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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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Bullets rained down on the streets of Austin less than twenty-four hours after bombs began falling on Iran. Three people were killed and thirteen others wounded when a gunman opened fire at a crowded Sixth Street bar early Sunday morning. Police killed him minutes later. At first the two events seemed unrelated: another mass shooting in America, tragic but familiar. Only later did details emerge suggesting the attack was symbolically tied to the war unfolding in the Middle East. Local leaders are fond of saying that Austin is a global city. Last weekend, the world came to Austin in a darker way.

Yet if we look plainly at what happened on Sixth Street that morning, something deeper comes into view. The shooter meant to kill innocent people. But he also struck at the basic condition of city life: strangers gathering together in the same place, sharing the same streets, the same music, and the same night.

The shooting was an attack on the freedom of the city itself.

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The Milan-Cortina Olympics drew me in almost by accident and held my attention for the next two weeks. Part of it was the spectacle: there were Quad Gods and ice queens, Snoop Doggs and domestic divas, heartbreaks and comebacks, chased dreams and crushed dreams—and Stanley Tucci sipping espresso. But beyond the spectacle was something deeper: the show of excellence. The Olympic spirit slices through winter on the blade of a skate, the edge of a cross-country ski, the runners of a bobsled. It soars off the half-pipe, leaps into a triple-axel, snaps into the net, and plows uphill. It sticks the landing—and even when it doesn’t, it gets back up again. It’s the human spirit conquering winter: our own bodies, our own nature, Mother Nature herself.

If the Olympic torch symbolized that spirit, the Promethean flame pulsed at night in Cortina, Livigno, and Milan, illuminating La Scala, the Duomo, the Naviglio Grande before filtering into the plazas and ancient streets beyond. By day, the snow-mantled Dolomites framed alpine villages nestled in valleys at the bottom of the slopes—themselves a reminder that civilization runs downhill.

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I have not been so into the Olympics, in any season, in years. Perhaps it was the athletics, the stunning scenery, the NBC production value, the afterglow of Heated Rivalry.1 It might have been more personal: these were the first I had watched since snapping on ski boots again a few years ago, after a 17-year hiatus from the sport. The Games began only a couple weeks after I’d skied in Northern Japan’s Furano, so the memories were fresh and visceral: the scrape of skis against snow, the blast of alpine air against my face, the lactic burn in my legs.2

Recent Games have been harder to love, overshadowed by geopolitics and controversy. The Sochi Olympics, with their Potemkin ski resort, mirrored Russia’s Potemkin democracy only weeks before it seized Crimea. Pyeongchang marked the primetime debut of the now-ubiquitous drone show and the high noon of South Korea’s abortive Sunshine Policy towards the hermetic North. The 2022 Beijing Games were an about-face from the world-stunning 2008 Olympics, with much of the world shunning them after sixteen years of intensifying repression—from the Uyghurs to Hong Kong to “Zero-Covid.”

Beyond geopolitics, the Olympics came to seem inseparable from scandal: corruption at the IOC, doping among athletes, cities bankrupted by monument building and left with modern-day ruins. Others have used the Games to justify sweeping infrastructure projects, while swatting away environmental or displacement concerns. More recently, host cities have tried a different approach: building less and making better use of what already exists. London converted its Olympic Village into a mixed-use neighborhood. Paris showcased the city itself rather than expensive new monuments and will turn its athletes’ village into housing. Still they had their problems.

This is not to say that Milan-Cortina was pristine or painless. Critics protested the felling of hundreds of trees for a bobsled track that even the IOC discouraged. Residents of Milan’s once-working-class Porta Romana district resisted development amid fears of further gentrification. There were the inevitable absurdities: “Penisgate” in ski jumping and a shortage of condoms in the Olympic Village. Yet these controversies never became the story of the Games themselves. There was too much else going on—the athleticism was real, the arenas were, too. The Games unfolded across a living landscape, so the flaws felt like the messy frictions of a real city rather than the hollow theatrics of a rotting regime.

A prosperous city in a peaceful country, Milan showed the world a different face of the Olympics—one that showcased its man-made terrain as much as its natural beauty.

Milan is a living city in a working region, one connected to the alpine valleys where winter sport became a way of life. Civilization settled here more than 2,600 years ago and spread into the surrounding valleys that today host ski resorts. Milan may not inspire the same oohing and aahing as Venice, Florence, or Rome but as Italy’s fashion, financial, and industrial capital, it sings its own arias. It belongs to a landscape where winter is not an abstraction but a season to be mastered. From Milan’s streets the same civilization extends upward into the mountains.

The Games captured something I’ve always loved about winter life: the triumph over winter itself. If civilization accumulates in the valleys, modern technology carries it uphill.

Gondolas and chairlifts trundle along steel spines up manicured slopes carved from mountain faces, carrying humanity into a cultivated landscape of lodges and lift stations, restaurants and restrooms—islands of warmth and light in an otherwise hostile terrain. Here, the wilderness comes into view: snow-capped peaks in one direction, the backcountry in another, the sky above it all. We traverse this landscape of packed snow on composite strips of wood and metal and carbon fiber, enclosed by the pines or, if above the tree line, by the contours of those who have gone before. The magic of the mountain is maintained by man—everything else would by its nature kill us.

As the shadows grow long and the sun begins its sharp descent, we ski downhill. Down St. Anton’s slopes where Austrian shepherds still graze their sheep, into valleys where Furano’s meadows fill with lavender, into the streets of Crested Butte and Telluride where coal dust and gold dust once fell like snow.3 It is there, at day’s end, that one enjoys the immensely civilized custom of après ski, sipping schnapps by fireplaces in mountain lodges or around fire pits in Adirondack chairs.4 Afterwards, the spirit warmed, skiers walk kintsugi streets in awkward boots back to their lodgings before setting out again on sneakered feet for dinner.

There is urbanity here, clad in down-filled parkas and woolen mittens.

Perhaps that was what was most striking: the seemingly effortless athleticism against a backdrop of seemingly effortless urbanism. That excellence is, of course, not effortless. The athleticism reflects years of grueling training, the urbanism reflects centuries of accumulated building. Watching the Games as an urbanist on skis, I found myself drawn into an Olympics that made it all visible. At a moment when inspiration feels rare and mediocrity common, Milan-Cortina reminds us—in the extraordinary figures of its athletes and the basic urbanism of its streets—that winter can be mastered. Between these hills and valleys, excellence becomes part of the ordinary landscape. The ski trails carved into the mountains slope back to civilization, where tomorrow the gondolas will rise again, lifting us towards Olympus.

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Japan is famous for its infrastructure. A vast lattice of tubes and conduits spans the country, overhead and underfoot—a system engineered to keep a nation moving. In individual compartments, the system responds to your presence, announcing your arrival with a custom jingle: then, the doors open automatically, friendly icons and wayfinding guide first-time users, and the seats are warm in winter. One is never left waiting long, the journey is always comfortable, and when it’s over, everything is whisked away without a trace. This is a system designed for people who have to go.

I’m talking, of course, about Japan’s public toilets.

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While in Japan a couple weeks ago, we took trains frequently around Tokyo and Kyoto. The trains were amazing, but what really impressed me were the bathrooms. No matter if we were riding the Shinkansen, commuter rail, or the metro, every station had free public restrooms available outside the gates and on most train platforms, above and below ground. Aside from the robotic toilet seats, the restrooms themselves were unremarkable. They were what bathrooms ought to be: gleaming, well-tended, free of trash, broken mirrors, grimy floors, nasty odors, and graffiti. This wasn’t the result of a national obsession with hygiene—many bathrooms annoyingly lacked hand dryers or paper towels—but rather a totally different set of assumptions about how public space should be used and valued.

Japan’s restrooms are not merely a nice public amenity but an essential part of Japan’s mobility system. The robo-toilets are cool and all, but it’s this basic technology of civic infrastructure that allows cities overflowing with millions of mobile people to feel clean, calm, and orderly. In Japan, when you’re on the go and you’ve got to go, you can just…keep going.

The American mind cannot comprehend this. Contrast this with the typical experience in a US city. Where public restrooms exist, they are either poorly kept or hard to reach. In Washington Square Park last summer, the restroom was so coated in grime that touching the sink felt like contamination—and there was no soap to wash it off. At Manhattan’s Hudson Yards around Christmas, I wandered through a multi-level warren of luxury boutiques in search of a bathroom. This is not only a New York problem, of course.1 While walking along Austin’s lakeside trail recently, I encountered a locked-up public toilet that stood like a relic of some lost civilization:

Look on my Public Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The ruins of ancient cities reveal that sanitation was one of civilization’s first problems, and public toilets one of its earliest solutions. As Ben Wilson recounts in Metropolis, the builders of Mohenjo-Daro, located in what today is Pakistan, installed flush toilets in every household in the third millennium BC—“more than could be said for the same region of Pakistan today, 4,000 years later.” A mere two thousand years later, Rome built its famous fresh-water aqueducts and underground sewer system, along with a system of public toilets for the plebes. These communal toilets served a social function: not only did men air their thoughts in public while togas hid their privates, they would clean themselves with a communal “wiping thing,” a sponge attached to a stick called a tersorium. Roman Emperor Vespasian taxed the urine collected from public toilets for use in tanning, declaring “Pecunia non olet” (“Money does not stink”—but I bet the tersorium did).

