- My name is Chase Robinson,
I'm the Interim President of the Graduate Center,
and I'd like to welcome you to what promises to be
an illuminating evening, this semester's second
major event in our year-long exploration of New
York's creative economy. Now, as many of you know,
the Graduate Center is a graduate school of arts and sciences. It's a center for applied
and theoretical research, and it's a platform for
performance, conversation, and public debate. As a community of students
and scholars committed to the idea that learning
is a public good, we regularly offer
public programs featuring eminent thinkers, cultural
leaders, and distinguished artists, addressing some of
today's most pressing issues. To that end, we've been
delighted to present Cultural Capital, the Promise
and Price of New York's Creative Economy, an
institution-wide public programming initiative that is exploring
the city's creative and knowledge-based
industries, through an array of conversations, panel
discussions, screenings, and performances. From music and publishing
to arts organizations and tech start-ups, New
York has long been vital to the creation and consolidation
of the creative economy. And tonight, as we come
to the end of our first semester, we pose a foundational question: What are the economics
of the creative economy? We've convened a
distinguished group to answer that question. First, I'm delighted to
introduce Edward Glaser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp
Professor of Economics at Harvard, where he
also serves as Director of the Taubman Center for
State and Local Government, and the Rappaport Institute
for Greater Boston. Specializing in the economics
of cities, including growth, segregation,
crime and housing markets, Professor Glaser has been
particularly interested in the role that
geographic proximity plays in creating knowledge and innovation. His most recent book is
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes
Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. It's also a pleasure to
introduce our own David Harvey. Currently a distinguished
Professor of Anthropology here at the Graduate
Center, Professor Harvey is an eminent social theorist,
and author of many highly influential books,
such as Social Justice and the City, The
Condition of Postmodernity, and Justice, Nature, and
the Geography of Difference. His most recent book is Rebel Cities. We're also honored to welcome Seth Pinsky. Mr. Pinsky served as
President of the New York City Economic Development
Corporation from 2008 to 2013. Appointed by Mayor Bloomberg
seven months before the collapse of Lehman
Bros., Mr. Pinsky reevaluated the agency's strategy
to position the City as a global center for innovation. He is currently Executive
Vice President at RXR Realty. Finally, it's a pleasure
to introduce this evening's moderator, Adam Davidson. Mr. Davidson is co-founder
and co-host of Planet Money, a co-production of NPR
and This American Life. He also writes the weekly
It's the Economy column for the New York Times magazine. Mr. Davidson has won several major awards, including The Peabody,
DuPont-Columbia and the Polk. He has also written for
the Atlantic, Harper's, GQ, and Rolling Stone. Please welcome me in welcoming
our distinguished guests. (audience applauding) - Thank you all so much for coming here. I'm really thrilled by this
panel, and by the conversation we're going to have. We thought it would be fun
to bring the city into the conversation, so some CUNY
staff went out and filmed parts of the city that
sort of represent some of the ideas that we're going to talk about. And we're gonna show those
to you and the panelists will respond a bit to those,
and then say what they have to say, and I think
if everything goes right, I'll have every three of you
attacked by the other two at some point in the conversation, (laughing) at least that's my goal. So why don't we start, let's
bring up the first image, which is, for me, a major
transformation of the city. This is the Google building
that many of you know on Eighth Avenue. I thought about this, I
remember when it came in. I grew up not far from
here and not far from the Google building, my dad, who's
sitting in the front row, Jack Davidson, was a member
of Circle Repertory Theater Company, which was a great,
not particularly profitable, off-Broadway theater company,
whose offices were in that building when I was a kid. And so I thought of that
building as sort of personifying the Greenwich Village, and
I don't think we called it Chelsea at the time, but
the area I grew up in, of sort of not terribly
financially successful but creatively exciting,
nonprofit arts organizations. Google, of course, is
quite a bit more profitable than Circle Repertory
Theater Company ever was. And I thought I would sort
of talk with the three of you about what does the presence, let's talk about that right now, of such a huge iconic
company choosing to make New York a major part of its home. And Ed, I'm guessing for you
this is, your book is called The Triumph of the City,
this would be a triumph for New York City, is that fair? - Well I think it's an
indication of the enduring strength of cities. I think I couldn't think
of a better example of that than Google. In some sense, we live
