(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 559: The Unfinished Metropolis

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Benjamin Schneider to talk about his book The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution. Ben chats about the unfinishedness of cities, the larger origins of NIMBYism, and how much our economy and built environment cater to cars.

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Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of this episode:

Benjamin Schneider: Thanks, Jeff. It’s great to be here.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’ve always been fascinated by this subject matter and tried to take as wide a view as I can on, on urbanism, um, and I hope that’s reflected in my book too.

So I, I really appreciate going kind of on that journey with you through the book. But I’m also curious, like your history in terms of cities and what made you start to care about them, what made you interested in them? Did it start when you were like a little kid writing Muni, or was it something later on in life?

It’s not just like a thing you can get interested in, you know, in your own time. And from there I got the fellowship at Citi Lab. So my first job out of college was working at CityLab, which was so cool. And you know, at that point I realized maybe I can make a career out of this kind of work. So yeah, it’s been a steady process of just being intrinsically interested in this stuff and finding a way to make it part of my work and my daily life.

I kind of stumbled upon this idea of the unfinished metropolis as an organizing theme or frame for all of it. That I agree. I think it does kind of encapsulate things well, you know, across all these different domains of urbanism. I think one common denominator is just a built environment that’s not responding to changing needs in society, or changing values of what we think is important.

Or a changing economy or a changing culture, changing technology in so many ways. We are living in an environment that is based on ideas and technologies that are 50 to a hundred years old.

And to really fix the damage that was done during that period, you need to have an equally expansive vision about how cities can evolve and be better.

Mm-hmm. But what is it about this time period that stands out to you from like a transportation and a city building standpoint? Because it’s a very interesting time that kind of created this stunted period we’re in now.

And then the Overton Park decision of the Supreme Court created a lot more judicial review of decisions around where to cite highways. So that moment, the interstate moment came. Crashing to a halt. And then there was a transit building moment that also happened in the seventies that was sort of a layover from the Great Society era, US Mass Transit Act.

That created a new pot of money that was almost as generous as the interstate pot of money for transit projects. And then that era crashed into the Reagan administration and the austerity politics there. And so you had kind of this increasing understanding that freeways through cities were really harmful and that transit was maybe a better gentler solution, but then just as that kind of connection was being made, the money and the sort of federal level institutional support and research and development actually really crucially was getting cut off.

So there was a void there that I argue really hasn’t been filled ever since.

And people knew on one side of the stripes knew that this was bad, but we did it anyways.

So we, we knew that he got this report, but the new insight that. Kimball found was what that report actually said, which is basically that the experts at the Federal Highway Administration at the time were saying freeways are never going to be a good solution for cities. The real solution is transit, effectively because of the geometry problem fitting, you know, a lot of wide roads and a lot of cars in urban environments.

It just, it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t make sense, and they knew that in 1960 and you know, they chose to bury this report. It was never made public. It was never really brought up again by Eisenhower. And we just sort of moved on and kept doing what we were doing, even though we knew it was not the right thing to do.

But at the time, people really expected things to change over time. They expected that. Um, the lower court ruling said people expect change, and so change is inevitable. But then Euclid versus Ambler, you know, cut that off at the pass and now we’re in this era that we’re in now where zoning is kind of restricting things.

So I found that really interesting and I’m wondering how you came across that and what your thoughts are on that specific item.

But what people may not know is that before that Supreme Court decision, there was a lower court decision that actually cited with Ambler Realty and said, it’s actually not acceptable for the city to zone your property just for single family homes. And it used this language that something to the effect of the, the continued growth of the city is reasonably.

To be expected. And to me that that’s such an important way of describing how urbanism was kind of understood in the popular imagination in the legal world throughout human history, really, that cities evolve, that they are living, growing things. Um, and that’s what makes the Supreme Court reversal of that decision so influential is that it basically said, no, that’s not the case.

Cities can and should be frozen in the state. They currently are in 1924 as that case happened or whenever people are kind of applying this logic and you know, the further you get from that moment of freezing a city, the less and less that city reflects the present day needs and wants of the people that live there.

I’m interested in that kind of angle too, because I feel like, you know, we’ve had NIMBYs for a long time in the United States, but this feels like the understanding of where they’re coming from.

We’ve been trained to understand that the urban environments that we grew up in are basically gonna remain that way for our entire life. That’s what single family zoning did, but it’s also what Car Centrism did. You know people who, who were living. Say in the 1950s had witnessed these really huge transformations of transportation systems.

