While the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago doesn’t open until Juneteenth, it’s already being reviewed in the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and everywhere else. (My favorite review? This one by Christopher Hawthorne, an architecture critic who writes a great newsletter, Punch List.)

Much is being made about how the Center is arriving nearly a decade after its commissioning, at a time when our politics — really, our entire world — has shifted. It’s a throwback to a pre-Trump, pre-AI America. Apparently, the Center has boxes of Kleenex on hand for all the people crying.

But something else has shifted a lot recently: the conversation about architectural and urban planning aesthetics. Questions about what architecture should look like have become unusually heated lately.

My sense is that there’s increasing discomfort with basic modernism in architecture. A growing chorus of people are tired with the prevailing design aesthetic that we’ve been living with that somehow went from the Lever Building to boxy, panelized 5-over-1 buildings that you find everywhere these days.

This vibe is coming from all different directions. On one side: Donald Trump. He signed a first executive order promoting classical architecture as a lame duck president in 2020, then after Biden rescinded it, re-instated it on his first day of office in 2025. And then in August 2025 issued another executive order on making federal architecture beautiful again through classical design. His administration has gone on to target Brutalist icons, such as the HUD and FBI headquarters, as part of the government’s plan to sell off buildings and consolidate office space.

And his renovation of Washington, from the soon-to-be-blueish reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial to an oversized East Wing ballroom, reflect a vision of opulence and monumentality that rejects the simplicity and functionalism of modern styles.

On another side, there’s increasingly an intellectual dissatisfaction with blah contemporary design: Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen, issued a “call for new aesthetics” back in December, asking what movement might define the 21st century the way Bauhaus defined the 20th. They wrote:

We’re more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like?

The duo offered to fund artists, architects, and designers working on new aesthetics, and they were promptly flooded with hundreds of responses within weeks.

Side bar: It's also worth noting a break emerging between tech culture and modernism. Products like the Cash App's wand signal a drift away from the clean, minimal aesthetic that Silicon Valley made its default. Mark Zuckerberg's transformation — from the gray t-shirt uniform to a more louche, chain-wearing self — reads as a small cultural indicator that modernism had become too cold to feel human, let alone relatable.

And finally, there’s a burgeoning strain of urbanism that is not just calling for more pedestrian space or housing that better reflects today’s demographics, but for older, timeless architectural styles over modernist styles.

California YIMBY's Eduardo Mendoza has argued that aesthetics matter to housing politics in measurable ways — that people support new development more when it looks coherent, detailed, and contextually appropriate. (Worth noting that Collison also funds CA YIMBY.)

A similar approach can be found in the U.K., where Create Streets is marshaling surveys of what streets people prefer to contend that modernist architecture is, broadly, unlikable.

The three examples emanate from different places. For Trump, the aesthetic push comes from a desire to convey and amass power, to reconnect with traditional Western aesthetics, and a rejection of the modernism-elitist alliance. For Collison and Cowen, I’m less certain the motive — a genuine boredom with contemporary aesthetics and desire to push boundaries? A frustration that we live in a time where art and AI slop are converging to no one’s benefit? A more philosophical disappointment in the lack of a new creative zeitgeist? For the urbanists, perhaps there is the hope that more traditional architecture will promote social cohesion, and that by restoring an aesthetic from the time before cars destroyed our cities we can get back to a more utopian urbanism.

What to make of this?

The case for easy

I'll be honest that I find parts of this conversation depressing. I grew up in a 1970s 42-story apartment building in the second-densest zip code in New York City —110,000 residents per square mile — and I fucking loved it.

This experience makes me biased toward density and late-20th-century architectural styles. And I likewise believe that most people’s architectural preferences are based on their personal experiences and the media treatment of built environment stereotypes.

So when I read writers contending that we should embrace pastiche and Pre-War styles to match people’s innate preferences, I’m skeptical. Yes, many people prefer McMansions over 42-story buildings because that’s what they’ve grown up around. But it’s not an immutable preference.

And here’s what I find most puzzling about the aesthetics push coming from the YIMBY world specifically: it contradicts the movement’s own deepest argument. YIMBYs have made a career out of arguing against people’s primal desires to keep others out of their neighborhoods — contending that those preferences, however sincerely felt, cause real harm and can be changed through education and policy. If you can shift public opinion on density and development, why would aesthetic preference be the one thing that’s fixed and must be deferred to?

I would agree with who has written in that we’ve largely grown nostalgic that everything was better once before, and that some counter-programming could be useful:

We are living in a somewhat backward-looking, nostalgia-oriented time period — one where narratives of decline are pervasive, and undeniable signs of progress are dismissed.

Under the circumstances, one might ask whether negativity toward contemporary architecture is not part of the problem. Maybe America needs a movement to celebrate current styles and push back against reflexive veneration of traditional vernaculars.

Writers such as Samuel Hughes (an editor at Works in Progress, a magazine that is part of Stripe) argue that architecture plays an important civic role, and we owe it to the public to make “easy” architecture rather than the challenging kind. Unlike a painting you can choose not to buy, buildings impose themselves on everyone who lives near them. I don’t disagree that contextual architecture — work that finds ways to be in conversation with its surroundings — is genuinely valuable.

But the argument tips at some point. You can only take the idea that architecture shouldn’t offend anyone so far. The goal of preserving neighborhood character is the same cudgel used by NIMBY groups to slow down development and prevent change. It uses the language of civic consideration to justify a veto. It privileges incumbent preferences.

The case for hard

Much as people want what they grew up with and what they’re used to, there will always be a small percentage of people who need to push back against the status quo. If it’s human nature to want trees and small-scale streets and decoration, then it’s equally part of human nature to want to progress beyond the ideas of our parents — to strike out, formally and literally, on our own.

Some of the greatest buildings in the world exist precisely because of this desire to be different. The Guggenheim Bilbao transformed a languishing industrial city into a cultural magnet and set a standard countless cities sought to copy. The Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House — deeply controversial when built, now among the most beloved structures on earth.

This is not an argument for novelty for its own sake. But buildings that challenge the status quo, that have a unique design aesthetic, shouldn’t be mandated away.

It’s also important to consider how time factors into all this. Time changes how we think about architecture. McMansions, derided for decades as intolerably gauche, are now the latest fave of Gen Z “Tuscan Moms.” By contrast, when I grew up in the 1980s, our modern building felt cool, and brownstones seemed kind of frumpy. I would be willing to bet that a lot of people will love boxy 5-over-1s in 50 years in the same way that A-frames or midcentury ranch houses, once seen as the epitome of bad, cheap design, are desirable these days.

How much of the adoration of older architecture is simply a love of things that are old and quirky, and which make us feel connected to the past? Consider our affection for repurposed gas stations and vintage fast food joints. Our opinions about any building — including the Obamalisk — might look very different in 50 years.

What should drive a movement?

Part of the problem with Trump’s classicism and the Collison-Cowen call is that they treat aesthetics as something that can be mandated or summoned by intention alone. But the great movements in architectural and design history didn’t emerge because a committee decided it was time for a new aesthetic. They emerged because conditions changed.

Bauhaus arose from a specific historical rupture — industrialization, the disruption of craft hierarchies, a genuine question about what mass production meant for beauty. Modernism spread because it solved real problems: cheap materials, fast construction, new forms of urban density. The aesthetics followed the conditions.

What are the genuine condition changes of right now? Of course, AI. But I’ll name one other: Zoning reform.

Slowly, unevenly, but fundamentally zoning reform has the potential to reshape what kinds of buildings are possible. And yet so far, the results are disappointing — we've largely produced variations on familiar themes rather than genuinely new typologies.

When I was in Miami last year, I saw 1111 Lincoln Road by Herzog & de Meuron from afar and became enamored with its transformation of the most abhorrent of building types — structured parking — into something sexy and social.

The building combines ground level retail, public parking, event space, and private apartments into one building that redistributes public, private, residential, and commercial purposes in surprising ways. That kind of imagination applied to the new freedoms zoning reform is opening up — mixed-use, missing middle, adaptive reuse of office towers — feels like the more interesting challenge than re-litigating whether cornices are good.

Back to the Obamalisk

All of this is not to defend the aesthetic rut we might be in. Modern design trends feel stale at this moment — even more so as AI slop makes every modern rendering icky.

Which is why the new Obama Center feels, oddly, so timely.

There was a lot of trolling of the project before it opened, like from Kate Wagner, the author of McMansion Hell who is now the architecture critic for the Nation, among others.

But now that the project is complete, many people are finding themselves surprised by how much they like it.

I wonder if people have changed their opinions upon seeing the main building in person after so many years of awaiting its arrival.

Or if it has arrived at the perfect time — not in the pre-pandemic era when modern aesthetics were safely championed, but at a time when many people feel a need for a new aesthetic without a clear direction of where to go. Who would have guessed that a building like this could point the way?

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Here’s a little blooper for the people still reading :)

• NYC has lost 150,000 children since the pandemic — more to far-flung places like Miami and Durham than just the suburbs, via

• I love this follow-up on the Marblehead-being-pricks viral moment, via

• Who would have thunk Denver would be called “the emptiest downtown” 6 years after the pandemic?

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This summer, I’m rolling out an occasional series of guest contributions from fellow urbanist writers. First up: Sam Sklar of Exasperated Infrastructures, who sat down with Andrew Rasiej — civic tech pioneer, founder of Civic Hall, and one of the people who’s been arguing that cities need to take technology seriously since before most policymakers knew what Wi-Fi was. Sam and Andrew’s conversation on AI and cities stuck with me, and I wanted to share it with my readers.

Sam Sklar: I’d love for you to start by introducing yourself and your background.

Andrew Rasiej: My name is Andrew Rasiej, and I’ve been at the intersection of technology and the public good for thirty-some years. My first foray into this arena was an organization I started back in 1995 called MOUSE.org, which wired public schools to the internet. At the time, almost all schools in New York City had no internet connection and very few computers. That program still exists.

From that experience, I spent a lot of time talking to elected officials about the need to wire public schools and got deeply interested in what I’d call civic tech—the idea that technology could be used to solve problems, create more transparency in government, and help deliver services.

In 2003, I started a conference at the intersection of technology and politics called the Personal Democracy Forum. I worked as a senior advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, which built an API allowing people to track where money in politics was going.

In 2015, I co-founded Civic Hall with Micah Sifry—a collaborative workspace on Fifth Avenue and 20th Street in New York that brought together people from the technology community with policymakers, nonprofits, government officials, foundations, philanthropy, and corporations. Within a year, we had over a thousand members. Within two years, we had done over two thousand events—brown bag lunches, book talks, panel discussions, demo nights, hackathons. We launched something like fifty or sixty new nonprofit initiatives out of that experience.

In 2017, I responded to a city RFP to build an office building in Union Square, and I proposed a new and larger Civic Hall. Seven years later, Civic Hall at Union Square opened—90,000 square feet. It’s the largest digital skills training center of its kind in the country. I’m a big follower of Eric Klinenberg, who wrote Palaces for the People about the need for civic infrastructure, and I’m very happy that Civic Hall got built—thirty-five million dollars of fundraising later, which was really hard to do during Covid.

