it is it is fantastic to be here at this
amazing event in this absolutely amazing
place
you know John just mentioned this fact
that you know this week after having a
coast to coast sea to shining she beauty
contest Amazon decided where where was
the second headquarters New York New
York and Washington DC isn’t it amazing
you know that this flat world death of
distance phenomenon that could locate
anywhere chooses such traditional old
style cities in some sense that’s the
larger story of the 21st century and the
graph that you’re seeing shows you in
some sense a portrait of America what
I’ve done here is I’ve taken two three
thousand odd counties in the US and I’ve
ordered them on the basis of their
density levels because at their hearts
cities are the absence of physical space
between people
cities are density proximity closeness
what the bottom line shows is the
relationship between density each one of
those dots is 1/10 of America’s counties
and it shows the relationship between
density and earnings and productivity
the densest tenth of America’s counties
have earnings that are 50 percent higher
than the least dense half of America’s
counties right this is something
economists call agglomeration economies
the fact that when you compare those
countries that are more than 50 percent
urbanized to those countries that are
less than 50 percent urbanized the more
urbanized countries have on average
incomes that are five times higher and
infant mortality levels that are less
than one third now the top line shows
the fact that might be more surprising
to you which is the relationship between
population growth between 2000 and 2010
and initial population density levels
what you can see is the places that
started being the most crowded only got
more crowded so whereas Americans at the
start of the 19th century were leaving
their dense enclaves on the eastern
seaboard to populate the empty spaces
between the oceans at the start of the
21st century instead of spreading out
we’re clustering in of course there
so some downsides for urban resurgence
for example it’s no longer nearly as
cheap to live here as it used to be this
shows the relationship between price
growth and distance from the center of
the city averaged across all of America
between 1996 and 2015 and what you’re
seeing is a big price tilt so whereas in
the 80s and the 90s suburban living was
hot homes in the suburbs were expensive
over the past 20 years what’s happened
is it’s become increasingly expensive to
find a place to live that you can
actually afford in a in the heart of a
thriving city on one level this shows
people wanting to live in cities not
just as places of production but also
places of consumption places where it’s
fun and exciting to be on another level
the lack of affordable housing is a
major urban crisis that we face in the
years ahead one way of seeing America’s
shift is through this lens which is
joblessness among primates males prime
aged is an official designation between
being 25 years old and 54 years old and
as I increasingly head towards that
upper limit I want to note how offensive
I find that but that being said over the
past 50 years there’s been extraordinary
revolution in the US and maybe it may be
America’s most unsolved troubling
unsolved social problem which is when I
was born less than 5% of prime aged
males were jobless for most of the past
decade more than 15 percent of America’s
prime aged males have been jobless and
they’re not jobless everywhere equally
there is a ridge in America’s eastern
heartland that starts in Mississippi and
Louisiana runs up through Appalachian
ends up in the cities of the northern
Rust Belt in which often joblessness
rates are over one in four and it’s easy
at least to imagine what less advantaged
Bostonians or New Yorkers are going to
do in the future it’s easy to see there
being part of a vast entrepreneurial
service economy but what are we going to
do in West Virginia right and that in
some sense paints the problem of the non
urban world is in a world in which it’s
not about manufacturing anymore it’s
about connections between people what is
the non urban America going to do now
this relatively rosy view of cities was
quite different from the New York City
of my youth where it seemed as
if not just President Ford but history
itself was telling New York to drop dead
in which Boston seemed like it was a
dinosaur right headed for the trash heap
of history in which in 1971 two jokers
had put up a billboard on the highway
leaving Seattle to ask the last person
to leave the city to please turn out the
lights because just as no one could
imagine a Detroit with a smaller General
Motors no one could imagine a Seattle
with a smaller Boeing this is before
Amazon before Costco before Microsoft
and Starbucks was just starting to roast
some coffee beans right but Seattle did
come back and so did Milan and so did
Boston and so did New York and they
didn’t come back because their former
manufacturing had come back they came
back because they did something new they
came back because they specialized in
the great thing of the 21st century
because just as globalization and
technological change wiped out the older
industrial cities these forces also
radically increase the returns to being
smart and we are social species that
becomes smart by being around other
smart people right this is what cities
do they enable those collaborative
chains of creativity that have been
