I judged this book by the arresting title Dark Age Ahead, and decided that – in my current frame of mind – I had to read it.1
Jane Jacobs wrote this is 2004, and the book has a bit of the feel of a time capsule – as her current events examples stem from 2001 to 2002. Jacobs’ strength as a thinker and writer is that she can extrapolate from events in her own life, close observations, and from the newspaper, and illuminate patterns and principles of any age. She’s not academic, and she depends on telling anecdotes. Some may see that as a weakness, although I feel it’s a strength of her work. Her ‘big ideas’ tend to be right, and written in a way that an educated, but non-expert, reader can understand.
The central thesis of this book – and I tend to agree – is that invisible but essential strands of our strong society2are fraying at the edges. Her list of essential strands are not necessarily somebody else’s, but hers seem worthy of consideration, and worry. At the beginning of 2017, when the fraying seems particularly acute, its interesting to note, again, that Jacobs published her book in 2004.
So what is unraveling?
Households
Critiques of the breakdown of the nuclear family are commonly heard from the Right, but Jacobs does not mean exactly the same thing here. A main concern, she develops in the chapter, is the extreme rise in the housing prices, beyond the rise of household incomes. Now that’s interesting, since her book predates the housing crash by four years, although it was obvious to many in the early 2000s that we were on an unsustainable path brought on by low interest rates and easy credit. Her other concern – which will not surprise Jane Jacobs fans – is with the pernicious affects the automobile has had on the development of suburbs and the undermining of public transportation infrastructure.
Credentials vs. Education
The replacement of a true education in favor of a more “practical” set of market signals through degrees offered by institutes, community colleges and universities. The focus of educational institutions has become to offer a set of letters that indicate preparation for a specific job, rather than passion about learning or knowledge. We can only imagine how justified Jacobs would feel about the $25 million settlement made by the President-elect with respect to his fraudulent “University.”
Science Abandoned
Jacobs has a specific complaint here about the “engineers” who deal with traffic congestion – a particular obsession of hers – but we see plenty of evidence lately of the denigration of science and the scientific method. I can’t tell if the problem has gotten better or worse (probably it’s mixed) but we suffer when society fundamentally doubts scientific conclusions or discounts the need for a scientific approach.
Dumbed Down Taxes
Jacobs addresses here the problem of tax collection at the Federal level, for example, when certain problems must be solved at the local level. Or vice versa. The result is decision-making with the wrong branch or level of government. In my home state we are plagued by the problem of school funding, which is taxed at the local level, legislated at the state level, but clearly failing standards at the federal level.
Self-Policing Subverted
Specific industries sometimes do best when they self-regulate, recognizing their collective interest to seek best practices and internally police or punish wrong-doers. While acknowledging that truth, Jacobs points out examples – from architecture to police departments to accounting firms – where deeply problematic practices arise from bad self-policing.
Are these the root causes of the rest?
In her introduction, Jacobs asserts but does not prove that these five negative trends listed above over time increase the chance of a major societal breakdown. And she means “Dark Age” literally. Like, post-Roman Empire type reversion-to-chaos.
She also asserts, but does not prove, that these five are not just as consequential as a more typical list of “society-destroying trends” such as racism, environmental destruction, crime, voter apathy/distrust, and the widening gulf between rich and poor, but that they are causal. Meaning, the racism, environmental destruction, stuff etc are actually symptoms of the societal unravelling, rather than the root causes.
I don’t know if she’s right. But there’s good stuff there to chew on.
Jacobs is a Canadian who lived a significant portion of her adult life in the United States, so her “strong society” comments could be considered aimed at both countries. ↩
I was under the impression that we all agreed that government officials should do everything to eliminate both the reality and the appearance of acting for financial gain before, during, and after serving as a public figure.
Apparently, that was naïve of me, as President-elect Trump has signalled his plan to turn over his business to his children, with details to follow in January 2017.
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins wrote recently that any President is “always conflicted,” and therefore maybe President Elect Trump should be cut some slack with respect to his and his family’s business interests.
As Trump declines to fully separate himself from the family business, “Why not widen our tolerance a bit?” asks Jenkins. “Why not allow that Americans have the right to pick a business owner as President? Let’s see how their choice plays out.”
No, let’s not. People who make public policy should not have a private financial stake in the outcome, or even the appearance of a stake in the outcome. Shifting the Trump businesses to his children does not solve this problem. Even if the Trump family members aren’t seeking to profit from government ties, both critics and favor-seekers will assume that’s the case. That assumption itself undermines basic good government.
I understand Trump supporters view his business success as a kind of protection against financial corruption. After all, he and his children don’t need the money. Personally, I like the idea of a wealthy businessperson in office who therefore should be “immune” to financial temptation.
But that’s not even the point. People will still assume that policy isn’t made with the public’s interest foremost in mind. His critics will assume everyone’s on the take. Allies and favor-seekers will attempt to gain an advantage however they can. Is that great hotel site with water views in Costa Rica worth $50 million? Maybe selling to the Trump children for just $40 million gets an important meeting set up. Revisiting Dodd-Frank banking regulation soon? I’m happy to review those financing terms for you, Mr. Trump, Jr.
