Speaker 1: And now you get back to drinking. It's it's evening
for me over here.
Speaker 2: And I wasn't gonna drink, but I did anyway, So
I'm half in the bag.
Speaker 1: I'm not really half in the bag.
Speaker 3: But you should definitely always drink.
Speaker 4: Yes, ask not what your country can do for you,
Ask what you can do for your country.
Speaker 1: Mister Gorbachhaw tear down this wall.
Speaker 5: It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and
Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lills. Today we're going to talk
to urbanism with Joel Kotkin lets a podcast.
Speaker 6: I probably took a bullet to the head because of
the things that they say about me. They talk about democracy.
I'm a threat to democracy. They're the threat to democracy.
Rather fake Russia Russia Russia investigation.
Speaker 1: That went nowhere. We have a lot to get to Lindsay.
Speaker 5: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricchet Podcast, number seven hundred and eight.
And if you add seven and eight you get fifteen.
If you divided fifty by the number of hosts here,
you well know, if you take fifteen and you add
the numbers to get six, you divide that by the
number of hosts.
Speaker 1: Three come up with.
Speaker 5: Two who were the number of people who were on
the stage and the debate which we're going to talk
about with Charles E. W.
Speaker 1: Cook and Stephen Hayward And I'm James Lalyx. I met it.
Speaker 5: I'm sitting at a long conference table here and downtown Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: Steven's on a ship.
Speaker 5: Charles is Florida, which has not been yet sawed off
by bugs Bunny left to float into the Caribbean. And Stephen,
you're in. You're taking the Norway cruise. Have you been
to Stoppinger yet and seeing the Herring Museum.
Speaker 1: No, I haven't been there.
Speaker 2: I've been to Bergen and had a ton of salmon,
and right now I have no idea what fjord I'm
sailing along, but I'm keeping my eyes open for Michael
Paluin's Norwegian blue parrot and having lots of aquafat. So I'm,
you know, and happy that the debate because it was
at three am local time, I did not watch, although
it everything I've read went exactly.
Speaker 1: As I predicted it would. Unfortunately, Charles, well.
Speaker 3: I'm not near any fields, although I could be given up.
How much rain we've had in the last ten days.
Is now I live in a place apparently that just
rains constantly all the time, one hundred percent of the time,
all day, all night, whatever the time is, whatever the
moment it rains. So I am sort of surrounded by
honorary feuds like waterlged lawns and cracks and crevices that
are full of water. You meant the debate, didn't you?
Speaker 7: You weren't. We're looking for a water update.
Speaker 1: Well, no, an aquavied and then a debate update.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I mean I think that everything in the
debate proceeded as people imagine that it would, in that
Trump's behavior was in keeping with his previous behavior, and
he responded to every single provocation that Harris threw at him,
as she had telegraphed she was going to for three weeks.
She said nothing of consequence, because she never does. She's
flatly incapable of taking a position, thinking through a position,
expressing a position, and the media is a national disgrace
which should not again be trusted to mediate any sort
of important conversation about the future of the United States.
So what happened was precisely what I had imagined would happen,
and I don't think it's going to have an enormous
effect as the result.
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so either.
Speaker 5: I think the people who a lot of the people
are going to be voting for Trump not because of
what they think he will do, but because what they
assume he won't, and that is the whole panoply of
expansion of the state that they would expect to happen
under either Harris the New or Harris the Old. She's
of the party, she's of the blob, she's of the state.
Air four don't want to vote for her. So they
vote for Trump because they know he will not increase immigration,
he will not raise your taxes, he will not enable
the regulatory state, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't
matter what he gets up there and says. It is
just what people are just assume. I know what he's
not gonna do. But there are those who are convinced
that he will bring about, in his second opportunity, authoritarianism galore.
And to that point, well, from the Hitler playbook, of course,
you have to find another to demonize. You have to
have some sort of xenophobic rant, and that's what we got.
I guess two of the takeaways seem to be first
they're eating cats and dogs. Now I have a take
on this in that no, they're not.
Speaker 1: They're not.
Speaker 5: The Ohio woman who ate a cat was probably mentally ill,
and she was not from Springfield. And the dog thing
may or may not be apocryphal, but it doesn't matter
because that's become sort of a stand in for the
issues that suddenly have been thrust the foe by the
Springfield Haitian situation. So I'd like you guys take on this.
Do you think that everybody on the right is absolutely
fulminating and fizzing and going effervescently crazy over something that
is not happening and is not a problem and if
it was, it'd be fine, or is you know, Stephen,
what do you think from your distance?
Speaker 1: What do you think? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well, so, first of all, the real headline here is
I think what the real grabber is. Wait a minute,
This little town of what sixty five thousand people took
in or had imposed on a twenty thousand Haitian immigrants
in a short period of time that nobody knew this,
I think, right?
Speaker 1: And you know, I am tempted to go with jokes
because I like to.
Speaker 2: I kept thinking, well, there has to be a Simpsons
episode that predicted this for Springfield, because the Simpsons always
seem to be ahead of what was happening in the future.