They’d seen, you know, this era when pretty much everyone got around by streetcar, they’d seen streets get completely reorganized to prioritize cars. They’d seen the emergence of freeways starting to get built. And then even some, what we, we now view as more exciting developments like Bart getting started these kind of unimaginable space, age, transit technologies that were just kind of getting underway.

Whereas we in our time, uh, really have only known kind of the car centric transportation system that we have. There’s not really like living memory of another way of doing things or really a, a frontier of new kinds of ways of getting around cities that. We can be excited about and kind of project into the future, although I think that is starting to change a little bit, which we can talk more about.

Um, but for the most part, you know, we, we kind of live in this eternal present of cities being a certain way and always seeming to remain that way.

Everything seems sclerotic and encased in amber, and so maybe that dampens optimism and maybe that’s kind of some of the stuff that’s happening in the wider world, in politics and everything else. And maybe that started from our city building and uh, the psychology of that is fascinating to think about.

Maybe that’s why we’ve pursued those kinds of policies. You know, as our society has gotten more affluent and comfortable, um, just keeping things as they are just feels better. But I think you also lose a certain dynamism, a sense of forward looking ness. There’s a, there’s a book that really gets into this in a cool way, which is Marshall Berman’s, all that A solid melts into air, and it’s a philosophical exploration of how people across modern history and, and in literature and art have kind of processed the physical world around them changing.

It was written really on the tail end of this mid-century, uh, moment of the last great spasm of city building as I describe it. He goes really deep in terms of how people. Experience and process and grieve and become excited about these massive transformations happening around them. Um, and it’s instructive to look back at that, just to see how all of those mixed feelings are, I think, pretty absent now for better and for worse.

Using high-speed rail and planes. And what she found was like people were super optimistic because they’d seen a lot of the change that’s happened there. I mean, you build 48,000 miles of high-speed rail in a 20 year period and people are gonna see, see something happening, all the improvements that have been made.

And so I find that fascinating. It kind of goes back to this quote that you have in the book that I think is really interesting, and I think you make a great observation, which is Americans have trouble believing that buildings and infrastructure can improve their lives because they’ve never seen it happen.

I find that’s illustrative of what’s happening here, but also interesting to see kind of a juxtaposition of that somewhere else, which is in China.

For instance, a really fast, frequent automated metro or a true high speed rail system. Um, it’s not clear when either of those things are gonna happen, but when they do, I think it’s gonna be a pretty big kind of leap of consciousness that people see. Like these technologies, trains and subway systems that I think we are trained to believe are these technologies of the past can actually be these kind of quantum leaps into the future that are much faster and more convenient than a self-driving car, for instance.

Uh, that’s gonna be open in 20, 30, 40 something, but. That’s happened and it’s actually shown off that changes can be made. And I’m curious, like in your position in, in New York City right now, what has the difference been and can you see that as a glimmer of hope of something that has changed and kind of can flip the script on those policy discussions?

Um, but what is different is that the MTA is earning $500 million a year that it’s able to bond against, and it’s a huge factor in its ability to modernize the system and build great projects like the IBX and the Second Avenue subway. So it’s paying dividends for sure. And you know, the lived experience for the 95% of New Yorkers who don’t drive into Manhattan every day is very positive.

It’s not positive for those few who, who do drive, and, uh, I totally understand why they’d be upset about it. But yeah, it just, it’s a good example, as you say, of like a bold policy that’s hard and complicated, but in the end is really beneficial and, and people can experience it very quickly. I’d love to see those kinds of things happen more in the sort of like net positive arena of a new transit line, for instance.

You see that a little bit here and there. We have some, some new transit projects. I mean, traveling to Seattle has been really exciting ’cause you can see the transit network there kind of row in real time and you can see how it’s transforming life in the city and some of these small Amtrak openings, the new lines in Minneapolis and in the very new one down in Alabama.

You know, instantaneously people. Have a new way of getting around and getting between the, the major cities and those regions. So you get these mini glimmers of, you know what, if this is a normal thing to open a new train line or a new transit line, um, it’s a, it’s a pretty cool feeling.

It like has the streetcar at the top, which is kind of the great-grandfather. And then throughout the tree you have like the metro systems on the left, and then you have light rail systems, and then you have like street cars and bus rapid transit on the other side. And I feel like that’s an interesting kind of way to explain how, you know, we’ve gotten to this point where we are building out in Seattle, but it’s also light rail.

