The Ricochet Podcast - Citizens on the Move

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

The contemporary social planner seems to favor all sorts of peoples' movements—except for the kind that involves automobiles, driven by citizens away from dense urban cores into the suburbs that they can afford. Today, Joel Kotkin (author of The Human City and The Coming of Neo-Feudalism) joins the podcast to discuss the new class of urbanists who brim with ideas for a city that won't work for the people meant to occupy them.Plus, Steve, James and Charlie quibble over Tuesday's debate, and they reflect on another 9/11 anniversary. - Soundclip from this week's open: Donald Trump and David Muir from ABC's Trump/Harris debate.

And now you can get back to drinking. It's evening for me over here, and I wasn't going to drink, but I did anyway, so I'm half in the bag. I'm not really half in the bag. You should definitely always drink. Yes. Okay. Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lilex. Today we're going to talk urbanism with Joel Kotkin. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me. They talk about democracy. I'm a threat to democracy. They're the threat to democracy with a fake Russia, Russia, Russia investigation that

went nowhere. We have a lot to get to, Lindsay. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 708. And if you add seven and eight, you get 15. If you divide 15 by the number of hosts here, you have one. Oh, if you take 15 and you add the number to get six, you divide that by the number of hosts. Three come up with two who are the number of people here. You have, well, no, if you take 15 and you add the number to get six, you divide that by the number of hosts. Three come up with two, who are the number of people who are on the stage in the debate, which we're going to talk about with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward.

And I'm James Lalix. I'm sitting at a long conference table here in downtown Minneapolis. Stephen's on a ship. Charles is in Florida, which has not been yet sawed off by Bugs Bunny and left to float into the Caribbean. And Stephen, you're taking the Norway cruise.

Have you been to Stavanger yet and seen the Herring Museum? No, I haven't been there. I've been to Bergen and had a ton of salmon. And right now I have no idea what fjord I'm sailing along, but I'm keeping my eyes open for Michael Palin's Norwegian Blue Parrot and having lots of aquavit. And happy that the debate, because it was at 3 a.m. local time,

I did not watch, although everything I've read went exactly as I predicted it would, unfortunately. Charles? Well, I'm not near any fjords, although I could be given how much rain we've had in the last 10 days. Now, I live in a place, apparently, that just rains

constantly all the time 100 of the time all day all night whatever the time is whatever the moment it rains so i am sort of surrounded by honorary fjords like waterlogged lawns and cracks and crevices that are full of water oh you meant the debate didn't you you weren't looking for a water update well no an aquavit and then a debate update okay well i mean i think that everything in the debate proceeded as people imagine that it would in that trump's behavior was in keeping with his previous behavior. And he responded to every single provocation that Harris threw at him as she had telegraphed she was going to for three weeks. She said nothing of consequence because she never does. She's flatly incapable of taking a position, thinking through position expressing a position and the media is a national disgrace which should

not again be trusted to mediate any sort of important conversation about the future of the united states so what happened was precisely what i had imagined would happen. And I don't think it's going to have an enormous effect as a result. No, I don't think so either. I think the people who, a lot of the people are going to be voting for Trump, not because of what they think he will do, but because what they assume he won't. And that is the whole panoply of expansion of the state that they would expect to happen under either Harris the new or Harris the old. She's of the party. She's of the blob. She's of the state. Therefore, don't want to vote for her. So they vote for Trump because they know he will not increase immigration. He will not raise your taxes. He will not enable the regulatory state, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't matter

what he gets up there and says. It's just what people just assume. I know what he's not going to do. But there are those who are convinced that he will bring about a second opportunity authoritarianism galore. And to that point, well, from the Hitler playbook, of course, you have to find another to demonize. You have to have some sort of xenophobic rant. And that's what we got, I guess. Two of the takeaways seem to be, first, they're eating cats and dogs. Now, I have a take on this in that, no, they're not. They're not.

The Ohio woman who ate a cat was probably mentally ill, and she was not from Springfield. And the dog thing may or may not be apocryphal, but it doesn't matter because that's become sort of a stand in for the issues that suddenly have been thrust to the fore by the Springfield Haitian situation. So I'd like you guys to take on this. Do you think that everybody on the right is absolutely fulminating and fizzing and going effervescently crazy over something that is not happening and is not a problem, and if it was, it'd be fine. Or is, you know, Stephen, what do you think? From your distance, what do you think? Yeah, well, so first of all, the real headline here is, I think what the real grabber is, wait a minute, this little town of what, 65,000 people took in or had imposed on it 20,000 Haitian immigrants in a short period of time? Nobody knew this, I think, right? And, you know, I am tempted to go with jokes because I like to.