And a few people sent me suggestions, I want to
make jokes about voodoo economics, you know, I always thought
was the problem with Haiti right in their economy. Then
we didn't. We're supposed to be against that, right. But finally,
and you know, a gat more halfway serious, I think
you're right that this is at the very least has
to be greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, the explosion
of the memes tells us something I think we know
here and in Europe that and you see the neglection
results that there's huge resentment by a broadcross section of Americans,
of Europeans, of the open immigration that's been pushed upon
US diversities, our strength and all the ideology that goes
with us and the media and our political class, and
for large part in both parties have simply ignored it,
repressed it, won't acknowledge it's happening, won't acknowledge any reasonable
concerns about it. And so it doesn't surprise me that
you have a explosion of memes, and you know, they're
just it's unbelievable how this is all spun out this week,
And that's very postmodern in a certain way. Right the
postmodernists say, truth in quotation marks is what's created by
our images and all the rest of that. So in
a certain way, this is the right wing's own postmodernist
revenge on the left.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The specifics don't matter.
Speaker 5: The picture of a cat Ai generated kitty with an
AK forty seven stands in for a series of legitimate
arguments and conversations about immigrants.
Speaker 1: It just does it.
Speaker 5: Just that's how the brain wires. So even when he
says they're eating cats and dogs. You may not believe it,
you may not know what, it may not be true.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 5: It connects something to an argument that I don't know
if we're gonna have that conversation.
Speaker 1: We'll see.
Speaker 5: But Charles, what did you think of the.
Speaker 3: I think that unfortunately, what you've just described works the
other way around, which is why, among many other reasons,
I'm not a postmodernist. That is to say that directionally,
the right in the United States and the Republican Party
and Donald Trump are correct about immigration. They're correct about
the problem at the border. They're correct about what all
of these illegal immigrants due to communities that are not
willing or able to absorb them. And if rather than
make that case, which is I think irrefutable, you promulgate
myths or at least unproven claims, you give the people
on the other side of the aisle this unfortunate opportunity
to say that's not true. And because it's not true,
it's a stand in for all the other stuff that
you're saying. You are a peddler of myths and all
your politics are based on lies, which is not true.
So I think that while I have been wildly amused
as well by the memes, and while I agree entirely
with Steve that the fact that they exist does tell
you something that people are frustrated, I think it was
a mistake for the candidate Donald Trump to say that
on stage, because now every headline has been Trump promulgated
a falsehood, and of course that the un lying message
that he's conveying here is correct, and it's one that
is shared by close to a supermajority in the United States.
I mean, we talked about this last week. We now
have this is astonishing given where we were in twenty fifteen,
A majority of Americans sixty percent, who want mass deportations.
That is how fed up they are with the Biden
Harris administration's abdication of responsibility. So I would not, if
I were Donald Trump, have given them any opening whatsoever.
I would have listed things that are far, far worse
than eating cats and dogs, like children being murdered by
people who haven't been vetted, like social services being overrun.
And the bottom line of it is three million people
violating the laws that our Congress passed. I think it
was a mistake, much as I do agree that it
does tell us something about latent feelings toward the border.
Speaker 1: I agree with you.
Speaker 5: The thing is is that if Trump, I believe he
had enumerated all of those things in a precise, logical
and empirical manner, then the conversation would have shifted to
a it's not a problem and be its xenophobic, because
we know that there's actually no legitimate reason for these
people to believe. Yes, it all comes from a deep
place of xenophobia. I don't think that if Trump had
put it better, we'd be having the conversation. I think
that Trump saying something like that would automatically delegitimize it,
even though we want to have that conversation.
Speaker 7: I don't agree.
Speaker 1: I don't agree.
Speaker 3: I think that if you say that people who are
angry about illegal immigration and xenophobes, then they say, fine,
I'm a xenophobe. I mean, if I could say something
moderately Boordy here, I have been told not personally, but
as part of the political movement to which I belong,
that if I, as a straight man, I'm not willing
to have sex with a trans person, i'm transphobic. Could
you know what my response to that is, James, Then
I'm transphobic.
Speaker 7: Yes, I'm not going to go do it.
Speaker 3: You're not going to bully me into doing something that
I don't want to do. And I think I think
the same is true increasingly of immigration. Is they say, well,
look at all these racists who are upset about illegal immigration,
and those people say, well, if that makes me a racist,
then I'm a racist. The problem with this is that
no one wants to say I'm a liar, and so
Trump has shifted the ground from something which is quite useful,
which is actually, no, I'm not to Okay, that isn't true, Butt,
and I just I just think it was a mistake
for him to say it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, part of the problem, I will give you all.
Let's Ephen get into your sing. I just want to
say I was talking with somebody who's a little bit
liberal on these issues about the wisdom of importing large
amounts of people from a drastically different culture into the
middle of America, and the response was about, Haiti, Well,
they just had an earthquake, which is to say that
because disaster had struck this country, therefore the sensible and
humane thing was, of course to gather.
Speaker 1: Them up and drop them in the middle of the country.
Speaker 5: That it would be cruel not to do so. And
there's no getting around that. I don't think Steven, you're
gonna say.
Speaker 1: Well, I was.
Speaker 2: I think we're pretty much in agreement here. But then
there's a couple of fault lines that are interesting. First
of all, just for the record, Charles, although I don't
think any of to tell you this, I'm very anti postmodern.
I just used that illustration because, okay, but I think
I'm a little closer to shames on this for this reason.
And then I think can draw out to a general
evaluation of the debate.
Speaker 1: It's look, let me put it this way.