powering humanity’s greatest hits since
Socrates and Plato bickered on an
Athenian street corner what
globalization and new technologies have
also done is they’ve made the world more
complex and the more complicated ideas
are the easier they are to get lost in
translation anyone who’s ever taught
knows the hard part about teaching is
not knowing your subject material it’s
knowing whether or not anything you’re
saying is getting through to your
audience at all right we have evolved
over millions of years to have these
cues for communicating comprehension or
confusion they’re lost when we’re not in
the same room with one another that’s
why face-to-face contact still matters
that’s why cities matter more than ever
right as the great English economist
wrote that in dense clusters the
mysteries of trade become no mystery but
are as it were in the air right this is
what you should be experiencing around
you all the time and I want to just echo
John Warner’s comments from the
introduction right you’re surrounded by
amazing people learn from them learn
from them constantly because if you’re
not learning from the smart people that
surround you in in this world you’re
screwing up now the fact that skills
at the background of urban reinvention
explains why some cities have done much
better than others right particularly
educated cities have done much better
more than 1/2 of Seattle’s adults have
college degrees about one eighth of
Detroit’s adults have college degrees
both cities are doing exactly as well as
you would expect their skill mix to show
them to predict what you’re looking at
here is the relationship between the
share of adults with college degrees and
earnings across America this is not just
the fact that your skills make you more
productive it’s that your skills make
your neighbors more productive by giving
them new ideas by giving them new
employment opportunities by giving them
new opportunities to sell to you right
the typical factors holding your years
of schooling constant as the share of
adults in your metropolitan area with a
college degree goes up by 10 percent
your earnings go up by 10 percent as
well this is something economists call
human capital externalities and it
reminds us that education is the bedrock
on which individual national and city
success rests now of course the skills
that matter for a city are not just the
skills that are learned in the classroom
they’re the things that are learned on
the street right at the breakfast table
in the business and I can think of no
skill no talent that is more important
for the long-run success of the city and
for making sure that cities are places
of opportunity than the talent and
inclination to be an entrepreneur you
know 60 years ago The Economist Benjamin
chinnis was neat was comparing New York
and Pittsburgh and noting that New York
appeared to be more resilient than
Pittsburgh did even then he argued that
this was a legacy of New York’s
industrial history of the garment trade
which was in the 1950s America’s largest
industrial cluster larger than cars
being produced in Detroit but unlike
those cars being produced in Detroit the
garment industry was a mother of
entrepreneurship because anyone with a
good idea and a couple of sewing
machines could get started and that
entrepreneurial human capital proved to
be fungible those entrepreneurs went on
to start movie studios to build
skyscrapers to start banks and they were
there to help reinvent New York when the
garment industry faltered
by contrast Pittsburgh had u.s. steel
u.s. steel train company men who are
great at solving short-run logistics
problems but were terrible reinventing
themselves when the steel industry
faltered it is amazing given how
mediocre our measures of
entrepreneurship are that you such a
good job of predicting urban resilience
one measure we use is the
‘sheriff employment startups the other
is say average establishment size and
this just shows you huge differences in
employment growth between those places
that have little firms those are the
ones and those places that have big big
firms you should know Suffolk County is
a big firm place and indeed part of the
push to create an innovation district in
Boston was a recognition that in fact we
desperately needed more small firms not
large headquarters
now of course cities also come back
because technologies have actually
played to urban advantages this is an
image of Robin chase the co-founder of
zip cars if car builds itself are as do
many other new comp new economy
phenomenon as being part of a sharing
economy but cities have always been
about sharing what is an urban
restaurant other than a shared dining
room a shared kitchen what is an urban
park other than a shared backyard the
difference is the technology enables us
to share more stuff right imagine
Zipcar in New York or Boston right in
1977 imagine you went to pick up your
car at the cut in the combat zone or in
Times Square in some Sunday morning and
like you found a dead body in the trunk
right this you know made sharing harder
and of course you know the idea of uber
right the idea uber in the 1970s this is
what we thought taxi cab drivers were
the idea you were gonna put something in
your phone and just say oh great
take me there is laughable and yet now
because of the technology we are safer
sharing things and that only makes
cities stronger this shows you actually
the map of Yelp coverage across cities