I kept thinking, well, there has to be a Simpsons episode that predicted this for Springfield. Because, hey, the Simpsons always seem to be ahead of what was happening in the future. And a few people sent me suggestions. I want to make jokes about voodoo economics, which I always thought was the problem with Haiti and their economy. Man, we weren't supposed to be against that, right? But finally, and, you know, getting more halfway serious, I think you're right that this is, at the very least, has to be greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, the explosion of the memes tells us something. I think we know, here and in Europe, and you see it in the election results, that there's

huge resentment by a broad cross-section of Americans, of Europeans, of the open immigration that's been pushed upon us, diversity is our strength, and all the ideology that goes with us. And the media and our political class, for the large part in both parties, have simply ignored it, repressed it, won't acknowledge it's happening, won't acknowledge any reasonable concerns about it. And so it doesn't surprise me that you have this explosion of memes. It's unbelievable how this has all spun out this week. And that's very postmodern in a certain way, right? The postmodern to say truth, in quotation marks, is what's created by our images and all the rest of that. So in a certain way, this is the right wing's own postmodernist revenge on the left.

Exactly. The specifics don't matter. The picture of a cat, an AI-generated kitty with an AK-47 stands in for a series of legitimate arguments and conversations about immigration. It just does. That's how the brain wires it. So even when he says they're eating cats and dogs, he may not believe it. He may not know it. It may not be true. It doesn't matter. It connects something to an argument that, I don't know if we're going to have that conversation. We'll see. But Charles, what did you think of the Well, I think that unfortunately, what you've just described works the other way around, which is why, among many other reasons, I'm not a postmodernist. That is to say,

that directionally, the right in the United States and the Republican Party and Donald Trump are correct about immigration. They're correct about the problem at the border. They're correct about what all of these illegal immigrants do to communities that are not willing or able to absorb them. And if rather than make that case, which is, I think, irrefutable, you promulgate myths or at least unproven claims, you give the people on the other side of the aisle this unfortunate opportunity to say that's not true, it's a stand-in for all the other stuff that you're saying. You are a peddler of myths and all your politics are based on lies, which is not true. So I think that while I have been wildly amused as well by the memes, and while I agree entirely with Steve that the fact that they exist does tell you something, that people are frustrated, I think it was a mistake for the candidate donald trump to say that on stage because now every headline has been trump promulgated a falsehood and of course the the underlying message that he's conveying here is correct and it's one that is shared by close to a super

majority in the united states i mean we talked about this last week we now have this is astonishing given where we were in 2015 a majority of americans 60 who want mass deportations that is how fed up they are with the b-Harris administration's abdication of responsibility. So I would not, if I were Donald Trump, have given them any opening whatsoever. I would have listed things that are far, far worse than eating cats and dogs, like children being murdered by people who haven't been vetted, like social services being overrun. And the bottom line of it is three million people violating the laws that our Congress passed. I think it was a mistake, much as I do agree that it does tell us something

about latent feelings toward the border. I agree with you. The thing is, is that if Trump, I believe, had enumerated all of those things in a precise, logical, and empirical manner, then the conversation would have shifted to, A, it's not a problem, and B, it's xenophobic. Because we know that there's actually no legitimate reason for these people to believe these things. It all comes from a deep place of xenophobia. I don't think that if Trump had put it better, we'd be having the conversation. I think that Trump saying something like that would automatically delegitimize it, even though we want to have that conversation. I don't agree. I don't agree. I think that if you say that people who are angry about illegal immigration are xenophobes, then they say,

fine, I'm a xenophobe. I mean, if I could say something moderately bawdy here, you know, I have been told, not personally, but as part of the political movement to which I belong, that if I, as a straight man, I'm not willing to have sex with a trans person, I'm transphobic. Do you know what my response to that is, James? Then I'm transphobic. I'm not going to go do it. You're not going to bully me into doing something that I don't want to do. And I think the same is true increasingly of immigration, is they say, well, look at all these racists who are upset about illegal immigration. And those people say, well, if that makes me a racist, then I'm a racist. The problem with this is that no one wants to say, I'm a liar. And so Trump has shifted the ground from something which is quite useful, which is actually no, I'm not, to okay, that isn't true, but. And I just think it was a mistake for him to say it. Yeah. Part of the problem, and I'll let Stephen get into your thing, I just want to say, I was talking with somebody who's a little bit liberal on these issues about the wisdom of

importing large amounts of people from a drastically different culture into the middle of America, and the response was about Haiti, well, they just had an earthquake. Which is to say that because disaster had struck this country, therefore, the sensible and humane thing was, of course, to gather them up and drop them in the middle of the country. That it would be cruel not to do so. And there's no getting around that, I don't think. Stephen, you were going to say? Well, I think we're pretty much in agreement here, but then there's a couple of fault lines that are interesting. First of all, just for the record, Charles, although I don't think I need to tell you this, I'm very anti-postmodern. I just used that illustration.