It’s not like a big metro. We’re doing little things in, in like Honolulu and other cities where one line at a time is, seems to be the norm, uh, in Los Angeles. They’re still building light rail and things like that. But I’m curious in your thoughts about that family tree and what that’s meant for, like how we have expanded or how we haven’t expanded our transit systems and maybe how that may be actually holding things back.

What I kind of appreciated about it is you can sort of see what the, the new things are from the family tree, like what’s been done more recently or what are the most innovative ideas out there, and the sort of place where the family tree ends, uh, I believe is you see automated light metro, like what they’re doing in Honolulu and bus rapid transit are sort of the big frontiers of transit planning in the US that should be understood as, you know, things that the general public.

Knows about and can call for in their community.

It connects a lot of different things. It’s a really, probably the best example of what happened in the seventies, even more than you know, some of the other ones that happened. I mean, Bart is great, but it doesn’t have the same rider. It’s more a commuter system than say, the Washington Metro. We went from that and because that got too expensive, we decided to build light rail in San Diego and in in Sacramento and these other places.

And then when that got too expensive, we decided maybe street cars in the street were the best thing to happen in bus rapid transit and things like that. And then when that got too expensive, then we started these branded buses without lanes and you know, it just basically sinks back into the car infrastructure.

I had this idea that. You know, we’ve kind of priced ourselves out of making these improvements in a lot of places and that’s actually negatively impacted kind of how we can make that change that makes people feel something totally different than what they’re experiencing now with this car oriented landscape we’ve created.

It is this sort of journey from a more expensive and high tech transit system to a cheaper and more minimalist system. And, um, that’s kind of a sad reflection of the, the transit cost problem that we have in the sort of. Lack of capacity to be ambitious and build really big things that represent quality of life improvements that can, you know, push the envelope of how fast and how high capacity trends it can be, uh, which we really are not doing anymore.

And I, I was struck by when you talked with Mike Lyden, a friend of mine from a long time ago. Who basically says like people taking Citi bike, they just see it as the way to move around. You know, they don’t identify as like cyclists. They’re just like using it. And that’s actually a testament to how integrated it’s gotten into the system that people use it and they don’t consider it like to be, uh, a statement of purpose.

In one of the kind of five major cities where they really exist in a robust way, it’s just. It’s akin to the transit system in terms of its level of ubiquity and accessibility. It really just transforms how you’re able to get around, and that’s a huge credit to, you know, the planners and the businesses that created this new mode of transportation.

And then the gradual effort to create the bike infrastructure that makes it safe for people to ride it. So yeah, I think that’s just a really exciting development. The whole biking, micro mobility, street transformation world. It’s progressing much faster than much of the other things that urbanists care about.

You know, a month or so, it’s really the fastest thing we’ve ever seen and it’s very impressive and it shows people that something different can happen. It’s that change, uh, mechanism. Again. You can show people what it looks like in a different world.

In this case, a pandemic that, uh, made it. Dangerous to be inside eating and drinking with a lot of people. And I think it was an important psychological leap for people to see that happen in the built environment. And unfortunately it was largely quashed in a lot of cities. Uh, it was sort of too different I think for, uh, a lot of policy makers to really accept on a large scale.

And I hope that’s something that people reconsider and remember kind of the. The little infusion of joy that that brought. And you know that these kind of skeletal outdoor dining programs that a lot of cities have now gone with can get expanded back into the much larger scale programs that they had before.

Housing units, could we have built in that time where we required parking? If you think about every new building that’s been built, every new big building that’s been built put five more units on it over the last a hundred years. Like what does that mean for housing? That’s crazy. It’s crazy to think about what we’ve lost because we’ve housed cars instead of people.

That’s a product of public policy and it’s got huge ramification. It’s not just this like neutral decision. And Tony Jordan at the parking reform network has been on the front lines of like spreading that message. It’s, in a way, it’s a fun topic in a sort of morbid way or feels parasitic. Yeah. It, it’s, it’s so absurd that, uh, it lends itself to these really vivid descriptions and juxtapositions of like.

What could you have done differently with that space if not used it for parking? And the answer is almost always, it could have been used a much better way, and parking still could have been accommodated. And, uh, we’re just not doing that nearly enough. We’re not being nearly creative enough about how to use that space

Right. I mean, there’s a stat in the book that surprised me but shouldn’t have, which is that drive-throughs account for three quarters of fast food and chain revenue. That’s, that’s insane. Yeah. That

And, um, yeah, it, it shows how closely connected the fast food industry is to car culture. I think people can kind of forget that, you know, there’s a whole huge part of our economy that serves cars and people spending time in cars and drive through is one of the notorious ones. Not only is it sort of contributing to that situation more broadly, but the physical space that drive-throughs take up is really huge.

