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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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Nature conspires to erode the walls we build: ice swells, the ground heaves, and the stones fall back to earth. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost wrote in “Mending Wall.” His poem is often read as a critique of man-made barriers, but Frost’s narrator is more ambivalent. The wall persists, and each year, he and his neighbor meet to repair and talk over it. The boundary may divide their land, but it brings them together, giving rise to the poem’s most famous line: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost’s insight is that the things that seem like barriers to connection might actually be the things that bring us together. Indeed, without the annual work of tending to the wall, those neighbors would have one less reason to meet.

This points to something fundamental about community: it has to be built and maintained.

Today, it seems easier not to make the effort. Technology has made it possible to work, shop, and be entertained without leaving home. Streaming, ecommerce, and delivery services have turned outbound trips into optional ones. Home has become a walled garden, increasingly entered not by neighbors, but by delivery drivers and service workers. When everything can be brought to us, going out—to the grocery store, the pharmacy, a restaurant, a movie—starts to feel like unnecessary friction. Meanwhile, shared experiences in real life are getting more expensive while solitary ones are getting cheaper.

When interaction is optional, it becomes easier to skip. Not because people don’t want connection, but because it now requires intention, planning, coordination, effort—friction. Social encounters that were once commonplace now have to be arranged. And so we have fewer interactions with other people outside our front doors.

The built environment often reinforces this pattern. Homes turn away from the street: facades are dominated by garages, otherwise blank-faced, with social life pushed out of sight; setbacks, fences, and deep front yards add visual and physical distance. Streets optimized for speed discourage lingering or casual travel on foot, and the absence of nearby cafés, shops, or parks removes everyday reasons to step outside. Exclusionary zoning, minimum lot sizes, transportation priorities, and market preferences have compounded these patterns over decades. The built environment sets the conditions for interaction: if it is designed to thwart community, staying home is often the path of least resistance.

But even a neighborhood with good bones does not safeguard against retreat.

Here in Austin, I live in a historic neighborhood in the central city. Even though the neighborhood is still car-oriented by urbanist standards, homes are close enough to the street to see who’s passing by, low fences and open yards invite conversation, sidewalks and shared streets provide space to walk and chat, and there’s just enough neighborhood retail to create reasons to leave the house. As a result, I’ve met many of my neighbors, renters and homeowners alike. We help each other with missed packages, text when a dog gets loose, take in each other’s trash cans, and stop to talk on walks or at the local coffee shop. These aren’t deep relationships, but they create a sense of familiarity and neighborliness—and little more. We still mostly live behind closed doors, even when we’re just a few steps apart. You can live here comfortably, even pleasantly, without ever participating in anything that feels like a community.

I know this firsthand. Shortly after moving in, I joined the neighborhood association and later served as acting vice president, but we never even managed a voting quorum at meetings. People who came didn’t really have a sense of what we were there for. Meanwhile, I put more of my civic energy into housing advocacy, city commissions, and the broader urbanist work I was already doing—and became part of a community there. I stopped going to neighborhood association meetings. The neighborhood remains the backdrop to my life, but not quite the stage.

The physical conditions for neighborliness were there, but they weren’t enough to sustain an organized community. Indeed, good neighborhood bones make it possible for those who want to step outside to do so—but even then, we mostly only encounter neighbors walking their dogs and pushing strollers. If we didn’t have a dog, I wonder if we would get outside half as much.

The usual explanations don’t quite resolve it. Yes, going out has gotten more expensive. Yes, technology has made staying home easier. Yes, the built environment reinforces this behavior. But even where interaction is free, even where it is easy, we are still opting out.

The answer may not be better places alone, but people willing to create and sustain connection within them.

If stepping out matters, someone has to step up.

My friend describes what that looks like in practice. She recounts the story of her neighborhood women’s club, which is defying the trend of increasing isolation with an active membership and social calendar decades after its founding. The women’s club has been around since 1958, but the only reason it has persisted for so long is because women from the neighborhood have made an effort to keep it going, and to keep it valuable. As Pari writes, “one of the biggest barriers to community in adult life is not desire. It’s friction.” Someone has to be the one who goes first:

Everyone is busy. Someone has to reach out. Someone has to pick a date. Someone has to host. Someone has to follow up. Even when we want more connection, the effort required to create it from scratch can be just enough to keep it from happening.