Oh, I know, I know. But I think I'm a little closer to James on this for this reason, and then I then they can draw out to a general evaluation of the debate. Look, let me put it this way. If Trump were the candidate who mastered facts and figures and weaved in better arguments and did things more conventionally, he wouldn't be Donald Trump. He'd be Ron DeSantis. And much of I might prefer Ron DeSantis as the candidate and for his ability to debate and make policy walk arguments that we think are strong. I'm not sure that, you know, even if the cats and dogs being eaten is completely ridiculous, which it probably is, I think it reaches people who say, I don't know if it's true or not, but there's something really badly wrong. And that makes the point more powerfully

than a list of facts and figures. Although you're right, I think you should use the real cases of people who were killed, who shouldn't have been and all the other things. He could do that, but he's Donald Trump, he's not ever going to do it. I get frustrated with all the articles I see every day saying, Trump must do this. He's not going to do anything we suggest, right? He's Trump, that's just the way he is, and I think, as we said of Ronald Reagan, we just have to let Trump be Trump, and he's going to win or lose as Donald Trump. Yeah, but the lose as Donald Trump is one of the problems there.

Ronald Reagan won 44 and then 49 states. Yeah, I understood. Just don't do the thing for the next debate and there won't be one. Redo the drinking game because the drinking game where every time Trump says this, you take a shot

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back. No questions asked. Remember, head to zbiotics.com slash ricochet and use the code ricochet at your checkoff for 15% off. And we thank Zbiotics for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Joel, James Lileks here in Minneapolis. I live in a dense city. My neighborhood is not. It was laid out as a suburb at the beginning of the previous century. It's a very walkable neighborhood. You might even call it a 15-minute city. I have pushed back sometimes with a lot of my friends who are very concerned about the idea, and I understand why. But, A, I like the idea of a 15-minute city where everything that I can find is walkable, and it's nice, and it's got trees and coffee shops and cafes.

But it really does stand in for something else in the minds of the people who are pushing this as a future model, doesn't it? There's a lot more control and observation there. Walk us through, because this is one of the new urban models that the urbanists are telling us about. Tell us about the perils and pitfalls and perhaps advantages of the dreaded 15-minute city. Well, there's nothing wrong with the idea per se, and actually there's some relevance in the sense there's more people working at home. It's a 15-minute city because you don't have to commute at all. I mean, in many of the neighborhoods I've lived in, and particularly when I lived in Hollywood for many years,

almost everybody worked at home. The same thing where I live in Orange County. I think there's one person on the cul-de-sac who actually commutes. So I do live in a 15-minute city. The university is an eight-minute drive, a 20-minute bike ride. I mean, there are lots of ways of doing it. I think what the problem is that the people who are pushing it are the same people who push density above everything, want to go into single family neighborhoods, which actually might be reasonably walkable, and impose a model which the vast majority of people don't want. I mean, if you take a look at the data, people are moving from high density to low density by enormous amounts. That's been the case basically for the better part of at least 50 years, but it's accelerated in the last five.

So the question is, what comes with it? And the question we also have to ask ourselves is, these are the same people who told us, well, if we built transit in Los Angeles, we spent a fortune on it, you know, everybody would be commuting around. And of course, you know, there are now fewer people riding transit in LA than there was in 1980. So, you know, so I think the, the, it's really the agenda of the 15 minute city. Let's face it. The, the new urbanists have gotten, you know, a bitter blow with the growth of online work. The whole thesis is how do you get into the downtown or the central district? But now the central district is much less important than it was five years ago and infinitely less important than it was 20 years ago.

There are two elements to this 50-minute city that I think give people the heebs and or the jeebs. One of them is the density thing that you mentioned. Along transit corridors, along busy streets, it makes absolute perfect sense to build apartment buildings. They're already dense, and the energy that you get from these corridors compounds, and you have interesting places. But when you say it is necessary to put a four-plex into a residential neighborhood, what you're saying is we don't like this paradigm of individuality that the single-family home represents. All of the hatred that they bring to sprawl, they bring to your neighborhood and say you can't have it, you shouldn't have it, it's too resource-intense, it's not communal enough, we don't like it. So part of the 15-minute city is to break up the individual homes. And the second part is, well, if you don't need to be outside of your 15-minute city, you shouldn't be.

