Dog Mania, Magical Thinking, and the Mona Lisa

City of Yes, And... #7

If you’re new here, welcome to “City of Yes, And…”—a monthly newsletter for paid subscribers featuring quick hits, hot takes, outtakes from the cutting room floor, and good takes from other writers. All subscribers receive my free weekly essays, usually published on Thursdays, occasionally more frequently. This week’s newsletter includes:

• Quick Hits: Catch Me If You Can

• Hot Takes: Cities Are for the Dogs

• Outtakes: Zohran Mamdani’s Magical Thinking

• Good Takes: In Praise of “Tourist Traps”

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Quick Hits: Catch Me If You Can

• I’ll be in New York City the week of August 18th. If you're one of the 450+ New Yorkers who read this newsletter, I’d love to meet up for coffee, lunch, or drinks. DM me or just reply to this email.

• Find me at upcoming conferences:

  • State Policy Network Annual Meeting in New Orleans, August 25-28

  • YIMBYtown in New Haven, September 14-16

  • Progress Conference in Berkeley, October 16-19

Hope to see you somewhere soon!

Hot Takes: Cities Are for the Dogs

My husband and I are proud dog dads to Suki, a 7.5-year-old Boston Terrier and the very best girl. She’s a people puppy, so she doesn’t much like other dogs competing for our attention—and in our neighborhood, there are a lot. Still, through her, we’ve met a bunch of neighbors, which has helped make the city feel more like home.

But then I’ll wake up to find a steaming pile of dog poo on the sidewalk outside our house—and all that goodwill evaporates.

Unfortunately, it’s not an uncommon occurrence. This is a pet peeve, so to speak, because we are extremely diligent in our practice of civic dog duty. Suki wears a little backpack with poo bags clipped to her harness, so we are always ready to clean up her business. We try to direct her away from neighbors’ plants that might not flourish when watered with dog pee. We don’t leave her outside in the yard to bark at all and sundry. Some of our dog-owning neighbors don’t always reciprocate.

So, despite being an unrepentant dog lover, I found myself agreeing with

Brad Hargreaves

’s missive on the problem of urban dogs. Brad’s got a bone to pick, but the issue goes beyond bad manners. He argues that “we are increasingly redesigning cities around the needs of dogs and their owners.” In particular, cities are opening more dog parks than any other kind of park while blocking new childcares. Brad argues that cities are catering to dog dads and moms at the expense of all-human families.

This is very much a “yes, and” publication, but as I’ve argued, cities aren’t for families—by design: they’ve restricted family-friendly housing, they’ve made it hard to build and manage childcares, and they’ve built the urban environment in a way that’s unsafe for kids. As Brad says, these are choices—and the choice is making it easier for families to say “no” to urban living. That’s not good for the future of cities, or of humanity either.

One problem Brad describes is how many people underestimate the expense of dog ownership, and then defer having a second child—but I think the bigger issue is that more people indefinitely defer having their first. The dog is a surrogate in expensive coastal cities like New York (where Brad lives), where young couples who might be popping out babies elsewhere are scraping by trying to afford rent. Indeed, the rise of the dog-friendly city is not so much a social shift but a symptom of the underlying affordability problem in major metros. Over half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened—meaning they pay more than 30% of their income for rent—but the city makes it extremely difficult to build new housing and lags, both in absolute and relative terms, construction in “peer” cities like Austin—and even here, Austin let things get too expensive, too fast (though prices are easing now).

If cities want to be places where people can afford to raise families—including families with pets—they need to legalize housing, make childcare easier to open and run, and ensure safe streets. And it’s not just young couples giving up on having kids—now it's people giving up their dogs. As the New York Times reports, shelters are overwhelmed with surrendered animals. The city isn’t just failing families. It’s failing fur babies, too.

Your city is failing this face (Photo Credit: Author)

Outtakes: Zohran Mamdani’s Magical Thinking