I first saw the Twin Towers with my own eyes on a family road trip in the early 1990s, while we were driving to Disney World from Southern Connecticut. My parents had woken us up hours before dawn and stuffed us into the rear of a Hyundai hatchback: my sister in her car seat between us, my brother and me wedged against opposite doors, sleeping on pillows. Sometime along our drive down the New Jersey Turnpike, I opened my eyes to the New York skyline, its buildings silhouetted against the fading dark as the first rays of dawn gathered behind them. The World Trade Center dominated Lower Manhattan, two geometric monoliths towering over the more elegantly tapered profiles of the prewar city, as though the bedrock had thrust them fully formed into the sky. Seeing them in that half-light, it was impossible to comprehend their scale: they were too large, or the surrounding city too small—or somehow both.

How could those buildings, seemingly connected to the core of the earth itself, ever be gone?

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I never set foot in the World Trade Center complex, but its presence in New York was an immutable fact of my early visits to the city. The towers loomed in photos taken from Liberty Island or the top of the Empire State Building, appeared as glimpses between uptown avenues, or suddenly filled the windows of a coach bus as we passed along West Street, close enough to see the enormous tridents framing the North Tower lobby. In September 2001, I had just started college at Boston University when two planes flew out of nearby Logan Airport one bright Tuesday morning. As the world ruptured that morning, I had the profound feeling that my childhood had finally ended.

Still, childlike disbelief brought me to visit, in January 2002, what we mercifully no longer call Ground Zero. I remember steam or smoke wisping from a mountain of rubble: steel bent into shapes no longer resembling beams, the broken shards of the iconic ribbed cladding, the detritus of offices and God knows what else. The fires were officially put out earlier that December, but the occasional hot spot was uncovered as debris was removed. I don’t know if the wisps I recall were real or recreations, but the rubble was certainly there.

When I graduated from college in 2005, I moved to New York. By then, Ground Zero had taken on a new meaning: it was a giant hole in the ground where zero seemed to be happening. The site had been cleared and construction preparations had begun in 2004, but the officials—governors, the mayor, developers, financiers, insurers—continued to fight about everything. Our moment of national unity had already fractured over the Iraq War, but war had broken out on the World Trade Center site almost immediately. Who would pay? Who owed what? Whose vision should prevail?

Progress happened in fits and starts—or by grown men throwing fits. The buildings around the periphery had their blown-out windows replaced and structural damage repaired, while 7 World Trade Center rose steadily on a privately-owned adjacent site. The defining feature of Downtown had become the Bathtub, a vast excavation on the western side of the sixteen-acre site with a seventy-foot-deep slurry wall studded with steel tiebacks to hold back the Hudson River. Looming over that maw, the abandoned Deutsche Bank building stood for years with a twenty-four-story gash in its side. Even its demolition proved fatal: a seven-alarm fire killed two more firefighters and injured 115 others.

In the early years, I would regularly hear stories from New Yorkers who had seen the second plane hit, who had trudged on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge as Lower Manhattan was evacuated, who had colleagues or contacts who simply vanished that morning. Eventually, those stories stopped getting told. Each year, the Tribute in Light would pierce the night sky on the anniversary, casting its ghostly columns into the void, and we’d sometimes walk the long blocks from our apartment on West 44th Street to Pier 84, stretching 1,000 feet into the Hudson, to catch the view. Inevitably, though, the anniversary became another date in the calendar—meetings, appointments, travel still had to be scheduled. We’d see the light in the sky and then remember the date.

For years, I would take out-of-town visitors down to the former site of the towers, and we would peer through the official Ground Zero Viewing Wall for signs of progress. Gradually, the hole began to take shape: the foundation of what was first called the Freedom Tower, later rechristened One World Trade Center, and the footprints of the Twin Towers that would be forever memorialized as Reflecting Absence, its waterfalls cascading into another void.

It was the emergent shape of the tower and memorial that brought context and meaning back to the site. When the memorial opened in 2011, one could stand at the former base of each tower and look up, and then imagine the bolt from the blue that created the endless upward emptiness. One could look down and trace the names of nearly 3,000 people as waterfalls drowned out the street noise and cascaded into another infinite void. One could look down again, more closely, and trace, ten times, the phrase “and her unborn child” and understand that what we saw in the TV footage was not only buildings falling but the lives they carried with them. One could look down farther still, into the Bathtub, where a museum opened a few years later with artifacts, exhibits, and a gift shop—but I still haven’t been able to bring myself to descend into it.

Memory warps and wobbles as it attempts to contain the unfathomable.

Controversial when proposed, unloved when constructed, the towers were sanctified by the violence of their destruction, displacing earlier memories. What many remember of the original World Trade Center was its windswept plaza, its humiliating scale, the way it obliterated the streetscape and lifted itself like a citadel above the neighborhood. Among much else, we hardly remember what it replaced: the bustling Radio Row, Washington Market, the Hudson Terminal Building, and other landmarks of the “thirteen historic, living and breathing square blocks of the city” that were destroyed in what Harper’s Magazine called an act of “urbicide.”

The original World Trade Center employed the methods and epitomized the spirit of the urban renewal era at enormous scale. The project was dreamed up by the technocratic Rockefeller brothers—Nelson, as governor, and David, as CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank—and the bureaucrats of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Using the power of eminent domain, the Port Authority seized sixteen acres of Lower Manhattan, displacing some 300 businesses, 30,000 employees, and 100 residents, ultimately demolishing 164 buildings and closing five streets. Meant to revitalize an ailing Downtown, the complex instead flooded the market with 10 million square feet of new office space, creating a supply glut that depressed real estate values and only worsened the economic slump. For years the Port Authority struggled to lease the complex, offering below-market rents to lure tenants from other Downtown buildings, while cross-subsidizing losses with revenue from its bridges, tunnels, and airports. Meanwhile, the tax-exempt authority took sixteen acres off the city’s property tax rolls. Still, by 2001, the towers were nearly full, instantly recognizable around the world, and inextricably tied to the identity of New York.

Folly, failure, icon, target: in the span of 102 minutes, it all came down.

We’ve been writing and rewriting our memories of what actually happened since almost the moment the first plane struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. The terrorists had cast the Twin Towers as pillars of American capitalism, symbols of its power and decadence. Their tenants included investment banks like Cantor Fitzgerald and insurance brokers like Aon Corporation—but also New York State and the Port Authority itself. In actuality, the towers embodied the American mixed economy and the often hazy relationship between bank and state. As targets, the towers were useful because of what they were perceived to stand for, not the entanglement of government power and private ambition that had made them stand.

Grief and anger demanded a defiant response, prompting calls to rebuild them safer and stronger. The approach taken instead was beset by petty politics, giant egos, appalling myopia, and absurd visions. Calatrava’s transit hub, meant to open its wings like a bird, became a financial albatross value-engineered into a skylight designed to crack open each anniversary—but hasn’t in years due to ongoing leaks. Despite it all, the still unfinished result is something better than what was there. The new complex reconnects the site to the surrounding grid, replacing a plaza hostile to pedestrians with streets they might actually want to walk and a lush canopy of trees where the original towers offered only a paved and shadeless plain. It also has some echoes of the old: where electronics vendors once peddled radio parts, Spotify now has its US headquarters.

In the center of it all is the memorial, inviting us to reflect on the absence of what was so horrifically destroyed twenty-five years ago. The Twin Towers stood on that site for nearly three decades, while the memorial punctures it, permanently, with what happened on their final day. Already, some 100 million Americans have no memory of what happened on September 11th. One day, when the last of us who remember have ourselves faded into memory, when the swamp white oak trees soar over the memorial plaza, when the bronze parapet bearing all those names has weathered green, when the city has absorbed it all into its daily fabric as another immutable fact—perhaps then the absence of those towers will truly be reflected. No one alive will remember seeing them there.

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When arriving in A Coruña, in northern Spain, the first thing one notices is not the crystalline blue of the Atlantic as it rolls onto the sandy stretch of the Playa del Orzán. Nor is it the endless galerías, the rows of white glass-enclosed balconies that give A Coruña its nickname, the City of Glass. Nor is it even the nearly two-thousand-year-old Roman lighthouse that still warns passing ships of the rocky shoals around the city. Instead, what strikes the first-time visitor to this midsize city of 250,000 is just how tall everything is. The Spanish news outlet elDiario.es analyzed more than 12 million buildings across Spanish cities and found that A Coruña has the tallest average height of any city in Spain. While you may be imagining Manhattan on the Gulf of Ártabro, the city beats the next tallest city, Barcelona, with an average height of slightly more than five stories.

Height can be deceiving: it is not necessarily an indicator of urban density—and sometimes it can indicate its opposite. This is particularly true of Spain’s postwar development.

Spain has a well-deserved reputation for having some of the world’s loveliest urban spaces: dense, mixed-use neighborhoods where ground-floor retail lines walkable streets, and where frequent plazas invite you to stop for a coffee or a glass of wine. Such streetscapes are typical in Spain, where 65 percent of the population lives in apartments, more than double the American rate of 26 percent and behind only South Korea’s 74 percent, per the OECD. During my recent visit, I spent time in about a dozen cities of varying sizes, including A Coruña, enjoying the pleasure of being on foot with places to walk to and sit in. But in A Coruña, while walking along its brilliant coastline after visiting the Roman lighthouse, I encountered a neighborhood that offered neither.

Adormideras was constructed in the 1980s as part of a deliberate strategy to keep middle-class families from decamping to suburban municipalities. Instead, Galician modernist architect Andrés Fernández-Albalat designed the neighborhood to bring the suburbs into the city. The neighborhood comprises a series of 8-to-9-story curvilinear apartment buildings surrounded by open space, sports fields, and parking lots. The ground floors of each building used to be storage spaces and have largely been walled off or turned into garages, creating cinderblock walls instead of an activated streetscape. Located on the hammerhead-shaped peninsula that includes A Coruña’s busy centro, municipal transit didn’t connect Adormideras to the rest of the city for years. Four decades later, the neighborhood still has little to walk to other than a municipal market, which received a €2 million European-funded facelift in 2022, but is only open from 9am to 3pm. You still can’t buy a roll of toilet paper on a Tuesday afternoon, as one resident complained. In this “country of bars and cafés,” you have to trek uphill to the livelier Monte Alto neighborhood to find a place to sit and get a drink. The most interesting sight in Adormideras—and perhaps an indication of its remoteness—is the nearby nude beach.

The contrast between the prewar centro of A Coruña and the postwar Adormideras reveals something essential: apartments do not necessarily make a neighborhood urban, just as tall buildings do not necessarily make it dense. Successful urbanism requires connected streets, a mixture of uses, and active public life. If Adormideras seems like an aberration from the classic centro, it’s not unique: Spain has a long history of building exactly this kind of neighborhood.

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For more than a century, Bilbao’s blast furnaces belched billows of smoke into the air, coating its buildings in soot and polluting the Nervión River. Iron ore mined from the surrounding hills had turned Bilbao into a steelmaking and shipbuilding powerhouse, and the grime and smog were the price it paid to become the wealthiest city in Spain. After decades under the Franco dictatorship, the caudillo’s death in 1975 allowed the city to breathe politically—but economically and environmentally, Bilbao was already choking. Global competition, technological obsolescence, and the exhaustion of its iron ore reserves threatened its industrial base, while the Nervión had become an open-air sewer of human effluvia and industrial waste, ecologically dead. By the 1980s, unemployment had risen as high as 23%, the population was declining for the first time in the city’s modern history, and Bilbao was beset by labor unrest, drugs, and terrorism from the Basque separatist organization ETA. Then, in August 1983, torrential rains overwhelmed its dilapidated drainage system, submerging the historic Casco Viejo beneath as much as three meters of water. To say the city’s outlook was underwater would be an understatement.

Less than fifteen years later, sunlight shimmered off the “voluptuous curves” of Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim Museum, the river sparkled, and the city had gained a reputation for urban revitalization. The economy had rebounded, unemployment had fallen, and tourists were arriving in droves. The New York Times called Bilbao’s transformation a “Cinderella story,” with the museum as its titanium slipper. More commonly, it’s known as the “Guggenheim effect.”

Cities around the world have attempted—and mostly failed—to replicate it. That’s because they have fundamentally misunderstood what Bilbao did. Indeed, Bilbao’s success owes not so much to its titanium-plated museum as to a restaurant table.

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The decline of Bilbao’s industrial base, the loss of 60,000 manufacturing jobs, and population loss had already convinced city leaders that something needed to change before the 1983 flood provided a catalyst for action. What emerged was a redevelopment plan that would tackle the city’s economic and environmental problems at scale: what was left of the steel and shipbuilding industries would be cleared from the riverbanks, railways that had cleaved through the city center would be rerouted, and the port would be relocated to the mouth of the river some fourteen kilometers downstream, where it met the Bay of Biscay. The city would finally build an underground metro—an idea first proposed in the 1920s—along with a tram to ease longstanding bottlenecks between the outer boroughs and the central city. Meanwhile, the river itself would undergo a massive cleanup and restoration, space along its banks would be reclaimed from wharves and railways and parking lots to create a 7.5-kilometer riverfront promenade, and the acres of contaminated land along the river would be cleaned up and sold for redevelopment. For a city that had long turned its back on the river, the Nervión was transformed from the city’s sewer into its spine.

Financially, it was a heavy lift. Bilbao financed different pieces through different mechanisms, but the most distinctive was its use of land value capture. By rezoning and decontaminating the land, the government was able to pay for public improvements funded by loans backed by the eventual sale of the upgraded and revalued land to private developers. Proceeds were then invested into the next phase of infrastructure, including €1.4 billion for the metro, €1.5 billion for the road network, €190 million for the airport, €28 million for the tram—and, later, €133 million for the Guggenheim Museum. The nearly €1-billion cleanup of the river was funded in part by user fees, while the new port’s debt was paid from profits. Altogether, the public investment in Bilbao totaled around €6 billion.

What made all this work was that most of the land in question was owned by the government—all four of them. Indeed, the rebuilding of Bilbao was a coordinated effort of the Spanish government via the Ministry of Transport and Public Works, the Basque regional government, the Provincial Council of Biscay, and Bilbao City Council. Together, these organizations created the 1991 Strategic Plan for the Revitalization of Metropolitan Bilbao, a master plan that would be executed by two purpose-built agencies: Bilbao Ría 2000, which managed the land and infrastructure redevelopment, and Bilbao Metrópoli-30, which coordinated strategic planning and public-private participation.