Therefore, congestion pricing, therefore little cameras that will charge you if you actually leave during certain amounts of hours, that's the sort of status top-down control that a lot of people say, no, no thank you, right? And that's precisely what they want. I mean, and I've seen it because I spend a lot of time in other countries. If you go, for instance, in Sydney, neighborhoods that were beautiful, single family neighborhoods, easily accessible into the downtown walkable. They now they now build, you know, for, you know, four story apartment complexes completely destroys the nature of the neighborhood. Terrible for the bird life and the other animals that live in these areas. It's terrible for the climate because concrete actually makes things hotter. There's something that has been essentially airbrushed out of the climate debate, which is the heat island, which many people,

particularly my colleague Ali Medaris, has worked on, which is basically you end up with much hotter conditions because it's all concrete. Somehow, I don't understand where green goes with concrete from one end to the other. Now, the other thing that's absurd is this idea that you have to go break down the last middle class and working class stable neighborhoods and cities when we have empty office buildings and empty shopping malls and empty factories, which could be converted. And as you mentioned earlier, you've got the transit corridor, you have the roads, you have the electricity. Why would you have to go into people's neighborhoods? And I agree, there is a,

certainly a element in the new urbanist thinking, which is basically, you know, we don't like this way of life. You know, and of course, very often, these are people who are quite wealthy, they may live, let's say, in Manhattan, or in an apartment in San Francisco, and they almost always have country houses, or at least one extra house. I mean, I love getting, you know, I've gotten lectures on proper lifestyle from British aristocrats. And I ask them, well, how do you live? And, you know, it's basically an attack on sort of middle-class home ownership. Now, I'm not necessarily a conservative per se, but I'm more in the sense of being, if you will, a kind of social democrat. I think the more people are able to buy a house and have an asset and be independent um that's what i think a good

social democratic regime would want to do but i would go back to truman in some ways in this area this idea that that we're going to move into a society where everybody's a renter for life we even rent our furniture we it's it's this weird sort of symbiosis, if you will, between the investment class, Wall Street, basically, and the green urbanists. They actually have a very common agenda, which is basically screw the middle class. So, Joel, it's Steve Hayward over in Europe this week, actually. And, you know, it strikes me, to build on what you've just said, it strikes me that one of the sleep you lived in LA for a long time, I always like to say that the sort of no growth or growth control or highly regulatory framework for housing began on the coasts 50 years ago, starting in California, starting on the East Coast, and it has over the decades spread inland and now infects Indianapolis, St. Louis, everywhere.

And there's some empirical data for this, I think, about the increasing cost of the regulatory process to build housing. And I think that's a huge driver of the housing cost problem in the country. Am I generally right about that, or what would you add or modify if I don't have the story quite in focus? Well, as my colleague Wendell Cox says, the housing crisis is not universal in the United States. I mean, yes, you have some of these same regulations to some extent being enforced. But, you know, housing prices, if you want to live in the outer rings of Houston, are still very, very reasonable. Much of the Midwest is still relatively affordable. Where it's really hit hard is in the

Northeast and on the West Coast. And in those areas, everything from, there are some cases where just the fees alone could be $250,000. If you talk to anybody in in the um in the development business the amount of time that you spend you know going through the regulatory process it's it that all gets baked into the housing course the problem we have with this election because i do think it's an important issue and i'm actually about to write an article about it um The real problem is that you've got one candidate, Kamala Harris, for her to talk about housing affordability is such a joke, given the fact that as Attorney General in California, she enforced laws that made it very difficult to develop suburban housing. She talked to anybody who was an official in san bernardino the whole bunch of

other places so the idea that california which has about the lowest affordability lowest home ownership um highest prices that's the model uh give me a break the the problem the the the republicans have is that their candidate is basically either an ignoramus or losing his marbles because he has no way of, he should be able to talk about these things, but he doesn't know how to put together a coherent sentence. You know, I mean, it's just one person is a complete phony and the other one is inarticulate yeah well i mean i remember trump from years ago wanting to use the power of eminent domain to you know kick out old ladies out of their houses in atlantic city and so forth he lost me there back then but a second question and then i'll kick it over to charles cook to see if

he wants to defend british aristocrats or, from your observation a moment ago. So, Joel, you know, I've known you on and off and seen you many times over the years, and I always describe you to people as a small-p, common-sense progressive, small-p progressive, a common-sense progressivism, right? And I took to heart a criticism you made, this was more than 20 years ago at a conference, and you may not remember, but you were criticizing conservatives like me, and I think rightly so, saying, you know, you go a little too far trying to make an ideology out of progressivism. You know, too much Woodrow Wilson and Hegel and all this sort of, you know, stuff that I do think people take too far. I took that very much to heart, and I think you were right about that.