Speaker 2: If Trump were the candidate who mastered facts and figures
and weaved in better arguments and did things more conventionally,
he wouldn't be Donald Trump. He'd be Ronda Santis and
much if I might prefer Ron de Santa, says the candidate,
and for his ability to debate and make policy walk
arguments that we think are strong. I'm not sure that
you know, even if the cats and dogs be eaten
is completely ridiculous, which it probably is. I think it
reaches people who say, I don't know if it's true
or not, but there's something really badly wrong, and that
makes the point more powerfully then a list.
Speaker 1: Of facts and figures.
Speaker 2: Although you're right, I think you should use the real
cases of people who are killed who shouldn't have been
and all the other things. He could do that, but
he's Donald Trump. He's not ever gonna do it. I
keep I get frustrated with all the articles I see
every day saying Trump must do this. He's not gonna
do anything we suggest, Right, He's Trump, That's just the
way he is. And I think, as we said of
Ronald Reagan. We just have to let Trump be Trump,
and he's gonna win or loses Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just loses. Donald Trump. Is one of the problems that.
Speaker 1: Yeah says, Yeah, I don't understood.
Speaker 5: Just don't do the thing for the next debate, and
there won't be one where you do the drinking right
because the drinking game where every time Trump says this,
you take a shotter every time here it says this,
you take a shot, you end up actually corecked the
next day, unless unless, unless.
Speaker 1: Maybe you don't want to do drinking games at all. Huh,
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James Lollx. Here in Minneapolis, I live in a dense city.
My neighborhood is not It was laid out as a suburb.
At the end of the previous the beginning of the
previous century. It's a very walkable neighborhood. You might even
call it a fifteen minute city. And I have pushedback
sometimes with a lot of my friends who are who
are very concerned about the idea, and I understand why.
Speaker 1: But a I like the idea of a fifteen.
Speaker 5: Minute city where everything that I can find is walkable
and it's nice, and it's got trees and coffee shops
and cafes.
Speaker 1: But it really does stand in for something else.
Speaker 5: In the minds of the people who are pushing this
as a future model, doesn't it. There's a lot more
control and observation there walk us through because this is
one of the new urban models that the urbanists are
telling us about. Tell us about the perils and pitfalls
and perhaps advantages of the dreaded fifteen minute city.
Speaker 8: Well, there's nothing wrong with the idea of per se
and actually there's some relevance in the sense there's more
people working at home. It's a fifteen minute city because
you don't have to commute at all. I mean, in
many of the neighborhoods I've lived in in particularly when
I lived in Hollywood for many years, almost everybody worked
at home the same thing. Where I live in Orange County.
I think there's one person on the cul de Sac
who actually commutes. So I do live in a fifteen
minute city. The university is an eight minute drive, a
twenty minute bike ride. I mean, there are lots of
ways of doing it. I think what the problem is
that the people who are pushing it are the same
people who push density above everything, want to go into
single family neighborhoods which actually might be reasonably walkable, and
impose a model which the vast majority of people don't want.
I mean, if you take a look at the at
the data, people are moving from high density to low
density by enormous amounts. That's been the case basically for
the better part of at least fifty years, but it's
accelerated in the last five. So the question is what
comes with it? And the question we also have to
ask ourselves is these are the same people who told us, well,
if we build transit in Los Angeles, so we spent
the hunting on it, you know, everybody would be commuting around.
And of course, you know there are now fewer people
writing transit in LA than there was in nineteen eighty
so you know, so I think the it's really the
agenda of the fifteen minute city. Let's face it, the
new urban iss have gotten, you know, a bitter blow
with the growth of online work. The whole thesis is
how do you get into the downtown or the central district.
But now the central district is much less important than
it was five years ago, and infinitely important than it
was twenty years ago.
Speaker 5: There are two elements of this fifty minute city that
I think give people the hebes and or the jeebs.
One of them is the density thing that you met
that you mentioned along transit corridors, long busy streets. It
makes absolute perfect sense to build apartment buildings. They're already dense,
and the energy that you get from these corridors, you know,
compounds and you have interesting places. But when you say
it is necessary to put a four place into a
residential neighborhood, what you're saying is we don't like this
paradigm of individuality that the single family home represents. All
of the hatred that they bring to sprawl, they bring
to your neighborhood and say you can't have that, you
shouldn't have it. It's two resources and intense, it's not
communal enough.
Speaker 1: We don't like it.
Speaker 5: So part of the fifteen minute city is to break
up the individual homes. And the second part is, well,
if you don't need to be outside of your fifteen
minute city, you shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: Therefore congestion pricing. Therefore little cameras that will charge you
if you actually leave during certain amounts of hours.
Speaker 5: That's the sort of status, top down control that a
lot of people say no, no, thank you.
Speaker 8: Right well, and that's that's precisely what they want. I mean,
and I've seen it because I spend a lot of
time in other countries. If you go, for instance, in Sydney,
neighborhoods that were beautiful, single family neighborhoods, easily accessible into
the downtown, walkable, they now they now build, you know,
for you know, four story apartment complexes, completely destroys the
nature of the neighborhood. Terrible for the bird life and
and and the other animals that live in these areas.
It's terrible for the climate because concrete actually makes things hotter.