While Tenochtitlan was providing regularly emptied public toilets for its citizens by the time the conquistadors arrived in 1519, the great industrialized cities of Europe wouldn’t begin to tackle the problem of sanitation at scale until the mid-19th century. Paris introduced the revolutionary pissoir, or open-air urinal, to its streets in 1830—only for most to be destroyed during the street-fighting of the July Revolution later that year. The pissoirs were reintroduced in 1843 as vespasiennes, in dubious honor of Emperor Vespasian, and by the 1930s the city had 1,230 public urinals. In the United Kingdom, George Jennings invented the first modern flush toilet and introduced the Victorians to public toilets, installing “monkey houses” in the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition of 1851. New York, Boston, and other cities experimented with European-style pissoirs in the mid-to-late-19th century, but ultimately abandoned them. In the early 20th century, cities including Cleveland, Denver, and Philadelphia built municipal “comfort stations” as part of a nationwide sanitation reform movement, providing access to women who often had to hold it in—or remain held back at home.

These facilities were not luxuries. They were explicit attempts to reduce street filth, improve public health, and bring order to rapidly growing cities.

For a time, Western cities treated public toilets as basic civic infrastructure, but that consensus eroded into the 20th century. From their 1930s height, Parisian pissoirs had declined to only 329 by 1966, and effectively to zero by the early 2000s—although Paris has since introduced modern, unisex public bathrooms called sanisettes. Austerity economics in the United Kingdom have led to the closure of nearly 700 public toilets since 2010, and 40% since 2004. In many other European cities, public restrooms still exist but are often behind a paywall—keeping them clean, staffed, and available. In the United States, municipal comfort stations faded after World War I. Pay toilets filled the gap, peaking at roughly 50,000 in the 1970s, only to disappear within a decade amid budget cuts and safety fears. Station bathrooms, ubiquitous in Japan, are rare here: most of the restrooms in New York City’s subway stations remain conspicuously padlocked.

Today, toilet access has been largely privatized along with every other aspect of American public life. The “public” restroom has retreated indoors, into bars and cafés and other private spaces where it has become a gated amenity “For Customers Only.” You must buy a coffee or burrito bowl for the golden ticket that unlocks the throne room.

Of course, the lack of public restrooms does not relieve the public of the need to go. Those who cannot afford a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino® Blended Beverage take to the streets—not in the French manner, but by pissing (or worse) in alleys, in doorways, behind bushes, and under sidewalk sheds. Walking to work in San Francisco one bright morning, I encountered a woman popping a squat against a four-door sedan. She at least had the decency to apologize to me as my American mind tried to comprehend what it was seeing. Still, it’s hard to blame her for the dearth of public toilets in a city in which it costs $1.7 million to build one. Walking through the Lower East Side last summer, we saw two drunk dudes relieve themselves on the street outside of the bar they had just exited from. The bar had a bathroom, but they chose the street.

This is the difference: we have come to accept disorder on our streets—but instead of restoring order, we reject the public infrastructure where disorder occurs.

Public order requires not only institutions but infrastructure—and, where necessary, enforcement. A ban on littering is mostly garbage in the absence of a trash can.2 A posted speed limit is merely a suggestion in the absence of traffic cops. In high-trust societies like Japan, order is embedded in cultural norms and maintained by the people themselves. In America, we may require attendants, security, or police to keep public spaces truly public. Here, norms have frayed and shared responsibility has eroded, so we can no longer rely on informal self-governance in our Age of Assholes. Rebuilding basic civic infrastructure is one way to begin restoring it.

Public toilets make this visible. Where they are built and maintained, predictable human needs are met in designated spaces; where they are absent or neglected, those needs spill into the street and degrade the public realm. Disorder, quite literally, flows downhill.

The existence of free, safe, clean public restrooms is emblematic of Japan’s approach to urbanism: the city is understood as a shared civic space, and citizens are expected to behave accordingly. Order is the default, not the exception. In American cities, we are still arguing over who the city is for. It is contested ground, and order is negotiable. We permit people to misuse public restrooms for illegal, unsafe, and unhygienic purposes—often because policy failures elsewhere have left them with nowhere else to go. But when our most basic civic infrastructure is repurposed as a social safety net, we don’t just fail the most vulnerable. We effectively exile everyone else from the public realm.

In the American city, the “public” restroom has been largely purged from the public square—and so we have excluded much of the public from ostensibly public places.

If the Romans left behind working aqueducts and marble latrines as markers of their civilization, the Japanese have given posterity bullet trains and robo-toilets at scale. Japanese cities are built to not only connect people, but also to accommodate them along the way. Clean, safe, public restrooms are as much a sign of civilization as a high-speed train network, revealing whether a society can maintain order in the most ordinary spaces.

A society that cannot maintain a public restroom cannot maintain public order. A society that cannot maintain public order cannot maintain its cities.

Ultimately, civilization is not measured by the heights of city spires or the speed of transit: it’s in the shitter.

Emperor Vespasian taxed public urinals because he understood that infrastructure does not fund itself. If you value this work and want to see more of it, consider becoming a paid member. I’ll continue publishing free essays, but more of my writing will be reserved for paid subscribers starting in March. Pecunia non olet!

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Tokyo greets the visitor in full force. Its scale is almost incomprehensible: a wall of buildings, a wash of light, a mass of bodies, the babel of ten million voices. And it is all in motion. From the whoosh of the Shinkansen to the unchoreographed ballet of thousands crossing at Shibuya, Tokyo is a city where people are always going somewhere—walking, wandering, but almost never lingering. Last month, I was back for the first time in fifteen years. Once I reoriented, this “megacity” revealed a different face. Off the main corridors, the scale suddenly contracts: the streets narrow, the buildings shrink, and the crowds dissolve into smaller streams of people. Beneath the incomprehensible whole lies a city that feels small-scale, intimate, and incredibly vibrant in a way few Western cities achieve.

And yet this is a city of 37 million people.

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Tokyo’s ability to fit so many people into one place isn’t the result of meticulous, top-down planning but of what Jorge Almazán and Joe McReynolds call “emergence,” the “spontaneous creation of order and functionality from the bottom up.” In their book Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, Almazán and McReynolds identify the five “ingredients” of Tokyo’s emergent urban environment: yokochō alleyways, zakkyo stacked buildings, undertrack infill development, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise, car-free neighborhoods.1 Once you know what to look for, these features are everywhere. Because they feel so natural, it’s easy to miss how they carry the weight of millions—and keep the city from being crushed by it.

Walking is my preferred way to explore a city: it’s the surest path to discovery and delight. Hidden near commercial districts and railway stations, yokochō (literally “side streets”) are warrens of narrow alleyways along which tiny bars and restaurants cluster. In these warrens, establishments serve only five to ten customers on footprints often less than 15 square meters. This smallness is the point: it lowers overhead, encourages idiosyncrasy, and helps small operators survive.

The experience of the yokochō can be intimidating: the spaces are so intimate you feel as if you are intruding on a secret. Golden Gai, once a post-war black market, now packs 250 bars into an area smaller than a soccer field. There, we found a six-seat bar where the owner hand-cut ice over cocktails and conversation. Earlier that evening, we had the worst meal of our entire 10-day trip at a yakitori stall in Omoide Yokochō—which translates as “Memory Lane” but which we’ll more fondly remember by its other moniker, “Piss Alley.” Meanwhile, we enjoyed one of the best meals of our trip on a hidden yokochō in Kyoto. The granularity of these alleyways creates a vibrant ecosystem impossible in wide-block, large floor-plate developments.

If Golden Gai is something of an oasis amid the high-rises of Shinjuku, the ward is also famous for another form of commercial density: the zakkyo, which somewhat beautifully translates to “coexisting miscellany.” The slender zakkyo buildings, typically 5 to 8 stories on narrow lots, take the logic of Golden Gai and make it vertical. They concentrate an astonishing diversity of offerings: an izakaya on the ground floor, a pachinko parlor on the second, a karaoke box above that—all advertised in bright neon signs that draw pedestrians upward. They are designed to be permeable: zakkyo buildings often feature “active edges” with stairwells and elevators open directly to the street. By shifting pedestrian traffic from the curb into vertical space, Tokyo multiplies the possibilities of every square inch.

This efficiency extends to spaces other cities consider unusable: the dead zones beneath elevated railroads and highways. In the US, “under the tracks” is usually a warning. In Tokyo, it’s an opportunity: cafés, restaurants, and shops nestle beneath the concrete ribs of rail lines and expressways, turning what Jane Jacobs called “border vacuums” into active corridors. At Ryōgoku Station, an undertrack café provided a welcome respite from the cold while we waited to enter the nearby Kokugikan Arena for the sumo championship. Even highways are integrated this way: along the Ginza Corridor of the Tokyo Expressway, rental fees from shops below help finance the road above. By treating these infrastructural leftovers as opportunities, Tokyo creates connectivity where other cities destroy it.

What’s striking, however, is that this vast city is not an endless sea of towers. Evident from the observation decks of Tokyo Skytree and Tokyo Tower, the city is largely low-to-mid rise, punctuated by clusters of skyscrapers. Perhaps most surprising is how quickly building height diminishes around the skyscrapers: indeed, much of Central Tokyo is characterized by small apartments and narrow 3-to-5-story buildings, while even some of the center and most of the suburban wards beyond the Yamanote Line are dominated by dense low-rise neighborhoods of one-to-two-story homes.