Along the way, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for New York City to catch up with the private sector in how it thinks about technology—how it could save money, deliver services better, create more equity and accountability. I was shocked from the beginning at how disconnected not just the school system, but the political and governmental systems were from the internet.

A quick side story: I ran for Public Advocate in 2005 on a platform to make New York City a wireless city, arguing that broadband was a public utility. When I went to the New York Times editorial board for my endorsement interview, they asked me what Wi-Fi was. This was 2005. People just didn’t understand.

I’m curious—how long do you think it would have taken for the city to wire all the schools without your vision?

Public schools are wired now, but they’re only open about 15 percent of the time in the year. And now we have a cell phone ban, which I don’t completely disagree with, per se. But to me, the failure to make the internet available in public schools twenty-five years ago, and now the banning of cell phones, both reflect a failure of public policy—a failure to understand these technologies. Technology is a tool. It can be used for good, and it can be used for bad. If policymakers don’t understand it, they can’t develop policies to take advantage of it.

The same goes for AI. In my opinion, the only way to fight bad AI is to build lots of good AI. And the only way to build good AI is to empower the people responsible for good in the world with the same tools and skills that the bad actors have.

Unfortunately, most foundations are still just developing strategies around AI. Most nonprofits don’t understand how to leverage it—they’re still debating governance and ethics, which are important, but they’re even afraid of using ChatGPT to write grant proposals. There’s a real digital divide. The original divide was getting schools connected to the internet. The second was getting people to understand how to use it for education. And now the divide is understanding how to leverage AI.

How do we make our policymakers less reactive to what practitioners can see coming and more proactive in building the groundwork so new technology has a place rather than a wall?

I want to start by defining what I believe civic tech is: any technology for the public good, full stop. Some people refer to GovTech as any technology the government uses to deliver services—but depending on who’s in power, that may or may not be civic. For example, if Palantir builds a massive database for ICE to track undocumented people, I wouldn’t call that civic tech, even if they have a government contract. The real question is: do these technologies shift power from the few to the many, or from the many to the few?

If government doesn’t understand how a technology works, it’s very hard for them to leverage it. City agencies often have data scientists on staff, but most government agencies don’t have a deep bench of technologically capable people. Digitally native young people coming into government are often shocked by what they find—I use the analogy of getting into a 1998 Pontiac with bald tires, a leaky gas tank, bad brakes, and a steering wheel that comes off the column. It would be great to get them to maybe a 2015 Toyota Prius. But they have a long way to go.

And the reasons for that gap aren’t really technological—they’re structural. Things like procurement rules, civil service regulations, hiring practices, and data silos. You can’t directly hire a state-of-the-art data scientist because civil service rules get in the way. So agencies do workarounds—they hire consultants like Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, or IBM, who charge a fortune. And even when those consultants deliver, they don’t change the culture inside the agencies. They’re like band-aids.

So the big question is: how do you create a culture of innovation inside city government that recognizes that the technologies everywhere in our private lives could be put to use solving problems inside government?

I’ll give you a really great example of civic tech that saved lives, saved money, and transformed the way we deal with mental health. It’s called Crisis Text Line. It was started about ten years ago by a social entrepreneur named Nancy Lublin, who received a text message while president of Do Something from a sixteen-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father. Nancy realized that teenagers don’t call 800 numbers—they text. Using a platform called Twilio, she created Crisis Text Line with three major innovations.

First: all the guidance counselors receiving and responding to texts worked distributed, from their homes or offices. No call center needed. Second: when a text came in, the counselor could see the full history of that person’s previous texts in real time, so they could understand the full picture. Third—and most amazingly—after receiving millions of texts, they analyzed the data and could tell policymakers things that were never visible before. For example, eating disorder problems spike for kids returning to school on Mondays after dysfunctional weekends at home. Or that the second-largest cohort of people claiming suicidal ideation is not teenagers, but unemployed white men in the Rust Belt. Or that there’s more sex trafficking of teenagers in Montana per capita than in Florida.

That kind of information was never visible because every city and state had its own isolated outreach system, and they weren’t talking to each other. Crisis Text Line is now a global platform, and cities, states, and countries have shut down their own systems and use it instead. That wasn’t a government service—it came from outside.

You’ve seen the growth of technology and the civic ability—or inability—to maintain and regulate it. We have private business as essential to economic growth, government with no technological runway to keep up, and a public that doesn’t have the foundation to engage with these questions. What’s step one?

I believe [step one] needs to be a public education campaign about AI. In 2017–2018, the government of Finland, working with the University of Helsinki, published a program called The Elements of AI, with the goal of educating 1 percent of the Finnish population in the basics of AI. It was so successful that they re-released it in thirty-five languages, and it’s now been distributed to over one hundred and seventy countries.

Research shows that 60 percent of the public is fearful that AI is going to take away their jobs or further erode democracy. AI is viewed very negatively by the majority of the public—and I think rightfully so, because government has largely failed them on this. A handful of states have passed laws to regulate AI. The federal government, particularly under Trump, has abdicated all responsibility. And the public is fearful. But fear is not a substitute for comprehension.

You’re never going to create public policy to leverage technology for the public good, or to limit its damage, unless you engage the public in understanding it. Think of it this way: if there were another pandemic like COVID, the government would issue public education around masking, social distancing, and vaccination. Well, I would say unfettered AI is a digital pandemic. It’s a public safety issue.

The government needs to step in and educate the public—not just about data centers eating up electricity or AI taking jobs, but about things like: that TikTok video you’re watching of someone saying Donald Trump is the greatest thing since sliced bread? That was an AI-generated bot, not a human being.

Do you think the City could actually do this?

I do. I recently penned a piece in the New York Daily News basically asking the governor and the mayor to launch a public education campaign around AI. The mayor announced the Office of Mass Engagement. I would say one of their responsibilities should be to educate the public about these technologies. Think of LinkNYC kiosks, buses, and subways with QR codes delivering AI education at a ninth-grade reading level.

In fact, I took The Elements of AI—the open-source curriculum from the Finnish government—and put it into Claude. I asked it to update the content for a US context at a ninth-grade reading level, then fed it a dozen research papers, pro-AI and anti-AI, and asked it to update the curriculum further. It built a seven-chapter course in about ten minutes. Pretty simple language—just enough to help people understand what an LLM is, what an agent does, and why it matters.

[Beyond technology literacy], I’m not sure anyone believes the capitalist model being sold to them is working anymore.

Correct. And the oligarchs building bunkers in Montana know the pitchforks are coming. Here’s what I’d love for people to take away from this conversation: this is a battle between good and evil. The question is whether these technologies shift power from the few to the many, or the many to the few. Right now, what we’re watching happen in real time is the latter.

I don’t believe you can stop this technology. But I do think you can mitigate it or match it—and the only way to do that is to arm the people responsible for good in the world with the same skills and tools that the bad actors have. I still believe that’s possible. I’m still an optimist that we can reboot our society around a more data-driven, responsive government and democracy.

It may not look like the democracy we’ve had for the last hundred years. Maybe it involves new decision-making platforms like Polis or participatory budgeting as a different way of deciding where community resources go. But civic engagement isn’t just about voting or jury duty or joining a community board. What civic engagement should really mean is being present in your community, taking responsibility for yourself and your neighbors. If everyone had that mindset, we wouldn’t have the polarization or the problems we have today.

And the last thing I’ll say: we don’t spend enough time actually listening to each other. I believe that people’s desire to be heard is greater than their desire to be right. If we spend time actually listening—even when we don’t agree, even validating another person’s perspective as crazy as it may be—we create the conditions for finding shared values, shared decisions, shared solutions. But we can’t get there unless we at least acknowledge the other party’s point of view.

If you’ve read this far, you’d probably enjoy a subscription to The New Urban Order.

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This is a short but sweet list to get you through to Labor Day, covering cities from SF to NYC to Philly and Austin, and lots in between.

Just so you know, each season, I compile a list of favorite urbanism books and add them to my Bookshop — you can peruse and pre-order there while supporting both this Substack and your local bookstore! Bonus: subscribers can vote on the next selection for our Book Club!

The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building

Brian Jay Jones | June 2

The Capitol traces three centuries of American history through the building at the center of it, with dramatic stories ranging from assassination attempts and thwarted bombings to ghostly cat prints and “fairy doors.” Jones brings in both iconic names — from George Washington to Ronald Reagan — and lesser-known characters, with particular attention to the stories and contributions of enslaved people. The result is a portrait of American politics, architecture, and popular culture in one place.

City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco

Jonathan Weber | June 9

San Francisco transformed from a mid-sized post-industrial city into the tech capital of the world over a few decades — but the boom carried a shadow. Journalist Jonathan Weber traces how a marriage of counterculture and tech optimism gave rise to the city’s rise, while homelessness, addiction, and a chronic housing shortage festered underneath. When the pandemic arrived, it cracked open the contradictions that the city’s political establishment had failed to resolve.

There are 8 more books previewed beyond the paywall.

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What’s your plan for the second half of the year? Here are my top choices — with plenty behind the paywall for paid subscribers!

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Make Shift

Community-led talks and workshops to showcase the relationship between design, technology, and power in cities.

May 20-21, 2026; New York City

Greater & Greener

The only event dedicated to exploring the full potential of parks as city-building tools

June 13-16; Austin

World Cities Summit

International conference focused on sustainability and livability

June 14-16; Singapore

5th International Placemaking Week

A global gathering of placemakers that emphasizes hands-on learning and innovative social events

June 24-26; Detroit

Future of US

Billed as a festival exploring community visions of the future we want

July 5-12 ; San Francisco

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👋🏻 I’m Diana Lind. I’ve been writing about cities for more than 20 years, including in the book Brave New Home.

💻 I post articles to this newsletter about twice a week and have more than 200 posts in the archive. About 90 percent of what I publish has a paywall and I save the best insights and commentary for my paid subscribers. If you’re enjoying my newsletter, don’t delay in subscribing.

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This is my fourth and last post on my trip to Bloomberg CityLab in Madrid— check out my preview of the event, coverage of Madrid, and a deep dive on one of the sessions on libraries. Overall, the conference provided an enormous number of great ideas and I could have written about every session. But what follows are some highlights.

Art + Life = Citymaking

Performing and visual arts were woven into several CityLab sessions — some more successfully than others! I really appreciated the sentiment to integrate culture into the conference. The artistic interludes left me feeling like citymaking itself is a kind of art, not just a job. Performances underscored the sense we are all involved in something quite profound, that local culture is not a sideshow but in many cases the point of urban life.

Two weeks later, I can’t get CityLab’s opener, Anthony Roth Costanzo ☝🏻— the leader of Opera Philadelphia, ironically an organization in my hometown— out of my head. I was shocked by Costanzo’s voice and so intrigued by the concept of Glass Handel that I’ve been listening to it ever since.

A New Vocational Pathway

CityLab’s two-day main event consisted of a series of panels and short keynotes. I appreciated one session focused on building the workforce we need. One example came from Boston, where a $37.8 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies will enable a Boston high school to double its enrollment capacity to more than 800 students and expand its curriculum to include new health career pathways that align to in-demand roles at Mass General Brigham. Students will now have opportunities to explore careers in perioperative services, medical imaging, nursing, emergency services, and medical laboratory science, and gain certifications and college credits aligned to these pathways while they are in high school.