Bilbao Ría 2000—named after the estuary Bilbao sits on to underscore the regional approach—was set up as a limited liability company whose board comprised members from each government and was chaired by the mayor of Bilbao. Importantly, although the participating governments contributed different amounts of land and held different shares in Bilbao Ría 2000, ownership split evenly between Madrid and the Basque institutions, decisions were to be made by consensus, and profits were to be reinvested in Bilbao’s redevelopment. Working not only across different levels of government but also political parties, Mayor Josu Ortuondo, Deputy Mayor Ibon Areso, and managing director Pablo Otaola understood that the success of the project relied on eliminating egos and building camaraderie among board members.

Their solution? Three-hour lunches in Bilbao’s restaurants, where the board members could discuss business over a meal and then spend the sobremesa afterward getting to know one another. Because each government controlled some essential piece of the transformation, consensus could have become a recipe for paralysis—or descended into squabbles for crumbs. Instead, the lunches turned institutional interdependence into personal trust, keeping the governments aligned as they delivered projects like the metro and the museum on time and on budget.

It was in this context that the Guggenheim opportunity emerged and became viable—over another restaurant table in Bilbao’s Old Town in December 1991.

Many bilbaínos were opposed to the museum project—not only because of the huge sums the government was committing—but because they saw it as an extension of American imperialism. Some derided it as “MacGuggenheim,” but the more common view was that it was “delirium.” As for the funds themselves, the city would be committing to not only providing the land, but to building and landscaping the museum, as well as buying the artwork and access to the Guggenheim Foundation’s collection and support. Essentially, Bilbao commissioned a work of sculptural artwork that the city would own but the Guggenheim would run. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that it would take the city twenty years to recoup its investment if the museum was lucky enough to reach half-a-million visitors per year.

Guggenheim Bilbao proved to be a smashing success, with first-year visitors reaching 1.36 million and typically around 1 million annually since. A survey by KPMG Peat Marwick found that in its first year, the Guggenheim increased GDP in the wider Basque Country by €144 million and generated nearly 4,000 jobs—about the same number that the shipyard that used to occupy the same spot supported at its height. Former Deputy Mayor (and later Mayor) Ibon Areso contends that the increase in public funds paid for the building within its first three years and for the entire investment within five.

The Guggenheim would become the enduring, international symbol of Bilbao’s turnaround—as well as a totem.

Every city wants its Sydney Opera House, Empire State Building, or Louvre, and scores have attempted to recreate the so-called “Guggenheim effect” with a cargo-cult mentality: if we build an icon, they will come. In Spain alone, several cities have tried and failed to mimic Bilbao’s iconic success: Santiago de Compostela’s City of Culture of Galicia, Avilés’s Centro Niemeyer, and Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences experienced development problems and cost overruns, underperforming expectations on tourism and revitalization. The Guggenheim itself has tried to recapture lightning in a bottle, with a twenty-year-long project in Abu Dhabi still not open. Denver, Rome, and Dundee have all taken their turns chasing the same lightning.

It’s easy to see how other cities might reverse the Guggenheim cause-and-effect. Many of the projects initiated under the master plan were long-term or invisible: the metro was literally underground, and so its impact on the local economy was largely invisible to the naked foreign eye. Indeed, the completion of the metro in 1995, two years before the Guggenheim opened, served as confirmation to the beleaguered bilbaínos that their city was not doomed and that their government was capable of delivering results. The locals even affectionately dubbed the glassy, tubelike station entrances “Fosteritos” after their designer, Norman Foster, celebrating the city’s new, forward-looking self-image.

Certainly, the economic impact of the museum is meaningful, but it alone does not explain the broader impact on the economy. The per capita GDP of Bilbao more than doubled between 1996 and 2015, dramatically outperforming Spain as a whole. Regional unemployment halved from the early 1990s to the Great Recession, again besting the rest of the country. The Basque Country remains one of the most prosperous in Spain not only because it retooled its economy around tourism and services, but because the government made major investments in a higher-skilled workforce through retraining and education that have also allowed it to build up its innovation, aeronautics, and other knowledge-intensive sectors.

And while the Guggenheim put Bilbao on the proverbial map, it already existed on actual maps for 700 years. Today’s tourists can explore its historic bones, roaming medieval streets in search of pintxos or sitting in the street cafés of the 19th-century Ensanche neighborhood. The world saw the shiny new thing, missing that it was the grittier city around it that had made it possible.

That’s not to diminish the importance of the Guggenheim to the city: it certainly brought Bilbao international acclaim and tourism dollars that only further galvanized the city’s transformation into a modern, vibrant metropolis. But the Guggenheim was the capstone of a much broader investment in the public realm of Bilbao, of which the museum was only one part—and which was itself only one part of a broader vision to reimagine the city’s transportation network, industrial base, and education system. Ultimately, the story of Bilbao’s success is not about one museum. It’s about political cooperation and political will, and what is possible when those forces align toward a common vision of a better future.

The cause of Bilbao’s success was not the visionary design of a single building, but of the trust forged over restaurant tables. The Guggenheim was merely its most spectacular effect.

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In Montreal, the question of who has the better bagel is one of moral and philosophical significance. Whether you’re a Fairmount fan or Saint-Viateur stan, the great bagel debate is a part of the city’s civic religion, with each shop’s partisans ready to die on a Mont-Royal-sized hill. During a visit to the French-Canadian city, I tried both. While Fairmount was my favorite, Saint-Viateur had the more interesting location, steps away from something perhaps even more controversial: the 2.5-kilometer car-free stretch of Avenue du Mont-Royal. When we visited on a warm, mid-June morning, the Avenue was packed with people: walkers, joggers, cyclists, strollers, and the odd tourist snapping photos of urban infrastructure (moi). Instead of cars occupying its lanes, there were thousands of people simply enjoying a beautiful day.

It was as if this pedestrianized street had been paved for pleasure. Its creation, and its ongoing survival, involved a bit more pain.

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Avenue du Mont-Royal is the main commercial artery of the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood, on the eastern slope of the eponymous mountain overlooking Montreal. Plateau itself is densely packed with Montreal’s classic duplex townhouses and well-served by transit, while the Avenue features continuous blocks of commercial and retail establishments, often with a story or two of apartments above. The pedestrianized strip of the Avenue encompasses more than 30 intersections. Where cars once dominated, alternative uses have proliferated. Adirondack chairs in bright colors and lush planters appear in vignettes every few blocks alongside public art. Parking spaces have been repurposed for outdoor dining decks for the plethora of cafes and restaurants—including Saint-Viateur, where we ate outside. The Jardin Nourricier, an edible garden, occupies several former parking spots. Murals add splashes of color to the streetscape. On a beautiful morning, sated with bagels, it was hard to imagine that any of this required a fight.

What seems like such a natural neighborhood resource is a more recent invention, an outgrowth of Covid-era indoor capacity limits. Pedestrianization of the Avenue was a long-term dream of Projet Montréal, the left-of-center party that has long-governed Plateau. Montreal’s local politics made the dream possible: as a local commercial street under Montreal’s governing structure, the Avenue is controlled by the borough (arrondissement). This urban wonderland, teeming with human life, is only open from late May through mid-October, mostly on account of Montreal’s forbidding winters. Every October, the whole thing must be disassembled and rebuilt in the spring. Despite its apparent success, it must be annually reaffirmed, refunded, and renewed. Why?

Because pedestrianization projects—often called pedestrian malls—have a long history of outright failures and middling results.

Time and time again, cities have made the mistake of assuming that pedestrianization simply meant closing a street to cars. But removing cars does not automatically create a walkable environment that generates foot traffic. Indeed, many cities that created pedestrianized malls failed to realize that a thriving pedestrian street is the culmination of preexisting urban vitality, not its cause.

That includes Avenue du Mont-Royal. The first attempt to pedestrianize the Avenue began in the summer of 1970 but fell out of favor by the freezing winter of that year, after which it was abandoned. A grassroots campaign in 2002 garnered 20,000 signatures for a permanent car-free avenue that was ignored by local authorities. The local business community, no doubt aware of the long history of failed pedestrian malls, opposed the change. Nevertheless, borough mayor Luc Ferrandez spent the decade from 2009 to 2019 installing pedestrian-friendly improvements around the borough that gradually softened that resistance. The rapid onset of Covid precipitated an emergency for restaurants and retail, and people suddenly looked on their streets and saw space that could be used for social distancing. The borough government designated a stretch of Mont-Royal as a “health corridor” (cordon sanitaire) but, notably, did not simply close the Avenue. They hired architecture firm Intégral Jean Beaudoin to holistically rethink this new public space, incorporating seating, public art, and greenery into the design.

During my visit in June, it was easy to see how popular the pedestrian mall is with locals. Estimates place daily pedestrian traffic around 15,000, while a survey by the local business association cites 90%+ visitor approval. Local merchant sentiment is generally net-positive: a 2024 survey found that 43% of merchants saw sales rise during pedestrianization, while 30% experienced a decline, generally businesses that were car-dependent or lacked patio dining. The more telling number is commercial vacancy, which fell from 14.5% along Mont-Royal in 2018 to 5-to-6% by 2023.

Street pedestrianization is not free. The annual budget for transforming Mont-Royal is about $1 million, split 60/40 between the local government and business association. Still, for the first several years, the project had to be approved and funded anew every year. The city committed to a three-year renewal through 2027, after which the Avenue will once again have to requalify. There is an ongoing debate about whether to make the season longer or shorter, or even permanent, despite the fact that winter is always coming in Montreal.

Mont-Royal therefore raises a more revealing question: not why so many pedestrian projects fail, but why so few succeed.

Pedestrianization emerged in the midcentury era as an attempt by cities to compete with suburban malls. Between 1959 and the early 1980s, American cities made more than 200 pedestrianization attempts. But by the early 21st century, most had failed, with less than two dozen remaining. The first attempt, Kalamazoo’s 1959 Burdick Street mall—designed by Victor Gruen, the inventor of the modern suburban shopping mall—was partially reopened to car traffic in 1998. Philadelphia’s Bicentennial-era Chestnut Street Transitway, which allowed buses on a car-free stretch of twelve blocks, became a pedestrian repellent dominated by bus fumes and noise until it was reopened to cars in 2000. As Alan Ehrenhalt writes, most of the surviving pedestrian malls were in cities with fewer than 100,000 people.

In all places, the predictors of failure were the same: the streets that were chosen for closure to cars were primarily destinations for drivers. Located in downtowns that were already in decline, they had insufficient parking for visitors, no residential density, no tourism draws, and emptied out at night and during inclement weather, which bred negative perceptions about crime and safety, and further reduced foot traffic. While year-round malls have been most successful in cities with accommodating year-round weather, the ingredients of successful malls are generally pre-existing foot traffic, transit access or sufficient parking, anchor institutions like universities, stadiums, or convention centers, and a mix of all-day pedestrian-friendly retail and restaurants.

The pedestrian malls that survive in America today often look a lot like what Victor Gruen achieved with his original suburban shopping mall. After two decades of struggle, Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade found its footing as an open-air national chain store mall—popular with tourists, close to the beach, but otherwise lacking in local flavor. Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road Mall went through a long period of doldrums following its initial success as the city itself declined in the 1970s, finding revival with the emergence of an artistic community in the 1980s that is now running up against high rents and replacement by national brands. Montreal’s Mont-Royal, with its density, its transit, and its deference to winter, has so far avoided both fates, retaining its distinctly local flavor—one that tastes a lot like bagels.

Pedestrianized streets are a staple of European cities and the envy of every North American visitor, from Copenhagen’s Strøget to Barcelona’s historic La Rambla, new Consell de Cent green axis—or its nearly entirely pedestrianized Gothic Quarter. Indeed, Spain seems to do pedestrianization effortlessly in its historic centros. On a recent trip to Spain, I spent time in about a dozen cities ranging in size from a couple thousand people to several hundred thousand to Madrid’s 3.5 million, enjoying pintxos and vino tinto in many of them. Each had largely pedestrianized centros where cars weren’t needed at all for accessibility thanks to nearby transit or the walkability engendered by residential and hotel density, or parking lots located just outside the centers for visitors.

Yet these apparently effortless pedestrian districts are not accidents of history. The Strøget was pedestrianized only in 1962. Madrid’s Plaza Mayor was a parking lot in the 1960s. Barcelona’s superblock green axes only emerged in the past decade. Pedestrianization is a choice to remove cars—but whether what gets pedestrianized succeeds depends on the urban fabric around it. In the European examples, the pedestrianized streets were already surrounded by mixed-use, dense, lived-in neighborhoods where walking was useful and effortless rather than incidental or recreational. The foot traffic already existed, even if it had to compete with cars for space.

What many American downtowns have historically lacked is the density of permanent residents and the existence of amenities that give people something to walk to. Zoning determines whether enough people can live within walking distance or whether there can be a mix of uses. Transit determines whether visitors need to arrive by car. Street design determines whether an urban environment is intended for pedestrians or vehicles. Too many American pedestrian malls reversed cause and effect. Cities thought that by removing the cars, vitality would reemerge, not understanding they had already erased the conditions that made vitality possible.

Montreal’s Plateau did not become a walkable neighborhood because Avenue du Mont-Royal became car-free. Instead, Avenue du Mont-Royal could become car-free because Plateau was already a walkable neighborhood.

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Scottie Ivory didn’t live to see the completion of the building that bears her name. The Ivory is the first of its kind in Austin: an all-electric, no parking, owner-occupied condo building with 75% of the homes designated as workforce housing and priced below market. At the June ribbon-cutting, the stories shared by Scottie’s friends, family, and members of her community spoke to a woman of character, resolve, and tremendous personal agency who spent her nearly 96 years fighting against the crime and blight that had transformed a vibrant neighborhood into a ghetto. Scottie’s pastor acknowledged the tremendous resolve it took to get The Ivory off the ground, invoking God’s protection for all those who made it happen.

As Scottie’s family and friends invited those gathered to join them in singing the old hymn “In the Garden,” I wondered why it seems like it takes an act of God to build affordable housing on a vacant lot in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Austin.

