The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: COVID-19 spells the end of the big city boom

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

COVID-19: Have we seen the last of the big city boom?On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, renowned urbanists Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin argue the motion Be it resolved COVID-19 spells the end of the big city boom.SOURCES: KHOU 11, CBS Miami, New York State, WGN News, Fox Business, CTV News, BBC NewsBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind.

Today's debate, be it resolved, COVID-19 and its social and economic fallout spells the end of the people. big city boom. Florida continues to see an alarming case increase and one expert today called Miami, the new epicenter of the pandemic. A new report from Rice University says the pandemic will hit Houston harder than any other city in Texas. Why New York, why we're seeing this level of infection, well, why cities across the country? It's very simple. It's about density. It's about the number of people in a small geographic location, allowing that virus to spread, and that virus is very good at what it does. It is a killer. It is very good at spreading. It is very contagious. And the dense environments are its feeding grounds. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard-Griffis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the globe, but it's our cities that have felt the greatest impact. Research shows that 95% of people infected with the virus live in urban areas. Supporters of big city living say people have been too quick to blame density as the culprit behind contagion. They say the pandemic offers us the chance to address the more complex issues that drive infection in the urban environment and build a new generation of inclusive cities where everyone wants to live. African Americans make up more than half of Chicago's COVID-19 deaths. Lightfoot is calling that sobering disparity a public health red alarm.

This is a call to action moment for all of us. Now is the time where we have to embrace this wholeheartedly as a city and take concrete steps to move forward. We're not going to reverse this overnight, but we have to say it for what it is and move forward decisively as a city. And that's what we will do. Critics of big cities say the pandemic has exposed the flaws in contemporary urban planning, which have emphasized the values of density and mass transit at the expense of safety and people's lives. They argue that as our hyper-connected world moves into an era of ongoing pandemic risk, de-densification is the only way to go. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the resolution,

be it resolve COVID-19 and its social and economic fallout spells the end of the big city boom. Arguing for the motion is Joel Kotkin. He's Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California, and executive director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute. Arguing against the motion is Richard Florida, professor at the University of Toronto School of Cities and Rotman School of Management. He's also a distinguished fellow at New York University and Florida International University. Richard, Joel, welcome to the Monk Debates podcast.

Nice to be here. Great to be with you, Roger. Well, I'm really looking forward to this discussion, this debate between the two of you. The future, the fate of cities in the shadow of COVID-19 has been an issue that has, I think, gripped all of us. We were reading about it in our newspapers. We're listening to podcasts like this to try to understand where, do cities go from here? And we've got a great resolution to frame this debate, be it resolved. The COVID-19 and its social and economic fallout spells the end of the big city boom. Richard, you're going to be

arguing against our motion. Joel, in favor. Joel, I'm going to put a proverbial two minutes up on our opening clock for you. And let's get your opening remarks and let's get this debate underway. All right. Well, first of all, I just want to make it clear that I don't think big cities or mega-cities are going to go away, but I do think, and this was happening before COVID, that we're going to have more dispersion of population, both within the megacities. I've been doing work even on Toronto, which has been growing also in its periphery faster than its core. So these trends were already happening. This is not like 9-11, which hit at a time when the cities were really resurgent. The COVID hit at a time when cities were already under a lot of pressure fiscally, economically, demographically,

New York and Chicago and Los Angeles all lost population last few years. So there's clearly been a problem. The question really is, how do we go forward? I think we do need the core city. There's still a need for the megacity. But I think it's going to change in the COVID era, particularly with the number of people working remotely. And I think you're just going to see an acceleration

of trends that already existed, where I think predominantly families and a lot of aging boomers will continue to leave. But I think young people who, after all, often feel that they're invulnerable anyway, are going to continue to go in. And I think that we could transform our core cities into something that's much more sustainable than what we have now. Thank you, Joel. Sysink to the point, you've opened this debate for us. I appreciate that. Richard, I'm going to Turn the microphone over to you. Put two minutes on the clock for your opening remarks on our debate. Be it resolved. COVID-19 and its social and economic fallout spells the end of the big city. Boom, you're speaking against our resolution today. Cities will clearly survive this pandemic and the economic and social fallout and the related crises that come from it.

