By James Pethokoukis and Ed Glaeser

America’s cities have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling predictions of prolonged urban flight and decline. “Cities are over,” we are being told. But cities are hubs of productivity and opportunity that have endured plagues for thousands of years. Will America’s cities survive the pandemic? And what’s in store for cities in the decades to come? To answer these questions and more, Edward Glaeser joined the Political Economy podcast.

Ed is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University and co-author with David Cutler of Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: At the World’s Fairs in 1939 and 1964, both in New York, there was a ride called the Futurama ride, and it gave visitors a glimpse of what America would look like in the near future. And particularly the one at the 1964 World’s Fair, I think it was the most popular attraction, gave the visitors a ride through what they call a “city of tomorrow.” Let me just briefly read from the narration, because listeners love when I read, of what they said the city of tomorrow would look like:

Plazas of urban living rise over freeways. Vehicles, electronically-paced; travel routes are remarkably safe, swift and efficient. Towering terminals serve sections of the city, make public transportation more convenient, provide ample space for private cars. And from a lower level, covered moving sidewalks radiate to shopping areas that are truly marketplaces of the world. Its traditions and faiths preserved, there is a new beauty and new strengths in the city of tomorrow.

That was 1964. By 1975, Hollywood was making grimy movies
about the decline of New York. Gerald Ford didn’t say it, but there was the
headline in New York: “Drop Dead.” “We’re not going to bail you out of bankruptcy.”
And we’re I’m going, is this: I’m sure you’ve been asked a lot, and I’ve
perhaps even asked, are cities over because of the pandemic? And that’s really
the wrong question. Cities can go very badly and not be “over.” New
York wasn’t over, even though things were very rough in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and
they came back. Detroit may seem over, but there’s still a Detroit, and
hopefully it will also have a revival. I want to ask you: How can cities
survive this pandemic and flourish going forward?

I
think it’s great that you took us back to the great industrial designer, Norman
Bel Geddes, and the Robert Moses-led World’s Fair of 1964, because in some
sense, that was a high point of optimism for the American city. Also, for the
integration of the car into the American city. Now, what then happened in the
1970s was the collision of two things which have an eerie resemblance to today.
One of which was an increase in mobility of people who could take their cars
and go out to the suburbs, thanks to Robert Moses in part, and the cars would
be streamlined, which is thanks in part to the industrial design of Norman Bel
Geddes. And firms, of course, could relocate their factories to lower cost
areas aided by the interstate highway system. And so that mobility made it
easier than ever to exit.

At
the same time, a heightened awareness of urban inequities led city governments
to think that they could treat their firms and their residents as a piggy bank
that they could use to fund their progressive dreams. That combination of
political redistribution — catering not to the mobile and talented, but
catering towards the most disadvantaged, which has so much to like about it — but
when the talented are mobile, they can just run away. And that’s indeed what
they did.

And
so New York was hemorrhaging industrial jobs. I mean, the largest industrial
cluster in the United States in the 1950s was not automobile production in
Detroit. It was garment production in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of
those jobs disappeared overnight. And then on top of that, you had wealthier New
Yorkers who were leaving for the suburbs where they could get public schools
that they liked better, where the crime was lower. And so this combination turned
into a really difficult time for cities where it really seemed as if places
like New York and Boston and Detroit — and Seattle for goodness’ sake — were
headed for the trash heap of history. Let’s not forget: Two jokers put a billboard
on the highway leaving Seattle, asking the last person to leave the city to
please turn out the lights because no one could imagine a Seattle with a
smaller Boeing.

How
does that relate to today? Well, there are two things that are going on right now
that are important in cities, one of which is the increased mobility made
possible by telecommuting, made possible by Zoom. That’s not going to replace
the office, but perhaps for some of the most successful firms, it makes it
easier to imagine moving away. On top of that, you have the threat of illness,
and of course, the fact that some cities seem like they’re on the verge of
being taken over by progressive leadership who think that policing is a thing
of the past and totally unnecessary, who think that we should again be taxing
the rich in order to deal with the problems of the poor. Now, I believe very
strongly that cities can do a better job with their policing. I believe very
strongly that cities can do a better job of making sure that they are places of
opportunity and upward mobility. But if they decide that they’re going to
ignore the ability of the talented to exit, none of that’s going to happen.

