Nick Hanauer:

There’s so much inequality in cities and also between cities.

Rick McGahey:

The United States is a metropolitan, urbanized nation. Metro economies are driven by cities at their core, and you’d think that, therefore, we must value cities and assist them and help them, but we don’t.

Nick Hanauer:

You’re making this very common-sense argument, which is, look, all the action is in these places. We should support them. It’s just dumb not to.

David Goldstein:

As a city boy, I resent that.

Announcer:

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in Downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein:

I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, Goldie, today we’re talking to Rick McGahey, who’s an economist and senior fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, about his new book, Unequal Cities, which is an exploration of why there’s so much inequality in cities and also between cities. I’m really looking forward to this conversation because you and I have spent a lot of time exploring the consequences of inequality on nonurban places, on rural places. I know we disagree a little bit about the efficacy of addressing that challenge because you’re more cynical than I am.

David Goldstein:

Right, right. We don’t disagree on the moral imperative. We should improve the lives of rural Americans. There’s been a lot of suffering, depths of despair, et cetera. We just disagree on whether there’s any political payoff. That’s my feeling, that they’ll have more money to spend on Trump campaigns and QAnon conspiracies.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, exactly. I have more hope in humanity. I think that if you treat people fairly, they’ll treat you fairly back. This book and Rick’s research should be of great interest to us because he’s doing some thinking about stuff that I think is very, very important. With that, let’s get right into it.

Rick McGahey:

I’m Rick McGahey. I’m an economist at The New School, and I have a current book called Unequal Cities from Columbia University Press, which is about the paradox of cities being the source of American and economic prosperity, but yet we neglect them badly.

David Goldstein:

That’s an issue near and dear to our hearts…

Nick Hanauer:

It is indeed.

David Goldstein:

…being city folk ourselves.

Nick Hanauer:

And interested in economic progress. Rick, why don’t you lay out your general thesis for our listeners?

Rick McGahey:

The United States is a metropolitan, urbanized nation. In 2020, US metros produced 90% of our GDP. The Los Angeles region’s GDP is greater than that of the State of Pennsylvania. The output of our top 10 metro is greater than the combined output of 38 states. These metro economies are driven by cities at their core, and you’d think that, therefore, we must value cities and assist them and help them, but we don’t.

We’re hostile to cities and urban life. It’s built into our constitution and federalism, and it’s reflected in our bad urban economics, something I know that you all are interested in. The book explores that paradox of cities being the source of prosperity, yet our neglect of them and I think the misunderstanding of mainstream urban economics about cities.

Nick Hanauer:

We very much agree with your thesis and have some pretty specific ideas about why what you’re saying is true. Those ideas are linked to research that people like Geoff West and Louis Benecore have done about the agglomeration effect of cities, effectively the multiplicative effect of increasing density and diversity on innovation. As we’ve explained to our listeners before, socioeconomic outputs go up non-linearly with increases in populations.

A city that’s 10 times as large as another one doesn’t produce 10 times as many patents. It’s something like 20 times as many patents, twice as many per person. And that that gives cities both a massive advantage in terms of creating prosperity, but also it’s an increasing returns effect. The bigger you get, the easier it is, and so on and so forth. Does that view of this correspond to your own view of what’s going on?

Rick McGahey:

Yes. For cities as hubs of innovation and growth, I think that’s right. I mean, you’ve always got agglomerating effects and then dispersing effects, but the agglomerating effects are very powerful. This is a place where some mainstream economists agree, the emphasis on innovation as coming from cities. Ed Glazer believes that, Enrico Moretti, a lot of mainstream economists accept that part of the thesis that innovation comes from cities and complexity and diversity. I think that’s pretty well established view. The question is then why does that same process or why is it parallel to a process that reproduces inequality both within cities and between cities.

David Goldstein:

The spatial inequality between cities and between cities and rural areas, that seems pretty obvious from the agglomeration effects, like what Moretti describes. I’m curious about the inequality within cities, whether that is inherent or whether that’s something that is due to our politics.

Rick McGahey:

I would say more the latter. If you look at the mainstream economic account of cities inequality as kind of a modified Kuznets curve, we can do the economics there, I think, the idea is you’ll get inequality at first, but then the city will grow, labor markets will get better, things will equalize in some magical market way, and then inequality will go down.