You know, first I want to say thanks to Joel, and he knows this. Your listeners don't. I found him to be by far the best debating partner I've had over the past. last 20 years, and even when we disagree, there is no one who I've learned more from. Look, crises like these, and Joel mentioned 9-11, the 2008 economic and financial crises, tend to lend themselves to dystopian takes, and we've seen these takes before. It's the end of cities, it's the death of distance, cities will disappear, and we've heard it. It's not been true. Cities have survived far worse than this. They've survived the Spanish flu, the bubonic plague, the black plagues. That's because urbanization, the clustering of people together in cities, in communities,

is a far greater force than infectious disease. On a personal note, I was born in 1957, which means I was born in the middle of a pretty darn big pandemic that killed 100,000 Americans. I'm American. My parents were born in the 1920s, and they were the youngest of their respective families, which means all of my aunts and uncles were born during or kids during the Spanish flu. Nobody mentioned it to me, and is a 40-year career as an urbanist, I had never heard about the role of infectious disease.

Cities will survive this. The case study that everyone is talking about is New York. And it is clear that in the wake of the pandemic, there was a pretty significant exodus from New York. The cell phone tracking data that we have suggests that more than 400,000 people left New York City. Most of them to getaway homes in the Hamptons, the Shore towns, the Hudson Valley,

that's about 5% of New York's population. When you look at mail forwarding, the number drops to about slightly more than 100,000 people or about 1.6% of the population, most of whom didn't decamp to other metros, but they decamp to small communities, suburban communities around New York. In fact, we've only seen a movement out of cities in three cities or search for housing outside of cities in three cities. New York and Boston and Detroit, where those searches were bigger. Across the United States, there is no change between April this year and April last year and people searching to look for houses, whether it be cities

in suburbs or rural areas, according to Zillow. But Joel said this already. What we're likely to see is far less a disruption or a recasting of trends and far more an acceleration of change is already underway. The people leaving cities are families, families with kids. Every single person I know who left New York fits that same profile. One good way to think about it is that this crisis has compressed family formation moves that might have been made over one or two or three years into two or three months.

Young people are risk oblivious. Joel's already said that. They will head back to cities. They have head back to cities in the wake of every pandemic before because cities offer more opportunity and higher wages. And let me say one last thing because the Monk debates are hosted in Canada and in Toronto. We've seen nothing of this in Toronto. There has been no massive exodus of people out of Toronto into the suburbs over and above

the family formation moves we've seen before. And I think the family formation moves in the exodus from American cities has to do with the peculiarities of American cities, which, as Joel has pointed out, are just not great places for families. Schooling is hard to arrange urban schools, locally funded, do not provide the opportunities that suburban schools do. Whether it's true or not, there's a perception of higher crime. There's not an extensive health care system or safety net for urban residents in the United States. And I think, as Joel said, what we could see coming out of this pandemic is not an end of big cities, but the opportunity to make our cities better. As they become less expensive and attract young people back,

they can become the kind of places that become innovative and creative again because they won't be as expensive and price people out. Thank you, Richard. A lot of interesting ideas to unpack there. And I want to give our listeners the opportunity to hear the two of you kind of reflect and react on each other's opening statements. You have had this debate, I think, together for a couple decades now, and that's part of the reason why we wanted both of you right now on this podcast together, because this has been an ongoing conversation between the two of you about the future of suburbs, of cities, of how people are going to live in the future. So, Joel, what do you want to react to

in Richard's statement, and particularly what would you take exception with that you'd like to bring the listeners' attention to? I think one place where we may have some differences, I think that they move online will bring a lot of businesses that have, historically been in the urban core, either into people's houses or into what may be suburban sub-centers. America reopening businesses not only rethinking how they operate, but where they operate. The pandemic may be the breaking point for companies looking to move offices out of big cities and into suburbs. The suburbs are going to have to change too. If they are going to be places where people work, they're going to have to have better amenities. I spent most of my life

in Los Angeles. Many of my friends are in the film industry. Most of my friends are in the film industry. them are self-employed. There's a great infrastructure of things to do, places to eat, places to hang out in L.A. so that you can still have this social contact while living the city. The biggest challenge I could see, A, would be this exodus of jobs. My friend, a real estate guy who, like my wife, is originally from Montreal. You know, what he's doing is he's buying suburban shopping malls, warehouses, things that have been deserted, turning them into socially distance office space so that if people want to still work, let's say if I'm working for Goldman Sachs, and I want to work in their center in Westchester or someplace else, that would be a possibility.