in the US and it reminds us that these
technologies tend to favor some places
much more than others that Yelp is very
much an urban phenomenon that enables us
to figure out what’s going on in these
amazing cities that surround us and Yelp
also gives us a picture about how cities
change what are the things and I’ll come
back to this later but one of the things
that’s really striking is is that we
often can’t measure our cities the way
that we would like to um census data
tells us about what’s going on with
gentrification six years after
gentrification actually happens we’re
still using 2013 data and five years ago
in like a politician’s lifetime that’s
like a million years in like a
politician’s life right luckily things
like Yelp for Google Street view images
are face to face and this shows that how
you can use Yelp images to actually tell
you whether or not in areas gentrifying
this just shows you that the
relationship between upgrading increases
in human capital
area and the number of new grocery stars
or the number of vegetarian restaurants
or other things which are like you know
items in the tea leaves for showing you
that an areas gentrifying we can now
even use the the images to actually
measure neighborhood change this work is
done with Caesar Hidalgo and Nikhil Naik
where they started with these these
images from Google Street View we’ve
figured out how to use computer vision
techniques to in some sense quantify
those images to measure how upscale or
low scale those are and we can then
measure whether or not areas are getting
nicer or less nice not just in terms of
incomes but in terms of the physical
landscape and what do you see just as
education and density are predictors of
success at the metropolitan area
education and density are predictors of
success at the neighborhood level as
well those are the areas that are
upgrading the physical landscape has
seen from Google Street View as seen
from the sort of measurement of the
images if you wanted to look across all
these different images different things
predict where gentrification is larger
or more vegetarian restaurants is big
laundromats appear to be really big now
that seems like a puzzle to me why would
laundromats predict gentrification I
think the point is it’s not a yuppie
thing to use a laundromat but to then
think after you’ve used lingerie I
thought I really want to write about my
experience online that’s a really yuppie
thing to actually want to do now of
course we face challenges and the
success of cities like Boston New York
has not been uniform right one thing we
need to make sure is that education
becomes more uniformly available and we
need to have things like vocational
training programs that wrap around
traditional schooling we need to make
sure that we regulate the
entrepreneurship of poor people far more
fairly right it’s practically criminal
in this world that we make it so easy to
be a rich world entrepreneur to start
your internet phenomenon and a Harvard
college dorm and we don’t even notice
until you have a billion users and gosh
maybe you’ve hacked an election whereas
if you wanted to like starch your coffee
shop in Dorchester I assure you you have
at least 15 permits to get through
before you’re gonna start serving any
beverage with mouths that’s outrageous
right and we really do need to make sure
we’re empowering the entrepreneurship
that cities naturally create we also
need to make sure we make enough space
for people to live in right the reason
why it’s too expensive to live in these
cities is we haven’t built enough New
York used to build a hundred thousand
units a year in the 1920s and the city
stayed affordable despite huge demand
for urban space there are two dangers
that every city fall
falls into one of which is monumental
ISM building for the sake of building
this was post-war urban renewal this is
what we see in the image is a stan up
there but the other dangerous NIMBYism
not in my backyard ISM fighting hard to
sort of prevent any change from going on
cities need to protect their historic
heritage but there’s also no repealing
the laws of supply and demand what this
graph shows you is the on the x-axis on
the horizontal axis and the amount of
new building along the y-axis is the
difference between price in the physical
cost of building what you see is the
places that build a lot like Houston or
Austin or Dallas or Atlanta aren’t
expensive and the places that are
expensive don’t build a lot right
there’s no repealing the laws of supply
and demand and the only way we can make
sure that rich and poor people don’t
feel like they’re in conflict with one
other in the cities is if we provide
enough space for both of them to coexist
peacefully to both of them to find their
dreams and every time we say new to any
new project we’re saying new no to
anytime you’re saying no to any new
project we’re saying no to families who
want to find a brighter future in in
cities I want to end with just one final
story which is it’s often acted it’s
often thought that cities are the enemy
the environment and the opposite is true
right the cities are actually in many
cases the greenest thing we’ve got going
and I like to make this point with the
story about a young Harvard college
graduate who in a beautiful screen
spring day in 1844 went for a walk
outside of Concord and he did a little
fishing and the fishing was good because
there hadn’t been much rain lately but
when he came to cook the fish into a