But then I saw your article here from a month or two ago, what happened to my party? What happened to common sense progressivism? Was it overcome by, you know, the ideologically hardcore, or where do you land? You just said a moment ago you're still a social democrat, which I think that's a great thing for us to have, but there don't seem to be very many of you left. We're moving towards extinction i suppose yeah although i think that actually the large part of the public is is there they you know for instance one of my arguments to conservatives is some you know particularly you know some of the libertarians will say well the market efficient. Let's get rid of all zoning. So what they do is they

go along with wiping out single family zoning and then don't say anything when construction in the suburban periphery is blocked. And I always ask conservatives, what kind of conservatism is going to survive if we become a country where only 25% of the people own their own home? You have no chance. Everything will be ultimately, of course, the ultimate thing will be people will be renters. They're going to want rent control. And why not? This is what I would say to younger people. If I have no chance of owning a home, no chance of starting a business, no chance of really ever being independent, I'm going to vote for Bernie Sanders. Why not? Yeah. Can I ask? Yeah, I won't be defending British aristocrats. I abjured British aristocracy when I became a citizen in 2018. Can I ask a very basic from the ground up question here? I'm originally from England,

as you can presumably hear. And in England, in Britain, I think about 9% of the land is built on. And in America, it's two, right? Right. Australia is even less. Yeah. Right. So when I'm here in the United States, as I have been for the last 13 years, space doesn't really figure in my imagination because there's almost a limitless amount of it. Everything you've described, and I know you've written a bunch for us at National Review where I write, is fascinating. But what I can never understand, perhaps you can explain to me, is why? Why are there people who are desperate to stop building on land to avoid sprawl? Why? It's just, what does it come from?

What's the origin of that? There's so much space. Well, first of all, the origins of the argument against it really started in the UK. The UK is really the fount of idiotic planning ideas, although elegantly presented. But the reality is, first it started off, it was kind of an aesthetic thing. If you read, let's say, Mumford, for instance, or Caro, a lot of it is clearly like these cookie-cutter houses with young families with tricycles in front. They just were offensive to the intelligentsia. I mean, that's sort of where it started.

Then, as the environmental movement got started, they started saying, well, those people, you know, they drive more, they eat up more energy, you know, they're gobbling up the farmland. Now, obviously, the United States, as you suggest, has no shortage of farmland. Actually, we retire much more farmland from being redundant than we do taking taking it over to build houses so but but you know logic doesn't matter um and then the other thing is that you have a lot of people who have decided that the way to save the planet is to force everybody to live like crap um i mean that's yeah you know because you know people say oh well you can live in the city. Yeah. You know what? If I could go to New York City and buy one of those, you know, four bedroom apartments on Central Park West or in Vienna in the Ringstrasse, I'd be okay with living in an urban area. But I couldn't afford it. And I have a nice house in a very expensive area. And if I did that and converted it into anything in New York City, I'd be lucky

to get one bedroom. So, you know, the reality is they don't understand that there's a class element, which is people who are not super rich cannot afford to live decently in urban areas. The other issue, which of course affects this, is even if you live in a nice neighborhood in the city, as I did in Los Angeles, you can't send your kids to public school. So you end up having to pay not only high taxes and every kind of fee that you could possibly have, and with the threat of densification, but you're also in a situation where, you know, you're basically forced to pay $40,000, $50,000 a year to educate your kids. By the way, the reason why I'm talking to you, not from my long-term home in Los Angeles where I lived for 40 years, but in Orange County, because when my youngest daughter was going into sixth grade, we took a look and we said, you know what? If we move to Orange County, she can still go to public school. And she did. And it worked out great. It saved us

about, well, somewhere around $300,000. Most people can't afford this. So one of the reasons that people move to the suburbs, it's not just because they want more space, which is part of it, is they want to be in a place where they could afford to live and send their kids to decent schools. You know, if I moved from Los Angeles to Dallas, I could live in the district with great schools. I couldn't do that in L.A. Once you go into places like La Cunada, which have good schools, the prices double. Yeah. Same thing with Calabasas outside of, you know, I mean, basically, urban America has a reverse Midas touch, and it drives middle class people out, particularly if they want to buy something, and particularly if they're married,

and even more so if they have children. My second question is, your criticism of Donald Trump was effectively that he's ineloquent, which he is, of course. But suppose that I managed to put a chip into his brain, and he suddenly became Demosthenes. Would he have the right ideas? And is the problem with the Republican Party that it is headed up by somebody who can't convey or doesn't think about this, or is it as well wrong? I would say this, and you know, I was talking to my wife about it the other day. On almost every issue but abortion, the Republicans are ahead. Even if you take a look in California, if you take a look at the positions that are taken by Republicans, they actually are fairly popular, even in a place like California, particularly in the suburban

areas. They seem to sometimes have a problem articulating this. Now, part of it is there is a wing of the Republican Party that's libertarian, you know, uber alice. And, you know, they would never even engage this kind of issue. And actually, I mean, I've had, let's say, very fierce arguments with, you know, libertarians on this issue, even though I'm sympathetic to a lot of libertarian positions. I think that the problem is the Republican Party doesn't know how to make its case. I mean, but on issues like crime, issues like the border, they're clearly energy. They're clearly ahead of the game. The problem is they don't really know how to talk to regular people. And then, of course, part of the problem is also this problem with the primaries, where the most unreconstructed 25%, 30% of the population is going to vote for Trump,

