really great book. Can I ask you one more before you ask your tough question? There's one thing. In the last chapter of that book, she says, what kind of problem is a city? She doesn't use the term spontaneous order, but that's the chapter where she deals with, you know, looking back and asks, you know, what is the nature of this thing we're looking at? And she calls a city a problem of complexity. Yeah. Right? That was my favorite chapter. Yeah. I wouldn't judge anyone who reads that chapter second, maybe. Maybe not first. It's a very Hayekian kind of chapter. Again, she doesn't use the term spontaneous order, but that's what she's really talking about in that chapter. What is the nature of the city? Well, it's a problem of organized complexity. Yeah, it's a very human problem because we react when people try to do things to us. And like a lot of nature or inanimate objects. So, as Sandy knows, I have a tough question for as I mentioned, I grew up across the river from Detroit. And if you've never been to Detroit, it's an interesting place to go. And it's an interesting place to read the history of because Detroit was a really great city. And now there are literally skyscrapers that are empty. The Michigan Central Skit Station is this really amazing train station. It's got office towers on top of it. And you can see through it because it's empty and the windows are broken. And actually, part of Transformers 3 was filmed there. This is how bad it was. It looked like whatever city there. I don't think it's supposed to be Detroit in that movie, but it looks like it's been attacked by Decepticons basically. So this is like a real failure of a city. Like it's really, really sad. So what do you think can be done to help a failed city? Detroit might be, we were talking about this, Detroit might be the only example of a whole city that's failed, but also neighborhoods that are having a really hard time. Do you think there's anything that can be done in terms of policy that we can pursue? We can make it easier to start a business there. Yep. You can do things at least in the short run that would increase safety, which may involve police, but it could be something else as simple as adding, allowing businesses to come and so that there are more people on the street. Again, I haven't studied it very closely. I know in general what the problems are. Given the situation now, there are limited things one can do. What you don't want, but what you can do is sort of learn from Detroit because as you say, there was a time when Detroit was very vibrant, was one of the great cities in the United States fueled by the automobile industry. And it's a very complicated, as all urban problems are, it's a very complicated problem because Jacobs and others might point to the fact that it was a sort of a monoculture, a monoculture, a single industry dominating everything and all of that. Others would point to perhaps quite rightly that back in the 70s when Chrysler and other these large corporations were beginning to fail, the government bailed them out. Well, maybe they should have failed then. And by this time, 40 years later, right, it's been 40 years, something else would have emerged and taken its place. But instead, we propped up the corporations, we propped up the UAW, which in some cases is really the same thing. And all of that, we've sustained this monoculture in Detroit way beyond what it probably should have been its life expectancy. And they've been trying to do things like create a people mover, a mass transit. That's the Detroit monorail for anyone who doesn't know. Detroit has a monorail. There's like nobody on it. It just goes in a circle. It's a terrible failure, and it takes up space, and it creates dead zones, and nobody uses it, and it's just very costly. So don't do that. Don't do that. So sometimes cities decline. I mean, the main indicator of a declining city is loss of population. New Orleans is another example of that. So you have to, sometimes cities, cities like Detroit don't disappear entirely. They've been, if you look at the history of cities from like 1500 to today, very few cities have actually disappeared from here. I mean, we're talking about in the dozens, maybe, maybe in the last 500, 600 years, they just, you know, they die sort of, they're close to them, and they come back, right? It's a great opportunity. And maybe that's what Detroit is. It's, for somebody, it's a great opportunity. For somebody, all this empty space is someplace they can camp out and start a little bit. Maybe they should have like Burning Man. Burning Man, so I'm not kidding. A dangerous proposition in Detroit. Yeah, I mean, just, you know, promote, maybe the city could promote something like that, or promote, I was just in Austin, Texas, where they had this motorcycle rally, the Republic of Texas, you know, like the Republic of Michigan, you know, some kind of rally, then bring in a devil, the space, you could use it for something another, and some bright person will see an opportunity to put two and two together, but then you have to allow that to happen. Yeah, I will say there are some cool art projects in Detroit. There's a neighborhood that's been made into one big art project called the Heidelberg Project. It's a little weird, but it's