Hospitals like Mass General Brigham have hundreds of open positions that are not at significant risk of automation in the near term, and they offer long-term career ladders that the employer has a direct incentive to invest in. The broader point: for too long, US career-focused schools have had thematic vocational areas without real, concrete jobs attached. At a time when everyone is nervous about the future of work, it is exciting to think about how this model might crack open a new vocational approach in the U.S. where employers help co-design (and fund!) schools, then train and eventually employ their students.

Empowering Young People

I really appreciated the conference’s focus on young people — not just as the recipients of new funding or policies, but as advocates for themselves. Florence Namayanja, Mayor of Masaka, Uganda – a city where 70% of the population is under 30 — spoke about coming to office and finding a profound disconnect between young people and city hall. Her solution was a Youth Desk — a dedicated office headed by a young person, explicitly designed to make youth feel comfortable walking into the mayor’s office, giving feedback and sharing ideas. The first output was a youth convention, which surfaced a clear demand: internships, mentorship, and pathways into city employment. The desk identified individual talents and began embedding young people across city departments, where some have since been formally recruited into decision-making roles. She then connected this to the Youth Climate Action Fund: when she became mayor, she inherited a massive waste backlog. Young people initially volunteered to clean the city alongside her, but through the YAF, those informal volunteers were formalized into associations that now hold city contracts for garbage collection. She described them as having become “business co-creators and co-governors of their own projects” — a shift from civic volunteers to civic entrepreneurs. Too often youth engagement is one-off and disconnected from true engagement and decision-making.

Harnessing AI

Throughout the conference, projects and policies using AI came up. For example, London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan has not only created an AI and Jobs taskforce, but will be offering free AI training to Londoners later this year. We also heard a presentation by Jigsaw, an incubator within Google, about an AI-powered civic engagement tool that is intended to close the “listening gap” —the difference between the number of people who are heard and those who want to be heard. Using technology that emerged from online commenting platforms, Google is seeking to create more dynamic ways of surveying people about their communities and then making that feedback legible to local leaders.

Daniel Ramot, co-founder and CEO of Via, also showed off how AI can help increase the return on investing in transit by creating dynamically routed microshuttles instead of more frequent buses along fixed routes.

I was really struck by MIT Senseable City Lab’s Carlo Ratti, who described returning to William H. Whyte’s foundational 1970s research on how people use public space (originally filmed on Super 8), and reanalyzing it alongside contemporary footage from the same New York, Boston, and Philadelphia spaces using AI.

The results were striking and unsettling: people now walk 15% faster through public space; solo walkers have increased 68%; lingering and spontaneous social interaction have declined dramatically. (If you want more on this topic, I published an interview with Ratti’s collaborator a year ago here.)

They say you can’t manage what you can’t measure. I think AI’s ability to make measurement faster and cheaper is going to really help us manage our cities in ways we’re just beginning to grasp.

This piece continues below the paywall with a few more examples of interesting highlights from the conference.

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• I loved this story about how a community made a bronze replica of a London Plane tree branch that rotted so that generations of kids in Walla Walla could keep climbing it. (Hat tip: )

• Two worthy items all over my LinkedIn feed: ’s New York Times piece about Invest Chattanooga’s model of supporting housing and ’s deserved Pulitzer for his book about the working homeless.

• Yay, Philadelphia’s Market East gets a deserved retail intervention — designed, implemented, and written about by three people I think I can call my friends.

I’ve been trying to think about how to process all the amazing sessions from Bloomberg CityLab last week, and I started out pulling together a big list of all the things that blew my mind, but one session I can’t stop thinking about focused on libraries.

Libraries are at the center of so many questions I’m grappling with these days: What is knowledge in the 21st century? How do we deal with shrinking government budgets? How do we reinvest in social infrastructure? How do we get people out of their homes? What kinds of spaces encourage a mix of age, class, race, and ability?

The session featured an all-star list of librarians (sounds oxymoronic, but wasn’t!) including: Marie Øestergaard, Library Director of Aarhus Public Libraries; Alexander Zambrano Salazar, Head of Knowledge Management and Public Innovation at the Bogotá Library System; Gene Tan, Chief Librarian and Deputy Chief Executive of the National Library and Archives Board of Singapore; and Brian Bannon, Chief Librarian and Merryl and James Tisch Director at the New York Public Library. Tommi Laitio, former Executive Director for Culture and Leisure in Helsinki, moderated.

I was jumping around from breakout-to-breakout, so I missed a little bit of the discussion. Initially, I thought I was just going to swoon over other countries that invest more in their libraries than we do in the U.S. Like in Aarhus, Denmark, they have this library called Dokk1.

It’s been called the best library in the world by TIME magazine and you could see why: it rethinks its role as a repository for books and study and instead epitomizes modern social infrastructure with a citizen service center, office space, fully-subterranean automated parking for 1,000 cars, a light rail transit station, and public space both on the harbor and on its front steps. All of this within some stunning, sustainable architecture.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, the National Library Board (NLB) has been focused on using AI for good since 2023. First they launched ChatBook, an AI chat service that invites users to engage in conversations with a book.

The NLB also launched StoryGen, which offers readers the opportunity to reimagine the plots of six different classics including The Wizard of Oz and stories from the Malay Annals (Sejarah Melayu) — it sounds like an AI-inflected Choose Your Own Adventure experience. From Gene Tan’s telling, Singapore libraries seem to exist in a nice space between art gallery and continuing education provider, beyond a source of books.

But while these examples are impressive — as my fellow Philadelphian Eliza Erickson asked during the Q&A– what about cities where the lack of an HVAC system closes the library down several times a year? In other words: What do you do about library systems where we’re still focused on need-to-haves rather than nice-to-haves?

It was in this context that I found the story of Bogotá so inspiring. Bogotá has about 8 million people and about two dozen branches of the official library. For comparison, New York City is about the same size and has 92 locations.

What Bogotá has instead are community libraries. For 30 years, the city has had Paraderos Paralibros Paraparques – Book Stops in Parks. As you can see below, these kiosks are more substantial than the little free libraries that often dot our American city streets. In Colombia, they not only provide books but also provide a space to enjoy them on the go.

According to Fundalectura, a Colombian non-profit organization founded in 1990 to promote reading and writing, “These stations offer a collection of books designed for the whole family, accompanied by activities designed and led by a reading promoter, with the goal of encouraging engagement with reading in public and open spaces.” I love the idea that these kiosks offer more than just infrastructure, but also programming.

About 15 years later, Fundalectura established reading kiosks in transit stations – what a lovely alternative to scrolling in transit!

The result of Bogotá’s decentralized system is that the city has many more spaces for reading beyond the city’s traditional libraries. Biblored — Bogotá’s library system — counted 145 reading spaces across the city in 2024.

As Brian Bannon, New York’s head librarian noted, all of these innovations in what a library can do — like AI exhibits and co-working spaces —are great, but there is also something really distinct and special about the act of reading. And libraries should help preserve that experience.

I recently read a Wall Street Journal article about how YouTube has invaded the classroom. An infographic explored how reading a book activates our brains — particularly our children’s brains — in ways that getting information from a screen does not.

Much as our physical bodies changed as a result of car-centric environments, I think we’ll find that our brains’ activity are changing because of our screen-centric lives.

It can be easy to despair over the declines in reading, particularly among young people.

Yet, there’s actually a countervailing narrative these days. Bookstores are shockingly thriving again. According to Fast Company: “Over the last five years, the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. jumped by 70%. In 2025 alone, 422 new bookstores opened, according to the American Booksellers Association.”

And programs where people spend hours reading together are taking off. New York Magazine profiled University of Pennsylvania Religious Studies professor Justin McDaniel who leads a course where “the students gather one evening each week for seven or eight hours to read an entire book in total silence, then discuss it in a darkened classroom.” Meanwhile, the New York Times profiled Page Break, an upstate New York reading retreat where participants read a novel over the course of the weekend together.

If reading for pleasure is no longer a widespread leisure activity, it does have an intense following of strong believers.

Library systems were made for a time when their primary function was to hold books and to have a space for lots of people to read in them. That formula makes less sense these days.

Bogotá’s decentralized approach to getting books out into community shows how to reach people where they are. In Philadelphia, where I live, our library system is pretty amazing and its programming is admirably diverse in its offerings and locations. And yet — I did wonder about finding ways to get more books into our other infrastructure of parks, transit, and neighborhood civic associations. The truth is that lots of people don’t go into libraries, but they might crack open a book if there was a bookmobile sitting at the park the way Mister Softie does on late afternoons.

At the same time, I wonder if our libraries could do more to take advantage of hard-core readers. Why not have libraries host reading retreats? One of the images during the CityLab panel discussion showed informal reading spaces in Bogotá that looked like they were in someone’s house. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find ways for people to share their own collections of books? I have some great books on Philadelphia’s history — you might have a collection of graphic novels my son would want to see. How fun it would be to browse a personalized, small scale collection that reflect an individual’s curated shelf? There doesn’t seem to be a good way yet for libraries to activate the book corps that is latent in our cities.

Bogotá’s model was a great example of how constraint is the innovation. They couldn’t afford to wait for a Dokk1, and neither can most cities. The infrastructure for a more distributed reading culture is already here — can we fully tap into it?

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As soon as I arrived in Madrid for CityLab, I was taken by the absolute, undeniable vibrancy on the streets. Compared with the United States, where most cities still feel half as animated as they were in 2019, walking Madrid’s streets was like a constant adrenaline rush. This wasn’t just my imagination or the fact that I was staying in the most touristy part of town – Madrid is that rare, old city that is growing in the 21st century. The city of Madrid has been gaining population at a steady, substantial clip, adding more than 500,000 residents since 2000. And that growth isn’t resulting in a shut-in, delivery-oriented, remote-work city like we’ve seen in the U.S. Instead, so many people are walking on the streets, police have to regulate the pedestrian traffic during busy holiday times.

A recent article in El Pais explores Madrid and Spain’s overall growth:

Last year, the city of Madrid surpassed 3.5 million registered residents for the first time and broke a record with 11.2 million tourists. This influx of people is further boosted by the 1.12 million commuters who arrive daily from outside the city to work there, compared to 790,000 in 2016. The number of trips on the metro and on buses has also broken historical records; the economy is booming, and the wider region of Madrid is approaching full employment.

Madrid is seemingly an outlier these days. It’s growing while other European capitals are stagnating. Welcoming immigrants while others are closing their doors. Raising minimum wage and bridging inequality while American cities are convinced paying low-wage workers more will result in unemployment.

And yet at the same time, Madrid also feels like it’s “just like us” in that it is grappling with a housing crisis, worried about the negative impacts of tourism, and seeing its population of older adults rise. Yet, the city is tackling these issues head on with an array of solutions.

As I walked around this magnetic city, I wondered: What can we learn from Madrid’s success?

