(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 583: Framing Urban Disorder

This week we’re joined by Ryan Puzycki, who writes at The City of Yes. We have a discussion on urban disorder, how it manifests, and how to address the upstream impacts instead of when it’s too late. We also talk about enforcing norms and the impacts of media on our perceptions.

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I’m also on the city zoning commission, and I spend most of my time writing a substack called City of Yes, where I explore urbanism and urban issues.

I did stints in London and Madrid, but I have not always worked in the urbanism space. I haven’t written about it until really just the past few years. I used to be in Montessori education, where I built and managed schools for about a decade, and there were kind of two aspects of that that brought me into this world.

One was just trying to build schools in San Francisco and Brooklyn, which was kind of a nightmare, just working through like the gamut of red tape and the conflicting bureaucracies that had, you know, requirements that didn’t quite align with each other. Um, but we still managed to get schools open, but you know, when, when people ask, “Why is preschool so expensive?”

I’m like, “Well, it’s very hard to do.” So that’s part of it. Um, but the other side of that was just seeing, especially in San Francisco, how we had this like constant churn in our school community between teachers who were getting burned out because they could only afford housing, you know, 90 minutes away in the South Bay, with people coming in from Fremont each day or, you know, San Jose, and, you know, you’re sitting in traffic, you’re sitting on BART.

It just, over time that just adds up and people don’t wanna do it anymore when it’s, it’s three hours of their life. So- Plus taking

You know, can we do two tuitions or another bedroom? And a lot of the time the families would choose to leave the city. And so this was in the 2017, 2020 timeframe and just sort of seeing that happening in real time in San Francisco, I was just thinking about how can we… what can we do at the school to fix this, and started to think more about, like, YIMBY politics and policy otherwise, and got involved a little bit, and then the pandemic happened and sort of every single pathology about urban life sort of came to the forefront during that time.

It was all I was thinking about other than trying to keep our school afloat. And we did that. We ended up stabilizing the school and selling it, and that question was still very much on my mind, what is going on in cities? What is their future? How can we solve them? And so I just started to do a lot of reading.

I ended up moving to Austin. I got very involved in local politics here very quickly with this urbanist group called AURA, which I’m now on the board of. We did a whole bunch of housing reforms. Got appointed to the zoning commission related to my work doing that, and then just was writing about this stuff and learning about it and trying to kind of figure out what was going on.

And so I have the Substack now. It’s been doing fairly well, but it’s mostly me just learning out loud and sharing what I’m learning with people. So I’m not an expert on this stuff. I don’t feel like an expert at least, but I am well-read and kind of a been in the trenches and some of the experience side here in the city.

the, you know, aging population, whether that’s- Mm-hmm … kids, how that impacts parents, how that impacts- Yeah … uh, people who are trying to take care of their elderly parents, the idea of healthcare, those types of things. Mm-hmm. So it’s kind of in this overarching umbrella, and I’m sure that we’ll get into the discussion about care infrastructure, but I think that’s a really fascinating kind of angle that you’re coming from.

That’s not sustainable. You can’t do that at scale, you know? I fully understand that. We focus on trying to run a good school, but it was only f- uh, we had 220 kids in our program. You know, how do we serve an entire city if those are the economics?

I know New York City is, is focused on- Yeah … on childcare and things like that, but that’s just one of the many different, uh, calculations about all this stuff, and cities are in the center of it, I think.

especially here in San Francisco because- Yeah … I feel like you can really, you know, put your foot in your mouth pretty easily and pretty fast- Mm … based on different opinions and stuff. But I think it should be discussed ’cause it’s really important.

What first kind of gotten you thinking about this idea that urban disorder maybe needs to be addressed?

Um, and I’d say certainly since the pandemic, that’s become more true. You know, in that piece and others I’ve written about, I’ve talked about living in San Francisco’s Mission District, just pre-pandemic and then while the pandemic was happening and, you know, homelessness, people shooting up was just part of life.

You… We’d be taking the dog for a walk, and she’d be sniffing something, then we’d realize it’s a used needle and immediately trying to tug her back.

Like, what was this? So, you know, it was always kind of there. I kind of was like, this is what it is to live here in San Francisco, at least. But I did have an experience, like, living in Manhattan for 10 years before that, and Manhattan didn’t have that. Like, you know, there was certainly a lot of homeless people in New York, but New York had homeless shelters.