even though most people don't want them. So what we end up with, and I'm already starting to work on, what is it going to be, you know, living under Kamala Harris? And of course, being a longtime Californian, I think I have an idea of what it's going to look like. Joel, you had said before something that was exactly correct, that the objection to sprawl in the suburbs began as sort of a culturally aesthetic revulsion, and then onto it was grafted environmentalism and other things. And it was fueled by the ungrateful baby boomers who grew up in Levittown and thought that it was just full of ticky tacky boxes and romanticized all the cold water walk-up flats in New York. The sooner we're done with that generation, which is mine, the better. But in a sense, some of what the new urbanists want is correct. It made me realize that perhaps the last

urbanist movement of which I approve was the City Beautiful movement that came out of the 1893 Columbia Exposition. And that itself was just trying to graft onto America the Haussmann Parisian, you know, the leveling of old Paris and the reconstituting it into Haussmann's vision, which again, I like. But I don't think they've gotten anything right since. I think Moses was wrong. I think that the people who wanted to tear down blight in the 60s made the mistake of going too far instead of rehabilitating places and we

ended up with these empty plazas and these windswept places that nobody likes and now we have new urbanism which has elements of it again that i like but also elements that seem a little too controlling a little too vengeful and petty and the rest of it what was the last i think what was the last new urban urban movement that actually you you think um is the one that we should be looking to that has the best ideas for everybody because you quote frank lloyd right in your book that people are going to go where they're going to i'm paraphrasing people going to go the city goes where the people go and one of the things that people hate about the suburbs is that they seem to be an expression of individual desire people left the city after the

war it's not because all of a sudden, oh, there's a highway and a car, I have to move. No, they wanted to go there. It was a better place to go. My own family, my mother grew up in Brownsville, which hopefully I won't offend your audience by this, but I have to quote her accurately. It was a shitty neighborhood then

and it's a shitty neighborhood now. When she got a chance to move to Long Island and have a little backyard and be in a place where she didn't worry about crime and where the public schools were good, she went. Nobody took a gun to her head. No. No, so I guess I'm not asking a question so much as giving a speech and a sermon myself. But yes, I mean, so shouldn't we, perhaps we should pick

and choose from all of these various strains of urban thought that have gone through the culture in the last hundred years or so. There is something to be said for beautiful, dense cities. There is something to be said for preservation. There is something to be said for building something new that contrasts and compares and the rest of it. But it just seems as if, has it ever been non-ideological? I'll you that urban design urban theory in the last hundred years has it always been well there's been an element of it but you know what's really interesting is there are some very good models um you know uh my friend aaron wren wrote a piece about where he lives now in Carmel, Indiana. Republican administration, in some senses, some new urbanist ideas, but still single-family homes.

That's doing well. You want to see some of the most amazing evolutions. I'll give you two very different cases. One, what I see, particularly outside of Houston, because I've spent so much time there, these new towns, Woodlands, Cinco Ranch, they have, you know, in the case of the Woodlands, they have a nice downtown. There are lots of jobs there. They have, you know, they have water features going all through.

You could take a boat around there's great bike paths um in a lot of ways they've achieved the the good part of the new urbanist regime for reasons of they know that people like it and they make money if they provide what people want so that's one the other alternative which is what I'm working on right now, one of the projects I'm on, is some of the old cities in Los Angeles. We call the Southeast LA places that you've probably never heard of, like Downey, Paramount, well, Lakewood you've heard of. I was just there with a friend who was a former head of the computer science department at

Chapman, and he said it looks better than it ever did. So you go into these small towns, which tend to have their own school districts, their own police forces. These towns are 90% Hispanic. We went there, no vacancies, no graffiti, no homeless people. You realize that, you know, a local area can do it too. I think a lot of the problems is, A, we have to get away from the idea that one size fits all people, have different things. The other thing is, the more you have a town where the people have a stake in it, and that's what's happening in places like parts of south east la whereas in the city of los angeles you you can't affect anything i lived in la when we ever had a problem you couldn't

get the city to do anything because you know i didn't have i wasn't the source of campaign contributions and i didn't work for a government union so you know nothing that we said in our neighborhood mattered well joel i've got uh to build on that, I've got one last California question, because I haven't been to Lakewood and Downey. I know where those places are, but I haven't been in a long time. It's your adopted home state. I know you moved from Brooklyn decades ago, and I'm a native Californian. And every time I see a story like the one two weeks ago, that Chevron, a company that grew in California in the 19th century, is leaving entirely for Houston, following how many companies are now major companies that have

left the state. And as you know, we are one recession away from California's fiscal situation going off a cliff that'll so deep it'll never come back. I keep thinking, never mind Republicans, we can meet in a phone booth now in California, but I keep thinking that at some point, isn't this going to wake up Democrats? Isn't Gavin Newsom going to, isn't he privately, doesn't he have to be privately saying something's wrong when all these businesses are leaving the state? Am I being too optimistic there? Is it just hopeless? Or what, are we going to be saved by Lakewood and Hispanic neighborhoods and politicians who say enough is enough? Well, the report we just did at Chapman called El Futuro es Latino, we go into all that stuff. And basically, the only hope for California is Latinos and Asians beginning to move to the center.

