Neon Liberalism #26: Against Hyperlocalism

Join Samantha and guest Ned Resnikoff as they discuss why Americans are so cynical about politics—and how a movement that began with the goal of returning control to the people has spiraled into the opposite outcome. Along the way they talk Robert Moses, "citizen voice" politics, how free markets and functional governments support each other—and why we have neither of them in America today.

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Full Transcript

Samantha Hancox-Li [0:09]
Hi and welcome back to Neon Liberalism, a weekly podcast where we take the issues of the day and try to put them in a larger historical and theoretical context.

And this week, I want to try to bring together two topics that on the surface might seem kind of different. So if you talk to ordinary voters, occasionally I talk to ordinary voters, it happens, you find people are very cynical about government. They're very cynical about elections. They often feel like it kind of doesn't matter who they vote for. They vote and they vote and they vote, and things don't change very much.

And that seems like a kind of a problem, a malaise in the air that people don't really know how to explain very well. And there's also a housing crisis you may have heard in this country, which for many people, feels like an economic problem rather than a political problem, right? The rent is too damn high. The price of housing just keeps on going up and up and up. And people don't really like that very much either.

And so I have come to believe that these two issues aren't separate, but are actually deeply connected. And so I thought I would have on the podcast this week Ned Resnikoff, who is an urban policy analyst and consultant who's written about the intersection between our political dysfunction and our housing and other things, our land use dysfunction. So yeah, Ned, thanks so much for coming on.

Ned Resnikoff [1:55]
Thank you very much for having me.

Samantha Hancox-Li [1:59]

Yeah, it's a pleasure. So you wrote this essay recently for the Roosevelt Institute, "How to Fix Housing: The Pivot from Localism to Regionalism and the Rule of Law," and what's your elevator pitch for this essay? What's the summary of what you're arguing here?

Ned Resnikoff [2:17]
So that essay came as part of a package of essays about restoring economic democracy, and I was thinking about what democracy looks like in the context of American housing policy. I think when people think about democracy, they often tend to have this basic framework that the more you are able to vote on things and provide direct input on decisions, the more democratic they are.

And in fact, though that's the way that our housing policy is set up in much of the United States, where there are ample opportunities to provide feedback on basic neighborhood level, site specific development decisions, I would argue that it's actually quite undemocratic and leads to some pretty egregious outcomes for the polity as a whole. So this essay was really my attempt to explain why I think the way that we currently do housing policy and permitting in this country is a failure of democracy, and what to try to articulate what a sort of truly democratic housing policy, land use planning regime might look like.

Samantha Hancox-Li [3:44]
Yeah, and I think that's really interesting, because you're highlighting what's kind of a paradox here, where we've tried for decades now to make sure that land use control, control over land use in this country is as democratic as possible, and yet it doesn't feel like it's democratic, right? It's for many people, like I said, it feels like it's opaque and they don't have a lot of control, or they can't understand why things aren't happening that they want to happen.

And so trying to unravel this paradox of how we've pursued economic democracy but haven't gotten kind of the opposite is, I think, a really interesting question. And to try and approach that question, I think we do have to talk a little bit about history, right? Because the land use regime that we have in this country today didn't come about by accident, right? It was created for reasons. It's created as a reaction to a particular era of land use that came before it, and that era, I believe, is for many people, is best symbolized by Robert Moses. Yes, a name to conjure with. So what's your take on Robert Moses? Who's Robert Moses?

Ned Resnikoff [5:08]
So Robert Moses was New York State's parks commissioner for a while. He held a variety of other quite boring and anodyne sounding positions for both the city of New York and the state of New York, but he was, as much as any single individual can be said to have built the physical infrastructure of modern New York City, Robert Moses might well be that person. He's responsible for approving and basically ramming through the development of some of the largest bridges and inter-urban freeways in the city, you know, for opening up access to Jones Beach on Long Island, for doing a sort of renovation of Central Park. So he really did build the city to a great extent, and of course, is the subject of Robert Caro's masterful biography, "The Power Broker."

The thing about Moses, though, and here I would say, actually, this is maybe a little bit of a weakness of the frame that Caro takes to approaching the character of Moses, because he talks about Moses as very much an individual, instead of someone who sits at the intersection of these larger forces. And in a way, what Moses was doing was the most extreme example of what was happening in virtually every major city in the country at the time, which was this massive expansion of inter-urban freeways, urban renewal projects that destroyed tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of units of housing, predominantly in working class, black and brown neighborhoods.

