President Obama on Jane Jacobs and Cities

Color me unimpressed. A few things:

1. It’s very possible for suburbs to thrive while a city decays. Philadelphia is a good example of this – the city has been going to shit for the past couple of decades (though it’s recently experiencing somewhat of a revival), while the suburbs and exurbs keep growing.
2. All this talk of “infrastructure” is a bit disturbing. Charitably, we can say that means mass transit instead of roads. But it’s hard not to forget that “infrastructure” à la Robert Moses is what killed cities in the first place.
3. Joe Biden on crime? Give me a fucking break. Crime is short for gun crime, and gun crime is a result of the war on drugs. Joe Biden was one of the biggest drug warriors in Congress.

It’s going to take more than an investment in public schools (the worst of which, by the way, are already extremely well-funded) and more cops on the street to bring America’s cities back.

I agree with all of your points. The video gave me a glimmer of hope that he may take Jane Jacobs seriously and back away from top-down economic planning.

The dangerous political trick with the infrastructure talk is that the word “infrastructure” can be tweaked to mean whatever people want it to mean for themselves. Roads, but for whom? Transit, but where? And is the cost justified?

People seem to project their hopes and dreams through Obama’s words, but will they be disappointed when the infrastructure they envision turns out to be different than the real outcome? We’ll see…

I too have little hope for Biden – mostly distrust. My only hope is that he is marginalized.

I don’t have access to the audio of this video at the moment, so I can’t comment upon what then candidate Obama said in Toledo last summer about Jane Jacobs. And I don’t have any of Jacobs’ books / interviews handy at the moment to cite my sources. But it seems to me that the very ideas of 1) an economic stimulus package and 2) an emphasis on “infrastructure” — especially on the part of an enormous federal government — are antithetical (sp?) to Jane Jacobs’ approach to urban and economic health.

While Jacobs was certainly not against governmental spending — she makes this very clear in her “rants” against anti-spending neo-conservatives in her seventh and last book, “Dark Age Ahead” (calling these neo-conservatives, if I remember correctly, bean-counters and cheese-parers) — it seems to me that she believed that 1) when government spending should be on specific, purposeful, problem-solving activities that were genuine governmental responsibilties in the first place, and 2) believed that much too much emphasis in any case was put on THINGS (e.g., buildings, factories, etc.) and that not enough emphasis put on processes. (It seems to me that in “Systems of Survival” in particular, Jacobs was saying that governments should stay away from economic “planning” — but that they should NOT, however, use this as an excuse to shirk from genuine governmental responsibilities.)

Regarding #1 (anti-general economic stimulus packages), I think her reasoning in this regard is not dissimilar to the arguments that were put forth by “Market Urbanism” (a/k/a Adam) in his recent post “Urbanism Legend: Positive NPV Infrastructure”: a) Economic stimulus projects are inevitably approved for political rather than economic reasons and thus have a tendency to to be economic white elephants; b) even in instances where a big centrally-planned project might nevertheless “make some money” in the long run, that doesn’t mean that had the same funds been left in private hands that they wouldn’t have been even far more profitable for the economy.

With regard to #2 (process is more important than infrastructure), it seems to me that Jacobs makes two additional arguments. Here is a very rough, and perhaps crude, description of these arguments:

(i) True economic development is a PROCESS whereby people use their ingenuity to figure out ways to get others to pay them enough money for a product or service in order to make a profit. While this may be stunningly obvious, Jacobs points out that most economic development programs blithely ignore this simply fact, nevertheless, and focus instead on the importation of factories, trainers, etc. (This is, more or less, like giving someone a handout rather than teaching them how to work.)

A real life example: a number of indigenous new businesses have sprung up in “downtown” Brooklyn. These successful businesses have figured out a way to make a downtown Brooklyn location work for whatever product or service they are selling. But the Borough President of Brooklyn (kind of like a county executive), like most other politicians, doesn’t see this as the true economic development that it is. Instead he wants the government to subsidize the destruction of these successful indigenous businesses and to subsidize the “importation” of a basketball arena and a number of office buildings instead.

(ii) Truely useful economic development creates products and services which “inevitably” in turn lead to other new products and services — it does not create “dead-end” products and services. This is why, for instance, a subsidized branch plant (or sports arena) is not true economic development. As Jacobs explains in the Economy of Cities, branch plants (or a Nets arena in downtown Brooklyn) are inherently economically “sterile” in a way that indigenous small business are not.

[Hope to eventually make a few additional points — like how Jacobs, if I remember correctly, had the wonderful temerity in “The Economy of Cities” to critize one of the most sacred cows of the New Deal (and one of the most sacred cows of economic stimulus spending and infrastructure spending in general): The Tennessee Valley Authority; how she writes about the importance of “drift” in “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”; how, in both (?) “Death and Life of Great American Cities” and the “Economy of Cities” she seems to me to be pointing out the same things about infrastructure that Stephen Smith (in his post above) does; how Jacobs saw private micro-lending (which recently won a Nobel prize) as an important stimulus to genuine economic development; etc.

Wow! Thanks for taking the time to share your depth of knowledge with us, Benjamin.

I recently picked up “The Economy of Cities”. I’m going to start reading right away….