Nick Hanauer:

All of that is bullshit.

Rick McGahey:

Kuznets has footnotes. He says, “This is an idea I have. There’s really not a lot of data for it.” It is bullshit, to use that technical term. We don’t see that. That’s one of the fundamental predictions of the mainstream economic urban model that has turned out to be false. I think that is a political issue. In the United States at least, and the book is very based on cases in the US in particular, although I think it’s true more generally, that it’s a lack of power and ability to adjust how those returns are distributed, which is built into our metropolitan form.

Nick Hanauer:

If I could just underscore what you just said, one of the various ways in which traditional economics conceives of these dynamical systems as is as an ergodic system. In fact, these systems aren’t stable in that way there. It’s not like a game of chess. It’s like a game of Monopoly that depends mostly on path dependence, luck and compounding, to say nothing of power and preference. In the absence of incredibly powerful countermeasures, these systems just become more and more unequal. And that’s the result of effectively policy malpractice in our cities, in our country at large. Here we are.

Rick McGahey:

Yeah, no, I think that’s right. If you think about regional economies, this disjunction between one regional economy and multiple governments, this isn’t quite the same argument you’re making, which is rooted I think more in how innovation takes place and then how those returns get captured and not distributed, but even the returns that come from the growth driven by innovation.

If you look at metropolitan areas, in my three case studies, Los Angeles, single regional economy, has five counties, over 190 separate governments who often fight with each other, Detroit, 10 counties, over 300 governments, and then New York, three states, 27 counties, over 750 municipal governments plus special sanitation, transport, water districts. You’ve got this fracturing of the political apparatus you would need to even do redistribution much less getting at the core issue of why the returns are selling unequal in the first place.

David Goldstein:

Though I can tell you in Seattle where it’s much less divided, we still have trouble on the redistribution side. I mean, we have a city government. We own our own utilities, both electric and water and waste. And then there’s the metro King County, which Seattle sits within, which has a lot of the functions. Yes, the individual cities and towns have control, but it’s much more centralized and much less distributed the power structure, and yet we have a lot of the same issues as these other cities, in particular affordable housing, the affordable housing crisis that you see all across the country.

Rick McGahey:

Yeah, that’s right. I think one of the challenges for progressives is to understand that this isn’t just redistribution, as important as redistribution is. New York City’s very characterized by a distributional politics post-production, and there’s not an engagement with how the economy works in the first place. And as a result, you’re always playing catch up. Even if you had a more unified or a better region, as you point out, this isn’t just a question of redistribution, as important as that is.

Nick Hanauer:

I think we are in absolute agreement with you about the problem, both in inequality within cities and inequality between cities. It’s certainly a challenge for people and it’s also a challenge for our politics.

David Goldstein:

Maybe an example might be useful to start with it. It struck me that you compared New York rather unfavorably to Los Angeles from a policy perspective. If you could explain the differences between the two cities and how they’ve approached this.

Rick McGahey:

Being careful to say that while I admire what LA has done, I think there are a lot of lessons they have for the reasons that we’re talking about before, not substantially move the needle on inequality. If you live in the United States, you’re going to be living in an unequal system. But LA has, I think, taken measures for that. New York, my chapter starts at the fiscal crisis, but this is true for lots of metropolitan areas. The tax base moves out to the suburbs. The needs in the city get higher. They don’t have federal aid, and they get into fiscal trouble.

With the fiscal crisis, New York went into long decades worth of relative austerity in the city, all the way up through Michael Bloomberg, who had a vision then of making the city kind of a corporate headquarters, but was against raising the minimum wage, against paid sick leave, against anything the city could arguably have afforded to do to make lower paying jobs work better. Bill de Blasio took on inequality, but again, really around housing and policing issues. There’s not a vision of the economy of New York, I think, except largely as something that produces wealth that you can try and redistribute.

The contrast with LA, I think, the LA chapter starts with the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent urban violence that came when the police officers were acquitted. That came at the same time as a massive structural change in the LA economy with the collapse of the aerospace industry. LA in 1990, LA County had 10% of all aerospace jobs in the United States, plus supplier chains and other things. In a decade after 1986, aerospace sent employment in the LA region, and therefore a lot of the related supply chain. It fell by almost 50%, replaced by low wage, mostly immigrant garment manufacturers.

