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Takes on the VP Housing Debate, Corruption in New York, and Austin’s Growth
I’m trying something new this week. Rather than a longer essay on a single theme, I thought I’d write about several items that are relevant to our usual urbanist bailiwick but perhaps not worth full-length posts individually. This is an experiment, so whether you love it or hate it, I’d appreciate your feedback—there’s a short survey at the end. Thanks for reading! — RP
Debate Blame Game
Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate was a refreshing reminder of what politics looks like when people make an effort at civility, appeal to our better angels, and generally stop acting like assholes. So it was disappointing that both Governor Tim Walz and Senator J.D. Vance still found opportunities to disparage people while they debated housing policy,
Vance claimed that “you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” Walz responded, “On housing, we could talk a little bit about Wall Street speculators buying up housing and making them less affordable, but it becomes a blame.” Walz is right about the blame, so one wonders why he brought up the Wall Street folks.
As I wrote in “Blaming the Bogeyman,” corporate investors are not the source of our housing woes, and in fact they serve a crucial function in providing rental homes to those who can’t afford a downpayment. Policies that would seek to cut investors out of markets would do real harm to renters—and it doesn’t build more housing:
All scapegoating does is fundamentally misdiagnose the root of the problem, allowing those who have the power to address it to avoid the responsibility of undertaking reform and the blame for failing to do so.
Nor should we blame immigrants. Certainly, in an environment of artificial housing scarcity, any increase in demand will impact prices. But in more liberal housing markets, like those in Texas, developers respond to increased demand by building more homes. Walz cited Minneapolis’s success story: “I've seen it in Minnesota, 12% more houses in Minneapolis, prices went down on rent, 4%.”
This is the way. Mass deportation and bans on corporate investors are not pro-housing policies—they’re anti-people policies. The only thing we need to blame is bad housing policy, and then follow the lead of those cities that have fixed it.
City of No Redux
Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was charged with accepting bribes from the Turkish government in exchange for the approval needed to obtain a temporary certificate of occupancy for a building. While the case against Adams plays out in court, it seems par-for-the-course in the mayor's increasingly scandal-plagued administration.
While housing advocates are rightly nervous about whether this will derail the mayor’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal, it’s disappointing that these modest but crucial reforms rely on someone of such questionable character. With a mayoral race coming up next year, how can New York attract better, more honest candidates to higher office?
On a recent episode of Raging Moderates, Scott Galloway suggests we ought to pay politicians more. If you want to get talented people into these roles, he reasons, you’ve got to pay competitively. The NYC mayor’s salary is $258,750—nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not a whole helluva lot when you consider the job entails managing a 400-year-old city of 8.5 million people, a $112 billion budget, and the 330,000 people who work for its government. Bill Clinton was only half-joking when he said the presidency was “the second-toughest job in American politics” after the NYC mayoralty.
I think there’s merit to Galloway’s argument, especially when you consider the paltry salaries we pay other high-ranking officials. Congressmen only make $174k, much less than the top TikTok influencers they’re always competing with for likes and follows. Meanwhile, the salary of the governor of Illinois is $216k, and four out of the last eleven have gone to jail.
It’s a compelling idea, but I think the problem runs deeper—it’s not just about the money.
If we want to reduce the temptation to abuse the power of office, we’ve also got to reduce the opportunities for corruption, which means taking a look at the powers those offices have. I’ve written about my experience hiring a small army of consultants, expediters, and lobbyists just to open a preschool in New York—we couldn’t have gotten our sign-offs from the Departments of Buildings, Health, and Transportation or the Landmarks Preservation Commission without that army. But should citizens really have to spend a small fortune and go to war with their governments as a cost of doing business? When you’ve been through the ringer, you can understand why less scrupulous people might decide that bribery is easier.
It shouldn’t be so hard to be good. The purpose of city government is not to stand in the way of citizens engaging in normal economic activity, but to provide the safety and services that facilitate it. Cities’ orientation should be toward getting to yes, but in practice the opposite is true. They throw up tons of barriers: byzantine bureaucracies, opaque processes, complex or unintelligible rules. It’s all no, no, no.
Opportunities for corruption arise when we give officials the power to interpret vaguely written laws rather than to comply with clear ones; when we give them the power to hold up issuing permits or licenses rather than holding them to firm deadlines; when every project is an opportunity for “negotiation” in which permission is granted only after concessions have been extracted for “the public good.” When engaging in basic human activity requires the permission of some pencil-pusher, we’ve usurped power from the people. That’s the real corruption in the system.
To really root it out requires deep reform—and a level of competence and integrity in public servants that cities might have to pay for.
Losing the Plot in Austin
Alex Hannaford has a new book out, Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City, that purports to be a “critical exploration of the transformation that has befallen one of America’s most beloved cities.” My post “Austin’s Migrant Crisis” referenced the book and was in part an implicit rebuke of one of Hannaford’s themes, that Austin’s culture has been transformed and deformed by dubious newcomers and unbridled growth.
As one commenter astutely observed, “Turns out Austin had been growing by leaps and bounds throughout the 20th century.” Over on X,
has a good post that puts some data behind that, showing why Hannaford’s economic narrative is just flat out wrong. Millerd suggests that Hannaford missed the real story in Austin, one of a city that has led the nation in housing construction and is seeing falling home prices and rents as a result. He thinks that will continue to make the city an attractive, affordable economic opportunity engine, especially for ambitious young people.
Having read an advance copy of the book, I don’t think Hannaford missed the story. As the quote in the above screenshot suggests, he intended to tell a cautionary tale of a city facing doom: Austin’s running out of water! The suburbs are on fire! There are Republicans here!!! No doubt the state GOP has an adversarial relationship with the city, but both despite that and because of it, Austin is the rare city that is both socially and economically open—welcome to all and easy to do business in. Moreover, Hannaford seems to have embraced a kind of climate doomerism that simply ignores our recent technological progress and clean energy abundance. With all of the bright, ambitious people here, a better book would have looked at how Austinites and other Texans are working to solve the problems facing us.
In Austin, it’s the doomerism that should get lost.
I Don't Want the World, But I'll Take This City
Austin City Limits Music Festival begins this weekend, bringing thousands of visitors and some of the biggest stars to our Zilker Park. Among them will be Chappell Roan, whose catchy, campy pop bops have blasted her from obscurity to stardom. Fame can be scorching, and it seems she’s burned some of her fans by not endorsing Kamala Harris a la Taylor Swift.
But I think Roan has got a perfectly healthy view of things, if this quote is anything to go by:
“I have so many issues with our government in every way,” she says. “There are so many things that I would want to change. So I don’t feel pressured to endorse someone. There’s problems on both sides. I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills, use your vote – vote small, vote for what’s going on in your city.”
She doesn’t owe anybody lip service or fan service, and she’s 100% right that people should focus more on what’s happening locally. After all, the people who run your city have a lot more impact on your day-to-day existence, and Joe Biden still can’t pave your potholes.
If you want to change the world, start with your city.
So…what did you think?
Feel free to elaborate on your response in the comments, or email me directly at puzycki at gmail dot com. As ever, if you enjoy what we’re doing here at City of Yes, please share with friends. Thanks for reading!
I enjoyed this! I don’t think you should stop doing regular essays but if you want to blend these in I think it’s a good idea.