You don’t have to be a young city to grow

In the United States, it can often seem like our oldest cities – places like New York, Boston, Philadelphia – are destined to stop growing, constrained by their density. By contrast, places like Phoenix and Houston are growing because they’re not densely developed and still have space to sprawl. Madrid provides an alternate vision of an older city that is continuing to add population and economic activity.

How has Madrid densified? One answer may be that it has expanded its metro system, faster and more cheaply, than anywhere else in Europe, making more of the city accessible to its downtown core. If you’re interested in how Madrid built 35 miles of subway at the same cost of 1.5 miles in New York, you should read this piece where author compellingly explains how political leadership — not an abandonment of regulation — made this possible. I also screenshotted this graphic from the piece as it shows just how integrated transportation is in Madrid.

Transportation is paying dividends as Madrid has made it possible for both city residents and suburbanites to cheaply and frequently access the urban core. The city has also invested in a few big transit-oriented development projects such as the massive Nuevo Norte project. When completed, it will surely be one of Europe’s largest urban regeneration projects that not only adds 10,500 housing units, but about 100 acres of green space, with sustainability built into its plan.

Addressing inequality and climate doesn’t have to slow economic growth

At CityLab, the President of Spain spoke about how cities can lead. His speech was so morally clear and eloquent, it nearly brought a tear to this TDS’d eye! Sánchez’s leadership has undoubtedly played a role in Spain and Madrid’s comeback. I can remember coming to Spain as a teen in the 1990s and how the Franco dictatorship — a 36-year period that ended in 1975 — was still very fresh in people’s minds, domestic terrorism was a regular fact of life, and anarchist graffiti could be found in every neighborhood. Spain’s resilience gives me hope.

Spain has been at the forefront of the transition to renewable energy. As a piece in The Parliament notes:

[President] Sánchez’s ascent to power in 2018 on a progressive platform marked a turning point. A smoother permitting process, significant investments in grid development, and targeted tax breaks all helped bolster clean energy projects.

Yet it wasn’t until 2022, after Sánchez injected billions of euros in EU post-pandemic funding into renewables and introduced a support scheme for wind and solar, that the boom became visible. Since 2022, solar capacity has almost tripled to over 41 gigawatts this year, while onshore wind capacity has grown to more than 32 gigawatts.

These investments have not only paved a truly sustainable future for the country, but also given Spain some enviable distance from the war in Iran and its impacts on fossil fuels.

Spain has also raised the minimum wage by more than 60 percent to about $17,000 per year. If that sounds impossibly low, consider that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is $7.25. If you worked a 40-hour week at that rate, you’d only make about $15,000 per year. As a result of the boost in wages for lower-income residents, Spain has one of the fastest-closing inequality gaps in the Eurozone.

Finally, Spain has endorsed the idea of sanctuary cities, taking in immigrants and beginning a process of “normalization” for them. Now Spain’s immigrant population exceeds 20 percent of the total population. These younger workers may be a boon, given that Spain also has a growing older adult population.

Aging well is a science and an art

Madrileños have a very high life expectancy – over 88 years for women! Compare that with Chicago, the American city with a similar size population, where life expectancy has yet to break 79. A whole extra decade of life in Madrid!

One-third of Madrid’s residents are aged 55 and over. But Madrid isn’t only focused on adding quantity of years, but quality. Its vision is active aging: “Active aging refers to the situation where people continue to participate in the formal labor market, as well as engage in other unpaid productive activities (such as providing care to family members and volunteering) and they live healthy, independent and secure lives as they age.” Madrid is tracking more than life span, but how long people contribute to society and are able to remain independent.

In the U.S., we talk about “healthspan” instead of “lifespan.” But that doesn’t account for whether older people still feel a sense of purpose — that sense of contributing to society — that is captured in this broader concept of active aging.

Going beyond ideology to address the housing crisis

Madrid’s approach to addressing its housing crisis spans ideology. There is a big push to build more market-rate housing in general — but also more public housing. There are YIMBY style reforms like raising the height limits of buildings and reducing parking minimums, but Sánchez’s interest in rent control has been controversial and recently resulted in a political defeat. Madrid has not banned Airbnbs like Barcelona, but is instead trying to address overtourism by encouraging tourists to get beyond the city center, and creating new strategies to disperse the impact of tourists at the Prado.

If I had to describe the approach that Madrid, and Spain more broadly, seems to be taking it would be Abundance, Spanish style. In the U.S., Abundance is animated by a vision of unleashing the market. In Spain, it seems to be more guided by effective leadership that can create a more equitable society.

Look back at that piece on Madrid’s tripling the length of its metro in 12 years, and you’ll see how leaders got it done:

Accountability: Madrid concentrated planning, funding, and construction authority at the right political levels, letting politicians stake their electoral fortunes on actually delivering metro lines.

Speed: The regional government streamlined environmental and planning approvals while construction crews tunneled around the clock.

Ok, in a nod to Klein and Thompson, it avoided the “everything bagel”: Madrid’s metro planners made deliberate choices between station design, signaling complexity, and proven versus innovative technology — rather than pretending those trade-offs didn’t exist.

And expertise. Because Madrid committed to sustained metro expansion, it could build and retain in-house engineering expertise.

Could this kind of leadership model work in the U.S.? I sure hope so! And it’s thrilling to see a country like Spain and a city like Madrid reminding us of what is possible.

If you’ve read to the bottom of this piece, you might want to consider subscribing to my newsletter! Most of my stories have a paywall and it’s a good idea to upgrade to a paid subscription now so you don’t have to keep thinking about it each time you hit the paywall!

For folks who are already paid subscribers, I thought I’d share a text exchange with a friend who asked for my Madrid recommendations. Enjoy!

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To get the coverage started, I reached out to James Anderson, the driving force behind Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation program – the organization’s expansive work to strengthen municipal modernization – and the CityLab conference. The Bloomberg Philanthropies Government Innovation program currently supports thousands of mayors and municipal officials in city halls across the globe, helping to build capacity in areas such as strong leadership and management; sophisticated use of data, tech, and innovation; piloting and scaling what works; and idea-sharing with peers across cities and around the world.

What follows is our email exchange leading up to next week’s event.

CityLab is held in cities that exemplify urban innovation. Why is Madrid the ideal host this year?

James Anderson: Madrid is a city where many of the pressures facing urban leaders everywhere are playing out at once—and being worked through ambitiously and concretely. It shows how a major metropolis can remake itself across multiple fronts simultaneously, from reclaiming infrastructure for public life through projects like Madrid Rio, which buried a highway to make way for open, recreational space, to investing in digital systems that make services easier to access and more inclusive, to tackling long-term challenges like sustainability and affordability. Its story is one of constant evolution and improvement—with one foot solidly in its 1,200-year history while the other strides towards the future. It is in that balancing act that the City has so much to share with its peers from around the world.

CityLab offers a chance to compare and contrast cities, helping mayors to learn from one another. How do you pair the content from CityLab with other activities to help mayors implement best practices from other cities?

Bloomberg CityLab brings together more than 100 mayors alongside the senior officials who run the core of local government—leaders in transit, innovation, economic development, and policy. They come to work on the issues at the top of their agendas and to hear directly from peers facing similar challenges in different contexts. The program is designed to support that. Mainstage sessions frame urgent, shared challenges, while smaller workshops, closed-door discussions, and field visits across Madrid allow for deeper, practical exchange on how ideas are developed and implemented. The mix of roles and perspectives keeps the conversation grounded and comparative, helping participants leave with a clearer sense of what to take on next. The summit also connects to our broader work—funding, programs, and networks—that support city halls in adapting and applying what they learn for their residents back home.

The event does a nice job of including mayoral legends, such as Michael Bloomberg and Anne Hidalgo, as well as up and coming leaders. Can you name a few cities and city leaders that readers should be keeping their eye on? What are they doing that is so special?

I continue to be struck by Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko who, while operating under extraordinary circumstances, is delivering critical services, maintaining connections, and sustaining a sense of community even as a war grinds on. In Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott, who inherited a challenging governance situation, is bringing integrity, consistency, and results to the job—like the fastest declining murder rate in the nation. Mayor Lauren McLean is another, as she begins a new program that will make Boise the first in the U.S. to connect municipally owned geothermal to affordable housing—transforming an overlooked public asset into a lever for household stability. And I am looking forward to our attendees gaining an up-close view into the work of our host. Mayor Martínez-Almeida has earned a reputation as a steady, effective leader—combining administrative competence with an institutional mindset to steer a clear direction for Madrid’s future.

Looking at the agenda, I was excited to see several sessions focused on human connection. Is this a topic that mayors are hungering to address?

One of the most common refrains I hear from mayors is how the plummeting loss of trust in public institutions, rising polarization, and information bubbles make the day-to-day work of local government today much harder. The CityLab program will examine these dimensions from multiple perspectives, like how to shape the built environment to promote solidarity to how policy designers can invite the public in to create shared ownership. Social cohesion was once a halo effect of government efforts aimed at other goals. Now, for many city leaders, it is a goal in its own right.

At the same time, many cities have long sought to harness tech and data to provide better government services. Is AI already changing what cities are doing — or are the exciting case studies more likely to be part of a CityLab in a few years?

The AI debate has been dominated by two extremes—fear and hype. What gets lost is where meaningful progress is actually happening inside city halls. Not because mayors are chasing new tools, but because many city halls have spent the past decade building the less visible foundations AI depends on—better data, more integrated systems, and clearer protocols for responsible use. Even as those capacities remain un-even city-to-city, we are seeing these investments pay off. Local governments—ranging from Ghent, Rio, South Bend, and more—are moving beyond back-office efficiencies to promising pilots as they test AI against real public service challenges and residents’ daily needs. So this isn’t something a few years off—it’s already underway. We are likely to see city halls take more of these steps while turning to tackle AI’s broader implications. As those impacts play out across local economies, workforce transitions, and more, mayors want to ensure AI’s gains get shared and its risks are managed.

Bloomberg Philanthropies has expanded its government innovation work in Europe— what drove this decision and what have been some of the early impacts of this deeper connection with European cities?

What we have learned is that there is a near-universal gap between local ambition and the capacity mayors have to deliver. Local governments are also confronting challenges that reflect the complex, changing 21^st-century landscape, and that requires different skills from those required to keep basic services running. The need for muscular municipal capability is constant worldwide—and we are building regional programming around the globe to help fill the gap. Last year, we significantly expanded support for European cities—scaling up our leadership programming and Innovation Team presence. While these efforts are early, we are beginning to see the benefits of the approach among participating officials, who face similar challenges in similar contexts, and place real value on learning from peers they can recognize. We then feed this work, and the research behind it, back into our global community of mayors and municipal leaders who benefit from the experiments emerging from Europe’s cities—and the progress those efforts can inform.

Stay tuned for more updates next week! And if you enjoy stories like this one and those below, don’t forget to subscribe!

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You Might Also Like:

• A new blog post by my friend Susanne Schindler of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard contends that Massachusetts redevelopment authorities could be retooled to advance social housing production, but need updated mandates, dedicated funding, and stronger capacity to do so effectively.

• Speaking of social housing, interviewed the new head of Seattle’s social housing development entity here.