I started off by taking us back to the 1960s. In the book,
you go back much further than that. Could you walk us through the history of
what happens to urban areas that are hit by plagues, going back to ancient
Athens?

Sure.
Why not go back to the plague of Athens, which is our first well-documented
urban plague? Thucydides, one of the two fathers of history, was actually there
and described the plague. So the backstory for this, of course, is that Athens
is doing all that you could possibly ask a city to be doing, right? It’s a
place of unbelievable creativity where dense urban streets bring together
people, of unbelievable talent, right? The creators of philosophy, the creators
of drama, the creators of architecture, the creators of sculpture, the people
who gave us democracy themselves, right? There are these chains of
collaborative creativity that can happen in cities, and I can’t think of any
place that does that better than fifth century Athens.

But
Athens’ very success occasions the envy of its more rural neighbors: Sparta.
And so starting in 431BC, the Peloponnesian war begins. Now Pericles, the canny
leader of Athens’ democracy, has a plan. He’s going to summon all the Athenians
behind the city walls, which he’s going to trust to protect the city from the
Spartan soldiers, from the Spartan hoplites. And then he will take advantage of
Athens’ superiority at naval warfare to send out his ships to harass the coast
of the Peloponnesian peninsula, where the Spartans live.

So
this strategy is perfectly sound militarily. The walls hold up well against the
hoplites, but the walls can’t keep out the disease that comes in through the
port of Piraeus, and the disease wreaks absolute havoc, perhaps killing a
quarter of Athens’ population. And this highlights two great weaknesses that
cities have when it comes to disease, which is still true in 2020. Cities are
the nodes on the global lattice of trade and travel. They’re always the ports
of entry for goods, for people, for ideas, and for diseases, right? And so it
was with Athens. Secondly, diseases spread more quickly when people are close
to one another, right?

That
doesn’t necessarily mean that density is itself dangerous, but certainly it’s
really important to be able to isolate yourself from other people to stop the
spread of disease. My own estimate suggests that for every 10 percent reduction
in trips in New York in 2020, there was a 20 percent reduction in COVID cases
during the months of April and May. And so this really derailed Athens’ success
as a city.

Athens didn’t disappear, but it was not this place where you
saw this flowering of creativity and connectivity.

Absolutely.
That was really gone. And the Plague of Justinian, which hit Constantinople a
thousand years later, was if anything even more devastating. That was the first
appearance of the Black Death on European shores. But they were devastating in
part because they hit societies that were already in flux. They hit societies
that were already vulnerable. For the last 650 years, however, mostly our
cities have been pretty darn resilient.

And
one of the epics that we detailed in the book is the 19th century, which really
shows city government at its best. This is the moment, in some sense when governments
stop being killers. You know, if you think about what governments did in the
centuries before 1800, they pretty much fought wars. Sometimes they’re
defensive wars, which you can justify. Certainly sometimes they’re offensive
wars, but they’re pretty much in the death business. Over the course of the
19th century, city governments spent enormous sums on things like sewers and
aqueducts in order to fight pandemic. They built institutions. They created
incentives to induce people to connect to the network, and they turned
government into something that was far more benevolent.

It
wasn’t easy, but it was an enormous epic in the history of government and
change. It really happened in response to disease. And those investments made
cities, by 1920, almost as healthy as rural areas. In fact, over the last 30
years, New York has had a life expectancy that’s two to three years higher than
the rest of the country. And that of course happened because of these
investments. But that very much showed a pragmatic, urban commitment to
actually fighting these demons that come with density — and not a tendency to
fall into fractious disagreement, or pitting one against another.

In the past century a city like New York has developed
better sanitation, but its economy has become more about service. The economy
has become more dependent on face to face interactions. Is that something we
need to be thinking about going forward?

It’s reminds us of just how economically vulnerable we are to this kind of pandemic. You know, if I take you back to the Black Deaths, 1350 in Europe, the human catastrophe was absolutely devastating, losing maybe a third of Europe’s population. But for the survivors, they ended up being richer because in an agricultural economy having a higher ratio of land relative to people means wages go up. That means the amount of food available goes up. And so Europe gets richer over the end of the 14th century because its population has shrunk. And in some sense that extra wealth sets the stage for the urban Renaissance of the 15th century. The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was a short, sharp shock to the economy as Francois Velde of the Chicago Federal Reserve board has illustrated, but it wasn’t all that devastating.