And so, I think it can be a little bit... we need to be cautious not to overstate too much the impact that this had on the sort of localism, the move toward localism in urban planning and land use, because that tradition of localism, in some ways, goes back hundreds of years to the pre-Revolutionary era. But it's certainly true that there was a significant and justified backlash to this that I think put the skids on these sorts of large, grand public infrastructure projects that were just kind of forced through with little input from neighborhoods, and facilitated a turn toward what the historian Jacob Anbinder has called "neighborhoodism." So this idea that decisions about what physical infrastructure exists in neighborhoods should really happen at the neighborhood level and involve the people who live there.

Samantha Hancox-Li [8:26]
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right to step back from Moses himself a little bit. You know, he's a good metonym for what was happening in this period. But right, like, I live in Pittsburgh, and people these days remember the Harlem Renaissance. They don't really talk as much about the Pittsburgh Renaissance, but Pittsburgh was, at the time, a major destination for the great migration of black Americans out of the south. I believe the largest black newspaper in the country at the time was published in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Courier. There was like a great hub of black culture, of black art, of black thought, and specifically in a neighborhood called the Hill District here.

And then I don't have the date exactly off the top of my head, the city comes through and says, that is a beautiful neighborhood. We are bulldozing half of it, and we are turning it into the Pittsburgh Civic Center and parking lots for the Pittsburgh Civic Center and highways to serve the Pittsburgh Civic Center that are going to branch out into all these much whiter suburbs, right?

And that's a key part of this era, right? And like Robert Moses himself, is certainly guilty of the exact same kinds of, you know, shall we say racist... you know, racist, racially tinged doesn't cover it, right? He talked about Jones Beach. He builds a highway out to Jones Beach, but he's very careful to make sure that the bridges over that highway are low enough that buses can't run on it, because he doesn't want the wrong kind of people going out there. And like, where do the highways go? They tend to go in poor neighborhoods, right?

It is a lot of this is a vision of our cities, right? That planners are pursuing a highly suburban and whites-first vision of the city, where we're going to keep jobs in cities, we are going to build highways to those jobs, and we're going to have segregated suburbs at the other ends of those highways. And if you are a black person who happens to live in the path of one of these highways, too bad for you.

Ned Resnikoff [10:46]
Yeah, a really kind of, I think, especially poignant illustration of this that I've been doing some research on this for a book I'm working on, and I learned that Black Wall Street, the subject of the target of the Tulsa race massacre, so that area did rebuild in the period following the massacre, but then was destroyed for good by essentially a freeway. Urban renewal is what actually killed Black Wall Street in Tulsa, for good.

Samantha Hancox-Li [11:21]
Yeah. And so I think this is an important history, because Moses and various other far more nameless planners like them, they had a vision for what our state wanted our cities to look like, and they made it happen, right? They went out there and they built infrastructure, and they tore down this, and they built up this to really fundamentally reshape American cities. But they also did it in ways that were often racist, in ways that we today regard as like, maybe not the ideal way to build a city.

And as we've talked about, there's a reaction. There's a pretty strong reaction to these events. You said, Anbinder calls it neighborhoodism. Others have called it localism. There is a concept called citizen voice that some scholars like to use on this subject. So can you describe what the new regime is like after the era of Moses?

Ned Resnikoff [12:31]
Yeah. Well, you can kind of see the difference between the two by thinking about the difference between how, for example, an inter-urban freeway was built and approved during the urban renewal era, and compare it to something much less ambitious being built in your own backyard. Say, compare that massive freeway to a duplex.

And there are cities where this is not the case. There are many cities that rely on what's called a by-right, or ministerial process, which means that if you have a proposal for a development project that complies with the local zoning and with the local building codes and design standards and everything, that you can go ahead and build it, that it's sort of a kind of objective, bureaucratic procedure to get the necessary entitlement.

But many places have what is called, in contrast to a ministerial process, a discretionary approval process, which means that if you want to build that duplex, even if it complies with all of the underlying rules and regulations, you still need approval from the local city council or planning commission or whatever administrative, appointed or elected body that decides on those entitlements. And typically, there's also a public comment process so all of your neighbors can come up to a public meeting and get in line and speak to the microphone for two minutes about why they don't want you to build your duplex, and then the officials, the planning commissioners, or the city councilors, they have really, really broad latitude to disapprove the project again, even if, under a ministerial process, it would clearly be a shoe-in.

Samantha Hancox-Li [14:38]
Yeah, and I think I want to emphasize that this is a pretty big difference between how different countries do their land use policies, right, like you've talked about this ministerial process where, like, there's a clear set of rules, and if you comply with these rules, congratulations, go ahead and build the thing in question, right? And this is how most of continental Europe tends to do their land use. This is how countries like Japan do their land use, as I understand it. But in America, it's obviously not how we do most land use decisions.