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Central East Austin was once the center of Black life in segregated Austin. The end of segregation was a moral necessity, but it also allowed residents to move beyond the confines of what the city once designated as the “Negro District.” The closure of the segregated high school and the forced busing of Black students to better-resourced white schools further eroded the ties locals had to the neighborhood. Central East Austin fell into decline, and buildings on the once bustling commercial stretches of 11th and 12th Streets burned to the ground and remained vacant. Criminals moved in as long-time residents moved out, and the corner of 12th and Chicon Streets became an open-air drug-dealing and prostitution market. In the past twenty-five years, rising real-estate prices elsewhere in Austin enticed new residents to cross the former racial barrier, driving up prices in East Austin. The scars and memories of that era of disinvestment and decay remain as a scattering of vacant lots, Black churches whose congregations drive in on Sundays, and murals celebrating the neighborhood’s past—while newer million-dollar homes sprout in between and new businesses fill storefronts serving a more recent clientele.

The Ivory is both an investment in the neighborhood’s future and a reminder of its past.

It’s remarkable that, out of that dysfunction, this building exists at all. The Ivory rises just a couple blocks from my house in Central East Austin, part of a peculiar complex that includes two other affordable condo buildings, called The Chicon Phase 1 (The Ivory is officially The Chicon Phase 2). Of its 53 condos, 40 are priced at or below 70% of the area median family income, with the one- to two-bedroom workforce homes priced in the $215k to $250k range—and they must be kept affordable for 99 years.1 Solar power will cover 90% of the building’s demand. The Ivory has one handicapped parking spot but no other on-site parking; residents will be able to share two electric vehicles, and each will also receive an e-bike on closing. CapMetro, the transit agency, also upgraded the bus stop at the base of the building to include a shelter with a commemorative mural. City officials, including the mayor and the Deputy CEO of CapMetro, emphasized the role of mobility and utilities in addressing affordability issues.

The Ivory extends an emerging mixed-use corridor. Phase 1, in addition to 20 units of workforce housing, brought retail spaces that are now occupied by a vegan café, an Urban Lagree studio, a French pastry shop, a pet store, and a bougie boutique that have brought vitality to the neighborhood since the buildings opened in 2018—even if they are not quite reflective of the neighborhood’s heritage. The Ivory has three commercial units, including a restaurant space, that me and my neighbors are excited to see occupied.

The Ivory benefited from a unique set of individuals, policies, and circumstances. The land for Phases 1 and 2 was assembled beginning in 2012 by the Chestnut Neighborhood Revitalization Corporation, a nonprofit formed twenty years ago to develop affordable housing for the neighborhood. As a designated Community Land Trust, CNRC is exempt from city property taxes, which supports its mission to provide long-term affordable ownership units. The project itself received a variety of public and nonprofit grants and financing, including $5.7 million in loans from the Austin Housing Finance Corporation, $4.3 million in funding from a tax increment reinvestment zone, and $14.7 million in pre-development financing and construction loans from Capital Impact Partners.

But the project would not have been possible at all without a density bonus program called Affordability Unlocked. In exchange for creating “permanent” affordable units, the program exempts projects from setbacks, “compatibility” height limits, and parking minimums.2 These benefits not only allowed The Ivory to be a full two stories higher than the three-story Phase 1 buildings, but also increased the number of potential units from 15, of which only 6 would have been affordable. In other words, the program unlocked an additional 34 affordable units and 38 new homes in total. The compatibility exemption is telling: when Phase 1 was built, these height limits—which Austin City Council has since reformed—suppressed the height of the buildings as they got closer to single-family homes. If you look at the side profile of the Phase 1 buildings, you can see the “step up” in height from the single-family-home-adjacent rear to the unrestricted street, while Phase 2 rises straight up at the setback line. The stepped shape of the Phase 1 buildings traces the outline of all the housing Austin made illegal to build.

And that’s sort of the crux of it: the density bonus program that made The Ivory possible is remarkably explicit about what Austin’s land development rules are locking up: affordability.

Proponents of density bonus programs argue that the market would not provide deeply affordable homes if such programs did not exist, and creating deep affordability is unquestionably difficult given the costs of land, building, and financing. Nevertheless, one reason why this is so difficult is because organic density in Austin—as is the case in so many other cities—has been suppressed for nearly a century by a rigid land development code whose purpose is to perpetuate low-density single-family housing. As I’ve argued previously, greater density in high-opportunity neighborhoods is the solution to broad-based affordability. To the extent that we suppress it through the underlying zoning, we are making housing less available and therefore less affordable overall.

But the project was complicated in other ways. The Ivory must preserve affordability for 99 years, operate almost entirely on solar power, and make car-free living possible through EVs, e-bikes, and transit. In a car-centric city and in a neighborhood where the nearest grocery store is not practically accessible without a car, it’s unclear whether those mobility alternatives will be enough to attract buyers. There’s an “everything bagel” quality to the project in that this one small building has been enlisted to advance a plethora of worthy urban policy goals all at once, none of which would have been possible without grants, subsidized public and nonprofit financing, regulatory exemptions, and years of effort. All of that delivered only 53 homes, which raises the question of whether this model can be replicated. Producing deeply affordable ownership housing on expensive land is already a complex task, but much of the complexity owes to how hard we have made building housing. Given the circumstances, it’s no wonder that success looks miraculous.

Nevertheless, ecce aedificium: behold the building.

On the sidewalk in front of The Ivory, Scottie’s family held her urn and led those assembled in singing “In the Garden.” With its provisions for long-term affordability, The Ivory will give a new generation of East Austinites the ability to stay for the long term, much like the hymn says: “And the joy we share as we tarry there / None other has ever known!” For the neighborhood at large, it heals an old wound and brings new life to a long-moribund spot, echoing East Austin’s past even as it welcomes a different future. The Ivory is undoubtedly a blessing for the neighborhood and those who will call her home—but it should not take a miracle to build affordable housing.

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One hundred million people were expected to descend on Philadelphia in 1976 for a year-long celebration of the city where the American experiment began. Two centuries after the Declaration of Independence made the city sacred ground in the American imagination, Philadelphia planning director Edmund Bacon proposed a Bicentennial celebration worthy of the occasion. Philadelphia would showcase its remade historic core, host a world’s fair, redevelop its waterfronts, pedestrianize Chestnut Street, and carry visitors across the Schuylkill by aerial tram. A rival coalition went further, proposing a four-mile megastructure constructed above the Pennsylvania Railroad yards. What got built turned out to be far more modest, and by the end of the year, fewer than 20 million people had come to the Cradle of Liberty to celebrate.1

Arriving amid economic stagnation, racial conflict, antiwar protest, and urban disorder, the Bicentennial was meant to be a transformative and unifying event at a moment when trust in the American project seemed to be unraveling. Its failure to live up to expectations also revealed how dramatically Americans’ understanding of the American city had changed since the republic’s founding.

Over the past month, we have explored the forces that animated the cities of the early republic. We found cities where the spirit of commercial enterprise, unleashed by immigrant financiers like Hamilton and Gallatin, energized a cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile populace; where civic entrepreneurship, exemplified by Franklin’s Junto and subscription library, led to the foundation of long-lasting institutions and the democratization of knowledge; where a replicable, affordable housing type, the rowhouse, enabled the rapid growth of an urban middle class; and where ambitious planners, L’Enfant chief among them, attempted to imprint a commercial spirit into urban streetscapes. Each story seems to belong to a different history: economics, politics, architecture, planning.

In fact, each was animated by the same conviction: that the republic would be built not only in statehouses and constitutional conventions, but in the physical fabric of the city itself. As historian Dell Upton writes, elites of the early republic believed that order “arose from within, from the character of its citizens, rather than being imposed by a higher authority.” The city was a tool of that formation—pursuing both “civilization,” the making of citizens, and “urbanity,” the cultivation of orderly relations among neighbors. If a free people could govern themselves within the bounds of law and the Constitution, then cities, too, could be organized according to the same republican logic.

In the physical city, that logic found its clearest expression in the grid. The grid was valuable not merely because it simplified surveying and real estate transactions, but because it made the city transparent: easy to read, easy to navigate, and open to everyone. Within this open society, capital could flow and commercial enterprise and civic entrepreneurship could flourish. Such a city presented opportunities rather than prescribing outcomes, making countless futures possible for its citizens—and making countless citizens. As Upton puts it, “The systematic city was above all a dynamic city.”2

This wasn’t only a Philadelphia story, but as “the intellectual as well as the commercial capital of the new republic,” Philadelphia became its crucible. This was not by design. William Penn and Thomas Holme’s original plan for the city was hierarchical, meant to be populated evenly from the Delaware to the Schuylkill under the authority of the city’s wealthy proprietors. Instead, in its first century, Philadelphia grew largely in defiance of that plan: commerce favored the Delaware waterfront, squares reserved for public use were subdivided and built over, and after nearly a hundred years only ten of Holme’s 176 planned squares had been fully developed. By the early nineteenth century, however, elite Philadelphians rallied around what reformers called “the ground plan...as laid out by the worthy founder,” leveling streets and regularizing squares to bring the long-neglected grid closer to Holme’s original map. What looked like a restoration of Penn’s plan was, Upton writes, actually “a revolutionary new urban vision”—the grid reimagined not as a hierarchy but as “a template for the relationships of a diverse, more loosely ordered citizenry.”3

Call it Philadelphia Freedom.

As immigration and industrialization transformed American cities over the course of the nineteenth century, however, urban leaders increasingly came to regard that freedom as the city’s greatest weakness. Smoke belched from factories, blood spilled from slaughterhouses, and soot stained buildings. Housing lacked running water and windows, families crowded into rooms, disease festered and spread. The streets were crowded with workers, businessmen, and shoppers alongside horses, carriages, streetcars, and trains—all dodging human and animal waste. Political machines made corruption, not commerce, the new coin of the realm. Reformers, confronting real crises, initiated programs to build sewers, sidewalks, and parks. They implemented building codes and sanitation standards. They pursued civil service reform and public improvements, seeking efficiency in government and beauty in the city itself. Along the way, they lost the idea that civic order could emerge from free citizens, and increasingly concluded that it had to be imposed by experts. The city was too complex to leave in the hands of citizens.

That new philosophy found several expressions in the late nineteenth century. Riding on the success of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the City Beautiful movement sought to cultivate civic virtue through monumental design, imposing, for instance, a Monument City onto L’Enfant’s commercial streetscape in Washington, D.C. The new profession of city planning promised to organize the metropolis scientifically. The first comprehensive zoning codes no longer treated the city as an open framework; whereas the egalitarian grid left uses and outcomes largely open, zoning circumscribed those possibilities, sorting, segregating, and prescribing uses in advance. Together, these movements reflected a growing suspicion that the emergent city was incompatible with an orderly one.

Edmund Bacon inherited this tradition in Philadelphia—but he also inherited a city in genuine distress. After World War II, Philadelphia’s industrial economy had been hollowed out, middle-class households and capital were fleeing to the suburbs, its housing stock had deteriorated, and its historic center was increasingly seen as obsolete. Bacon’s answer combined elements of strategic preservation with wholesale erasure. In Philadelphia’s historic core, the neighborhood that planners renamed Society Hill contained one of the country’s richest concentrations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, and a racially and ethnically mixed population of mostly working-class renters. To urban renewers, it was a slum; to the people who lived there, it was home.4 As Society Hill’s historic houses were restored, much of the mixed-use city of warehouses, workshops, and markets was cleared away, along with nearly six hundred families, one-fifth of them black.5 Nearby, Bacon completed a vision that Beaux-Arts planners had floated since 1917: clearing three densely built blocks north of Independence Hall to create Independence Mall, while demolishing buildings around the surviving revolutionary landmarks to isolate them as monuments.6 The result made Independence Hall more visible to tourists but less intelligible as part of the living city that the founders would have known.

Having already remade the revolutionary historic city, Bacon’s Bicentennial plans were the logical culmination of his work. He would use the nation’s anniversary to reshape the city on an even larger scale according to a comprehensive vision of what Philadelphia should become. Instead, political disagreements, congressional investigations of President Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission, and limited funding reduced the scope of the city’s plans. By the time 1976 arrived, neither Bacon’s plan nor its more ambitious successor had been built. The city welcomed the nation with refurbished landmarks, museums, sporting events, street festivals, and the much diminished Chestnut Street Transitway—a bus-only pedestrianized mall that ultimately failed. What visitors encountered was not a city remade for the future so much as a curated version of the city inherited from the past: Independence Hall and the Mall, the restored houses of Society Hill, the Delaware waterfront. Philadelphia celebrated the republic in the fragments of the old commercial city that had survived three centuries of growth—and the twentieth century’s repeated attempts to “improve” it.

Such is American urban history.

When Ben Franklin stepped out of the Pennsylvania State House after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked what kind of government had been created. As he walked the few blocks home from what today we call Independence Hall, he would have passed through a dense streetscape of brick and stone buildings containing stores, homes, and workshops along streets thronged with people. He would have passed fellow citizens engaging in the life of the city: merchants closing deals on a handshake, apprentices setting type in a printshop, neighbors trading news and gossip on their stoops. Here, on its streets, was a city in motion, making and unmaking itself again, ordered but unfinished. When he answered, “A republic—if you can keep it,” he would have seen the new republic already emerging all around him in the streets of Philadelphia. Here was where the citizens of the new republic would be made.

If Franklin walked out into the Philadelphia of today, he’d find a great, ceremonial lawn with sweeping views of Independence Hall, swept clean of the commercial and civic life that had produced it. In alienating the revolutionary buildings from their historic urban context, the midcentury planners alienated future generations of Americans from their history. Buildings once embedded in the fabric of everyday urban life became monuments to be gazed upon, relics of a past republic whose cities generated civilization and urbanity. Today, Franklin might ask a different question than the one he answered in 1787: not whether we can keep the republic, but whether we can still build cities that make citizens.