in an age of paradox, an age in which it is
effortless to telecommute across the planet, in which we
could all occupy whatever sylvan spot appeals to our biophilia. And so many ways, in so
many places, we choose the inconveniences of city life. To me, at least, Google symbolizes that, both in its vast New York
presence, and also in the Googleplex. Because if you think of what
company should have been able to do long-distance working best, in all the world, surely
it should have been Google, the company that allows
people everywhere to search for things throughout the planet. And yet, they don't
send their workers home. They don't tell them
go work from anywhere. In Silicon Valley, they
build the Googleplex, a very famous example of
geographic concentration, and here in New York, they
buy this esteemed building, this former center of the
Port Authority, a vast amount of physical space that
brings smart people together near one another. And at least I think the
ultimate force that explains this is that what globalization
and new technologies have done is they've
increased the returns to being smart, they've increased
the returns to innovation in so many ways, not
just financial returns. And we are a social
species, we get smart by being around other smart people. Cities enable us to
learn from one another. They enable those collaborative
chains of creativity that have powered
humanities greatest hits, from Athenian philosophy to Facebook. And Google is just
taking advantage of that. And that, to me, is what this symbolizes. Although, I can't resist
the fact that what's so great about this is
you not only have this 21st Century New York in
Google here, you have, of course, classic 20th
Century New York in the era of LaGuardia and FDR
and the Port Authority. And then you have, now
covered by it appears, outside of the thing, the Chase
Manhattan Bank, late 18th, early 19th Century New York. And of course the story
of how Burr and Hamilton collaborated to essentially
bamboozle the city government in order to get
their, get themselves a bank. Burr get himself a bank
by promising to provide clean water for the city. Clean water, which of
course, never materialized, is symbolized by the Chase Manhattan Bank, which was of course the
J.P. Morgan Chase, which is the Chase Manhattan Bank,
which is the bank of the Manhattan Water Company. It is of course, false, as
you will read in Wikipedia, that that octagonal logo
is the cross-section of a water pipe. That's nonsense. But if it helps you to
remember the somewhat sordid history of how this
bank came about in this political combination of
two men who would later, one of whom would later shoot each other on the banks of the Hudson,
that's a helpful thing. - On the New Jersey side. - Indeed. (laughing) - And just to help everybody,
I'm gonna sort of try and paint your ideological perspective. Ed, you told me the other
day that you're sort of an old school New York
Republican, a fairly left on social issues,
moderate centrist on economic issues, in other
words, you're a member of a party that does not exist. - That's right. That's right. And proudly so. I wouldn't want to be a
member of any party that would have me, of course. But, right, so remember in terms of... I have, like Professor
Harvey, a deep-seated fear of government, and also
a belief in using what government we have to
make the lives of the poor better off. And I think that those are
linchpins of my ideology. - Great, so David, you proudly
call yourself a Marxist, and bring that perspective
to many of your writings about how cities work. And I'd first like to
just hear you respond, 'cause I have to say I was
fairly familiar with Ed's work. I'm an economics correspondent,
which, I don't say this normally, but in America,
I think that means I'm a Capitalist correspondent. And I wasn't familiar with
your work, but I found it thrilling to... You have these wonderful
videos online of where you walk through Marx's
Capital volumes 1 and 2, and really enriched my
understanding of those books. And then you write very
powerfully about cities from a perspective, frankly,
that for me was utterly new and really exciting to read about. And bizarre, really. (laughing) Really hard to get my head around. And so I feel like, when I
read Ed's book, I was just going mmm hmm, mmm hmm, yep, yep. And when I read your book, like, what? Where's he going with this? And so I'm finding myself really wondering what are you gonna say
about this building. How does this make you feel? - Well, I'll tell you
what I'm going to say, the interesting thing
about this building is to think about the labor
process that's involved, and the activities going on there. What does it make? What does it produce? And it turns out, with
Google, that we, the public, actually do the labor. We do it. They don't make anything. They just sit there in that
building and what do they extract from us? They extract rent from us. In other words, this is
a totally parasitic form of economic activity. - That's what you would say. (laughing) - And it's very interesting. Way back when, about 1957,
you probably remember this, Bert Hoselitz wrote this
piece, which was about. - '67. - '67? - The year I was born. On this island. - Yeah, well, he wrote this
