And now you get back to drinking. It's it's evening for me over here.
And I wasn't gonna drink, but I did anyway, So I'm half in the bag.
I'm not really half in the bag.
But you should definitely always drink.
Yes, ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister Gorbachhaw tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lills. Today we're going to talk to urbanism with Joel Kotkin lets a podcast.
I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me. They talk about democracy. I'm a threat to democracy. They're the threat to democracy. Rather fake Russia Russia Russia investigation.
That went nowhere. We have a lot to get to Lindsay.
Welcome everybody. It's the Ricchet Podcast, number seven hundred and eight. And if you add seven and eight you get fifteen. If you divided fifty by the number of hosts here, you well know, if you take fifteen and you add the numbers to get six, you divide that by the number of hosts.
Three come up with.
Two who were the number of people who were on the stage and the debate which we're going to talk about with Charles E. W.
Cook and Stephen Hayward And I'm James Lalyx. I met it.
I'm sitting at a long conference table here and downtown Minneapolis.
Steven's on a ship.
Charles is Florida, which has not been yet sawed off by bugs Bunny left to float into the Caribbean. And Stephen, you're in. You're taking the Norway cruise. Have you been to Stoppinger yet and seeing the Herring Museum.
No, I haven't been there.
I've been to Bergen and had a ton of salmon, and right now I have no idea what fjord I'm sailing along, but I'm keeping my eyes open for Michael Paluin's Norwegian blue parrot and having lots of aquafat. So I'm, you know, and happy that the debate because it was at three am local time, I did not watch, although it everything I've read went exactly.
As I predicted it would. Unfortunately, Charles, well.
I'm not near any fields, although I could be given up. How much rain we've had in the last ten days. Is now I live in a place apparently that just rains constantly all the time, one hundred percent of the time, all day, all night, whatever the time is, whatever the moment it rains. So I am sort of surrounded by honorary feuds like waterlged lawns and cracks and crevices that are full of water. You meant the debate, didn't you?
You weren't. We're looking for a water update.
Well, no, an aquavied and then a debate update.
Okay, Well, I mean I think that everything in the debate proceeded as people imagine that it would, in that Trump's behavior was in keeping with his previous behavior, and he responded to every single provocation that Harris threw at him, as she had telegraphed she was going to for three weeks.
She said nothing of consequence, because she never does. She's flatly incapable of taking a position, thinking through a position, expressing a position, and the media is a national disgrace which should not again be trusted to mediate any sort of important conversation about the future of the United States. So what happened was precisely what I had imagined would happen, and I don't think it's going to have an enormous effect as the result.
No, I don't think so either.
I think the people who a lot of the people are going to be voting for Trump not because of what they think he will do, but because what they assume he won't, and that is the whole panoply of expansion of the state that they would expect to happen under either Harris the New or Harris the Old. She's of the party, she's of the blob, she's of the state.
Air four don't want to vote for her. So they vote for Trump because they know he will not increase immigration, he will not raise your taxes, he will not enable the regulatory state, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't matter what he gets up there and says. It is just what people are just assume. I know what he's not gonna do. But there are those who are convinced that he will bring about, in his second opportunity, authoritarianism galore.
And to that point, well, from the Hitler playbook, of course, you have to find another to demonize. You have to have some sort of xenophobic rant, and that's what we got. I guess two of the takeaways seem to be first they're eating cats and dogs. Now I have a take on this in that no, they're not.
They're not.
The Ohio woman who ate a cat was probably mentally ill, and she was not from Springfield. And the dog thing may or may not be apocryphal, but it doesn't matter because that's become sort of a stand in for the issues that suddenly have been thrust the foe by the Springfield Haitian situation. So I'd like you guys take on this.
Do you think that everybody on the right is absolutely fulminating and fizzing and going effervescently crazy over something that is not happening and is not a problem and if it was, it'd be fine, or is you know, Stephen, what do you think from your distance?
What do you think? Yeah?
Well, so, first of all, the real headline here is I think what the real grabber is. Wait a minute, This little town of what sixty five thousand people took in or had imposed on a twenty thousand Haitian immigrants in a short period of time that nobody knew this, I think, right?
And you know, I am tempted to go with jokes because I like to.
I kept thinking, well, there has to be a Simpsons episode that predicted this for Springfield, because the Simpsons always seem to be ahead of what was happening in the future. And a few people sent me suggestions, I want to make jokes about voodoo economics, you know, I always thought was the problem with Haiti right in their economy. Then
we didn't. We're supposed to be against that, right. But finally, and you know, a gat more halfway serious, I think you're right that this is at the very least has
to be greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, the explosion of the memes tells us something I think we know here and in Europe that and you see the neglection results that there's huge resentment by a broadcross section of Americans, of Europeans, of the open immigration that's been pushed upon US diversities, our strength and all the ideology that goes with us and the media and our political class, and for large part in both parties have simply ignored it,
repressed it, won't acknowledge it's happening, won't acknowledge any reasonable concerns about it. And so it doesn't surprise me that you have a explosion of memes, and you know, they're just it's unbelievable how this is all spun out this week, And that's very postmodern in a certain way. Right the postmodernists say, truth in quotation marks is what's created by our images and all the rest of that. So in a certain way, this is the right wing's own postmodernist revenge on the left.