Ned Resnikoff [15:20]
Yeah, I think the other exception to the general international trend is the UK, possibly the Anglophone countries in general. But as I understand it, in the UK land use planning system, essentially everything is discretionary, like it's actually somehow even worse than the way we do it in California, which is quite an achievement.

Samantha Hancox-Li [15:40]
Mind boggling. No, I so yes, I think that turns out to be the answer is that it's primarily a difference in like the Anglophone legal tradition and the French legal tradition coming out of the Napoleonic Code. But that's another episode to talk about these particular histories. For the moment, we'll just take it as a fact, right? There's the ministerial tradition, and there's the discretionary approach we've taken in America.

And so there's the discretionary aspect, but there's also this hyper-local aspect, right? That it's not just, oh, you have to go before politicians and make your case for why you should be allowed to build this, but that those politicians are going to defer to the community, in some sense, and the more local community you can find, the better that is, right?

And these kinds of public comment processes are happening all the time in our country, right? Like you, listener, in your town right now, there's probably a public comment process going on for something. And I strongly recommend going to one of these events just to really start to see how the sausage gets made in this country, because it can be very enlightening.

Yeah, I mean, because, again, from my experience, you go to these places, and the people who turn up are a particular kind of person, right? You know, people have studied the political preferences and the demographics and the wealth of people who come to these events. And can you tell me a little bit about that? What are the kinds of people who participate in the citizen voice process?

Ned Resnikoff [17:31]
Yeah, so we have some pretty good empirical research on this. The study that everyone cites is "Neighborhood Defenders," which is a book by the political scientists Einstein, Palmer and Glick. And Alexson has also done some follow-up research on this. Einstein, Palmer and Glick are looking primarily at Massachusetts suburbs, and then Alexson's research was on San Francisco. And in both cases, you get a pretty similar result, which is that the people who tend to show up to public to deliver public comment in these sort of planning meetings tend to be older than the general population. They are disproportionately white, they're disproportionately male, and they're disproportionately homeowners. And all of these traits also, unsurprisingly, correlate with the people who are showing up tend to be much more strongly opposed to the production of new housing in their neighborhoods.

And again, this is a finding that seems to bear out in a variety of different contexts. I think one thing that's also important to keep in mind about these meetings is, in some ways, it's intuitively... it makes intuitive sense that the people who would show up to these meetings would be the ones who have the, you know, they own their homes, and so they see some sort of concentrated impact from the production of housing, as opposed to the more diffuse benefit that comes from the effect that housing production has on a regional housing market. They because they're older, they don't necessarily work full time or have young kids, and so it's easier for them to make these meetings. And then also, because they tend to be more affluent, they're more highly educated, probably a bit more experienced in navigating these sorts of complicated administrative processes. And so those things all kind of lend themselves to showing up to these types of meetings.

Tellingly, though, the research that we have on what happens when you try to make these meetings more accessible is not super encouraging. So when, during the COVID-19 lockdown, you had a lot of these meetings moving to Zoom, and then you know, when there have been other experiments with, well, what if we offer childcare at these meetings? In those cases, it doesn't look like these sorts of interventions are able to substantially change the composition of who's showing up to these meetings.

Samantha Hancox-Li [20:29]
Yeah, and I think that's important, and it kind of gets to what you talked about in terms of education and resources that enable you to navigate the political system, right? That these things are they're publicized. They're all publicized, but not like, necessarily, what we call well publicized, right? Like, actually figuring out, is something happening, and where is it happening, and how do I show up to that? That's like a burden, right? That's a burden of political engagement, understanding that they are important, that they matter, to be committed to. Like, yeah, I'm going to show up to this one and all of the three following events in the series that this organization is running, right? That's a burden. And the people who tend to show up are the ones who, like you say, are committed in a particular way, have wealth, have resources to navigate these kinds of systems.

And so I think that's kind of an important thing to keep in mind when answering the next question that I have for you, which is, did this system of localism solve the Robert Moses problem?

Ned Resnikoff [21:43]
Not particularly. I mean, in a sense, yes, I mean it did create more bulwarks against massive redevelopment projects that could upend entire neighborhoods. But if you just kind of look around the country right now, urban freeway expansions are still happening all the time, and still pretty frequently destroying housing or making housing functionally unlivable, because all of a sudden you're right next to a multi-decker freeway.

There's a great book about this by Megan... I'm blanking on her last name, but it's called "City Limits," and it's about contemporary urban freeway expansions in Texas and the effort to push back on them. And it's just, it's shocking how many of these things are still getting built and widened constantly, despite the evidence that we have on widening is that doesn't actually reduce congestion in the long term. That's Texas, but even in California and Oregon and elsewhere, you see this sort of thing going on.