What real estate seller anywhere in the world wouldn’t want to cut them a good deal? What bank wouldn’t offer preferential terms?
Mafia
The widespread idea that people get rich off of public service is an insidious termite nest, eating at and hollowing out the foundations of a republic. Successful generals in the late Roman republic generated extraordinary, corrupting wealth through their public offices. Latin American governments and Putin’s Russia offer past and current examples of the corrupt practices and cynicism it engenders about government. This is not a “Let’s see how their choice plays out” situation. We already know how it plays out.
Different moral codes
Jane Jacobs in Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics argued that a completely different set of moral codes defines how people in government should act versus how people in private enterprise should act. The two moral codes are each valid, and each work independently and properly in parallel, when contained within their own system. The blending of the two moral systems, however, leads to criminal outcomes and a breakdown of trust in society.
I read this about 20 years ago and haven’t seen a better explanation since.
The partial list of the proper moral codes of government workers – and here you could picture the police and military, plus political campaigners and government office holders – include the following precepts: Shun Trading, Be Obedient and Disciplined, Adhere to Tradition, Respect Hierarchy, Be Loyal, Take Vengeance, Dispense Largess, Be Exclusive, Show Fortitude, and Treasure Honor. Those moral codes make me picture an impressive old county courthouse, commanding a bit of awe. In a government and public service context, these moral precepts work best.
A partial list of the proper moral actions of business people – and here you could picture a trading firm, a technology startup, or a busy coffee shop – include the following codes: Shun Force, Collaborate Easily with Strangers, Compete, Use Initiative and Enterprise, Be Open to Inventiveness and Novelty, Be Efficient, Be Thrifty, Dissent for the Sake of the Task. I’m picturing an open floorplan marketing company with comic-book colored walls, glass conference rooms, and the smell of caffeine. In a business context, these moral values work best.
The point is not which code of conduct is morally superior, but rather that each code is consistent and appropriate to the job at hand.
Jane Jacobs, activist and brilliant writer
The problem, Jacobs explained, is when you mix the two moral codes. The mixing leads to monstrosities. The Mafia, for example, is a for-profit business enterprise which employs moral codes from the government side, like loyalty, largesse, honor, and vengeance. Government office holders, on the other side, slip into corruption when they adopt values like of profit-seeking, inventiveness, and enterprise. Private armies and mercenaries are a special kind of mixed moral-code monstrosity, as is anytime we see politicians engaging in clear pay-to-play practices. What is moral and good in one context is not moral and good in the other.
Democrats too
By no means does one party have a cleaner history than the other on this. According to biographer Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson built an ill-gotten fortune through pressuring businesses in Texas to advertise with radio stations nominally “owned” by Lady Bird Johnson, while Johnson served in Congress and the Senate. Technically (technically!) they weren’t his, but come on, “entrepreneurial activity” in this context is obviously wrong. Al Gore reportedly left the Vice Presidency in 2000 with a $1.7 million net worth, which then grew to an estimated $200 million net worth by 2012 through media, technology, and solar investments. I have a hard time believing his business partners solely valued him for his business acumen, rather than his government experience. The $240 million in income reportedly earned by the Clintons in their post White House careers also disgust me. They mixed the separate moral codes of business and government in a monstrous way, and they unfortunately set the stage for Trump to blow off calls to fully separate himself from his family’s businesses.
The point should not be “forget it, because both sides do this.” The point is, we should not be ok with the mixing of profit and public service, nor even the appearance of it. People will assume it’s happening with Trump’s family. We can’t do what Jenkins suggests, and normalize it, accept it, and “see how their choice plays out.”
Accepting this kind of moral monstrosity moves the republic much close to the Russian and Latin American model, and that’s not a good thing.
In downtown Las Vegas Nevada recently I visited a small business that is the opposite of everything we normally associate with Sin City. The small business made me think about the role of both visionary billionaires and geography to city revitalization.
The small, serious, bookstore The Writer’s Block opened last year as part of The Downtown Project, entrepreneur Tony Hsieh’s plan for bringing tech startups, small businesses, and a sense of community back to Las Vegas’s downtown.
How does this even exist?
The Writer’s Block is the type of business that is hard to believe even exists in 2015. Not to mention, it exists within shouting distance of the Las Vegas casino monoculture madness. While Amazon.com swallows up entire multiverses of retail shops – slaying Barnes and Noble and every other bricks-and-mortar shop in its path – how does an independent anachronism like The Writer’s Block dare to open?
The free market alone would never support this.
I’m just spitballing here but I suspect not enough Las Vegas residents live close enough to The Fremont Experience to need a quickie Dom Delillo White Noise discussion in person, while picking up their Kierkegaard paperback.
The crazy irony is that a precious, almost twee, bookstore like The Writer’s Block only exists because Hsieh, who sold Zappos for $1.2 Billion to Amazon, makes it exist.