What’s encouraging, oddly, to me about the LA case is that people there with strong labor unions support, but not just them, communities of color, community organizers, some scholars said, “This is falling apart. We have to do something about it.” Then they organized and continue to organize. The group I talk about is the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), but there are a lot of others in that story as well. What they were able to do was bring together three groups that don’t often work well together. One, unions, but also developers who want to make some money, but also some of them you can work with.

That’s one pool. Second pool is communities of color who do want jobs and prosperity fairly distributed. The third was environmentalists, who often are seen as opposed to growth. What LA has been able to do through constant negotiation and discussion and organizing is have those three groups work together. My core example was in 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, they used a ballot measure to raise the sales tax, a regressive tax, but still income that they could get. That takes a two-thirds vote in California on the ballot because of Proposition 13 restrictions. They got a two-thirds vote in favor of raising taxes to build the LA metro system, and everybody got something from that.

The unions got unionized jobs, but they in turn had the promise to be inclusive of more minority workers, mostly men still, but poor and minority workers who’d been excluded from that. It created development opportunities for real estate around transit hubs. Communities of color got more jobs than some monies directed to them. Also better bus service, they fought for that. It wouldn’t just be metro. The environmentalists, some movement, very hard in LA, to roll back auto and carbon producing transportation.

That’s encouraging to me that those three groups, none of whom could have got what they wanted working separately, that they found a way to work together against a lot of forces that pull them in opposite directions. I don’t regrettably see that in New York.

Nick Hanauer:

What role does racism play in anti-urban bias?

Rick McGahey:

Gigantic. I think it’s hard to look at any policy in the United States and not think about its racial impacts, but race is certainly a key to it. It’s always been true to some extent with an anti-urban bias, but especially with both the great migration of Blacks out of the south with the change of southern agriculture, and then really in post World War II with suburbanization and white flight from cities, where we threw a lot of federal money and resources into building these independent suburbs around the core city, which still was driving the regional economy.

It has a lot of white flight. People moved out of the city. And then you get a lot of conflict between these suburbs and the central city, which increasingly takes on a racial dimension. In the housing markets, we know the suburbs control zoning. Zoning is often exclusionary. At that time, it was actually explicitly racist. I don’t have to go into those details. And then that reproduces itself over time.

Nick Hanauer:

In your research on this problem, what surprised you? What did you learn that you didn’t expect to learn?

Rick McGahey:

I always knew that federal policy was tilted against cities because of our love of agrarianism. I used Thomas Jefferson’s quote about great cities as a pestilence upon mankind. Jefferson said the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia had some virtue because it would kill off some of the urban population. I think what surprised me…

David Goldstein:

As a Philadelphian, I take of offense at that.

Rick McGahey:

That’s something to think about, an agrarian slave holding guy. They were scared of cities. The French Revolution and urban rise scared a lot. There are quotes in Washington and stuff in this too. Jefferson is the most articulate. But I think what surprised me more is how hostile state governments are to cities historically. And that I think is something that I bring out that isn’t written about as much. States control their cities. There was a big battle on this in the 19th century that was stimulated oddly by railroad financing. Cities were issuing, and states, tons of bonds to try and attract railroads, and it was beginning to destabilize the financial markets.

There’s this series of court fights. Are cities allowed to be independent actors, or do states control them? It ultimately ends up being decided in favor of the states, that the cities, with very rare exceptions, are totally creatures of state government and that they can’t really do anything without state approval. That surprised me how deep that is and how shaping that is that encourages the suburbs. We see a lot of preemption of state governments, of cities trying to do progressive things. The State of Missouri has two big cities, Kansas City and St. Louis.

Both those cities past urban minimum wage increases and the Missouri state legislature overturned both of the minimum wage increases and then passed a law saying no city in Missouri can raise its minimum wage without state approval. It’s this power of states in our federal system, which has also a strong racial component, particularly in the Jim Crow era, that surprised me, I think.

Nick Hanauer:

Here’s another issue I’d love to get your thoughts on. This agglomeration effect, this increasing returns effect, that you find comes as a consequence of diversity and density and complexity that produces effectively all the innovation from which most of our prosperity comes from is as close to a law of nature as it gets in terms of economics. I mean, it just is really hard to fight against that, although Zoom has made an impact on that a bit. But in truth, it is very difficult to fight with that force. As a consequence, what happened in our country and in most countries is that effectively all of the prosperity is produced in superstar cities.