But in making the effort, the club’s leaders have created a structure that lowers the activation energy for everyone else. The club serves a vital role in the neighborhood, welcoming new neighbors, creating connections, and fostering lifelong family friendships. What its leaders have built is not a club sustained by obligation, but a standing invitation to participate in neighborhood life.

This is social infrastructure built on the recognition that place is not enough.

Compared to Pari’s neighborhood, my own has more of the conditions urbanists typically prize: mixed uses, sidewalks, neighborhood retail, walkability. But the comparison only underscores the point: even in a place with stronger physical conditions for interaction, organized community does not happen by default. It’s not at all effortless—and that’s the point.

A neighborhood doesn’t have to provide community. But if it doesn’t, it has to be found somewhere else. If you’re waiting for it to show up on your doorstep—even in a walkable neighborhood—you may be waiting a long time.

Somebody has to do the work.

What’s at stake here is not just convenience or preference, but the conditions that make social life possible. Loneliness and isolation are personal tragedies, but they are also civic ones. Without everyday encounters, the familiarity that makes public life feel welcoming begins to erode. When we don’t see our neighbors, everyone beyond our front doors becomes easier to ignore, easier to abstract away—not just in our neighborhoods, but in our politics, our institutions, and our common life. These fractures won’t be repaired from behind screens. They require us to show up in the same places, to see and be seen, to navigate the small frictions of living alongside one another. Frost understood this. The wall he describes may be an inconvenience, but it is also a reason to meet—a place where neighbors return, again and again, to tend and repair.

Human nature demands that we see each other: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” We don’t love walls like his—and yet we need the friction they create all the same. Instead, we’ve spent years optimizing for convenience, eliminating friction wherever we can. In succeeding, we’ve stripped away many of the small, incidental moments that gave daily life its texture. If we want community, we will have to build some friction back into our lives—good fences where we can meet and mend.

And some of us are going to have to choose to do it first.

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In 2013, I joined a small company that wanted to open a Montessori preschool in Brooklyn. We’d zeroed in on a landmarked building in a historic district. It needed extensive work, but the prospect of bringing a long-vacant space back to life in a family-friendly neighborhood seemed worth the risk. What made the site especially attractive was its zoning: preschool was allowed by right, so we wouldn’t have to go through a lengthy, expensive, and unpredictable rezoning process. As we would discover, that advantage didn’t matter. Getting the project through the development process would prove far more difficult than expected—and would ultimately send our contractor to prison.

New York’s permitting system didn’t just delay our project. It transformed what should have been a straightforward renovation into something far more complex and uncertain. In many cities, a project can be legal at every step and still fail to get built. In that sense, what we call “permitting” systems don’t actually grant permission.

They don’t just regulate development—they arrest it.

The problem in Brooklyn was that the most straightforward design could not satisfy the competing requirements of multiple agencies all at once. The building code required ADA compliance, which meant adding a ramp and elevator. The ramp conflicted with Department of Transportation rules governing the sidewalk. Both changes altered a historic facade, triggering review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. And everything still needed approval from the Department of Health. The only path forward was a total redesign. It required reengineering the entrance at the expense of precious classroom space, all of which delayed construction and added significant cost. We assembled a small army to navigate the approvals: a construction consultant, a permit expediter, a preservation consultant, and eventually a lobbyist. We met with elected officials to secure their support, and then we relied on them to apply pressure on agencies when our project inevitably got stuck in the process. In practice, getting approvals meant not just satisfying the rules, but navigating the politics around them.

Even that wasn’t enough. The delays and shutdowns pushed our contractor into insolvency. He resorted to fraud to stay afloat—a fact we only discovered after months of inexplicable inactivity on site. Complexity doesn’t justify criminality, but a simpler system might have avoided it. We eventually got our preschool open, but not before spending millions of extra dollars, missing more than an entire school year, losing hired teaching staff and enrolled families, and having to change contractors midway.

New York is an extreme example of dysfunction, but less drastic versions of this kind of development hell are common in many cities.