There's something that has been essentially air brushed out of
the climate debate, which is the heat Island, which many
people my particularly my colleague Ali Maderis, has worked on,
which is basically you end up with much hotter conditions
because it's all concrete. Somehow, I don't understand where where
green goes with concrete from one end to the other.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 8: The other thing that's absurd is this idea that you
have to go break down the last middle class and
working class stable neighborhoods and cities. When we have empty
office buildings and empty shopping malls and empty factories which
could be converted. And as you mentioned earlier, you've got
the transit corridor, you have the roads, you have the electricity.
Why would you have to go into people's neighborhood? And
I agree there is a certainly a element in the
new urban is thinking, which is basically, you know, we
don't like this way of life, you know. And of course,
very often these are people who are quite wealthy. They
may live, let's say in Manhattan or in an apartment
of San Francisco, and they almost always have country houses
or at least one extra house. I mean, I love
getting you know. I've gotten lectures on proper lifestyle from
British aristocrats and I asked them, well, how do you live,
and you know it's it's it's basically an attack on
sort of middle class home ownership. Now I'm not necessarily
a conservative per se, but I'm more in the sense
of it being a, if you will, a kind of
social democrat. I think the more people are able to
buy a house and have an asset and be independent,
that's what I think a good social democratic regime would
want to do. But I would go back to Truman
in some ways in this area, this idea that we're
going to move into a society where everybody's a renter
for life. We even rent our furniture. It's it's this
weird sort of symbiosis, if you will, between the investment
class at Wall Street basically and and the green urbanists.
They actually have a very common agenda, which is basically,
screw the middle class.
Speaker 2: So, Joel, it's Steve Hayward over in Europe this week, actually,
and you know, it strikes me, to build on what
you've just said, it strikes me that one of the
sleeper issues in this campaign that neither campaign is talking
about is high housing costs and rent. It's being swept
up in an inflation story, which is fine, but I
have a synoptic or potted history.
Speaker 1: I can state briefly, and I want to see what
you make of it.
Speaker 2: I think, as you know, and you lived in LA
for a long time, I always like to say that
the sort of no growth or growth control or highly
regulatory framemank for housing began on the coasts fifty years ago,
start in California, starting the East coast, and it has
over the decades spread inland and now infects Indianapolis, Saint Louis, everywhere.
Speaker 1: And there's some empirical data for this.
Speaker 2: I think about the increasing costs of the regulatory process
to build housing, and I think that's a huge driver.
Speaker 1: Of the housing costs problem in the country. Am I
generally right about that?
Speaker 2: Or what would you add or modify if I don't
have the story quite in focus?
Speaker 8: Well, As my colleague Wendel Cox says, the housing crisis
is not universal in the United States. I mean, yes,
you have you know, some of these same regulations to
some extent being enforced. But you know, housing prices in
the if you want to live in the outer rings
of Houston are still very very reasonable. Much of the
Midwest is still relatively affordable where it's really hit hard
is in the northeast and on the west coast, and
in those areas everything from there are some cases where
just the fees alone could be two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. If you talk to anybody in the in
the development business, the amount of time that you spend,
you know, going through the regulatory process, it's that all
gets baked into the housing. Of course, the problem we
have with this election, because I do think it's an
important issue and I'm actually about to write an article
about it, the real problem is is that that you've
got one candidate, Kamala Harris. For her to talk about
housing affordability is such a joke, given the fact that
as Attorney General in California, she enforced laws that made
it very difficult to develop a suburban housing she uh,
you know, talk to anybody who is an official in
Sam Bernardino, the whole bunch of other places. So the
idea that California, which has about the lowest affordability, lowest
home ownership, highest prices, that's the model. Give me a break.
The problem that the the Republicans have is that their
candidate is basically either an ignoramus or or losing his
marbles because right, he has no he has no way
of He should be able to talk about these things,
but he doesn't know how to put together a co
here in sentence, you know, I mean it's it's just
one person is a complete phony and the other one
is in articulate.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I remembered Trump from years ago wanting
to use the power of eminent domain to you know,
kick out old ladies out of their houses in Atlantic
City and so forth.
Speaker 1: And he lost me there back then.
Speaker 2: But a second question, and then I'll kick it over
to Charles Cook to see if he wants to defend
British aristocrats or not from your observation a moment ago. So, Joel,
you know I've known you on and often seen you
many times over the years, and I always describe you
to people as a small py common sense progressive, small
p progressive, a common sense progressivism, right, And I took
the heart of criticism. You made this more than twenty
years ago at a conference and you may not remember it,
but you were criticizing conservatives like me, and I think
rightly so saying, you know, you go a little too
far trying to make an idiology out of progressivism, you
know too much Woodrow, Wilson and Hagel and all this
sort of you know, stuff that I do think people
take too far. I took that very much to heart,
and I think you were right about that. But then
I saw your article here from a month or two go.
What happened to my party? What happened to common sense progressivism?
Was it overcome by you know, the ideologically hardcore? Or
where do you land? You just said in a moment,
you're still a social democrat, which I think that's a
great thing for us to have.
Speaker 1: But there don't see me very many of you.
Speaker 8: Left where where we're we're moving towards extinction? I suppose, yeah,
although I think that actually the large part of the
public is there they you know. For instance, one of
my arguments to conservatives is some you know, particularly you know,
some of the libertarians will say, well, the market is efficient,
let's get rid of all zoning. So what they do
is they go along with wiping out single families owning
and then don't say anything when when construction on the
sub in the suburban periphery is blocked. And I always
ask conservatives what kind of conservatism is going to survive
if the if we become a country where only twenty
five percent of the people own their own home, you
have no chance. Everything will be Ultimately, of course, the
ultimate thing will be people will be renters. They're going
to want rent control. And why not if I can
never This is what I would say to younger people.