And that has created a circumstance in which if you don’t live in one of those cities, if you live in the country, about all that’s available to you is opening campgrounds or growing food. That’s it. And as a consequence, the people who don’t live in these superstar cities are effectively frozen out from the majority of the prosperity which is created in the country. This effect applies in Germany as well as it does in the United States. But the thing about Germany is that you’re never more than 30 minutes by car from a big city. In the United States, you may be seven hours in car from a big city.

And that dynamic creates a terrible political problem in our system, because it creates understandable resentment from the people who live in effectively 90% of the surface area of the country. There’s not that many people there, but they do elect senators.

Rick McGahey:

I mean, that’s a big problem.

Nick Hanauer:

This is the problem in the United States of America. If you simply stipulate that we’re not likely to change that arrangement, then it is very much incumbent upon us to find ways to make sure that the people who do not live in the 11% of the counties that created 90% of the jobs over the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve got to find a way to make those people feel included. We have written extensively about how to do economic development in non-urban places as a way to solve this problem.

You are writing about effectively the opposite problem, which is you’re making this very common sense argument, which is like, look, all the action is in these places. We should support them. It’s just dumb not to, right? How do we resolve the tension between those two things? Is that a fair question?

Rick McGahey:

Yeah, no, it’s a good question, and I like your point. Although my book really is anchored in the United States system, we do see these effects elsewhere. You mentioned Germany. You look at the United Kingdom and England versus other cities, they’ve had decades of various policies that don’t move that needle at all. That’s a great point. It is a real challenge to me. Well, setting aside the disproportionality of power in those states and also how that power is maldistributed, most people who live in rural areas don’t benefit from, as you know quite well, from the fact they’ve got senators.

They’re treated badly and they’re stirred up on other issues, but they’re not given good development. I mean, most people, at the least the lower 48 states, live in a commuting shed. There’s a great crazy map that I refer to, two geographers did, where they mapped about 98% of the commuting trips in the United States and you see this heat map of cities emerge from it. There might be something with the second level cities that can be brought into a network via the technology. I was more of a skeptic that working from home would stick as much as it seems to be doing.

Nick Hanauer:

Give it time.

Rick McGahey:

No, no. Well, most relocations are still intra-metropolitan. They’re not inter-metropolitan. They’re within the same metropolitan area for a whole bunch of other reasons. What you do in these rural areas, they’ve got to be brought… As you said described very well, that this is where the action is, this is where the economy’s generating. How do we bring them into that network in some way that still keeps them in place? That does mean they have to be brought into that production network in some way, or we just have to be willing to subsidize.

Nick Hanauer:

Which is a legitimate alternative, right?

Rick McGahey:

Right, absolutely.

Nick Hanauer:

We should just be honest.

David Goldstein:

We’re doing it to a certain extent.

Rick McGahey:

No, we’re massively doing it.

David Goldstein:

I mean, the Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis, makes this point about the failure of the UROs, that it’s a monetary union without political union, and he compares it to the United States, which is, I don’t know how… A great political union we are right now, but the effect of our system is that, as he says, we recycle surpluses from the surplus, largely blue cities, through the rest of the country and into the deficit areas. And that’s actually, he argues, is necessary for these surplus cities and states to remain surplus cities and states because it maintains a market for them.

Nick Hanauer:

To a certain extent.

Rick McGahey:

Oh, that’s interesting. I just have only looked at the fiscal stuff of that, which you know quite well that the blue states subsidized the red states by and large.

David Goldstein:

And the blue city subsidized the red counties. I mean, you see that in Washington, there’s like five or six surplus counties. King County, where Seattle is, we get about 65 cents back from the state for every $1 that we send. The majority of the state budget comes from here. And then there are counties in Eastern Washington where they get 3, 4, 5, $6 back for every $1 they send. I want to tell you, when you go out there and you talk to voters, my God, could they resent the way Seattle is sucking them dry. They believe it’s the opposite.

Rick McGahey:

Similar stories in most states, I think, that the driver metros also contribute to tax revenue and then are seen as oppressing the areas. It’s not just messaging, but we’ve done poorly on explaining that to people and finding some way to link them in. I mean, arguably poor rural people and poor urban people have lots in common, lots of the same kind of exploitation, but they’ve been successfully set against each other. In West Virginia, people there firmly believed that it was Obama’s regulations that knocked out the coal industry.