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Pierre Charles L’Enfant is remembered today for his design of Washington, D.C., but by the time he died in 1825, he was nearly penniless and all but forgotten. When a new generation rediscovered him in the early 1900s, his body was exhumed from its original, lonely burial site. Only a couple bone fragments and a tooth remained of the man whose hands had drawn the lines from which a city emerged amid a rolling wilderness. L’Enfant was given full honors and reinterred atop the hill at Arlington Cemetery, to spend eternity looking out across the Potomac over the city that bears his imprint. While L’Enfant would recognize the bones of his plan in the capital he designed, he might not recognize much of its spirit—for Washington, D.C.’s development did not go at all according to plan. Although L’Enfant was a brilliant artist and visionary planner, he could not see his own deficiencies in that one art that would come to define the District of Columbia more than any other: the art of the possible.1

L’Enfant would learn the hard way that all urban planning is political.

L’Enfant’s improbable life story began in 1754 in Paris, where he grew up the son of a court painter to Louis XV, before training at the Royal Academy. There, he absorbed the lessons of great French urban landscapes, especially the grand avenue of the “seemingly infinite” Champs-Élysées. He left France to join the American cause in 1777, and as a soldier in the Continental Army distinguished himself as an illustrator, earning the attention of Baron von Steuben, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. After the war, Hamilton commissioned L’Enfant to design New York’s Federal Hall, launching his career as a planner and precipitating his greatest commission: the design of the nation’s capital.

Under the new Constitution, Congress passed the Residence Act of 1790 to create a “district of territory not exceeding ten miles square, to be located as hereafter directed on the river Potomac.” Congress authorized the president to appoint three commissioners to buy, survey, and build a capital ready to receive the government by December 1800, when it would relocate from its temporary home in Philadelphia. Washington selected commissioners with deep ties to the tidewater area and to himself: all three were investors in the Potomac Navigation Company, alongside the president. The job of surveyor went to Andrew Ellicott, already famous for finishing the Mason-Dixon Line. L’Enfant appealed successfully to the president for the opportunity to become the new district’s Planner in Chief.

Thomas Jefferson believed the plan for the city should reflect republican modesty, proposing a simple grid of some fifteen hundred acres with a public walk connecting the President’s House and the Capitol. While Jefferson believed that cities were moral morasses, the territory that L’Enfant encountered was not the swamp of lore but “a quiet, sparsely inhabited territory of hills, forests, farms, and wetlands.” Within this 100-square-mile diamond, L’Enfant envisioned a capital that would dispense with the rectilinear grids of cities like Philadelphia, which struck him as “too simple and uninspiring” for the seat of a great empire.

Instead, L’Enfant proposed a city of sweeping diagonal avenues, public squares, fountains, and a canal centered on a grand avenue flanked by the President’s House and the Capitol. Four times larger than Jefferson’s plan, L’Enfant’s design adapted to the rolling topography of the land rather than imposing a rigid grid upon it. What L’Enfant proposed was not merely an American Paris, but a “Paris reborn as a republican Rome, a seat of wisdom and power on display for the rest of the world.”

L’Enfant envisioned the capital not as an isolated seat of government but as the commercial capital of a continental republic, a conviction shared by President Washington. Washington and the commissioners had invested in the Potomac Navigation Company because they believed the river would become “the channel of commerce” between the Atlantic world and the American interior. A canal would connect both branches of the Potomac and lead to a vibrant port with wharves, quays, and docks for transatlantic shipping, warehouses and trade exchanges to rival those of Philadelphia and New York, and a naval shipyard. Even his proposal to complete the canal before constructing most public buildings reflected this commercial logic: the city first needed a framework through which “men, goods, and building materials—money, in other words—could move easily into, out of, and around the site.”

Likewise, L’Enfant’s wide boulevards were not meant merely to impress but to “shorten travel time, encourage growth, and prevent unhealthful crowding.” His Grand Avenue—what we know today as the National Mall—was inspired by the mixed-class, mixed-use character of the Champs-Élysées and would be lined with commercial shops and open markets, playhouses and cultural halls, fine homes, foreign embassies, and state legations. His plan further distributed commerce throughout the city by organizing development around a constellation of civic squares, each intended to become a small neighborhood center with “its own storefronts, its own traders, mechanics, homes, and taverns.”

With its American Champs-Élysées, the federal city would be the fitting capital for the emerging Commercial Republic.

The construction of this great city was itself a commercial endeavor, requiring thousands of workers and millions in financing. Understanding that “money is the wheel to give motion to the machine,” L’Enfant argued that investments in public works, financed by loans secured by federally-owned land, would raise land values and induce development. He suggested that the city could stimulate friendly competition among the states by designating a “state square” for each; similarly, religious institutions could be granted lots to develop rival churches. More immediately, he wanted to discourage speculation and underbuilding by requiring that purchasers of available lots build within a limited time frame. It was an ambitious and thoughtful scheme, one that “would have animated many thousands of hands moving across the site like a great living machine” as they built a city from the wilderness. As L’Enfant’s biographer, Scott W. Berg wrote, “It would have been something to behold.”

It was not to be.

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Before Paul Revere set out on his legendary ride on the night of April 18, 1775, he stopped at home for his overcoat and boots. His house, at 19 North Square in Boston’s North End, was built around 1680 and looked, even then, like a relic: with its clapboard siding, gabled roof, diamond-leaded windows, and wide street frontage, it seemed better suited to a Puritan village than to a prosperous merchant town. On his way to the waterfront, Revere would have passed the neighboring Pierce-Hichborn House, a symmetrical, narrow, and three-story brick building from 1711 that “represented the prosperity of the town’s enterprising tradesmen.” This house marked a “radical change” from the Revere House—an early ancestor of the Federal-style rowhomes that would come to define the urban republic Revere helped inaugurate.1

Rowhomes were, for over a century, the ubiquitous form of urban middle-class housing in America. Might they be on the verge of a comeback?

As Americans emerged from the colonial era, they set about building a new republican society, reflecting a sense of ordered liberty. As Dell Upton argues in Another City, the founding generation understood that order and liberty could not be imposed from on high but relied on the self-discipline and character of its citizens. Accordingly, the city itself was seen as a tool of republican formation. Early citybuilders leveled and defined streets, rebuilt waterfronts, replanted parks, and erected buildings in pursuit of both “civilization”—the making of citizens—and “urbanity”—the cultivation of orderly relations among neighbors.2 These ideas would also be imbued into early republican homes.

The rowhome—variously called the rowhouse, town house, or brownstone—emerged not only as the architectural expression of that republican ideal, but as a practical necessity for accommodating the explosion of urban growth in the decades after the Revolution.

Between 1790 and 1830, the population of Philadelphia had more than tripled to 147,877, while New York had sextupled to 202,589. In Philadelphia, population growth overwhelmed William Penn’s original, more pastoral city plan, requiring the addition of secondary streets and the subdivision of “super blocks into smaller, narrower lots more suitable to urban rowhome construction than to single dwellings.”3 Springing up out of necessity, rowhomes fit neatly onto the narrow lots, allowing builders to replicate the same design block after block while reducing costs through shared party walls, bulk purchasing of materials, and the efficient installation of utilities.4 In New York, the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 divided Manhattan into standardized blocks and narrow lots, providing a framework for rowhome expansion as the city grew northward. Yet the grid did not invent the rowhouse; it merely scaled a form already visible on Greenwich Village’s pre-grid streets. As in Philadelphia, most were built as speculative developments, with developers leasing the land from its owners to create “instant” neighborhoods with long rows of attached houses.5

The rowhouse spread between the shores of the Delaware and Schuylkill in Philadelphia, between the Hudson and East Rivers in New York, and to other growing cities all along the Atlantic seaboard. As it rose, usually between two and five stories, it carried a common architectural DNA. The prevalence of what came to be known as the Federal style, which characterized row homes from roughly 1790 to 1835, can be traced to the influence of architect Asher Benjamin. Benjamin’s American Builder’s Companion, first published in 1797, was the most influential pattern book, providing builders with replicable drawings and measurements for doorways, windows, columns, cornices, and decorative details. The Federal style was modest in appearance and classically proportioned, eschewing ostentation and gaudiness. The pattern books encouraged “slight variations from building to building within a row, without a major expense,”6 but local idiosyncrasies emerged, like New York’s brownstone stoops or Boston’s bowfronts.

The rowhome’s economies of scale made it so prevalent and homeownership so attainable for a broad swath of Philadelphia’s growing middle and working classes that Philadelphia earned the nickname “City of Homes.” Promoters even built a “model Philadelphia house” at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, advertising a cost of about $2,500—less than $100K in today’s dollars. Incidentally, Philadelphia’s high rate of homeownership was credited with creating “a more ‘contented’ labor force” than in peer cities like New York, an observation with potential political relevance today.7 In New York, for its part, middle-class rowhomes expanded across the boroughs throughout the nineteenth century and into the prewar era, and much more sporadically afterwards, offering “affordability and stability for tenants, wealth-building opportunities for non-professional landlords, and entry points for small developers.”8 They still represent about 25% of the city’s residential building stock today.9

The rowhome’s success was not merely economic. In its simplicity and ubiquity, the Federal-style rowhome embodied the republican ideal of ordered liberty in brick and mortar. Outwardly, the rowhome allowed for individual expression tempered by self-restraint, while each block formed a cohesive unit. Wealth and status varied significantly behind each facade, but the rows of homes nevertheless reflected a society whose citizens were considered equal and could afford to live as neighbors.10 The rowhome was where economic reality met republican idealism, making the values of the early republic not merely aspirational, but reproducible.

The Federal style faded after the 1830s, but the rowhouse lived on, adapting to new tastes and new locales even as older neighborhoods gave way to steel-framed high-rises. As urban growth slowed and middle-class families moved outward, many surviving rowhouses were subdivided into tenements and single-room occupancy buildings, then written off as “slums.” By the mid-twentieth century, urban renewal began clearing once-thriving rowhome neighborhoods in New York, Boston, New Haven, and others, displacing thousands. In 1964, Ada Louise Huxtable lamented that Federal-era rowhouses were worth so little that “their greatest value seems to be cheapness of acquisition” for redevelopment.11 Yet even as she wrote, preservationists were fighting for what was left. Within a decade, house-hunters were rediscovering dilapidated rowhomes in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side. By 1976, The New York Times summarized the entire cycle: “elegant single-family rowhouses, which turned into middle-class rooming houses, which became slums, which now are chic brownstones. Such is the way of the city.”12

Ironically, Americans continued to prize historic rowhouse neighborhoods while making it nearly impossible to build new ones. In Sunbelt cities where rowhomes had never flourished, zoning codes imposed suburban design standards that ensured they never would. Cities imposed large minimum lot sizes, setback requirements, parking mandates, and density restrictions that effectively outlawed the continuous attached street wall that defined the Federal rowhouse, turning this once ubiquitous form of urban middle-class housing into the “missing middle.” Where townhomes are permitted today, they are typically detached or semi-detached, built around garages or parking lots rather than sidewalks and streets. The “way of the city” was itself a relic of the past.

Yet, after a century of neglect, America may finally be on the cusp of a rowhome revolution.

In Austin, a startup is attempting to rebuild what they call the “cornerstone of the American dream.” The American Housing Corporation is using advanced engineering and vertical integration to lower the cost of urban starter homes in the form of family-sized rowhomes.13 AHC’s goal is a replicable rowhome model manufactured at scale, targeting a $750K price point in Central Austin’s historic walkable neighborhoods, where detached single-family homes often run upwards of $1M+, with expansion under consideration in Seattle, Reno, and other cities.14 As a vertically integrated company, AHC buys land, fabricates fiberglass-reinforced cement and steel panels, delivers them to build sites in shipping containers, and assembles them on-site with a five-person crew and a crane—the first took three weeks, a timeline the company expects to keep shrinking. JPMorganChase estimates such an approach could reduce construction costs by 20% to 30%. Right now the company has capacity for twelve homes a year; a larger facility, opening in 2027, aims for 1,200.15 It’s the same replicable logic used by builders of the Federal-style rowhome, executed in steel and fiberglass instead of brick and timber.

Last month, I toured AHC’s current factory and original rowhome prototype with co-founder Will Davis, who moonlights as pro-housing Twitter/X personality “YIMBYLAND.” The prototype, pitched on the backlot of the factory, was a three-story construction with a minimalist, modernist aesthetic and warm wood finishes across its 3-bedroom-plus-office/nursery, 2.5-bathroom layout. It wasn’t hard to imagine a young family gathered around the built-in dining banquette or navigating morning routines across multiple bathrooms, an early reader curled up with a book in the reading nook, or parents enjoying a cocktail on their balcony at the end of a busy day. While the prototype’s clean modernist lines differ from Federal fanlights and cornices, future units might see more traditional cladding. Still, the underlying form—attached, street-oriented, narrow-lot, and family-scaled—revives the republican logic that once made rowhomes the default urban home.

This type of building would have been impossible on Austin’s single-family lots under the city’s old zoning rules.

Davis credits zoning reforms undertaken by the City of Austin in recent years with creating an opportunity for a company like AHC to enter Austin’s development ecosystem. These legalized three (attached or detached) homes by right on single-family lots, reduced minimum lot sizes, eliminated parking minimums, and eased setback requirements and other rules. Houston, which reduced minimum lot sizes to 1,400 square feet (i.e., smaller than the average rowhome lot in New York City), saw the construction of more than 30,000 townhomes across the city in the following decades. Most weren’t built as classic rowhomes, but they allowed Houston to remain the most affordable big city in America. AHC’s aim of perfecting “the original American urban home” for a modern America, to my mind, does more to revive that early republican Federal style in spirit.

Resurrecting the urban rowhome means rebuilding more than a housing type. The twentieth century did not simply outlaw attached homes; it dismantled the ecosystem that once made them ordinary and reproducible. Pattern books gave way to zoning codes, speculative rowhouse builders disappeared, and financing shifted toward detached subdivisions and large apartment complexes. Historian Suleiman Osman described rowhomes as “the suburban tract homes of the nineteenth century,”16 but the knowledge of how to mass-produce beautiful, family-sized urban homes faded in the next century. Companies like AHC are rebuilding that ecosystem with twenty-first-century tools.