You didn’t really see the, you know, flagrant drug abuse and things like that. So I at least had an inkling that, like, there’s another way to go about this, not necessarily that New York has solved its problems or maintained the level that it had achieved. But certainly compared to San Francisco, at least there was a difference.

And then, um, I came to Austin, and Austin is somewhere in between those two. It’s not… It’s vastly overstated by many of the people here who hate Austin and love to, uh, dunk on it. But we do have a lot of visible homelessness. We do have a large total homeless population. You don’t see the drugs so much, but you do see mentally ill people walking into the street.

I mean, I have to pass through the east side of downtown Austin, which is where we have our homeless shelter for men as well as one for women, but you see people who don’t really have anywhere to go during the day or anything to do. Some of them seem like they need treatment or help, but they’re standing in the middle of traffic or wandering into traffic, and they don’t seem to be aware that they’re there.

And that’s dangerous not only for those people but also for the people who are driving when somebody erratic enters the right of way. And so, um, it’s a long way of saying that I think we all, if we live in cities like this, we all kind of live with it in a certain way, and I just had a sense that maybe that we shouldn’t have to.

Now, why I wrote this particular piece was because I often see from certain, like, center-right people or conservative-identifying people this idea that, well, you know, disorder is a function of, like, American individualism. And, you know, that just didn’t sit quite right with me. And so, uh, what I was trying to explore in this piece is this perceived tension between individualism or liberalism or whatever you wanna call it, and, you know, public order.

And so that was kind of the genesis of it. And a couple other writers, Chris Arnade, who writes a substack about walking around the world, and then Addison Del Mastro, uh, wrote another piece riffing off of that in which they were kind of discussing these ideas, and I wanted to engage with that and kind of press on some of their formulations of this problem.

Yeah. Uh, or you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do-ism- Mm-hmm … kind of feeling. And I’m wondering what you took from those arguments, and specifically about this kind of idea of individualism, and specifically I’m interested in the folk libertarianism aspect of it.

Um, I think we misuse, abuse the phrase sometimes to mean a whole bunch of things. So I was trying to separate political individualism, which I think is kind of the system of American rights constitutionalism, institutional governance, from this idea of just basic individuality or, you know, flying your freak flag or whatever.

But it is not quite the same thing, or not necessarily necessitated by, I would say, the underlying political philosophy aspect of it. So I was pushing back, I guess, on saying that that guarantees or defines this kind of realm of disorder that we inhabit.

Yeah. Um, but- It’s a

We are responsible for their wellbeing, their jobs, their health, their, all these things. Yeah. And in the South it was more individualistic, right? Like, they were like, “Okay, every man for himself. We’re here for profits, and we’re gonna, you know, build these, uh, plantations.” There was a stratification of wealth, right?

So there’s a very poor and that worked the land, there was the slaves, and then there was the very rich. And then during the book he talks about George Washington’s travel logs noting this difference between the North and the South. And- Yeah … and it led to this really fascinating quote, which is, “The result was a country where people expected contradictory things.”

“Absolute freedom to do what they wanted with their own property, while expecting to control what their neighbors did with theirs.” And I feel like there’s, like, the connection there between, like- Yeah … the property rights aspect of it and, you know, how people expect you to treat them specifically as individuals.

And so what ended up happening was the cities ended up getting dumped with all of the problems, the social problems, while the suburbs could live, I guess, separated from, from the consequences of it. But yeah, so I think what’s interesting about the quote you just gave, well, was the South really individualistic?

I mean, not from the perspective of a slave, right?

I mean, Jefferson himself penned the words that he spent the rest of his life ignoring. So I guess I, you know, maybe push back against Yoni That’s fair. Too. Um, but yes, I mean, our country is, of course, full of contradictions. We’ve, we’ve been from the beginning. We see that in our cities here, you know. In the same piece about the sanctuary suburbs, well, you know, a lot of cities call themselves sanctuary cities, and then they don’t build enough housing and forcing people who live there to move out.

So, you know, we say we care about the homeless. Again, we don’t, we don’t provide, you know, treatment centers for the mentally ill. We don’t provide enough beds for those who are on the streets. Um, we have, uh, this tendency to, and I don’t know if this is just like we’ve inherited from our, you know, boomer parents or whatever, this sense of entitlement to not have to have trade-offs.