It
didn’t last in part because the demand for the industrial products that were
the heart of this economy wouldn’t disappear just because there was a plague. But,
I mean, no one thinks you’re going to get a disease from an ice box. A hundred
years later, however, those industrial jobs have disappeared and been replaced
by urban service sector jobs — the one fifth of the employed labor force in
2019 that worked in leisure hospitality and retail trade. And what happened was
for millions and millions of American workers (32 million of them, in fact),
the ability to provide service with a smile provided an employment safe haven
when the factory jobs disappeared. And yet that smile turns into a source of
peril rather than pleasure in a time of pandemic. And those jobs can disappear
in a heartbeat, which is exactly what we saw.

And
so we proved to be incredibly vulnerable to the pandemic. Now, of course, we
dealt with this with federal spending on an enormous scale. I mean, I remember
a time when spending a couple of trillion dollars to fight a recession seemed
like it was a pretty big deal. Apparently we’ve crossed that Rubicon, but it
doesn’t really dispel the fundamental weakness of our economy to this type of
pandemic, which I think is one of the reasons why our governments going forward
really need to spend almost whatever it takes to make sure that this doesn’t
happen again, to make sure that this pandemic is a one-time occurrence.

Even without mentioning pandemics, there’s a lot to say
about the problems facing American cities. And we don’t seem to be doing a lot
of problem solving when it comes to housing costs, inequality, and congestion,
do we?

No,
that’s right. And that makes us weaker in response to the pandemic. So I’ve got
two chapters that focus on this. One was focused specifically on the high cost
of housing and the gentrification battles. Now I think there is an easy policy
fix for this, which is just to allow more housing to be built, right? And the
narrative that I give is very much inspired by Mancur Olson, which is in the US
over the past 30, 40, 50 years, we have allowed insiders to become increasingly
empowered in lots of different ways, right? Whether it’s occupational licensing
or excess of business regulations. My favorite example is housing. If you go
back to the 1960s, if you owned a plot of land, you were pretty much allowed to
put up anything reasonable on it.

50
years later, in lots of parts of coastal America pretty much all your neighbors
have veto rights over anything you might want to do with that property. And
we’ve made this change in an incremental way, community by community. And we’ve
imposed a giant web of housing regulations on the coastal parts of the country
that radically restrict our ability to build new housing. I mean, New York stayed
affordable in the 1920s because it built 100,000 units a year, because it was a
city that still catered to outsiders. Now we have cities that cater only to
insiders, which may mean rich homeowners. But this change in thinking, which is
that we’re going to protect people from any harm, also means that if you’re in
a neighborhood, you’re losing out because your rents are going up.

Instead
of saying to yourself, “You know what really needs to happen? We need to build
more housing in Los Angeles as a whole, which will stop my rent from going up,”
you say, “Oh, I just don’t want any strangers coming into my neighborhood.”
Right? So it becomes even more insider oriented. And we really need to remember
that cities are at their best when they are providing opportunity for
outsiders, for people who are coming there without anything. And real
affordability does not mean some small number of special affordable units that
have been allocated to the lucky few, or a few people who have benefited by 30
years of rent control. Real affordability means that anyone can come to the
city and rent an apartment at a reasonable price. So I have one chapter about
the closing of the metropolitan frontier and this triumph of insiders over
outsiders and the battles over gentrification in Los Angeles. But then the
other two things we talk about specifically relate to limited upward mobility
in cities, which we think relate particularly to schools.

Let me jump back to housing for a second. You’ve described
a pretty simple solution, which is: build more. We have an obvious problem and
an econ 101 solution. Does the fact that we’re not building suggest that this
is a problem that just can’t be solved politically? If we can’t make our cities
denser with more housing, maybe we need to have more high productivity cities
across the country. What do you think?

Well,
I think competition among cities has a lot to recommend itself. I think
historically that’s how it’s worked in the US. Historically we’ve started new
cities, and in the Sunbelt they have been oriented around new technologies,
cars in particular, and have catered to outsiders. I think that’s part of what
happens, and there are still parts of America where you can still build. But
even there — even in Texas — the past 10 years have been very heady days for
Texas real estate, which doesn’t mean that you can’t still build on the edges
of Houston, but the areas that are close to the city center, whether or not
it’s in Austin or in Dallas-Fort Worth, those places have become much more
restricted. And when Texas starts to regulate, I start getting scared. So I’m
not willing to just accept that we’re going to go to new places. I think we do
need to fight this.