If that happens, then we've got a chance, because these are people who want to buy houses. They tend to have kids. They should be a constituency that the party should fight for. And one of the things that I've been talking a lot with Latinos about is you've got to make people work for your vote. You know, I mean, what's happened to the African-Americans? They've become so predictably Democrat that the Democrats really don't have to do anything for them. All they've got to do is say a few words and pander a bit. Meanwhile, the condition of black America continues to deteriorate, particularly relative to other groups. So, you know, the problem we have in California is that we have a very powerful group of people, and this is why I think Newsom doesn't get it. He lives in this

Silicon Valley bubble. This, you know, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are the same person, essentially. Their backers are the same, their views are the same, and what they'll do is they will back up when things get bad. So, for instance, Newsom's been vetoing some of the more absurd laws that are being pushed, because he knows that there's a problem. But what's interesting to me is when companies leave, and to me, the most important loss by far is X, because space was, I think, our ticket in California. I've written a lot about space, including for a national review. When you lose these companies, it's very, very difficult. But the problem is that you've got this group of companies who don't manufacture anything, who are what my friend Mike Lind calls toll booth companies,

you know, like Apple, like Microsoft, you know, where they make money no matter what. They're just being there. They make money. There's no incentive from them, and they're the big backers of the democrats there's no incentive to address the loss of these these jobs i mean you know he made many mistakes but when pete wilson was governor um i have to give him credit every time there was a company that was talking about leaving they put a team out there. Sometimes they talked them out of it. Sometimes they didn't. Doesn't seem to be any attempt. I was meeting with a bunch of executives at Toyota. They have a few things left here in Southern California. Talk about a company that should be here.

They said, you know what? Nobody cared. We left. I think the mayor of Torrance was upset. I think that was about it. Have you heard word one about SpaceX leaving? SpaceX, which I think may be the most important company in the country

in the long term? Not a word. Not a word. Well, that's another podcast, and we'll have that too, because California matters. And it absolutely is a lesson. Once a shining beacon of hope and opportunity and orange juice and all the rest of it, and now a dire lesson. Joel Kotkin, the author of The Human City, Urbanism for the Rest of Us, and The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, a Warning for the Global Middle Class. Thanks for coming on.

I could have talked to you about urbanism for another hour or so, but got to run and have a great weekend. You too, and look forward to seeing the podcast, and feel free to contact me in the future. I do have a piece, by the way, coming out that Andrew Stetterford is editing on immigration, which might be of some interest. Oh, well, there we go. Look for that in National Review, I assume? In National Review, yes.

Yay. Good. All right, Joel, thank you. Thank you. You know, talking about California and what it used to represent, I can't think of a style, a mood, a vibe that's come out of California in a long time. What most people think of is a long-dead 50-, 60-, 70-year-old paradigm of googie architecture, of neon, of all the car culture things that sort of erupted in the mid-century. That's what people think of when they think of California, California urban culture.

Not anymore. The other alternative, of course, is to go to we mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright before. I'm working on a piece now for the newspaper where I have been reduced to being the urbanist writer there. Frank Lloyd Wright did a gas station in a small town in Minnesota in 1957. He'd done a house for the guy who had some gas stations. And he said, hey, you know what? Why don't you build me a station? And Frank Lloyd Wright dusted off some plans from 1927 for a broad acre city and put in this city, this little small town, this absurd futuristic building

that was already 30 years old when he put it up and was pointing to a future that never actually happened. And when people look at it and say, why didn't we build more things like that? Well, because it was weird. It's a weird looking thing. It doesn't fit. People weren't crazy about it. It's a novelty. It's not a way we wanted to go. And as much as I love some of the particulars of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, building an entire city around those ideals and styles, I think was bad. And that's one of the objections I have to all of these new urbanist ideas, is they tend to impose a paradigm as opposed to letting things grow organically and jostle for

competition. That's all I have to say about that. Well, I'll just say here, here, I mean, you know, I thought, I think maybe you said this, James, is the new urbanists had a lot of good ideas, but they wanted to impose it on everyone by fiat, right? I used to say, look, if you want a 15-minute city, you want new urbanism or whatever, just allow it to happen. Let's scale back the zoning regulations that prohibit these kinds of forms of neighborhoods and cities from being built, and let a thousand flowers bloom. But that's not good enough for... Really, this is another species of utopianism, I think. You mentioned transit and so forth.