Like we expect… You know, New York City is going through this right now. You know, Mayor Mandani had a lot of goals and visions for when he came into office of things he wanted to do, and well, he actually has to produce a budget first, and, you know, they’re making trade-offs in real time about, well, what can we actually do here and how do we fund it and how do we pay for it?

Because there are, well, there are limits. And those are imposed by reality. And so, I don’t know. I feel like a lot of American life today and politics in particular is wanting to have it both ways. Nobody ever has to hurt. Nobody has to, I don’t know, contribute. Nobody has to share in this great thing we call public life.

Um, but yet we still want the benefits of it. So, yeah, I mean, I, I, I guess I have some frustration with that notion.

Mm-hmm. And at the moment we’re kind of neglecting them. And I feel like that neglect, and like you say, is, like, leading to some of these problems that we’re seeing, the lack of housing, the lack of, and we mentioned before, care infrastructure. Yeah. And so what happens is people who are out on their luck or they have problems that they are facing, they are stuck without a solution, or they’re trying to do things on their own, which that individualism isn’t really fair to them and isn’t really fair to everybody else.

It’s not humane, in my view, to let people overdose on drugs. You know, drug addiction is a disease. It’s a tragedy. We should be trying to cure people of it, not facilitating it, which is, I think, a mistake San Francisco has made. So that is, in my view, a responsibility of a society and of a city. And, you know, it’s always the cities, of course, that are gonna deal with it anyway.

But a lot of those problems could have been prevented further upstream. You know, how did somebody get into homelessness in the first place? Most people don’t enter homelessness because they’re addicted to drugs or because they’re mentally ill. Sometimes, but once you become homeless because you got evicted, you couldn’t afford your house, there wasn’t new supply, so rents went up, up, up, which is what we’ve seen everywhere.

If you were put on the street suddenly, I don’t know what I would do. My life depends right now on electricity and air conditioning and access to water and a bathroom and a bed. I have a, a chili pad on my bed to keep it cool. Like, I can’t… I have a very bougie sleeping arrangement. Like, if I’m on the street, I’m dead.

Your life can fall apart so quickly, and then you have to hold down a job, you have to take your kids to school. You haven’t showered. You know, you’re living out of your car. I just… You know, for… It’s incomprehensible to me. And yet this is a thing that happens to people all the time. Now some of those people get through the shelter system, and we don’t ever see them, but some of them don’t.

That’s a lot of men. It’s a lot of Black men. In Austin, that’s at least the demographic. And well, we don’t really have an answer for them other than there’s a, there’s a, there’s a greenway down the outside of downtown where you can pitch a tent until we tell you to clean it up.

They had sent you out into the woods with a tarp and then told you to fend for yourself. I didn’t like it very much. I slept with a rock as my pillow, and it was not comfortable. Uh. I can’t imagine sleeping on the street is comfortable either, so… And also kind of some of the stats, like people talk about homelessness as this kind of overarching thing.

But I don’t know how many people understand, like you mentioned, like how it occurs, right? And research here in California specifically by PPIC and others have said, you know, most of the folks who are homeless, they’re functionally homeless. Uh, they live in their cars, or they are sleeping- Yeah … couch to couch.

And why it happens is because the safety net doesn’t catch them. You, you know, there’s, they’re, they’re just one bad day away from their homelessness. W- and it’s not- Yeah … any fault of their own, whether they had health problems, they couldn’t pay their medical bills. Mm-hmm. Their home gets foreclosed on because they couldn’t pay their rent because they lost a job because of reasons, maybe it was health.

This edge that people are on that we’ve put them on because of the system that we operate. And I’ve- Yeah … I feel like if we had kind of a little bit more compassion and if we learned a little bit more about why this is happening, uh, some of this research shows it, but we might understand a little bit better how to solve it.

And I think there’s a lot of people that do, but I think there’s a lot of people that kind of push it aside and, you know, the, I think those individuality arguments are part of that. It’s not coming to grips with the idea that, um, there is an edge, and a lot of people are living on it.

So people see homeless people putting up tents in greenways or, you know, loitering around public spaces downtown, and they assume that’s what the whole problem is. And so the city here, I think 2020, passed a camping ban which then of course the Supreme Court, you know, codified with the, the Grants Pass decision a couple years ago, basically saying that states and cities can do that.

