One conventional way to think about cities is that people migrate to urban areas in order to make more money. This remains true today and the data is pretty clear that, if you live in an urban area, you're likely to make more money than if you didn't -- even if you're just as educated. You're also likely to make even more money if the city is really big (there's a correlation between income and city size). And you probably also walk a little faster given that, you know, time equals money.

But there are other reasons for wanting to live in a city. And probably the biggest is that they can bring us pleasure. Back in 2001, Edward Glaeser, Jed Kook, and Albert Saiz published this paper called, "Consumer City", where they showed that high amenity cities have tended to grow faster than low amenity cities. They also went on to demonstrate that, in high amenity cities, urban rents have tended to increase faster than urban wages, suggesting that there are other reasons for wanting to live in a city beyond simply wage growth.

Fast forward to today and Ed Glaeser has a new opinion piece in the New York Times arguing the following:

New York is undergoing a metamorphosis from a city dedicated to productivity to one built around pleasure. . . The economic future of the city that never sleeps depends on embracing this shift from vocation to recreation and ensuring that New Yorkers with a wide range of talents want to spend their nights downtown, even if they are spending their days on Zoom. We are witnessing the dawn of a new kind of urban area: the Playground City.

I saw City Observatory comment that they thought it was odd Glaeser didn't mention his previous work on the Consumer City. But I wonder if this is him not wanting to suggest that this was a trend decades in the making. Maybe instead, he wanted to position it as a dramatic and profound shift brought about by a pandemic. But how can you not ask this question: Is the Playground City truly something novel, or are we just following a trend line?

In my view, they're not all that different. The basic idea is that people like cities that are cool and fun, and so they will pay a premium to be in those kinds of places. This was true in 2001 and it's still true in 2023. The only difference today is that we now believe we have too much office space in some markets, and so we're trying to recalibrate around work vs. pleasure. But even with this, the work component of our cities isn't going to zero.

Photo by Jan Folwarczny on Unsplash

Here is an interesting chart from the New York Times explaining the disproportionate impact that highway and urban renewal projects have had on non-white families in the US. The x-axis is the non-white population share in 1950. And the y-axis is the percentage of displaced families that were non-white. What this means is that the diagonal dotted line through the middle represents a kind of racially balanced displacement.

However, as you can tell from the graph, displacement from 1950 to 1966 was not balanced. In Providence, for example, only 3% of families were non-white in 1950. But these families represented 31% of the ones displaced for renewal projects. In Philadelphia, about 18% of families were non-white, but here they represented 71% of those displaced.

I don't think that this will be news to a lot of you. "Urban renewal" is a loaded term in American urbanism. But the article does do a great job of taking you back through time in cities like Houston, Chicago, and New York. The article is also by Adam Paul Susaneck, who is the founder of Segregation by Design. If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to check out his website.

According to this recent New York Times article, California is set to put into effect a new mandate that would require 100% of passenger vehicle sales in the state to be fully electric by 2035. Included within this mandate are also interim targets: 35% of all sales by 2026 and 68% of all sales by 2030.

When I first read the article, my first thought was: "Isn't 2035 kind of far away? Can't we do this sooner?" And this is usually how my mind works when I see some date in the future. But then I remembered that EV sales last year in the US only totaled somewhere around 5% of all sales.

So there is work to be done, and mandates like this will certainly help. As I understand it, this will be the first mandate of its kind in the US and also one of the strictest in the world. A lot of other countries have simply set targets, rather than all-out bans.

This is what it means to lead. You do things before others.