Exactly. The specifics don't matter.
The picture of a cat Ai generated kitty with an AK forty seven stands in for a series of legitimate arguments and conversations about immigrants.
It just does it.
Just that's how the brain wires. So even when he says they're eating cats and dogs. You may not believe it, you may not know what, it may not be true.
It doesn't matter.
It connects something to an argument that I don't know if we're gonna have that conversation.
We'll see.
But Charles, what did you think of the.
I think that unfortunately, what you've just described works the other way around, which is why, among many other reasons, I'm not a postmodernist. That is to say that directionally, the right in the United States and the Republican Party and Donald Trump are correct about immigration. They're correct about the problem at the border. They're correct about what all of these illegal immigrants due to communities that are not
willing or able to absorb them. And if rather than make that case, which is I think irrefutable, you promulgate myths or at least unproven claims, you give the people on the other side of the aisle this unfortunate opportunity to say that's not true. And because it's not true, it's a stand in for all the other stuff that you're saying. You are a peddler of myths and all your politics are based on lies, which is not true.
So I think that while I have been wildly amused as well by the memes, and while I agree entirely with Steve that the fact that they exist does tell you something that people are frustrated, I think it was a mistake for the candidate Donald Trump to say that on stage, because now every headline has been Trump promulgated a falsehood, and of course that the un lying message that he's conveying here is correct, and it's one that is shared by close to a supermajority in the United States.
I mean, we talked about this last week. We now have this is astonishing given where we were in twenty fifteen, A majority of Americans sixty percent, who want mass deportations. That is how fed up they are with the Biden Harris administration's abdication of responsibility. So I would not, if I were Donald Trump, have given them any opening whatsoever.
I would have listed things that are far, far worse than eating cats and dogs, like children being murdered by people who haven't been vetted, like social services being overrun. And the bottom line of it is three million people violating the laws that our Congress passed. I think it was a mistake, much as I do agree that it does tell us something about latent feelings toward the border.
I agree with you.
The thing is is that if Trump, I believe he had enumerated all of those things in a precise, logical and empirical manner, then the conversation would have shifted to a it's not a problem and be its xenophobic, because we know that there's actually no legitimate reason for these people to believe. Yes, it all comes from a deep place of xenophobia. I don't think that if Trump had
put it better, we'd be having the conversation. I think that Trump saying something like that would automatically delegitimize it, even though we want to have that conversation.
I don't agree.
I don't agree.
I think that if you say that people who are angry about illegal immigration and xenophobes, then they say, fine, I'm a xenophobe. I mean, if I could say something moderately Boordy here, I have been told not personally, but as part of the political movement to which I belong, that if I, as a straight man, I'm not willing to have sex with a trans person, i'm transphobic. Could you know what my response to that is, James, Then I'm transphobic.
Yes, I'm not going to go do it.
You're not going to bully me into doing something that I don't want to do. And I think I think the same is true increasingly of immigration. Is they say, well, look at all these racists who are upset about illegal immigration, and those people say, well, if that makes me a racist,
then I'm a racist. The problem with this is that no one wants to say I'm a liar, and so Trump has shifted the ground from something which is quite useful, which is actually, no, I'm not to Okay, that isn't true, Butt, and I just I just think it was a mistake for him to say it.
Yeah, part of the problem, I will give you all. Let's Ephen get into your sing. I just want to say I was talking with somebody who's a little bit liberal on these issues about the wisdom of importing large amounts of people from a drastically different culture into the middle of America, and the response was about, Haiti, Well, they just had an earthquake, which is to say that because disaster had struck this country, therefore the sensible and humane thing was, of course to gather.
Them up and drop them in the middle of the country.
That it would be cruel not to do so. And there's no getting around that. I don't think Steven, you're gonna say.
Well, I was.
I think we're pretty much in agreement here. But then there's a couple of fault lines that are interesting. First of all, just for the record, Charles, although I don't think any of to tell you this, I'm very anti postmodern. I just used that illustration because, okay, but I think I'm a little closer to shames on this for this reason. And then I think can draw out to a general evaluation of the debate.
It's look, let me put it this way.
If Trump were the candidate who mastered facts and figures and weaved in better arguments and did things more conventionally, he wouldn't be Donald Trump. He'd be Ronda Santis and much if I might prefer Ron de Santa, says the candidate, and for his ability to debate and make policy walk arguments that we think are strong. I'm not sure that you know, even if the cats and dogs be eaten
is completely ridiculous, which it probably is. I think it reaches people who say, I don't know if it's true or not, but there's something really badly wrong, and that makes the point more powerfully then a list.