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Remote work promises freedom: from offices, from commutes, even from place itself. But that freedom may not be as free as it appears. Tyler Denk, the CEO of newsletter platform beehiiv, recently took to LinkedIn to extol its virtues. Six years after the pandemic rapidly accelerated the prevalence of remote work, it’s not hard to see why many love it: it cuts office expenses, it eliminates commuting time, it allows companies to hire the best people for the job wherever they live, and it increases productivity. For Denk personally, remote work has given him “lifestyle arbitrage,” allowing him to live a much richer life in Medellín, Colombia, with a private chef, a maid, and penthouse views. Denk said, “Fully remote over mandatory in-office is a hill I will die on.” Having worked remotely in various capacities over the years, I know the freedom and mobility it offers, too.

And yet, what looks like a triumph over place-bound work isn’t one: the remote work lifestyle depends entirely on people who cannot be remote at all.

Denk’s setup is extreme, but the underlying dynamic applies even to more modest remote work arrangements. While knowledge workers enjoy the comforts of home, their daily needs are met by an army of in-person workers: childcare providers watch the kids, HVAC technicians and landscapers maintain the house, logistics workers in warehouses facilitate the on-demand deliveries that show up on doorsteps. Even when remote workers step out to a local café, the people serving them are serving them there—in a fixed location that is optional for the knowledge worker but mandatory for the barista—on streets maintained and kept safe by a battalion of police, EMTs, sanitation workers, and utility technicians.

The freedom to be untethered from a specific place rests on a layer of people who remain very much tethered to it.

Indeed, only about 22% of the workforce can work remotely at least part of the time, with levels correlating directly with educational attainment. For the vast majority, remote work is aspirational—and mostly unattainable. That’s because mobility isn’t evenly distributed across work. The closer you are to abstraction and decision-making, the more mobile your work becomes; the closer you are to execution, the more place-bound it remains. Disparities like this aren’t new. The problem is failing to recognize who is supporting the hill remote-work die-hards are standing on: Denk’s “lifestyle arbitrage” depends on the tethered reality of local labor. His penthouse views come with blind spots.

These kinds of blind spots aren’t new.

In 2016, many people in dense, prosperous cities like New York, where I lived at the time, were genuinely shocked by the election results. The morning after, at the Montessori school I ran, there were more tears shed by parents than children. And yet, just weeks earlier, a visit to my in-laws in Northern Maryland had offered a very different view: in the working-class neighborhoods surrounding their gated community, Trump signs were everywhere. If you stayed within the confines of Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn, or other “gated” communities, you wouldn’t have seen much that challenged the prevailing view—you’d have had to go to Staten Island for that.

For coastal elitists like myself, entire categories of the American experience had been filtered out of view. Our picture of what America looked like was riddled with blind spots, and many of us missed the real divides emerging in our national life.

That divide mapped closely onto economic mobility. Some people could move toward opportunity, participating in a global economy that rewarded flexibility and abstraction, obtaining the best jobs and the best homes in the best cities. Many others were stuck in place, tied to a job, an underwater mortgage, or a town whose best days were long behind it.

The pandemic only accelerated this divide. For those in the knowledge economy, work grew even more detached from place as global mobility became a real option for many. Digital nomadism was no longer just a niche lifestyle choice but a way of life for an increasing number of people who saw the world’s cities as places to forage for opportunity. Meanwhile, for those whose work required physical presence, they were not only tethered to place, but exposed by it: to health risks, to rigid schedules, to the strains of a convulsing world. We briefly called them “essential workers,” a moment of clarity about interdependence that faded almost as quickly as it appeared.

What has emerged from all that was not only a shift in where people lived, but in how they experienced the world.

For knowledge workers, remote work has produced a kind of digital suburbia. The original suburbs offered an escape from the frictions of city life—crowding, noise, disorder—by separating daily life into zones connected by car. The digital version goes further. In digital suburbia, whether at the top of a penthouse or in a suburban subdivision, the home is the center of all aspects of daily life. Work, food, services, and entertainment are all mediated through and delivered to the home, minimizing the need to engage with the outside world at all. But this convenience still depends on a fully place-bound workforce to keep it running. The difference now is that, instead of you having to go to it, everything comes to you.