Urban builders in the early republic believed cities could cultivate civilization and urbanity. They did so not only through the form of the city, but—as the immigrant founders understood—through the cultivation of opportunity. For many Americans in the early republic, housing was more than shelter; it was the vehicle through which families accumulated wealth, neighborhoods acquired stability, and citizens learned to live alongside one another as neighbors. With housing—especially homeownership—out of reach for many in America’s richest cities, it’s no surprise that housing affordability is a potent political issue where it appears to be the least attainable. A revival of the rowhome would not simply restore a forgotten building type, but resurrect an American tradition of mass-producing affordability and opportunity for enterprising urbanites. More than preserving old houses, that revolutionary tradition is worth reclaiming for the twenty-first century.

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William Penn imagined Philadelphia as a utopian “greene country towne” when he founded the city in 1682. Unwalled, and “laid out with a beautiful regularity, the streets large, strait, and crossing each other at right angles,” Philadelphia would avoid the crowding and unsanitary conditions of Europe while serving as a symbol of openness and religious toleration. Seventy-five years later, Benjamin Franklin encountered a city that “had the disgrace of suffering those streets to remain long unpaved,” kicking up oppressive dust clouds in dry weather and transformed into quagmires when wet. Franklin took it upon himself to find a neighborhood streetsweeper, persuade his neighbors to fund him, and build the public case for legislation to pave the city’s streets. This kind of practical civics and public spiritedness—this was Franklin at his most characteristic. He understood that “these trifling matters” were the foundations upon which great institutions were built.1

Franklin was the nation’s first civic entrepreneur.

From the time he was a young printer in his early twenties, Franklin set out not only to improve his own moral character and financial station, but those of his fellow strivers. In 1727, at the age of twenty-one, he founded the Junto, a club of young tradesmen, artisans, and “leather aprons” like himself—social aspirants excluded from the more exclusive gentlemen’s societies inhabited by Philadelphia’s elite. As Walter Isaacson describes it, the Junto “celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society, and the proposition that hardworking citizens could do well by doing good.” More civic laboratory than discussion club, its members identified practical problems, debated solutions, and transformed those ideas into institutions. From the Junto would emerge proposals for neighborhood constables, a volunteer fire company, and the academy that would become the University of Pennsylvania.

Its earliest and most enduring success was a library. Initially collected from Junto members’ personal collections, the Library Company of Philadelphia became America’s first subscription library in 1731—and still exists today. Franklin believed that democratized knowledge “improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries,” and credited the Library and its many successors with educating the colonists about their rights. The Latin motto Franklin gave the library was as much his life’s credo and could equally grace the lintels of any of his institutions: Communiter Bona profundere Deum est—“To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.”

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By the time the blood had dried on the fields of Yorktown, the American economy was in ruins. The fledgling nation was essentially bankrupt with a war debt of $160 million in 1780 dollars—nearly $4 billion today. While Washington’s bedraggled troops roamed the countryside barefoot, the Continental Congress’s printing presses had issued some $241.5 million in paper money, which had lost 98% of its value by war’s end. The government under the Articles of Confederation had no power to raise taxes. Gold and silver had flowed out of circulation. The country had zero banks. As interest payments on the debt grew faster than the cash-strapped government could pay for them, the country sank into a deep recession. The United States had won the war, but could it survive the peace?

The men tasked with saving the young republic were not New England lawyers or Virginian planters, but immigrant orphans. Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin arrived on America’s colonial shores with ambition and an uncommon facility with finance. In rescuing the republic from financial collapse, they would leave a far deeper mark on the American experiment than they—or anyone else—could have imagined.

It could not have been more different from what the Founding Fathers intended.

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The American Revolution was led by the land-owning colonial elite, and land shaped how they imagined the republic they were building. Planters like Thomas Jefferson believed that “governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as [the people] are chiefly agricultural”—cities, he believed, bred corruption and dependence. It was a vision rooted in what the founders knew: in a world where banks were illegal and wealth was measured in acres, capital was an abstraction. The immigrant financiers understood something different. Having been uprooted from their homelands and immersed in Atlantic trade, they knew that capital was “movable, portable, migratory in the same sense that they themselves were.”1

If they were rootless, money was, too.

Raised in the bustling trading world of Liverpool before immigrating to Philadelphia, Robert Morris built a global merchant network and learned to speak the language of British pounds, French livres, Dutch florins, and Spanish reales. In December 1776, as British troops closed on Philadelphia and Congress fled to Baltimore, Morris—who in signing the Declaration of Independence signed a potential death warrant if captured—stayed behind to keep the government functioning. It was Morris who supplied Washington with the financial backing that made the victory at Trenton possible, and who repeatedly drew upon his own reputation and personal credit to keep the nascent government afloat. Appointed Superintendent of Finance in 1781, he persuaded Congress to charter the Bank of North America, the nation’s first bank, in a desperate effort to stabilize a currency that had nearly collapsed. It was not a permanent solution—only a stronger federal government could solve that problem—but Morris bought the republic enough time to survive until the Constitutional Convention of 1787.2

Morris turned down the opportunity to be the nation’s first Treasury Secretary under the new constitution, ceding the position and the responsibility for building the nation’s financial architecture to Alexander Hamilton. Trained in a trading house on St. Croix, Hamilton was constitutionally unsuited to the compromises politics required, and yet he understood something no other founder grasped as clearly: that the republic’s survival depended on its creditworthiness. By assuming the states’ debts into a single federal obligation—what he called both “the price of liberty” and “a powerful cement of union”—he bound the financial interests of creditors to the success of the national government. The resulting securities market gave investors a stake in the republic’s future. Hamilton then established the Bank of the United States, whose provisions for limited liability became the model for the state-chartered banks and corporations that followed. During the entire colonial period, only eight for-profit corporations had been chartered. During the 1790s alone, more than three hundred appeared, and by 1837, there were more than 600 banks in operation across the nation. The institutions he built outlasted the enemies he made.3

The so-called Revolution of 1800 brought Jefferson and the Republicans to power, and Albert Gallatin to the Treasury. As a nineteen-year-old Gallatin had left his native Switzerland in search of opportunity in the colonies. After trying and failing at land speculation, manufacturing, and agriculture, he went into politics and became an expert in finance. Having opposed Hamilton’s agenda as a state legislator and then as a congressman, Gallatin spent much of his tenure as Treasury Secretary protecting Hamilton’s financial architecture from an administration that was ideologically committed to dismantling it. While working to reduce the national debt and internal taxation, he also financed the Louisiana Purchase and westward expansion of the country. Where Hamilton had built the system, Gallatin understood what it meant: “no law exists here, directly or indirectly, confining man to particular occupation or place,” he wrote—for in “every species of trade, commerce, art, profession and manufacture,” opportunity remained open to all comers. The absence of the old constraints was itself the achievement.4

Together, Morris, Hamilton, and Gallatin did more than rescue the republic from insolvency—they built the financial architecture that transformed political liberty into economic reality, directing capital toward productive enterprise across the land.

The social landscape was shifting beneath their feet.

The United States that emerged after the Revolution initially looked, at least on the surface, much like the agrarian colonial society it had always been. Most Americans still lived on farms, and towns remained small—in 1800, only 33 towns had a population of 2,500 or more, and only 5 percent of Americans lived in cities—and industrialization lagged well behind England. Yet beneath that familiar landscape, as Gordon S. Wood argues, a profound social revolution was already taking place. By the early 1800s, America had become, seemingly overnight, “perhaps the most thoroughly commercialized nation in the world.”5

Commerce no longer described merely trade among nations. It came to define the everyday exchanges of ordinary Americans in an expanding national marketplace. Freed to pursue opportunity, Americans threw themselves into “enterprise,” “improvement,” and “energy.” As one Columbia professor lamented in 1800, “From one end of the continent to the other, the universal roar is Commerce!”6

This was the deeper consequence of the Revolution. In breaking the chains that had bound the colonies to the King, the Founders had swept away an inherited political order. The immigrant financiers had supplied the institutions that allowed a new commercial order to emerge in its place. Human relationships were increasingly defined not by sovereign and subject, priest and parishioner, lord and serf, master and slave, but by voluntary association and exchange under the rule of law. In this commercial republic, distinctions between gentlemen and commoners began to blur as success increasingly depended on individual merit and achievement more than birth, title, or family name. While the British aristocracy continued to sneer at work, it became honorable in America. Leisure became suspect, and “nearly every adult white male became a gentleman.” The aristocratic hierarchy of the Old World had, in Tocqueville’s words, “melted into a middle class.” Social mobility had become the hallmark of American life.7

Jefferson had imagined an agrarian republic of independent farmers, yet he never confronted the paradox that land itself had long been the foundation of inherited hierarchy. For centuries, serfs, indentured servants, and slaves had all been bound to the soil, including at Jefferson’s own Monticello. Commerce, instead, became the “golden chains” that allowed an unshackled society to cohere.8 Not for everyone—at least not yet—but for millions of men regardless of station or origin, the commercial republic was the mechanism by which Jefferson’s promise “that all men are created equal” became something more than an idea.

That was the American Revolution.

Perhaps ironically, those Founding Fathers who lived into the early 1800s came to regard this new society with unease, fear, and disillusionment. Benjamin Rush looked at the America of 1812 and saw “a bebanked, a bewhiskied, and a bedollared nation.” Jefferson believed American society was going backward—the people were more religious, more sectarian, and less rational than they had been at the time of the Revolution.9 History, meanwhile, has not always looked kindly on the men who built this new republic. Robert Morris made some poor investments in the 1790s, ending up in debtors’ prison, abandoned by friends and allies only to die in penury and obscurity. Alexander Hamilton was driven out of politics and to an early grave by Aaron Burr’s bullet. Albert Gallatin alone enjoyed a long and distinguished afterlife, becoming a diplomat, businessman, and, among much else, founder of New York University.

John Adams variously described Hamilton as “the bastard Brat of a Scots pedlar,” “a foreigner,” and “not really an American.”10 He might have said the same of the commercial republic that Hamilton and the other immigrant financiers built. Yet that system would come to be seen as the bedrock of the young republic’s economy—eventually recognized the world over as quintessentially American.

Today, Hamilton and Gallatin rest in the shallow soil of the graveyard beneath Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, while skyscrapers rise from the bedrock around them. The graveyard sits at the top of Wall Street—long the symbol of American finance—at its intersection with Broadway, long the symbol of America’s vibrant, gaudy, commercial culture. They sleep at the crossroads of the commercial republic they helped to build, while just a few miles away, the Mother of Exiles continues to welcome the rootless strivers who, like them, arrive in search of opportunity.

Happy Independence Day!

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This essay is the final installment in a Pride Month series on gay life and the city. The first two are “The Lavender City” and “The Death and Life of Gay American Cities.” Today’s essay is free for everyone; if you’d like access to the full archive, please consider upgrading.

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The night I met Margaret Thatcher began at the East India Club and ended at a gay bar.

It was London, May 2004, and I found myself at a celebration of the election of Britain’s first female prime minister—at a Victorian-era gentlemen’s club that prohibited women. The prior semester I had interned for a Conservative member of Parliament and befriended his gay policy director, who invited me up to London to attend the event with him and his gay Tory friends. I was an unlikely guest: American, non-conservative, not quite out of the closet, and without the public-school pedigree or Oxbridge degree that seemed to be the price of admission to this rarefied world of power and politics. Nevertheless, there we were in varying shades of gay: a Tory staffer, a publicist, a celibate Anglo-Catholic priest, and a closeted American heading to celebrate Margaret Thatcher on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her rise to power.

We convened for gin-and-tonics before the event, then piled into a black cab that whisked us across town to Saint James’ Square. In that gorgeous spring, the plane trees and pin oaks were in full leaf, and we were half-cut. The East India Club commanded the square, torches blazing along the pavement as if to keep alive the waning flame of Empire. We were ushered upstairs to the Ladies’ Drawing Room, where we were packed in likely violation of some fire code—but women were allowed there. A stage and podium were arranged at the front of the room, behind which large windows were thrown open onto the May day beyond. A bar was tucked against the side wall, and more G&Ts procured. The large doors at the back of the room were closed at the appointed hour, and soon screens flanking the dais began playing a photo montage celebrating Mrs. Thatcher’s reign. Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory” provided the soundtrack, while the assembled masses sang along in a pomp-ish version of karaoke:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,

How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?

As the chorus ended and the orchestral track sounded its final, triumphal notes, there was a pause and a hushed silence—and then the giant doors burst open, and all of us looked out, and then down. And there she was: or, at least, there was the top of her iconic bouffant hair helmet. The Iron Lady was short, but age and retirement had not reduced her power: the crowd split of its own accord, creating a path to the dais. Liam Fox, then Chairman of the Conservative Party, was playing bodyguard. I pushed my way through the throngs, pronouncing “sorry” with a British accent and an elbow-shaped circumflex, and thrust my hand into the Baroness’s path. Her eyes locked briefly with mine as she grasped my hand.

I retreated to my gay companions, left with the lingering memory of her lavender touch.

For we were not the only homosexuals in the room. Gays gravitated toward the Tories, and to Thatcher in particular, in part for political reasons and in part for social and aesthetic ones. Thatcherism was not merely a set of policies but a milieu of clubs, country houses, dinner parties, the palaces of church and state, ancient institutions, and timeless wit. Indeed, many of the men in her orbit—gay or straight—seemed more attached to that world than to Thatcherism itself. Meanwhile, the socialist-inflected Labour Party was not a natural home for Oxbridge-educated homosexuals who were too well-bred-and-read to take up the red rose. If the Tory world offered status, glamour, tradition, and access, Labour offered coal mines and picket lines. Indeed, many Marxists saw homosexuality as a decadent, bourgeois lifestyle, a symptom of the sickness of capitalism. Conversely, all gays knew that Marxism definitionally had no taste: in rejecting elites, it inherently rejected the tastemakers.

Thatcher was neither a champion of gay rights nor a straightforward enemy. She had supported overturning laws criminalizing homosexual acts, “which she considered a humiliating intrusion into privacy and a waste of court time,” according to biographer Charles Moore. She employed “a good many homosexuals,” promoted them, enjoyed their camp behavior, and seemed largely oblivious to their sexuality, often trying to set up “suitable” husbands for her secretaries without realizing the men in question were gay. While Thatcher personally disapproved of homosexuality on religious grounds, she also tolerated the “sexual peccadilloes” of her gay subordinates so long as they kept them out of the press.

