Land trusts, co-ops and imperfect representation

The site of the Champlain Towers South partial collapse in Surfside, Florida. Photo: National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Last month the New York Times ran an article by Claire Fahy about community land trusts. I've been hearing more about them lately: there's a group calling itself the Western Queens Community Land Trust that shows up to events, and my City Council member regularly indicates support for them. Several of the people I follow on social media also express support for them.

I've already explained one reason community land trusts are a bad idea: they assign benefits to people based on where they are. The intent is to grant people benefits as compensation for hardship, past (oppressive urban highways and drug laws, and yes I know that these things are not really in the past), or present/future (cheap roads, communication and energy in the country). Despite this intent, the benefits regularly go to people who don't need or deserve them, such as recent arrivals and wealthy vacationers. The benefits also fail to go to people who do need and deserve them, because they've left the area, because they are not part of the legally defined group, or because there aren't enough benefits to go around.

But even if you ignore the fact that it's not really fair to distribute benefits to people based on where they currently live, there's another problem: the trust part. Community land trusts don't have a mechanism to ensure that those benefits are reliably and evenly distributed to the people who live in their declared territory. The trusts are currently constituted as private nonprofit corporations, and I am not aware of any mechanism for governance, proposed or possible, that could make them genuinely representative. We're just supposed to trust them.

Fahy says "The concept of a community land trust began in 1969" and talks about a recent increase in the use of community land trusts in urban areas. That's probably true, but the concept of a nonprofit organization owning property and leasing it out to individuals and families is much older. And in fact, Fahy mentions that the concept was directly copied from the Moshavim model of settler colonialism in Israel, which is a dubious distinction.

Here in New York we have nonprofit housing developers like the Phipps Houses that have been renting at below-market prices for generations. We've also had housing cooperatives since the 1880s at least, and they don't live up to the lofty rhetoric of "community" we hear from some proponents.

I've lived in two different housing coops. One suffered from underinvestment stemming from an effort to keep rents affordable; another suffered from corruption by the officials who were responsible for running the property, and managed to get away with tens of thousands of dollars.

From what I've heard, these are relatively minor concerns in the grand scheme of what can go wrong with a housing coop. The condominium models used around the country and around the world are similar. Among the more extreme risks are the collapse of the Champlain Towers in Florida in 2021. Some have argued that the disinvestment we saw in Champlain Towers is a flaw in the condominium model.

Beyond the risk of corruption is a more general vagueness about governance. Who decides what the land trust should invest in? Which new properties should it buy? How much housing should it build, or allow to be built? What criteria should it use for who it sells/lends to? Should it develop and lease commercial properties, community facilities, parking? If it earns profits, what happens to those profits?

Who chooses the people that make those decisions? Are they appointed by elected officials? Are they elected at the bottom of the ballot, overshadowed by candidates for President, Mayor or Congress? Or in low-turnout off-year elections? Or are they elected by the membership of the Land Trust - and who gets to be a member? Are they even just a self-perpetuating board of directors? Where is the trust there?

Since they live in the midst of housing co-ops and nonprofit housing, you'd think the people who are promoting community land trusts here in New York City would acknowledge the existence of those models, compare the community land trust model to those models, and have some argument about why community land trusts are preferable, but I haven't seen anything like that. You might also think they'd acknowledge the problems of governance and function that have affected co-ops and nonprofits. Nope.

Community land trusts are also promoted as a way to combat the housing crisis. Fahy says, "The primary model in New York creates rental units," but they don't really create any units. They simply buy property and rent it out.

The trusts have the power to reduce displacement by keeping rents low and resisting pressure to sell, but I haven't seen a discussion of how that would address the core problem of housing: there isn't enough of it in places where people want to live. They're not any more capable of creating new housing than any other organization; in fact, they may impede it. This is no solution for the vast numbers of people who don't already own housing.

In sum, community land trusts are likely to serve the wrong people, and may not even successfully represent those people, or function competently at all. They are promoted as a solution to the housing crisis, but even if they function perfectly they're no better at creating new housing than any other organizational model, and likely worse.