Without Hsieh’s vision and investment, the free market does not, could not, create a bookstore like this. The free market in Las Vegas supports the casino monoculture.
Just like the “free market” in downtown San Antonio supports more tourism and hotels.
So places like The Writer’s Block need a financial thumb on the scale to overcome what the pure “free market” would produce all on its own.
So who provides the thumb on the scale?
It seems to take a big money capitalist like Hsieh to defend the small money capitalist growth of businesses like The Writer’s Block against the city monoculture. It’s all very strange and ironic, but I feel like it’s important for San Antonians to consider.
On the role of the well-heeled visionary in making this happen
In my hometown San Antonio, we count one very successful urban infill development – called The Pearl – which originally depended greatly on the vision and investment of a single investor. It wouldn’t have happened without his purchase of real estate and investment in curating the businesses to fill The Pearl development.
Subsequent entrepreneurial investment and development has followed up this lead. The result is the rebirth of an entire section of the formerly neglected area just north of downtown.
With very few exceptions (only the occasional ‘The Rent Is Too Damned High’ complaint) The Pearl has garnered huge praise and very little criticism. It works. It also appears to have enough momentum to succeed far beyond the scope of the original investor’s investment in The Pearl.
It’s too soon to say the same for Las Vegas’ downtown.
Haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate
Shake It Off
As you might expect for an ambitious project funded by a singular visionary multi-millionaire, not everyone is happy with Tony Hsieh. As my good friend Taylor Swift so rightly sings, “Haters gonna hate (hatehatehatehate.)”
I would sum up this shade as suspicion about a wealthy person pushing their vision on a city, backed by his own funds to enact that vision, and the natural schadenfreude that whole hot mess engenders. Personally, I disagree with the haters, as I don’t see this as nightmare dressed like a daydream.
Yet the haters have a point, because taken as a whole, the Las Vegas Downtown Project does not feel, yet, like a real downtown city. Huge gaps remain.
For this to work, I assume Hsieh’s catalytic investments have to be followed up in the next ten years by many more times the volume of independent investments, by other entrepreneurs, to actually make downtown Las Vegas come alive as a real place, for real people who live there. But you can see the outlines of a real place there, and that feels exciting.
Geography in Downtown San Antonio
Another well-heeled visionary in San Antonio has taken on downtown proper as his canvas for urban renewal, tech startups, and a sense of community. Like the Downtown Project in Las Vegas, the rebirth of downtown San Antonio shows promising signs from a low starting point, but has a very long way to go to feel like a real, live, urban downtown attractive to residents rather than tourists.
One challenge is that the geography of downtown San Antonio is bigger than The Pearl. Also unlike the Pearl – which started out in a pretty empty section of town – any new construction in downtown San Antonio has to compete geographically with the still-thriving tourist monoculture already in place.
Real Estate in downtown San Antonio isn’t actually that cheap. Real estate owners by reputation have a habit of holding on until the next hotel chain offers top dollar, so we get more hotels to replace the emptiness rather than something new.
Hsieh’s Downtown Project in Las Vegas has the advantage of focusing on relatively empty, dilapidated areas a few blocks removed from the casino monoculture of the Fremont Experience, which keeps it from competing directly with the awfully repetitive, but financially viable, casinos.
Folks focused on downtown San Antonio do not have the same luxury of empty space enjoyed by the Downtown Project, but must work with and around the existing tourist infrastructure.
We’re years away from knowing whether these experiments will succeed.
The Fremont Experience is as you would expect – flashing lights, zip-lines, elderly men in Borat-style mankinis – and good for the 36 hours (maximum!) that you plan to be there.
Which is to say, after a short while, it’s impossible to enjoy. If I lived in Las Vegas, I would avoid this place at all costs.
Just a few blocks away from the Fremont Experience, the Tony Hsieh-led Downtown Project has curated, funded, and purchased real estate for a number of locally-oriented businesses. Businesses catering to actual, real live, Las Vegas residents.
Each of these locations independently represents a glorious reprieve, a gulp of oxygen, apart from The Las Vegas Strip or the Downtown Fremont Experience.
I visited the Downtown Project locations with two questions in mind.
First, how does part of a city die?
It’s the tourists and conventioneers, dammit
Second, how do you revitalize a city downtown?
I already know what’s killed the popular parts of Las Vegas, just like I know what’s killed downtown San Antonio (where I live.) For all the money that it brings, it’s also what makes the place unlivable.
It’s the tourists and conventioneers, dammit.
Insect on a Dead Thing
David Foster Wallace most devastatingly explained the problem of tourism in places like The Strip or the Fremont Experience in Las Vegas, or in my hometown of downtown San Antonio, in a footnote to his essay “Consider The Lobster.”
“As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all…To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”
Obviously we’re not going to print DFW’s views about tourists on the buttons of San Antonio Ambassador Amigos anytime soon, but I feel his pain.