It’s, um, I think it’s the equivalent of like adding a second parking lot to any drive-through restaurant to include that drive-through lane and then the actual driveways themselves coming in and out of the property make really dangerous collision points for pedestrians too. A remotely kind of urbanized area, walkable area.

Drive-throughs can be really scary places to walk.

And now we have, you know, e-commerce and online shopping and a lot of deliveries and stuff. So you’re shifting away from this brick and mortar understanding of how cities are funded and operate to now more online distribution of goods and services, which has huge, you know, wide ranging impacts. And you talk about this a bit in the book as well.

And the, the solution there, the way to make brick and mortar compete is to put the people where the stores are already. I mean, if you live in a, a walkable neighborhood. It’s often not more convenient to order on Amazon because you can walk to the store and get it in five minutes rather than in 24 hours.

So I think, yeah, the e-commerce revolution can have this very anti-urban valence, but it can also point the way forward to a more urban way of life that can actually compete with a convenience factor of those services.

You talk about soho in the book, but then also now some of that space is actually still valuable for warehousing and even industrial because. You can have industrial spaces in cities now, and a lot of the warehousing that happens for the just in time deliveries that Amazon target, uh, home Depot, whoever else does these big box stores, you know, is really taking up real estate in, in cities because they wanna be close to where their populations are.

And so that’s a big change that’s happened, you know, in the last decade or so too.

But on the other hand, this is an important part of. The functioning of modern life. And those businesses do provide a lot of jobs, often a lot of blue collar jobs for people without college degrees. And part of the current state of inequality in America is the fact that those blue collar jobs are less and less happening in cities themselves and more and more in more exurban areas.

So I do think there’s promise to bringing more of those kinds of jobs into urban environments. The challenge becomes how do you. Integrate it in the broader kind of urban system in a, in a safe and environmentally friendly way. And you’re starting to see some, some glimmers of that. I think with like Amazon’s e-bike delivery services, that’s something that would be really cool to see take off more in more places.

And obviously renewable energy is huge for making sure that these kinds of places are not directly polluting. And then an underrated idea that I think people should start thinking about in terms of urban industries. Bringing back the multi-story warehouse. Those are the, the types of buildings that have since been repurposed into lofts in, in many cities, in places like Soho or uh, Soma in San Francisco.

And I think if we were to build more of those kinds of structures now, then there’ll be more reusable in future generations to take on whatever kind of use we need them for, whether it’s housing or office space or healthcare or things we can’t even imagine now. If

They’re just like big concrete squares being lifted up and put up, you know, real quick. Almost like, uh, magnet tiles, uh, being put up. Mm-hmm. Um, that’s another thing, going back to that sixties, seventies and eighties thing, you were talking about the way buildings were built and the tax breaks that they got.

And I was fascinated by that seven year of depreciation schedule that basically created all these like really crappy buildings that got changed later on, but you know, it left its mark on cities around the country.

But these, not to me.

And that led to. Too much commercial real estate, more than the market would bear, and in places where it was not appropriate. And so that’s a really important kind of policy origin for the retail apocalypse that we have today, which is a little bit overstated. But there’s no doubt in overabundance of commercial real estate, whether it’s strip malls or office parks that are just not able to be economically successful.

A lot of those were built not to provide the space for commerce to take place, but. As effectively tax shelters to take advantage of these tax laws that just incentivize building. So I guess it’s just an important lesson in like the fact that those tax policies can have a really big impact for years to come and, and shape the fortunes of cities.

Mm-hmm. There’s something to be said there about that time period where we got all this stuff because of the way that things were structured that aren’t necessarily like urban policy. It’s just like something that business people thought would be a good idea and then they didn’t have cities in mind when they did it, so mm-hmm.

It has all these downstream effects that impact us today.

The interstate, I think is probably the biggest example of this. It wasn’t understood really that it would reshape cities at all, even though obviously it would, and it, it literally destroyed so many, so many neighborhoods. But the people planning it and the policy makers that wrote it initially, the members of Congress that wrote that act were not thinking about planning.

There was no sense of like. How should this integrate with cities as they exist today? How will they create new types of urbanism? So that’s an important mistake to not repeat. Again, you know, if you’re gonna make a massive change to any kind of lever of public policy, it’s really important to be aware of the urbanistic side effects and impacts.