• Shout out to NYC fellow Substackers: I so enjoyed spending time IRL with in Queens recently. Check out her Substack, . This piece by of Rabbit Fur Coat brought back memories of early 2000s in Ft. Greene. And kudos to of Street Stack for hosting his first in-person gathering to “walk on water.”

• I also just wanted to say: I’m one month away from my 3-year anniversary on this Substack. Should I keep this Substack going??? If you think so, please don’t forget to upgrade to paid! Support from readers really truly does make it possible for me to dedicate time to this newsletter.

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I’ve written a lot about how our country’s economy and society has increasingly centered around our homes, rather than public spaces. See this piece from earlier this month.👇

Why is this happening now? Of course, technology plays a role. We’re using DoorDash instead of going to the supermarket, shopping online instead of going out to stores.

But technology is only part of the problem. The other issue is that real-world businesses are now much harder to launch than online ones.

If you’re an ambitious person, founding an online business can seem sexy – it’s seen as innovative, path-breaking. And because online businesses can scale much more easily than in-person ones, they’re more likely to get large investments from outside funders, like venture capitalists.

By contrast, if someone wants to open a store or a cafe or, God forbid, a preschool, there’s seemingly no end to barriers. Starting a physical business requires navigating a byzantine maze of permits, licenses, inspections, and approvals that can take months or years and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

To give one local example, Little Susie’s, a hand pie company, announced last summer that it was opening a new location in my neighborhood. Nearly a year later, it’s still not open, posting on Instagram that they’re “waiting on some licenses.”

Beyond the administrative headaches, in-person businesses require a lot of upfront money for a lease, employees with regular hours, and some degree of customer service —none of which is required online where entrepreneurs are increasingly boasting of their monthly spend on AI tokens rather than employees.

One way to shift this problem is to reform the barriers to in-person business. As notes:

Austin has paired zoning reform with efforts to streamline permitting, even as rising fees complicate the picture. New York voters have approved changes to speed parts of the approval process, while state leaders are pushing to reform environmental review laws. In California, lawmakers have begun to narrow the scope of CEQA for housing. And beyond these high-profile cases, cities from Seattle to Minneapolis are experimenting with ways to make development review faster and more predictable. These efforts matter. But they also point to the scale of the challenge: this is not a problem of a single rule or a single city, but of how we have structured the development process itself.

As Ryan concludes, reform only gets you so far. So then what?

In San Francisco, the city has been working for years to reform its permitting process through a program called PermitSF. Since Mayor Dan Lurie has been in office, the city has legislated new reforms on permitting everything from sidewalk businesses to special events to housing and public works.

But the city is also recognizing that real-world businesses need real-deal incentives to grow.

For decades, we’ve created tax incentives to lure big businesses to relocate to office parks and commercial sites. Now, finally, at least one city is realizing that it needs to put serious money on the table to get the kind of retail it wants in its highest ROI location: downtown.

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• Family-friendly cities: Manhattan Institute released this report on building family-friendly cities. The report finds three key intertwined issues: affordability and fit, reliability, and time. MI’s Bigger Apple Substack is also worth checking out.

• Listening: These two interviews — Jim Collins by Oprah and Jesse Eisenberg by Sam Fragoso — were exactly the kind of intense musings on life I needed to get me through various chores this week.

• You’re the best: If you look forward to opening this newsletter, and it gives you interesting things to think about and talk about, please don’t forget to become a paying subscriber!

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In the past decade, California has enacted more than 100 housing laws to address the state’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. But which of these bills actually moves the needle and helps build more housing – and specifically, more affordable housing?

While I was out in Sacramento a few weeks ago, I attended the Housing California conference and saw Colin Parent, CEO of San Diego-based Circulate Planning & Policy, present some findings from a new report: Win-Win Bonus: How California’s Bonus Law Quietly Transformed Housing Approvals.

The report makes the case that two bills have been particularly helpful in building more housing: AB 2345, a 2020 statute that gives a 50 percent bonus for affordable homes, and AB 1287, which in 2023 provided a second stackable 50 percent bonus, if a project includes even more affordable homes. Together, these bills enable projects to grow to twice the size of their zoning capacity, if they include affordable units.

The report finds that these two laws, known as “Bonus Law” have become the most widely used streamlining laws tracked by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. According to the report, Bonus Law has been used to approve:

• More than 140,000 homes overall

• More than 69,000 deed-restricted affordable homes

• In 2024, 47 percent of all homes approved in multifamily projects

• In 2024, 78 percent of all homes in 100 percent affordable projects, and

• In 2024, ten times more homes than every other tracked streamlining law.

It’s that last bullet that I find so compelling and worthy of more analysis. Why is Bonus Law so successful, and what aspects of it can be replicated elsewhere?

Inclusionary Zoning Could Actually Work

Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) requires developers to reserve a specific portion of their housing units at below-market rates. IZ has gotten a bad rap over the years as some research has shown that mandated affordable housing results in very few units getting built — often because municipalities offer an option to pay into an affordable housing trust fund instead of building the affordable units. In cases when developers do build the units, the market rate units can cost more to offset including affordable units.

Bonus Law in California essentially rescues inclusionary zoning from its own problems in two ways. First off, it gets the numbers right. From the report:

Bonus Law offers a set of benefits that are conditioned on providing affordable homes, but are more than sufficient to offset those added costs. While adding more affordable units would create further losses for a project, Bonus Law compensates by providing an increasing scale of benefits….Assembly Bill 2345 increased the amount of development capacity a project could receive from 35 percent to 50 percent. That new bonus level would also require an increase for affordable housing set-asides from 11 percent very low-income units, to 15 percent. Pro forma analyses were used to determine the amount of bonus that would be necessary to create a real win-win, and more than offset the costs of providing affordable units. The pro formas showed that the 15 percent threshold ate up some of the proposed surplus, but not all of it. It accurately predicted that many future projects would use the new policy.

But secondly, it provides no option of in-lieu fees. Given that some 170 municipalities in California already have some inclusionary requirements, using Bonus Law makes a ton of sense for projects already in progress:

Bonus Law has no option for in-lieu fees, so with few exceptions, any project taking advantage of it must build affordable units on-site. Courts have held that affordable units under Bonus Law can be used to satisfy local inclusionary obligations. For projects subject to local inclusionary mandates, the use of Bonus Law becomes an easy decision. The costs of the affordable on-site units are already baked into their pro forma, so using Bonus Law does not generate additional costs. Bonus Law then becomes a win-win. The local jurisdictions get the affordable units they require, and homebuilders receive offsetting benefits to help the financial feasibility of their projects.

I’ve got four more key takeaways on why Bonus Law has been successful, below the paywall.

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In the 1980s, gated communities began to proliferate throughout the American suburbs. By tucking housing and private amenities past a gatehouse, these enclaves were a way for the middle and upper-middle class to flee from cities, their crime, their concrete, and their undesirables.

As Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder wrote in their 1997 book, Fortress America, gated communities marked a notable retreat from civic society:

Millions of Americans have chosen to live in walled and fenced communal residential space that was previously integrated with the larger shared civic space. Civic space is more than a political or jurisdictional construct. It is a manifestation of society, culture, and the shared polity.

As if the pendulum of privacy had swung too far, trends shifted in the early 2000s as cities became safer and came to epitomize a different kind of good life — the opposite of a fortress. People lived in cities for rich experiences and exposure: to new ideas and interesting venues, to people who weren’t like them, to financial and social opportunity.

Even if urban elites found ways to separate themselves — private schools instead of public, weekend homes instead of a YMCA membership — they still sought out ways to see and be seen around town. Getting the right reservation, seeing the talked-about show, joining the fancy gym were the ultimate status symbols. But so was getting on the board of important nonprofits and being part of serious civic conversations.

Today, something else is happening. The pendulum is swinging back, and people are gating up — but without physical gates.

Some see the issue as a matter of lifestyle arbitrage. Certainly, as people work remotely and can live farther from their jobs, they are taking their urban salaries to the suburbs and even rural areas (more on this in my March 2026 piece on migration trends).

Richard Florida wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, entitled “What Is a City When Its Wealthiest Leave?” noting that the wealthy are moving to lifestyle tax havens such as Miami, Austin, and Dubai that “combine low or no income taxes with warm weather, luxury amenities and easy access to global networks.” Because the 1 percent are no longer tethered to one place, Florida argues that they are no longer interested in “loyalty, civic investment and philanthropy — the long-term commitment that built private schools, museums, hospitals, universities and cultural institutions. When people stayed, they fixed what was broken because they had no alternative.” But the problem may actually not be about staying in one place, so much as spending time in a new kind of gated community in any city.

The retreat I'm talking about has nothing to do with high crime or taxes. Indeed, American mobility is at record lows, suggesting very few people are moving at all.

Instead, they’re retreating from regular people and inconvenience by staying home.

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Odds and Ends:

• Worth a read: This new report by NYU’s Arpit Gupta and JHU’s Steve Teles on Industrial Policy for Housing Construction. The authors contend that liberalizing land use, while necessary, is only half the solution to the housing crisis — and that a light-touch industrial policy supporting factory-built housing is the missing piece needed to make housing genuinely affordable.

• Proud wife moment: My husband has been working with the United Way to form a $100 million fund to help buy up naturally occurring housing in Philadelphia, and the effort was recently reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

• Keep it going: If this Substack gives you interesting things to think and talk about, please don’t forget to upgrade to a paid subscription. Most of my pieces have a paywall — don’t miss out on content and subscriber-first event invites!

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What the latest Census data shows

As the Census Bureau reported last week, the country grew by just 0.5 percent between June 2024 and July 2025, or half the rate of increase between 2023-2024.

This slowdown in population growth is not unexpected as the number of counties with natural decrease (more deaths than births) was 65 percent — roughly the same level as the prior two years.

What’s different this time? The decline in immigration is hitting major cities.

• Our biggest cities/counties are collectively losing people: Collectively, the 50 counties with 1 million or more people in 2025 had a net domestic migration loss of 637,634. New York City, for example, lost 12,200 residents over the course of the year, and its international migration dropped by a whopping 70 percent.

• The Midwest is now primed for growth. Michigan notched more resident arrivals than departures for the first time in decades in 2025 — that’s especially notable given that immigration dropped so much. Though much smaller, cities like Des Moines have grown nearly as quickly as Phoenix over the past five years.

• Domestic migration patterns continue to redistribute the population from the largest counties to less populous ones. Mid-sized counties (50,000-999,999 in population) had a combined net domestic migration gain of 533,766. In other words, people are moving to smaller cities and less-populated suburban counties. You might have seen that piece on the Case for the “Solid B” City — the truth is that people have clearly already found, and are moving to, these places.

• They’re also moving to places beyond the suburbs. Smaller counties (15,000-49,999) had a net domestic migration gain of 95,095. Even rural counties with less than 15,000 people are defying the pattern of population loss and had a slight net domestic migration gain of 8,773.

What it means

Many cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, are seeing effectively flat population growth at this point after a few years of slowly trying to regain population lost during Covid. But annual population changes aren’t just a function of how many people arrive, they’re a function of how many people leave. And here’s what’s also changed this time around: Fewer people are leaving these cities.