These neighborhoods have very small lots, high lot coverage, and narrow, ancient alleys and laneways called roji. Occasionally, a winding, pedestrian-only street betrays its history as an ankyo—a “dark canal” paved over in the rush to modernize. Tokyo has an average density of 38,000 per square mile, yet these neighborhoods feel unexpectedly calm. This is because cars are largely absent. Most of the roji predate modern width requirements, making driving impractical and sidewalks unnecessary. In their absence, the street becomes a shared, safe space for walking and community. These neighborhoods are often ringed by arterial roads where taller buildings cluster, but commerce is allowed almost everywhere. Single-family homes can host small businesses, and most areas are anchored by shōtengai, pedestrian shopping promenades that serve as neighborhood arteries. These areas feel like villages, yet they support a density sufficient to sustain world-class public transit.

Today’s village feel is an echo of an invisible past. Almazán and McReynolds argue that although few buildings from the pre-Meiji Edo period survive—the average age of a home in Tokyo’s low-rise neighborhoods is just 30 years—“Edo’s heritage is visible all across Tokyo, embodied not by individual works of architecture but rather by the city’s underlying physical and social configuration.” The small parcels of land and the human-scale street grid are the bones of the seventeenth-century castle town, persisting through fire, war, booms, and busts.

After the firebombing of World War II, much of Tokyo was rebuilt along the preexisting property lines. Where American planners might have seen an opportunity for wholesale clearance and rationalized grids, Tokyo’s property owners rebuilt on their own parcels, preserving the historic, organic street network. In many cases, infrastructure was added through a system of land readjustment, in which owners pooled land for streets and transit improvements and then received smaller, more valuable plots in return—a process that allowed the city to modernize without the mass dispossession that defined American urban renewal.2

That continuity allowed Tokyo to modernize without erasing its underlying structure, preserving the connective, human-scale fabric that still defines the city today—and helping keep large parts of the city within reach of ordinary residents.

It’s not a perfect place. There are few parks, green spaces, and plazas—and when there are, they are likely to be bereft of benches. Greenery emerges in bursts of potted plants, small gardens, and shrines tucked into the interstitial spaces of the city’s neighborhoods. Outdoor dining and drinking are almost unheard of. In the run-up to the 1964 Olympics, Japan engaged in a Robert Moses-style spree of urban highway building, while the city’s experiments with “towers in the park” modernism are as soul-crushing as they are anywhere.3 Meanwhile, the prevailing building trend is what Almazán and McReynolds call “corporate-led urbanism,” typified by megadevelopments like Roppongi Hills and Azabudai Hills. These “towers in the mall” are essentially closed systems, designed to exclude the city rather than extend it, breaking up the circulatory network and turning their backs on the traditional Tokyo street.4

But the traditional Tokyo street itself follows a different logic.

As Almazán and McReynolds write, “the street is first and foremost treated as a space to move, not to linger.” This is a relatively recent shift. Edo-era streets were places for both commerce and community, but postwar policy choices—restrictions on street stalls, modernist traffic separation, and restrictive police management—gradually pushed activity indoors. Even the few benches that exist in Tokyo’s public spaces are often designed to discourage long stays. The street here is a place to move through, not to settle into. Tokyo is, in that sense, a network of edges built for dispersion rather than nodes meant for lingering. A city like Lisbon, by contrast, is a network of nodes. When I visited last year, its streets and plazas offered a nearly continuous public–private interface: places to sit, sip, and watch the world go by.

In Tokyo, the people are in motion, and the world is a blur.

Tokyo is a city optimized for circulation. This doesn’t make it a bad place, just a different one. Because temperatures were below freezing during our visit, we weren’t looking for al fresco dining—and we didn’t need to. If the European plaza is an extension of urban living space, Tokyo’s street network is a series of hallways leading to a much larger indoor realm. That is where the lingering happens: in the six-seat bars, the third-floor cafés, and the basement izakayas. While the streets of Europe provide breathtaking views, Tokyo’s public realm provides a network of inner discovery. It is not a city of vistas, but a city of doorways.

Can any of this emergent serendipity translate to Western cities? We see flashes of it at times: a Japanese-inspired bar in an Austin alley, or the hidden murals and establishments of Freeman Alley in Manhattan. But these remain exceptions. Our highways still carve border vacuums instead of supporting the surrounding community, our neighborhoods still separate homes from commerce instead of layering them together. Parking minimums, single-use zoning, and rigid life-safety codes make the kind of small-scale diversity seen in Tokyo difficult to reproduce.

The deeper lesson is not aesthetic but structural: American cities are unlikely to look like Tokyo, but they could aspire to be more connected like it. A city of millions only feels livable when its parts are closely stitched together—when streets, buildings, and transit form a continuous network rather than a series of isolated destinations. Tokyo works not because it is orderly or monumental or even beautiful, but because almost everything connects. Its streets make space for all the “coexisting miscellany” of urban life to move about freely—and that connection might be the most important ingredient of all.

Tokyo works because of its “coexisting miscellany.” My work at City of Yes is dedicated to understanding how we can bring that kind of serendipity to our own cities. To keep this work sustainable, I am moving to a more frequent paywall model starting this month. I’ll still publish free essays, but more of my essays will be reserved for paid members. If you value this work, consider joining the nearly 100 paid members who make it possible. Thank you!

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Hi. I’m traveling in Japan this week, so I’m resurfacing an essay I wrote in 2024 that feels newly relevant after last week’s “The Age of Assholes”. Enjoy—and I’ll see you next week with some thoughts on Japanese urbanism. —RP

Cosmo Kramer is perhaps the world’s worst neighbor. Inconsiderate of personal space and prone to explode through Jerry Seinfeld’s door at any moment, he’s a caricature of what non-city people imagine urban life is like—loud, intrusive, literally on top of each other. On the other hand, Seinfeld presents Jerry’s apartment as a sort of urban refuge, a place where his friends George and Elaine can easily and effortlessly “pop in” to gossip and kvetch and overshare. They enjoy the kind of regular social interaction that makes their little group cohere, even if they collectively exhibit a “callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent.”1

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

While Jerry confesses to hating the pop-in, it’s something of a trope in television. In Will & Grace, Jack fabulously sashays his way into Will and Grace’s apartment. In Friends, Monica’s ludicrously large illegal sublet is the nexus for her sextet and Phoebe’s pop-ins. Or Kimmy Gibler bursting into the Tanner home on Full House, Urkel irritating the Winslows on Family Matters, and Barney Stinson barging into Ted’s apartment on How I Met Your Mother.2

The trope is largely a made-for-TV myth.

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Real adult life is largely bereft of the pop-in friend—and I think it might be for the worse. When we lived on West 44th Street in Manhattan, we had one friend who would occasionally buzz up after getting a haircut in the salon in our (smart, walkable, mixed-use) building. These visits involved no planning, no expectations, nothing more than a few moments to catch up and enjoy each other’s company. And for those moments, they made a big, often anonymous city feel a lot more intimate and accessible—these pop-in visits made our lives better and our friendship stronger. 

But if our friend’s salon hadn’t been in our building, how likely is it he would have gone forty-five blocks out of his way to pop in otherwise? He was the exception that proves the rule.

The kind of low-effort socialization portrayed in Seinfeld and other shows is exceedingly rare in real life, but it’s something I’ve been craving more of, especially in these post-pandemic days of working from home. I know I’m not alone in feeling that way. I thought we might get closer to it when we moved to Austin, joining a group of friends who had found their way here over the years. Instead, the reality was that most of our friends who “moved to Austin” ended up in its suburbs, and pop-ins aren’t likely to happen when there’s a 45-minute drive each way.

But it’s not like we see the friends who do live nearby all the time, either. Getting together at all often requires a couple weeks’ notice, coordinating reservations, menus, babysitters—it’s an event, and events must be planned. Most of us won’t find that too shocking, but is it necessary…or even normal? shares a striking anecdote from Italy that suggests it might not be:

While in Trieste, I signed up to take one-on-one Pilates classes from an Italian woman in her late 30s. As I shared my frustrations about life in America, particularly how lonely it could feel, she asked me how often I saw my friends. “About once a week,” I said, even though as I said it, I realized it was much less.

She was shocked. “This is not normal,” she said. “I see my friends every day.” She explained that when she left that evening, she would stop to see her friends as she walked home—a glass of wine with one, perhaps dinner with another.

None of this was planned in advance.

If you showed up at someone's house in Washington, DC, unannounced, you would be considered a sociopath.

In America, we do not live in the land of the free-to-pop-in. 

In the case of the characters from Seinfeld, sociopathy might indeed be implicated. But it’s interesting that so many sitcoms rely on this trope despite its apparent antisocial connotation in American life. Of course (spoiler alert), TV is not real life. TV sitcoms require continuity of place and consistent casting for budgetary and narrative reasons, so it’s not surprising that prime-time regularly shows prime-age adults engaging in something largely unfamiliar to the average viewer.

But the idea of popping in at Jerry’s apartment—or Monica’s, or Will and Grace’s, or Ted’s—appeals to we-the-viewers nonetheless. I don’t think it’s because Hollywood has acculturated us to some foreign ideal, but rather because the presentation of friendships in these shows is inherently appealing. We, too, wish to experience the effortless pleasure of regularly being around people we love.

And yet it is something we seem incapable of replicating offscreen. As Seinfeld might ask, “What’s the deal with that?”

Perhaps it’s that, in a world of same-day delivery, swiping left and right, and Zoom therapy—a world in which we have optimized effort away—we’ve come to expect everything else to be effortless, including relationships. Or maybe we’ve forgotten how to put in the work. suggests we're suffering from “social atrophy”:

We are so burned out by our data-heavy, screen-based, supposedly friction-free lives that we no longer have the time or energy to engage in the kind of small, unfabulous, mundane, place-based friendships or acquaintance-ships that have nourished and sustained humans for literal centuries.