So I would say that the sort of turn toward neighborhoodism has had a pretty uneven impact, and the benefit that it... the group that it most directly benefits, has turned out to be affluent homeowners, who are able to use these tools very effectively to prevent their neighborhoods from becoming denser.

Samantha Hancox-Li [23:43]
Yeah, and I do want to dwell on that right, because there's this idea, right, in order to prevent these kinds of damaging, harmful infrastructure projects, we are going to give every single neighborhood a veto, you know, every single community a veto to stop bad things from happening to them. But then it turns out that like access to those veto points is, as we've talked about, pretty unequally distributed, right? The ability to organize, to understand the process, to commit to it long term, to like, found your own little organization and show up and say, hi, I'm the representative of the Mellon Orchard, you know, community association that is just like me and my five friends. But it sounds better, right? It sounds better when you show up at a community meeting like this, right? All this stuff adds up to kind of bring us back to these inequities of wealth and power and race in many cases.

Ned Resnikoff [24:44]
Yeah, it also creates really difficult pressures on neighborhoods where you don't have the sorts of resources. In the case of an urban freeway expansion, there's, you know, an easy solution to the problem of, well, what do we do instead of building this freeway here, which is just, don't expand the fucking freeway. But in the case of something like housing supply, where the housing actually really does need to get built somewhere if you're going to avoid out of control housing costs and homelessness and all the other kinds of urban dysfunction that come along with that, if you're not building the housing in the affluent, high opportunity areas, then it needs to go somewhere. And this is, you know, I think what people typically understand as gentrification, where a particular neighborhood that was maybe formerly a working class neighborhood is getting more expensive, and there are all these multifamily new buildings going up. A lot of that is the product of artificial supply constraints in the higher income areas, where, you know, for a lot of developers, it would be their first choice to build there.

Samantha Hancox-Li [26:02]
No, I think that's important, and it's housing, but it's not just housing, right? There's other kinds of municipal infrastructure, like, you know, a water purification plant. The city needs a water purification plant. We're all using the water. It's got to go somewhere. It's got to go to a water purification plant. You don't necessarily want to live next to a water purification plant, because of all the shit that you know is functionally what they're trying to take out of the water there. It's not necessarily a nice place to live. And so where does that go? Well, some neighborhoods scream the loudest when you try to put a water purification plant in them, and some don't scream so loud, right?

Ned Resnikoff [26:44]
Right. And we should say that, you know, we've been talking a lot about neighborhoods, and certainly neighborhoodism can be a powerful force in larger cities in particular, but it's also a function of municipal fragmentation too. It's not just the neighborhoods kind of jockeying to keep out housing, but it's also the fact that in our large metro areas, we've basically engineered a series of massive collective action problems from the fact that there are all these outlying suburbs and micro jurisdictions around every major city that benefit from access to the city's labor market and urban amenities, but are able to say, we don't want to do anything to contribute to the actual planning needs that allow a city to function.

Samantha Hancox-Li [27:26]
No, I think that's right. And to me, this is probably the most fundamental, most important problem with neighborhoodism, is that, sure, there are some local issues, right, but a lot of these so-called local issues inevitably have an impact on the larger metropolitan area, right? If you do not build more housing in the highest demand areas, where is that demand going to go? The next neighborhood over? And we've all seen this process happen, right? The jobs market of most major metropolitan areas. It's just one jobs market, and everybody kind of knows they're not like looking at where the city limits technically go on the map to decide where to work. They just, you know, they look around the metropolitan area to try and find a job, right?

Water infrastructure, power infrastructure, transportation infrastructure. We are all connected right by all of these problems. But what localism has done is completely distort our view of these problems and create, like you say, a collective action problem where you in your tiny, your tiny, little pinhole view of the world, that's something looking at your neighborhood, you say, look at all these costs. Look at all this construction. Look at all these things that I don't like. And you have control over whether it gets built and who cares about the larger impact, the larger benefits that building all that stuff is going to bring to your overall metropolitan area.

Ned Resnikoff [29:25]
Yeah, I mean, I'll also say on top of that, there's the issue of, this is maybe a little bit of an ancillary issue. But the people who are coming to speak out against this sort of development, it's not just a matter of their trying to defend their neighborhood or their community despite what the larger metro area might need. It's also that they have a very distorted and not necessarily accurate perception of what will benefit their community.