You and I could go on all day about this, James, and I think Charlie would tear his hair out. There is an element of utopianism that is underneath all of these urban plans. It really is, no matter what you look for. The Garden City models, for the Robert Moses imposed grids with the awful, dreadful

concrete, you know, the word doesn't prove it, igloo, that's it. The standing in the middle of Winsep empty plazas. All of those things have an element of utopianism to it, and that's why I say it's Spanish into hell with it. All right, before we go, a couple of things. One, meetup's coming up. St. Louis, October 3rd through the 6th. That's right. People at Ricochet get together in person and drink and eat and have fun.

And you'd be surprised how little politics they actually talk about. Panama City, Florida, December 6th through the 8th. I don't know the geography of, but Charlie, is Panama City close to where you happen to be? Or are you just going to be, you know, Mr. Undisclosed location and leave us? No, I live in jacksonville oh okay it's three and a half hours four hours away from me florida's big state not so much across although that isn't a cross journey but down yeah it takes it takes you as long to get from the keys to tallahassee as from tallahassee to Washington, D.C. I'm not surprised. I wouldn't use the keys as your starting or ending point, because that does really seem

to be tacking it on just a bit. And you could never get me across that bridge in a million years. I love it down there. Oh, I like the keys. I just, not the bridge. I prefer to come to it from a watery angle. So go to Ricochet.com, check out the meetups page, and you will see, you know,

and if you're not a member, well, this is Rob Long, whoever, wherever he's been, likes to say, join, and then just put out the call,

and wherever you are, there's a fighting chance that Ricochet people will come to you in the flesh. Last thing, we had another 9-11 anniversary. Every year,

it fades a bit more. Every year, the, the tributes are a bit more muted. The anguish still seems for some to be particularly raw. But it's been a long time. And what are your thoughts on this day? I usually think the day before, oh, tomorrow is that day. And this may be one of the years in which i i didn't think that i knew it as soon as i woke up because the just you know you look at your watch you look at the date it's just it's it's stamped it's but i didn't think about it the day

before what did you guys feel i always do also i was flying on both September 10th and September 11th. So perhaps that focused on my mind. I think that quite inadvertently, I mean, not completely inadvertently, I did book the flights, but not because I wanted to, but because I had agreed to do an event somewhere. I have flown on about six of the last 13 September 11th since I lived in the United States. That is a strange feeling. It's just odd looking at your plane ticket, and it says September 11th on it. It will never not be strange.

Well, when you do that again, and the ticket actually has a Powerball at the end of the flight number, that's when I would be a little... Oh, boy. Yeah, I was, well, I was in Washington that morning, staying at the University Club, just a few blocks from the White House, so I'm watching it on TV, but then hearing the sirens start running, a lot of them, and I thought, well, something must be happening here. And that was before the news of the plane hitting the

Pentagon and the White House being evacuated, so I was kind of close to an awful lot of the noise anyway. In fact, I have friends of close to an awful lot of the noise anyway. In fact, I have friends of mine saying, oh, my goodness, this is the first year, maybe the second year, that I have students coming into college who were born after 9-11. So I don't know. I mean, you know, I grew up with World War II parents and always talked about Pearl Harbor, right? That was something that lasted forever. And, you know, I sort of absorbed all that myself and still think of Pearl Harbor Day when it comes.

But I don't know. I got to think the current generation who probably doesn't think much about Pearl Harbor, I think it's going to be even worse another generation from now, James, sadly, because it shouldn't be. I think you're right. As far as the planes go, I live the the approach to the airport in minneapolis and on 9-11 there was a great calamity as they brought all the planes down they emptied the skies out and then for a very unusual afternoon and evening there was no noise above except for those the high whine of a jet way overhead making circles, figure eights. And so on a normal 7, 9-11 like we had this week,

I hear the tremendous roar of the engines overhead as one plane after the other makes its leisurely descent. And I'm glad that it's normal, and I remember the day that it wasn't. I won't forget, but you're right, there are those coming up. I mean, my daughter daughter it doesn't have a particular meaning to me even though for me one of the things I will never forget is standing there watching all this happen on the television while my daughter a toddler is playing on the floor and she picked up a small little Fisher Price phone that said hello hello and she's holding it out to me. She has this delightful smile on her face as the phone says, hello,

hello, like it's the future calling. I will never forget that. Anyway, we thank everyone for listening to the podcast today. We advise you to do yourself a favor and by all means, try Z-Biotics and go to Ricochet.com. Sign up if you haven't. You'll enjoy

the member feed. Do not, whatever, do not, do not go to Apple Podcasts and give us five stars. That would be a horrible thing to do. I'm using that old reverse psychologically there stuff, you know. Thanks, Charlie. Thank you, Stephen. Enjoy. I give my regards to Norway, of course,

and my regards to swampy, damp Florida. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Well, next week, gang.