Why are we still talking about them?

Don't make land a proxy for people

Starrett-Lehigh Building: II. 601 West 26th Street, from Eleventh Avenue and 23rd street looking northeast past the West Side Express Highway, Manhattan. Berenice Abbot, 1938.

A couple of years ago I read a Politico article about bitcoin mining in eastern Washington with this quote: "Most of the surplus is exported, at high prices, to markets like Seattle or Los Angeles, which allows the utilities to sell power locally at well below its cost of production." This is not an isolated occurrence - I read a similar story from Inner Mongolia.

Why would the people running a power company sell the power below cost? They could simply be doing it as a bribe, to buy off a constituency with a lot of political sympathy. They could be doing it because rural incomes are low relative to those in big coastal cities, and the regulators wanted to be nice to people with lower incomes, or to subsidize rural living. Or they could be doing it as a form of compensation to people who might have added risk living downstream from a large dam, or other environmental costs related to the project.

Whatever the reason, they didn't count on bitcoin miners free riding on the cheap power - a form of "jurisdictional arbitrage" over the artificial cost difference. I bet there's a couple other things they didn't count on, and if you've also taken Econ 101, you're probably thinking of the same things, like that they're not providing the same discounts to low-income people in cities, and that these subsidies for rural living are encouraging rural overpopulation, which can have disastrous costs.

The reason is that land is an imperfect proxy for people. Sometimes it works great, and sometimes it fails. And when it fails bad, the consequences can be really disastrous.

Lately I've been hearing calls for an arrangement like the cheap rural power in connection with New York State's proposed legalization of recreational marijuana use. There's a very good reason for this: the drug laws passed by Nelson Rockefeller and others targeted drugs largely used by low-income Black and Latinx people, and they were enforced more harshly on dealers and users from those populations.

These discriminatory practices had an effect not just on the individual drug dealers and users and their families, but on their communities - and I use this word to mean their friends, neighbors and customers, people who owned businesses and charities where they might have spent money if they weren't in prison, and people who might have benefited from other, non-drug-related, work that they might have done.

When the drug enforcement authorities removed people and their productive power from their communities, they reduced the political and economic power of those communities, resulting in neglected housing stock and infrastructure.

So basically, the white elites of New York and their elected representatives screwed low-income Black and Latinx people over for decades. What do we do about it? At a minimum, any of the dealers convicted under these laws who are still willing and able to work should be guaranteed jobs in the field. I'm frankly baffled that I would have to say this: if your business is selling pot, why the fuck wouldn't you hire people who have a documented track record of success selling pot under really difficult conditions?

Okay, so what about the people who can't work, or don't want to sell drugs any more, or who were just convicted of possession? If they're dead, what about their heirs? They should be refunded all the fines and prison fees they've paid over the years, paid a regular minimum wage for any prison employment, and paid damages for unjust imprisonment.

Now here's the tricky part: what about their communities? Their friends, neighbors, customers, the businesses and charities where they might have spent money? The groups whose political and economic power was reduced? The housing stock and infrastructure of the places they called home?

Well, how many of those friends, neighbors and customers are still there? How many of the businesses and charities are still operating? How big was the Black and Latinx population in those areas when they were arrested, and how big is it today? Who lives in those houses now? Who walks the sidewalks and takes the train? To take a stark example, think about almost any block in North or East Williamsburg.

Let's avoid the temptation to blame migrants. Migration is a normal part of human existence. If these pot dealers and users hadn't been unjustly imprisoned they might be retired to Miami or Mayagüez right now. Many of them might be anyway. If they hadn't been economically oppressed, they and their kids might be "gentrifying" somewhere else right now. In any case, can we agree that there's no reason to send our tax dollars to some wealthy white family living in a row house in Williamsburg with no connection to a convicted pot dealer who lived there in the sixties?