For those whose lives are fully immersed in digital suburbia, it’s easy to have blind spots about what and who makes it all possible.

Cities have been slow to adapt to this new reality. For some, the city now feels optional, flexible, even frictionless. For others, it remains rigid, expensive, and unforgiving. Cities are now caught in a simple bind: the people with the most freedom to leave no longer need to stay, while the people who make urban life possible can no longer afford to.

City leaders tend to treat these as separate problems. They’re not. In order for a city to be attractive to the highly mobile 20%, it must be affordable for the 80% who make that lifestyle possible. The highly mobile can take the lifestyle with them—to the mountains of Montana or Medellín, or to more mundane actual suburbs.

Many city leaders still struggle to accept the premise. Why would anyone give up the weather of Los Angeles or the amenities of New York for places like Austin or Charlotte? And yet, the Census data is clear: people continue to leave high-cost cities for cheaper ones. At the same time, many cities are still only tinkering around the edges of zoning reform even as rents reach record highs. School districts are hemorrhaging students as families escape to family-friendly housing in the suburbs. Municipal budgets are strained by rising costs, competing priorities, aging infrastructure, and unfunded pensions. Service cuts, higher taxes, and harder times appear to be the only paths forward—not exactly a compelling value proposition. Pleading for the wealthy to return to pay the bills, as New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently did, is not a solution.

By failing to provide upward mobility for the 80%, cities are forcing physical mobility: pricing out place-bound workers while giving the already-mobile fewer reasons to stay. What they are confronting is not that people can leave, but a widening gap between those who can choose where to live and those who are forced to move. Cities only work when the people who depend on them—and the people they depend on—can live within them. The problem isn’t just affordability or mobility; it’s that cities are responding to both without fully seeing either.

If cities can’t keep the people who make the physical world work, they won’t be able to keep those who inhabit the digital one.

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In Central Texas, kolaches are a staple of breakfast menus, and hungry Texans gobble them up by the passel. Texans hungry for housing, meanwhile, have turned to the “Texas donut,” a common building type in which a ring of apartments wraps around a multi-level parking garage. In the past decade, Austin built a lot of them—enough to produce something almost unheard of in recent America: falling rents. Once one of the most expensive rental markets in the country, Austin is now cheaper than the national median. But even as donuts proliferated, families were leaving, school enrollment fell, and the district slipped into structural deficits. Austin had served up plenty of housing, but not much that families could live on.

Austin built enough housing to bring rents down. It didn’t build enough to keep families there.

As Pew writes in a new report, Austin built housing at a rate three times that of the national average from 2015 to 2024, adding 120,000 homes—a 30% increase in the housing stock. The result was striking: rents fell even as the city continued to grow, adding another 18,000 people from 2022 to 2024. In fact, Austin appears to have temporarily overshot demand, building enough housing to push rents down despite continued population growth. Critics have pointed to a “glut” of luxury apartments to explain this decline, but the data suggest something else. Rents fell by only 2.6% in newer luxury buildings—and by 11.4% in buildings catering to lower-income renters. As Austin’s high-tech growth machine brought in higher-income workers, those residents moved into new buildings instead of competing for older housing, easing pressure across the market. Few major U.S. cities have built at anything like this pace; in supply-constrained markets like New York and San Francisco, high-income residents are more likely to bid up older housing instead. Most of Austin’s boom, however, took the form of large apartment buildings, which have made up 47% of all homes built since 2015, compared to 25% of detached single-family homes.

In one sense, this is a clear success: Austin has become much more affordable. On the other hand, the collapse in school enrollments at Austin Independent School District tells a more complex story. Like many cities, Austin saw families leave for the suburbs during the pandemic, but enrollment losses began well before then and have continued since. Indeed, the district lost more than 10% of enrollments between the 2017/18 and 2023/24 school years, but birth rates in the district have been declining since 2015, well before the pandemic. From 2021 to 2024, only 45–47% of children born in the district enrolled in kindergarten. Most did not switch to private schools—they left for the suburbs. Meanwhile, the city’s fastest-growing demographic is residents aged 65 and older, many of whom remain in large single-family homes in the urban core. The central city has increasingly become a haven for wealthy households, retirees, and childless couples. In effect, Austin succeeded in housing its incoming workforce, but in doing so it reshaped who the city is most accessible to.

