Welcome to the “City of Yes, And…” #1
Outtakes, Hot Takes, & Good Takes
This is the first edition of my newsletter for paid subscribers. The “City of Yes, And…” will be similar to my “Hot To Go!” piece from October and will include:
Outtakes: Material that didn’t make the final cut in my regular essays but that deserves a spotlight.
Hot takes: Short, timely opinions on issues that don’t warrant a full essay.
Good takes: Content from others that inspired or challenged my thinking.
I’m sharing a free preview of what’s to come in future editions. Thanks and enjoy!
P.S.: If you do enjoy this and want more content like it, please consider supporting this work by becoming a paid subscriber! New subscribers can get a 15% discount on an annual subscription for the next week. Thank you! 🤠
Outtakes
I really enjoyed the opportunity to interview California Forever Head of Planning Gabriel Metcalf. Gabe made a couple comments that I thought were worth highlighting:
[W]e need to acknowledge that most housing production in America is greenfield development. Most housing production in California is greenfield development. If we were to stop greenfield development, our housing shortage—and in California, our housing catastrophe—would be much, much worse than it already is. It is simply not a serious housing proposal to imagine we could do what needs doing without greenfield development.
He’s right: San Francisco added just 1,200 housing units in 2024 and permitted only 744 through November, a month in which it permitted zero. Yet the city faces a state mandate to add 82,000 homes by 2031. Good luck.
But do people want what California Forever is offering? Gabe concluded:
If we're able to do this, I hope one thing it does is prove the market, prove that there's an unmet demand for walkable urbanism.
One of the underlying questions that informs my reading and writing is: how much of our built environment is the result of human nature, nurture, or culture? Is Joel Kotkin right that people’s “revealed preferences” overwhelmingly demonstrate an innate desire for sprawling, car-centric suburbs—or have we offered housing consumers a false binary between sprawl and density? California Forever is, if anything, a gigantic experiment to test whether this hypothesis is true. As reader
notes in a comment, “Given the price of housing in basically every walkable urban city in America, it seems the question of demand is already settled!”Solano County ought to let California Forever proceed if only to test that hypothesis!
Hot Takes
Last week,
responded to a reader asking how to make New York a high-growth place. His advice? “Upzone, upzone, upzone!” But he noted other issues holding the city back:The general story you want to tell about New York is that the unique agglomeration economy of New York City tosses off a level of economic surplus that is unparalleled in the United States. That surplus, unfortunately, attracts rent-seekers. This is, to an extent, inevitable, but at this point, the rent-seekers are preventing the host from thriving and are creating a self-defeating de-growth cycle.
Relatedly, I recently finished Ken Auletta’s The Streets Were Paved with Gold, which chronicles how New York narrowly avoided bankruptcy in the 1970s. The extent to which rent-seekers in the public and private sectors were essentially running a grift on taxpayers is astonishing. Unions demanded exorbitant wage increases and fringe benefits, politicians gave it all away to stay in power, the banks financed the largesse expecting to be bailed out or backstopped by the Feds—and amidst the mutual backslapping, everyone made sure to reward their friends and cronies with cushy, chauffeured sinecures. As Auletta drily notes, “Public service does not become quite the sacrifice our public officials enjoy proclaiming it to be.”
Taxpayers literally paid for all of it in the form of higher taxes and reduced services. The net result was that
New York undertook its own partial experiment in local socialism and income redistribution, with one clear result being the redistribution of much of its tax base and jobs to other parts of the country as middle-class taxpayers and businessmen fled town.
Talk about killing the golden goose.
Belatedly, the rent-seekers decided that bankruptcy was unpalatable and came together to rein in city spending and balance the budget, setting the city up for recovery in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Nearly fifty years later, the pandemic has created a similar situation for many cities including New York: population flight, declining tax revenues, cuts to city services, a general sense of disorder and malaise. Many cities behaved during the boom years as if the good times wouldn’t end, confusing luck with success, and setting themselves up for failure when the party was over.
Cities looking to get their fiscal houses in order cannot, in this easy age of remote work, simply ratchet up the demands on taxpayers. Instead, as Matt says,
[L]eaders should be looking skeptically at basically everything on the books and asking themselves, “Does this have genuine public benefits or is it just more rent-seeking?”
Our cities need people who are ready to add value and build, who understand that urban abundance is win-win and that rent-seeking is worse than zero-sum.
Good Takes
I constantly consume books, Substacks, podcasts—some more intellectually nutritious than others—so I especially appreciate work that inspires fresh insights or new integrations. Recently,
wrote two related essays that did just that.In his first essay, Andrew introduces a helpful model for thinking about how different transportation modes work better at different densities. Cars thrive in low-density suburbs, transit excels in high-density cities, but mid-density places are poorly served by both. Andrew calls this gap the “missing middle of transportation,” and he argues that it can be best served by space-efficient micromobility options like scooters and e-bikes and autonomous vehicles that don’t need parking.
His second essay expands on “the Geometry Problem”: cars and car infrastructure consume a lot of space. In low-density areas, cars unlock economic value by connecting people and places. In high-density areas, they cause congestion and reduce the land available for more productive uses. Thus, cities face a trade-off between space and time: as density increases, cars become less inefficient, and so more space-efficient modes of transportation—like transit and micromobility—become necessary to increase economic output.
These insights led me to dust off my MBA and reflect on a foundational principle of finance: the time-value of money, which says that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. The phrase “time is money” captures its essence: delayed value is diminished value. Likewise, space in cities has a time-sensitive value. Urban land that sits underutilized—because it is locked up in car infrastructure or restricted by zoning—delays higher and better uses, diminishing both its present value and the city’s overall economic productivity. Conversely, cities that enable higher-density, transit-oriented development unlock agglomeration effects: more economic activity per square mile, shorter commutes, and better access to jobs, services, and customers.
Urban economic output can be seen as a function of the “space-time value of money”: land that is underutilized delays higher returns, while efficiently used land accelerates value creation. Density, then, is one measure of how well a city maximizes its land's economic potential. This potential—realized through cashflows from rents, business activity, and tax revenues—is shaped by planning decisions, including zoning and transportation policy. Restrictive zoning and car-centric planning waste both time and money, preventing dense cities from unlocking their full economic potential.
If there’s other content that would make a paid subscription more valuable to you—or something else that would make a difference, please let me know with a DM or a comment below. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!