Since Las Vegas represents the ultimate monoculture problem, a problem many times bigger than San Antonio’s, I was intrigued to see what Tony Hsieh’s vision and money has wrought, despite the odds.
If you’re curious as I was about what’s there, here’s a quick guide to highlights of the Las Vegas Downtown Project.
The Las Vegas Downtown Project
Eat – After the oversized Las Vegas buffets and the bland celebrity chef chains, the palate cries out for better food. In the morning after a night of poker I wandered off Fremont Street, seemingly past empty or underutilized buildings. It felt like out of nowhere that I found this bustling breakfast/lunch place, and nobody in there gave off a tourist vibe.
You get the sense of a brunch place responding to the vision of a single person or chef.[2] For San Antonians, think Liberty Bar on Alamo Street, or Il Sogno in the Pearl. Real food, prepared fresh. Very un-Vegas.
An awesome kids/adults game in Container Park
Eat was my first Downtown Project destination, and it set the right mood. I didn’t realize it until I finished eating, but I was around the corner from Container Park, the most completely integrated part of the Downtown Project.
The Preying Mantis from Burning Man at the entrance to Container Park
In Container Park, reused shipping containers provide the architectural motif for a self-enclosed ‘shopping mall,’ with unique stores, a kid-friendly tree-fort, a playground with hula hoops and giant toy building blocks, and a performing arts stage.
Over the course of two days in Vegas I visited Container Park three times. At night, a country-music band played while children gamboled in front of the small stage and parents drank beer. The kid-friendly nighttime scene reminded me of a large-scale Friendly Spot in Southtown, if The Friendly Spot had a flame-throwing preying mantis straight from Burning Man out front.
During my first visit to Container Park, I wandered in to Kappa Toys.
Kappa Toys in Container Park
The owner, Lizzy, (with dyed-purple hair, a Cosplay-dressing style, and named for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice heroine) comes from Austin by way of Brooklyn. She seemed to have carefully selected every item in her store. She knows where her items are manufactured and how they’re made. Like many owners who are part of the Downtown Project, she was recruited personally by Hsieh to bring her unique business to Las Vegas.
Lizzy – a compelling evangelist for the Downtown Project – recommended to me THE hangout place for a combination of coffee, cocktails, lawn games, and local party-scene – The Gold Spike.
Fully hooked on checking out the Downtown Project places, I headed that way immediately.
Here’s your first clue about how The Gold Spike differs from the casino monoculture: At the street level, the entrance has a blank, almost speakeasy type entrance.
I mean, I knew I was at the right address, and I had seen a large “Gold Spike” sign above the building from a distance, but the reflective doors to enter suddenly seemed forbidding. Was I allowed to go in? Will I need a special invitation? Is this even the place?
If I was a random tourist off The Strip or if I had wandered a few blocks from the Fremont Experience, nothing at the Street level of The Gold Spike made me welcome to come in.
Which. Is. Brilliant.
Gold Spike life-size chess set
Obviously this is a calculated move to attract local clientele, and break away from the tourist casino monoculture. Presumably that is the way you can get Las Vegans to go there.
In addition to the essential draws of caffeine and alcohol, The Gold Spike offers board games, and semi-curtained private spaces indoors for playing them. Outdoors, in a walled-garden area, there are bean bag toss games like cornhole, plus grown-up frat-style games like lawn-size Jenga, life-size Chess, and soccer-ball pool (which looks just like it sounds.)
At The Gold Spike I also saw my first Bitcoin Teller Machine (I do not approve!) and watched some young gentleman clearly in the drug trade make a withdrawal (I do not approve!) from this BTM.
I frown disapprovingly upon this BTM!
I spent many happy hours here. If I ever return to Las Vegas, I will only ever stay at The Gold Spike hotel.
For my last stop of the Downtown Experience, I walked down Fremont Street to The Writer’s Block, a quiet, serious, small-scale, bookstore. But not so serious that they don’t keep their fat pet bunny in the back room in a cage, and, on the day I visited, host a writer’s workshops for teens.
If you like books (I do!) and enjoy talking to hard-core readers (I do!) The Writer’s Block offers a little slice of heaven.
Downtown Project thus far
All of these Downtown Project businesses, by themselves, are worth visiting, although they are separated by emptyish city blocks and are not well integrated with one another. It’s not yet a vital urban core to the casual observer (me). But they form the outlines of a real place within Las Vegas. For a visitor to The Strip or the Fremont Experience who craves something beyond the flashing lights, I recommend each one highly.
Jane Jacobs begins her Cities And The Wealth Of Nations with a fundamental critique of mainstream economics. Cities – and not nations – she argues, are the fundamental wealth producers, and therefore cities – and not nations – should be the basic unit of analysis for economics and finance.
From this critique flow original ideas on rural development, currency regimes, and the decline of economic empires.
As in her better known classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs radically ignores, or leaves aside, the starting principles of her intellectual predecessors.
Jacobs isn’t held back by the fact that Adam Smith – and almost all subsequent macroeconomists – consider national economies the appropriate way to measure economic growth.