Okay, well, you can’t sleep on the sidewalk anymore. You can’t put up a tent there. But where can you sleep? You know, the same people who voted for that were also not building housing for forty years. They refused homeless shelters in their neighborhoods. They said no to affordable– one hundred percent affordable housing projects in, in their communities.

And so again, the contradiction of wanting to have it both ways. I don’t wanna see this, but yet I don’t wanna do any of the solutions that would make it go away for real. And so I would say there’s an illiberal impulse to that lack of solutionism here, where we are going to exclude, control, decide who gets to live, you know, in any particular place.

What’s the right housing typology? We can’t have apartments in this part of town because it’s been zoned for single-family housing for a million years, even though it’s right next door to downtown. Can’t put a building of SROs somewhere close by because that will attract the wrong kind of people, you know?

So, you know, that is an illiberal impulse, this desire to control, I think. And so this is where the essay was trying to kind of bring it all together, that both of these things are illiberal, not what a allegedly or supposedly avowedly liberal city, a liberal society, um, says they want. We want people to be housed, but yet we don’t allow housing.

So well, we can only do one of those things, you know? So if, if you are perpetually Choosing not to build housing, then you are choosing the illiberal side of the equation there.

Yes. Um, I think that’s one of the frustrating things about San Francisco specifically, is all the services and everything is at basically in the Tenderloin, right? It’s where- Yeah … many of the problems are, but nobody wants it in any other part of the city. And so, you know, you have this force and then, and then you have the national conservative machine telling everybody that San Francisco is a hellhole.

Um- Right … and I go outside on my street and I, I see blue skies and a wonderful community and like people walking around, and I’m like, “Where is this coming from?” Well, it’s coming from the fact that we do have services for people, and they are- Yeah … in this, concentrated very heavily in this one neighborhood.

And so you have this just like push for, uh, making, you know, a scapegoat out of a place where- Yeah … people care a little, maybe more than, than others. Um, there’s a lot of places in San Francisco that don’t care as well. Yeah. But, you know, I think that that’s an interesting part of it too, is like a lot of the services and everything, uh, the, the limited services I should say, are, you know, kind of concentrated in cities.

And so what does that say about the way that we provide care for people in a larger way?

But of course, the yeoman farmer was actually a plantation owner where the planting was done by slaves, and the cowboy was a myth created out of like two decades of, you know, Texas grazing. Never really was a thing, and it disappeared just as quickly as it arrived. And, but of course, the sub- suburbs are the enduring aspect of American life, and I think anybody, probably listeners here know that history of how the government subsidized the suburbs, bulldozed cities to build highways into the suburbs.

And so, you know, redlined- The places where Jews and immigrants and Black people lived, so they couldn’t get access to capital and build wealth and move out to those suburbs themselves and channeled all of the poor people, all of the people who needed services into the cities. You know, there’s an inelegant phrase from the, the kind of Victorian progressive era where, you know, cities were called the, the dumping grounds of the poor.

And to your point, like, cities have always had to absorb, I would say, you know, the problems of society, and the suburbs are the sort of escape valve from it, and they have surrounded themselves with exclusionary zoning to make that true. You know, Marc Andreessen in Atherton opposed an apartment building there.

I’m damn sure he’s not going to allow a homeless shelter anywhere near his house. This is our history. Somehow, you know, the, the ideal of American life is, you know, the white picket fence on a large lot with a perfect little house and the dog and the kids and the 2.1 children or whatever it is. And but that’s been manufactured for, you know, 200 years.

Uh, so it’s not surprising to me that we’re still kind of fighting this battle. But yes, I do think that the culture has been oriented against cities, and cities get blamed for being responsible for solving the problems that have been foisted upon them.

You know, cities are places of cooperation and shared knowledge and greater good, but without the guardrails of public responsibility and enforcement, they’re not as good as they could be. I feel like we’re backsliding away from kind of what we should be, and one of the reasons feels like we, we aren’t enforcing a lot of these things that we should.

There’s a couple of items in, in your piece specifically of people doing things that are just illogical, not necessarily, uh, as an individual, but like the idea of somebody peeing in a subway car or shooting up in the subway hall or whatever it may be. Those are things that should be, I don’t wanna say punished, but just like the rules- Yeah

should be enforced, uh, that people shouldn’t be doing those things. And when we allow it, we actually degrade further, you know, the push forward in societal goodness.