Her instinctive tolerance existed alongside profound blind spots. She presided over a gay panic that stemmed in part from her government’s fraught handling of the AIDS crisis. Her government also passed the notorious Section 28 law banning the “promotion of homosexuality” by any local authority in 1988. Although 83% of the British public supported the ban when it was passed, Section 28 had the unintended consequence of galvanizing the British gay rights movement and bringing actor Ian McKellen out of the closet.

Mother of the Free, indeed.

In the Ladies’ Drawing Room, with the windows thrown open as if to invite an assassin, the Iron Lady took to the stage to thunderous applause. Although Mrs. Thatcher had largely withdrawn from public life following the death of her husband Denis the year before, she gave a short speech. In it, she warned that the Conservative Party was losing touch with ordinary voters, years before the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit would reorder British politics—and a full decade before a Conservative government would legalize same-sex marriage over the objections of most of its own MPs. “We’ve got to get back in touch with the people,” she said.

“We’ve got to get back to the bar,” said my friend, whose boss was one of those MPs, along with Liam Fox, who’d vote against gay marriage.

After the speech, the Baroness descended from the dais and zigzagged her way through the crowd, Fox keeping a wary eye—Thatcher at his elbow, Thatcherism at arm’s length. As she wended closer to our group, I grabbed my friend and pushed forward again, calling out, “Lady Thatcher, could I get a photo?”

“Of course!” she declared.

My friend took my camera, and I, being American and having no idea what to do with a British lady—iron or otherwise—threw my arm around the buttery satin of her waist. Meanwhile, my friend couldn’t figure out how to get the bloody thing to work, and so we stood there in silence. If a pause could seethe, I heard it in the restless crowd around us. The photo captures the faintest ghost of a smile on Mrs. Thatcher’s ruby-red lips, and the placidity of a face that had long grown accustomed to useless men. I, of course, am beaming, while a glimpse of Liam Fox appears between our heads.

French President François Mitterrand once said of her, “She has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Lady Thatcher’s skirts didn’t quite twirl up around her, but no sooner had an embarrassed “Thanks!” escaped my lips before she pirouetted from my American embrace with a throaty “Aaaaawlright”—and returned to the people.

As we left the gentlemen’s club, we slid past Savile Row suits and Jermyn Street shoes to return to our place among the rabble. The torches outside the club blazed bright beneath a dusky sky as we piled into another cab en route to Soho Square. At a gay bar called Sanctuary, we joined a larger gathering of Conservative Party gays who didn’t make it to the East India Club. The men in Soho were no less polished than the men in Saint James’. Their accents were just as posh, their tailoring nearly as sharp, and many had passed through the same Oxbridge colleges and parliamentary offices. The atmosphere was decidedly more camp but no more theatrical than the other gentlemen’s club from which we’d just arrived. Bartenders mixed us G&Ts, and I mixed and mingled with the Tory disestablishment, coming out only as an American, even as I peeked through the lavender door.

From the East India Club to the gay bar, we had gone through the looking glass. Behind closed doors, the homosocial and the homosexual were less discrete—and the latter less discreet. In both spaces, men gathered among men to enjoy the kind of intimacy and companionship that existed apart from ordinary domestic life. The East India Club excluded women as a rule; the gay bar invited them in on certain conditions—but in either, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to imagine the Iron Lady sitting in a Chesterfield sipping an ice-cold G&T. Meanwhile, the gay men moving between those spaces were doing what they’d always done: finding the rooms, official or otherwise, where they could be some version of themselves. Moving between those spaces myself, I’d spent the entire evening in the company of men, as it were—quite how Mrs. T herself preferred it.

And I wondered: in those halls of power where princes, dukes, and even Denis Thatcher had found a sanctuary among other men—had it ever revealed itself under that roof, the love that dare not speak its name?

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Hell’s Kitchen was my home for eleven of the thirteen years I lived in New York. To me, the neighborhood was the Hair 2 Stay salon in the basement of my apartment building, where the hairdresser once gave me a bunch of Thai basil from her Asian market. It was Minerva, who would complain about her knees in her Spanish accent as I hauled her grocery cart up four flights of stairs. It was Jay, a Korean immigrant who ran the dry cleaner down the block where we took our laundry because the machines in our building swallowed quarters like casino slots. It was the line cooks of the Shake Shack on one corner and the bartenders of the French brasserie on the other. It was the guy with the mullet yelling “Strippers!” outside a different kind of shake shack. And it was the Mid City Gym, where I’d occasionally train with an ex-convict named Bashar who, for his life of crime, found himself trying to bulk up twinks in what he called “a gay gym.”

This was daily life in the so-called “gayborhood”—and if you weren’t looking for it, you might not have noticed.

Gayborhoods are, of course, some of the most storied and celebrated urban neighborhoods: San Francisco’s Castro, Chicago’s Boystown, Boston’s South End, Washington’s Dupont Circle. In New York, Hell’s Kitchen was the last of three major gayborhoods, after Greenwich Village and Chelsea. The gays arrived in the Village when it was still shabby and not yet chic: cheap rents brought well-educated bohemians to what was then a working-class Italian-immigrant neighborhood, transforming it into a middle-class district even as its new denizens railed against bourgeois values. When Jane Jacobs moved to the Village in 1947, gay men and women sidled invisibly through the sidewalk ballet she celebrated lest they attract suspicious “eyes on the street,” retreating to a largely private life behind closed doors. Jacobs lived less than ten minutes on foot from the Stonewall Inn, but she left before the famous riots of 1969 brought gay men out of the closet and into the streets.

Stonewall didn’t transform the Village into a gayborhood so much as reveal the hidden one that had been there for decades. When gay men came out, they found safety, solidarity, and visibility in numbers there. This had a flywheel effect, too: the more gays who nested there, the more who flocked there. Institutions beyond the gay bar emerged to support the community: bookstores, coffeeshops, health clinics, community centers. That visibility could be translated into political power, as Larry Kramer did in New York and Harvey Milk did in San Francisco. You couldn’t have had ACT UP or Gay Men’s Health Crisis without the dense institutional networks gayborhoods provided. Before there could be “Milk for Supervisor,” there was Milk behind the counter of his camera shop in the Castro, organizing his community. The visibility of the gayborhood fostered broader public acceptance of gays, which eventually translated into political wins—and unanticipated losses.

As the well-heeled set moved into the Village, the high-heeled set moved north to Chelsea, and once priced out of there, they marched further north to Hell’s Kitchen. To be fair, each migration left behind not only gay bars and institutions, but an increasingly professional homosexual class amidst the gentry. By the time I arrived in New York in 2005, the Village had become the province of wealthy sophisticates, designer boutiques, and luxury cupcakes, Sex and the City’s vision of a neighborhood where gays were merely fashionable accessories to a glamorous heterosexual life. But you could still sing showtunes at Marie’s Crisis.

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The Hamilton Lodge Ball was the height of fashion and the social season. Beneath a canopy of shimmering chandeliers, two thousand dancers dazzled on the floor. Ballgowns glittered with sequins, jewels, and peacock feathers as dashing tuxedoed figures waltzed among them. Liquor sloshed from martini glasses while three thousand spectators crowded the edges of the ballroom and craned their necks from the balconies above. Mrs. Astor had paid a fortune for a box near A’Lelia Walker. Journalists from every city paper jotted notes. New York’s Finest kept the gawkers at bay.

This was Harlem in 1930: liquor was illegal, the crowd was racially mixed, and the ballgowns were worn by men.

Long before the riots at the Stonewall Inn launched the modern gay rights movement in 1969, a vibrant, increasingly visible gay world existed across New York City, from Greenwich Village to Harlem. Attracted by the freedom of the city—its anonymity, its capacity for self-invention, its commercial life—young gay men sought new opportunities and an escape from family surveillance, small-town norms, and the everpresent threat of exposure. As George Chauncey details in Gay New York, the city opened new possibilities and liberties for gay men from the 1890s and into the early 1930s—until a newly censorious cultural and regulatory backlash forced gay life underground.1

New York gay life first emerged visibly in the 1890s, amid the working-class saloons and men’s clubs of the Irish and Italian neighborhood around the Bowery red-light district. By the turn of the century, it had spread across the city and into middle-class life. Men of means found respectability in bachelor flats and apartment hotels, while those with fewer means increasingly lived in rooming houses—discreet, cheap furnished bedrooms, rented by the week, that housed much of unmarried New York. A 1940 study of gay men incarcerated for “degeneracy” found that 61 percent lived in rooming houses, also known as single-room occupancy units.2

Rooming houses, with their “casual intermingling of strangers,” drew the ire of Progressive Era moral crusaders, who set out to “protect” young men from urban temptation by building safe havens for them. The most famous were the residential hotels built by the YMCA. By the 1920s, the Y’s seven residential hotels housed more than a thousand young men and had become a central part of gay social life. They also served visiting gay men, offering hotel rooms, gym and pool access, meals—and “never ending sex” in the showers, according to one happy customer.

Before the emergence of gay bars, bathhouses “were some of the first exclusively gay commercial spaces in the city.” At the Ariston Baths on the Upper West Side, gay men could socialize openly and meet with gay friends as early as 1902—until it was shut down by anti-vice crusaders the following year. The Everard Baths on West 28th Street served gay men from at least 1919 until it burned down in 1977. Cheap restaurants, lunch counters, and cafeterias “dotted the city’s commercial and furnished-room districts” and became vital and visible gay social infrastructure, safe places for gays and lesbians to meet, professionally network, monitor police activity, and be themselves. While the smart set enjoyed “Café Society Uptown,” gays and lesbians enjoyed a campier, more ironic “Cafeteria Society Downtown.” Life Cafeteria on Christopher Street was a notorious “fairy hangout,” while Vanity Fair’s 1931 guide to New York noted that the Paramount cafeteria in Times Square had a “dash of lavender,” for any tourists who wanted to gawk.

In the 1910s and ‘20s, gay life had begun to cluster in two neighborhoods, creating enclaves in Greenwich Village and Harlem. The Village offered cheap rents, cheap restaurants, and an anti-bourgeois artistic culture that tolerated nonconformity. Uptown, Harlem was the only place in a segregated city where Black gay men could congregate in commercial establishments, but in the age of the Harlem Renaissance and jazz, many white gay people found its blues clubs and basement speakeasies “wide open” to them, too. Gay residential enclaves emerged in the rooming house districts of Hell’s Kitchen and in the tonier bachelor flats north of the “Frenzied Forties” around Times Square, dubbed the “Faggie Fifties.”

Across the city, gay New Yorkers built what Chauncey calls an “organized, multilayered, and self-conscious gay subculture, with its own meeting places, language, folklore, and moral codes.” They developed sophisticated systems of dress, speech, and behavior that made the gay world visible to other gay people while remaining largely hidden from everyone else.

As Chauncey writes, if this was a closet, it was a “very large closet indeed.”

In the 1920s, the closet burst open with, counterintuitively, the onset of Prohibition. New Yorkers resented the moralism of Prohibition, a sentiment shared by Mayor Jimmy Walker and Tammany Hall, who gave their tacit approval to the emerging nightlife underworld by frequenting it nightly. The city’s moral guardians feared the social and class mixing welcomed by the transgressive new speakeasy culture, as well as its “rejection of convention and interest in the outré.” Indeed, the “popular revolt” against Prohibition’s moralism made middle-class New Yorkers gay-curious, and they nudged open the closet door for gay men they called “pansies.”

And so the Pansy Craze was born.

In this underworld of corruption and bathtub gin, bribery was the coin of the realm, paid by nightclubs serving straight and gay clienteles alike. Here, gay culture emerged as part of the city’s nighttime entertainment economy. The “pansy act”—a camp gay man playing a camp gay man—became a fixture of Times Square nightclubs like the swanky Club Abbey, where Jean Malin, in the words of Vanity Fair, entertained “through a lavender mist a somewhat bewildered clientele.” Elsewhere, drag queen impresario Jack Mason helped to cultivate an appreciation of camp as “the pinnacle of sophistication.” Of course, the spectacular was as much a spectacle, and Chauncey describes much of the Pansy Craze as “the gay equivalent of blackface.”

If the Pansy Craze in the clubs was all knowing winks and bewildered smirks, Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge Ball was something far more public. One of many gay drag balls of this era, the Hamilton Lodge Ball was the largest gathering of gay men and women in the city and the most visible stage on which they sashayed. Officially called the “Masquerade and Civic Ball,” by the late 1920s everyone knew it as the “Faggots Ball.” The [white] writer Max Ewing described a ballroom “packed with people from bootblacks to New York’s rarest bluebloods,” all the men dressed as women and “wearing plumes and jewels and decorations of every kind.” Eight hundred guests attended in 1925, but up to 7,000 spectators and dancers were regularly attending by the early 1930s—peaking at 8,000 in 1937. As the Amsterdam News headline of 1937 blared: “PANSIES CAVORT IN MOST DELOVELY MANNER AT THAT ANNUAL HAMILTON LODGE ‘BAWL’.” For many men, it was their “one-night-a-year freedom.”

The Faggots Ball “made the existence and scope of [the gay] world manifest.” It was not to last.

Just as Prohibition unintentionally spawned the nightlife underworld and the Pansy Craze, Repeal inadvertently ended the party. The backlash was swift. Under Repeal, alcohol was licensed and controlled by New York’s State Liquor Authority, which set out to prevent a return to the perceived disorder of the working-class saloons by prohibiting licensed establishments from becoming “disorderly.” The SLA interpreted homosexuals themselves to be “lewd and dissolute,” meaning that a bar could become disorderly simply by serving them. In practice, anything coded as homosexual—from campy behavior to discussing the opera—could be treated as evidence of disorder. Undercover SLA agents routinely entrapped gay men, going to gay bars, ordering drinks, encouraging advances, and then arresting the man once they were both outside for “degenerate disorderly conduct.”

In the decades after Repeal, the SLA’s surveillance regime pushed gay life into exclusively gay bars. These were often short-lived, as the SLA targeted and shut down “literally hundreds” of gay or gay-friendly establishments—and bar owners had no legal defense. As gay life went underground and became invisible to the broader public, the “sexual deviant” became a postwar bogeyman accused of causing “drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” While gay men had always been subject to fines or imprisonment for “lewd” behavior, arrests reached the thousands in the postwar years. To one closeted Wall Street executive, the “constant, deadening fear” of bar raids kept many men away.

