Bring Back the Bulldozer

A more muscular urban agenda for the next four years

I’m going to write about something I’ve avoided on Streetstack. If you don’t want to read about Donald Trump or a bunch of very US-centric issues, save yourself six minutes of reading time. Next week will be about fun riverside parks.

Utopia for 75% of American planners is a robust European-style public sector studiously planning in the public interest with a generous social safety net to back it all up. If that was ever possible in the US, the dream died on January 20th when Donald Trump was sworn in. I always expected Trump’s purge of the Federal bureaucracy and transactional politicking to trickle down to New York City but I didn’t expect it to be this fast. The Federal government quickly intervened to dismiss a long-building corruption case against our mayor, Eric Adams, so that he could better assist with the administration’s mass deportation plans. This is not my characterization of the dismissal. Emil Bove, the Deputy Attorney General said as much at the dismissal hearing.

Mr. Bove renewed his assertion that the prosecution should be dismissed because it was hindering Mr. Adams’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The judge, Dale E. Ho, asked whether that logic could apply to other officials with critical public safety and national security responsibilities in New York. “Like the police commissioner, for example?” the judge asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Mr. Bove said.

Concerned that Adams had sold out the City in exchange for what is essentially a pardon, four of NYC’s eight deputy mayors resigned. These people are responsible for overseeing, among other things, transportation, housing development, economic development, parks, sanitation, and public safety. As a follow-up, the President announced he was revoking the Federal authorization of NYC’s congestion pricing scheme — which in its short life had already drastically cut car traffic in lower Manhattan while actually boosting foot traffic in commercial corridors. “NEW YORK IS SAVED, LONG LIVE THE KING,” he wrote on Truth Social. This week the trash got picked up and the subways arrived, but it would be naive to think that all this won’t eventually be felt at street-level.

I’ve met asshole architects and asshole politicians and plenty of asshole developers but I have never met a planner who was a real asshole. Unpleasant or weird yes, but never a nailed-on jerk. The long shadow of Robert Moses has beaten any whiff of realpolitik or ego out of the profession. For a planner to seek power or use it is frowned upon. You go to the hearing and take your lumps from the public or the politicians and don’t fight back. Our rule-following field does not feel prepared to defend its work when our enemies work faster than the rules. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” is the saying but this administration’s motto is “better to ask neither forgiveness nor permission.” This doesn’t just dim the prospects of professional planners but also of normal people who want things like less traffic and walkable cities. If we don’t simply want to write off urban progress for the next four years —or at a more basic level, defend what we already have— what do we do?

Even before Trump, there was a notable lack of edge to most progressive urban causes. “Edge” is not naming your podcast “The War on Cars,” or tweeting when a mail-truck parks in the bike lane, it is a willingness to use the levers of power. There are planning advocates who will go into the smoky back rooms to great effect, but not enough. I’m cynical that the model of urban-issue advocacy that worked in the past, which relied heavily on rallying a small but highly engaged group for critical mass rides, rent-strikes, and call-ins, will carry us through the next four years on its own. An urban agenda with teeth probably operates a lot more like AIPAC than Transportation Alternatives. This means advocates should not just endorse preferred candidates but actively work to unseat and defeat those who are oppositional to our ideas. It means attacking politicians who fail to produce housing or have high numbers of traffic deaths in their districts. It also means aggressively owning the narrative around our best ideas instead of retreating to the same hard-to-follow liberal arguments for bike lanes being about “economic justice” or plazas being about “cherished third spaces.”

I wrote about a project to close a street to traffic outside a school in a deep-red portion of Queens with a history of traffic violence. The leader of this effort spoke about it as new outdoor space that would relieve pressure on the school’s under-sized gym, giving kids room to play and exercise outside after school, and oh yes, by the way, remove a few cars in the process. Whenever a pack of finance bros whizzes by on e-Citibikes I think “there goes a cyclist with a lot of money and power who no one is organizing.” A pitch for more bike lanes to these guys would be Bike fun. You want more. The narrative around urban issues needs to be vastly simplified, tailored to their audiences, and answer more directly the question “what’s in this for me and mine?”

The fact that “NIMBY” seems to have finally entered popular parlance even outside the planning world is an encouraging sign. Labels make sparring easier. So does expertise, which we allegedly have a lot of but rarely deploy in public. I went to a public hearing for a package of housing reforms led by NYC Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick. After presenting the broad strokes of the plan, Garodnick took comments from both the public and elected officials, and he did not suffer fools. To a City Council Member who said she supported housing but not the package, he pointed out the minuscule number of new housing units constructed in her district during her tenure. Another opposing Council Member was confronted with the stat that over half of their district’s residents were rent-burdened and asked rhetorically how they could oppose the package when so many of their constituents stood to benefit. Garodnick won over, in real-time, a Queens resident who misunderstood what an ADU was. It was refreshing and surprising to see a public official sparring with both the public and grand-standing electeds. This package of reforms, known as City of Yes, would eventually pass.

A shift to a more aggressive footing goes beyond how we argue. Litigiousness is a big one. When Trump announced he was killing congestion pricing, the MTA had a lawsuit ready to go that day. Janno Lieber, the MTA’s CEO, said he will not comply with the Federal order to stop the program unless a judge tells him to and all appeals are exhausted. It remains to be seen if relying on the legal system is viable. Trump is determined to remake the courts in his image. But it was refreshing to see our side suing for once, when we are so often the ones getting sued. In Massachusetts, the State, supported by pro-housing groups, is aggressively taking on some of its wealthiest towns in the name of new housing. Andrea Campbell, the Massachusetts Attorney General, has been steadily suing towns in the Boston area that are failing to comply with a very modest rezoning to allow multifamily housing around regional rail stops. It might not sound radical to sue people who are breaking a law, but the fact that a State is taking on some of it’s wealthiest areas is a sign that 1. The housing crisis is too urgent to ignore, especially in Massachusetts, which is losing population and especially young families and 2. Cajoling people has its limits and eventually you need to take out the stick.

Finally, there has probably never been a better time to just get away with stuff. These chaotic years could actually lead to a flourishing of tactical urbanism - everyday people taking street improvement into their own hands through fast and cheap changes. Every rogue bench, every tree-bed garden, and illegal sidewalk table and chair is a little bit of progress that requires zero input from the shriveling public sector.

These types of strategies, going after enemies, changing a pitch based on audience, being almost excessively litigious, are normal operating procedure for pretty much every lobby and special interest. Planning, with its ideals of transparency and community-based consensus might be spiritually uncomfortable moving in this direction, but if we’re convinced our ideas are good for humanity, shouldn’t we be willing to engage in a little combat? If what I’m calling for sounds nebulous, it’s because I’m shooting from the hip, and there is no playbook for right now. I’ve tried to give some examples of a more muscular way of going about the urban agenda. Ferry operators hated the Brooklyn Bridge, people doubted NYC’s universal Pre-K, drivers hated London’s congestion charge, and they were ignored or even steamrolled, and now the world has all those things for the better. Urban planners used to get their way via the bulldozer. No one is calling for the return of eminent domain or “slum” clearance, but if we believe what we’re saying — that the world is on fire, everything is in crisis, and our ideas are good, then break eggs to make the omelet.