This isn’t just a story about demographics. It’s a story about what kinds of housing Austin built—and what it didn’t.

The deeper problem is the cost of family-friendly housing. Austin has plenty of expensive single-family homes and plenty of apartments, but very little in between: townhomes, family-sized condos, and small apartment buildings—the “Missing Middle.” For young families, the available options don’t line up: detached homes are often out of reach, while large apartment buildings rarely offer the space, stability, or path to ownership they seek. Much of the new housing built during the boom has been one- to two-bedroom units in Texas donuts—not the larger, ownership-oriented homes that many families are looking for.

The question isn’t whether Austin built enough housing. It’s why it built so little of the kind families actually need.

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It’s the stench that gets you. Television has desensitized us to suffering and violence, but the tart smell of unwashed bodies and the effluvia of an encampment still offend the nose, if not the eye. It’s only experience that turns the visual visceral. More than once, I’ve dodged a mentally ill person stumbling into oncoming traffic while driving to the gym in Austin. I’ve yanked my dog away from used needles hidden in the grass in San Francisco. I’ve sat on a crowded New York subway while a fidgety man flicked a razor blade in and out of his mouth. If you’ve spent any time in America’s cities in recent years, you’ve probably had an experience like this as well. If we’re lucky, these signs of disorder are merely sensory offenses, but they have become familiar features of life in many downtowns and on transit systems.

Liberal governance is often blamed for this—but disorder is anathema to the truly liberal city.

, who has literally walked across cities worldwide, has written a lot about disorder on America’s streets. In a recent essay, written from “spotless” Seoul, he laments that “We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening.” Arnade blames our “culture of individuality,” which elevates self-expression over citizenship and fuels “antisocial tendencies” like drug abuse and mental illness.

Writing in response to Arnade, shares his concern about disorder but diagnoses it differently. The problem, he argues, is not merely a culture of individuality or soft-on-crime politics, but a deeper strain of American “folk-libertarianism,” the instinctive belief that no one should tell you what to do. Reflecting on his travels in Asia—echoing Arnade’s observations from Korea—he found the orderly public behavior there almost oppressive: free of disorder, but also of spontaneity. America’s “you-do-you” ethos, which tolerates more disruption and rudeness, may be more appealing to American sensibilities. As he puts it, America’s “deeply individualist culture…really is incompatible with density and living in close proximity with a lot of people all the time,” although he thinks we’ve erred too far on the side of individualism.

I agree with Arnade and Del Mastro that culture matters here, and that ideas of American individualism shape how we experience public space. They’re also right that American society tolerates a wider range of behavior than many others. But what we are seeing on our streets is not simply the tail of that distribution. Shooting up on a street corner or screaming into the void are not examples of individualistic self-expression. They are symptoms of people who can no longer exercise their freedom within the bounds of a shared civic order.

Instead, the problem with our cities is that they aren’t individualistic enough.

In our political discourse, we tend to talk about “individualism” in unhelpful ways. In the framing that Arnade and Del Mastro employ, both “protest speech” and “pissing in a subway car” could fall under a broad-brush definition of individualist self-expression. But these are entirely different things. Political individualism embodies the tradition of respecting and protecting individual rights: to speak, to assemble, to secure contracts, and the like. This is the classical liberal tradition, and the foundation of the American system. Political individualism—otherwise known as liberalism—means that every person’s rights must be protected equally, under the rule of law. Those rights are reciprocal: my freedom exists alongside yours, not at its expense. Our 250-year history has often been a fight to make that actually true.

Conversely, individuality is how we express ourselves and behave in public. It can range from the morally meaningless—blue hair, goth clothing, punk music—to behaviors that create minor externalities, like smoking or talking loudly. But it does not include monopolizing public goods, destroying property, or outright violence. Individuality derives in part from individual rights, but it is not a free pass. Personal authenticity does not entitle you to YOLO your way into crimes against humanity.