Excuse my French. Uh, it was about, you know, these, like civic norms, you know, holding a door for somebody, saying please and thank you. But you know, not blasting TikTok when you’re sitting on the subway, not, you know… Things like that, which, you know, there is isn’t a law against using your video in a crowded space, and I’m not sure there should be, but there should be a sense of like propriety that I am around other people who may not wish to hear what I’m doing.

And so like you tolerate that though, well, why not somebody peeing? You know, if we don’t care about the space that we’re all sharing together, why should anybody? And I think you kind of can get into this downward spiral of deteriorating just society and, uh, I don’t know, kind of feels like the American experiment right now at large in some ways.

Oh, well, who cares about the rules? I don’t know if that sounds like anybody we know in politics these days, but…

Um, I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. Apologies for being so self-referential, but, um- No … you know, the piece was called The Public Square Is Not Online I sort of was kind of dramatizing, like, what if Twitter was real life? What if it was actually a public square? And, like, the behaviors that people do on there, they were doing in your real public square.

Like some, you know, guy with a blue check standing up and just pronouncing his views to the rest of the square, and another guy on the other side doing the same thing, and then a bunch of little people, minnows around him. You know, the reply guys. You know, me too, me too. People hiding behind the bushes who you don’t know are there, but, you know, the, the vast the, the silent majority, I guess.

Uh, but it would be ridiculous, right? It would, it would be totally dysfunctional on its own. You know, so it, it, it… I don’t think it really… It’s not a public square. It doesn’t mimic, I think, what real in-person human interaction is. And I think it… This is not novel, but just brings out the worst in us, and is meant to do that.

So I don’t know. I don’t think good conversations happen there. I think they happen here, one-to-one, or in person, and, and whatnot. But it amplifies, I think, the bad. And of course, I don’t know. On a fundamental level, it’s just like the whole thing just kind of sucks in my view. So

I h- I have to be on social media for my job. Yeah. I go through a lot of news items every day, and just, like, the negative news of it all, you know, can get you down, and it’s not healthy. Mm-hmm. But I also, in reading your piece specifically, like, I noted every single social media thing that you were talking about.

You were describing them as what they would be like if it was actually a real place, and I was like, “Oh, that’s LinkedIn. That’s Facebook.” Yeah. “That’s that.” You know, like you… And it’s, it’s unfortunate that I know the answers to those things. Yeah. Right? But I do. Uh, so… But I think that, you know, for social media, as I was saying before, like, since in San Francisco a lot of this is concentrated, you can, you know, point your camera at one corner of the street in one part of the city and say- Yeah

“This place is a horrible, horrible place.” Whereas if you take it in totality, it’s a won- Yeah, totally … it’s a wonderful, wonderful place. And so I think that, that, you know, kind of hyperfocus or ability to take things out of context is, I think, frustrating. And also just the manipulation that goes on now.

The algorithm itself, like, suffocated actual information sharing. Unless you were being ostentatious, unless you were being combative, unless you were being anything you can think of that’s kind of, like, over the top and not something you would do in, what you said, a public square- Mm … you were pushed down in terms of your, your reach.

And so I think that that’s kind of where I stand on it, is, like, the whole thing of, of public disorder is actually amplified by these- Yeah … these social media conglomerates, a- as it were. And in a worse way, the ideas that certain people wanna pass through Those are the ones that get through, and so it changes the discussion even if the discussion- Yeah

in real life isn’t really like that. And so since so many journalists are on there as well, they soak that in and believe that this is real life and, and you know, there’s a joke Twitter’s not real life, but-

Let’s say like, you know, for trans people for example, like- Mm-hmm … you know, obviously trans people exist, but are they taking over college sports? No. I mean the, the, it’s an insane, you know, comment to make because it’s not actually happening. Yeah. But the public square hologram that is Twitter made it so that the people thought that that was a thing, and so now there’s all these people who are writing about it, and people are reading about it, and it’s like This is not a thing, and this is not a thing that Americans care about.

And so, you know, I think public disorder from that standpoint is, like, it’s salacious and it’s engrossing in the way that it aggregates your senses, and that is why it gets attention. Yeah. And that is also why it makes it harder to solve.