Technology didn’t change our need for social nourishment and sustenance. And those “literal centuries” were not ancient history. Indeed, for many of us, the pop-in was a feature of our youth. Remember the neighborhood kids who would pop in at your front door to ask you to play, or the college students who would pop into your dorm room for a casual chat at 3 a.m.? I suspect it is also a feature that returns in retirement. Until she died in 2023, my grandmother would regularly grab a screw-top of white wine and pop in at her friend’s house across the street. So I don’t think we have some innate aversion to the pop-in; rather the opposite, it seems.

Something happens in adulthood between college and retirement that makes us forget how to have these easy relationships. It would be easy to blame it on kids and career, but many if not most friends my age and older are at a point in their careers where they largely control their time, and it’s not like my childless friends are popping in at each other’s homes, either.

So what’s the deal with us? Did changing work patterns and social expectations, ossified land use policies that discourage walking, revolutionary smart phones, disruptive social media, or a global pandemic alter our behavior? Or do we actually have to live much closer to our friends to make it happen?

Or was Jerry’s apartment a place you could only ever really pop in at in TV Land? 

We can’t fully blame the paucity of pop-ins on land use policy, mid-life logistics, or other exogenous factors, though they all add friction that makes the pop-in rarer than it might be. Instead, we have to look inward: you’ve got to have both the willingness to pop in as well as the willingness to be popped-in on—that’s the missing social sinew that seems to keep us from flexing this muscle. Which is a shame, for the pop-in offers a possible low-stakes remedy for strengthening our social wellness at a time when our in-real-life connections have gotten weaker. As with any exercise, it might hurt at first, but the heavy lift gets easier each time you try it.

Reclaiming those “small, unfabulous, mundane, place-based friendships” that nourish and sustain us—the kind of effortless friendships we see on TV—requires somebody to make an effort. Is anybody up for a pop-in?

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The summer after seventh grade, I spent a few weeks at Goucher College attending what I can only describe as a nerd camp. By day, I learned about equine veterinary medicine, but by night, I got my first glimpse of campus and dorm life. We ate at dining halls, hung out in common areas, and spent evenings circulating around the dorm, eating Papa John’s Pizza Product in hallways and popping into each other’s rooms until curfew. It was in this new social environment that I first heard Denis Leary’s satirically antisocial song, “Asshole.” The song is at once a skewering of a kind of Middle American worldview, in which the protagonist rebels against the stultifying complacency of bourgeois life to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, achieving self-actualization by becoming, well, a colossal asshole.

What made the song satire is that Leary’s Asshole is in on the joke—he knows what he’s doing is wrong. I worry today that the song, or at least its spirit, has become something of an American anthem.

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Leary identifies the core aspect of what it means to be an asshole: “I gotta go out and have fun at someone else’s expense.” Being an asshole is when you externalize the costs of your actions onto other people. You expect other people to clean up your dogshit. You force pedestrians to jump out of the crosswalk as you speed to your hot yoga class. You hold up the line at Starbucks waffling between the Trenta Iced Ozempic Latte and the MrBeast Protein Mocha with G.O.A.T. Milk.

Assholes have always roamed amongst us. What seems to have changed is that we once considered being an asshole a bad thing.

Today, we exhibit a much higher tolerance for what past Americans would have considered extremely antisocial behavior. Yet civil society depends on members of society conforming to certain social norms. If your parents weren’t savages, they probably taught you to say “please” and “thank you,” to wait your turn in line, to hold the door open for the next person, to wash your hands, to respect your elders.

As I enter my millennial dotage, my patience for the flouting of the basic social norms wears thin. The particular inciting event for today’s jeremiad was a bit of assholery I encountered earlier this week. We were walking our dog when a Waymo stopped in the road and began honking—unusual, since self-driving Waymos are the most courteous and cautious drivers on the street. As we rounded the corner, we saw why: a man was standing in front of the car, a few feet from the open door of his parked truck, intentionally ignoring it. This wasn’t some act of pedestrian protest; he was simply daring the Waymo to wait. It wasn’t until we made eye contact—and another car pulled up behind—that he moved.

He was caught in the act of being an asshole.

Now, people being assholes around Waymos is already a well-documented phenomenon, particularly in Assholetopia (i.e., California). But it seems like driving-related douchebaggery has accelerated in recent years. Legions of drivers have simply stopped using their blinkers to signal that they’re turning—frustrating to other drivers, but incredibly dangerous for pedestrians navigating an already hostile terrain. UPS vans and Ubers park in bike lanes, treating flexposts meant to separate rights-of-way as in-the-way, forcing bicyclists and scooters into traffic. Speeding is out of control. By prioritizing driver speed over the safety and convenience of anyone else, our roadways are engineered to create assholes out of all of us—but too many of us choose our convenience over responsibility on the road.

Of course, this pattern doesn’t stop at the curb.

Plenty of people act like assholes outside their cars. The dogwalker who leaves shit on the sidewalk isn’t just being gross, she’s forcing others to clean up her mess. The subway rider blasting TikToks in a packed car is turning a shared space into their private living room. The Instagramming mom ignoring her elementary school kid as he beats up a toddler is modeling antisocial behavior for the next generation. Even seemingly small acts like littering, spitting gum, or smoking around nonsmokers are all variations on a theme: I do what I want—fuck you very much. I can’t prove this behavior is on the rise, but it feels like this breakdown in social infrastructure—how we expect people to behave in shared spaces—is happening everywhere.

It’s tempting to think none of this matters, and I’d forgive you for dismissing these as the senile ravings of an Elder Millennial. But here’s what concerns me: a society that can’t sustain basic norms in low-stakes shared spaces shouldn’t be surprised when it can’t sustain them in high-stakes ones, either.

When George Washington was a teenager, he religiously copied and adopted the 110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a text originally written by French Jesuits. The Jesuits used the word bienséance, meaning “propriety” or “decorum”—words that Washington carried with him throughout his career and tried to imbue into the office of the president. Rules about not spitting in fires, killing vermin in the sight of others, or how to properly soak bread might strike the modern ear as peculiarly dated, but the bulk exhibit the timelessness of good manners, hospitality, and basic hygiene. The very first echoes the Golden Rule: “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.”

In other words, don’t be an asshole.

The rotunda of the US Capitol is painted with an allegorical fresco called The Apotheosis of Washington, showing Washington sitting in heaven between the goddesses Liberty and Victory. In Leary’s song, his narrator also rises to the full height of his character, ending with a ridiculous but unapologetic rant in which he fully embraces his base(d) nature. Call it The Apotheosis of the Asshole. Leary’s Asshole is gonna eat Big Macs and wipe his mouth with the American flag as he drives his ugly-as-sin gas-guzzler at 115 miles per hour only to “toss the styrofoam containers right out the side.” And why not? As he proclaims, “there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it,” because we’ve got “nuclear fucking weapons.”

In other words, we’ve got the power, so we might as well use it. And so Leary concludes: “I’m an asshole, and I’m proud of it.”

Washington understood—like a certain superhero—that with great power comes great responsibility, including when to show restraint. After winning the Revolution, Washington could have easily declared himself king. Instead, he surrendered his sword to Congress and retired under his own vine and fig tree—until he was recalled to serve as president under the new Constitution a few years later. As the first occupier of the office, Washington had enormous latitude to shape it. He rejected monarchist stylings, embraced civilian leadership, and elevated republican virtue—including punctilious good manners. Washington, as president, chose not to be an asshole.

But the framers knew they could not rely on the better angels of every future president’s nature. They created a system of checks and balances—courts, competing power centers, a Constitution—to provide guardrails. They tried, in other words, to build a system that was asshole-proof.

The problem is that the Constitution is only a piece of paper: it has no power of its own to preserve, protect, and defend itself. The formal guardrails only hold if people believe in them. As the Founders well understood, the self-government of a free people requires the self-control of free individuals. When that self-restraint erodes, when the rules of civility no longer govern civil society, the erosion of constitutional norms is the inevitable next step—and there is no reason to expect that an unscrupulous elected official will feel bound by them, either.

When we excuse small acts of assholery in everyday shared spaces, we pave the way for much graver acts at higher levels of public life.

Which brings us to Washington’s final Rule of Civility, the 110th: “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Civility isn’t politeness or a mere inconvenience. Individually, it’s what makes a person more than a robot or a monster; collectively, it’s the moral technology that makes a free society possible. As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the question is whether we’ll rediscover pride in what it means to be American—or will we, like Leary, take pride in being assholes?

A society that elevates assholes will inevitably be ruled by them.

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As the saying goes, everything’s bigger in Texas—and that includes our road system. With more than 700,000 lane-miles, Texas maintains the largest network in the country, roughly 50 percent larger than that of the next state. The Texas Highway Department, the forerunner to today’s Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), even started a travel magazine in 1953 to encourage Texans to explore what an awestruck Georgia O’Keeffe described as “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” The magazine was called Texas Highways, and the implication was clear: the way to get around Texas was on its roads.

Now, TxDOT is confronting the possibility that the way Texans have gotten around in the past is not exactly the road to the future.

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Part of it is financial. Running the country’s largest road system is expensive: TxDOT projects spending over $43 billion in the next decade just to maintain the existing system, with another $100 billion allocated for expansion. There are also hidden costs: within the Texas Triangle—home to roughly 80 percent of the state’s population—drivers lose an estimated 423 million hours to congestion each year, imposing $11 billion in economic costs. Congestion has continued to rise even as the share of Texans working remotely has more than doubled. Meanwhile, the Texas population is expected to grow 40% by 2050, increasing per-person traffic delays by 200%. All that congestion is deadly: more than 75,000 people have died in crashes since November 7, 2000, the last day without a traffic fatality in the state. While TxDOT itself operates less than 30% of the total lane-miles in the state’s roadway system (the rest are local roads), 64% of all fatal and serious injury crashes occurred on state-owned roads. The department wants to reduce the 4,000 or so annual fatalities to zero by 2050.