If I have no chance of owning a home, no
chance of starting a business, no chance of really ever
being independent, I'm going to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: Why not? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Can I ask, yeah, I won't be defending British aristocrats.
I have jud British aristocracy when I became a citizen
in twenty eighteen, can ask a very basic, from the
ground up question here.
Speaker 7: I'm originally from England.
Speaker 3: As you can presumably here, and in England, in Britain,
i think about nine percent of the land is built on.
Speaker 7: And in america's two right.
Speaker 8: Right, In Australia is even yeah, right.
Speaker 3: So when I'm here in the United States, as I
have been for the last thirteen years, space doesn't really
figure in my imagination because it's almost a limitless.
Speaker 7: Amount of it.
Speaker 3: Everything you've described, and I know you've written a bunch
of US at National Review, where I write it is fascinating.
But what I can never understand, perhaps you can explain
to me, is why why are there people who are
desperate to stop building on.
Speaker 7: Land to avoid sprawl?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 7: It's just what does it come from? What's the origin
of that there's so much space?
Speaker 8: Well, first of all, the origins of the argument against
it really started in the UK. The UK is really
the found of idiotic planning ideas, although elegantly presented, but
the reality is the first it started off, it was
kind of an aesthetic thing. If you read let's say
Mumford for instance, or Caro, A lot of it is
clearly like these cookie cutter houses with you know, with
with young families with tricycles in front. They just were
offensive to the intelligentsia. I mean that sort of where
it started. Then as the environmental movement got started, they
started saying, well, those people, you know, they drive more,
they eat up more energy, you know, they're gobbling up
the farmland. Now, obviously, the United States, as you suggest,
has no shortage of farmland. Actually we retire much more
farmland from being redundant than we do taking it over
to build houses. So but but you know, logic doesn't matter.
And then the other thing is that you have a
lot of people who have decided that the way to
save the planet is to force everybody to live like crap.
I mean that's you know, because you know, people say, oh, well,
you could live in the city.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: You know what if I could go to New York
City and buy one of those you know, four bedroom
apartments on Central Park West or in Vienna in the Ringstrasa,
I'd be okay with living in an urban area, but
I couldn't afford it. And I have a nice house
in a very expensive area, and if I did that
and converted it into anything in New York City, I'd
be lucky to get one bedroom. So you know, the
reality is they don't understand that there's a class element,
which is people who are not super rich cannot afford
to live decently in urban areas. The other issue, which
of course is affects this is even if you live
in a nice neighborhood in the city, as I did
Los Angeles, you can't send your kids to public school,
so you end up having to pay not only high
taxes and all every kind of fee that you could
possibly have and with the threat of densification. But you're
also in a situation where you know, you're basically forced
to pay forty fifty thousand dollars a year to educate
your kids. By the way, the reason why I'm talking
to you not from my long term home in Los Angeles,
where I lived for forty years, but in Orange County
because when my youngest daughter was going at the sixth grade,
we took a look and we said, you know what,
if we moved to Orange County, she can still go
to public school. And she did and it worked out great.
It saved us about well somewhere around three hundred thousand dollars.
Most people can't afford this, so that one of the
reasons that people moved to the suburbs. It's not just
because they want more space, which is part of it,
is they want to be in the place where they
could afford to live and send their kids to decent schools.
You know, I if I moved from Los Angeles to Dallas,
I could live in the district with great schools. I
couldn't do that in LA Once you went into places
like which I have good schools, the price is double. Yeah,
the same thing with Calabasas outside of you know, I
mean basically, the urban America has a reverse Midas touch,
and it drives middle class people out, particularly if they
want to buy something, and particularly if they're married, and
even more so if they have children.
Speaker 3: My second question is your criticism of Donald Trump was
effectively that he's ineloquent, which is of course, But suppose
that I managed to put a chip into his brain
and he suddenly became Demosthenes. Would he have the right ideas?
And is the problem with the Republican Party that it
is headed up by somebody who can't convey or doesn't
think about this, or is it as well wrong?
Speaker 8: I would say this, and you know, I was talking
to my wife about it the other day. On almost
every issue but abortion, the Republicans are ahead. Even if
you take a look in California, if you take a
look at the positions that are taken by Republicans, they
actually are fairly popular. Even in the place like California,
particularly in the suburban areas. They seem to sometimes have
a problem articulating this. Now, part of it is there
is a wing of the Republican Party that's libertarian, you know,
uber Alis and you know, they they would never even
engage this kind of issue. And actually, I mean I've
had let's say, very fierce arguments with you know, libertarians
on this issue. Even though I'm sympathetic to a lot
of libertarian positions. I think that the problem is the
Republican Party doesn't know how to how to make its case.
I mean, but on issues like crime, issues like the border,
they're they're clearly energy, they're clearly ahead of the game.
The problem is they don't really know how to talk
to regular people. And then of course part of the
problem is also this this problem with the primaries where
you know, the you know, the most unreconstructed twenty five
thirty percent of the population is going to vote for
Trump even though most people don't want them. So what
we end up with, and I'm already starting to work
on what is it going to be, you know, living
on the Kamala Harrison of course, being a long time
California and I think I have an idea of what
it's going to look like.