As Chauncey concludes, the “state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it.”

The gay world that had existed in bathhouses, cheap cafeterias, and campy nightclubs withdrew behind closed doors. The closet door became a liminal space between the secret gay city and the straight city outside. Every gay bar was, in a sense, a speakeasy accessible to those who knew the password—the coded language, the sartorial cues, the flicker of eyes or the flick of a wrist. Gay men stepping through that closet door crossed back and forth between the worlds of visibility and invisibility. The closet wasn’t merely a metaphor; it was a physical geography of actual doors, actual thresholds, actual streets in New York. The Stonewall Inn was behind one of those doors, already a symbol of the peculiar state of gay life: a Mafia-owned dive in Greenwich Village, it had been regularly raided by the police, its patrons accustomed to the humiliation of arrest.

The story we tell of Pride is of a movement born in the humid early hours of June 28, 1969, when gay people stepped out of the darkness of the closet into the full visibility of the streets for the first time. It was not the beginning. The Stonewall riots were a reclamation of a world that now refused to hide itself behind a lavender-painted door.

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Blackshear Elementary School has anchored Central East Austin for more than a century. Founded in 1891 in what was then the Gregory Town freedom colony of former slaves, it later became one of several officially segregated schools for African-American students. The current building replaced the original one-room schoolhouse nearby in 1903 and continued to expand over the following century. In the 1930s, principal Friendly Rice instituted Austin’s first free lunch program, later adopted by the school district at large, and started one of the first public school libraries for black children in the entire South. Operating as a fine arts academy since 2015, its walls are covered in murals celebrating its history and community. A Texas Historical Site marker stands at the entrance to what is the Austin Independent School District’s oldest continuously operating elementary school.

Blackshear survived more than a century of segregation, urban renewal, gentrification, and demographic change—and after all that, it will close thanks to a district-wide budget crisis.1

Earlier this year, AISD announced that Blackshear will join a list of 10 other schools slated for closure and consolidation as the district grapples with a potential budget shortfall of $181 million. The district has been beset with a host of problems, the largest being a major drop in enrollment. Enrollment peaked at 83,000 in 2016 and then dropped by 7% in the first year of the pandemic. After losing 3,000 more students in the past year, enrollment stands at 69,000 students—a 17% drop over 10 years. For its part, Blackshear has capacity for 500 students, but enrollment was as low as 210 students in recent school years.

What’s going on?

The pandemic accelerated the decline as families that found alternatives during the disruption largely didn’t return. But the trend was already pointing downward, and the district deserves some blame for how it has managed the crisis. The school closure announcements have been erratic, and the district has backtracked on promises not to lay off school librarians, reversing course on the last day of school. With 88% of expenditures going to people, budget cuts inevitably hit jobs—but the chaos does not breed confidence.

Nevertheless, statewide data suggests this is not merely an Austin problem.

Across Texas, schools lost 76,000 students in the current academic year, the first non-pandemic enrollment decline in more than 40 years. What’s befuddling observers is that these declines are happening even as the City of Austin and the statewide populations have grown. Indeed, the Census just announced that Austin has officially passed the one-million resident mark, adding 4,000 new residents in 2025.

Of the students who disappeared, 81% were Hispanic, leading observers to blame anti-immigration rhetoric and policy, including ICE’s detention of Texas students. Meanwhile, despite gains in affordability, the cost of housing remains out of reach for many, with a dearth of starter homes potentially delaying family formation. Fertility is down across the state. Meanwhile, a new voucher program will launch later this year that is expected to reduce public school enrollment by 24,500. All of which is to say that there are structural, policy, and political headwinds facing Texas schools.

But the biggest headwind may be the way Texas has chosen to fund—or not fund—its schools.

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In the fraught election of 2020, the people of Austin voted overwhelmingly to raise taxes on themselves to pay for an expanded transit system called Project Connect. More than five years later, the project is mired in cost overruns, litigation, political sabotage from the state legislature, and wavering federal support. The centerpiece of the project, a light rail line, is now expected to cost $840 million per mile—roughly triple the 2020 estimate—and may not arrive until 2033. Critics have seized on the cost overruns and phased rollout as proof that the project “went off the rails.” Governor Greg Abbott joined the chorus, saying:

While Austin leaders keep pushing higher property taxes, the State of Texas is keeping Texans moving. Smart infrastructure grows our economy and moves people efficiently—without more local tax increases.

It’s tempting to infer from the governor’s statement and recent coverage that Project Connect is stupid infrastructure. While it has actually already delivered on some of its goals, such as bus lines, Project Connect has real challenges. Some, like the cost overruns, reflect inflation and labor shortages; others reflect design choices and America’s broader incapacity to build infrastructure competently. But the governor’s comment is illuminating: the “smart infrastructure” he is referring to is almost exclusively highways—which are never subjected to the same scrutiny as transit. His own Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is recognizing the limits of highway expansion in Texas’s increasingly crowded urban areas, even as it pursues new expansion projects. Of course, the people affected by those projects don’t have a say in the outcome.

Indeed, when was the last time you voted on a highway?

It’s absurd to even ask the question. At the same time that democratically-approved Project Connect is being dragged through the courts and the press, TxDOT is ramming its $4.5 billion I-35 Capital Express Central Project through Central Austin. Years of hearings allowed residents to shape details of the project, but never to meaningfully decide whether it should happen at all. The 107 homes and businesses seized through eminent domain didn’t have a choice, either. Where TxDOT once erected a concrete barrier separating Black and Hispanic neighborhoods from downtown, it now plans to dig a trench up to 22 lanes wide through the city’s core. A proposal to partially cover the submerged highway with park-like “caps and stitches” received no state funding, while the Trump Administration revoked a federal grant that would have helped. If the city cannot assemble the money itself, which seems more likely by the day, future Austinites will inherit a massive highway chasm through downtown.

The project’s $4.5 billion price tag promises to accomplish what, exactly? Austin voters never had a meaningful say in I-35—and the critics who complain that voters approved Project Connect when it was only 5% designed might consider at what percentage of design voters typically approve a highway. (The answer is never percent.) Major highway expansions in Texas have repeatedly failed to durably reduce congestion; successive expansions of Houston’s Katy Freeway, for instance, only worsened traffic. Studies routinely show that urban highways impose major economic and social costs on the communities around them: pollution, noise, dangerous streets, lost time, and declining quality of life—occasionally the wholesale obliteration of entire neighborhoods for asphalt. Yet unlike transit projects, highway expansions are rarely subjected to existential public scrutiny. There is no referendum, no sustained accounting of whether the promised benefits materialize, and no realistic mechanism for voters to stop them once they begin. Now TxDOT wants to do it again: the proposed MoPac South expansion would add eight more miles of lanes on the west side of the city to the tune of $825 million, no credit check or referendum required.

So here’s a question for the governor: why must one project win a citywide referendum, survive years of litigation, secure federal sign-off, and face potential death by the Texas Legislature and Supreme Court—while the other requires nothing?

This asymmetry, of course, is not accidental. For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome—as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win. Consider Florida’s Brightline, the only privately financed passenger railroad in the country. Ridership has grown steadily, yet the company still struggles financially—not because the railroad itself is flawed, but because it operates within a built environment engineered around the automobile. Florida’s sprawling land-use pattern, weak local transit systems, and overwhelming car dependency suppress the very ridership base a private rail operator needs to survive. Critics point to this and conclude that “the market” has spoken against transit. But this is circular reasoning. The transportation market was already shaped by decades of public intervention on behalf of roads and highways. Transit is then judged for failing inside conditions designed to undermine it.

Meanwhile, America’s highway industry is deemed Too Big To Fail.

The federal Highway Trust Fund, which pays for highways and some transit infrastructure, is not self-financing. The gas tax that feeds it has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, and three decades of inflation and fuel efficiency gains have steadily eroded its purchasing power. For most of the past 25 years, expenditures have exceeded revenues, so Congress has transferred $275 billion in general revenues to the fund since 2008 just to keep it solvent. The Congressional Budget Office now projects a cumulative shortfall of roughly $300 billion over the next decade. Some have proposed solving the deficit by stripping out the 12-14% of transit funding entirely, which would delay the shortfall by about one year. Meanwhile, a 2025 study found that roughly 40% of the new urban highway lane miles built over the past four decades were funded by the gas tax. In other words, the road network has vastly expanded while its primary funding source has failed to keep up, meaning the gas tax is fueling the Trust Fund’s insolvency. But who in Washington is actually counting?

In this context, it is no surprise that transit struggles. The playing field has not merely been tilted against transit, it’s been toppled over in favor of highways. A private transit system, however well-capitalized and well-run, can’t overcome the terrain engineered against it. A flawed transit project doesn’t stand a chance.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

If the train doesn’t arrive in Austin, it will be because it couldn’t compete with that.

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A tree wants to grow. It burrows its roots into the earth and thrusts its branches toward the sky. Left alone, it grows to its natural height and form: tall, full, and wild. The art of bonsai is to turn a potential giant into something that can fit in a pot. It requires constant intervention. New growth must be clipped and pruned and cultivated into the desired form: “It is your nature to be small,” the gardener says. And so the tree becomes a work of stunted beauty. Were the tree left to grow wild once more, it would not find its basic nature anew. Shaped for so long by suppression, its growth would become weird, warped, and gnarled.

Zoning likewise turns our cities into works of artifice, stunting their natural growth in the name of a certain kind of beauty. Suppress organic growth long enough, and the pressure doesn’t dissipate, it shows up elsewhere: in skyrocketing prices, in stagnation, in people priced out or pushed out entirely.

Like the bonsai, zoning requires a constant gardener. The dead hand of the law divides the city into individual pots in which only certain things may grow. The city is a living thing, and yet we dwarf and bind and cripple it. When at last we break under the strain, and allow some new use or form or height, what emerges often looks strange or misshapen, not like what was there before, but not quite like a city either.

It is our nature to resist change. That’s human. But it’s also our nature to adapt to change. The dead hand of the law pats us on the back to tell us we shouldn’t have to.

The tension surfaced recently at Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission.

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Elon Musk has referred to social media, and X-née-Twitter, as the “global town square,” so I decided to go on a world tour. In one of these town squares, badge-wearing speakers shouted at each other through megaphones, while random guys replied to everything they said. Occasionally, they all turned on a passerby to explain why he was wrong, but most of the crowd lingered in the shadows. In the next square, everyone was frantically checking everyone else’s credentials and arguing about who had a right to be there at all. In another, a loud and angry man stood on a platform taller than everyone else’s, proclaiming truths into the wee hours of the night. I moved on to another, where I found an army of name-tagged professionals in business casual taking turns at a podium, each explaining how honored they were to receive a niche award and how humbled they were by their own success. Finally—and really, I’d seen enough—I stopped by a square where distant elderly relatives were stitching their political views into needlepoints while people I hadn’t seen since high school reminded me why I haven’t attended a reunion.

If these social media platforms actually existed as real places, most of us would cross the street to avoid them. But the fact that they look nothing like real town squares—and that nobody behaves normally in them—is telling: they are not town squares, and they never were.

The town square was never primarily a place for speech. It was a place for daily life—for commerce, for errands, for the ordinary transactions that brought people together whether they chose each other or not. Civic life, political discourse, even revolution, emerged from that daily friction as a byproduct of people having to be in specific places. Social media attempts to replicate the positive externality without its source.

Speech was the exhaust, not the engine.

Everywhere they have existed, town squares began as markets. The Greeks did not design the agora so that Socrates could engage in philosophical dialogue; they built a market square so that people could buy salted eels from Lake Copais and Corinthian pottery. The Roman Forum began as a central marketplace, and only later was it crowded with civic buildings—because that’s where people already gathered. In the Arab and Islamic worlds, commerce flourished in bazaars and souks that were surrounded by coffeehouses where men shared coffee and tea, ideas and news. In the Americas, Aztec markets like Tlatelolco served both a commercial and civic purpose. Spanish colonial law prescribed central plazas with commercial and civic functions arranged around them, a pattern visible across Latin America and in California’s mission towns. In the United States, New England town greens, California’s Spanish-heritage plazas, and Texas’s courthouse squares placed town halls, courthouses, churches, and meetinghouses around the commerce that gave them life.

Across the world, and across time, people intuited this relationship and built accordingly. The trade in goods preceded the trade in ideas—and it was from the physical market square that the very concept of a “marketplace of ideas” eventually emerged. The civic life of the square was sustained by its commercial life, not the other way around.

Musk was not the first to make this mistake. Everyone from Bill Gates to Hillary Clinton has invoked the town square to describe the social internet, but the confusion runs deeper than metaphor. Consider how differently a physical town square and a social media platform actually function. In the offline town square, you couldn’t choose who you encountered, and everybody who was there was brought there by necessity. That unchosen quality built familiarity across socioeconomic differences and around shared stakes, requiring civility in equal measure. In the real square, you show up as yourself and you interact with real people using your real name—because you would see these people again and again.

Online platforms invert this: people encounter each other algorithmically, then choose who to follow, and your feed reflects your choices back. The result is not a shared space but a multiverse of echo chambers, each mistaking itself for the whole. Often, people hide behind pseudonyms, which makes it easier to behave like an asshole and to treat other people as abstractions. The architecture of the real town square encourages good-faith encounters, accountability, and civility. The architecture of social media rewards outrage, in-group signaling, and attention-whoring. Offline, the whores are more modest.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that platforms built without the engine that makes the exhaust civil are, well, exhausting.

The problem is not that social media is bad at being a town square—it’s that social media is a categorically different thing. Social media platforms are communication tools. The public square is a commercial and civic institution.

By the time people began calling the internet the new town square, America’s actual town squares had long lost their institutional relevance to everyday American life. Mass automobile ownership from the 1920s onward made sprawling suburbs not just possible but, with considerable help from government policy, the dominant form of American development. The home refrigerator reduced the frequency of daily shopping trips, supermarkets overtook local grocers by the 1950s, and the consolidation of retail into national chains removed social and civic anchors from communities. The entry of women into the workforce at scale in the 1970s reorganized households around dual incomes, compressing or eliminating the daily errands and informal exchanges that had sent people repeatedly into local commercial life. Meanwhile, as retail drifted from walkable Main Streets to big-box stroads, the “Town Square” or “Town Center” had become a shopping mall.