chowder we cooked chowder’s in Boston
right that’s what that’s what we do
right President Kennedy would tell you
that the that we’d inflict the flames to
the nearby dry grass and a fire started
and it spread and it spread by the time
it was a raging inferno that it
destroyed a whole natural ecosystem
hundreds and hundreds of acres of prime
woodland was just decimated by this
young man today of course he is somewhat
oddly revered as the secular saint of
American environmentalism right
while the Concord Freeman in his own day
called him a flibbertigibbet which i
think was pretty bad for 1844 today he
is of course Henry David Thoreau whose
book Walden preaches the gospel of what
a wonderful thing it is to live
surrounded by Nature
now surely it may have been wonderful
for Thoreau to live surrounded by Nature
but it doesn’t seem that was so
wonderful for nature to be surrounded by
Thoreau as indeed he you know his story
reminds us that we are a destructive
species and often
best way to take care of nature is to is
to stay away from it and cities enable
us to actually be good neighbors to
nature not to be bad neighbors and
together with Matthew Khan a USC
environmental economist we’ve measured
carbon emissions in different parts of
the country and what you see should not
surprise any of you the places that look
green are brown the places that look
Brown are green and I discovered this
personally when I started acquiring
small children about 12 years ago
that’s how economists talk we we move
from what are those green areas not that
far away from from here to one of those
brown areas not that far away from
Walden Pond and of course you know I’m
an economist I believe in choice I
believe that everyone should be free to
choose where they want to live but let’s
not hamper our cities let’s not hamper
places where there’s economic Hope where
there’s an ability to come up with new
opportunities for anyone where there’s a
possibility to envision the future that
includes all Americans and this doesn’t
mean that we need to you know
artificially boost our cities but let’s
not artificially restrict their growth
with excessive land use restrictions
let’s not make it difficult for
entrepreneurs to start businesses and
these in these areas who want to let’s
not have policies that artificially
encourage Americans to drive long
distance by subsidizing highways let’s
not have federal housing policies that
act as if the only possible way to
achieve the American dream is behind a
white picket fence in the suburb let’s
remember that America is you know
there’s no reason why cities can’t be an
absolutely vital and critical part of an
America that’s open to everyone thank
you [Applause]
amazing event in this absolutely amazing
place
you know John just mentioned this fact
that you know this week after having a
coast to coast sea to shining she beauty
contest Amazon decided where where was
the second headquarters New York New
York and Washington DC isn’t it amazing
you know that this flat world death of
distance phenomenon that could locate
anywhere chooses such traditional old
style cities in some sense that’s the
larger story of the 21st century and the
graph that you’re seeing shows you in
some sense a portrait of America what
I’ve done here is I’ve taken two three
thousand odd counties in the US and I’ve
ordered them on the basis of their
density levels because at their hearts
cities are the absence of physical space
between people
cities are density proximity closeness
what the bottom line shows is the
relationship between density each one of
those dots is 1/10 of America’s counties
and it shows the relationship between
density and earnings and productivity
the densest tenth of America’s counties
have earnings that are 50 percent higher
than the least dense half of America’s
counties right this is something
economists call agglomeration economies
the fact that when you compare those
countries that are more than 50 percent
urbanized to those countries that are
less than 50 percent urbanized the more
urbanized countries have on average
incomes that are five times higher and
infant mortality levels that are less
than one third now the top line shows
the fact that might be more surprising
to you which is the relationship between
population growth between 2000 and 2010
and initial population density levels
what you can see is the places that
started being the most crowded only got
more crowded so whereas Americans at the
start of the 19th century were leaving
their dense enclaves on the eastern
seaboard to populate the empty spaces
between the oceans at the start of the
21st century instead of spreading out
we’re clustering in of course there
so some downsides for urban resurgence
for example it’s no longer nearly as
cheap to live here as it used to be this
shows the relationship between price
growth and distance from the center of
the city averaged across all of America
between 1996 and 2015 and what you’re
seeing is a big price tilt so whereas in
the 80s and the 90s suburban living was
hot homes in the suburbs were expensive
over the past 20 years what’s happened
is it’s become increasingly expensive to
find a place to live that you can
actually afford in a in the heart of a
thriving city on one level this shows
people wanting to live in cities not
just as places of production but also
places of consumption places where it’s
fun and exciting to be on another level