Speaker 5: Joe, you had said before something was exactly correct, that
the objection to sprawl in the suburbs began as sort
of a culturally aesthetic revulsion, and then onto it was
grafted environmentalism and other things, and it was fueled by
the ungrateful baby boomers who grew up in Levittown and
thought that it was just full of ticky TACKI boxes
and romanticized all the cold water walk up Flos, New York.
As soon as we're done with that generation, which is mine,
the better, But in a sense, some of what the
new urbanists want is correct. It made me realize that
perhaps the last urbanist movement of which I approved was
the city Beautiful movement that came out of the eighteen
ninety three Columbia acquisition, and that itself was just trying
to graft onto America the houseman Parisian, you know, the
leveling of old Paris and the reconstituting it into the
houseman's vision, which again I like, but I don't think
they've gotten anything right. Since I think Moses was wrong.
I think that the people who wanted to tear down
blight in the sixties made the mistake of going too
far instead of rehabilitating places, and we ended up with
these empty plausas and these wind swept places that nobody likes.
And now we have new urbanism, which has elements of
it again that I like, but also elements that seem
a little too controlling, a little too vengeful and petty,
and the rest of it was the last what was
the last new urban urban movement that actually you think
is the one that we should be looking to, that
has the best ideas for everybody, Because you quote Frank
Lloyd to writing your book that people are going to
go where I'm paraphrasing, people are going to go.
Speaker 1: The city goes where the people go.
Speaker 5: And one of the things that people hate about the
suburbs is that they seem to be an expression of
individual desire.
Speaker 1: People left the city after the Wars, not because all
of a sudden, Oh there's a highway in a car,
I have to move. No, they wanted to go there.
It was a better place to go.
Speaker 8: I can my own family. My mother grew up in Brownsville,
which hopefully I won't offend your audience by this as
but I have to quote her accurately. It was a
shitty neighborhood then in the shitty neighborhood now. When she
got a chance to move to Long Island and have
a little backyard and be in the place where she
didn't worry about crime, and where the public schools were good.
She went nobody took a gun to her head.
Speaker 5: No, no, So I guess I'm not asking a question
so much as giving a speech and a sermon myself.
But yes, I mean, so shouldn't we Perhaps we should
pick and choose from all of these various strains of
urban thought that have gone through the culture in the
last hundred years or so. There is something to be
said for beautiful dens cities, There is something to be
said for preservation. There is something to be said for
building something new that contrasts and compares and the rest
of it. But it just seems as if has it
ever been non ideological? I'll ask you that urban design,
urban theory in the last hundred years, has it always been.
Speaker 8: Well, there's been an element of it. But you know
what's really interesting is there are some very good models.
You know, my friend Aaron Wren wrote a piece about
where he lives now in Carmel, Indiana. Republican administration in
some senses, some new urbanist ideas, but still single family
homes that's doing well. You want to see some of
the most amazing evolutions, I'll give you two very different cases.
One what I see in eparticularly outside of Houston, because
I've spent so much time there. These new towns Woodlands,
Sinco Ranch that they have. You know, the case of
the Woodlands, they have a nice downtown, there are lots
of jobs there. They have you know, they have water
features going all through. You could take a boat around.
There's great bike paths. In a lot of ways. They've
achieved the good part of the new urbaness regime for
reasons of they know that people like it, and they
make money if they provide what people want. So that's one.
The other alternative, which is what I'm working on right now.
One of the projects I'm on is some of the
old cities in Los Angeles we call the Southeast LA.
Speaker 1: Places that you've.
Speaker 8: Probably never heard of, like down E, Paramount, Well Lakewood
you've heard of. I was just there with a friend
who is a former head of the computer science department
at Chapman, and he said, it looks better than it
ever did. So you go into these small towns which
tend to have their own school districts, their own police forces.
These towns are ninety percent Hispanic. We went there, no vacancies,
no graffiti, no homeless people. You realize that you know
a local area can do it too. I think a
lot of the problems is a we have to get
away from the idea that once one size fits all,
people have different things. The other thing is the more
you have is a town where the people have a
stake in it, and that's what's happening in places like
parts of south of East LA, whereas in the city
of Los Angeles you can't affect anything. I lived in
LA when we ever had a problem, you couldn't get
the city to do anything because you know, I didn't
have I wasn't a source of campaign contributions, and I
didn't work for a government union. So you know nothing
that we said in our neighborhood matter.
Speaker 1: Well, Joe, I've got the build on that.
Speaker 2: I've got one last California question because I haven't been
to Lakewood and Downey. I know those places are, but
I haven't been in a long time. It's your adopt
at home state. I know you moved from Brooklyn decades ago,
and I'm a native Californian and every time I see
a story like the one two weeks ago that Chevron
a company that grew in California in the eighth nineteenth
century is leaving entirely for Houston, following how many companies
are now major companies that have left the state. And
as you know, we are one tech procession away from
California's fiscal situation going off a.
Speaker 1: Cliff that will so deep it'll never come back.
Speaker 2: I keep thinking, never mind, Republicans, we can meet in
a phone booth now in California. I keep thinking that
at some point, isn't this going to wake up Democrats?
Isn't Gavin Newsome going to is the privately? Doesn't he
have to be privately saying something's wrong when all these
businesses are leaving the state?