Maybe Des Moines. Forget Houston: Maybe Des Moines will be
the new tech hub.

You
know, it really does create costs when you have these incredibly productive
parts of America, like Silicon Valley, that have tiny amounts of new population
growth because they’ve decided to regulate out change. They’ve decided to
regulate away new construction and consequently people end up locating in areas
that are much less productive. You know, the work of Peter Ganong and Danny
Shoag shows that prior to 1960, Americans (especially lower income Americans)
typically moved to places with higher wages. That’s stopped over the last 50
years. And that’s a bad thing. We really should continue this thing that people
move to opportunity in America.

And I cut you off before when we were talking about
education and upward mobility.

So
education and crime are the other two that I want to say something about. I
think we need to start with the humility to learn here. I’ve been on the edges
of the education reform movement for the last 20-odd years. Lots of things have
been tried. Lots of money has been spent, and very little has moved in terms of
the dial. There are some charter schools that do amazing things, and that
movement should continue. But I think it’s likely that we’re going to need new
approaches. One of the things that we push in the book is doing more
experimental work with wraparound forms of education that essentially do an end
run around the teacher’s union by providing after school, weekend, summer
programs and vocational training. And the beautiful thing about vocational
training is because you know what you’re trying to teach, you can have real pay
for performance.

So
you can say basically, “If you don’t train a functional plumber, you’re not
getting paid.” And so you can competitively source it, and you have to worry
much less about micromanaging exactly what people are doing. And you’re trying
to create a product that is far less amorphous than trying to train an American
citizen, so we can leave high schools to go about their business. I mean,
ideally they’ll improve as well. But we can put a whole bunch of incremental money
into training people with usable skills for the real job market.

I liked how you described this. Let’s say we’re going to
spend vastly more in school. We’re going to spend 100 billion dollars, but we
really don’t know how to spend that 100 billion dollars in an effective way.
And that’s why you were calling for an Apollo program rather than a Marshall Plan.
A Marshall Plan suggests you know right where to put that money. When they
started the Apollo program, they didn’t know exactly how to get to the Moon. In
fact, in that original speech, Kennedy spoke about all the innovation that was
going to happen before we could get man on the Moon. And that’s why you were
calling your reform an Apollo program, which to me is about trial and error and
experimentation and discovery rather than just from the beginning saying, “Oh,
we know these are the programs we know need more funding.”

Absolutely.
I mean, humility is where you start on this. I think that’s absolutely critical.
Now with cops, I think I am more hopeful in part because, unlike schools, the
functioning of police departments changed massively in our lifetimes. And if we
compare the 1980s, when American cities seemed like they were completely lost to
crime, with most of the last 20 years, it’s really been a huge difference. And
there’s really been a revolution in public safety now that wasn’t free,. It
both required more spending and it also only occurred with the accompaniment of
massive amounts of incarceration, often of relatively minor offenses. And in
some cases, police that have been far too brutal towards their citizens. Now
going forward, I think there’s no way of getting around a dual mandate. So the
view that you’re just going to defund the police and anything good is going to
happen from that seems like absolute madness to me.

We
want our police to do more, not less. We want them to stop crime just as much
tomorrow as we did yesterday, but we also want them to make sure that they
treat all the citizens with a reasonable modicum of respect, with a reasonable
amount of decency. So that requires two things. First of all, you need to give
police chiefs quantitative targets of what you’re asking for in terms of this
respect and decency. Now that means you probably need some form of regular
customer surveys about how people are feeling about their relationship with the
police. And you need to hold police chiefs accountable for delivering a
reasonable amount of customer satisfaction. But if there’s one thing I believe,
there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? And consequently, you’re not
going to get the cops to do more by giving them less. And police reform really
requires a dual mandate and the resources that will empower police chiefs to
get it done.

As we approach the end, I just want to circle back to the
pandemic. How do we make our cities and our society more resilient to the next
pandemic? And it seems the experts seem pretty confident there’s going to be
another one. So how will we be better prepared next time?