Treating destructive behavior that imposes costs on others as “individualism” undermines the concept of political individualism and, with it, the system of equal rights that makes it meaningful. This conflation leads us away from solutions and toward the sad conclusion that urban disorder is the inevitable price of American liberty. But it’s actually the opposite that’s true.

Disorder is not a consequence of political individualism. It’s a failure to enforce it.

Political individualism requires more than formal rights on paper; it requires the protection of shared space in practice. A society committed to equal liberty must enforce the norms that allow millions of strangers to coexist in dense urban environments. When homeless encampments colonize public parks, or the mentally ill take over public bathrooms, or addicts shoot up and drop needles in school zones, a small number of disruptive actors are effectively allowed to privatize public space. Everyone else loses the freedom to use it.

But this disorder is not only a violation of the public’s rights. It is also profoundly inhumane to the people living in it, as I argued in “We’re All Experiencing Homelessness.” Leaving the severely mentally ill to deteriorate on the street, or addicts to slowly poison themselves in public view, is often framed as compassion. It’s actually an abdication of responsibility. A liberal society that takes individual rights seriously has obligations not only to protect the public, but also to intervene when people can no longer meaningfully exercise their own freedom. In that sense, Arnade is right that empathy demands intervention. But if his moral case is correct, the causal explanation lies elsewhere. The disorder visible on American streets is not a triumph of individuality or political individualism, nor does it arise from people “broken by our celebration of freedom.”

It reflects the breakdown of the liberal institutions that once sustained urban life.

Those institutions operated across several domains: housing, health care, and the systems that enforced basic norms of public order. In each case, the failure is not simply one of policy, but of the institutions themselves. In high-opportunity cities, land-use regimes have become fundamentally illiberal, mired in anti-democratic proceduralism and rigid regulation, preventing us from building enough housing. Older forms of inexpensive urban housing like SROs were regulated or banned out of existence. At the same time, we dismantled large parts of the mental-health system without building adequate alternatives, putting thousands of people who might have lived in cheap rooms or supervised institutions out on the street. The result was modern street homelessness. Layered on top of this is an opioid crisis that has dramatically intensified the disorder associated with street homelessness.

Our approach to policing disorder has likewise become incoherent. We criminalize public activity that causes no real harm—like selling loosies or food cart vending—while failing to enforce what actually does, like fare evasion, shoplifting, and open-air dealing. At the same time, we ask police to manage problems they are not equipped to solve, from mental illness to chronic homelessness, without providing the institutional capacity—beds, treatment, and housing—that make enforcement possible. Meanwhile, the informal mechanisms that once sustained civic order—from Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” to the occasional finger-wagging “Karen”—have closed the blinds or become suspect. This is rational: informal norms only function when they are backed by formal institutions. When neither formal nor informal enforcement works well, civic order inevitably degrades—and an “Age of Assholes” emerges.

A liberal order cannot exist without functioning institutions that protect both individual rights and the shared spaces in which those rights are exercised.

Cities were the shared spaces in which those institutions first emerged. Long before liberal rights were codified in law, cities created spaces where individuals could live more freely than they could under older social hierarchies. As I wrote in “The Freedom of the City,” this idea was captured by the medieval German phrase Stadtluft macht frei—city air makes you free. For centuries, cities allowed people marginalized by mainstream society to live more freely, both politically and socially. Before minorities, women, and gays had equal rights, cities often allowed forms of life that were illegal or taboo elsewhere: interracial neighborhoods, single women living independently, gay bars and social networks, dissident salons, underground music scenes, safe harbors for immigrants. This was not tolerance of disorder, but of difference: a willingness to allow people to live differently so long as they could live together. Urban life thus allowed people to become individuals in the political sense, and from that freedom, social individuality followed. Rather than being at odds with cities, individualism has historically been one of the conditions that made urban life possible—and individuality one of the forces that made it vibrant.

Today, the threat to the liberal city is not individualism or the tolerance of difference, but the erosion of the institutions that once kept disorder in check. The liberal city—one in which people are politically free to live as full individuals—has always depended on rules of civility, functioning institutions, and the enforcement of norms when they are broken. When that civic order erodes, urban life itself begins to deteriorate. Modern cities remain one of the greatest expressions of liberal civilization, but they only work when the civic order that sustains them is taken seriously and safeguarded. Restoring that order requires more than resolve; it means rebuilding the institutions—and the expectations—that make shared freedom possible.