Of facts and figures.
Although you're right, I think you should use the real cases of people who are killed who shouldn't have been and all the other things. He could do that, but he's Donald Trump. He's not ever gonna do it. I keep I get frustrated with all the articles I see every day saying Trump must do this. He's not gonna do anything we suggest, Right, He's Trump, That's just the way he is. And I think, as we said of Ronald Reagan. We just have to let Trump be Trump, and he's gonna win or loses Donald Trump.
Yeah, just loses. Donald Trump. Is one of the problems that.
Yeah says, Yeah, I don't understood.
Just don't do the thing for the next debate, and there won't be one where you do the drinking right because the drinking game where every time Trump says this, you take a shotter every time here it says this, you take a shot, you end up actually corecked the next day, unless unless, unless.
Maybe you don't want to do drinking games at all. Huh, but let's say you do.
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You get your money back, no questions asked. Remember head to zbiotics dot com slash ricochet and use the code ricochet had you check off for fifteen percent off. And we thank zebiotics for sponsoring this The Ricochet Podcast. Joel James Lollx. Here in Minneapolis, I live in a dense city. My neighborhood is not It was laid out as a suburb. At the end of the previous the beginning of the previous century. It's a very walkable neighborhood. You might even
call it a fifteen minute city. And I have pushedback sometimes with a lot of my friends who are who are very concerned about the idea, and I understand why.
But a I like the idea of a fifteen.
Minute city where everything that I can find is walkable and it's nice, and it's got trees and coffee shops and cafes.
But it really does stand in for something else.
In the minds of the people who are pushing this as a future model, doesn't it. There's a lot more control and observation there walk us through because this is one of the new urban models that the urbanists are telling us about. Tell us about the perils and pitfalls and perhaps advantages of the dreaded fifteen minute city.
Well, there's nothing wrong with the idea of per se and actually there's some relevance in the sense there's more people working at home. It's a fifteen minute city because you don't have to commute at all. I mean, in many of the neighborhoods I've lived in in particularly when I lived in Hollywood for many years, almost everybody worked at home the same thing. Where I live in Orange County. I think there's one person on the cul de Sac who actually commutes. So I do live in a fifteen
minute city. The university is an eight minute drive, a twenty minute bike ride. I mean, there are lots of ways of doing it. I think what the problem is that the people who are pushing it are the same people who push density above everything, want to go into single family neighborhoods which actually might be reasonably walkable, and impose a model which the vast majority of people don't want. I mean, if you take a look at the at the data, people are moving from high density to low
density by enormous amounts. That's been the case basically for the better part of at least fifty years, but it's accelerated in the last five. So the question is what comes with it? And the question we also have to ask ourselves is these are the same people who told us, well, if we build transit in Los Angeles, so we spent the hunting on it, you know, everybody would be commuting around.
And of course, you know there are now fewer people writing transit in LA than there was in nineteen eighty so you know, so I think the it's really the agenda of the fifteen minute city. Let's face it, the new urban iss have gotten, you know, a bitter blow with the growth of online work. The whole thesis is how do you get into the downtown or the central district. But now the central district is much less important than it was five years ago, and infinitely important than it was twenty years ago.
There are two elements of this fifty minute city that I think give people the hebes and or the jeebs. One of them is the density thing that you met that you mentioned along transit corridors, long busy streets. It makes absolute perfect sense to build apartment buildings. They're already dense, and the energy that you get from these corridors, you know,
compounds and you have interesting places. But when you say it is necessary to put a four place into a residential neighborhood, what you're saying is we don't like this paradigm of individuality that the single family home represents. All of the hatred that they bring to sprawl, they bring to your neighborhood and say you can't have that, you shouldn't have it. It's two resources and intense, it's not communal enough.
We don't like it.
So part of the fifteen minute city is to break up the individual homes. And the second part is, well, if you don't need to be outside of your fifteen minute city, you shouldn't be.
Therefore congestion pricing. Therefore little cameras that will charge you if you actually leave during certain amounts of hours.
That's the sort of status, top down control that a lot of people say no, no, thank you.
Right well, and that's that's precisely what they want. I mean, and I've seen it because I spend a lot of time in other countries. If you go, for instance, in Sydney, neighborhoods that were beautiful, single family neighborhoods, easily accessible into the downtown, walkable, they now they now build, you know, for you know, four story apartment complexes, completely destroys the nature of the neighborhood. Terrible for the bird life and and and the other animals that live in these areas.
It's terrible for the climate because concrete actually makes things hotter. There's something that has been essentially air brushed out of the climate debate, which is the heat Island, which many people my particularly my colleague Ali Maderis, has worked on, which is basically you end up with much hotter conditions because it's all concrete. Somehow, I don't understand where where green goes with concrete from one end to the other.