Does this mean that people are happier in these cities and want to stay there? Or that those who wanted to leave already left, particularly during the 2020-2022 reshuffling? Or does this point to something else — a lack of economic opportunity and affordable housing elsewhere, and a population that is stuck in place? I think it’s increasingly the latter.

Stagnant population growth is going to have a lot of impacts on local businesses. If you’re always pitching to the same people, year after year, your business is going to have find ways to connect deeply with an existing customer base. It’s also going to have ramifications for real estate — fewer people coming and going is bad for that industry as well.

3 Population Predictions for the Next 5 Years

I love making predictions based on the data, and I see a few trends worth commenting on here.

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• Sometimes I feel like I’m writing into a void (anyone out there?) and so it is gratifying when I hear back from readers — even if to offer a counterpoint to my ideas. The Philadelphia School District wrote its own op-ed in response to my “abundance for schools” piece. While the District’s piece did not really address my suggestion of partnering with developers to build housing and co-locate community needs on the same site as new schools, I’m happy my piece started a conversation!

• I really enjoyed this podcast with and that revisits a 16-year old bet on autonomous vehicles. I’ve been listening to AI Summer for a while and it’s a good one if you want to hear people talk thoughtfully and casually about AI. I’m also glad to see Ryan’s back publishing his writing again.

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I was in Sacramento last week. I’d never been before, but I really liked it! As you might expect, I went into a deep dive on the city. Here are five quick takeaways from my trip:

Sacramento, and its surrounding region, are growing

While most of California has seen declining or stagnant population, Sacramento is growing. According to Placer.ai’s analysis in a piece called Sacramento’s Quiet Rise:

The Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom metro area is emerging as one of California’s most resilient growth stories. Between 2021 and 2023, the region added residents at a steady, if modest, pace…. And by 2024, the CBSA pulled ahead of the national metro average for year-over-year (YoY) population growth, outpacing major California peers including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

Sacramento is growing in part because it has something for everyone. Its growth has not been marked by just one demographic group. Instead, it’s pretty evenly split across affluent families and lower-to-middle income singles.

LinkedIn called Sacramento one of its 25 cities on the rise in 2025, noting:

From semiconductor plants to new medical centers, billions are flowing into California’s capital — and with tourism on the rise, the city is seizing the moment, moving ahead with major infrastructure upgrades like a $1.3 billion airport expansion to support its next chapter of growth.

While the entire US is facing a population slowdown, the city of Sacramento’s population still rose overall by 2 percent post-Covid. Sacramento as a region is predicting Denver-like growth and expecting to add nearly 600,000 people by 2050. This seems somewhat unlikely given current extremely low rates of immigration, but still Sacramento is gaining transplants from other parts of California more prone to wildfires and higher housing prices.

Some good public transportation in the state of sprawl

I was impressed to see so much light rail in Sacramento, running frequently. Turns out that Sacramento Regional Transit District has a lot to be proud of. According to the SacRT blog:

What makes the Sacramento Regional Transit District (SacRT) stand out is our true “rags-to-riches” story of how we rose up from financial instability, poor service and image, rising costs, and lack of trust from the community and our riders, to make a historic turnaround in just a few years. Between 2018-2025, we lowered fares; expanded service; completed a comprehensive route optimization; regained the trust of city jurisdictions and reannexed them back into SacRT; implemented the Light Rail Modernization Project; was awarded funding to start the Hydrogen Bus and Fueling Facility; started construction on the Watt/I-80 Improvement Project; implemented the nation’s first free rides for student program of its magnitude; achieved double-digit ridership growth; and increased operating reserves by nearly 500% – all for the first time in our 50-plus-year history.

This ain’t no humble brag! SacRT’s CEO Henry Li has been winning awards from the American Public Transportation Association and the local business journal for his leadership.

I was also interested to see that SacRT launched a Bus Stop and Bike Lane Enforcement Program using AI – apparently the only revenue-generating program of its kind in the U.S.

Riverfront placemaking is a work in progress

Coming from Philly where we have been investing for decades in beautifying our riverfronts, I was a little less impressed by what I saw of Sacramento’s riverfront. I took a jog through its historic Old Sacramento section, then up along a trail on the river. Like many cities, a highway is located along the riverfront and there’s not a ton of space on the actual water. From my time on the river, there was not a ton to see.

But researching, I found that the city has had a master plan for the riverfront for over 20 years, and is now chipping away at progress.

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For the past month, Philadelphia has been publicly debating a new facilities master plan for our school district. Like so many municipal planning documents, it is full of hard choices.

For my family, the consequences aren’t abstract. We’re directly affected by some of the planned closures and consolidations in our neighborhood. I understand the plan rationally — hooray, our schools will probably be great in 2040! But when I look at the disruption in the next five years and at the fact that my kids need great schools now, I’m actually kind of full of despair.

Kristen Graham, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s primary education reporter, and the rest of the Inquirer team, has been doing extraordinary work documenting community by community how years of hard-won investment in Philadelphia — libraries built, special programs created, test scores raised — are being swept away with the closure.

But no one seems to be discussing that there is not one new school building created in the district’s plan. Every categorization is a variation on what already exists — Modernize, Maintain, Co-locate, Close & Repurpose, Close & Convey. The vocabulary of the plan tells you everything about the psychology behind it. This story line of retreat is compounded by the school district’s recent plan to close a $300 million budget gap with layoffs and cuts.

School closures are presented as inevitable these days, not only in Philadelphia but around the country. A recent Boston Globe piece explores how public schools are closing throughout Massachusetts, with Boston public schools reaching record low enrollment and rural parts of the state experiencing 30 percent enrollment declines.

But in Philadelphia, it’s as much about mentality as it is about the reality of demographic changes. Philly peaked at 2 million people in 1950 and has been shrinking ever since. In that time, we’ve become genuine masters of rethinking our existing building stock. We celebrate the adaptive reuse of old schools into housing, into creative hubs like Bok. That ingenuity is real and worth honoring. But somewhere along the way, expansion got eliminated from our cultural DNA entirely. We have so many old buildings that we’ve often stopped being able to imagine building something new.

There’s a parking lot in my neighborhood that proves the point. In the 1970s, the school district cleared a square block at Fairmount and 22nd Street to build a new high school. NIMBY neighbors who worried about teens from other parts of the city coming to their neighborhood successfully blocked it. The result was 50 years of vacancy and eventually paid parking on one of our prime commercial corridors. The neighborhood civic association that acquired the property for $250,000 in 1999 reaps the parking revenue and has never developed it. I imagine selling might threaten their funding stream; building is too complicated. And so the lot sits.

That lot is a perfect case study in what an abundance mindset could actually look like. The city and the school district could acquire it and partner with a private developer to build everything the neighborhood needs at once: new housing, a new school, a community hub, ground-floor retail. The profitable sides of the development would subsidize the cost of the new school and community assets.

In New York, it’s not uncommon to find this model at play. For example, two public schools share a building with Whole Foods and market-rate apartments in a Midtown building designed by renowned firm SOM. It’s just one of many projects made possible by the city’s Educational Construction Fund, which has added over 18,000 school seats, 4,500 units of housing and 1.2 million square feet of office space in New York City since its inception in 1967.

In Baltimore, the city is co-locating schools with community hubs and mixed-use development as a way to invest in neighborhoods and make the math work for everyone.

Interestingly, this mixed-use model is also how a private school in Philadelphia is currently financing its new K-8 campus in Center City, bundling the school with luxury apartments. The market knows how to do this. The question is whether the public sector has the ambition to try.

What we need is an abundance mindset for schools — not a scramble over a shrinking pie, but a goal to create the schools families actually want, and a willingness to reverse-engineer solutions from there. Rather than try to whittle down the district’s holdings, losing the confidence and participation of families who are tired of investing in a district that seems destined for instability and decline, what would it take to build the schools that would enable Philadelphia (and many urban school districts like it) to compete with those in the suburbs? With that as a north star, how could the school district harness public land and private capital to create a master plan that better balances the need to close some schools with the need to create new ones as well?

Even in NIMBY strongholds like the Bay Area, communities like Davis are seeking to annex nearly 500 acres to build 1,800 units of housing, all in a bid to not just add more attainable housing, but add the enrollment and tax base needed to avoid closing its prized schools. In denser cities like Philly and Boston, you have the potential to accomplish similar goals in much less space.

There is some hope in Philadelphia: a new Harlem Children’s Zone model coming to North Philadelphia could be transformative for families there (albeit in existing school buildings). At least here we are witnessing an appropriate sense of ambition. We also need this kind of big picture thinking for the broad middle — families who want to stay in cities and need reassurance the schools will be there for them if they do.

How about you? What is your school district like these days?

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This is one of my occasional free posts — hope you liked getting the chance to read the whole story! If you haven’t upgraded to paid yet, here’s your chance to support this work, read 200+ pieces in the archive, and ensure you won’t hit a paywall next time.

• I’ve been listening to the new podcast, Closer, about social infrastructure.

• I enjoyed this piece that defines what is and isn’t a third space.

• I’ll be announcing a subscriber event in Pittsburgh soon! We’ll be checking in on this $600 million reinvention of downtown, among other things. Don’t forget to upgrade to paid if you want first dibs on the invite or read past the paywall on this piece and 200 pieces in the archive!

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Six years ago, we shut down cities across the world. In the first three years afterward, a full rebound felt possible with enough effort. By years four and five, the indicators were slowly but steadily improving — more people on transit, more people in the office. But 2025 was a hard year, and 2026 has gotten off to an even worse start.

Now, six years in, I worry ground is being lost again. Transit agencies such as Philadelphia’s SEPTA and San Francisco’s BART are sounding dire alarms about their fiscal situation, while Minneapolis and D.C. have been pummeled by Trump administration actions. Still, office buildings are being reinvented for the better and arts-centered revitalization strategies are taking hold in downtowns.

Here are six trends shaping where we are six years after Covid.

Some cities are struggling more than ever

Washington, D.C. was already among the hardest-hit cities from pandemic-era remote work. But that disruption paled against what the Trump administration has since inflicted — the intense ICE and National Guard presences, the attacks on tourism anchors like the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center.

According to a recent Brookings report, the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region now leads the country in job loss, with employment down nearly 1.7% in December 2025 compared to the prior year.

Federal workforce cuts resulted in a 14.3% employment decline, but private sector stagnation is making it worse. The net result: 56,000 jobs gone, with unemployment rising across every county in the region, falling hardest on women and workers of color.

D.C. is an extreme case, but it’s not isolated. Minneapolis reported that a single month of intensified immigration enforcement — with up to 3,000 federal agents deployed into neighborhoods — cost the city more than $200 million in economic impact, factoring in losses to commerce, community livelihoods, mental health, and basic food and shelter security.

A new case for city self-interest

A year after it started, New York City’s congestion pricing program has been a success, and it points toward a broader shift in how cities think about their relationship to the surrounding region. Cities absorbed the worst of COVID — economically, epidemiologically, socially — while suburbs often benefited from the resulting dispersal. Remote work let higher-income residents exit without severing their economic ties, effectively decoupling suburban prosperity from urban investment.

In that context, regional-collaboration arguments can start to feel like asking cities to subsidize the flight of their own tax base. A different logic is emerging: if you want to benefit from the city, you need to invest in it.