the lack of affordable housing is a
major urban crisis that we face in the
years ahead one way of seeing America’s
shift is through this lens which is
joblessness among primates males prime
aged is an official designation between
being 25 years old and 54 years old and
as I increasingly head towards that
upper limit I want to note how offensive
I find that but that being said over the
past 50 years there’s been extraordinary
revolution in the US and maybe it may be
America’s most unsolved troubling
unsolved social problem which is when I
was born less than 5% of prime aged
males were jobless for most of the past
decade more than 15 percent of America’s
prime aged males have been jobless and
they’re not jobless everywhere equally
there is a ridge in America’s eastern
heartland that starts in Mississippi and
Louisiana runs up through Appalachian
ends up in the cities of the northern
Rust Belt in which often joblessness
rates are over one in four and it’s easy
at least to imagine what less advantaged
Bostonians or New Yorkers are going to
do in the future it’s easy to see there
being part of a vast entrepreneurial
service economy but what are we going to
do in West Virginia right and that in
some sense paints the problem of the non
urban world is in a world in which it’s
not about manufacturing anymore it’s
about connections between people what is
the non urban America going to do now
this relatively rosy view of cities was
quite different from the New York City
of my youth where it seemed as
if not just President Ford but history
itself was telling New York to drop dead
in which Boston seemed like it was a
dinosaur right headed for the trash heap
of history in which in 1971 two jokers
had put up a billboard on the highway
leaving Seattle to ask the last person
to leave the city to please turn out the
lights because just as no one could
imagine a Detroit with a smaller General
Motors no one could imagine a Seattle
with a smaller Boeing this is before
Amazon before Costco before Microsoft
and Starbucks was just starting to roast
some coffee beans right but Seattle did
come back and so did Milan and so did
Boston and so did New York and they
didn’t come back because their former
manufacturing had come back they came
back because they did something new they
came back because they specialized in
the great thing of the 21st century
because just as globalization and
technological change wiped out the older
industrial cities these forces also
radically increase the returns to being
smart and we are social species that
becomes smart by being around other
smart people right this is what cities
do they enable those collaborative
chains of creativity that have been
powering humanity’s greatest hits since
Socrates and Plato bickered on an
Athenian street corner what
globalization and new technologies have
also done is they’ve made the world more
complex and the more complicated ideas
are the easier they are to get lost in
translation anyone who’s ever taught
knows the hard part about teaching is
not knowing your subject material it’s
knowing whether or not anything you’re
saying is getting through to your
audience at all right we have evolved
over millions of years to have these
cues for communicating comprehension or
confusion they’re lost when we’re not in
the same room with one another that’s
why face-to-face contact still matters
that’s why cities matter more than ever
right as the great English economist
wrote that in dense clusters the
mysteries of trade become no mystery but
are as it were in the air right this is
what you should be experiencing around
you all the time and I want to just echo
John Warner’s comments from the
introduction right you’re surrounded by
amazing people learn from them learn
from them constantly because if you’re
not learning from the smart people that
surround you in in this world you’re
screwing up now the fact that skills
at the background of urban reinvention
explains why some cities have done much
better than others right particularly
educated cities have done much better
more than 1/2 of Seattle’s adults have
college degrees about one eighth of
Detroit’s adults have college degrees
both cities are doing exactly as well as
you would expect their skill mix to show
them to predict what you’re looking at
here is the relationship between the
share of adults with college degrees and
earnings across America this is not just
the fact that your skills make you more
productive it’s that your skills make
your neighbors more productive by giving
them new ideas by giving them new
employment opportunities by giving them
new opportunities to sell to you right
the typical factors holding your years
of schooling constant as the share of
adults in your metropolitan area with a
college degree goes up by 10 percent
your earnings go up by 10 percent as
well this is something economists call
human capital externalities and it
reminds us that education is the bedrock
on which individual national and city
success rests now of course the skills
that matter for a city are not just the
skills that are learned in the classroom
they’re the things that are learned on
the street right at the breakfast table
in the business and I can think of no
skill no talent that is more important
for the long-run success of the city and
for making sure that cities are places
of opportunity than the talent and
inclination to be an entrepreneur you
know 60 years ago The Economist Benjamin
