Street Cleaning Vol 6: Stay Off The Flowers

A newsletter of bits and pieces.

Recently, across two different walks to Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, I decided to take a picture of every sign I saw about dogs relieving themselves. Here is a categorized sample.

Official Pleading

Un-Official Pleading

Official Threatening

Educating

Uhh

A lot of strategies to meet one problem. Clearly, the social cost of letting a dog go on someone’s flowers is low for the dog-owner (and zero for the actual dog), so people have taken it into their own hands to do something about it. Behind this stupid photo series is a serious topic. How do we shape people’s actions in shared space? Threaten people, educate them, appeal to their sense of civic duty, shame them? A brutal police crackdown? These are the kinds of questions city-shapers think of all the time (the last option seems to be the most popular these days).

To answer this question, I think you need to understand the reason there’s a problem in the first place. Here is a final example, which is not a sign, but a makeshift doggie bag dispenser. I would categorize this as “accommodation” — the solution accepts that people will be forgetful or lazy and not bring a bag with them and makes it dead-easy to do the right thing.

For what it’s worth, I think every dog-owning household that makes over 100k a year should have to pay a tax for supplementary sanitation, and this one reason I will never be elected to office. Speaking of which…

NYC- Mayoral Corner

Early voting for the NYC Mayoral primary has begun. A lot has happened since I put out this primer (which is still relevant). Zohran Mamdani has closed the polling gap, and Brad Lander was detained by ICE. The primary will end June 24th, then in November we’ll get to see the winner, whatever insignificant stooge the not-very-serious NYC Republicans throw up, and Eric Adams run in the general. Oh, and by the way, Andrew Cuomo has already said he’ll run as an independent regardless of how the primary goes, so we’ll see him again too, potentially setting up a three-way scramble between Adams, Cuomo, and the Republican over conservative leaning and Orthodox Jewish voters.

On the other side of the spectrum, Mamdani has done better than anyone ever could have imagined and may fancy running in the general election even if he loses the primary. If you’ve followed my writing, you can probably tell I’m for a stronger social safety net and a greater role for the public sector in things like housing production. Mamdani’s values are broadly aligned with mine, yet many of his ideas sound impossible to pull off. I hate myself for being the egg-headed technocrat in the room (*stares longingly at Brad Lander), but I don’t know how you pay for his agenda in our current political and economic climate, and I’m not sure all of them are even good ideas.

But Mamdani’s laser focus on affordability has, in many ways, revealed how deeply out of touch New York’s political class is. Cuomo is essentially running the Kamala Harris campaign, saying as little as possible, promising nothing, and not engaging the public or media. He may still win, but it’s already closer than he would have expected, and he would likely win on the basis of his billionaire-funded super PAC flooding the airwaves. Also curious to me are many of the Ezra Klein disciples on Substack who have somehow shoehorned Cuomo into their rankings or have left Mamdani off for being unrealistic. Thinking Zohran is unrealistic is one thing, but strategically using a Cuomo vote to try and block him is dangerous. Cuomo was governor for over a decade, and the “abundance” didn’t exactly flow. Under his watch, New York City became more expensive, built less, and defunded mass transit.

The abundance crowd, and YIMBYs more generally, need to understand what Zohran is tapping into if they want to strengthen their own movement. Sometimes I feel like none of these people have ever felt what it’s like to realize you can’t afford to live in the place you love. Not priced out like apples are suddenly more expensive at Citarella, but truly “time to leave” priced out. We are losing a generation of middle and working-class New Yorkers, and they do not understand their plight in terms of supply-side economics; they understand it in terms of rent, childcare, and grocery bills. Zohran is speaking their language. We have not seen a broadly popular, charismatic local politician like Mamdani in my lifetime in NYC. I consider myself a technocratically minded voter, but I respect the hell out of Mamdani’s message, even if I have qualms about his ideas for fixing the problems he has correctly identified.

Don’t rank Cuomo.

I’m going to Seoul

I’ll be in Seoul visiting family, a city I haven’t been to since I was 14, when I was singularly focused on eating as much Hangwa as possible and drinking gallons of Pocari Sweat (which is easy to find in the US now). If you have recommendations related to design, urbanism, or architecture, let me know! Also, there may be a hiatus on posts while I’m there for the rest of June. Sorry, good thing this is free (but also huge shoutout to my 31 paid subscribers who financially enable me to drink one to-go coffee a day guilt-free).

How about them links:

• War is Bad - A profile from the Project for Public Spaces on the rebuilding of the market in Aleppo after the Syrian Civil War. It’s an inspiring story, but also deeply painful to realize how quickly war can erase centuries of culture and how hard it is to rebuild, not just the buildings but the human life they contained. I think about this as we seem to be beating the drum for doing a Regime Change, again.

• More Storefronts less Stores - NYC’s City of Yes package of zoning reforms aimed at increasing housing and relaxing rules on commercial facilities seems to be working. One stat that made me sit up, 500 vacant storefronts were occupied in the year since the package passed, many with non-retail occupants. I’ve written extensively about the need to reimagine storefronts in an age of declining retail, and I’m excited to see that happening in practice.

• Game Cities - I rediscovered the website of Konstantinos Dimopoulos, an urban planner who consults on cities in video games. Cool job. There has been a lot of theorizing on depictions of the city in visual art, music, etc, but not to my knowledge in videogames. Dimpopoulos wrote this article about what makes a good game city.

• It’s Hot Out - All governments collect reams of data. One thing NYC does quite well is make data available to the public. A team led by my old professor, Mehdi Heris, triangulated data like mean radiant temperature, surface temperature, tree canopy, and permeable surfaces to create the Urban Heat Portal, which will tell you why your neighborhood is hot. An amazing tool. Mehdi has devoted a lot of his career to studying and measuring urban heat. Go CUNY.

City Sign of the Month

We just had a bunch of signs, but here’s another one that feels relevant.