Historically, the state has approached the problem of congestion by building more lanes. But by TxDOT’s own admission, the “just one more lane” strategy has reached its limits.

Texas offers a clear empirical test of whether highway expansion can reliably relieve congestion. The state has space, money, and political support to build roads at a scale few others can match, so if congestion, safety, and access could be solved by lane-miles alone, Texas should be the place where that strategy succeeded. Instead, the results have been mixed at best. After TxDOT expanded Houston’s Katy Freeway to 26 lanes, subsequent studies found that travel times during peak periods worsened rather than improved, as increased capacity was quickly absorbed by additional driving. If lane expansion were going to solve congestion anywhere, it would have solved it here. Instead, Texas ranks near the bottom of U.S. states in measures of urban congestion.

At root, the congestion problem is a connection problem: Texas cities have grown rapidly and they’ve grown outward, with jobs dispersed across metro regions; for the most part, the only way to get around is via those 700,000 miles of roadways. That problem is shaped largely by geometry: automobiles consume large amounts of space relative to the number of people they carry. A typical city bus can carry forty passengers while occupying roughly twice the length of a Ford F-150—often occupied by a single driver. If those same forty people travel separately by car, their vehicles would consume 20x the road space even before accounting for safe following distances. Scale that difference across tens of thousands of vehicles moving through the same constrained corridors, and congestion is no longer a failure of planning or enforcement but a predictable outcome of space constraints.

And in densely built up urban areas, that space is very constrained. To facilitate an expansion of Interstate 35 through Central Austin, TxDOT had to purchase (via eminent domain) more than 100 homes and commercial properties, seizing 54 acres of valuable land that will fall off city tax rolls as it is steamrolled into additional lane-miles. The project reflects the geometry problem once again: cars take up a lot of space, and expanding urban highways means taking space that is already occupied by higher-value uses. In dense areas, that’s an increasingly expensive proposition.

So it’s noteworthy that this highway-first state is acknowledging that these constraints require new approaches to address Texas’s future transportation needs.

Indeed, late last year, TxDOT published its draft Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan (SMTP), the first of its kind in Texas.1 While that alone is notable, what makes it groundbreaking is its focus on transit alternatives as a necessary part of solving the congestion problem. That the report arrives as TxDOT is in the midst of multibillion-dollar highway expansion projects in urban areas is a reflection of the problem: the state remains deeply committed to highway construction, even as its own analysis shows that widening alone is unlikely to deliver its long-term transportation and safety goals.

TxDOT cites demographic shifts as putting additional pressure on the road-dominant model. The population of seniors is projected to nearly double by 2050, increasing demand for alternatives to driving. The younger cohorts of Millennials and Gen-Zers—rather than ruining everything—express greater interest in and preferences for non-automobile modes. Meanwhile, the state’s growing majority-minority population tends to drive less and use transit more in urban areas. At the same time, many households are increasingly cost-burdened by housing and transportation combined.

Texas already has 77 transit agencies, which together carried nearly 230 million passengers over 252 million service miles in 2024, nearly all of it funded locally. Yet much of this service operates in mixed traffic, limiting frequency, reliability, and capacity. The SMTP argues that many of transit’s shortcomings stem less from missing infrastructure than from weak service, and that higher-quality transit with priority treatment—along with better coordination across providers—is necessary if transit is to function effectively at scale. TxDOT also acknowledges that better communication is needed to overcome misconceptions about transit.

The big opportunities for the state are in intercity transit between the various nodes of the Texas Triangle, where TxDOT projects total Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) will increase by more than 50% by 2050. Today, drivers make more than 40,000 daily trips between Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, a 3.5-hour drive, and Houston and Austin, a 2.5-hour drive. Strikingly, Austinites and San Antonians make more than 266,000 daily trips along the 90-minute Interstate 35 corridor connecting the two cities. This corridor represents one of the highest-leverage opportunities for improving regional connectivity, and both TxDOT and Travis County are studying the feasibility of a rail connection between the two cities.

TxDOT also opens the door to other transportation providers. The SMTP highlights the role of Amtrak, which already provides passenger rail service across the state (for a mere 7.5-hour ride between San Antonio and Dallas), as well as public-private partnerships that have created bus-oriented transit centers across Texas. They also flag Brightline—a privately owned intercity rail line between Orlando and Miami—as a potential model. Meanwhile, Texas Central, a private initiative to build a high-speed rail link between Houston and Dallas has struggled to gain traction. The plan suggests that autonomous vehicles will undoubtedly be a part of the state’s transportation future but stops short of spelling out policy proposals.

While TxDOT acknowledges both the high costs of the congestion problem and the potential economic benefits of transit alternatives, the SMTP is devastatingly realistic about the challenge:

“No funding source exists for delivering a statewide transit network in Texas.”

Under the Texas Constitution, nearly all state transportation dollars are dedicated to roads, leaving transit largely dependent on federal, local, or other sources. Meanwhile, the state legislature’s recent interest in alternative transportation modes has been in trying to defund local transit. So it’s no surprise that Texas’s transportation system remains overwhelmingly road-dominant. Statewide, total VMT reached more than 300 billion in 2023—more than 1,000 times the service miles traveled by the state’s transit agencies. On a per-capita basis, Texans log roughly 10,000 vehicle miles of travel per year, while transit agencies collectively provide about eight service miles per resident.

If Texas is Car Country, it’s by design.

While it seems unlikely that Texas as a whole is ready to embrace transit, TxDOT has done perhaps the hardest work of all: admitting that we have a problem, and acknowledging that the road to recovery will not be paved with one more lane. The significance of the SMTP is not that TxDOT has suddenly embraced transit, or that highways are about to be abandoned. It’s that the state’s own transportation agency, based on its own data, has concluded that roads alone cannot deliver the transportation outcomes Texans want. If the future of transportation in Texas is multimodal, it’s not because TxDOT has changed its values but because it has recognized real-world constraints. Congestion, at root, is a geometry problem. Solving it, however, is a political one.

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Over the past year, much of my writing has been an attempt to understand how decisions made decades ago shaped our modern housing landscape and created the conditions of scarcity that make reform so vexing today. Last week, I found myself making the case for a causal approach to reform inside the Department of Housing & Urban Development itself. Staff in HUD’s Office of Multifamily Housing reached out after my essay “The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market” caught their attention. The office oversees federal programs that provide project-based rental assistance for low-income seniors, people with disabilities, and other deeply cost-burdened households, disbursing nearly $20 billion annually in rental subsidies to households at the bottom of the income distribution.

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I have an annoying habit of reading everything as a story about cities. Harry Potter is in part an epic about wizardly transit via invisible trains, flying Ford Anglias, and floo powder. The Great Gatsby tells a cautionary tale about suburban sprawl and auto-dependency. Even in fiction, authors can’t escape questions of place and connection: how people move, where they gather, and what separates them. In that sense, E.M. Forster’s great social novel, Howards End, is not merely a story of class and power in Edwardian England, but also one of early twentieth century urbanization. Published in 1910, the novel captures many of the themes we still debate in modern-day urban discourse: gentrification, automobility, affordability, the evolution of the city.

What gives Howards End its enduring power—at least as an uncanny urbanist text—is that it shows what happens when urban change outpaces our ability to build a shared moral and social life and we exclude the full swathe of humanity from our cities.

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A strange but lovely book, the novel follows Margaret Schlegel and her family as they confront a changing London, one in which her family’s long-term but leased home, Wickham Place, is to be redeveloped into higher-density flats. Forster writes that the “Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him, too, away from his moorings,” and Margaret suddenly finds herself noticing and bemoaning the “architecture of hurry” rising up to house a rapidly growing population. As she wonders about her landlord and the “quality of the men born” in a booming city, she stops herself: “That way lies madness. Thank goodness she, too, had some money, and could purchase a new home.”

Margaret’s acceptance of the redevelopment of her neighborhood is softened by the financial cushion on which she knows her family will land. As London rapidly urbanizes, not everyone is brought along into the future, and some are crushed by the weight of change. The titular Howards End, a country house whose ownership is contested both literally and symbolically, symbolizes the future of England and who will inherit it. The dilemma at the heart of the novel is that London’s moral evolution lags its technological evolution. And yet this is not an anti-urban book. Instead, it is a warning about who benefits from urban change—and who is left to absorb its costs.

The theme of the book is perhaps best expressed by Margaret’s famous exhortation:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

Cities, too, must connect the prose and the passion. The prose is the “rational”: the legal and institutional frameworks on which cities are founded—zoning codes, street layouts, and infrastructure that give the city its physical form. The passion is the “emotional”: how life in those places actually feels day to day, shaped by the spaces and proximities created by the prose. Margaret’s exhortation appeals to a kind of human-centric urbanism. One that recognizes the desire path that cuts a dusty line across the green expanse of a park, rather than officially prescribed paper plans that ignore actual human needs. One that nurtures the sidewalk ballet of Jane Jacobs, not the strip-mall stroads of auto-centric suburban sprawl or the soulless towers-in-the-park of Le Corbusier. When our passion and our prose connect—when planning is human-centric—they produce cities that exalt human life.