The biggest question, and I really like to ask Richard what his thoughts are, is how do we do high-rise subway density? how do we do social distancing and dense urbanity, and how would it have to change if we're going to maintain that regime? Thank you, Joel. Great. Richard, your opportunity to react to Joel's opening statement, maybe to what Joel's just said, how do we do high density in an era of pandemics and plagues? Every single one of those points well taken. The bigger point that we have to make cities and suburbs better, both of them better. And the fact that so many urbanists impugns suburbans by default and definition is a huge problem, since a larger number of Americans, particularly live in suburbs

than do in cities. The way I would reframe this is say there's two sets of forces acting on metropolitan areas and on societies today. The first of a set of pull forces. There are many people, particularly families with children, but also the old and the vulnerable, for whom dense urban living is scary. Living in an apartment with an elevator, going up and down that with others, and getting on a train or transit, whether that's a commute in from the suburbs or a local commute from an outer borough or a city neighborhood. But those folks are going to head to suburbs, and suburbs are going to be able to attract them. As Joel said, I think quite aptly, there will be an opportunity for some suburbs to recast their dying malls, their dying

retail centers, their old shoddy office parks, and to make them regional commuting hub. And as Joel has said, I've also heard office and real estate developers talk about that, including ones that have central city properties. They're going to need some subsidiary properties in the suburbs. But there are also push factors that are going to push some people back to cities. It's going to be hard for major corporations that have invested so heavily in the city to bail out, that there has been a preference for urban locations, for tech firms, for media firms, for entertainment firms for finance firms, young people are going to continue to want to live in cities

and they're going to need a place to work. They're risk oblivious. They'll live in small apartments with roommates. We may find, interestingly enough, that walkable and bikeable neighborhoods close to incumbent industry clusters, like the areas of Soho and Tribeck, like the areas of Sarriety, like the areas surrounding Bentown, Manhattan, like those downtown core areas surrounding Toronto's business district, they may become even more highly desired and as outer borough and, and outer-lying urban areas decline in value, we may seem those rise. But I think the big point that we have to get to is that this is a time where we can make cities and suburbs better. That what we are seeing is that our cities and suburbs were not prepared for pandemics.

Moreover, with the wave of protests and unrest we've seen, cities and suburbs alike have evidenced a growing unease and a growing awareness of racial and socioeconomic division, class division. Those are all issues that are on the table now, and hopefully out of this, we will get a new round of policy innovation in cities and suburbs that will get our cities off this exclusive luxury city trap that Joel has so accurately criticized, and back to being the kinds of places cities and suburbs alike where middle class people can live, get a job, and raise their families. Let me go back a little bit to what Richard was saying. Take New York. You know, my family's been in New York for well over 100 years. We don't use New York effectively. Everything gets concentrated in a few

areas. I agree completely that areas that people can walk, bike, or even drive to work are going to be very attractive. And one of the great tragedies of New York is there used to be a very vital business community, for instance, in Brooklyn. When I grew up, most of the people in my neighborhood, They own sewing shops, they own retail stores in Brooklyn. They almost all disappeared. Everything got concentrated into Manhattan. And New York is an enormous city. And yet many of the parts have been turned into little more than commuter sheds from Manhattan.

That is not the model that's going to work going forward. And here's a very important historical point because I did deal with pandemics because I wrote the city of global history. and also when I did the book on neo-futalism. What we see is not that cities will be wiped out, as Richard's completely right about that, but they're going to maybe get a little less dense. After the Spanish flu, and there were lots of other things that happened in Manhattan, and by the way, in other big cities too,

there was a conscious idea that we should de-densify Manhattan. So Manhattan went from somewhere around 2.4 million to about 1.5 million. By the way, that was 1950 when New York was probably the most important city in the history of the world. No city ever dominated the world economy, even London, than New York in 1950. I think that what we're going to see is that many of these cities are going to find themselves needing to sort of reposition, if you will, humanize themselves. One of the early areas that Rich and I actually started to agree on is that these high-rise office, the kind of Hudson Yards development, doesn't attract creative people. Creative people, they like Soho, they like Brooklyn, because its scale is human. That's what we need to look at.