But if you look at coal industry employment, it was dropping like a stone for 15 to 20 years before that. We have lots of examples of that sort of thing. We have not done well in finding ways to link the economic interests of particularly I think lower and middle income people in cities and most rural residents, because most rural residents don’t benefit from this domination by the politics. They’re easily dominated by a few powerful interests, often rooted in industries that aren’t taking care of those folks.

David Goldstein:

Where does all that subsidy go then?

Rick McGahey:

Well, some goes to keep the households going, because otherwise they don’t have much labor income. A lot of it probably gets sucked up through landlord work, some profit. I mean, we have lots and lots of subsidies. We have agriculture subsidies, and those all go to big firms. The subsidies that flow to individual households really tend to be in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and social security for older folks, and they consume that, and then it feeds back into the sales of these consumer groups, I think.

It doesn’t produce a lot in terms of land values, at least until… There has been some effect, I think, of the working from home people who move out further from their core city and carry that income with them, and that’s pushed up land prices, again, making people angry in those areas. But I think most of the subsidy flow really is in the form of transfer payments. I don’t have that nailed down, but I think that is where a lot of it is.

Nick Hanauer:

One of our questions is always the benevolent dictator question, which is, if you were in charge, what would you do? What you recommend?

Rick McGahey:

Probably like Nick too, I’d be like an academia, I’d be a left-wing run DeSantis and have a lot better economics produced in the economy. But I think about city-states. I’d take this heat map that these geographers did and think… It turns out there were about 55 of these clusters. I thought, well, what if that were the political map of the United States and not our states? What would the Senate look like? It wouldn’t be nirvana, but I think city and urban centered political jurisdictions would help a lot because this is a collective action problem. Cities can’t solve these things on their own. They need to align with other cities.

I think that’s the story in California, which has a lot of problems, but its urban areas have now got some leverage over the state government. If you had a country of city-states based on these commuting zone maps, I think you’d have a potentially somewhat different politics. It still doesn’t go to the next core problem about how the economy produces in this way, but I think we’d have a better chance at making networks and distribution and linkages with a better politics.

Nick Hanauer:

Interesting. If I could just play that back to you, you think that if we, I’m groping for words here, got rid of state governments and settled on cities. That would be interesting.

Rick McGahey:

Basically metro driven. Texas is my favorite case. You know the Texas Triangle, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. It produces, what, 70, 80% of Texas’s GDP, 60 some percent of the population, but its political leverage in the state is minuscule. You still have conservatives and people voting that way, but an urban centered governance I think would be better.

David Goldstein:

Interesting. Given the fact that our constitution is broken and unfixable and we can’t get rid of the states, if we ever went to a constitutional convention under our current rules, it would end up even worse.

Rick McGahey:

Oh, absolutely.

David Goldstein:

What can cities do to address the inequality problem within them?

Rick McGahey:

I think you build from where you are, at least cities with reasonably strong markets. Detroit is a real challenge for me to think about what it does, but Seattle was a pioneer in raising the city minimum wage. If you have a state government that’s not going to preempt you, there are a number of things you can do on the labor side. I think in economic development, you can stop doing dumb things. You can stop wasting money on firms specific subsidies. All economists, even the most conservative, think that economic development subsidies that go to individual companies are just a total waste of money and cut your tax base.

They’re the same with geographically narrowly targeted things like Enterprise Zones and Opportunity Zones. There are things you could stop doing. Tim Bartik at Upjohn has got good evidence on things that you can do. They don’t solve with this problem, but they’re better at job creation. Look for industries with multipliers, business and workforce development services. I think some stuff on the labor market regulation you can do, if the weight will bear it.

On the economic development, a lot more use of community benefit agreements, which are legally binding agreements that tie economic development activity, even subsidies, because I don’t think politically you can actually get rid of those either, but you should restrain them, but that there’s clear negotiated outcomes that are legally enforceable and monitored. That was a big tool in the Los Angeles experience. And then on housing, we mentioned before, it’s another whole discussion we don’t have time for, but I think we need a lot more supply. I think one of the places progressives are making a mistake is to be anti-development.