Now, here's a slightly more difficult problem. What if it's one of these neighborhoods, like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a lot of the people moving in are middle-class or wealthy Black and Latinx people? They still face discrimination for the way they look and maybe their accents or names, but they haven't been held back by the drug laws. Are they entitled to any of this money?

We could probably continue thinking up different categories of people and the degree to which they should be entitled to any reparations for the Rockefeller drug laws, but the point is that land is an imperfect proxy for people. And when I keep hearing about sending money to affected "communities" and hardly anything about support for affected people and their heirs, I start to smell a bait-and-switch.

This brings me, finally to a transportation issue. Lately, you might have seen some posts about proposals to mitigate some side effects of highway teardowns. Alexander Laska of Third Way Energy and Beth Osborne of Transportation for America wrote:

"To ensure that neighborhoods around the highway receive the benefits of its removal or modification, the project sponsor for any award under this program should be required to establish a land trust or land bank that would receive initial ownership of any property that becomes developable through activities supported by a grant under this program. The land trust would help locals buy the property, preserve and build affordable housing, support the opening of locally-owned small businesses, and preserve greenspace and parks."

As with the case of mitigating marijuana legalization, the goals of this proposal are ones that I support. Having been priced out of three of the New York neighborhoods I've called home, I don't want to see anyone forced to move because rents rise beyond their ability to pay. But I think the proposal, and others like it, are misguided and will ultimately be damaging to the very populations they aim to protect.

This is just one of many proposals that avoid placing the blame for rising rents where it belongs: on the people responsible for restricting the supply of housing, which channels every increase in the quality of life of a neighborhood into a bidding war with wealthy people attracted by that increase, driving up rents.

Osborne is no dummy, and she does acknowledge, in an interview with Streetsblog's Kea Wilson, that the real culprits are the local elites and the intolerant zoning they've established: “But of course, when the supply [of highway-free, walkable neighborhoods] is artificially constrained and demand is extremely high, that creates a really valuable product." But she professes no hope of ever overcoming that intolerance. "You have to actively protect land to make sure that people can afford to stay.”

But as with marijuana legalization and cheap hydroelectricity, protecting land doesn't do much to protect the people affected. This is personal for me: as a child I lived in a neighborhood that benefited from the cancellation of plans for one expressway and the tearing down of another. Now I can't afford to live in that neighborhood. I'm a prime victim of rising rents, unable to live in my childhood home.

Here's the thing, though: a land trust wouldn't have done diddly shit for me, because I wasn't living in that neighborhood when the highway was torn down. I wanted to stay; my parents moved away while the highway was still up, and took me with them. I couldn't even stay in the next neighborhood because I wanted to move out of my parent's apartment and rents were too high for my income. I left the third neighborhood to go to school, and couldn't move back because I'd given up my rent-stabilized apartment.

The neighborhoods I lived in when I was a bit older never even benefited from a highway teardown (although both of them could have). Rents just went up because people in my generation realized that the suburbs suck. A community land trust wouldn't have done much for me in the third neighborhood because once I left I was no longer a "long-time resident." Even if I'd qualified for one in my second neighborhood, it would probably have been oversubscribed, with a gigantic wait list.

Who would benefit from the community land trusts proposed by Laska and Osborne? A subset of residents: those who don't move. Those who never leave the area to go to school, or spend time in another country. Those who never try out another city for a year or two, to realize what they were missing in New York. Maybe those who leave, but who master the practice of subletting, of property management, of gaming the system. And it would probably wind up benefiting wealthier people who move in after the land trust is established.

Basically, the people who benefit from the community land trusts are the same people who benefit from intolerant zoning, from rent control, from community benefits agreements, from community boards: the local elites. Yup, this is just another bribe to local elites to get them to agree to something that they already know would be good for everyone who lives in the area.

Here's the bottom line: If you want to help the people, help the people. You want to help poor people? Send money to people who don't have a lot of money. You want to compensate people for racist policies that sent them and/or their family members to prison? Find those people and give them money. You want to counteract the effects of intolerant land use policies? Fight the intolerant land use policies. You want to compensate people who are victims of intolerant land use policies? Give those people an opportunity to register and send them a cut of rising property values.