It seems like all of this, you know, the arenas of city building and moving around in cities is an afterthought to a lot of these policy makers, even though it should be the basic organizing principle. Right. It should be the way that we look at how rules and regulations operate. How. How should we be in the city?

There was a really interesting piece in, I think it was either Time Magazine or news, I think it was time last week after Zoran Ami won the election in New York City talking about, you know, whether cities are built for justice or whether they’re built for capitalism. And I find that really a interesting frame to think about it.

And the way that you know your book fits into that is that. It’s talking about all the ways that it’s been built for capitalism. You know, all these things have been done for businesses to get bigger rewards rather than serve the people that live in them. And I think that that’s like, that frame will stick with me for a long time and maybe organize the way that I think about cities and, and how rules and regulations are meant to or do not operate in them.

And if you look at the federal news starts, projects for major transit expansions, there’s a few really good ones on there, but. There’s so many more that I think are not even being looked at kind of because they’re just not politically conceivable. For instance, like who’s gonna be the political leader that kind of unifies NJ Transit and the LIRR into one regional rail system for the New York area, or even.

You could imagine a regional rail authority for the entire Northeast corridor that runs all of those systems and closely integrates it with the long distance high speed trains they have, there are through running projects for regional rail that code and, and ought to happen in almost every big city.

You know the Link 21 project in the Bay Area, the North South Rail connection in the Boston area. Link Union Station is the LA version, which is, that one is actually happening, but there isn’t the sort of the planning to make use of that and turn it into kind of a world class regional rail system. So thinking about, I guess those, what are like our generations urbanist moonshots that we should be thinking about and advocating for being planned so that when the political environment changes, we are ready to really fight for making those plans a reality.

The Link 21 project is like kind of mired in politics here, and the Bay Area and the downturn from the pandemic hasn’t helped much of the discussion because mm-hmm. Obviously, you know, Bart’s ridership is down the city, downtown doesn’t get as many workers in the daytime, but that’s the best time to plan, right?

That’s the best time to like actually put something in place so that when that does happen, when there are more residents in downtown San Francisco, when there are people who live here, they can get to other parts of the region fast. And it actually also makes me kind of, and I was gonna ask you about this earlier, but like, it makes me frustrated by like the big tech companies in, in the Bay area, right?

Like the Apples of the world that had this opportunity with this huge piece of land to build like. Almost a central city. They could have built like a downtown type of complex with residential stuff and commercial stuff in addition to their offices. But they, you know, Joni, Ivan decided to build a spaceship.

And so that doesn’t give me a lot of, um, hope for what happens with like ai if he’s like the person who’s building out this system for Sam Altman or whatever the heck. They’re doing. But like those types of decisions being internal facing versus external facing are ones that have been very frustrating from a city building standpoint and get away from this discussion of moonshot ideas mm-hmm.

That the private sector could help with. Right. If they wanted to. California forever. That’s another one that frustrates me, that like it’s a bunch of billionaires and a money grab rather than actually a city building experiment. And folks I know that work on that project, uh, would say otherwise, but I just don’t believe them.

And we really are not seeing that. I don’t know. I hope some of those folks read the book and, um, get inspired to participate in that kind of stuff more.

You know, she famously sat at the front of the bus and defied the racist laws of the time. Then at that time, the transit system ran 15 minute service on a lot of the buses that were operating there. And funnily enough, this was a national city lines company. This was the company that is infamous for destroying streetcar service around the country, which is sort of not exactly true, um, but she made this protest at a time when transit service was actually pretty good.

And then fast forward a few years, by the 1970s, transit service is taken to the, the city level. It becomes public transit and it’s massively defunded, and it becomes a really poor service. Much worse than when Rosa Parks mounted her protest. And it becomes so bad that by 1998, the City of Montgomery actually does away with fixed route transit service altogether and replaces it with dial aide vans.

And this is just like. Such an egregious instance of kind of taking away transit and making it useless. And the empirical data from that experiment shows it was useless and people weren’t able to get to their jobs, and it was a disaster. They did restore fixed route transit service, but still to this day, transit service in Montgomery, Alabama is much worse, much less frequent than when Rosa Parks mounted her protest.

And I think that’s just such a poignant historical arc. Like how American Transit has just trended in the last 70 years.

Where can folks get a copy so they can read about it?

Benjamin Schneider: Thanks so much, Jeff