But then, you know, I follow a lot of Austin boosters, and if you follow their feeds, there’s nothing wrong with the city. It’s this amazing place, you know? Yeah. It’s like, “We have no problems at all.” So it can work the other way, too, I guess. But I mean, to your point, in my homelessness piece, that’s basically the point I was making, was that everybody focuses on the visible parts of homelessness, and they don’t realize that that’s really just the tip of the iceberg, and so they’re missing the upstream problems that are causing people to end up on the streets.

So when they see the 6,000 number, they think, “Oh, of course. Yeah, I’ve seen 6,000 homeless people in the city.” It’s like, “No, you haven’t. You’ve actually only seen maybe a couple thousand. There are 3,500 others who are going through shelter systems that you, I am sure, never look into.” You know, New York too, you know, 90% of the homeless population in New York is sheltered.

In New York, you could be forgiven for never seeing a homeless person in Manhattan, if that’s where you spent all of your time, because they do a good job of hiding it. But it, it is a huge problem that masks maybe their housing shortage. So what I try to do in my pieces sometimes is reframe an issue, especially for people who are aware of a problem but maybe don’t realize how it’s happening.

I want to shine a light on the upstream causes of this thing so that if we care, if you say, I’ll take your word for it, you care about homelessness and the mentally ill, well, the best way we can do it is by, you know, legalizing more housing, by funding mental health programs, diversion programs, things like that.

Yeah. And a lot of that I think, like, cuts into this. Here’s another example that I’m thinking about is, like, the bus system in San Francisco and Muni and, you know, people being afraid to ride because there’s so many folks who ride it ’cause it’s the place of last resort. Well, people expect the transit agency to focus on that, but it’s actually not necessarily their job.

It’s the city’s job to focus on the housing and the care- Yeah. Mm-hmm … infrastructure and everything else that you were mentioning. So I’m curious what you think is, like, the best way to go about centering the problem but also solving it where it actually is coming from rather than, like, you know, the biopsychosocial model versus the biomedical model, where biomedical model you solve it in the hospital as best you can when it’s at the end stage, versus the biopsychosocial- Right

model, whereas, like, this is a societal thing that we should be working on. Where are the points that we need to focus on?

So I think with something like homelessness, it’s… I want to say there’s no, like, mono-causal explanation or solution for that matter. Like, zoning reform is not a panacea. I’ll just put that out there right now to all of my YIMBY friends. Um, it is necessary. It’s a necessary part of the solution, but it doesn’t solve everything.

And so anyway, when I think about homelessness, I think about, well, prevention is a big part of it, and we should be spending as much of our dollars on making sure that people don’t enter into it in the first place. Because once they cross that threshold, everything gets much worse and much more expensive to solve downstream.

However, many people have already crossed that threshold, and so we have people who are a large population of chronically homeless people who need a higher level of care and, um, that is going to cost more money. Now, if we are doing a good job at preventing people from getting to that place, over time the chronically homeless population should be shrinking.

They should be getting rehoused or into treatment centers or whatever they need. And then hopefully we are building enough housing or whatever interventions we need to make on the front end so that people aren’t coming in, or if they do, it’s very quick that they get out very quickly. They’re rapidly rehoused.

You know, Houston has a great rapid rehousing program where they’ve managed to dramatically shrink their total homeless population by sixty, seventy percent over the past ten years or so by instead of building the housing themselves, they just pay rent. And they’ve been shown to have a ninety percent success rate in keeping people, even with drug addiction and mental illness, off the streets once they get rehoused.

And part of the reason why they’re able to do that is because rents are cheap in Houston because they built a lot of housing, which is great, but I think they also put their money in the most important spot, which is right at that beginning gate. So that person who crossed the threshold almost went into it or immediately taken out of that homelessness spiral.

If a city was gonna spend a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars building permanent supportive housing, well, now they… you know, that’s however many months of rent, two hundred months of rent maybe for, for somebody. So, you know, you could see how those same dollars can go to a lot more people all at once.