Yet connection has always come with costs. Connection breeds congestion, both vehicular and human. Congestion is, at bottom, a problem of pricing and geometry—but a vibrant city is ultimately a reflection of the value of the human connections it fosters. The question cities have grappled with for more than a century is how to increase the value of those connections while managing their costs.

Howards End obliquely explores one facet of this problem: the “architecture of hurry” that widens social distance even as physical proximity increases. An uncle addresses the issue early on:

“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it.”

Forster is not warning against sprawl as such, but against the impulse to treat scale and expansion as virtues in themselves. What Howards End captures intuitively and morally in Edwardian England would soon present itself as a concrete policy problem elsewhere. Across the Atlantic, American cities were grappling with their own version of the same dilemma: how to manage growth, movement, and congestion in rapidly expanding urban centers. Indeed, the problem of congestion became, for American cities, the central problem of modern urban policy—and the effort to understand and manage it would shape urban decision-making for decades to come.

As Robert Fogelson documents in Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, the pattern of concentrating economic activity in dense downtown cores had already emerged by the mid-1800s, with transportation advances allowing residential life to spread outward. New transit technology—from the omnibus to the streetcar to rapid transit—brought people from their homes in outlying areas into increasingly congested downtowns every day, which made movement slow and sometimes dangerous. Early efforts to manage congestion focused on building height. Skyscrapers were blamed for crowding and disorder, even though they often alleviated congestion by concentrating activity vertically instead of spreading it horizontally. The nation’s first real zoning code—New York’s 1916 resolution—was an attempt to regulate congestion, including the mixing (or “congestion”) of certain types of residences and uses. Meanwhile, streetcars and commuter rail expanded urban footprints without fully decentralizing employment. Inevitably, some retail and entertainment followed people outward, creating competing nodes that siphoned activity from downtown without replacing its density or diversity. Into the early twentieth century, economic shocks and federal policies such as redlining and mortgage subsidies further weakened downtowns while reinforcing preferences for living beyond them.

By the time Robert Moses, Ed Logue, and other midcentury planners came to power, policy, economics, and technology had already thinned urban cores and drained downtowns of their vibrancy. They correctly sensed that downtowns were failing because people were no longer coming to work, shop, or linger in sufficient numbers. But they misunderstood what kind of congestion cities require. Treating circulation as a proxy for vitality, they sought to reintroduce activity by moving people through cities faster rather than by rebuilding the dense connections that make urban life durable. Motorways promised to reconnect what earlier choices had pulled apart, so the planners bulldozed highways through existing neighborhoods, creating space for cars while demolishing the “blighted” slums that tens of thousands of people called home. This, of course, only accelerated displacement and exurban growth, moving one type of congestion to the highways and another kind away from declining downtown streets. Because these planners held power at metropolitan scale, that misdiagnosis reshaped entire regions, often with devastating consequences.

The end of the urban renewal era did not mark the end of this logic, only a shift in how it was enforced. Where bulldozers once cleared neighborhoods in the name of circulation, low-cost and high-density housing types like SROs were increasingly zoned out of existence, while downzonings capped the number of people allowed to live near job centers. The tools grew less visible and less violent, but the underlying aim remained the same: to manage congestion by limiting connection. Over a century, planners designed policies to thin cities instead of better connecting them, choosing automobile traffic and decentralization over foot traffic and density.

As they would discover too late, a thousand square miles were not a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile—and they were much harder to connect.

These problems still confront us today. Remote work creates new opportunities for connection beyond place while undermining human connection within cities. Autonomous vehicles could be a connection solution or another congestion problem. Policies like New York’s congestion pricing are an attempt to manage the costs of connection by reallocating and repricing how people use urban space. Meanwhile, many American downtowns have not fully recovered from the pandemic: foot traffic remains uneven, office buildings remain underoccupied, and yet traffic congestion has returned. For many downtowns, the problem echoes that faced by the midcentury planners: too little human connection, too much of the wrong kind of congestion.

More than a century ago, Howards End warned that cities risk fragmentation when the prose and the passion of urban life get out of step with each other, when we fail to plan for connection. Planners repeatedly misunderstood the type of connections that made cities flourish and attempted to eliminate all friction, only to discover that they had eliminated the conditions that made urban life worth living. They misread congestion as a pathology of dense urban life rather than as a byproduct of the connections that fuel it. The task for twenty-first century planners is therefore not to banish congestion, but to understand it as a necessary consequence of connective value creation—and then to better manage its costs. The aspiration and end of our policy, then, should be to plan and build cities that exalt human life.

That’s the whole of the sermon: only connect!

Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy, and better connected new year!

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For my final piece of the year—and my final “City of Yes, And…” paid subscriber bonus— I thought I would get into the backstory of last week’s alternate history essay, “Cities For All Mankind.” Ironically, the seed of the piece was planted in a city that my fictional high-speed train bypassed: Providence, Rhode Island, where I attended the Strong Towns National Gathering in June. There, I was on a walking tour with local developer and housing advocate , who was taking us through the west side of downtown, an area that was subjected to midcentury urban renewal. Along the way, Seth made a comment that’s been echoing in my mind ever since: “We’re living in the ruins of a former civilization, with no idea how they built it.”

That comment put into words something I’d been intuiting from my study of urbanism over the past several years: that cities are the default shape of human civilization—and that we lost something human through the various policies we inflicted upon them in the twentieth century. While doing a bit of research after my visit to Providence, I came across photos of the city as it was: neighborhoods of historic streets, vibrant communities, places that were and might still have been—all swept away as the bulldozers blundered through, carving highways and clearing so-called slums. The idea percolated throughout the year as I wrote about urban renewal in New Haven, urban highways, and the destruction of single-room occupancy units.

“Cities For All Mankind” was an effort to imagine what the world might look like today if we hadn’t aggressively, through public policy, pursued a different shape of human civilization—if we had not committed, at scale, these crimes against urbanity.

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Boston’s Scollay Square teemed with morning commuters as I stepped out of the Crawford House with my overnight bag. I slipped through the ornate 1898 subway headhouse—one glance at the clock told me I had thirty minutes. Below ground, America’s oldest subway carried me one stop to Park Street, where I switched for the short ride to South Station. On this Monday morning, the train hall was bustling. The Solari board showed my train—the 9:05 AM Merchants Limited—ON TIME amid a catalog of commuter departures, including service to the northern suburbs and New Hampshire via the so-called Big Dig, with the next Merch scheduled for only a half-hour later. I grabbed a coffee and waited for the display to flap to NOW BOARDING and then headed to Track 1, where the train—one of New England Coastal’s new Kawasaki Clipper Class 700 electric sets—waited with its doors open.

I found my ticketed seat by the window as other passengers—mostly businesspeople, but some leisure travelers, too—filled in their seats. At exactly 9:05, a subtle forward motion and a soft pneumatic hiss announced our departure. The Merch picked up speed as we rolled past Dorchester’s well-preserved triple-deckers and the statelier apartment houses they had grown into, cresting 130 mph by the time we cleared the city line near Milton. From there, the train whizzed past streetcar suburbs and then sparser historic villages, as we reached our top speed of 200 mph.

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The woman sitting next to me was reading the Boston Record, but the passing scenery held my attention as I sipped my coffee. The conductor entered the cabin, greeting my neighbor by name and scanning each of our phones before he moved on. “See you tomorrow,” he said to her.

At the glide-through near Providence, our speed dropped to 170 mph, but we accelerated as we exited Rhode Island and entered the longest unbroken high-speed stretch along the Connecticut coast. Long Island Sound glinted in the sun as we cruised by, while shoreline villages sped by in a blur of historic rail stations and town centers. Less than 10 miles outside New Haven, the train began to gently decelerate, entering city limits in industrial East Haven before traversing the Quinnipiac Viaduct, from which I glimpsed the mid-rise, mixed-use towers of the industrial-chic Long Wharf waterfront. We pulled into Union Station at 10:16 AM, the Merch gliding to a halt beneath Eero Saarinen’s undulating concrete canopy.

In New Haven, the woman next to me departed, and I smiled at the elderly man who took her place. He unfolded his copy of the New York Sun as the train began moving just a few minutes later. As we passed under Church Street, one of the historic trolleys New Haven has so lovingly preserved trundled overhead towards Long Wharf. The Merch gathered speed as it pushed through the West Haven neighborhood, running parallel to the commuter lines. The train ran slower through southern Connecticut, never surpassing 180 mph as it strung the necklace of historic train depots and their concentrations of mid-rise apartment buildings along Connecticut’s shoreline downtowns. Still, within thirty minutes, we’d crossed into the Empire State and were soon zipping past historic New Rochelle.

Before I knew it, we were in New York City, passing into the Borough of Yonkers and then coursing along trenched tracks in the Bronx, the city passing overhead in continuous blocks of apartments. After crossing the Bronx River, the train slid beneath the Bruckner Green Belt, the park briefly closing over the tracks before we emerged into daylight and began our ascent across the Hell Gate Bridge. The massive stone viaduct carried us above Astoria’s courtyard co-op blocks and many pedestrianized commercial streets. Beyond, the late-deco condo towers of the Queens Gold Coast rose along the water, clad in terracotta blues and golds. As the train banked, the skyline of Manhattan appeared, its clusters of spires marking the map of the transit hubs below. Then the Merch plunged into darkness, gliding under the huge Sunnyside Yards redevelopment before slipping beneath the East River.

A few minutes later, we eased into Penn Station, light filtering down from the immense glass canopy to the tracks below. The display over the door flashed 11:06—right on time—just as the 15-minute Newark Airport Express slid in on the next track. I rode the escalator up to the concourse, craned my neck at the skylit vault overhead, and stepped out onto Seventh Avenue, right into the heart of this megalopolis of nearly twenty million.