Cities such as New York and Philadelphia have historically taxed people who work there but don’t live there, and newer examples such as Seattle’s Jumpstart tax employers to support affordable housing. But in a work-anywhere economy, this may not be so smart.

Instead, cities may turn to protecting leisure for locals. Tourism taxes have taken hold in European cities, and Barcelona plans to phase out all Airbnbs and short-term rentals by 2028. In the U.S. we may see more nativist strategies to ensure a city’s cultural assets aren’t only for tourists but grow local audiences. A recent survey of museums found that still half have lower attendance than in 2019. Some museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Detroit Institute of Art, charge different rates depending on whether you’re local or not. As Covid has changed how often people frequent downtowns, we might expect more cities to prize local activity and reap the financial rewards of one-time visitors.

Bets on the creative class are back

Cities are turning to the creative economy again. The Chicago Loop Alliance recently announced a plan to create a new arts district within the Loop, linking Millennium Park to the Chicago Riverwalk and elevating cultural institutions within the Loop. This comes on the heels of Chicago’s 2025 launch of the “cultural stadium” concept, linguistically linking the arts to the already successful sports-entertainment industry (I see what you did there!). Meanwhile, Philadelphia is committing $150 million to a new streetscape along its already established but mid-feeling Avenue of the Arts.

The creative class thesis — that arts investment attracts talent, which attracts employers — was already out of vogue prior to the pandemic. But now the goal may no longer be about talent so much as just foot traffic and arts-based economic activity.

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• I had the privilege of interviewing a group of smart Philadelphians about their big ideas for Philadelphia’s forsaken Market East neighborhood (Philadelphia Magazine).

• Media diet this week: Jesse Jackson’s Keep Hope Alive speech, what to do with boomers who shouldn’t drive but are car-dependent, and is the 3rd place dead?

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For decades, American cities have tried to leverage transit infrastructure with transit-oriented development (TOD). It’s the cornerstone of smart growth: build dense housing and commercial space around rail stations and bus corridors and you can reduce car dependence, get residents to jobs more easily, and generate economic activity. Most cities have designated special TOD zones, offered density bonuses to developers willing to build near stations, rezoned corridors to encourage mixed-use density, and poured plenty of federal, state, and local money into TOD. It’s the holy grail of urbanism — infrastructure, housing, and jobs.

And we should keep doing that!

But when I walked the Beltline in Atlanta last month (ashamedly, for the first time despite the Beltline being 20 years old now), as part of my subscriber-only event in January, I found myself thinking maybe we should also be investing just as seriously in pedestrian-oriented development.

It’s abundantly clear that the Beltline has transformed Atlanta. Read that again and fully take it in: Atlanta — the poster child of 1990s and 2000s sprawl — has been transformed by a pedestrian and cycling trail.

A 22-mile loop of multi-use path threading through a necklace of former rail corridors and brownfield land has activated unproductive post-industrial land, transformed neighborhoods, and drawn a cross-section of Atlantans to share in public space — even though the Beltline doesn’t have the light rail that was initially promised. People want to live near the Beltline, and Atlanta-born companies like Mailchimp want to locate their offices on it. Much like TOD creates a gravitational pull toward transit infrastructure, pedestrian and cycling-oriented development could turn scarcity of high-quality pedestrian environments into our cities’ economic powerhouses.

In 1 999, Georgia Tech student Ryan Gravel delivered a master’s thesis argued that Atlanta’s historic freight lines should be repurposed for mass transit, creating a new focal point to limit the city’s sprawl. He envisioned dozens of stations connecting to MARTA's existing rail spokes. The line would be modeled on Portland's MAX — at-grade crossings, overhead power, simple modular station design — and would serve both existing neighborhoods and new transit-oriented development on adjacent brownfields. Gravel’s Beltline concept found a receptive audience in Shirley Franklin, Atlanta’s mayor from 2002 to 2010. Trails and parks were added to the vision later, and when the project was officially launched in 2005, it carried both ambitions.

The pedestrian infrastructure proved far easier to finance, permit, and construct than the rail component — and it worked. The Eastside Trail opened in 2012 and immediately drew crowds, development, and national attention. The trail created the demand that transit planners had been hoping light rail would create.

Despite failing to create light rail, the Beltline has served that goal of reinvigorating the core of Atlanta and encouraging the region to densify rather than endlessly sprawl outward. More than 4,000 units of housing have been developed within the Beltline’s Tax Allocation District — a special taxation zone that has raised $750 million for the Beltline. And donors have raised nearly $250 million more for the project. In the project’s first 20 years, it’s catalyzed $10 billion in private investment surround the Beltline. (These and other highlights from the first two decades of the Beltline can be found here.)

And something else is happening: rather than offer the prescribed light rail, the Beltline has become a haven for e-bikes. People are taking full advantage of the Beltline and its interconnected trails and spurs to commute, sometimes faster and more safely than driving. As more e-bike sharing options have become available in the less affluent Westside neighborhoods, the Beltline’s biking infrastructure is becoming more accessible to a wider swath of Atlantans. It turns out that trails are transportation, too.

Now there is a renewed push to bring traditional transit back to the Beltline. MARTA has targeted 2028 for operational streetcar service on part of the corridor. But in March 2025, Atlanta’s mayor withdrew support from the Streetcar East Extension, redirecting focus to a different corridor. The window may be closing. Having spent years letting the pedestrian investment mature, the city now faces a transit retrofit on a corridor that has already been built out around foot traffic and bicycles — a harder and more expensive proposition than building transit and trails together from the start.

The Beltline’s trajectory begs us to wonder: Why aren’t we building pedestrian and cycling realms from scratch to capitalize on the obvious demand for this product in more cities, and in more places than just abandoned rail lines?

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• I was recently on the Good Traffic podcast by and The Way We Live Now podcast by .

• I loved this op-ed in the New York Times about communal living to raise kids — it’s by of the Supernuclear Substack. Gillian also makes a cameo in my book, Brave New Home.

• In case you’re not a paying subscriber, here’s a piece I wrote about the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver and what it means to clean up cities. Subscribe now to never miss a piece!

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My feeds on LinkedIn and Substack are full of predictions about how AI will upend our lives. The viral Something Big is Happening post gets referenced a lot, and ’s End of the Office has been making the rounds. Both share a general theme: buckle up. As Yang puts it bluntly: “Expect it to get incredibly, intergenerationally rough out there.”

I agree that we’re in for a lot of turbulence with a whole host of new winners and losers. But what that actually looks like is a lot less clear than many of these commentators let on.

1. We’ve been here before, and we were wrong.

Lots of people are comparing February 2026 to February 2020 — the moment before Covid hit and everything changed. But we weren’t only wrong about what a pandemic would be like at the start, we were wrong for years afterward. Remember the viral NYC is Dead post that spawned a ton of reaction, including a slap-back from Jerry Seinfeld? That was written in August 2020 when it seemed genuinely unlikely that NYC would return to anything resembling normal. Six years later, New York’s economy is more nuanced than anyone predicted — we have both a world where “remote everything” is a norm, and we have cities like New York that are thriving. Confident, one-directional predictions tend to age poorly.

2. Labor will change, but it won’t disappear.

In 2023, published a piece in his Substack Understanding AI that examined whether translators were still finding work, given AI competition. Turns out that translators are still making a living, because AI translations that are merely good enough don’t cut it in fields like law or medicine, where translations have to be 100 percent accurate. So, while more people use Google Translate to, say, order food abroad, professional translators still exist — they’re just expected to use AI to work faster, produce more for less, and accept downward pressure on pay.

This is probably what will happen with a lot of white-collar industries — and I’ve seen the same trajectory in media over the past 30 years. Journalism still exists — there are just far fewer jobs, the pay hasn’t kept up, and the stability is gone. The freelance rate of $1 per word is roughly the same today as it was at the turn of the century. Welcome, corporate America, to what most other workers have experienced for decades: instability, constant hustle, and ironically plenty of work to do.

3. Most organizations don’t have humans to replace.

This is the point I rarely see made: most businesses are already threadbare.

While the AI-and-jobs discourse centers on large tech companies that went on hiring sprees and are now cutting back, that’s just a slice of the economy. Most small businesses have under five employees and are already undercapitalized and understaffed. For them, AI will be a tool that helps existing employees do more — not a replacement for headcount that doesn’t exist. The pandemic-era layoffs sparked a jump in new business creation that has remained very strong, more than double a decade earlier. I imagine that AI will turn a lot of white-collar workers into small business entrepreneurs.

4. AI will make offices more important, not less.

One reliable way to protect your job from AI is to make sure it requires being physically present. The assumption that AI leads to the death of offices gets the logic backwards — if knowledge work becomes more automated, demonstrating irreplaceable human judgment in person becomes more valuable, not less. What the office looks like may change. We may not see the same static offices with decade-long leases and rows of cubicles. We may see major devaluations of office buildings before price corrections settle in and new investors come in. And showing up for work may mean working from home part of the day, but meeting clients for lunch or at their offices, not necessarily maintaining a cubicle 9-5. But being some place where you can signal work commitment and reap the rewards of visibility and networking is not entirely going away.

5. More Greedy Jobs

The end game of all this could be more of what economists call the Greedy Job: a role that pays disproportionately high wages in exchange for near-constant availability and long hours. As top performers leverage AI to expand their output, companies will double down on those employees, investing ever more in top talent and ever less in entry-level workers. The result is likely more households making a deliberate choice — one person goes all-in on the career, the other doesn’t — rather than two people trying to split the difference with two jobs.

These are just a few of my counter-takes. What do you think?

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In January, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy announced a new initiative, Public Land for All Communities and the Environment (PLACE), which aims “to empower local government and civic partners to overcome common procedural and legal barriers to the effective transfer and transformation of public land, including for affordable housing, nature-based solutions, conservation, and other public benefits.” As someone who has written time and again (and again and again) about public property and potential innovations for it, I wanted to learn more and interview Lincoln Institute’s President and CEO Dr. George “Mac” McCarthy. I was heartened to learn how much Lincoln Institute is doing to build communities of practice, supported with data and insight, around this issue. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Q: What’s your hope for what the PLACE initiative will achieve?

McCarthy: Our goal is to find more effective ways to allocate and dedicate public land for better public purpose. A lot of publicly owned land is not really used well or managed well, and that’s because it’s politically challenging to use. We’re going to build political will to figure out ways to use it more effectively. What are the best ways for whomever owns the land, whether it’s a local jurisdiction, a county, a state, even the federal government, to actually convey it and make sure that it’s conveyed in a way that redounds to public benefit?

As a first step, it’s critical that places know what they own. We talk about public land as if it’s a known entity. But as it turns out, there’s so many different public sector institutions that own or control land and it’s sometimes really hard to figure it out. When you actually look at all the land records, the owner of record could be just some acronym. One of the other goals is to identify and map publicly owned lands.

Then we want to contribute methods and a framework for people to make better decisions about how to use land for public benefit. Some of the land might be suitable for affordable housing, some might be suitable for nature-based solutions. So we are producing scenario-planning tools that allow users to identify their own priorities for different kinds of land use and then run their different land parcels through a gauntlet of questions to find out what it’s most suited to.