Nearly 30 years after this book was published, I am impressed at just how useful her analysis is for understanding current economic problems. Want to understand why China’s experiment in the 60s didn’t work but what is working today? Want to understand why the European Common Currency may really never work? Wan to understand what types of transfer payments may undermine our economy in the long run (and it’s not the ones you were thinking about).
Jacobs offers much in this book to help us understand these and other big questions.
Cities are the key units of measure, not nations
In economics we typically quote Gross National Product when measuring growth, but that measurement, Jacobs would argue, obscures the preponderance of economic activity which flows not from a nation as a whole but rather from its cities. It makes more sense, therefore to think of the economies of New York and LA as the keys to understanding development.
She points to the historical example of Italian city-states, and the modern examples of Singapore and Hong Kong, to illustrate the mechanism by which cities, not nations, drive trade, innovation, labor markets, and capital formation. The regions surrounding cities become ‘city-regions’ shaped entirely by the urban center. Regions outside of cities, including rural and less populated areas, either conform to the proximate city economy, or get left developmentally backward.
Rural Development
If cities, not nations, drive wealth creation, then our definition and perspective on economic under-development changes. Jacobs argues that less-developed economies typically suffer from a lack of successful cities, or an over-reliance on a single city.
“Show me a poor, underdeveloped country,” Jacobs seems to say, “and I will show you a country with very few or no successful cities.”
Among my do-gooder peers, “rural development” seems like one of those universally admired ideas, like Motherhood, Cross-Fit, and pro-biotic yoghurt.[1] A number of close friends have dedicated significant years of their impressive lives toward this admirable goal.
But viewed through a Jane Jacobs filter, rural development becomes an oxymoron. If innovation, technology adoption, specialization, job creation and capital formation all happen in cities, then attempts to drive rural development work against the natural order of economic life. To the extent rural and agricultural areas become shaped by and therefore satellites to vibrant cities, rural folks may make a living, for some time, albeit generally at a reduced standard of living compared to urban areas. For significant parts of a less developed country to embrace investing in rural development, however, Jacobs would call it madness.[2]
Currency Regimes
Jacobs goes to significant pains to illustrate the different pace of economic growth in urban and rural areas, and to explain how this difference interacts with national currencies.
Currencies, she reminds us, interact with economic growth as part of a natural economic feedback loop, and – when freely tradable -currencies act as a pressure valve for equalizing values through international trade.
Successful cities spur trade, foster technological changes, create jobs, and create capital, all of which benefit from – and indeed require – an expansive monetary policy to accommodate faster growth. Rural areas, by contrast, typically plod along at a slower pace of change, for which an entirely different – and more restrictive monetary policy – may be appropriate.
The problem with many national currencies, she argues, is that different rates of growth within a single nation between the city and the countryside receive inappropriate signals from the currency.
People in rural areas tied to a monetary policy driven by the needs of high-growth cities will suddenly find everything in a city inordinately expensive, as inflation in some areas outpaces it in others. Urban-dwellers, by contrast, will find their economic life stunted if monetary policy makers favor the needs of rural producers, in essence holding back the faster city-driven growth.
Currency Regimes – the city-state advantage
Jacobs points to successfully developed city-states, such as Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong – that thrived with their own currency – as evidence of her view. Far from representing a disadvantage – due to the costs of currency exchange – a unique tradable currency helps these small countries match economic growth to appropriate monetary policy.
Monetary policy closely matches the high-growth trajectory of the city states, unencumbered by rural areas.
Jacobs offers a memorable metaphor for why unique currencies can enhance growth, whereas national currencies frequently hinder growth:
“National currencies, then, are potent feedback but impotent at triggering appropriate corrections. To picture how such a thing can be, imagine a group of people who are all properly equipped with diaphragms and lungs, but who share only one single brainstem breathing center. In this goofy arrangement, the breathing center would receive consolidated feedback on the carbon-dioxide level of the whole group without discriminating among the individuals producing it. Everybody’s diaphragm would thus be triggered to contract at the same time. But suppose some of those people were sleeping, while others were playing tennis. Suppose some were reading about feedback controls, while others were chopping wood. Some would have to halt what they were doing and subside into a lower common denominator of activity. Worse yet, suppose some were swimming and diving, and for some reason, such as the breaking of the surf, had no control over the timing of their submersions. Imagine what would happen to them. In such an arrangement, feedback control would be working perfectly on its own terms but the results would be devastating because of a flaw designed right into the system.
I have had to propose a preposterous situation because systems as structurally flawed as this don’t exist in nature; they wouldn’t last. Nor do they exist in the machines we deliberately design to incorporate mechanical, chemical or electronic feedback controls; machines this badly conceived wouldn’t work. Nations, from this point of view, don’t work either, yet do exist.”
Currency Regimes – anticipating the EU problem
Jacobs published Cities And The Wealth Of Nations in 1985, prior to the launch of the European common currency, but it’s easy to anticipate how she would describe the European Union crisis of the past few years. Observing the culture and economic activity of Germany, shackled together with the culture and economic activity of Greece, we can imagine her horror.