So
I think this is something that the city governments can’t do. Everything about
cops or even schools can be done at the state or even the local level. But in
order to pandemic-proof our world, we really need national and international
action. And the idea that my co-author David Cutler, who is a health economist,
and I pushed forward is something that we call “NATO for health,” with the idea
that this really requires global cooperation and global investments in things
like preemptive vaccines, global surveillance. And this means you need an
organization which is far less unwieldy than the WHO. Hence NATO: a small
number of committed countries, they’re actually ready to put dollars on the
table, it’s going to be run by people with scientific expertise, and it’s going
to be willing to make decisions that are not necessarily politically acceptable
to everyone.

And
we think that on top of that we’ve got to be open for something of a grand
bargain around foreign aid. So you’ve got to worry, or you should worry, that
the low level of sanitary infrastructure in many developing world cities is
making possible the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Now, one way to
deal with that is to invest more in pipes, to invest more in sewers, to invest
more in aqueducts. And the West can fund some of that. It wouldn’t be a huge
amount of spending, but we could fund some of that. But there should be a quid
pro quo, which is that if they’re going to be part of this, then they need to
agree to surveillance. They need to make sure that new diseases that are
popping up are being dealt with. And on top of that, they have to agree to more
sanitary rules, separation between humans and animals for example, wild animals
in particular.

And
so we think this giant health quid pro quo can be part of the glue that ties
NATO for health together. And of course, NATO for health, unlike the WHO needs
to be willing to shut borders when there’s a real risk of something spreading. So
much quicker than we currently saw for COVID-19. That’s one example of the kind
of international investment that we need, but, in some sense, the larger
message is: This was a really catastrophic thing for the world, but we had
warning signs. We had warning signs of mini outbreaks that occurred — SARS,
MERS, Ebola — in the past 20 years. Let’s not ignore this warning sign. Let’s
make sure that this is at the top of the national and global priority list
going forward.

Let me end with this: If New York on the 60th anniversary
of that 1964 World’s Fair were to have another one — America doesn’t do World’s
Fairs anymore, but if there was a 2024 World’s Fair —and they had another
Futurama exhibit, and you were asked to advise them on what their new future
exhibit would look like, what their new “city of tomorrow” exhibit look like? What
sort of insights or advice or foresight would you give them about what a city
can look like a generation from now?

In 1964 we were very focused on physical technology, particularly mobility, right? And mobility can get better in cities, but it’s not really what it’s about. What it’s about is a city that’s more open for outsiders. And that means less regulation of entrepreneurship. As I have often said, it’s an outrage that we regulate the entrepreneurship of the rich, which often takes place in cyberspace, so much more lightly than we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor, which takes place on the ground.

So my city of the future would be one in which any new entrepreneur can come and get themselves a permit within a week at a relatively low cost with the help of a centralized permitting office. My city of the future will be one in which people think that cities have educational programs that are the best in the world.

In
fact, far from fleeing from the city to get better schools, you would come to
the city and say, “Boy, look at this amazing computer programming thing that’s
going on here. Look how nimbly the city is able to provide lots of different
things to enable you to adapt to changing circumstances.” And it would be a
city that actually really does a great job of empowering people. It would be a
city that has lots of innovation in housing. So the physical landscape changes.
Although some many buildings may be kept as memories of the past, it changes in
a way that provides affordable space for ordinary people to come in. That might
mean mass-produced, high rise dwellings that are made somewhere else and then
plopped into space quickly. And they could be perfectly attractive.

And
finally, there are going to be cities in which we’ve figured out sensible
policies, whether or not it’s congestion pricing or NATO for health, to do with
the downsides of density. So we figured out how to make it so that people could
move through the cities quickly, not necessarily by building more highways, as
we imagined 1964, but by figuring out smart sets of incentives to get people to
use mobility in a wise way. And we’ve also built in a way that enables people
to use at least my favorite form of urban mobility to walk to work. And I guess
I’ll end on that, which is my favorite cities are archipelagos of different
neighborhoods, places where people have lots of different choices about where
they can live. And for me, at least my favorite neighborhoods are ones in which
walking is really paramount. So I would hope that would be part of our Futurama
looking forward.

My guest today has been Ed Glaeser. He and David Cutler are the authors of Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, available now. Ed, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, James.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Ed Glaeser is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

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