Whatever you do, don't make poor people live in poor places to get cheap electricity. Don't give money to people who were never affected by racist policies, and just happened to move to a place where lots of people were. Don't make people stay in the same place in order to benefit from rising property values.

The bottom line is: don't make land a proxy for people.

Who's your Suburb Buddy?

Adam Hengels had a good post about fighting rising rents back in 2015. He points out that while "gentrification" battles are almost always fought on the neighborhood level, the problem is actually regional:

The battlefield is not in the gentrifying neighborhoods. It is in the more wealthy neighborhoods where empowered residents fight to keep new people out.

Hewlett Bay Park. Photo: Paul Seligman / Flickr.

There are tons of pretty suburban towns, and even small cities, that could be cozy, hip, dense alternatives to Manhattan or Brooklyn, but they've got zoning that keeps apartment buildings out and stifles nightlife, giant parking lots surrounding the commuter rail stations, infrequent train service and parking requirements that drive foot traffic away. If they got their act together, a lot of people would be moving there instead of here.

Here's an example: I live in Woodside, Queens. Per capita $24,399, population density 44,500 per square mile. We've got a decent commute to Manhattan (30 minutes to Grand Central), and a nice mix of shops and restaurants (a Walk Score of 94). I'd be happy to have more people here, but if they went someplace else that'd be okay too.

If I walk down to the Long Island Railroad station, I can get a train to Hewlett and take a short walk to the village of Hewlett Bay Park, which Wikipedia lists as the wealthiest per capita place (city, town, village) in the New York metro area at $113,320. Hewlett Bay Park has a population density of just 1,382 people per square mile, and a Walk Score of 42. It's an hour and thirteen minutes to Grand Central: a beautiful walk to the LIRR Far Rockaway Branch station, then change at Penn for the 3 train to the Shuttle.

The population of Hewlett Bay Park is estimated at 437 people, which is about a third the population of my co-op. Their zoning requires that every building be built on a minimum lot size of one acre, which is about a third the size of the lot my co-op is on. If the whole village were the same density as Woodside, it could hold about 17,800 people. Think how rents would go down across the metro area!

Last year we had a huge fight over a ten story building that would have added about 200 units to the neighborhood. That building would have fit on a single one of Hewlett Bay Park's 256 acres. Or if Hewlett Bay Park allowed townhouses near the train station, those 200 units could be spread across ten or twenty acres. My neighbors and I couldn't agree on whether we wanted it here, but I'll bet none of them would have been energetically opposed to putting it in Hewlett Bay Park.

Of course it's unfair to put all the burden on Hewlett Bay Park for accommodating the million or so people who want to live in New York. Right next door is Hewlett Neck, per capita income $88,049, population density 766.2 per square mile. There are a bunch of other wealthy villages and towns that are keeping people out with exclusionary zoning.

So why, even since Adam's post appeared three years ago, do people keep fighting at the neighborhood level? I think there are two reasons: first, the spatial segregation strategy of moving to the suburbs does effectively put a lot of distance between the wealthy and the crowds, not just in terms of raw travel time, or even in terms of social networks, but in terms of migration pressure. My wife and I did look at apartments in Scarsdale, but we're the exception in our class and income bracket. Most of the people moving into our neighborhood have been priced out of Inwood or Ridgewood. The people moving into Ridgewood got priced out of Williamsburg. The people moving into Williamsburg got priced out of Greenwich Village. The people in the Village got priced out of the Upper East Side, and the people there got priced out of Scarsdale. So even if we yell at the people in Ridgewood and Williamsburg it's not going to help much.

The second reason people don't fight Scarsdale is fragmentation. There are lots of wealthy, exclusive suburbs that are keeping people out who then chain-bid my mom's rent up. Why blame Scarsdale for my troubles and not Bronxville? How do I pick one?