chinnis was neat was comparing New York
and Pittsburgh and noting that New York
appeared to be more resilient than
Pittsburgh did even then he argued that
this was a legacy of New York’s
industrial history of the garment trade
which was in the 1950s America’s largest
industrial cluster larger than cars
being produced in Detroit but unlike
those cars being produced in Detroit the
garment industry was a mother of
entrepreneurship because anyone with a
good idea and a couple of sewing
machines could get started and that
entrepreneurial human capital proved to
be fungible those entrepreneurs went on
to start movie studios to build
skyscrapers to start banks and they were
there to help reinvent New York when the
garment industry faltered
by contrast Pittsburgh had u.s. steel
u.s. steel train company men who are
great at solving short-run logistics
problems but were terrible reinventing
themselves when the steel industry
faltered it is amazing given how
mediocre our measures of
entrepreneurship are that you such a
good job of predicting urban resilience
one measure we use is the
‘sheriff employment startups the other
is say average establishment size and
this just shows you huge differences in
employment growth between those places
that have little firms those are the
ones and those places that have big big
firms you should know Suffolk County is
a big firm place and indeed part of the
push to create an innovation district in
Boston was a recognition that in fact we
desperately needed more small firms not
large headquarters
now of course cities also come back
because technologies have actually
played to urban advantages this is an
image of Robin chase the co-founder of
zip cars if car builds itself are as do
many other new comp new economy
phenomenon as being part of a sharing
economy but cities have always been
about sharing what is an urban
restaurant other than a shared dining
room a shared kitchen what is an urban
park other than a shared backyard the
difference is the technology enables us
to share more stuff right imagine
Zipcar in New York or Boston right in
1977 imagine you went to pick up your
car at the cut in the combat zone or in
Times Square in some Sunday morning and
like you found a dead body in the trunk
right this you know made sharing harder
and of course you know the idea of uber
right the idea uber in the 1970s this is
what we thought taxi cab drivers were
the idea you were gonna put something in
your phone and just say oh great
take me there is laughable and yet now
because of the technology we are safer
sharing things and that only makes
cities stronger this shows you actually
the map of Yelp coverage across cities
in the US and it reminds us that these
technologies tend to favor some places
much more than others that Yelp is very
much an urban phenomenon that enables us
to figure out what’s going on in these
amazing cities that surround us and Yelp
also gives us a picture about how cities
change what are the things and I’ll come
back to this later but one of the things
that’s really striking is is that we
often can’t measure our cities the way
that we would like to um census data
tells us about what’s going on with
gentrification six years after
gentrification actually happens we’re
still using 2013 data and five years ago
in like a politician’s lifetime that’s
like a million years in like a
politician’s life right luckily things
like Yelp for Google Street view images
are face to face and this shows that how
you can use Yelp images to actually tell
you whether or not in areas gentrifying
this just shows you that the
relationship between upgrading increases
in human capital
area and the number of new grocery stars
or the number of vegetarian restaurants
or other things which are like you know
items in the tea leaves for showing you
that an areas gentrifying we can now
even use the the images to actually
measure neighborhood change this work is
done with Caesar Hidalgo and Nikhil Naik
where they started with these these
images from Google Street View we’ve
figured out how to use computer vision
techniques to in some sense quantify
those images to measure how upscale or
low scale those are and we can then
measure whether or not areas are getting
nicer or less nice not just in terms of
incomes but in terms of the physical
landscape and what do you see just as
education and density are predictors of
success at the metropolitan area
education and density are predictors of
success at the neighborhood level as
well those are the areas that are
upgrading the physical landscape has
seen from Google Street View as seen
from the sort of measurement of the
images if you wanted to look across all
these different images different things
predict where gentrification is larger
or more vegetarian restaurants is big
laundromats appear to be really big now
that seems like a puzzle to me why would
laundromats predict gentrification I
think the point is it’s not a yuppie
thing to use a laundromat but to then
think after you’ve used lingerie I
thought I really want to write about my
experience online that’s a really yuppie
thing to actually want to do now of
course we face challenges and the
success of cities like Boston New York
has not been uniform right one thing we
need to make sure is that education
becomes more uniformly available and we
need to have things like vocational
training programs that wrap around
traditional schooling we need to make