Speaker 1: That might be too optimistic. There is a just hopeless.
Speaker 2: So what are we going to say by Lakewood and
Hispanic politicians who say enough is enough?
Speaker 8: Well, the report we just did at Chapman called the
El Fertudo s Latino. We go into all that stuff,
and basically the only hope for California is Latinos and
Asians beginning to move to the center. If that happens,
then we've got a chance. Because these are people who
want to buy houses. They tend to have kids. They
should be a constituency that the party should fight for.
And one of the things that I've been talking a
lot with Latinos about is you got to you got
to make people work for your vote. You know, I mean,
what the what what's happened to the African Americans. They've
become They've become so predictably Democrats that the Democrats really
don't have to do anything for them. All they got
to do is say a few words and pander a bit. Meanwhile,
the condition of Black America continues to deteriorate, particularly relative
to other groups. So, you know, the the the problem
we have in California is that we have a very
powerful group of people. And this is where why I
think Newsom doesn't get it. He lives in this Silicon
Valley bubble.
Speaker 5: This.
Speaker 8: You know, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are the same person. Essentially,
their backers are the same, their views are the same,
and what they'll do is they will back up when
things get bad. So, for instance, Newsom's been vetoing some
of the more absurd laws that are being pushed because
he knows that there's a problem. But what's interesting to
me is when companies leave. And to me, the most
important loss by far is X because Space was I
think our ticket in California. Big written a lot about Space,
including for a national review. When you lose these companies,
you know, it's it's very, very difficult. But the problem
is that you've got this group of companies who don't
manufacture anything, who are what my friend Mike Lincoles told
booth companies you know, like Apple, like Microsoft, you know
where they make money no matter what, they're just being there.
They make money. There's no incentive from them, and they're
the big backers of the Democrats. There's no incentive to
address the loss of these these jobs. I mean, you know,
he made many mistakes, but when Pete Wilson was governor,
I have to give him credit. Every time there was
a company that was talking about leaving, they put a
team out there. Sometimes they talked them out of it,
sometimes they didn't. Doesn't seem to be any attempt. I
was meeting with a bunch of executives at Toyota. They
have a few things left here in southern California. You
talk about a company that should be here, and they said,
you know what, nobody cared we left. I think the
mayor of Florence was upset. I think that's about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Have you heard word one about SpaceX leaving SpaceX, which
I think may be the most important company in the
country in the long term. Not a word, not a word.
Speaker 5: Well, that's another podcast and we'll have that too, because
California matters, and it absolutely is a lesson, once a
shining beacon of hope and opportunity and orange juice and
all the rest of it's and now a dire lesson.
Joel Cotkin, the author of The Human City, Urbanism for
the Rest of Us and Becoming of Neo Feudalism Awarding
for the Global middle Class.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 5: I could have talked about urbanism for another hour or so,
but got to run and have a great weekend you.
Speaker 8: Too, and look forward to seeing the podcast, and feel
free to contact me in the future. I do have
a piece, by the way, coming out that Andrew Stutterford
is editing on immigration, which might be of some issul.
Speaker 1: Well, there we go. Look for that in National Review,
I assume.
Speaker 8: In National Review.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, good, all right, Joe, thank you, thank you.
You know, talking about California and what it used to represent.
I can't think of a style, a mood, a vibe
that's come out of California in a long time. What
most people think of is a long dead, fifty sixty
seven year old paradigm of Googi architecture, of Neon, of
all the car culture things that sort of erupted in
the mid century. That's what people think of when they
think of California. California urban culture not anymore. The other alternative,
of course, is to go to We mentioned Frankloyd right before.
I'm working on a piece now for the newspaper where
I have been reduced to being the urbanist writer there.
Frankloyd Wright did a gas station in a small town
of Minnesota in nineteen fifty seven, you don't know how
for the guy who you know, had some gas stations
and he said, hey, you know what, why don't you
build me a station? And Frank Lloyd Wright usted up
some plans from nineteen twenty seven for a broad acre
city and put in this city, this little small town,
this absurd futuristic building that was already thirty years old
when he put it up, and was pointing to a
future that never actually happened. And when people look at
it and say, why didn't we build more things like that? Well,
because it was weird. It's a weird looking thing. It
doesn't fit. People weren't crazy about it. It's a novelty.
Speaker 1: It's not a way we wanted to go.
Speaker 5: And as much as I love some of the particulars
of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, building an entire city run
those ideas and styles I think was bad. And that's
one of the objections I have to all of these
new Orbinist ideas is they tend to impose a paradigm
as opposed to letting things grow organically and jostle for competition.
Speaker 1: That's all I have to say about that. Well, I'll
just say here here. I mean, you know, I thought
I think maybe you said James Is.
Speaker 2: The new urbanists had a lot of good ideas, but
they wanted to impose it on everyone by fiat right.
Speaker 1: I used to say, look, if you want a fifteen.
Speaker 2: Minute city, you want new urbanism or whatever, just allow
it to happen.
Speaker 1: Let's scale back.
Speaker 2: The zoning regulations that prohibit these kinds of forms of
neighborhoods and cities from being built and let a thousand
flowers bloom. But that's not good enough for Really, this
is another species of utopianism. I think you know, you
mentioned transit and so forth, and you and I could go.
Speaker 1: On all day about this, James and tear his hair out.