How do we remake our cities so that more people can work closer to home? Thanks, Joel. Richard, I want to move through a couple of key items here that our listeners, no doubt, want both your views on. And one of them obviously would be the place where most people, traditionally would have been listening to this podcast, which would have been on mass transit. We know that podcast listeners like shows that are 30 to 40 minutes long, like the monk debates, because it matches up with their commuter time. So what Richard is the future of cities, when mass transit has gone from a universal good to a potentially acute personal health risk, how are big cities going to function in an era of heightened concern about path,

in your public transit system? This has been a fascinating debate to watch. You know, when a senior economist, who's also a public health economist at MIT, writes a pretty interesting paper and says that the subway was the main dissemination vehicle for COVID-19 in the coronavirus in New York, a wave of urbanists critique that. And then when you have America's CDC recommending the people, don't take a subway, but drive your car alone to work. Look, whether those things are true or not.

I don't know. But I can tell you that fear of subways, trains, and transit is for sure real, and it's not only been seen in the United States, it's been seen in Asia. People are driving more to work. People are scared. Ridership has been way down on the TTC during this pandemic, and tonight a new survey shows many commuters aren't likely to return, even when more workplaces and businesses are back open. Prano is a heck of a lot like New York, in its economic composition, its industrial mix, and the fact that people commute very long distances on trains and subways into the center core. Cities like New York and Toronto are going to have a heck of a time.

I mean, there is no doubt that the congestion on roads leading into New York and Toronto will be something like we've never seen. So that means staggered work days, staggered work schedules. It means trying to figure out how to get people up office buildings. Will this last forever? No. Will it last for six months or a year, 18 months, until we get past us? Of course, and I would say unequivocally, fear of transit and trains and mass transit will be perhaps the single most daunting challenge facing big cities with center core concentrations of any challenge they face.

Joel, what's your take on this? Well, I think Rich is right. But I did want to, before we, the place where Rich and I really came together was on the issue of class. And the other issue that cities are going to have to deal with is how do they provide opportunity to their working. class populations. What we've seen in L.A., and seen in many other cities, is that there's now a huge generation, not just of African Americans and other minorities, but young people who feel they have no hope. They really have no idea of how they're ever going to even get a nice place to live, much less buy a house or start a business. And if cities don't deal with it, this is going

to be another major crisis because we have to think about how a city functions. I mean, I think about it very, you know, almost emotionally about my grandparents coming from Russia, having nothing, I mean, really nothing. And New York made their lives. They went to the New York schools. My mother became a nurse. My father became a doctor. My uncle went to CCNY after he got out of the Navy, became corporate executives. That, path has to be restored or cities will never be stable over time. That's a great point. That's really an important point, Joel. And I want to have Richard come back on that because I think Richard, what this crisis has exposed is that issues of equality and justice, which I know, Richard,

you believe strongly about, have to go hand in hand with diversity. It's not enough just to say that our cities are diverse. Are they equitable? And do they afford some basic social justice to the people that live in them. Right now, this pandemic seems to suggest that they've failed miserably. They have failed miserably. I wrote a whole book about this, The New Urban Crisis. And in the opening of that book, I say, there was an event when I was a nine-year-old boy that made me an urbanist. I was driving with my dad through the streets of New York, New Jersey, hearing shots ring out, seeing buildings burning, and having National Guardsmen in tanks, pull us over and say, turn your car around and get out of town. In the mind of a nine-year-old boy, trying to figure out

the issues of race and class and urban decay and urban decline. That's, I think, would push me somehow to be an urbanist. And these are universal problems. You know, it's interesting that the police brutality situation, which George Floyd blew up in Minneapolis, which was arguably the city that probably has the highest degree of equity. Now, I don't have your problems, but compared to Los Angeles or New York or Boston or Washington, D.C., or San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Paul, is on a different planet. But I think, Rudyard, and I think you know this. When Joel was talking about New York and what it gave his parents and grandparents, I was thinking of Toronto today. I never realized how great a city of Toronto is until now. I knew it was a