You can have development with also strong affordability provisions and even maybe some kind of rent regulation, but this anti-supply, anti-growth thing doesn’t work for us. Climate adaptations, there’s job creating stuff out of that. There are things cities can do and then try and build out from that, find ways to find some common interests with the suburbs, which is hard, but hopefully doable, especially if your city has got some prosperity in it.

Nick Hanauer:

One final question, why do you do this work?

Rick McGahey:

Well, that’s a great question. I went to the disco to study economics and thought I’d be a history of economic thought major. I went to study with Bob Hawbrunger and ended up just caring a lot about these policies. I mean, I think the economy is the central thing and it’s so misunderstood. That’s both within the field, and that all of us, and you all do a great job with this, have an obligation to get other ideas out there that can be of use to people who really are at the front lines that are trying to make change.

Nick Hanauer:

Great. Well, Rick, it was such a pleasure to have you on, and best of luck in your endeavors.

Rick McGahey:

Great. Thanks and keep up your good work. I was really excited when The Press said that I was going to be on your program. I’m a big fan.

Nick Hanauer:

Thank you so much.

David Goldstein:

Thank you. My god, Nick, would I love the city-state model.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, I was thinking you would love that.

David Goldstein:

Did you see the map? He has a map of this in the book where you see how the country would be divided up into 50 some city-states of relatively equal populations. And then, of course, there are these void areas. Think of it as like unincorporated King County. There are these void areas in big swaths of Wyoming and Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, where there’s nothing. I mean, there’s some people, but there’s cow and some sheep and coal and oil and gas, whatever. I don’t know quite what you do with those places in the middle.

Nick Hanauer:

This is the new version of that famous New Yorker thing where there’s New York and the Hudson and then The Hinterlands.

David Goldstein:

Which of course is what the country was when it was founded and we created this federal system where every state gets two senators and so forth. It hasn’t turned out well, because one of the points that Rick makes in the book is that when the United States was founded, we were a very rural country compared to Europe. It was about six, 7% urban compared to closer to 30% in Europe, even at the end of the 18th century. Now, of course, the whole world is urbanized. We have this constitution that was created for a middle class agrarian, largely rural America that has been superposed on a country that is very, very different.

It disempowers the cities. As a city boy, I resent that. This is part of our disagreement on rural policy. I look at a city like Seattle. I see a city that could do so much more if we were unencumbered by the state and unencumbered by the federal government, and even acknowledging the need to recycle our surpluses throughout the rest of the economy, both for economic, if not for moral reasons. If we were free to serve the needs of our own people, we could do a lot better job if we could invest in education and in housing and in the type of high labor standards, high standards that would improve everybody’s lives.

We could be a model here for the rest of the country. I think that Seattle, my adopted city almost more than anywhere else in the country and the world, has an opportunity to do things right, to take advantage of the affluence that we have to do things right. The politics makes it very difficult when we’re in a state where we, at the moment, cannot have an income tax, for example.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, hopefully that’s going to change. Anyway, I mean, I wonder if there are less ambitious implications for rearranging how we govern regions. I have to sit with it and think about it. But as he quite rightly points out, most of these things are collective action problems. And if you dice the polity up in the wrong way, yet it gets very hard to solve those collection action problems. If you rearrange the chairs a little bit, maybe you could do a little bit better. I don’t know. I got to think about it.

David Goldstein:

The fact that red county, red State voters believe the opposite, that they think they’re subsidizing us instead of we are subsidizing them. I think that’s a big step. I’m okay subsidizing them. I’m okay building their infrastructure. I want people to be able to have dignified, comfortable lives growing the food we eat. I think that’s important. But I think there needs to be some awareness and maybe the solution in the long run is more we continue these subsidies, but it’s like paying tribute. We’ll let you manage your cities, run your cities the way you want, as long as you keep sending us money.

As long as they understand that’s what we’re doing, we’re paying tribute to be able to build the type of lives we want. If we build enough housing, they are free to move here to take advantage of the prosperity. I think that in the end is the big problem, Nick, is that we can’t fulfill the progressive vision that we have in cities like Seattle if we don’t build enough housing for people to move here and share in it with us. Then it’s just hypocritical. We become a walled city, not a city-state.

Nick Hanauer:

We’ll put a link in the show notes to Rick’s new book, Unequal Cities. Buy it at a local independent bookstore. Fascinating stuff.

Announcer:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at @civicaction and @nickhanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at @pitchforkeconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.