As you may have recognized—from the first three words, perhaps—almost none of this was real.

Scollay Square was erased by midcentury urban renewal, replaced by Government Center. The Big Dig buried an urban highway, not a through-running rail link, so Boston’s northern and southern commuter lines remain disconnected. Dorchester was redlined, depriving non-white residents of the same access to capital that built generational wealth in the suburbs. Much of New Haven was flattened by the same man who demolished Boston. Along Connecticut’s coast, zoning locked old towns in single-family amber while I-95 carved through the larger downtowns. In New York, the Bruckner is an expressway, the Queens coast is largely industrial, Penn Station is long gone, and the rail network that once stitched these places together collapsed.

The journey I imagined is not a recreation of the past, but a glimpse of a conceivable—though unlikely—alternate reality, one that could only have existed if the city builders and urban planners of yore had made an entirely different set of choices.

The title of this thought experiment is an homage to the AppleTV series For All Mankind, which imagines an alternate history in which the United States loses the race to the moon—and responds not with retreat, but with renewed ambition. In this timeline, Apollo 11’s astronauts never left behind a plaque on the lunar module proclaiming “We came in peace for all mankind.” Instead, competition becomes a catalyst for invigorated investment, technological progress, and social change. The point of the show is not to present a kind of utopia, but to show what an America that never lost confidence in its ability to build at scale might look like—while dramatizing the compounding effects of incremental changes.

The landscape of modern urban America is likewise the result of compounded decisions. Fare controls weakened the finances of streetcars and subways, slowly starving the systems that had allowed cities to grow. Federal housing policy redirected capital away from urban neighborhoods and toward new subdivisions at the metropolitan edge, hardening racial and economic divides in the process. Zoning codes froze cities in place and reduced their capacity to accommodate future growth, while highways undermined fare-controlled private passenger and freight rail and cut through the very neighborhoods that had been denied investment. Limits on annexation fractured metropolitan governance, allowing suburbs to grow without responsibility for the cities that sustained them. Urban renewal, in the final stroke, precluded incremental change for wholesale clearance, obliterating vibrant neighborhoods and affordable housing, displacing thousands. Some of these choices were rooted in the country’s long history of racial exclusion; others were defended as pragmatic, even benevolent responses to real problems. Many enjoyed broad public support at the time. Yet together, they formed a self-reinforcing system that favored sprawl over density, and displacement over continuity.

What emerged was not the result of inevitability, but of intent: we came in peace to the moon; we did not come in peace to our cities.

Was this the way it had to be?

Without exclusionary zoning, without redlining, without urban renewal, American cities would likely have evolved in a more recognizably urban way. More people would live in them, because cities would not have stopped building—or hollowed themselves out. Neighborhoods would have changed gradually rather than being erased. Suburbs would still exist, but more often as extensions of cities rather than escapes from them: denser, more mixed-use, more connected. The phrases that came to define late-twentieth-century urban America—“white flight,” “inner city,” “renewal”—might never have taken on the meanings they did in places that were allowed to repair themselves instead of being cleared.

None of this suggests that cities would have been immune to change. Wars, economic shocks, industrial restructuring, technological shifts, and changing social norms would still have shaped urban life. Wealthier households would still have sought space; the automobile would still have been popular; air-conditioning would still have opened the Sun Belt; retail and work would still have evolved. Urban change was inevitable, but the form it took was not.

The irony of our history is that, if Apollo represented our highest aspirations in pursuit of the final frontier, the decade it eclipsed marked the abandonment of our civilizational home here on earth. We cannot know what our cities would have looked like had our forebears approached them with the same sense of wonder they brought to the moon. The planners of the twentieth century reshaped American cities with power and certainty, but rarely with humility.

Today, as we confront housing scarcity, technological change, and shifting social patterns, the question for us is not whether we will shape our cities again. It is whether this time we will do so in a spirit of goodwill, leaving behind a built world that reflects benevolence toward all, and a love of the places we call home. One in which our descendants will know that we, too, came in peace for all mankind.

Happy holidays!

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I have a confession to make: I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons.1 Indeed, a lot of what I know about the fantasy role-playing game has been inferred from memes. You’ve probably seen some version of the one I’m thinking about: the so-called Alignment Chart, a 3x3 grid that describes a character’s worldview along two axes, morality and lawfulness. Morality falls along a spectrum of Good, Neutral, or Evil, while one’s orientation to laws and rules is Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic. The chart yields nine personality types, recognizing that most people—dwarves, orcs, and dragons, too—do not fall neatly into a binary: they can be Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, or Neutral Evil, for instance. This framework has been used to describe taxonomies of everything from politics to sandwiches, even to other alignment charts.2

It’s also a useful way to think about land-use law.

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Before applying this framework to land-use law, it helps to see how it works in a familiar fictional universe. Since I don’t know the difference between a dwarf and druid, I chose Star Wars instead of D&D. The Good Guys in Star Wars are fairly easy to map onto the D&D framework: Obi-Wan Kenobi is the archetype of the Lawful Good who upholds the Jedi Code and fights for the values of the Republic; Luke Skywalker is Neutral Good, guided by his own moral compass rather than the Jedi Code; Han Solo is Chaotic Good, acting on instinct and playing by his own rules for a good cause. C-3PO is the exemplar par excellence of the Lawful Neutral: he’s obsessed with rules and terrified of breaking protocol, outcomes be damned. Among the Bad Guys, Darth Vader epitomizes the Lawful Evil—governed by an absolute belief in the Empire’s hierarchy and the rules-based order of the Sith—while the Emperor himself is Neutral Evil, more interested in the pursuit of power for power’s sake: rules, order, and institutions are subservient to his will.

With that vocabulary established, we can leave the characters behind in a galaxy far, far away and turn toward more terrestrial concerns. What’s useful about the D&D framing is that we can use it to think not only about characters, but about systems and policies, too, rather than flattening zoning reform into a good-versus-evil binary of YIMBYs and NIMBYs.

The goal of the YIMBY movement is (or should be!) the restoration of a system of Lawful Good, one based on the rule of law and grounded in the bedrock principles of American jurisprudence: equality before the law, transparency and legibility, due process, the presumption of innocence, and consistent enforcement. We want a legal system in which land use rules are clear, non-arbitrary, and equally applied; permissions are predictable and timely; opportunities for corruption and regulatory capture are minimized; and outcomes are oriented toward justice, not punishment or extraction. A Lawful Good land use regime would be a system in which by-right development is the norm; the code is based on objective performance, nuisance, or form-based standards; approvals are administrative, timely, and not discretionary; and applicants have the right to clear, time-bound appeals. The purpose of such a system is not to reward developers, punish NIMBYs, or to concentrate power. Rather, it’s to minimize the injustice that arises from nonobjective law and to reduce rent-seeking behavior and obstructionism. Such a system would be boring, legible, automatic, and deeply unheroic—bereft of villains and victims alike.

Most importantly, a Lawful Good system is one that enables housing development. Obviously, this is not the system we have in most of America.

Zoning presents itself, at least on its own terms, as a Lawful Neutral system: a value-neutral, rules-based framework designed—in theory—to impose order, predictability, and harm prevention through the separation of “incompatible” uses. Zoning was created ostensibly to protect single-family neighborhoods from noxious activities like slaughterhouses and chemical plants. But from the moment of its conception, it classified apartment buildings, neighborhood corner stores, and mixed uses as similarly “incompatible.” These determinations were not grounded in science or performance-based evidence, but established by arbitrary fiat, embedding aesthetic judgments and cultural preferences within a legal regime that claimed neutrality.

That system was sustainable only so long as cities did not change—which, of course, they always do. As municipalities evolved, fixed use segregation increasingly failed to map onto lived reality. Rather than allowing the code itself to adapt automatically, the system responded by creating exceptions: rezonings, variances, special permits, and overlays. What began as a system premised on categorical rules thus gave rise to a parallel regime of discretionary review, administered by neighbors, planners, zoning commissioners, elected officials, and an expanding constellation of environmental, design, and historic preservation boards. In this regime, the law was weaponized to slow, stymie, or stop housing altogether. Today, whether this system builds housing is almost beside the point. It exists for its own sake.

If the purpose of a system is what it does, then our land use regimes are certainly not neutral—and no longer lawful. Instead, we have a regime of Chaotic Evil.

With that system-level diagnosis in mind, the alignment chart becomes a useful way to categorize housing policies—not by intent (theory), but by how they function (practice). Some policies reinforce a lawful, predictable system; others operate neutrally but entrench scarcity; still others actively empower obstruction. The chart below is my attempt to capture some of these distinctions at a glance.

One of the premises of the D&D Alignment Chart is that character profiles can drift, and the same is true of systems. No city adopts Chaotic Evil by ordinance. What begins as Lawful Neutral can, over time, slide—not because anyone chose malice, but because rigidity gives way to exceptions, exceptions give way to negotiation, and negotiation gives way to arbitrary power. The result is a regime that still looks lawful on paper but operates chaotically in practice, rewarding delay, extraction, and obstruction rather than compliance with clear rules. The housing crisis is best understood not as a failure of intentions, but as a failure to keep our land-use systems anchored to lawfulness. And so we have modern zoning regimes that are illegible, illiberal, and zero-sum—that almost require the invention of villains and victims to function.