lovely city. Look, Toronto has terrible issues of race and class that's grappling with, but people do feel a general sense of economic opportunity. Public schools here work. People that I know send their kids to public school. They do not feel impel to send them to private school. They can send them private school, but they don't. You mentioned walkability in my neighborhood, close to the city core. My kids could walk to four or five schools, a public school, a second public school, a Catholic school that is provincially supported, and two private schools. And you mentioned the city college system. I don't want to praise the University of Toronto. They seem like a conflict of interest because I work there. University of Toronto is a school that supports.

it's 95,000 students, the vast majority of them from our city and province. And if you got in an Uber or a cab anywhere in Toronto and you talk to the proprietor, they would probably tell you that one of their kids was going to or went to the University of Toronto. Couple that with universal health care, a better social safety net, a system which creates better social cohesion for ethnic minorities, disabilities, and new immigrants. Now, is Toronto perfect? No, but are there lessons in cities like Toronto for U.S. cities damn well there are? I couldn't agree more. I mean, one of the reasons we left Los Angeles,

and I'm a thorough Angelino, and I love the city, I've written about its history, I've taken film crews from France around it. I mean, I loved it, but ultimately, we were forced with my youngest daughter that it was going to cost us about $250,000. I make a good living. I don't make that good a living. But the bottom line is, we had to move, and what on things I find really attractive about Orange County, I think this is one advantage that many suburbs have, is the school systems have not deteriorated. My daughter walked to her elementary school. She now goes to a charter school that's one of the leading arts schools in the country. The cities have sort of destroyed themselves. I use this term now called blue aside, you know,

where you basically have done everything you can to screw it up. Why should a city like Los Angeles with its amazing creative population and enormous resources, why should we have dysfunctional public schools? Same thing's true of New York. Why is it that my mother, growing up in Brownsville, which I won't quite use her language, but she said it was a crummy neighborhood then and a crummy neighborhood now, she could still get a decent education in the New York City schools. The cities have got to look at the basics. And I think one of the things I think that is very important that we could learn from Canada is why do inner city schools have to be bad, not just the schools, but also trade schools.

Until we fix the schools and deal with crime and disorder, I think it's going to be a very rough future. And so, Red, you're going back to your point. I think that the inequity is felt more viscerally in the United States. And as people have pointed out, the United States and Canada, too, there has been been opportunity hoarding. Wealthier people are able to locate themselves in urban neighborhoods that are more upscale and afford private schools or to move to the suburbs where public schools are better and less advantage people cannot. One of the most extensive studies on post-traumatic stress disorder in the community was done here in Atlanta and it found the staggering statistic

that of those who lived in low-income areas in this city, 46% suffered from PTSD. That is a rate much higher even than soldiers who've seen rule. I think the Canadian cities in protecting social cohesion have done a much better job of developing policy measures which mitigate against to some degree. Now, there's plenty of opportunity hoarding in Toronto, but these measures mitigate against them. And I think having schools funded at the provincial level, not simply being dependent upon local property taxes, is pretty useful.

having a set of standards that schools have to measure up to. One of the other big issues of the United States, it just has a lot of cities, which is a good thing in a way. Canada has far fewer. And so the few cities it has has experienced these incredible waves of immigration. And somehow Canadian cities have been better at absorbing those. So for all those reasons, I do think there are some warts and all, there are some lessons. But the problems that Joel and I are talking about are quite unique to that society. and we shouldn't generalize. That's the only point I want to make. The crises American cities are going through are to a greater degree different

than the crises other cities may be going through. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast, be it resolved, COVID-19, and its social and economic fallout spells the end of the big city boom. If you enjoy this podcast, review us on iTunes. We also welcome your ideas for debates and debaters,