It might be possible to do some kind of multilayered market research and find out exactly which set of racist NIMBYs to blame for the migration into your neighborhood, but that's probably not worth the trouble. We can do this quasi-randomly, keeping to a set of basic principles:

1. It should have a good transit commute. I do not want to take decent car-free Manhattanites and ship them out to Yorktown Heights where they'll all buy Volvos. There are in fact many New York suburbs where you can walk to shopping, walk to the train, walk to everything. If you can't walk to shopping, we'll have to zone for shopping when we zone for apartments.
2. This should be a place that can sustainably absorb lots more people. That means probably not low-lying areas like Deal or Centre Island. Hewlett Bay Park is on the bay, but it's mostly out of the flood zone and didn't do too bad during Sandy.
3. Everybody pile on the favored quarter. New York has some suburbs that are not wealthy. Some of them are already changing, like Newark and Rutherford. Others are too poor to be attractive to people who already live in Brooklyn Heights, like Freeport. Let's focus on the top of the food chain.

With that in mind, here are the ten places in the New York area with the highest per capita income where Google Maps gives a transit commute time to Grand Central, with their densities and their walk scores. Next time your local NIMBYs come out in force against a building, pick a town from this list. I've already claimed Hewlett Bay Park for the people of Woodside, so spread things out by picking a different town. If you've already heard someone else using a town, pick a different one. If they're all taken, pull up the next twenty. Make a bunch of buttons saying WHY ISN'T THIS BEING BUILT IN DARIEN? and hand them out. Let's see what happens!

Place	State	County	Per capita income	Density	Walk Score	Transit line	Transit commute to Grand Central
Hewlett Bay Park	NY	Nassau	$113,320	1,382	42	Far Rockaway	1:13
New Canaan	CT	Fairfield	$105,846	322.7	86	New Canaan	1:09
Darien	CT	Fairfield	$105,846	203.9	27	New Haven	0:59
North Hills	NY	Nassau	$100,093	1,543	27	Port Washington	1:01
Westport	CT	Fairfield	$97,395	503	23	New Haven	1:08
Sands Point	NY	Nassau	$95,647	222.4	23	Port Washington	1:26
Plandome	NY	Nassau	$95,102	857.6	15	Port Washington	0:58
Matinecock	NY	Nassau	$93,559	118.1	5	Oyster Bay	1:25
Greenwich	CT	Fairfield	$90,087	1,278	94	New Haven	0:44
Scarsdale	NY	Westchester	$89,907	873.2	36	Harlem	0:32

Who will save New York City from #SaveNYC?

A lot of people are alarmed by the language Donald Trump, with its emphasis on “taking back our country” and “making America great again.” They evoke the phrases used by ugly, repressive movements throughout history: They have taken over our land and ruined it. We must defeat them and take it back.

Does anyone really miss this place? Photo: Latinka Igrutinovic / CCRNY

Brian Lehrer recently had a great interview with Mark Lilla, a Columbia humanist who’s just written a book on reactionary thinking. Lilla observed that reactionary movements thrive on words like “once” and “again,” evoking past golden ages that were often entirely fictional (Lilla gives the example of Hungarian fascists who imagine a time when their boundaries contained no Jews or Roma) and promising to make them reality in the future.

As I was writing this, I was struck by the realization that these reactionary movements never succeed in bringing about the golden ages they promise. Instead, at best they establish an isolated decline, and at worst they unleash horrific mass murders.

Anyone who knows Trump’s history of racial provocation has not been surprised that his comments appeal to reaction as well. But I’ve been just as disturbed by the rhetoric used by some around recent migrations and developments in cities.

When Andrew Cuomo created a nonprofit organization called “The Committee to Save New York” back in 2011 to provide superficially independent advocacy for his initiatives, it struck me as the messianic delusions of an egomaniac with real power. But Jeremiah Moss’s “SaveNYC” campaign - an outgrowth of his “Vanishing New York” blog, feels like a totally different kind of threat. It feels reactionary.