No.
The other thing that's absurd is this idea that you have to go break down the last middle class and working class stable neighborhoods and cities. When we have empty office buildings and empty shopping malls and empty factories which could be converted. And as you mentioned earlier, you've got the transit corridor, you have the roads, you have the electricity.
Why would you have to go into people's neighborhood? And I agree there is a certainly a element in the new urban is thinking, which is basically, you know, we don't like this way of life, you know. And of course, very often these are people who are quite wealthy. They may live, let's say in Manhattan or in an apartment of San Francisco, and they almost always have country houses or at least one extra house. I mean, I love
getting you know. I've gotten lectures on proper lifestyle from British aristocrats and I asked them, well, how do you live, and you know it's it's it's basically an attack on sort of middle class home ownership. Now I'm not necessarily a conservative per se, but I'm more in the sense of it being a, if you will, a kind of social democrat. I think the more people are able to buy a house and have an asset and be independent, that's what I think a good social democratic regime would
want to do. But I would go back to Truman in some ways in this area, this idea that we're going to move into a society where everybody's a renter for life. We even rent our furniture. It's it's this weird sort of symbiosis, if you will, between the investment class at Wall Street basically and and the green urbanists. They actually have a very common agenda, which is basically, screw the middle class.
So, Joel, it's Steve Hayward over in Europe this week, actually, and you know, it strikes me, to build on what you've just said, it strikes me that one of the sleeper issues in this campaign that neither campaign is talking about is high housing costs and rent. It's being swept up in an inflation story, which is fine, but I have a synoptic or potted history.
I can state briefly, and I want to see what you make of it.
I think, as you know, and you lived in LA for a long time, I always like to say that the sort of no growth or growth control or highly regulatory framemank for housing began on the coasts fifty years ago, start in California, starting the East coast, and it has over the decades spread inland and now infects Indianapolis, Saint Louis, everywhere.
And there's some empirical data for this.
I think about the increasing costs of the regulatory process to build housing, and I think that's a huge driver.
Of the housing costs problem in the country. Am I generally right about that?
Or what would you add or modify if I don't have the story quite in focus?
Well, As my colleague Wendel Cox says, the housing crisis is not universal in the United States. I mean, yes, you have you know, some of these same regulations to some extent being enforced. But you know, housing prices in the if you want to live in the outer rings
of Houston are still very very reasonable. Much of the Midwest is still relatively affordable where it's really hit hard is in the northeast and on the west coast, and in those areas everything from there are some cases where just the fees alone could be two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If you talk to anybody in the in the development business, the amount of time that you spend, you know, going through the regulatory process, it's that all
gets baked into the housing. Of course, the problem we have with this election, because I do think it's an important issue and I'm actually about to write an article about it, the real problem is is that that you've got one candidate, Kamala Harris. For her to talk about housing affordability is such a joke, given the fact that as Attorney General in California, she enforced laws that made it very difficult to develop a suburban housing she uh, you know, talk to anybody who is an official in
Sam Bernardino, the whole bunch of other places. So the idea that California, which has about the lowest affordability, lowest home ownership, highest prices, that's the model. Give me a break.
The problem that the the Republicans have is that their candidate is basically either an ignoramus or or losing his marbles because right, he has no he has no way of He should be able to talk about these things, but he doesn't know how to put together a co here in sentence, you know, I mean it's it's just one person is a complete phony and the other one is in articulate.
Yeah.
Well, I mean I remembered Trump from years ago wanting to use the power of eminent domain to you know, kick out old ladies out of their houses in Atlantic City and so forth.
And he lost me there back then.
But a second question, and then I'll kick it over to Charles Cook to see if he wants to defend British aristocrats or not from your observation a moment ago. So, Joel, you know I've known you on and often seen you many times over the years, and I always describe you to people as a small py common sense progressive, small p progressive, a common sense progressivism, right, And I took
the heart of criticism. You made this more than twenty years ago at a conference and you may not remember it, but you were criticizing conservatives like me, and I think rightly so saying, you know, you go a little too far trying to make an idiology out of progressivism, you know too much Woodrow, Wilson and Hagel and all this sort of you know, stuff that I do think people take too far. I took that very much to heart,
and I think you were right about that. But then I saw your article here from a month or two go. What happened to my party? What happened to common sense progressivism? Was it overcome by you know, the ideologically hardcore? Or where do you land? You just said in a moment, you're still a social democrat, which I think that's a great thing for us to have.
But there don't see me very many of you.
Left where where we're we're moving towards extinction? I suppose, yeah, although I think that actually the large part of the public is there they you know. For instance, one of my arguments to conservatives is some you know, particularly you know, some of the libertarians will say, well, the market is efficient, let's get rid of all zoning. So what they do is they go along with wiping out single families owning and then don't say anything when when construction on the
sub in the suburban periphery is blocked. And I always ask conservatives what kind of conservatism is going to survive if the if we become a country where only twenty five percent of the people own their own home, you have no chance. Everything will be Ultimately, of course, the ultimate thing will be people will be renters. They're going to want rent control. And why not if I can never This is what I would say to younger people.