While I’m guessing that there are plenty of statements by Jane Jacobs that will illustrate the points I’ve made in my previous post above, I thought it might be fun to point out just a few that were easily found. Here’s a planned first installment — one that also seems to me to illustrate a number of Stephen Smith’s comments, both above and in a recent previous post:

Economy of Cities (hardcover, pg. 225 onward) [The comments within the Jacobs’ quotes that are within the brackets are mine — BH]

“. . . economic development is expensive and when development work is [misguidely] skimped or obstructed, large amounts of capital thus become available for other [wasteful] uses instead.

Consider, for a moment how much investment in new and young enterprises might be bought with $300,000,000 . . . . I mention the sum of $300,000,000 because it happens to be the amount of money that was spent in the 1950s upon public housing and related public [“infrastructure”] construction in one district of New York [City], East Harlem, which has a population of about 200,000 persons. The economic problems of East Harlem are now worse, if anything, than before this expenditure was made . . . No money to speak of goes into East Harlem for [business] people there to use producing goods and services [i.e., goods and services that businesses, including small businesses, use to produce other goods and services], developing new work, and becoming economically self-supporting. But this is obviously not owing to lack of capital, per se; witness the $300,000,000 made available to the housing [“infrastructure”] projects.”

In a footnote she mentions, “Incidentally, more than 1,300 commercial enterprises, of which a large proportion belonged to Puerto Ricans, and more than 500 noncommercial enterprises were destroyed, because they were physically in the way of the housing projects [and, particularly, because they were in the way of the planners’ obsession with supposedly park-like “open spaces”].

“Lack of capital, per se, has obviously not been the reason for lack of a relatively modest investment in devlopment of new work. Consider the billions of dollars available for highways, many of which are pure makework for powerful construction unions.”

In a footnote she then adds, “Just one stretch of such highway [“infrastructure” — the Lower Manahttan Expressway that Jacobs was a leader in fighting?] in New York City, less than two miles long — which will solve nothing and indeed will only compund present traffic and pollution problems — will destroy or dislocate [in the Lower East Side, Little Italy, what is now called SoHo and the South Village] some 800 businesses empoying about ten thousand persons, and will cost close to $200,000,000. It is being pushed by an alliance of the construction labor unions, one of the city’s two largest banks, and a number of government agencies whose own growth depends upon this and similar projects.”

P.S. — Looking back, what was the better “infrastructure” investment for NYC?: 1) vast sums of public money to be spent on DESTROYING existing buildings, both commercial and residential, in the Lower East Side, Little Italy, SoHo and the South Village to build an unneeded highway; or 2) much smaller sums of public moneies used to maintain and gently upgrade the existing infrastructure (e.g., streets, sewers, etc.) which allowed the private sector to reinvent [in spectacularly economically productive fashion, by the way!] the existing stock of buildings, businesses and residences?

– – – – –

P.S. — In case I don’t get a chance to get to it, the Jane Jacobs analysis of the Tennessee Valley Authority that I was thinking of is not in the “Economy of Cities,” but in “Cities and the Wealth of Nations.” (It’s most of Chapter 8, “Capital for Regions Without Cities” — pages 110-123 in the paperback edition that I have).

By the way if I remember correctly, under highway funding formulas, the money that would have been spent on the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have been mostly Federal government money, not New York City money. I believe that was a large part of the allure of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, especially to local politicians, in the first place — all that money was thought of as being mostly “free” money to the City of New York.

If this is true, I think it just goes to show that, at least sometimes, you’ve got to be careful about “free” “infrastructure” money — in the end, if not used wisely, it can be very costly.

There are two very nice quotes in Jacobs’ “The Nature of Economies” (2000) that relatively briefly explain what seems to me to be Jacobs’ position of things like economic stimulus packages. (As mentioned in another one of my recent posts on this blog, “The Nature of Economies” is written like a Socratic dialogue — or to my mind, a novella — so Jacobs’ thoughts are spoken by various characters.) Here’s the quote:

Armbruster [basically, he’s the host of the discussion]: “So is there any practical value or advantage in knowing that economic development is differentiations emerging from generalities?”

“Yes,” replied Hiram [basically a stand-in for Jacobs]. “It tells us that development isn’t a collection of things but rather a process that yields things. Not knowing this, governments, their development and aid agencies, the World Bank, and much of the public put faith in a fallacious ‘Thing Theory’ of develoopment. The Thing Theory supposes that development is the result of [a locality merely] possessing things such as factories, dams, schools, tractors, whatever — often bunches of things subsumed under the category of infrastructure.

“However, if the development process is lacking in a town or other settlement, things either given or sold to it are merely products of the [development] process somewhere else. They don’t [however] mysteriously carry the process along with them. To suppose that things, per se, are sufficient to produce development creates false expectations and futilities. Worse, it evades measures that might actually foster [real] development.”

“Such as?” asked Armbruster.

“Think[ing] about how the process works and therefore what it requires,” said Hiram.

(Page 32, March 2001 Vintage paperback edition.)

2) “In the Soviet Unioin, development initiatives and decisions were in the hands of bureaucrats. Just as you might expect, the development of bureucratic and military work proliferated, but too little else was developed. The eight million employees in the bureaucracies that did the Soviet Union’s economic planning were believers in the Thing Theory of development — but then, so are our own [American] policy makers, politicians, and civil servants, for the most part.” (Pages 33-34.)