A single monetary regime for the European Union may or may not ultimately survive the ongoing crisis that began in 2008, but the pain imposed by inflexible currencies could not be any clearer.
Countries like Spain and Greece right now – with high structural unemployment – receive disturbing monetary feedback from the restrictive German control on the European Central Bank. Even if smart Greek observers like this one claim that union remains essential, it comes at great cost. He says it’s worth it, but Jane Jacobs would say it’s not.
Seeds of Decline
Jacobs ends Cities And The Wealth of Nations on a downbeat note, arguing that the vast economic differences between urban and rural areas leads inevitably to the creation of vast, inefficient, subsidies from the former to the latter areas, made in the interest of national stability.
These subsidies come in a variety of forms[3], but Jacobs claims they contain within them the seeds of inevitable national economic decline.
Given the current political divides in the US, her commentary on the inefficiency of subsidies seems particularly ironic and notable.
Jacobs laments the inevitable and vast transfers of wealth from cities to rural areas, since this saps economic strength from wealth-producing cities and shifts it to lower-growth, under-developed rural areas.
I’m struck by the idea that the conventional wisdom of current political dialogue in the US assumes, unlike Jacobs, that our urban underclass receives an unfair share of government largesse, sapping the vitality produced by a theoretical US “heartland.”
And yet, our national legislative system – guaranteeing an over-representation of people in under-populated states via the Senate – practically guarantees that subsidies will flow from urban to rural areas, not the other way around, as is commonly supposed.
Predictions are hard, but it doesn’t pay to underestimate Jane Jacobs.
Jacobs claims, somewhat dramatically, that the seeds of inevitable national economic decline stem from these unproductive flows of capital from urban to rural areas.[4]
In the hundred-year view, she argues, the United States began its decline in 1933 with the implementation of large scale rural subsidies, while Japan’s decline will date from their similar decision in 1977.
The last twenty-five years have been kind to her ideas in this book, just as her ideas from The Death and Life of Great American Cities seem as relevant as ever, fifty years on.
We ignore her ideas at our own great peril.
This completes my trilogy of Jane Jacobs book reviews.
[1] Universally un-admired ideas, for example, include chemical weapons, Humvees, and Alex Rodriguez.
[2] Interestingly, although Jacobs does not focus on this example – probably because she published her book in 1985 – China’s last fifty years is almost a perfect illustration of Jacobs’ idea. The catastrophe of China’s 1960s rural development, which set back an entire generation, has been replaced with furious urban development, and the greatest, fastest, boom in human wealth creation the world has ever seen. By a long shot.
[3] In the US, Jacobs points to the 1930s as the beginning of the era of decline in the US. Rural Farms bills in the US, we can infer, would be the kind of thing Jacobs deplores. In Japan, Jacobs points to 1977 as the year that subsidies to less productive rural areas began in earnest.
[4] Along with unproductive and excessive military spending.
Why do some American cities diversify, improve, innovate and grow? While other cities – most recently and egregiously Detroit – stagnate, shrink, and ultimately fail financially?
I’m way outside of my intellectual comfort zone when it comes to commenting on urban planning policy, but reading Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities this summer has armed me with enough thoughts to be dangerous.1
Jacobs published this over fifty years ago, but her observations and arguments seem right on target.
I visited New York City last week – my home for 13 years but now just a vacation spot for me – and I heard Jacobs whispering in my ear about the whys and hows this continues to be a dynamic, innovative, prosperous place. It’s the most exciting place on planet Earth to walk around, stone cold sober, on any given Thursday at 2pm.
A serious homer
If there’s any obvious critique of Jane Jacobs, she’s what the sports fan world calls a serious homer. She loves her Greenwich Village circa 1960 (The Death and Life was first published in 1961), and she returns again and again to the ways in which her diverse neighborhood outshines anywhere else.
She considers and praises certain other successfully rejuvenated neighborhoods within great American cities, such as Boston’s North End, Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and Georgetown, in the District of Columbia.
But virtually all other cities she ignores or – like Los Angeles – actively denigrates. The rest of urban and suburban America she refers to sweepingly as “The Great Blight of Dullness.”
So, we may acknowledge upfront that she’s a teensy bit narrow in her praise and appreciation for large parts of urban America.
And yet, when I think about the Leave It To Beaver America of 1960 to which she’s comparing Greenwich Village, can you blame her? And when I think about the monstrosities of city planning that has led to unbounded suburban sprawl from 1960 to the present day, she’s far more right than wrong.
As to the keys to successfully rejuvenating cities and the common errors of urban planning, as far as I can see, she was absolutely Capital R Right about it all then and even more so today.
The key to a vital city – Diversity
Here Jacobs does not simply advocate “Diversity” in the post-1990s sense – code for a preponderance of non-Northern European ethnic influences – although we can infer from her book that she’s a proponent of that type of diversity as well.
She really means by diversity to advocate against one overly dominant mode of living. She means the absence of monotony on a very broad scale.