If I have no chance of owning a home, no chance of starting a business, no chance of really ever being independent, I'm going to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Why not? Yeah?
Can I ask, yeah, I won't be defending British aristocrats. I have jud British aristocracy when I became a citizen in twenty eighteen, can ask a very basic, from the ground up question here.
I'm originally from England.
As you can presumably here, and in England, in Britain, i think about nine percent of the land is built on.
And in america's two right.
Right, In Australia is even yeah, right.
So when I'm here in the United States, as I have been for the last thirteen years, space doesn't really figure in my imagination because it's almost a limitless.
Amount of it.
Everything you've described, and I know you've written a bunch of US at National Review, where I write it is fascinating. But what I can never understand, perhaps you can explain to me, is why why are there people who are desperate to stop building on.
Land to avoid sprawl?
Why?
It's just what does it come from? What's the origin of that there's so much space?
Well, first of all, the origins of the argument against it really started in the UK. The UK is really the found of idiotic planning ideas, although elegantly presented, but the reality is the first it started off, it was kind of an aesthetic thing. If you read let's say Mumford for instance, or Caro, A lot of it is clearly like these cookie cutter houses with you know, with with young families with tricycles in front. They just were offensive to the intelligentsia. I mean that sort of where
it started. Then as the environmental movement got started, they started saying, well, those people, you know, they drive more, they eat up more energy, you know, they're gobbling up the farmland. Now, obviously, the United States, as you suggest, has no shortage of farmland. Actually we retire much more farmland from being redundant than we do taking it over to build houses. So but but you know, logic doesn't matter.
And then the other thing is that you have a lot of people who have decided that the way to save the planet is to force everybody to live like crap. I mean that's you know, because you know, people say, oh, well, you could live in the city.
Yeah.
You know what if I could go to New York City and buy one of those you know, four bedroom apartments on Central Park West or in Vienna in the Ringstrasa, I'd be okay with living in an urban area, but I couldn't afford it. And I have a nice house in a very expensive area, and if I did that and converted it into anything in New York City, I'd
be lucky to get one bedroom. So you know, the reality is they don't understand that there's a class element, which is people who are not super rich cannot afford to live decently in urban areas. The other issue, which of course is affects this is even if you live in a nice neighborhood in the city, as I did Los Angeles, you can't send your kids to public school, so you end up having to pay not only high taxes and all every kind of fee that you could
possibly have and with the threat of densification. But you're also in a situation where you know, you're basically forced to pay forty fifty thousand dollars a year to educate your kids. By the way, the reason why I'm talking to you not from my long term home in Los Angeles, where I lived for forty years, but in Orange County because when my youngest daughter was going at the sixth grade, we took a look and we said, you know what, if we moved to Orange County, she can still go
to public school. And she did and it worked out great. It saved us about well somewhere around three hundred thousand dollars. Most people can't afford this, so that one of the reasons that people moved to the suburbs. It's not just because they want more space, which is part of it, is they want to be in the place where they could afford to live and send their kids to decent schools. You know, I if I moved from Los Angeles to Dallas,
I could live in the district with great schools. I couldn't do that in LA Once you went into places like which I have good schools, the price is double. Yeah, the same thing with Calabasas outside of you know, I mean basically, the urban America has a reverse Midas touch, and it drives middle class people out, particularly if they want to buy something, and particularly if they're married, and even more so if they have children.
My second question is your criticism of Donald Trump was effectively that he's ineloquent, which is of course, But suppose that I managed to put a chip into his brain and he suddenly became Demosthenes. Would he have the right ideas? And is the problem with the Republican Party that it is headed up by somebody who can't convey or doesn't think about this, or is it as well wrong?
I would say this, and you know, I was talking to my wife about it the other day. On almost every issue but abortion, the Republicans are ahead. Even if you take a look in California, if you take a look at the positions that are taken by Republicans, they actually are fairly popular. Even in the place like California, particularly in the suburban areas. They seem to sometimes have
a problem articulating this. Now, part of it is there is a wing of the Republican Party that's libertarian, you know, uber Alis and you know, they they would never even engage this kind of issue. And actually, I mean I've had let's say, very fierce arguments with you know, libertarians on this issue. Even though I'm sympathetic to a lot of libertarian positions. I think that the problem is the Republican Party doesn't know how to how to make its case.
I mean, but on issues like crime, issues like the border, they're they're clearly energy, they're clearly ahead of the game. The problem is they don't really know how to talk to regular people. And then of course part of the problem is also this this problem with the primaries where you know, the you know, the most unreconstructed twenty five thirty percent of the population is going to vote for
Trump even though most people don't want them. So what we end up with, and I'm already starting to work on what is it going to be, you know, living on the Kamala Harrison of course, being a long time California and I think I have an idea of what it's going to look like.