Disorder is not the price of liberty in the city. It is evidence of its retreat.

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Along its 12,000 miles of curb, New York City has more than three million parking spaces—and only 2.5 percent of them metered. In a city where land routinely sells for thousands of dollars per square foot, that means millions of square feet of some of the world’s most valuable real estate are effectively given away for free. The idea of charging for some of that space is now under discussion at City Hall, and it makes a lot of fiscal sense: a recent report estimates that metering only 25 percent of existing free on-street spots could raise $1.21 billion in new revenue annually. In a city facing a major budget crunch, the streets themselves may be paved with gold.

Yet the policy debate in New York is oddly inverted. At the same time City Hall is considering charging for curb space, it is also debating eliminating fares on city buses. Both questions turn on the same basic issue: how should scarce transportation infrastructure be priced?

The logic is easy to see in parking. As economist Donald Shoup showed in The High Cost of Free Parking, when curb space is priced at zero the consequences show up elsewhere: more congestion from drivers circling for spaces, more idling and cruising, and less street space available for other uses. Pricing even a fraction of New York’s curb space would force the city to confront what that land is actually worth. Some of it may still be best used for parking, but pricing makes that trade-off visible rather than hidden, opening the door to higher-value uses like bus lanes, wider sidewalks, or outdoor dining.

Charging for curb space is commonplace. Cities large and small across the United States use parking meters and residential permits to manage demand for street space. Yet transportation debates rarely unfold in such practical terms. Instead they are quickly recast as ideological battles: transit denounced as socialism, highways celebrated as freedom.

But this systemic ideological framing largely misses the point. The United States already operates a deeply hybrid transportation system in which public infrastructure and private vehicles coexist across every mode. Roads are publicly built but used by all types of vehicles and services; rail infrastructure may be public or private while passenger service often runs across both. The only fully private passenger transportation network in the country—and the tenth largest transit system by ridership—is owned by none other than Mickey Mouse.1

The real ideological conflict is not about ownership, but about the instincts that shape how the system is run.

One of those instincts is what Ezra Klein has called “everything bagel liberalism.” The phrase captures the tendency to load a single policy with every worthy progressive goal at once. Transportation policy is no exception. Instead of focusing on moving people efficiently from one place to another, transit systems are layered with policy poppy seeds and onion flakes: climate goals, labor rules, equity mandates, environmental reviews, and social justice objectives. Each may be reasonable on its own, but taken together they can make transit systems slower, more expensive, or impossible to build at all. In New York, where every project must satisfy a stack of environmental reviews, labor mandates, procurement rules, and political oversight, the result is a system that isn’t just slow but prohibitively expensive—contributing to construction costs more than $2.5 billion per mile, among the highest in the world.

It’s the poor outcomes this instinct yields that generate most of the vitriol from opponents on the right. But the right has its own flawed instinct, which we might call “car-brain conservatism.”

Whereas transit is often derided as socialism, driving on government-built roads in government-licensed vehicles manufactured to government-dictated safety and fuel standards, powered by government-mandated ethanol, and parked on government-provided spaces somehow remains an emblem of American freedom. Decades of highway expansion, “free” parking, and auto-oriented land use have trained us to ignore the enormous subsidies embedded in car infrastructure, making alternatives seem politically infeasible. As a result, policy continues to prioritize automobiles at the expense of other modes.

Freedom isn’t free—but parking must be.

But of course auto-centric infrastructure is not free. Gas taxes no longer cover the full cost of building and maintaining highways, forcing general taxpayers to fill the gap while cities inherit billions in long-term road maintenance liabilities. Even highway agencies are beginning to acknowledge the limits of this approach. The Texas Department of Transportation has warned that the long-standing “just one more lane” strategy cannot solve congestion in dense urban areas where land is scarce and expansion costs are rising.