Our goal isn’t to tell people how they should use their land. Our goal is to tell people how they should think about using their land and let them figure it out themselves.

Finally, we want to build a record of success in lots of places so we can tell those stories. Other places will hear about them and then they will try to replicate that success. There are already examples of places that have made good use of public land. One of our first efforts is to start to document that and tell those stories.

Public land has been in the news more during the Trump administration since the announcement of selling off the non-core buildings that the government owns. Do you see this work as being in collaboration with the federal government, or are partnerships at the local and state level?

We did an initial screening to find buildable parcels in transit-accessible, urban areas, and we defined this as parcels that are more than half an acre, with no building more than 1,000 square feet, not in a wetland or public park. Parcels had to have at least one transit stop within a quarter-mile radius and one active trip per hour during evening rush hour. We found 276,000 acres—just 5,000 owned by the federal government, about 237,000 by local governments, and the rest by states. Most urban land is not in federal control, though the federal government can incentivize local governments to use their land better.

In Philadelphia where I live, our publicly owned land bank has not been a resounding success and there’s concern about poor public sector stewardship of land. Yet, the public is also distressed to see the government selling off its property. Are you building a community of practice around public land management?

If you sell without attaching negative covenants, you have little control over how it’s used, and the potential for public benefit is limited. All you get is a one-time shot of revenue.

We’ve been trying for years to build a pipeline from land banks to land trusts. The key is that a community land trust keeps the land and improvements treated separately. The government could convey land through a very long-term, low-cost lease and maintain ownership, which means they maintain oversight to ensure it’s used permanently for public benefit.

The perfect partner for government is the community land trust—a nonprofit entity existing in perpetuity to steward land for affordable housing and more. Really good land trusts do commercial development, owner-occupied stuff, community space, rentals and low-income housing tax credit projects. Burlington’s Champlain Housing Trust has thousands of rental units.

We want to build a specific community of practice around establishing partnerships between cities and community land trusts to allocate public land long-term and get affordable housing and community-serving uses permanently stewarded.

There might be other examples where you don’t want to convey to a community land trust—maybe because there isn’t one with capacity to do stuff at scale. But there might be other local entities or public-private partnerships.

There are other communities of practice focused on using land for nature-based solutions. Philadelphia is leading the nation finding ways to manage storm water with land use solutions instead of building more sewers. We have to create a community of practice around that and figure out who can help develop the land to provide those benefits. Every publicly beneficial use should spawn a community of practice.

Cities have owned this land for a long time but not done anything with it, I think, because it costs money to do so. What’s the business model for cities to engage on this?

It depends on the use and what you’re hoping to generate. We have many land use tools used for millennia to help land pay for its own development.

One used hundreds of times around the world is land readjustment. Washington DC was built using it—in 1789 the United States wasn’t flush. Manhattan was built using it north of Wall Street when they built the grid without money for streets, sewers, and subways. You sell some at its post-improvement value to pay for improvements. That’s how they rebuilt Japan and Germany after World War II. We’ve just never done it in the United States since the 19th century.

Depending on nature-based solutions, you’ll generate increased land values in adjacent properties. Most local governments’ knee-jerk reaction is to use a TIF, which I think is the silliest way to generate value. If you’re gonna use a TIF, you might as well do land readjustment. Anybody who does a TIF knows that improvements raise land value and generate more tax revenue. But if it’s gonna raise the value, why don’t you garner some of that value?

Then there’s sale of development rights around these improvements by changing zoning. Lots of places are just getting their brains around the idea the public sector could sell development rights. But there’s a billion-dollar private market in New York where private parties transfer development rights. Chase Manhattan paid $240 million to add 500 feet to [its headquarters at] 270 Park.

We have dozens of tools, and it’s almost never a problem of inadequate access to capital. That’s a specious argument made by people who don’t want to go through it. What they’re really saying is: this is hard. Not that it’s impossible or the money can’t be found. They don’t want to go down the road because it’s hard.

How do cities take the next step?

First, cities have to figure out what they own. We built the Who Owns America database—we know every parcel in the United States. We can tell them what they own, plus the dimensions, slope, and context information to figure out suitability. They could access that tool. We’re not giving it away for free—we’ve invested a couple million dollars in it—but we won’t charge what the private market would for GIS analysis.

The other technology tool is a suitability planning tool we’re building. And we have communities of practice that can walk local governments through how to fund development depending on use. We’re building boilerplate mechanisms to facilitate land transfer.

We’re going to be as facilitative as possible. We’re offering to work with places that send a team—community land trust members, public officials with land control—to work with us. But we have limited capacity. There are 90,000 municipalities in the U.S. We’re not going to help every one, but once communities of practice get going, they’ll teach each other.

To read more about using public land for affordable housing, including case studies, check out Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s latest brief here.

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As a young East Coast urbanist in the early 2000s, all I knew of Atlanta was that it was the epitome of growth and sprawl. “This is a city without a historic core, a city in constant evolution -- a Deep South version, you might say, of Los Angeles,” wrote R. W. Apple, Jr. in a 2000 New York Times piece, summing up how I imagined the city at the time.

A quarter-century later, Atlanta is clapping back. First and foremost, the Beltline, a 22-mile ring of bike and pedestrian infrastructure has forever altered the city, showing that a walkable, modern, mixed-use Atlanta is not only possible, but highly desirable.

And now a host of other developments such as Centennial Yards, the Stitch, and a 16-acre reinvention of South Downtown, are proving that Atlanta is also more than the Beltline. When the FIFA World Cup lands in Atlanta this summer (a deadline that is endlessly mentioned by locals), the one-dimensional caricature of Atlanta from earlier in this century will be wildly outdated.

A VC Strategy for Real Estate

David Cummings is a tech entrepreneur who sold his business Pardot for a reported $95 million and founded Atlanta Tech Village (ATV) and Atlanta Ventures in the early 2010s, helping incubate more than 300 tech businesses, like Calendly, and create more than 10,000 jobs.

But within a few years, ATV was running out of space for its community. Cummings was on the search for a larger campus when German developer, Newport, put up for sale a package of 60 buildings that had taken them years to assemble.

South Downtown was once a transportation hub and shopping center, with a “hotel row” serving passengers for the nearby railroad station. Over the 20th century this all changed: the station was demolished, highways encircled the area, MARTA public transit infrastructure upended the streets, department stores waned.

By the time Cummings owned the buildings in January 2024, they were not only in disrepair but also clad in layers of past unsuccessful bids at reinvention. Less than 100 people lived in the area. Yet, he saw their potential. Per his own blog:

The last 10+ years in Atlanta have really opened my eyes to how regions of the city can be dramatically upgraded and enhanced, with the two biggest makeovers being Midtown Atlanta and the Beltline. After $10 billion plus of investment in each of those areas, the number of residential units, restaurants, retailers, and overall walkability and livability of those areas have skyrocketed.

Could he dramatically upgrade and enhance South Downtown? My take is that Cummings and his team deployed a venture capital playbook more common in tech deals: invest in a product you know has a clear market, remain highly unprofitable for a time, but come to dominate that market and be wildly successful in the end. Could this model translate to real estate?

Many thanks to South Downtown’s leads for architecture and development, Lucas Roberts and Bryan Capps, who toured around my subscribers and me on a rainy January day to find out.

Housing and Retail First

SoDo’s first residential project — a reinvention of a former department store — will deliver just about two dozen units, and maybe three dozen people. As South Downtown’s CEO Jon Birdsong has written, the math is crazy.

Here’s Birdsong’s account:

if everything goes exceptionally well and our team flawlessly delivers a building that was Atlanta’s first department store, built 125 years ago that hasn’t been occupied in over 30 years while also finding 34 people in 26 units who want to co-pioneer a neighborhood next to Kessler Loft residents, and we convince three retail tenants to believe early before the building is finished to sign on the dotted line, SoDo Atlanta, LLC plans to make 4.82% on the invested dollars. That barely ekes out the current 3 month T-bill or a high-yield savings account.

Of course, Year One is just the beginning. The payoff will be quite different in year 20.

There’s also a set of interdependencies here: the people living in the apartments are necessary to activate the retail and restaurants. But those amenities are needed to attract people to live downtown. It all has to come together at the same time.

So far, the available retail in South Downtown has been filled with cute independent businesses, as well as a few historic old timers, and they’ve set a tone that will set the area apart from corridors filled with chains and Irish pubs. That curation seems to be paying off: just last week Filipino restaurant, Estrellita, which was awarded a Michelin Bib, announced its move to Broad Street. Birdsong’s Q3 2024 list of tenants is impressively fun. They have also posted more than a dozen short-term opportunities to lease pop-up spaces during the World Cup.

Essential Placemaking

We next walked down a section of Broad Street that Eric Kronberg Architects is reinventing as a mixed-use corridor with lush landscaping and engaging commercial spaces. This video by is better and faster at explaining the situation than anything I could offer:

The SoDo campus includes not just historic buildings, but a number of parking lots. Roberts said that a typical developer would turn those parking spaces into large multifamily development first; instead they’re saving those opportunities for last, but activating the lots with temporary uses, such as Smorgasburg Atlanta, which brought out 10,000 people in its first weekend.

But they’re also turning one large parking lot which spanned Broad to Peachtree into a park. Kronberg said pitching the value of the park was an “easy sell.” (Only to urbanists!) One of the things that I loved the most about the plans for the neighborhood was the sense of constant indoor/outdoor connection. This pocket park will be like an extension of the Tesoro restaurant on the corner, while the apartments at 85 Peachtree will look out onto an activated public alley.

One interesting thing to note: There is no master architect or planner for South Downtown. There are several different architecture and design practices involved in different chunks of the development. Roberts explained they didn’t want “to cram a master plan into a space that has to feel organic.”

What’s been hard to convey in this short recap is the massive scale of the preservation and adaptation work under way. The process has unearthed materials and building techniques you just don’t see anymore, like the oversized windows in 85 Peachtree, the central skylight in an old department store, the wooden columns that get thinner as you go up each floor in the building. Many of the old buildings have become “organ donors” with materials and spaces incorporated into other buildings. The exploratory, unprescribed nature of the development is rare and exciting. I encourage you to check out South Downtown’s Instagram, and posts by Cummings and Birdsong to get a fuller sense than I can provide here.

Consider the Alternatives

I couldn’t help but think about Philadelphia throughout the tour of Atlanta. Our Market East neighborhood is like many post-pandemic downtowns: boring, grimy, vacant, and both overvalued and undervalued at the same time. Owners of properties at 10th and Market plan to demolish several buildings and host pop-ups during the World Cup — but have presented no clear plan of what will come afterwards.

Atlanta shows what is possible when you have an enlightened developer with a long-term view on returns. The South Downtown team is building an ecosystem of place and talent that supports itself. It’s a testament to the enduring value of mid-sized, mixed-use buildings, to the simple formula of housing+retail+sidewalks=magic. But South Downtown left one question unanswered: How do you get other developers to understand that they have to move beyond a short-term, extractive mindset to create something that will still be valuable decades from now? That's the question cities like Philadelphia still need to answer.

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