Vibrant cities encompass a wide variety of ages – for people and buildings. Living cities encourage a plurality of mixed uses, an ever-changing mix of commercial and residential activity. The best city blocks and neighborhoods, she argues, may hear the shouts of school children in the morning, the swish of retirees rubbing shoulders with tourists at mid-day, and the clink of post-work bar hoppers at night.
Growing and vital cities depend on an ever-changing series of industries and specialists, and do not become overly dependent on a single industry, like Detroit did, or Atlantic City does. Cities dependent on a limited number of employers or a small number of industries tend to fail.
But if diversity is so important, how do you get it?
Four generators of diversity
Jacobs lays down four essential features of successful, revitalizing cities. Each of the four tends to produce urban diversity, although each on its own is insufficient to guaranty it. The interaction between the four factors gives a neighborhood or a city the greatest chance of fostering diversity, which in turn gives a city renewed life.
Mixed Primary Uses – Jacobs has in mind here the healthy effect of city blocks used for more than one purpose, at different times of the day.
A business plaza surrounded solely by office buildings for example, emptied out after 5pm, will tend to stultify in the evening emptiness. A few luncheon places can survive, but little else.
A residential area full of students only, without the salutary effect of salaried workers, families with young children, and retirees, each using the sidewalks and byways at different times of the day, will tend to stagnate.
A park frequented only by parents, nannies, and perambulators between 9am and 11am will, over time, cease to attract any other lively activity during any other hours.
Mixed primary uses, however, of business, residential, and park spaces, with different functions for different groups at different times of the day, encourages healthy city blocks.
I find myself looking anew at city blocks, mentally counting the hours during which different people will share the same space. In New York City’s most interesting neighborhoods, the answer is all day, in different ways, by every different kind of person. 2
Small blocks – I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for nearly a decade and never realized just how long some of the East/West blocks are, compared to the Jacobs ideal.
It turns out, according to Jacobs, these long blocks discourage diversity and probably served to hold back the Upper West Side from revitalization for a long time.
A section of Manhattan like Rockefeller Center with smaller blocks, or the irregular small blocks of Greenwich Village, tends, in contrast, to increase the safety, diversity, and cohesiveness of city blocks. Pedestrians on an errand from point A to point B in a neighborhood of small blocks will vary their route in a way which tends to increase a diversity of uses.
City planners, break up your long blocks!
Aged Buildings – Here Jacobs describes the most counter-intuitive part of city revitalization, and strikes a blow against typical “Tear down the Old, build the New” urban planning.
She argues that revitalized city neighborhoods need – against conventional wisdom -the presence of older buildings to kick-start growth.
The best part about her argument, for this ex-banker, is that she employs a financial argument to make her case, which goes as follows.
New construction, most often facilitated by investment capital and market-based loans, typically leads to high rents and low-risk leases. For investors and their bankers, filling their brand new buildings, only the safest tenants will do.
A chain restaurant, or bank, or insurance company, or any established national franchise, will always be preferred to a mom-and-pop proprietor. The key to repaying borrowed money, or to returning investment capital, is to achieve the highest return on capital up front. Starbucks, Subway, H&R Block, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, let me introduce you to my new construction real estate broker. Unfortunately, new construction areas are dreadfully sterile.
Older buildings, by contrast, may often be owned by the landlord free and clear of a mortgage. The building’s original use may have disappeared, so the building needs to be retrofitted, or used despite its imperfect fit for a new business. Thus the owners, mortgage free, may offer their unusual or slightly rundown space at a lower rent than the new construction building next door.
This lowered rent, or retrofitted space, or building owner not seeking her maximum return on capital, is the key to offering diverse commercial and residential spaces. How does that new gluten-free bakery start-up in the old shoe store storefront, or the app development company in an old fire station, or the artist’s loft in the empty factory come about? They could never afford the new rent in the new office building. But they have a chance to get started in the retrofitted space owned outright by a landlord who is just happy to not own an empty building.
From such humble old buildings, mixed alongside newer development, spring interesting and diverse neighborhoods.
Jacobs does not wish for blocks upon blocks of all dilapidated or empty buildings, but rather a mixture of ages to offer a diverse mixture of uses and opportunities. In the neighborhood open to urban renewal, today’s new construction buildings become, in 30 years, aged buildings with less debt, and the opportunity for a new lease on life.
Concentration – A key to diversity, says Jacobs, is urban density. Suburban sprawl, which seems to promise refreshing air and a modicum of the pastoral ideal, instead tends to lead to homogeneity. Concentrated residential and commercial life, by contrast, encourages specialization through the satisfaction of diverse needs. A city with density offers greater opportunities for supporting any business the residents can dream of. Without the concentration of population and businesses, fewer diverse enterprises can survive.
Residents of the revitalizing downtown where I live now frequently complain about the absence of a full-service grocery store. The reason there’s no grocery store nearby is there’s not enough population density. Only when density happens can urban amenities like a grocery store survive.