And so, you know, they haven’t solved everything. They still have a, a population, but relative to other cities of their size, it’s a much lower per capita rate, including Austin, which I think could learn something from Houston. San Francisco for sure. So there are, there are models I think that we can follow, but like if we’re not doing the prevention, then we are just committing to making the problem permanent, and that’s going to only be more and more expensive and catastrophic over time, not only for our cities at large, but for the individuals suffering through it.

treatment and things like that. The same thing with Medicare. I mean, we, in California specifically, we have a program where Medicare is allowed to purchase housing for people who are really high risk. And so what that means is, I mean, rent housing for people. But, like, what that means- Mm-hmm … is, like, instead of spending $10,000 a night in an emergency room- Right

they’re actually, you can actually put them up for six months where their health will stabilize and improve, rather than them being on the street and then coming into the emergency room every few days to cost $10,000- Yeah … you know, per night. That’s a huge savings. A $5,000 a month rent is way cheaper than $10,000 a night, I mean, if you think about it from that perspective.

Yeah,

You have this, you know, way of seeing the problem before it happens, and so you can nip it in the bud, versus like the biomedical model, which is like, “You’re now in the hospital. How do we treat this?” Yeah. It’s only a short-term solution unless there’s something very acute, right?

or it’s terminal.

that we can figure out how these things cascade, it’s not, not necessarily helping.

We would only have to focus on, you know, deeply affordable. You know, in Austin, we’re getting to a point now where market rents are reaching into what was subsidized or had to be subsidized a few years ago. You know, we could probably still go farther with that, but it should lead to policymakers to rethink how we’re spending these dollars, and could we put them to more higher, into higher uses.

I mean, the Austin model should just be every other city should look at this and just make it legal to build more housing.

You know, smaller, you know, that’s I think five times what Austin spends for a city that’s three-quarters the size. Anyway.

How do we make care functional in each of these districts? Do we need to build senior centers? Do we need to accredit more care professionals? Do we need to do this?” And so I think, you know, thinking about it from that point of view is a really fascinating way of thinking about how we can actually start to, like, systematize the way that we can actually get to that point where we are taking care of things before they get out of hand.

And so there are models out there. I mean, you know, the, the superblocks in Barcelona, part of their charge is actually making things closer for people so they can actually get more care infrastructure available to them. The same thing in, uh, in other countries. I think Melissa and Chris Bratton talked in their book recently about Bogota doing something similar.

So I think there’s, like, ways we can do this. It’ll be a little bit of work, but it actually might be good to front load it rather than at the end, as we were just talking about.

Yeah. Uh, you wrote recently about the gap in state enthusiasm for light rail versus massive- … uh, road expansion.

But

Because amazingly, TxDOT did put out this- Yeah … report saying- Big deal … we need to do more than roads, but TxDOT is still, you know, gonna spend $5 billion in Austin. It’s still gonna spend money expanding I-10 and I-45 in Houston. Obviously, Dallas has its stuff going on. So I’m curious if that’s actually permeated any membranes there-

in, in the area in Texas.

But then we move to the, you know, metropolitan planning organization level, and in the Central Texas, it’s called CAMPO. And, uh, Austin, which is the largest political entity on that body, is a minority voice. So the surrounding suburbs are still very much oriented towards we need to build roads, we need to expand highways, we need to make it easier to get into the city, and so we’ll just bulldoze the city to do that.

So I would say even though some good people at TxDOT understand the limitations of the problem, there’s, one, just the culture is not quite there in Texas, and two, the constitution is not there either. You basically can’t spend money in Texas on anything but highways. So, um, it’s gonna take the culture to change more broadly, I think, for that to translate into something that appears, you know, as a bill.

I wouldn’t expect it to be next session. We’re gonna have to convince a bunch of people who live in suburban places that we need- Alternate modes going forward. But meanwhile, you know, TxDOT is still following the logic that it has grown accustomed to over its history, and we’re expanding I-35 through Central Austin.

We’re trying to expand MoPac on the west side of town, which is- Good luck

So in theory, you could build an eightplex in a single family neighborhood or a small apartment building with a coffee shop at the bottom of it This is basically impossible under code currently. Our zones reflect a kind of suburban planning mentality, I would say, and so this would allow us to get to a more urban form, which would be great in the central city.

I live in, uh, to your point about streetcars, I live in Central East Austin, which was a streetcar suburb-

All of the neighborhoods surrounding downtown are zoned for single family, and under some recent zoning reform, you can do three homes by right on a single family lot, which is great, but it is not enough to really make our, our, our transit systems work for everybody. So if we can get that passed, which, uh, we are hoping to do in the next 12 months, then we need to get it mapped, and if we can do that, then maybe we’ll get a city here after all.

A denser city.

We’ll have that in the show notes so you don’t have to figure out how to spell it.