email us at podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. Let's, in our remaining time before we get to your closing statements, just try to cast our minds forward a bit to try to help listeners understand where cities are headed next. And Joel, I want your view on what is going to be the social consensus around cities? because, I mean, there was a lot of hard work that's been done by Richard and other people over the last couple decades to try to build a greater understanding amongst American and Canadian society writ large about the importance of cities, economically, culturally, socially, and otherwise. Do you feel, Joel, that that consensus is going to have a harder time reestablishing itself in the context of a new kind of passive civic resistance to densification? Because the perception is that the last. lack of densification has in fact saved lives. Do you think there's a fracturing of the consensus

around cities and society today? The best thing that could happen to cities is that they start to think that they can't go back to what they were. My old sense in Japan used to say the hardest thing is how to unlearn the secrets of your past success. Those urbanists who, unlike Richard, are just saying, well, we're just going to go and double down to what we were doing before. they were already in trouble and this situation, both the recent disorders and the pandemic, have made them worse. So you have to start to think about how do we make cities work. People will have greater choices of where they want to live and that cities are going to have to adjust to the situation that they're going to be competing as the suburbs are going to be competing for talent,

for industry. It's not just going to happen to them. I think one of the reasons that I think many cities, for instance, ignored their social issues, is they said, oh, well, we've been told that everything's going to go to the city, everybody's going to come there, so we don't really have to fix ourselves. Cities are going to have to say, our future is not going to be a reflection just of the past. It's going to have to be something different. And one of the things that people like Richard and I are working on is what does that future look like. To build on what Joel said, I don't think there is a consensus around cities, right? You're I think the United States, if you will, is a highly polarized place.

And I think a lot of that polarization is around cities versus the rest of the country. I mean, we know that places turn from red to blue at about 800 people per square mile. It's just a part of a fault line in American life. And one of the things I think is you're not going to solve it. I think one of the reasons Americans are so vexed is because they feel like with our federal government so powerful, if their guy or gal is not in the White House, they're screwed. So one of the things I think we need to do is devolve power and have a mutual coexistence. And in some ways, that's what Joel and I are saying.

If you're a city dweller and that's what you like, go for it. If you're a suburbanite and that floats your boat, go for that. If you like rural lives, that's fantastic. And we are a divided country. And let's get with understanding that we can, and what we know, this is so important if you take the most polarized Americans, not liberals and conservatives, You take the most dogmatic liberals and the most dogmatic conservatives, and where national liberals, they can't, issues, they can't agree on anything. You pose local issues to them, they agree on about 90% of things.

They're not quite there on gun control, and there's a few others, but on 90% of issues of how to grow the economy, take care of people, provide health care, they're in pretty close consensus. So I think devolution is one. The other thing that worries me is I do think, and Joel said this, I think the big cities will survive. The Los Angeles, the New Yorks, the San Francisco, the Bostons, the Toronto's. And I think there will be small cities in rural areas and suburbs that will do great. Joel and I are working in one in Arkansas right now trying to put our heads together on something. But the Nashville stories, the Pittsburgh stories, the Arkansas stories are a small number. What really worries me is what happens to the cities like Detroit that was on the upsling, like Cleveland, like Buffalo.

And Joel already said it, if Brooklyn lost its business district, many of these cities lost the equivalent of their business district to bigger cities. I think when people talk about the rise and the rest, they get a little bit utopian. I think we're going to get to see the rise of the small number of the rest. But I'm very much worried about this continued tendency in advanced economies where the biggest cities grow and smaller and medium-sized cities continually get left behind. We've starting to see that the real sweet spot for growth, is about a half million to a million. You know, so there has been some move to smaller cities, but there are clearly a whole bunch of cities,

St. Louis, particularly the urban core, St. Louis, Detroit, these places are really in danger of being left behind. They can't take another urban disorder. You know, you trash New York and New Yorkers, you know, they're pretty resilient and there are so many positives. You trash Detroit, you trash Cleveland. very hard to make that case. We have to remember many of these cities never recovered from the 68 riots. There are still large parts of Chicago that were never rebuilt. There are parts of Washington, D.C., that were never rebuilt.