And so a good hyper-local example you see of this all the time is homeowners and small business owners getting up in arms against bike lanes or any sort of what's called active transportation infrastructure, like, essentially infrastructure for people who are walking or biking or scootering or whatever. And the argument is very frequently, well, this is going to destroy small businesses in our neighborhood or our city, because where are the people who patronize these businesses going to park? And in fact, as it turns out, all of the research that we have on this shows that making areas more walkable and bikeable is actually great for retail and for other types of businesses, because if you actually think about it, you're not window shopping when you're driving around in your car. But if you actually make it possible for people to walk around these areas that you increase foot traffic, you increase people just kind of popping into these stores, and it can be a real boon for retail sales, as we've seen very recently, actually, with congestion pricing in Manhattan.

So that's just an example of the types of people who are showing up to these meetings. You know, are often treated with a certain amount of deference and authority because they're quote, unquote, the community, and because also they're the types of individuals who wield outsized power over the electoral fortunes of local politicians. But they're not necessarily people who understand what the actual interests are of their particular neighborhood.

Samantha Hancox-Li [31:50]
I mean, or even their own interests, right? I mean, but certainly I've like again, there are proposals, there's bike lane proposals, there's parking reforms that are going on in my city, in Pittsburgh, and many small business owners in the areas have turned out against them, and it's always kind of maddening. And I think this is actually another pretty deep issue that I want to emphasize. It gets to what I talked about with Will Stancil on this podcast about the sense in which these are ideological and cultural ideas as much as they are mere material, right? It would be better for the small business to have more bike lanes and to have more, you know, less parking and a more pedestrian friendly urban design. It would be better for their bottom line in the most crass economic way you can imagine. But they don't believe it, right? They believe that bike lanes are going to be bad for their business. They believe that most of their customers drive to their business, which is not true.

And I think this is something that we see, not just at this specific policy question that we've been talking about, but also in this broader question of localism that there are certain, you know, codified legal aspects to the localism regime, to the community voice regime, the citizen voice regime. But a lot of it is cultural. A lot of it is officials extending deference to local communities, to citizen feedback, even when they have no legal requirement whatsoever to do that kind of thing. Yona Freemark has a paper about this. You know, how municipalities exploit their de facto power to manage metropolitan planning? Right about the extent to which our officials are engaging in this kind of deference and engaging in like, extensive community feedback processes that they're not required to, but they feel like they have to. They feel like that's the right thing to do, and that's how things ought to be done, even as as we've talked about, it seems to be really harming our cities, to be generally bad for people.

Ned Resnikoff [34:26]
Maybe just a note on this sort of question of, you know, is it actual material interests? Or to, you know, paraphrase Žižek, like it's pure ideology, I tend to be a little bit more of a materialist than Stancil. I mean, I think some of his points about the effect that the information environment can have on people's perception of their interests and how it maybe leads them to misunderstand, for example, how larger economic forces are actually affecting their material interests. That's all well taken. But I think sometimes what gets lost with like a purely cultural account of what's going on is that there are different ways to understand people's material interests, and wealth accumulation is one of them. But I think another one to think about is not just sort of wealth accumulation as sort of like a bottom line amount, but things like market share and and maybe even more importantly than that, actual political power and political influence within one's community.

One of the things that I found really illuminating in my own thinking about the sort of ideological but also material roots of nimbyism is the political scientist Jessica Trounstine's work in a book called "Segregation by Design," where she presents some pretty compelling evidence that one of the things that suburban nimbyism is doing is essentially metering or restricting access to public amenities within a certain community. I mean, essentially, this is, like, you know, the non-academic way to talk about this is that it's, you know, it's essentially a different way of doing segregation after de jure Jim Crow went extinct, you could see this in, I think, a lot of different contexts.

An example that I find, particularly enraging as a UC Berkeley alum and a resident in the East Bay is at Berkeley, as with a lot of other high quality public colleges and universities, you have this entire community of homeowners that's spread up around it, who are essentially have essentially gotten rich off of their proximity to this incredible public amenity, right? Like a world-class public university. And in fact, the city of Berkeley would literally not exist if it were not for UC Berkeley, like the university came first and then the city grew up around it, and yet you have a lot of those homeowners who have benefited tremendously from their proximity to the university now using their position to try and prevent things like more student housing being built. And so what you essentially have is, I mean, almost something like a sort of municipal resource curse, where the people who have had long term direct access to the benefits of this incredible public resource are attempting to monopolize it and keep out the people who the resources actually originally intended for, which is, you know, students, and in particular, you know, lower income students, who can, who if they go there, can dramatically increase their lifetime earnings, in many cases.

So, I mean, I think that's even where, even where we're not talking about pecuniary benefits or monetary benefits from nimbyism, there's a certain amount of, there's a certain power dynamic in play that I would also describe as a sort of material force, if not necessarily a directly financial one.

Samantha Hancox-Li [38:46]
Yeah, there's a whole can of worms there about whether we count something like living in a segregated neighborhood as a material benefit or a cultural benefit. And it's an interesting question. I have strong views about it, but maybe again, maybe another podcast.

