My Amazon Review of Edward Glaeser's and David Cutler's "Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation"

 

Sickness and the City

 

Harvard urban economics professor Edward Glaeser and Harvard health economics professor David Cutler have teamed up to write a book about the post-Covid environment for cities. They rightfully note that isolation and social distancing caused by the pandemic are city destroyers in that they break the bonds of agglomeration economies that are so necessary for cities to succeed. In a word they represent an “existential threat” to a city’s viability.

 

There is quite a bit of history here in that they discuss role of cholera, typhus, bubonic plague, and influenza in determining the development or nondevelopment of cities. Early on city leaders understood the need to quarantine sick individuals and travelers from lands where sickness was evident.

 

To deal with future pandemics the authors call for strengthening the public health infrastructure to deal with stockpiling protective equipment and the delivery of healthcare services. They propose a global public health NATO to supplement the World Health Organization which would intervene in health emergencies. This NATO would also help fund vitally needed sanitation infrastructure in less developed countries. Given NATO’s defeat in Afghanistan, it has become far less of a role model.

 

They view urban America largely through the narrow prism of New York and Los Angeles where the struggle is between the insiders and the outsiders. Homeowner insiders control local zoning which restricts housing supply that makes housing unaffordable for all but the wealthy, and the police and teachers’ unions insiders make reform of policing and education difficult. It is these insiders who prevent cities from achieving their natural function of being the engine for intergenerational mobility.

 

Going forward the competitive environment for the so-called super star cites is going to get tougher. The authors believe they will continue to thrive, but the breakthrough of remote work is going to make it more difficult. Simply put, there is too much office space and the businesses that live off dense concentrations of office buildings will suffer.

 

My main criticism of the book is that it is way to New York and Los Angeles focused. It ignores the very exciting urban environments of Houston, Nashville, Austin, and Denver, for example. Those cities are thriving amidst the pandemic and will do far better once it ends.     

For the full Amazon URL see: Sickness and the City (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Mason B. Williams', "City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York"

Mason Williams just loves government. He can't get over how New York City became a paragon of an Amercian version of social democracy under the able leadership of Fiorello La Guardia financed by his his good buddy FDR sitting in the White House. With up to a third of the city's budget being funded by Washington, the city had the resources to build the projects we are so familiar with 75 years later. In the interest of full disclosure, growing up in the Queens of the 1950s, I benefited from much of what Williams writes about, especially the parks and the playgrounds.

Williams tells a good story, especially about the La Guardia - Roosevelt relationship and the political millieu of 1930s New York, but he leaves out much. In particular, although he is mentioned, the great "power broker" Robert Moses is hardly discussed. I would have loved to learn more about the La Guardia - Moses relationship. Afterall it was Moses and his public authorities that built the infrastucture for today's New York. Think the airports, the bridges, the tunnels and the roads. Also think the parks and the playgrounds. Second he fails to note that the brilliant administrators the city had in the 1930s were a result of Jews and Itallians who were locked out of the private sector found their way into municipal government. That was an important one off. Lastly Williams is so enamoured with government that he is a booster of rent control. Nowhere is a discussion of the downside of what rent control wrought as the housing stock aged.

I have noticed that several reviewers and implicitly Williams see lessons from the 1930s for today's New York. I hate to break it to you but they aren't there. Why? Both Roosevelt and La Guardia rightly opposed public employee unions. Their presence today makes it far more difficult to administer the city than in La Guardia's day. Also Robert Moses exisited in a world without environmental impact reports and their attendant lawsuits. What took a few years to build in the 1930s would take at least a decade today, assuming the project would even be allowed to start.

Nevertheless readers who have nostalgia for the 1930s and who are more politically liberal than myself would really enjoy this book. It plays into all of their fantasies.