Joe, you had said before something was exactly correct, that the objection to sprawl in the suburbs began as sort of a culturally aesthetic revulsion, and then onto it was grafted environmentalism and other things, and it was fueled by the ungrateful baby boomers who grew up in Levittown and thought that it was just full of ticky TACKI boxes and romanticized all the cold water walk up Flos, New York.
As soon as we're done with that generation, which is mine, the better, But in a sense, some of what the
new urbanists want is correct. It made me realize that perhaps the last urbanist movement of which I approved was the city Beautiful movement that came out of the eighteen ninety three Columbia acquisition, and that itself was just trying to graft onto America the houseman Parisian, you know, the leveling of old Paris and the reconstituting it into the houseman's vision, which again I like, but I don't think they've gotten anything right. Since I think Moses was wrong.
I think that the people who wanted to tear down blight in the sixties made the mistake of going too far instead of rehabilitating places, and we ended up with these empty plausas and these wind swept places that nobody likes.
And now we have new urbanism, which has elements of it again that I like, but also elements that seem a little too controlling, a little too vengeful and petty, and the rest of it was the last what was the last new urban urban movement that actually you think is the one that we should be looking to, that has the best ideas for everybody, Because you quote Frank Lloyd to writing your book that people are going to go where I'm paraphrasing, people are going to go.
The city goes where the people go.
And one of the things that people hate about the suburbs is that they seem to be an expression of individual desire.
People left the city after the Wars, not because all of a sudden, Oh there's a highway in a car, I have to move. No, they wanted to go there. It was a better place to go.
I can my own family. My mother grew up in Brownsville, which hopefully I won't offend your audience by this as but I have to quote her accurately. It was a shitty neighborhood then in the shitty neighborhood now. When she got a chance to move to Long Island and have a little backyard and be in the place where she didn't worry about crime, and where the public schools were good. She went nobody took a gun to her head.
No, no, So I guess I'm not asking a question so much as giving a speech and a sermon myself. But yes, I mean, so shouldn't we Perhaps we should pick and choose from all of these various strains of urban thought that have gone through the culture in the last hundred years or so. There is something to be said for beautiful dens cities, There is something to be said for preservation. There is something to be said for building something new that contrasts and compares and the rest
of it. But it just seems as if has it ever been non ideological? I'll ask you that urban design, urban theory in the last hundred years, has it always been.
Well, there's been an element of it. But you know what's really interesting is there are some very good models. You know, my friend Aaron Wren wrote a piece about where he lives now in Carmel, Indiana. Republican administration in some senses, some new urbanist ideas, but still single family homes that's doing well. You want to see some of the most amazing evolutions, I'll give you two very different cases. One what I see in eparticularly outside of Houston, because
I've spent so much time there. These new towns Woodlands, Sinco Ranch that they have. You know, the case of the Woodlands, they have a nice downtown, there are lots of jobs there. They have you know, they have water features going all through. You could take a boat around. There's great bike paths. In a lot of ways. They've achieved the good part of the new urbaness regime for reasons of they know that people like it, and they make money if they provide what people want. So that's one.
The other alternative, which is what I'm working on right now. One of the projects I'm on is some of the old cities in Los Angeles we call the Southeast LA.
Places that you've.
Probably never heard of, like down E, Paramount, Well Lakewood you've heard of. I was just there with a friend who is a former head of the computer science department at Chapman, and he said, it looks better than it ever did. So you go into these small towns which tend to have their own school districts, their own police forces. These towns are ninety percent Hispanic. We went there, no vacancies, no graffiti, no homeless people. You realize that you know
a local area can do it too. I think a lot of the problems is a we have to get away from the idea that once one size fits all, people have different things. The other thing is the more you have is a town where the people have a stake in it, and that's what's happening in places like parts of south of East LA, whereas in the city
of Los Angeles you can't affect anything. I lived in LA when we ever had a problem, you couldn't get the city to do anything because you know, I didn't have I wasn't a source of campaign contributions, and I didn't work for a government union. So you know nothing that we said in our neighborhood matter.
Well, Joe, I've got the build on that.
I've got one last California question because I haven't been to Lakewood and Downey. I know those places are, but I haven't been in a long time. It's your adopt at home state. I know you moved from Brooklyn decades ago, and I'm a native Californian and every time I see a story like the one two weeks ago that Chevron a company that grew in California in the eighth nineteenth century is leaving entirely for Houston, following how many companies
are now major companies that have left the state. And as you know, we are one tech procession away from California's fiscal situation going off a.
Cliff that will so deep it'll never come back.
I keep thinking, never mind, Republicans, we can meet in a phone booth now in California. I keep thinking that at some point, isn't this going to wake up Democrats? Isn't Gavin Newsome going to is the privately? Doesn't he have to be privately saying something's wrong when all these businesses are leaving the state?