So I think that we're really going to see a lot of cities. I think this is something that I'm also concerned about. There are going to be winners and losers, and there may be more losers than winners. That's an important point, Joel, to remind us of that has been. historical context. Conscious of our time, I want to provide you both with an opportunity to wrap up, to provide some closing remarks that kind of summarize this debate and maybe just put yourself into service of the listener for a moment to give them a sense of what you want people to take away from this conversation. What are the kind of key points that resonate for you in terms of understanding the future of big cities and where they're headed in the era of COVID?

We're going to take this in the reverse order of the opening statements. So Richard, you're up first. There is no doubt in my mind, and I think we agree. Cities will survive, especially big superstar cities like New York and Paris and London and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Toronto. But I think U.S. cities face special challenges. They have been handicapped from the get-go. Their education systems are horribly unequal. They suffer from a particularly egregious legacy of class and racial divisions.

and injustice. They have a policing strategy, which is different than much of the rest of the world and has been. They sparked it tonight, the powder keg of unrest for decades. Americans should take note of the fact that we learned just recently. The fastest growing metropolitan area in all of North America is Toronto, Canada. Who would have ever imagined in the wake of the sunbelt shift, the rise of the south, that Toronto Canada would be the fastest growing metropolitan area, in North America. That's telling us something. And it's telling us about the role of immigration, about the role of a better educational system, the role of a different style, not a perfect style of policing, and of community cohesion. Look, people think that these crises will activate the

better angels of our nature and make us better people. Lord God, I hope they do. But they also shine a light on the great divides of race and class and inequity that decks our cities and divide our cities and suburbs, not only our cities and suburbs, but big superstar cities from less advantaged cities and communities, I'm worried that at the end of this crisis, we're going to forget. That's what really keeps me up at night. The great pandemic of 1918 wasn't immediately followed by a great awakening. It was followed by the Roaring 20s, a period of inequity, of federal dysfunction in the United States, some of the worst leadership, the United States, had, and it took another two decades for the United States with a new deal and a World War

to put its society back together. I only hope that we can have the wake-up call we need and only hope that we can begin to rebuild our cities in ways that are more equitable, more inclusive, that support middle-class families that build and rebuild less advantage communities, and also that we take very seriously the idea that we have to build better suburbs in rural areas, because most of the United States remains a suburban and rural economy, and at the same time that we strengthen our cities and focus on our cities, we have to build back our suburbs and rural areas better too. Thank you, Richard.

Joel, we're going to come to you. We're going to give you the final word in our conversation today. Take us away. I think that what we need to do now is to tell cities, and I would also say suburbs. You need to change. This is not going to go away. Whether we have this pandemic, whether there'll be another pandemic. I mean, the people in Asia, one of the reasons I think they handled this better in many cases is

they had already had several pandemics. We as a society have to sit down like people do in Seoul or like they do in Singapore, where I've done a lot of work, and say, how do we minimize the dangers? And the other thing I want to just leave you with is something that I learned working in Singapore. I am not justifying their system. I don't think I would want to live there in long term. I certainly wouldn't want to be a professional journalist there. But I'll tell you something. they thought about their class and race issues very, very thoroughly. They made sure their neighborhoods were well distributed. They made sure that 80% of people in public housing could own their own homes. Lee Kuan Yew had some negative things, but he was a genius in how you build a city

successfully. And just as I think we can learn in the United States from Toronto, I think we can learn also from the successful cities in Asia. But more than anything else, we have to learn that we have to change. And if we don't change, we're going to see these problems not only recur, but get worse. Thank you, Joel. And thank you, Richard. You know, this is a time of exceedingly polarized public debate and conversation. And it's just a real privilege to have the opportunity to listen to the two of you reflect in this kind of civil and substantive fashion. It reminds us of the art of public debate and why we need more of that in the public square. So thank you both for taking the time. time and all the preparation that you've done for our conversation today, greatly appreciate it.

Thank you, right. Thank you. I want to thank Joel and Richard for a fascinating debate on the future of big cities in the era of pandemics. I certainly learned a lot, and I hope you did too. For more great debates on everything from the future of economic inequality to climate change, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on our economy, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You'll also find detailed show notes on today's debate. Thank you, our listeners, for joining us in our movement to restore the art of public debate. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths, Marilyn Missouri, and Christina Campbell are the producers.

The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Steve Lewin. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.