Nevertheless, when pursuing political reform, it helps to think in terms of policies rather than personalities. This runs against the grain of contemporary discourse, which prefers stories of victims and villains. But most people involved in housing politics think of themselves as acting in good faith, pointing to a harder truth: our system of Chaotic Evil isn’t just the product of bad law, but the outgrowth of basic human biases. Aesthetic NIMBYism—the instinctive discomfort with change that does not “fit”—reflects a common preference for familiarity and visual continuity, not an ideology of exclusion. It’s best understood as a True Neutral orientation rather than a moral failing. But when that base instinct is entrenched in law and empowered to physically shape our cities, it produces and perpetuates systems of scarcity and exclusion. Over time, this accumulates as cultural ballast, embedded in the built environment itself, and extraordinarily difficult to unmoor.

Seen this way, the central conflict in housing politics isn’t between good people and bad people, but between systems that remain anchored to lawfulness and those that drift away from it. The alignment chart isn’t a moral scorecard; it’s a way of assessing whether policies reinforce lawful systems, or undermine them through chaos and discretion.

The housing crisis isn’t the brainchild of evil geniuses but the braindead progeny of a deeply flawed system. To fight such a system, and restore a system of Lawful Good land use, we don’t need to roll the twenty-sided dice and hope our YIMBY paladins can withstand the onslaught of demonic zoning enforcers. Ultimately, there are no dragons to be slain to get housing out of its regulatory dungeon—only bad policies.

What’s in your Alignment Chart?

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Everybody hates Wall Street. From Shylock to Scrooge to Gordon Gekko, the archetype of the rapacious, unscrupulous banker has long been a cultural constant. The trope reinforces an us/them binary: Wall Street versus Main Street, high finance versus the common man—and, well, reality doesn’t always help to dispel the caricature. Nevertheless, the cultural bias matters, because it primes us to misread what financial actors are actually doing in today’s housing market. So it’s not entirely surprising that a growing chorus has pointed to institutional investors, particularly private equity (PE), as complicit in the single-family housing shortage. Joining the chorus in a new key, Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic acknowledges that while PE didn’t cause the crisis, it is definitely “changing housing.” Still, she asks, “Wouldn’t you like to have someone to blame?”

After all, blaming private equity “makes intuitive sense.” But intuition is not information, and Lowrey does her readers a disservice by telling a shallow story relying on deep anti-finance biases more than data.

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Lowrey focuses on a recent report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions, called “Who Owns America?” (WHOA). Drawing on original research as well as a survey of the literature, WHOA finds that corporate landlords now own upwards of 20% of properties in some communities. The authors caution that “there is nothing inherently bad about investor ownership,” noting that a “responsible, responsive corporate owner is preferable to a negligent individual landlord.” The problem is that some research finds that corporate owners are more likely to file evictions and raise rents than non-corporate owners. What especially troubles Lowrey is that the areas of investor concentration are not the expensive coastal cities most cited for their housing shortages, but instead neighborhoods in the South and Rust Belt, “where large shares of families can’t afford a mortgage.” There, investors are “pushing thousands of Black and Latino families off the property ladder” by gobbling up starter homes, leaving them “stuck paying rent.”

And while these are concerning claims, there’s a slight problem with Lowrey’s framing: the WHOA report is not specifically about private equity, but all corporate landlords as such.

WHOA does not isolate institutional investors at all, counting any non-individual owner as “corporate.” Corporate ownership might include mom-and-pop LLCs holding individual units, multifamily giants like Greystar and AvalonBay, nonprofits, housing trusts, churches, universities—any property not held in an individual’s name. The study measures total residential land area, not single-family homes, including sprawling multifamily complexes and any other type of non-owner-occupied residential property. While this gives us some broad measures about the scope of ownership in the rental market, treating it as an indictment of one relatively small player is simply a category error.

The mismatch between what the report measures and what Lowrey claims it shows is a perfect example of how anti-finance narratives fill in the gaps when the data doesn’t.

If we want to understand what impact institutional investors like PE are having on single-family housing markets, and starter homes in particular, it helps to actually look at the history and the research about them. Which means we first need to revisit their origin story during the Great Recession.

Large-scale corporate landlords have been involved in housing markets for generations, and corporate ownership is the norm for multifamily developments everywhere. Institutional investor participation in single-family housing markets is a more recent phenomenon, going back to the Great Recession. In the run-up to the crash, policymakers and lenders engineered a credit system built on excess and characterized by loose underwriting, speculative borrowing, securitization that obscured risk, and the assumption that major banks would be rescued if things went wrong (“too big to fail”). When the crash came, millions lost their homes and banks were left with distressed inventories in the hundreds of thousands. Institutional investors stepped into that vacuum. They bought foreclosed properties that banks could not manage, stabilized neighborhoods at risk of blight, and returned large numbers of homes to the market as rentals for households suddenly locked out of mortgage finance.

While this was certainly opportunistic, it wasn’t obviously predatory: investors served a vital, market-clearing function at a time when many banks and individuals had no other options.

In the years after the financial crisis, we overcorrected and massively underbuilt housing in America, causing a shortage of single-family homes estimated in the low millions—Lowrey cites a 4-million-unit deficit. At the same time, institutional investors became much larger players in the single-family housing market. But the research tells a far more nuanced story than the popular narrative. What it shows is that institutional investors tend to help renters, disadvantage prospective buyers, and behave exactly as we’d expect in a market defined by scarcity.

Joshua Coven finds that institutional investors lower rents, improve neighborhood access for renters, and raise incumbent owners’ home values—while reducing opportunities for new buyers.1 Felipe Barbieri and Gregory Dobbels reach similar conclusions through a different lens: institutional buyers can exert pricing power, but they also add to the rental stock, which pushes rents down.2 Both studies show similar tradeoffs: renters and homesellers gain; would-be first-time buyers lose. Meanwhile, research from Caitlin Gorback, Franklin Qian, and Zipei Zhu shows that institutional investors bought 56-to-61% of their homes from other landlords and the rest from owner-occupants—meaning they are not primarily displacing first-time buyers so much as changing the allocation of investor ownership in the rental market.3

But the extent of investor involvement is also blown out of proportion to reality.

As Lowrey herself concedes, individual and mom-and-pop investors still vastly outnumber institutional and corporate owners in the single-family rental market. Coven reports that institutional investors have purchased up to “8.5% of the housing stock in certain ZIP codes in the suburbs of some US cities, including Atlanta, Phoenix, and Tampa” since 2012. Gorback et al. find that while investor activity in single-family housing grew after 2010, the overall share of single-family homes owned by any kind of investor remained limited—rising to a peak of 12.4% in 2015 before falling below 11.7% by 2022. Only a small portion of these investor-owned homes are held by institutions. Other studies have found that institutional investor ownership of single-family rentals—which excludes owner-occupied units—is about 3% nationally. The Urban Institute puts that figure at 3.8%, which represents 574,000 units out of a total supply of 15.1 million single-family rental homes—in a total market of 85 million single-family homes.

In other words, institutional investors own 0.675% of all single-family homes in America.

Although institutional ownership is small overall, investor activity is concentrated in certain markets, which makes it more visible. Gorback et al. find that institutional buyers tend to pursue entry-level, mid-size homes in neighborhoods with healthy job growth, low vacancies, and rising prices—places that already attract demand. These areas often have higher minority populations, not because investors are targeting vulnerable communities, but because those communities live in the very neighborhoods experiencing the most appreciation. In other words, investors are following growth, not driving decline. The effect is a more competitive bidding environment in those specific markets, but the underlying dynamic is unchanged: too many households chasing too few starter homes. The competition is a function of scarcity, not investor strategy.

So what’s to be done?

Predictably, these patterns have prompted calls to ban or restrict institutional investors in single-family housing markets. In Congress, bills have been filed called the “American Neighborhoods Protection Act” and “End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act.” Several state legislatures have proposed similar legislation to cap institutional ownership, to tax investors differently, or to ban them from purchasing starter homes altogether. The Lincoln Institute report nods to these ideas, and Lowrey quotes experts who acknowledge their political appeal. Nevertheless, those experts recognize the difficulty of implementation, in part because it’s hard to define who qualifies as an institutional investor. The research also consistently warns that such policies would have significant unintended consequences. Barbieri & Dobbels find that reducing institutional participation would shrink rental supply and push rents up. Gorback et al. show that institutional buyers often replace other landlords, meaning restrictions would primarily affect the rental market while doing little to increase homeownership. Coven likewise suggests that blocking institutional investors could reduce neighborhood access for lower-income renters. In other words, politically satisfying bans or restrictions could worsen exactly the outcomes critics claim to worry about.

Restricting institutional investors does not create new homes; it simply reshuffles the existing scarcity.

The real problem is not institutional ownership but the simple arithmetic of too few homes. Scarcity amplifies the market power of the most well-funded bidders, whether they’re private equity investors or individual cash buyers. The investors themselves are not shy about this. As Coven points out, the IPO filing for Invitation Homes, one of the largest institutional investors, stated that it selected markets with expected population and employment growth, and “constrained new supply, to target rent and price growth.”

Institutional investors are not creating scarcity; scarcity is creating the opportunity for institutional investors.

Ironically, the answer to the question “Who Owns America?” is: predominantly individual Americans, not institutional investors. But that’s the wrong question. While it would be wonderful if everyone who wants to own a home could, what matters far more amid a national housing shortage is whether we are building enough homes for everyone who needs a place to live. We shouldn’t care too much if it’s Blackstone, Cornerstone Church, or “Stone Cold” Steve Austin who’s providing it. The problem is that we’ve made it too hard in too many places for anyone to provide housing—and therefore too hard for people to access it as renters or buyers.

The real question is “How can we build enough housing in America?” Blaming private equity won’t help us answer that.

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