That might be too optimistic. There is a just hopeless.
So what are we going to say by Lakewood and Hispanic politicians who say enough is enough?
Well, the report we just did at Chapman called the El Fertudo s Latino. We go into all that stuff, and basically the only hope for California is Latinos and Asians beginning to move to the center. If that happens, then we've got a chance. Because these are people who want to buy houses. They tend to have kids. They should be a constituency that the party should fight for. And one of the things that I've been talking a lot with Latinos about is you got to you got
to make people work for your vote. You know, I mean, what the what what's happened to the African Americans. They've become They've become so predictably Democrats that the Democrats really don't have to do anything for them. All they got to do is say a few words and pander a bit. Meanwhile, the condition of Black America continues to deteriorate, particularly relative to other groups. So, you know, the the the problem we have in California is that we have a very
powerful group of people. And this is where why I think Newsom doesn't get it. He lives in this Silicon Valley bubble.
This.
You know, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are the same person. Essentially, their backers are the same, their views are the same, and what they'll do is they will back up when things get bad. So, for instance, Newsom's been vetoing some of the more absurd laws that are being pushed because he knows that there's a problem. But what's interesting to me is when companies leave. And to me, the most important loss by far is X because Space was I
think our ticket in California. Big written a lot about Space, including for a national review. When you lose these companies, you know, it's it's very, very difficult. But the problem is that you've got this group of companies who don't manufacture anything, who are what my friend Mike Lincoles told booth companies you know, like Apple, like Microsoft, you know where they make money no matter what, they're just being there. They make money. There's no incentive from them, and they're
the big backers of the Democrats. There's no incentive to address the loss of these these jobs. I mean, you know, he made many mistakes, but when Pete Wilson was governor, I have to give him credit. Every time there was a company that was talking about leaving, they put a team out there. Sometimes they talked them out of it, sometimes they didn't. Doesn't seem to be any attempt. I was meeting with a bunch of executives at Toyota. They
have a few things left here in southern California. You talk about a company that should be here, and they said, you know what, nobody cared we left. I think the mayor of Florence was upset. I think that's about it.
Yeah.
Have you heard word one about SpaceX leaving SpaceX, which I think may be the most important company in the country in the long term. Not a word, not a word.
Well, that's another podcast and we'll have that too, because California matters, and it absolutely is a lesson, once a shining beacon of hope and opportunity and orange juice and all the rest of it's and now a dire lesson. Joel Cotkin, the author of The Human City, Urbanism for the Rest of Us and Becoming of Neo Feudalism Awarding for the Global middle Class.
Thanks for coming on.
I could have talked about urbanism for another hour or so, but got to run and have a great weekend you.
Too, and look forward to seeing the podcast, and feel free to contact me in the future. I do have a piece, by the way, coming out that Andrew Stutterford is editing on immigration, which might be of some issul.
Well, there we go. Look for that in National Review, I assume.
In National Review.
Yes, yeah, good, all right, Joe, thank you, thank you. You know, talking about California and what it used to represent. I can't think of a style, a mood, a vibe that's come out of California in a long time. What most people think of is a long dead, fifty sixty seven year old paradigm of Googi architecture, of Neon, of all the car culture things that sort of erupted in the mid century. That's what people think of when they
think of California. California urban culture not anymore. The other alternative, of course, is to go to We mentioned Frankloyd right before. I'm working on a piece now for the newspaper where I have been reduced to being the urbanist writer there. Frankloyd Wright did a gas station in a small town of Minnesota in nineteen fifty seven, you don't know how for the guy who you know, had some gas stations and he said, hey, you know what, why don't you
build me a station? And Frank Lloyd Wright usted up some plans from nineteen twenty seven for a broad acre city and put in this city, this little small town, this absurd futuristic building that was already thirty years old when he put it up, and was pointing to a future that never actually happened. And when people look at it and say, why didn't we build more things like that? Well, because it was weird. It's a weird looking thing. It doesn't fit. People weren't crazy about it. It's a novelty.
It's not a way we wanted to go.
And as much as I love some of the particulars of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, building an entire city run those ideas and styles I think was bad. And that's one of the objections I have to all of these new Orbinist ideas is they tend to impose a paradigm as opposed to letting things grow organically and jostle for competition.
That's all I have to say about that. Well, I'll just say here here. I mean, you know, I thought I think maybe you said James Is.
The new urbanists had a lot of good ideas, but they wanted to impose it on everyone by fiat right.
I used to say, look, if you want a fifteen.
Minute city, you want new urbanism or whatever, just allow it to happen.
Let's scale back.
The zoning regulations that prohibit these kinds of forms of neighborhoods and cities from being built and let a thousand flowers bloom. But that's not good enough for Really, this is another species of utopianism. I think you know, you mentioned transit and so forth, and you and I could go.