But I do want to focus on this idea that it's that it kind of brings us back to a collective action problem, right? It's this idea that people are saying, okay, well, I live in this neighborhood, and it's becoming very valuable, but I gotta stop more construction in this neighborhood, that'll increase my own home price. But on a if you do this everywhere for the entire region, it starts to become extremely dysfunctional, right?

And so I guess that's sort of my question to you, how has this fragmentation of authority and responsibility and vetocracy, how has that warped our cities?

Ned Resnikoff [39:51]
Well, it's made it very, very difficult to solve housing crises, for one thing, because housing markets, like labor markets, are essentially regional. You know, the cost of the apartment I rent in Emeryville, which is a smaller city in the East Bay, is very tightly correlated with the cost of housing in Oakland or Berkeley or San Francisco, right? Like all these prices kind of rise and fall in tandem with one another. And Emeryville builds a lot of housing, and recently, Oakland has been taking some important steps to get a lot more housing built. But these are two cities of respectively, I think about 13,000 residents and about 400,000 residents, and you're talking about a metropolitan area that has millions of people in it, and you know, hundreds of jurisdictions that are not making an effort to do their fair share when it comes to housing construction. So even our relatively large city in this area, like Oakland, there's only so much they can do.

I mean, another great example of this is the New York City metro area, where you obviously do need a lot more housing production in the city itself, but New York City cannot really resolve its own housing shortage on its own, because you have these vast single family tracts out in places like Long Island or the Connecticut and New Jersey suburbs or Westchester County, that if you're not building in those places, then the city itself is going to have a very, very difficult time making up the housing shortfall.

Samantha Hancox-Li [41:47]
Yeah, I mean, New York City is certainly a particularly difficult problem, because the metropolitan area is spread across multiple states, even not just multiple counties, but just a truly enormous urban conglomeration.

So to kind of bring it back to your essay, your essay isn't about problems. Your essay is about solutions, you know, you It's called "How to Fix Housing." And in the essay, you kind of argue for shifting to a new paradigm in a couple of important ways. So what's the better paradigm that we should be thinking about for urban planning?

Ned Resnikoff [42:33]
Yeah, I mean, the way I describe it is that we should actually be doing real planning. So like I said, housing markets are regional, which means that the actual metropolitan region is probably the appropriate venue for doing housing planning across multiple jurisdictions.

I think the other thing to think about is at what point in the process community input becomes involved, and how are you actually constructing the community when it comes to that? Because I think something that we haven't really talked about is that whenever people talk about the community, there are a bunch of implicit, unstated assumptions about who actually is a member of that and who doesn't count.

So what I propose building on the work of others like Anika Singh Lamar at Yale is a model in which there is ample room for input from residents, but that that input takes place at the actual general planning stage, instead of the site by site stage. And I think the general planning stage is a much more appropriate place to have that sort of input, because it's where you're actually having a conversation about trade-offs. It's not just do we build a five-over-one on this parcel or not? It's okay, we have these housing needs moving forward for the next eight to 10 years. How do we distribute the actual land use changes to get that housing built around the urban area in an equitable way?

The other thing that I propose is trying to find ways to make sure that the input is actually representative of the people who live there. So one way to do that, which some jurisdictions have experimented with, is doing actual professional polling or surveys in order to capture a more demographically representative share of the people who live in their borders.

I'm very into this idea of essentially treating community input, land use planning, like jury duty. So you get a random selection of people who live in a metropolitan area and try to make it as representative as possible. You pay people a stipend, and then for a week or two weeks, they're actually deliberating over the region-wide zoning and planning map with planners from the relevant jurisdictions, and really actually having to think through the various trade-offs of, you know, how you could plan for housing or whatever other infrastructure needs there are.

Samantha Hancox-Li [45:43]
Yeah, so that's very interesting, and I want to come back to that in a minute. Because from what I see, you're arguing that we should, there's like two really core components to what you've just said. And number one is, we've got to zoom out, right? We can't be trying to make decisions on again, decisions through a pinhole. You have to see a metropolitan area of a large urban area and the suburbs that are all there because the urban area is there. The whole urban conglomeration has one unit, right? You know, Alan Bertaud has this line that cities are labor markets, right? They are about production. They are and like, that's the thing that knits them all together and makes all of these problems interconnected in a very deep way. And so we have to actually make planning decisions at the organically natural level for it, which is not block by block, but you know, again, metropolitan area by metropolitan area.