The enemy of vital cities
If Jacobs is the declared supporter of four keys to success – mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings, and population concentration – she also declares herself the enemy of a set of popular ideas that still live on in a certain strain of city planning. She names the enemy in various guises as the ‘The Garden City,” “The City Beautiful” movement and “The Radiant City.”
You will know these enemies, she argues, by their aesthetic preference for symmetry, homogeneity, pastoral ideals, green but ultimately useless spaces, idealized compartmentalization of functions, and the separation of residential from commercial activity.
My adopted neighborhood
I think about my downtown neighborhood in San Antonio, TX, which I’m hesitant to say – but also proud to say – captures some of the magic that Jacobs celebrates in Greenwich Village of 1960. We live among an interesting mix of uses by a wide range of ages – from retired historic preservationists to 20-something bartenders – and an eclectic set of art galleries, renowned restaurants, small museums, professional offices, outdoor bars and a linear riverbank park. We enjoy our short blocks, and preponderance of old buildings, with only a smattering of new construction.
Repurposed building in a revitalizing section of San Antonio TX, south of downtown
The only missing element is density, although the number of housing units in the area – due to some newly built apartment buildings – has probably doubled in the past five years and may double again in the next five. There will be grumbling from some in the old guard about this new density when it finally arrives, but I’m confident Jacobs had it right – we will need the population concentration if our neighborhood is to continue to diversify.
As San Antonio more than doubled in population between 1970 (650,000) and 2010 (1.3 million) most of the growth occurred not in the downtown area but rather in wider and wider rings of newer suburban development. As in many American cities during this time, the downtown and near-downtown actually lost density and headcount over the decades, even as the total city population soared.
Growth continues at the outer suburban edges, but has also returned, on a small scale, to the inner core. Not every one of my downtown neighbors will welcome the changes, but I believe Jacobs that we need the influx of population to keep this area diverse.
Seeds of decline, sown in success
Looking ahead, as Jacobs did in 1961 in Greenwich Village and as I do in my own neighborhood, we realize diversity is hard to maintain.
The problem, Jacobs points out, is that success in some particular area leads to more of the same success. Too much success in a narrow number of ways crowds out the diversity that led to success in the first place.
We know that yesterday’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, of course, becomes tomorrow’s unaffordable and exclusive community. As landscaping improves, the range of conversation topics narrows.
A successful bar on a funky street attracts thirsty crowds, which encourage copycat bars all up and down the street, which indelibly alters the original funky feel. I’m sure Bourbon Street is great, just as long as I don’t have to live right next to it.
A successfully historically preserved house museum draws a healthy group of tourists, encouraging historic preservationists to start a movement to lock an entire neighborhood in the sticky amber of an idealized historic era. Fossilization follows.
Whenever the success of today crowds out the possibility of diversity and change, a city neighborhood loses its ability to renew itself.
Seeds of success, sown in decline
But all is not lost. The lessons of Jacobs are optimistic. The old buildings which some associate with decline instead provide the opportunity for diversity and therefore new growth. If real estate prices decline enough in downtowns – hollowed out by the previous generation’s preference for suburban life – the affordable retrofit buildings can welcome a whole experimental group of businesses and activities at a lower price point.
While in New York last week I had lunch with a friend who, for business reasons, had visited 20 cities around the country in the last three months. His meetings were in the tertiary cities of America; not Chicago or San Francisco but rather less well-known areas – areas that Jane Jacobs probably never bothered to visit.
He noted that in almost every single one he saw there were signs of a revitalizing urban core, a growing and experimental re-urbanization of previously abandoned areas.
The farmer’s market on Saturdays next to the Episcopal church, the brick riverside manufacturing building converted to a glass-blowing operation, the social-media marketing company next to couture cupcakes,3 all of these indicated a new generation of folks in these cities, all over the country, independently and purposefully choosing urban living over the suburban ideal of spending one’s weekends tending to a kelly-green patch of lawn.
The revitalization of American cities he described over lunch last week sounded modest in these places, but the fact that it’s happening all over indicates an unstoppable and healthy trend.
I read one book and suddenly I’m an expert on urban planning. You should have seen my confidence with all things medical after I took a 2-week First Responder course. I’m pretty sure I could be a country doctor if it wasn’t for those pesky malpractice laws. ↩
As Shawn Corey Carter, America’s Poet Laureate of 2023, once proclaimed “MDMA got you feeling like a champion; The city never sleeps, better slip you an Ambien.” ↩
I understand, I get it, you hate couture cupcakes. I do too. I mean, I love to eat them, obviously, it’s just the idea of them all that’s just SO 2009. But still, a couture cupcake store indicates a certain kind of BoBo population living nearby. I’m sorry, who are the Bohemian Bourgeoisie, you ask? They’re the people fueling this re-urbanization that Jane Jacobs foresaw in 1961. ↩
I judged this book by the arresting title Dark Age Ahead, and decided that – in my current frame of mind – I had to read it.1
Credentials vs. Education
Why do some American cities diversify, improve, innovate and grow? While other cities – 
