 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. Sandia Kedda from SUNY 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, Sandia. My pleasure. I'm looking forward to this. So tell us a little bit about one of your favorite people. Yeah, oh sure. Yeah, she's one of my heroes. My other heroes, of course, are Ludwig Van Mises, F.A. Hayek, Israel Kersner. 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 streets, 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 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's 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. The growth of cities, the most dynamic part of cities, tended to be on the outskirts, what we today call the suburbs and the fulver, the places where, strictly speaking, we're outside the control of the crafts, gills and, you know, the burger meisters and everything. So people would settle 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 artificially accelerated, their growth, they can be. But historically, you know, the dynamism of cities have really come about as a result of development on the penumbra of cities, the outskirts. For cities to be incubators of ideas and sort of engines of economic development, there have to be opportunities for people without a lot of money, but with good ideas 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 Hasidic Jewish community there and not much else. And now, as you know, it's like the center of hipsterdom. 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. Strangely 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, you know, that is, now the thing, the 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, prices rising and falling and then falling and then rising elsewhere. 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 in 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 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's, it's, it is a man-made 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 thought out. And, 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. For what extent is that a help or 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 lower east side and places like that where they were 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. So they wanted to subsidize suburbanization or at least go out to the outer boroughs, outer boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, et cetera. And so the subways would go out to where people weren't. And it was kind of like the interstate highway system, you know, in a small scale. You're deliberately trying 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, the subway runs in some of the densest places on earth, or this 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. 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, 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 it. Not 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, you 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 a 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 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. 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 can think of zoning, you know, 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. 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. You see opportunity in cities and so they, they move there, hoping to do better. Jacobs 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, she has fairly specific indicators of which you can tell one from the other. But that's an important distinction to make between not all, not all slums are the same. Now, why are some slums persistent? By the way, Harlem in Tate 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 interventions 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 topic for another day. Yeah, no, I mean, that's not, you know, 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 have always been poor people, there have always been slums, but the sort of great society, welfare programs, subsidized housing, other kinds of interventions with spectral 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. And 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. 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. 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, you know, adding, you know, allowing businesses to come and so that there are more people on the street. I mean, again, I haven't studied it very closely. I know in general what the problems are. But, you know, in it, so they're, you know, 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, you know, one of the great cities in the United States fueled by the automobile industry. And it's a very complicated, as all, you know, 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. 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. 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.