Today, we are living in a world of on-demand delivery and remote work. Modern commercial life does not require many of us to leave our homes at all; when we do shop, the encounter is gone, leaving only the transaction. Even in what remains of our historic town squares, we have become more transactional, in the non-commercial sense. The town square has become another venue to be “activated” with First Fridays, yoga on the green, and jazz in the plaza—and “programmed” with holiday fairs for artisanal tchotchkes, food festivals featuring local-to-nowhere mozzarepas, and farmers markets for $15 eggs. These can be valuable community events, but nobody has to go, and so that daily texture of civic life remains out of reach. People can still opt-in, self-sort, and filter out.

Town squares today function more like social media than the reverse.

Our historic town squares are no longer where daily life happens. For many Americans, school pickup and drop-off is one of the last genuinely local rituals left in modern life. Parents wait outside for their kids, temporarily stranded together, in a pattern that repeats over weeks and months and years. The school sidewalk has the potential to be a civic generator because it has the basic ingredients of the historic town square: necessity, recurrence, social mixing, and a defined place. These conditions generate return loops, routines that bring the same people back to the same place, over and over. Even here, we tend to squander the opportunity: parents—or their nannies—wait in their cars at the school pickup lines, and even those who do get out find nowhere to linger once the kids emerge.

What else brings people together day after day? Transit hubs have the necessity and recurrence, but they are mostly for passing through, not lingering. Playgrounds and dog parks are destinations you choose, not rituals you’re bound to. The paucity of examples points to the depth of the problem.

Here is the conundrum: the social and economic forces that brought us to this moment are not reversible. Nobody sane would argue that we should get rid of refrigerators or working women; on-demand delivery and remote work are here to stay; and even in places where it is possible to live car-free, the patterns of commercial life that bolstered our civic life are long gone. In an era of convenience and everything-at-home, good urbanism is not enough to overcome our growing aversion to friction. People have to choose it. Social media is a powerful communication tool, but it is not a substitute for the unchosen, embodied, recurring encounters that once made civic life possible. The “global town square” promises to abolish the frictions of place while simulating the feeling of public life. It cannot.

The internet gives everyone a stage and nobody a town. There’s no algorithm that will change that.

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It looks like a normal neighborhood. Its modest raised ranches sit on large grassy lots enclosed by fences. Leafy trees and tidy sidewalks line the street, cars are parked in the driveways, pools and patios appear in backyards, waiting for the warmth of summer. It could be anywhere in suburban America—but a few clues suggest it is not. An elevated subway train rolls by just a couple blocks away. Neighboring row homes and six-story apartment buildings come right up to the property lines. There are paved-over vacant lots right across the street, a legacy of the neighborhood’s near-death and partial recovery.

This is the South Bronx—and this suburban subdivision, Charlotte Gardens, sits amidst one of the densest neighborhoods in America. That it exists at all tells you something about what the urban renewal era ultimately produced.

When President Jimmy Carter visited Charlotte Street in 1977, there were no gardens—only rubble and the husks of firebombed buildings. He was standing on the ruins of a generation of urban policy failure. What had been thriving communities of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants for a generation began to decline after World War II. The redlining of “ethnic” neighborhoods began a process of disinvestment in quality housing stock, while federal mortgage policy drew the middle class out to the suburbs. Robert Moses’s construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway fatally sliced through the borough, displacing 60,000 people and blighting the adjacent land. Later low-income housing projects further concentrated poverty in the Bronx, while factories closed and good working-class jobs moved away. Crime rose, schools failed, and people left in droves. What they left behind became the poorest zip code in America.

Against this backdrop, declining land values coupled with rent control created perverse incentives for property owners. Rents didn’t cover costs, arson was cheap, and a match was worth more than a mortgage. By the 1970s, there were 30 arson fires a day—12,000 per year—making local Engine Company No. 82 of New York’s Finest the busiest firefighters in the country. A hapless City Hall was considering a policy of “planned shrinkage,” essentially giving up on the borough.

And so the Bronx burned.1

It was into this “urban wilderness” that Ed Logue stepped in 1979. Logue had made a name for himself in New Haven, Conn., where his attempt to build “The Slumless City” displaced more than 30,000 people. In Boston, he remade its historic downtown into the monolithic Government Center, displacing thousands more. Under the logic of urban renewal, these were considered successes. That record brought him to New York, where Governor Rockefeller put him in charge of the Urban Development Corporation. The UDC built projects all over the state, including the subsidized housing projects in the Bronx that had accelerated its decline, but its dependence on federal dollars and its sloppy finances left it exposed when Washington pulled back funding. In 1975, the agency defaulted on its debt, leaving dozens of projects unfinished, and Logue resigned in disgrace.

“Mr. Urban Renewal”—the man who had razed and rebuilt entire cities—would end his career building a suburban subdivision.

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The crooked streets of San Sebastián’s Old Town lead the weary traveler to refuge from the summer sun. Through narrow pedestrian alleys lined with pintxo bars and bakeries, the space suddenly opens into an expanse of light at the Plaza de la Constitución. Beneath its neoclassical arcades, cafés spill into the plaza, their umbrellaed tables beckoning passersby to take a seat and sip a kalimotxo or glass of tinto, to imbibe the murmur of the city as the Atlantic breeze wisps through its honey-colored buildings and tiled streets. “La Consti” is the quintessential European plaza, the distilled ideal of walkable urban life.

At 9am, the entire plaza is a parking lot.

Late at night, after the last stragglers stumble home, the plaza empties. Chairs are stacked, umbrellas tied, and everything is pushed under the arcades. By morning, it fills again with trucks and delivery vans bringing in the food, booze, and fresh linens that make the square come alive as a gathering place later in the day. Before the first coffee orders are placed, they’re gone, and the square returns to its familiar form. The Plaza de la Constitución is an aperture in Old Town’s medieval grid—and a window into a basic fact of urban life: the café on the piazza depends on a network of vendors, warehouses, and distribution systems that operate from somewhere else.

Every vision of the good city edits out the unglamorous aspects that make it possible. It’s easy to imagine the city square, the walkable street, the human-scaled neighborhood—and to forget that even the most connected 15-minute-city is but one node in a much larger human network. Modern life depends on infrastructure cities cannot function without.

Trains need rail yards, buses need depots, and delivery trucks need parking lots. Before goods reach our stoops or our favorite shops, they pass through a network of ports, airports, loading docks, warehouses, and cold storage. New homes require lumber yards, steel mills, and concrete plants. The fountain in the park and the flush in our toilet would not be possible without sewage treatment plants and pumping stations. Waste collects in recycling centers and materials recovery facilities instead of on city streets. The knowledge economy is not “in the cloud” but grounded in a network of electrical substations, fiber-optic vaults, and data centers.

These systems are often unsightly, disruptive, and obnoxious. Understandably, nobody wants them in their backyards—and yet we have to put them all somewhere.

That tension shows up in our planning decisions, as well. Last month at Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission, we had a first-of-its-kind case. An autonomous vehicle (AV) company was seeking to rezone a lot to allow for fleet maintenance and storage uses: basically a place to park and service their cars. The land in question was in an existing industrial/office park adjacent to Dell’s headquarters, nearly twelve miles north of downtown, along a major corridor a short drive from the interstate highway. During the hearing, commissioners disagreed about allowing an intensive auto-centric use in this area, which is now surrounded by single-family homes and apartment buildings on three sides.

There’s an argument that this site could one day become housing—which Austin still needs—but a city can’t only be about housing. Every industrial site converted to homes is one fewer place for the unglamorous uses that make the rest of the city possible. Austin’s growth has already swallowed much of the industrial land that once absorbed uses like this. AVs like Waymos are already driving on Austin’s streets and part of the central city’s mobility system, and they operate under state law that limits what the city can do to regulate them. The question was never whether they need somewhere to go. It was where.

Put them downtown—where the ill-fated Cruise stationed its AV fleet—and it creates a permanent parking lot on valuable land that could be put to better use. Push them to the periphery, and it increases travel distances and costs, while paving over greenfield lots. Refuse them, and they don’t disappear—they just show up somewhere worse. If not on an existing industrial lot along a central traffic corridor, where else should they go?

City staff recommended approval, and we voted 6-4 to grant the rezoning.

The AV depot is just a more visible version of an old question: how we allocate space among uses that we treat as incompatible but which are, in fact, necessary for the city to function at all. The central question—where does this go?—is a citywide one. It can only be answered at the level of the whole system: how much space do we need for housing, for mobility, for logistics, for the invisible infrastructure that makes everything else possible?

We used to have better ways to answer.

In centuries past, cities laid out street grids, reserved rights of way, auctioned off lots, and largely let private actors sort out the rest. Unglamorous uses found their places alongside everything else—sometimes too close. “Incompatibility” and “zoning” hadn’t yet entered the planning lexicon, and so the warehouse, the rail yard, the slaughterhouse, and the tenement weren’t seen as problems to be solved by land use rules. Still, they generated real externalities: smoke, noise, the smell of rendering plants and tanneries, sanitation hazards that spread disease through densely packed neighborhoods. Industrialization and mass immigration intensified these conflicts at a scale cities hadn’t faced before. Cities turned to planning to manage it.

Early zoning attempted to manage the externalities of urban proximity: separating noxious industrial uses from residential neighborhoods made sense. But the same instrument proved useful for other purposes. New York’s 1916 zoning resolution was partly a response to garment factories encroaching on Fifth Avenue’s retail palaces—and partly an attempt to keep the immigrant workers who worked those factories out of more genteel neighborhoods. The jump from incompatible uses to incompatible people happened almost immediately, and soon zoning was being used to separate apartments from detached single-family homes, and detached single-family homes from everything else. Zoning was, from the beginning, as much about exclusion as about order. Once that logic took hold, it proved hard to reverse.

What began as broad zones gradually became finer-grained, and then finer still, until the zone dissolved almost entirely into the individual parcel. Every use, every building, every proposed change became its own negotiation. City-wide trade-offs don’t get made—they get deferred, parcel by parcel, until they reappear as crises: a housing shortage in too many places, a lack of space for infrastructure in others.

Much of what we now call “planning” serves to protect what’s already there today, not to plan for what the city might need tomorrow. The result is a system that can’t answer the question it keeps generating: where does it go? If the answer is “nowhere,” the needs don’t disappear—they scatter, reappearing in places less suited to them, or not at all. “Out of sight, out of mind” is not a planning philosophy.

The system we have is largely what people asked for—and it has conscripted planners into enforcing it. This is the “sanctuary suburb” mindset, a desire to capture the benefits of urban life without any of its costs, to see only one version of the city and keep hidden the parts that make it actually work—or to push those parts somewhere far enough away that they become someone else’s problem. Today’s planners are often the ones tasked with solving it, operating within a system that isn’t built to answer the question in the first place. Instead of working at the scale of the city to plan where the next generation of infrastructure goes, they are instead adjudicating the setbacks needed to make a triplex fit on a single-family lot. That’s not planning. It’s a waste of the time and talent cities desperately need directed elsewhere.

In Spain, the sun also rises, and once again the trucks will rumble into Plaza de la Constitución. Laundrymen will unload clean linens, fishmongers will bring out the morning’s catch of anchovies, and grease trap vans will pump out yesterday’s rancid oil. The parking lot of vans and trucks will clear out in time for the waiters to arrive, stubbing out cigarettes as they cinch aprons around their waists. Chairs and tables will roll out, umbrellas will unfurl, espresso and Aperol will flow across the plaza. La Consti comes back to life as the trucks and vans return to their corners of the city—out of sight of the plaza, in places nobody cares to look.

That part of the city may be unglamorous, but the glamour of the plaza would be impossible without it.

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They had voted to leave the city. Then they showed up to tell it what to do.

A few weeks ago, Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission heard a case involving the rezoning of an obsolete office park, a project that would bring a mixed-use residential complex to an expensive part of the city that overlaps with the top school district in Texas. The opposition wasn’t unusual—except for one detail. The neighbors objecting didn’t live in Austin, having voted to deannex from the city in 2024. Now they were asking the city to “protect” them. The case was decided on the merits, not on jurisdictional questions, but it was a striking example of something much more common.

These residents had opted out of the city—out of its taxes, its governance, its responsibilities. And yet they still thought they had the authority to control what happened next door, even though “next door” remained within city limits.

That’s not unusual. It’s a defining feature of the modern American suburb.

We talk a lot about sanctuary cities. But the American suburb was always seen as a sanctuary from the city. While modern suburbs emerged in response to increasing wealth, automobility, and changing preferences a century ago, they were also fueled and protected by a system of subsidies and policies that privileged suburban interests at the expense of the cities they depended on. That system did not emerge organically. Indeed, the modern sanctuary suburb is largely a function of those policies.

At the federal level, the government created the subsidized 30-year mortgage to enable mass ownership of detached single-family homes largely for middle-class households, while deploying underwriting standards that denied capital to African-Americans, Jews, and immigrants. Tax policy made mortgage interest deductible, penalizing renters. Federal dollars funded urban renewal programs to bulldoze the “slums”—largely coterminous with those same redlined neighborhoods—displacing thousands. What urban renewal didn’t touch, federal highway spending finished, as high-speed roads were built through low-income neighborhoods for the benefit of those who had already left the city.

State policy reinforced this arrangement by protecting suburban independence, most notably by curtailing cities’ ability to annex surrounding areas. As metropolitan regions grew, this fragmented governance, separating where growth occurred from where it was planned, financed, and managed. Cities lost not just territory, but the ability to coordinate development and align growth with infrastructure and fiscal capacity. At the same time, states ceded zoning authority to municipalities in the name of local control. In practice, this allowed suburbs to translate a preference for detached single-family homes into law, constraining supply to stabilize property values, limit demographic change, and preserve a fixed vision of neighborhood form. Over time, those expectations hardened into something more than policy. “Neighborhood character” became a kind of entitlement, embedding an aesthetics of exclusion. And because these tools were so widely adopted, they came to feel less like government interventions and more like the natural order of things.

Altogether, these policies did not just enable suburban growth; they sanctified it, turning homeownership—and the single-family neighborhood—into a limited, protected asset. Scarcity was not a byproduct of the system. It was the system.

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