sure that we regulate the
entrepreneurship of poor people far more
fairly right it’s practically criminal
in this world that we make it so easy to
be a rich world entrepreneur to start
your internet phenomenon and a Harvard
college dorm and we don’t even notice
until you have a billion users and gosh
maybe you’ve hacked an election whereas
if you wanted to like starch your coffee
shop in Dorchester I assure you you have
at least 15 permits to get through
before you’re gonna start serving any
beverage with mouths that’s outrageous
right and we really do need to make sure
we’re empowering the entrepreneurship
that cities naturally create we also
need to make sure we make enough space
for people to live in right the reason
why it’s too expensive to live in these
cities is we haven’t built enough New
York used to build a hundred thousand
units a year in the 1920s and the city
stayed affordable despite huge demand
for urban space there are two dangers
that every city fall
falls into one of which is monumental
ISM building for the sake of building
this was post-war urban renewal this is
what we see in the image is a stan up
there but the other dangerous NIMBYism
not in my backyard ISM fighting hard to
sort of prevent any change from going on
cities need to protect their historic
heritage but there’s also no repealing
the laws of supply and demand what this
graph shows you is the on the x-axis on
the horizontal axis and the amount of
new building along the y-axis is the
difference between price in the physical
cost of building what you see is the
places that build a lot like Houston or
Austin or Dallas or Atlanta aren’t
expensive and the places that are
expensive don’t build a lot right
there’s no repealing the laws of supply
and demand and the only way we can make
sure that rich and poor people don’t
feel like they’re in conflict with one
other in the cities is if we provide
enough space for both of them to coexist
peacefully to both of them to find their
dreams and every time we say new to any
new project we’re saying new no to
anytime you’re saying no to any new
project we’re saying no to families who
want to find a brighter future in in
cities I want to end with just one final
story which is it’s often acted it’s
often thought that cities are the enemy
the environment and the opposite is true
right the cities are actually in many
cases the greenest thing we’ve got going
and I like to make this point with the
story about a young Harvard college
graduate who in a beautiful screen
spring day in 1844 went for a walk
outside of Concord and he did a little
fishing and the fishing was good because
there hadn’t been much rain lately but
when he came to cook the fish into a
chowder we cooked chowder’s in Boston
right that’s what that’s what we do
right President Kennedy would tell you
that the that we’d inflict the flames to
the nearby dry grass and a fire started
and it spread and it spread by the time
it was a raging inferno that it
destroyed a whole natural ecosystem
hundreds and hundreds of acres of prime
woodland was just decimated by this
young man today of course he is somewhat
oddly revered as the secular saint of
American environmentalism right
while the Concord Freeman in his own day
called him a flibbertigibbet which i
think was pretty bad for 1844 today he
is of course Henry David Thoreau whose
book Walden preaches the gospel of what
a wonderful thing it is to live
surrounded by Nature
now surely it may have been wonderful
for Thoreau to live surrounded by Nature
but it doesn’t seem that was so
wonderful for nature to be surrounded by
Thoreau as indeed he you know his story
reminds us that we are a destructive
species and often
best way to take care of nature is to is
to stay away from it and cities enable
us to actually be good neighbors to
nature not to be bad neighbors and
together with Matthew Khan a USC
environmental economist we’ve measured
carbon emissions in different parts of
the country and what you see should not
surprise any of you the places that look
green are brown the places that look
Brown are green and I discovered this
personally when I started acquiring
small children about 12 years ago
that’s how economists talk we we move
from what are those green areas not that
far away from from here to one of those
brown areas not that far away from
Walden Pond and of course you know I’m
an economist I believe in choice I
believe that everyone should be free to
choose where they want to live but let’s
not hamper our cities let’s not hamper
places where there’s economic Hope where
there’s an ability to come up with new
opportunities for anyone where there’s a
possibility to envision the future that
includes all Americans and this doesn’t
mean that we need to you know
artificially boost our cities but let’s
not artificially restrict their growth
with excessive land use restrictions
let’s not make it difficult for
entrepreneurs to start businesses and
these in these areas who want to let’s
not have policies that artificially
encourage Americans to drive long
distance by subsidizing highways let’s
not have federal housing policies that
act as if the only possible way to
achieve the American dream is behind a
white picket fence in the suburb let’s
remember that America is you know
there’s no reason why cities can’t be an
absolutely vital and critical part of an
America that’s open to everyone thank
you [Applause]
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