The “everything bagel” and “car-brain” instincts also distort our perception of risk. Because we have socialized the cost of road space, we have normalized roughly 40,000 annual road deaths as the cost of a car-dependent society, while rare deaths on transit systems make headlines. Critics on the right are not entirely wrong to note that transit systems are often expected to function as de facto homeless shelters and refuges for people with untreated mental illness. But isolated crimes on buses or subways are then treated as evidence that transit itself is unsafe. Transit often takes the blame for failures elsewhere in public policy. What’s missed is that transit not only can and should be safe. New York itself demonstrated this in the 1990s, when enforcing fare rules helped restore order on the subways. It is also demonstrably much safer than driving on the streets: in 2025, New York City recorded 205 traffic deaths, including 111 pedestrians and 20 bicyclists, and more than 47,000 injuries—compared to the four people killed on the subway.

Safety is just one example of a broader problem: transportation debates are constantly diverted into symbolic or ideological arguments that obscure how these systems actually function. The real issue is simpler: transportation infrastructure is scarce and expensive. The practical question is how to allocate it—and pricing is one of the most powerful tools for doing so.

Three recent developments show how pricing reveals the trade-offs involved in allocating scarce transportation infrastructure.

In California, the BART regional rail system recently made headlines when it reported that installing more than 700 fare gates generated $10 million in new annual revenue while sharply reducing crime and maintenance costs. The lesson is simple: systems that allow unrestricted free access sacrifice both revenue and order, while systems that enforce fares recover both.

A second example highlights the opportunity costs involved in treating infrastructure as free. NYU’s Marron Institute has quantified the opportunity costs New York faces if it adopts fare-free buses. For roughly the same cost—$1 billion per year—the MTA could build forty-one miles of new subway lines, expanding access to transit deserts while enabling the construction of more than 167,000 new homes near sixty-four new stations.

Finally, a federal judge recently upheld New York’s congestion pricing program, which charges drivers a toll to enter Manhattan. Early results from the MTA’s first-year data show the policy is working: vehicle entries into the Congestion Relief Zone fell 11%, morning rush-hour crossing speeds rose an average of 23%, transit ridership increased 7% system-wide, and more than $500 million in new revenue is flowing toward transit improvements. Pricing scarce road space both reduces congestion and generates the resources needed to improve the broader transportation system.

Together these examples point to the questions transportation policy should actually be asking: Does the system reach people? Can they afford to use it? And are incentives aligned so that it functions efficiently?

In other words, it’s all about: access, affordability, and efficiency.

Of these three goals, affordability was central to Mayor Mamdani’s proposal to eliminate bus fares. The idea is meant to make transit cheaper, faster to board, and more equitable. But eliminating the farebox would also remove a critical revenue stream that helps sustain the transit system and fund improvements that could meaningfully improve travel times. As Works in Progress and Vital City have argued, buses are slow because they lack dedicated lanes and stop far too frequently. Prioritizing free fares would induce demand for buses, reduce demand for subways, and do nothing to address the infrastructure problems that make buses the slowest mode in the system, all while draining resources from it. If affordability is the true concern, the solution isn’t to turn a vital, capital-intensive system into a costly welfare-on-wheels program—it’s to make existing subsidy programs like New York’s badly under-enrolled Fair Fares program work.

But if affordability comes at the expense of access and efficiency, is it really affordable?

In fact, putting a price on infrastructure can improve access, affordability, and efficiency all at once. Congestion pricing has reduced traffic, improved travel speeds, and generated new funding for transit improvements. Charging for curb space would extend that same logic to another scarce part of the transportation system. Pricing even a fraction of the city’s free curb parking could manage demand for street space while generating significant new revenue for transit improvements or expansion. And the roughly $1 billion per year that fare-free buses would cost could instead fund major subway expansions, bringing rapid transit to neighborhoods that lack it today. Revenue from transportation pricing doesn’t just improve the system—it expands what the city and its transit agencies can afford to do.

Neither everything-bagel liberalism nor car-brain conservatism offers a useful guide to transportation policy. If we want to help those who struggle to afford transportation, we should let welfare be welfare and let transit be transit. That means acknowledging scarcity, pricing infrastructure in line with its real costs, and investing where it expands access the most. Transportation infrastructure is both essential and expensive. Our goal should not be to make it free, but to make mobility abundant.

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