On all day about this, James and tear his hair out.
There is an element of utopianism that is underneath all of these urban place It really is.
No matter what you look for for the garden.
City models, for the Robert Moses imposed grids, with with the awful, dreadful concrete pretty you know, the word doesn't prove igno, that's it. The standing in the middle of wincept empty pauses, all those things have an element of utopianism, utopianism to it, and that's why I say it's managing to hell with it all? Right, before we go, a couple of things. One meetups coming up Saint Louis October
third through the sixth. That's right, people at Ricochet get together in person and drink and eat and have fun. And you'd be surprised a little politics they actually talk about. Panama City, Florida, December sixth through the eighth. I don't know the geography of but Charlie is Panama City close to where you happen to be or are you just going to be you know, mister undisclosed location and.
Leave us No, I live in Jacksonville.
Oh okay, it's three and a half hours, four hours away from me, Florida's big state. Not so much a cross although that isn't a cross journey, but down. Yeah, it takes it takes you as long to get from the Keys to Tallahassee as from Tallahassee to Washington, d C.
I'm not surprised I wouldn't use the keys as you're starting a ending point, because that does really seem to be tacking it on just a bit, and you could never get me across that bridge in a million years.
I shove it down.
I met well.
I like the keys, I just not the bridge. I prefer to come to it from a watery angle. So I go to ricochet dot com, check.
Out the meetups page and you will see you know.
And if you're not a member, well was Rob Long whoever wherever he's been likes to say join and then just put out the call and wherever you are, there's a fighting chance at Ricochet people will come to you. In the flash, last thing we had another nine to eleven anniversary. Every year, it fades a bit more every year, the the tributes are a bit more muted. The anguish still seems for some to be particularly raw. But it's been a long time. And what are your thoughts on
this day? Did you? I usually think the day before, oh, tomorrow is that day. And this may be one of the years in which I didn't think that I knew it as soon as I woke up, because the just you know, you look at your watch, you look at the date. It's just it's it's stamped, it's But I didn't think about it the day before. What did you get to do?
I always do.
Also, I was flying on both September tenth and September eleventh, so perhaps that focus in my mind. I think that quite inadvertently, I mean not completely intervertently. I did book the flights, but not because I wanted to, but because I had agreed to do an event somewhere. I have flown on about six of the last thirteen September eleventh since I lived in the United States. That is a
strange feeling. It's just odd looking at your plane ticket and it says September eleventh on it, it will never not be strange.
Well, when you do that again and the ticket actually has a power ball at the end of the flight.
Number, that's when I would be a little oh boy.
Yeah, I was.
Well, I was in Washington that morning, staying at the University Club, just a few locked from the White House. So I'm watching it on TV. But then hearing the sirens start running a lot of them, and I thought, well, something must be happening here. And as before the news of the plane hitting the Pentagon and the White House being evacuated, I was kind of close to an awful
lot of the noise anyway. E factually friends of mine saying, oh my goodness, this is the first year, maybe a second year, that I have students coming into college who.
Were born after nine to eleven. So I don't know.
I mean, you know, I grew up with World War Two parents and always talked about Pearl Harbor, right, that was something that lasted forever, And you know, I sort of was rmbed with that myself and still think of Pearl Harbor day when it comes.
But I don't know.
I got to think the current generation who was probably doesn't think much about Pearl harbor.
I think it's going to be even.
Worse another generation from now, James, sadly, because it shouldn't be.
I think you're right. As far as the planes go.
I live under the approach to the airport in Minneapolis, and on nine to eleven there was a great calamity as they brought all the planes down. They emptied the skies right, and then for a very unusual afternoon and evening, there was no noise above except for those the high whine of a jet way overhead making circles figure eights and so on. On a normal seven nine to eleven like we had this week, I hear the tremendous roar
of the engines overhead. Is one plane after the other makes it's leisurely descent, and I'm glad that it's normal, and I remember the day that it wasn't. I won't forget,
but you're right, there are those coming up. I mean, my daughter, it doesn't have a particular meaning to me, even though for me one of the things I will never forget is standing there watching all this happen on the television while my daughter, toddler is playing on the floor, and she picked up a small, little Fisher Price phone that said hello Hello, and she's holding.
It out to me.
She has this delightful smile on her face as the phone says hello Hello, like it's the future calling. I will ever forget that anyway. There, we thank everyone for listening to the podcast today. We advise you to do yourself a favor and by all means tries biotics and go to rigaghet dot com sign up. If you haven't, you'll enjoy the member feed. Do not whatever, do not do not go to Apple Podcasts and give us five stars.
That would be a horrible thing to do.
I'll be using that old reverse psychologically there stuff, you know.
Thanks Charlie, thank you, Steven. Enjoy that.
I give my regards to Norway, of course, in my regards to swampy Damp Florida. And we'll see everybody in the comments.
At Rigachet four point zero. Well next week. Ag