I’m All Lost In, #71: Defending congestion pricing against Trump; reading Edith Wharton; funding affordable housing.
I’m All Lost In…
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#71
First things first. Two follow-ups.
.Last week, after learning that legendary UCLA city planning professor Donald Shoup had died just a week earlier on February 6, I posited that he was my generation’s Jane Jacobs and linked his LA Times obituary.
The NYT followed the LA Times’ lead this week, publishing their own comprehensive Shoup obituary. They called him “an intellectual hero to urbanists.”
Last month, in an item here called “Worried about Elena,” I flagged the disturbing news accounts about pro tennis coach Stefano Vukov and the ongoing WTA investigation into his treatment of Kazakhstani women’s tennis star, and 2022 Wimbledon champion, Elena Rybakina.
The WTA has since concluded their investigation, which reportedly documents Vukov’s abusive behavior toward Rybakina; they’ve now banned Vukov from coaching for a year. The investigation and a three-page summary remain confidential, but tennis reporters Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare at the Athletic were able to get the summary. This week they wrote an important article about the troubling situation.
Onto this week’s obsessions.
1) Congestion Pricing
2025 has begun. Democrats have woken up. They’re finally fighting Trump.
It’s perfect that congestion pricing—the policy of charging people who drive their cars into the city—is the battle Democrats have chosen to strike back. Not only is congestion pricing my favorite urbanist cause, but the standoff (Trump declared that he’s shutting down NYC’s local program) exposes Trump’s ersatz populism by pitting it against an honest government effort to support the masses.
Oh, I know, mass transit is “elitist!” … Please. Be serious, people.
Filling your car with gas, and paying for parking, not to mention covering auto insurance and buying a car in the first place, is a much more expensive way of life than taking the bus and the subway.
The facts are: 1) Lower income people ($25,000 to $49,000 a year) make up the biggest segment by class of transit ridership (24%); 2) while the poorest, those earning less than $13,000 a year, only 13% of the U.S. population, represent a disproportionate 21% of transit riders; and 3) people of color, who make up about 40% of the U.S. population, make up 60% of transit ridership. Of that group, African Americans, who make up about 12% of the population, have far and away the most outsized transit ridership numbers at 24%; the median Black income is about $53,000, 32% lower than whites.
As a result of Trump’s authoritarian arrogance, the good guys are finally fed up and punching back. In rapid-response battle mode that I haven’t seen Democrats take up since candidate Bill Clinton’s Campaign-‘92 war room, the Governor of New York and the head of NYC’s MTA immediately countered Trump’s regal pronouncement that congestion pricing was dead with a patriotic middle finger and a lawsuit.
I was po’d at Hochul last July when she briefly bailed on NYC’s congestion pricing program, but she’s going to the mat (and court) to fight for it now.
The congestion pricing nerds’ fearless rejoinders have taken on a fierce tone of urban populism.
Congestion pricing detractors are usually the ones who corner the common-folk angle on the issue. Charging people to drive in from District 12 to The Capitol, they harangue, is elitist. But Trump, who’s openly playing Donald Sutherland’s Coriolanus Snow himself in this fight and literally IDing himself as the king, has given progressives a clear opening. Gov. Hochul, transit riders, and MTA head Janno Lieber (with the quote of the week: “This is not the first time a president has said ‘drop dead’ to New York”) have struck back as the actual commoners. Arguing for local control and citing stats about how the new policy is already helping burdened commuters by reducing traffic migraines, easing car commute times, increasing foot traffic for local small business, and spiking transit ridership (while simultaneously providing funding for basic transit system repairs), New York City, of all places, is now poised to humiliate Trump’s shallow populist posturing: About 85% of the people who come into Manhattan’s central business district—where congestion project would be implemented—take public transit to begin with.
According to the live traffic data, congestion pricing has improved travel times.*
NYC’s pro-city populism is the ultimate affront to MAGA, and as Trump tries to shut it down, I’d say the emperor has no clothes because at its core the anti-congestion pricing rhetoric from MAGA is comically flawed: If the city is such a god-forsaken place, why is it so important to suburbanites to be able to flock downtown? Given that the ability to live a suburban lifestyle is only feasible—and sustainable—thanks to the offset that dense housing and commercial centers provide, it seems more than fair to ask suburbanites to help cover the costs of running a popular destination city.
*Excellent footnote: the go-to data tracker for Manhattan’s new congestion pricing program—which compares travel times before and after congestion pricing went into effect on January 5th, is a tool built by a college econ student (and his brother) for a class project. Talk about Transit Oriented Teens.
The tracker uses real-time traffic data from Google Maps to calculate traffic times for chosen routes and days. The data is presented as a line graph of traffic times before and after congestion pricing went into effect on January 5th. Compare one line to the other to see whether traffic times have increased or decreased.
Unsurprisingly, depending on the route and time of day, the new tolling scheme seems to be working — perhaps even better than expected.
2) Edith Wharton
This is the fourth time the brilliant early 20th Century American writer Edith Wharton has taken a spot on my weekly obsessions list.
That’s because not only did I read another one of her slow-burn short stories this week that illuminates the shadows of the human condition, but I’m now six chapters into her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth.
The short story, “Autre Temps” (“Other Times, Other Customs,” as it was called when it was first published in Century magazine in 1911) is from “The New York Stories of Edith Wharton,” a special edition New York Review of Books collection I’ve been dipping into and reading since last August, i.e. savoring.