And second, you argue that we have to do this again in a more ministerial way, right? That we should not be making it a discretionary or arbitrary again. I mean, we've seen examples of this across the country, how this kind of discretionary process invites corruption, and also just bad decisions, but just having a clear set of standards where we're going to say, here is our urban area. Here are the things that we want to achieve to make everybody's lives better. And here's like, the clear list of rules that you builder can follow when you're making, you know, new housing, or you're making a new commercial space, or whatever it is right to just make things intelligible to people, to make the process simple and straightforward. But also, and I guess this cycles back to like, well, how do you make sure that that's all democratic, right? How do you make sure we don't wind up back in Robert Moses land?

And for me, like one of the key things here to understand, how is this not just Robert Moses, again, is to recognize that Robert Moses wasn't elected, right? Robert Moses held a weird constellation of appointed positions in all these like you say, these kind of anodyne sounding agencies that gave him enormous de facto power and enormous de facto money that he could distribute or not distribute and direct around the city and blah, blah. But he didn't actually have to face any election. He never had to face popular accountability.

And similarly, when we look at urban renewal projects around the country, a lot of the most famous ones are happening in the 50s and 60s. When, you know explicit Jim Crow, segregation was still the law of the land, when disenfranchisement of black Americans was very thorough going right, when people are just already shut out of the political process. And so how do we make sure we don't wind up back in Robert Moses land? Well, we have real democracy, real, as I like to put it, a clear connection between what happens when you go to the polls and what kind of government policy you get at the other end of it.

And so, yeah, I mean, you've suggested that we try this. I mean, that's kind of difficult with the particular municipal fragmentation that we've talked about. So we have to, like, you've been saying, oh, should do polling, or we should do jury duty for land use regulations. But how does that compare, I guess, in your opinion, to just having, well, we're just going to have a general election, right? That's where the democracy comes from, is we elect people, and that's where everybody's voices gets heard and everybody's votes get counted, and then those officials make land use decisions for the whole region.

Ned Resnikoff [49:58]
Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. It's not something I get very much into in my essay, but I'm a big believer in the way that democracy should work is that you, the way a representative democracy should work is that you elect a particular candidate who promises to do something, and then they do it, and then you can evaluate when they're up for reelection again, whether them doing that thing was actually good or bad. And we have a very number of ways that at every level of government in the United States, we've made the relationship between what a candidate says they want to do and what impact they're able to have in office incredibly attenuated, and also what sort of feedback for their actions voters actually receive. And so yeah, that's absolutely broken at the local and state level as well when it comes to land use planning. And one of the ways in which it's broken is because you have this sort of then arduous site by site review process that can really undermine whatever the intent was of the original general plan.

This is, I mean, talking about zooming up to higher levels of government, I think this is something that we've seen in California and many other states, which is where the locus of where you're able to overcome those sort of local collective action problems is at the state. And what has happened in California has been described by many anti-housing people at the local level as a sort of undemocratic power grab by the state. But what's actually happened with the YIMBY legislation that the state has passed is fairly straightforward, which is that people in the legislature like Scott Wiener, Buffy Wicks, Chris Ward, they have said, elect me and I will work at the state level to deal with this housing crisis, and then people voted for them and continue to vote for them, and then they author and lobby for legislation to upzone across the state, including in their own neighborhoods. And that is democracy that is much more democratic than what's actually happening at the local level, where when state pro-housing laws are passed, particularly affluent entrenched interests in particular cities try to figure out ways to subvert these laws that were passed by democratic, democratically elected representatives of the state and not just their particular neighborhood.

Samantha Hancox-Li [52:18]
No. And I think I kind of want to dwell on this idea that something's broken down in our system. And this gets back to the kind of cynicism people have about government, where, again, they go out and they vote and they want something to happen, and the candidate promises it's going to happen, and then it doesn't, and they can't understand why, right? And I think this has exerted a profoundly corrupting influence on our political system. It's made people cynical, but it's also warped incentives for politicians, where politicians understand it's going to be pretty tough to get a lot of stuff done, you know, in material terms. But on the other hand, I can really, you know, play the hits when it comes to things that I can't do anything about. I can't change anything, but there, you know, I'm gonna again, one of my personal bug bears is when I have, you know, candidates for City Council in my district who are coming to me talking about their stances on abortion and on climate change and on foreign policy and like those things are all really great and important, and you as a city councilor have absolutely no impact on them. You have absolutely no impact on them. So why are you talking to me about it, right?

And so I think that this fragmentation of responsibility, the fragmentation of accountability, that citizen voice, that localism has given us. It promised democracy, but it has not delivered democracy. It has not delivered functional democratic control over public policy. It's delivered a system where people don't know what they're voting for, and they aren't getting it, and they don't understand why. And it's, we can see the evidence of that dysfunction all around us at this point.