In his blog Moss bemoans, in inflammatory terms, the loss of small businesses, institutions and landmarks, and the opening of chain stores and trendy spots. If you read it regularly - or if, like Moss, you read the news and walk the streets with an eye for these events - the cumulative weight of all those closings definitely brings a feeling of impending doom. How long before Manhattan looks like the Westchester Galleria?

I have no reason to doubt the individual facts that Moss cites: businesses closing, buildings demolished, chain stores expanding and yes, corruption and inequality. But as with Trump or the other cases Lilla cites, it’s not at all clear that the past was any better, or that the reactions championed by Moss will make the future like the past, or any better at all.

Anyone who knows the history of New York - or human history for that matter - knows that businesses have been closing and buildings being demolished since forever. Many of the beloved businesses bemoaned by Moss and his fans were once the crass new businesses and buildings, taking the place of earlier beloved authentic community businesses and historic buildings, and maybe even longterm residents.

Even chain stores have been in New York for longer than any of the businesses mentioned by Moss. Sure, the chains keep expanding - until they stop. Queens is full of buildings that used to hold Child’ses and Woolworths. They didn’t ruin the city, and neither did Chock Full O’Nuts or Horn and Hardart. Remember when it seemed like Krispy Kreme and Blimpie were going to take over the city?

I’ve never seen any quantitative data to show that the numbers of quirky independent storefronts, soulless corporate chain stores, venerable community institutions, ridiculous hipster playplaces, or beloved family businesses have changed significantly over the years. I also haven’t seen data on the rates at which businesses are opening and closing, and buildings are being demolished.

I suspect that if we had any, it would show that the relative numbers of various kinds of businesses have remained relatively constant over the years, with individual businesses simply moving from despised new invader to community institution over time. I would also guess that the rates of change have been roughly cyclical, without a dramatic increase in turnover in the long term. In other words, what we see here looks less like a response to actual trends and more like the recency effect in action.

Moss also concentrates exclusively on businesses that he sees as providing some unique value. In the Vanishing New York there are no corrupt restaurants, discriminatory boutiques, derivative bodegas or ugly buildings. Nobody goes out of business because they mismanage their finances, provide bad service or sell crappy stuff. Everything must be saved. Nothing must go.

So far this is a simple difference of facts and policy. I think that Moss and his followers are misguided and disagree with their vision of New York. They reciprocate. We each try to convince people to go with our side.

What I find disturbing is when the rhetoric goes beyond factual disagreements into the inflammatory. If we take Moss’s claim that “the soul of New York City is getting murdered” at all seriously, it can only be seen as a call to action. These are drastic times, he is telling us. And drastic times require what?

Similarly, reasonable people can disagree about whether the “Small Business Jobs Survival Act” would actually help any small businesses and their jobs survive (and whether that would actually lead to better lives for people overall). But when the rhetoric goes beyond policy recommendations into scapegoating, that’s not just disturbing but alarming.

Moss has ratcheted up the rhetoric: the hashtag for his SBJSA campaign is #takebackNYC. Who do they want to #takebackNYC from? The claim is that it’s the corrupt real estate developers. I’m not dismissing the undemocratic influence of these business people, but even if there is too much turnover in retail Moss has not made a convincing case that the real estate developers are behind it, or that this bill would do anything to improve the situation.

I’m not really worried for the developers; they can take care of themselves. I’m worried that the idea of “taking back NYC” will spread beyond them. I’ve already covered how the term “gentrification” in general, and Moss’s movement in particular, turn migrants (who often themselves have been displaced by rising rents in other neighborhoods) into the Other, and scapegoat them as the agents of displacement.

One thing I’ve noticed about angry people in political movements is that if they get blocked by opponents who are more powerful, they will often turn their anger on targets that they have a chance of defeating. Thus bus advocates will attack train advocates before they try to defeat road advocates. Pedestrians will attack cyclists instead of drivers. And similarly, I fear that the “take back NYC” crowd will find themselves unable to defeat the corrupt developers and will turn first on the non-corrupt developers, and then on people moving in to the developments.