Speaker 5: There is an element of utopianism that is underneath all
of these urban place It really is.
Speaker 1: No matter what you look for for the garden.
Speaker 5: City models, for the Robert Moses imposed grids, with with
the awful, dreadful concrete pretty you know, the word doesn't
prove igno, that's it. The standing in the middle of
wincept empty pauses, all those things have an element of utopianism,
utopianism to it, and that's why I say it's managing
to hell with it all? Right, before we go, a
couple of things. One meetups coming up Saint Louis October
third through the sixth. That's right, people at Ricochet get
together in person and drink and eat and have fun.
And you'd be surprised a little politics they actually talk about.
Panama City, Florida, December sixth through the eighth. I don't
know the geography of but Charlie is Panama City close
to where you happen to be or are you just
going to be you know, mister undisclosed location and.
Speaker 7: Leave us No, I live in Jacksonville.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, it's three and a half hours, four hours
away from me, Florida's big state. Not so much a
cross although that isn't a cross journey, but down. Yeah,
it takes it takes you as long to get from
the Keys to Tallahassee as from Tallahassee to Washington, d C.
Speaker 5: I'm not surprised I wouldn't use the keys as you're
starting a ending point, because that does really seem to
be tacking it on just a bit, and you could
never get me across that bridge in a million years.
Speaker 7: I shove it down.
Speaker 1: I met well.
Speaker 5: I like the keys, I just not the bridge. I
prefer to come to it from a watery angle. So
I go to ricochet dot com, check.
Speaker 1: Out the meetups page and you will see you know.
Speaker 5: And if you're not a member, well was Rob Long
whoever wherever he's been likes to say join and then
just put out the call and wherever you are, there's
a fighting chance at Ricochet people will come to you.
In the flash, last thing we had another nine to
eleven anniversary. Every year, it fades a bit more every year,
the the tributes are a bit more muted. The anguish
still seems for some to be particularly raw. But it's
been a long time. And what are your thoughts on
this day? Did you? I usually think the day before, oh,
tomorrow is that day. And this may be one of
the years in which I didn't think that I knew
it as soon as I woke up, because the just
you know, you look at your watch, you look at
the date. It's just it's it's stamped, it's But I
didn't think about it the day before. What did you
get to do?
Speaker 7: I always do.
Speaker 3: Also, I was flying on both September tenth and September eleventh,
so perhaps that focus in my mind. I think that
quite inadvertently, I mean not completely intervertently. I did book
the flights, but not because I wanted to, but because
I had agreed to do an event somewhere. I have
flown on about six of the last thirteen September eleventh
since I lived in the United States. That is a
strange feeling. It's just odd looking at your plane ticket
and it says September eleventh on it, it will never
not be strange.
Speaker 5: Well, when you do that again and the ticket actually
has a power ball at the end of the flight.
Speaker 1: Number, that's when I would be a little oh boy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was.
Speaker 2: Well, I was in Washington that morning, staying at the
University Club, just a few locked from the White House.
So I'm watching it on TV. But then hearing the
sirens start running a lot of them, and I thought, well,
something must be happening here. And as before the news
of the plane hitting the Pentagon and the White House
being evacuated, I was kind of close to an awful
lot of the noise anyway. E factually friends of mine saying,
oh my goodness, this is the first year, maybe a
second year, that I have students coming into college who.
Speaker 1: Were born after nine to eleven. So I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I grew up with World War
Two parents and always talked about Pearl Harbor, right, that
was something that lasted forever, And you know, I sort
of was rmbed with that myself and still think of
Pearl Harbor day when it comes.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 2: I got to think the current generation who was probably
doesn't think much about Pearl harbor.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be even.
Speaker 2: Worse another generation from now, James, sadly, because it shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: I think you're right. As far as the planes go.
Speaker 5: I live under the approach to the airport in Minneapolis,
and on nine to eleven there was a great calamity
as they brought all the planes down. They emptied the
skies right, and then for a very unusual afternoon and evening,
there was no noise above except for those the high
whine of a jet way overhead making circles figure eights
and so on. On a normal seven nine to eleven
like we had this week, I hear the tremendous roar
of the engines overhead. Is one plane after the other
makes it's leisurely descent, and I'm glad that it's normal,
and I remember the day that it wasn't. I won't forget,
but you're right, there are those coming up. I mean,
my daughter, it doesn't have a particular meaning to me,
even though for me one of the things I will
never forget is standing there watching all this happen on
the television while my daughter, toddler is playing on the floor,
and she picked up a small, little Fisher Price phone
that said hello Hello, and she's holding.
Speaker 1: It out to me.
Speaker 5: She has this delightful smile on her face as the
phone says hello Hello, like it's the future calling. I
will ever forget that anyway. There, we thank everyone for
listening to the podcast today. We advise you to do
yourself a favor and by all means tries biotics and
go to rigaghet dot com sign up. If you haven't,
you'll enjoy the member feed. Do not whatever, do not
do not go to Apple Podcasts and give us five stars.
Speaker 1: That would be a horrible thing to do.
Speaker 5: I'll be using that old reverse psychologically there stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: Thanks Charlie, thank you, Steven. Enjoy that.
Speaker 5: I give my regards to Norway, of course, in my
regards to swampy Damp Florida. And we'll see everybody in
the comments.
Speaker 1: At Rigachet four point zero. Well next week. Ag