Ned Resnikoff [54:54]
So this might be the obligatory part of the interview where I talk about Theda Skocpol and diminished democracy. If you engage me in a conversation on these issues for long enough, then inevitably, I'm either going to bring up Theda Skocpol or Francis Fukuyama, but it's Skocpol's turn. I think one of the things that we've learned from her scholarship is the role that membership-based organizations like labor unions, local chambers of commerce, you know, organized religious bodies, played in the sort of structuring of a robust local and even federal democracy, and how the gradual hollowing out of all those institutions has led to much more dysfunctional government at basically every level. And I think housing policy is one of the places where you can definitely see that, in part, because the only institutions that are really left as big local players in housing policy are homeowners associations and neighborhood associations.

There's a lot of skepticism, some of it justified about the older sort of urban growth machine model. But I think it is indisputably true that when you had the local Chamber of Commerce kind of approaching city planning from a more growth-oriented, boosterist mindset, you did not see these severe housing shortages like you do now. And similarly, I think if you had more robust local labor movements that were more attentive to not just the sort of meat and potatoes of the contracts that they're bargaining for in terms of, you know, wages and benefits, but also the relative value of those wages when you take them home, and what the cost of living in a particular area does to what you're negotiating on behalf of your members, then you might start to see something of a more robust local democratic counterweight to the wealthy homeowners lobby.

Samantha Hancox-Li [57:09]
No. And I, I mean, this is something I kind of wanted to talk about earlier, about this question of, like, self interest and the way that, like, yeah, you know, home equity, it's going up and up. But like, what does it actually buy you when everybody else's housing costs are also going up and up? But again, that's an interesting question, but I'll come back to that another day.

Ned Resnikoff [57:31]
Right? And how liquid is that actually, right? I mean, you're the wealth stored in your house is not particularly liquid.

Samantha Hancox-Li [57:42]
No, not at all. But what I want to kind of emphasize, from what you've just said, is in a lot of our discourse today, a lot of people want to present it as if there's this deep and important conflict between free markets and economic democracy, or political control, or whatever you want to call it. And I think in a well functioning system, these things work together right where, like the kind of economic democracy that you're arguing for, regional planning, clear guidelines for what you can build and what you can't build and why and how it's going to benefit everybody. That works hand in hand with a free market, where people can look at those guidelines and say, I want to build that right, and I'm going to right, as opposed to the kind of system where we have now, where like, do you want to build apartment buildings? Do you want to be a builder of apartment buildings in your city? You better really know your City Councilor, right? You better really be well connected, and you better have really deep pockets, to ride out the litigation, to ride out the community engagement process, to ride out all the bumps in the road between the time when you decide I want to do this project, and when you actually complete it and sell it right. And a again, a better planning process would enable more people to earn a living by producing the kinds of goods and services, especially housing, that we all need.

Ned Resnikoff [59:36]
Yeah, this gets back to, I think, one of my fundamental frustrations with the way that housing policy is sometimes discussed in intra-left debates between like lefty YIMBYs and left anti-YIMBYs, where it often gets framed as this question of, well, market forces, good thing or bad thing. And I'm essentially a Social Democrat in orientation, where my view about this, and part of why I put so much emphasis on planning is that absolutely, markets should be subordinated to democratic control. They are creatures of the state. They're not something that exists prior to the state. And so therefore, you know, in a democratic state, they should be managed in a way that meets the needs of everyone who, you know, is a member of the polity.

But they can be useful. I mean, they're useful. They actually, like markets can when designed correctly and, and, you know, when designed correctly is kind of the whole thing. They can provide useful signals about demand for certain things, about, you know, just what actually we need to be producing more of, what are people's preferences. And we can use those sorts of tools to make sure that everyone gets housing again, it's not the only thing, like market mechanisms are not going to allow us to house people at the very low end of the income spectrum, and so there's a massive role for the state in actually ensuring that everyone has housing. But if we simply say, like, we're going to subordinate every single decision about what gets built to some sort of plebiscite, then we're going to end up with a very, very perverse set of consequences.

Samantha Hancox-Li [1:01:39]
Yes, no, I agree with a lot of what you said. Don't agree with all of it, but I do want to really thank you for coming on the podcast and talking about how politics and economic democracy and markets, and the kind of political and economic outcomes we're all dealing with and trying to deal with and trying to imagine a better way forward from, you know, how we're going to solve these problems that we're all faced with. Because I think at this point, it's very clear that we have some serious problems and that they need cleaning up, and that any solution is going to have to be both political and economic. So yeah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you all for listening to the podcast and tune in next week for more Neon Liberalism.

Ned Resnikoff [1:02:39]
All right, thank you.