Think about that the next time you read one of Moss’s jeremiads. When the people he stirs up find themselves unable to Save NYC, or Take Back NYC, what are they going to do? Who are they going to try to take back NYC from?

Let a thousand Brooklyns bloom

As I said last year, what many people call "gentrification" in large American coastal cities is the result of the confluence of four or so different migrations. Cities have been drawing the Best and the Brightest and International Migrants for all of history, since the first trading post was set up where a trail crossed a river. They are not the main source of demand for urban real estate. Rents are rising because those two streams are joined by two other major streams, the Empty Nesters and the Small City Exiles.

Beacon. Photo: Chung Chu / Flickr

The conformist Baby Boomers failed to make their utopia in the suburbs, and the back-to-the-landers failed to make their utopia in the country. Now they've got bad knees or bad eyesight or whatever, and if they care at all about any people, deer or trees on the road they'll do the right thing and buy a condo near their kids in the city where they can walk to shopping. Sucks if you wanted that apartment, twentysomethings.

Here's what I said about the Small City Exiles last year:

not the best or the brightest, or complete misfits, but they’re pretty bright, mildly kinky or noticeably nonconformist. Or maybe they can’t drive because they’re blind or epileptic, or they just don’t want to. Eighty years ago they’d have been pretty happy in Rochester or Knoxville or Omaha or San Luis Obispo: reasonably normal, functioning members of society, with enough peers to have a stimulating intellectual and artistic fellowship.

Today, those towns have hardly any jobs at all, especially within walking distance of downtown, shopping and services are sprawled out across the area, and transit between them is inconvenient. With this fragmentation, they can barely sustain a monthly open mike or an Indian restaurant, let alone a poetry slam or a regional Thai place. Our heroes – somewhat large fish in not-so-large ponds – see the grim desperation in the faces of their older neighbors and head to the bigger cities, where there are more opportunities, not just for jobs but for dinner after 8PM.

In that post, and in other recent posts, I've pointed out that the Empty Nesters and Small City Exiles don't need the big cities. They don't need a regional Thai restaurant. They were happy enough in the small cities, but there were no jobs and nowhere to walk. If we can fix those two problems they won't move to the big cities and drive up the prices.

If we make these small cities really attractive, many of the exiles will move back, and some will move to other small cities. What would it take? I'm not an expert on economic development, but I can think of a couple things that would help. First of all, they should be Strong Towns, keeping taxes low by focusing government spending on cost-effective, dense areas and avoiding spreading obligations out over huge distances.

It seems that a lot of our current economic growth is in high technology, and the places with most promise for tech are those that attract techie types, creative types and financial types (and people who are some combination) and allow them to mix and bounce ideas off each other. But I don't think you can declare a "Silicon Mangrove" in the middle of nowhere, upzone and automatically get tech jobs. It also seems that it helps for the city to be a physical port, connected to trade routes that make it easy for them to get materials and ship out products.

To my mind, the most promising small cities are those that are close to established centers like New York or San Francisco, so that staff members can spend a day in the city talking to potential collaborators and funders, and be home for dinner. Just as before the highway era, they can benefit from their proximity to the big port.

Some of these small cities are already coming back; you can tell because they're often called "the next Brooklyn." And where they are, people are already worried about displacement. It's important not to dismiss those displacement fears out of hand. Some towns have more vacancy than others. If rents are rising faster than wages, either the town should loosen zoning to allow more housing to be built in walkable areas, or we should work to boost opportunities in other towns.

Some people in those towns have expressed fear of their unique towns being swamped by a "monoculture," turning them all into clones of Brooklyn. I'm skeptical about these fears in general, but in small cities they're particularly unfounded. Beacon isn't Brooklyn, and neither is Rosendale; they've got way too much of their own personalities to become clones of Park Slope or Williamsburg. In particular, a lot of the people moving there are actually Small City Exiles who grew up in the area and tried to make it in the city.

I'll talk about what I think would help revive these cities in another post.