This story is about Mrs. Lidcote, a middle-aged woman who has been ostracized by her aristocratic set for her disreputable personal history—divorcing and remarrying (enough of a transgression in its own right) and then divorcing again. She’s surprised to learn that her daughter, following in the same transgressive divorcee footsteps, is, however, not being ousted from society. With a generational change in values, young Leila is actually blossoming in her second marriage as part of the nouveau riche set; this knavish tax bracket is Wharton’s area of expertise, and she uses her immersive tale to explore the cutting vagaries of human psychology.
The revelatory pain point for Mrs. Lidcote is that while she feels some sense of liberation in the new feminism, she’s not convinced it’s hers to have. Even more crushing, with no idea what this freedom could even bring her, Mrs. Lidcote chooses to retreat back into her comfortable isolation.
Early in the story, Wharton foreshadows: “New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must read or perish.”
Wharton’s second novel, published in 1905, and written when she was 43-years-old, is about 29-year-old jeune fille à marier, Lily Bart.
The novel The House of Mirth, recommended as a fix for my growing Wharton habit by bookstore genius Valium Tom—he says is the best novel ever written (and also a City Canon classic)—begins like a movie. The opening montage follows protagonist Lily Bart, a 29-year-old jeune fille à marier (so, not so jeune, anymore) around midtown Manhattan. We come upon her in the first paragraph in Grand Central Station through the eyes of the unencumbered, cool, and sardonic bachelor, Lawrence Selden, an acquaintance from her social circle. Lily, in “her desultory air,” has evidently missed her 3:30 train north. With time to kill until the late train, she decides to join him for tea, and they head through the throng, exit the station and walk west a block along 42nd St. to Madison Ave. and up to Selden’s top floor brick and limestone bachelor flat. After a flirtatious round of tea and conversation, Lily heads back down to the street where she runs into the plump, nosy, and unctuous Mr. Rosedale. After an unsettling conversation, she’s off in a hansom back to Grand Central to catch the late afternoon north-to-the-country train. Once she’s settled in, she meets two others from her crowd aboard the train, pretty and “serpentine” Bertha Dorset and sheltered and wealthy, Percy Gryce. The train is taking them all to Lily’s friend Judy Trenor’s country estate for a weekend getaway of late night bridge games, walks in the setting summer splendor, and ultimately, for ruminating about things that point to larger things: cheque-book calculations over a shrinking balance and age lines on her face. Even the candlelight blur (Lily hastily turns out the wall light in her room as a preventative measure) can’t obscure them.
“The collapse of a house party,” Wharton writes early in Ch. 7, in perhaps some more foreshadowing. (It’s also a great name for down-tempo set of dub.)
3) Funded Inclusionary Zoning, FIZ
Yes, I’m psyched that the Washington state legislature has a bill in play that would subsidize affordable housing along transit routes. And I wrote a PubliCola column this week urging Seattle to follow suit.
But what I’m really obsessed with here—and what I’m actually trying to expose in Seattle—is the prevalence of reactionary lefties; I credit Christopher Hitchens with coining the perfect derisive description for this set: “Reactionary Utopianists.”
This left leaning faction clings to “authenticity” and “back in the day” gatekeeping in the same way MAGA clings to “real” American gatekeeping. It’s a kind of purity pathology that shows up in “neighborhood character” housing battles in what I call the “Keep Austin Weird” crowd; which seems more like “Keep Austin White,” if you ask me. (Scroll scroll scroll down here for my write up on Max Holleran’s Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing, which outs this kind of NIMBYism in progressive clothing).
These are the Bernie Bros. who idle in a macho Romanticism where knee jerk anti-developer politics often rush to shut down opportunities for new housing as if developers were guilty of manufacturing and selling meth as opposed to apartments.
Likewise, in their own knee jerk anti-development politics, Social Justice lefties can exhibit a similar provincial and reactionary idealism; Lydia Polgreen wrote an insightful column about leftist nativism last year, which I quoted at length at the time when I took a shot at writing about this tricky topic.
So, in my otherwise straightforward column praising the legislation (the bill, which aims to increase density along transit lines, subsidizes mandates on developers to build affordable housing by helping it pencil out with a tax exemption), I also took the time to give a bit of background context so I could outline this disconcerting dimension of the left.
First, a little history. Known as transit-oriented development, or TOD, housing around transit stops is a longtime priority for pro-density urbanists. In Washington State, I trace its origin back to the 2009 (!) legislative session, when the housing advocates at Futurewise first took up the cause.
At that time, their nascent pro-housing movement unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of anti-development opposition from both the homeowner right (who are touchy about “neighborhood character”) and the social justice left (who often equate new housing with developer “giveaways” and displacement).
Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. First of all, gentrification has escalated exponentially under Seattle’s low-density status quo, a trend that calls b.s. on the NIMBY thesis that denser zoning is the cause of gentrification. If anything, the last 10 years under single-family protectionist policies show that it’s the opposite: Sequestering multifamily housing into a minuscule slice of the city’s residential areas causes gentrification.
And, more importantly: The pro-density “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement of the past decade has re-framed the density debate in a way that has attracted social-justice lefties. YIMBYs now talk about municipal land use regulations in the context of historic redlining and current exclusionary zoning laws that wall off huge portions of cities like Seattle from lower-income families and renters. As a result, lefties no longer stand in lockstep with wealthier “neighborhood character” obstructionists like they used to.