cool, I guess, that it's there. So yeah, and it's just, I think that you're right, like, let things happen, let people take advantage of opportunities. I hope that's what we see. I get a little misty-eyed when I think about Detroit, because it's sort of home. I don't mean to sound cold or anything like that, but, you know, sometimes there's some neighborhoods that, you know, can't be saved right away. I mean, that you have to let them go so that some other parts can do better. I mean, I think Detroit will come back. I hope so. So I have one more poll that I'm going to launch, and I've got a question that I think you'll find interesting. Oh, this poll, by the way, you can answer, if you think every single option is right, you can pick every single one. But just kind of a quick question. Do you think there's an ideal size for a city that balances good and bad? That's from William. He asked you pretty early on, and I thought I would tackle it right. No, I don't. I don't. Cities are one of, you know, they say that, you know, Nassim Taleb, the Black Swan guy, is a mathematician who wrote about many things, but I asked him, well, he came to a colloquium once, and he was talking about sea creatures. He said, like whale, they can grow to, they're almost unlimited in size because the buoyancy of the ocean, and remember, as long as they live, they'll just keep on growing. That's why, that's why very old whales are so huge, octopuses, too. In other words, they're scale-free, and cities are like that. Cities are scale-free. You can have a, you know, the largest city in the world in 1800, you know, what, London, had a million people. Now, the largest urbanized area in the world, probably Tokyo, Yokohama, you know, close to 20 million people, there's no upper limit to what a city can be, as long as, you know, the conditions that enable the kinds of things we're talking about, economic development, spontaneous order, emergent social networks, and that sort of thing to make people safe and secure, give different neighborhoods, different districts and identity that they can live with, promote and live with. I mean, there's no limit to the maximum size. There's no maximum size of the city. Yeah, and that's kind of cool for those of us who love cities. I think that's just neat for reasons that I can't articulate. I wanted to share very quickly the results of the poll. I tried to think of a few things that might help, and as you can see, everybody thinks decentralizing decision-making to districts and neighborhoods might be a good idea to help utilize that local knowledge or local wallage, which is what I was about to say. And then some people don't like zoning. Some people think that better city plans might have a role to play, and I mean, I guess we don't know. The great thing about cities is that they are places for experimentation, so hopefully we get to see a lot of these things tried out. Unfortunately, not only economic experimentation, but somebody had community organizations, that kind of experimentation too, local governance, it's an amazing possibility there. Yeah, oh, I could talk about it for another hour, but I won't do that to everybody. Unfortunately, we've got a little bit over time. There were a few other things we wanted to talk about. I'm going to try and make the resources available online. One of them is, Sandy has this great talk called A City Cannot Be a Work of Art, which is a really intriguing statement, I think, so I'll see if I can make something like that available through the website. And the website, of course, is fee.org slash big ideas. It's on all of our graphics, so hopefully you've seen it by now. Sandy has a column with the Freeman, which is Fees Magazine, and it's called Wabi Sabi, which is, oh, remind me what it means. Yeah, it's a Zen Buddhist term that one interpretation is that you see the beauty in imperfection, in impermanence, and that sort of thing. So I want to recommend it. It's maybe my favorite column, only partly because he writes often about cities, and I'm really enthusiastic about them right now. I will be sharing a few columns from that. Like us on Facebook, so that you can keep up with us. We're going to make this video available, so if you know anyone who wanted to attend but couldn't, I know there's a World Cup match tonight, and that the USA is playing, I'm sorry, there's just a lot of things going on. So if you know anybody who maybe had national loyalties that couldn't be broken to join us tonight, follow us on Facebook. I share a lot of articles, and I will share the videos as well. And join us again. My next event will be with, he's not on here, but Don Boudreau from George Mason University, and the name of the event is What Does It Cost to Keep Them Out? So we're going to be talking about trade restrictions and immigration restrictions, and why they don't always work out exactly the way that we think that they might. But I really want to thank Sandy for being on. Yeah, so much we can talk about there too. I want to thank Sandy so much for being on tonight. Like I said, I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I think it's been really great. And I want to thank everybody for joining us as well. Yes, thank you everybody. My pleasure. Janet, take care. You too. Bye, everyone.