piece and he was looking at American cities and they were all full of productive stuff. They made steel, they
made autos, all this kind of stuff. All the industries we
knew, employed thousands of people, all the unionized
labor, all this sort of stuff. And he looked at Latin
American cities and said you don't see any of that. All you do is see them
sort of extracting rent from the rural populations
and the rest of it. So he divided the world
into productive cities, which were our cities,
and parasitic cities, which were their cities. It's now been totally reversed. New York City is one of the
most parasitic economies in the universe. Whereas all of the
production is taking place in places like Bangladesh,
Shenzhen, all the rest of it. And Google is a classic
form of new industrial organization, which is
not about making anything. As I said, it's really
about extracting labor from everybody else who
actually contributes all the information that
Google then utilizes and sells to everybody else at a profit. - I... - Oh, you don't like that (laughing). - I certainly have no
interest in Google personally, and am not here as
representative of Google. (laughing) But I think that actually
it's a narrow view of what Google does to say that
they don't produce anything. Now, they don't produce
anything physical, although they actually do produce
physical things through some of the subsidiaries
that they own, but what they have created is concepts, ideas,
that in turn make people's lives, I'll leave aside
words like better or worse, but easier. And I think the fact that
people gravitate towards Google indicates that
people actually believe that what they've produced
make their lives easier. People voluntarily use
Google because they think it's the best way to
find the information that they're looking for. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the concept of cities that are consumer
cities, or parasitic cities, and cities that are producers,
but I think to limit production just to
physical objects is missing a lot of what makes this time in our history particularly exciting. - But the trouble with that
is, CUNY actually produces all these things, but just
that we haven't figured out, Mr. President, we haven't figured
out how to extract rent... - But I don't think that... - from it all. This is the point. What's the most profitable
industry right now? It's rent extractions, it's not about actually making things. - But I mean steel companies
are rent extractors as well, I'm not sure why that's
any different from Google. - Steel companies make steel
and put it into buildings. - And Google makes algorigthms. - Google feels like... I mean I would have
thought that you would have launched into an attack
on J.P. Morgan Chase, which would have felt
like very strong ground for attacking, attacking rent-seeking. Whereas Google, to me at
least, the first thing that I think when I
think of Google is just straight gratitude. Do you remember what search
engines were like before Google, and now they're a lot better, and I feel really grateful
to the guys at Google who enabled me to learn
stuff more quickly. - I think that's... - And you know what else? They've never charged me a penny for it. I mean it's sort of an amazing thing. - No, but they've extracted
vast amounts of money from doing exactly what you talk about. And we could do that for free. - They have. - We should be doing all of that for free. - I'm gonna interject,
'cause I know we're just minutes away from
everyone agreeing on this. (laughing) But I do want to, we
have a bunch of videos, so I do want to move forward. I think the... What I would be interested
in talking about a bit going to the theme of the
idea of a creative city, I want to just spend a
moment defining what we mean by a creative city. This is the Equitable
building down in Wall Street, and we were sort of joking
backstage that Wall Street and finance has become ever
more creative over the last... - [David] I think they're,
when I say it's a parasitic city, I think this city has
more creative accountants, more creative tax lawyers, more... I mean, it is the most
creative place in the world (audience laughing) for almost every
fetishistic design that can actually be constructed. And so I think that is the center of what the creativity is about. The people who came up
with collateralized debt obligations and got us into
the foreclosure crisis. - That would be J.P. Morgan, yep. - Okay, yeah, well, yeah. That's the creative side. And again, it's about
dispossessing people of their own value, it really is. It's an economy of dispossession,
not an economy of making, and that is the problem I have. - When I first hear the
phrase creative cities, I grew up in Westbeth,
which is all artists in Greenwich Village. And as a friend of mine said,
you had to be a bad artist to live there, because
you had to meet maximum income threshold. They're not bad artists,
they're wonderful artists. But they're not all wonderful. But they're not high earn... they weren't, at least when
you come into the building, you're not high earning artists. And it was a building and
a culture I grew up in in New York in the 70s, like
the Google building once was, of not particularly
profitable creative enterprises that really were
self-consciously creative; theaters, dance, painting, et cetera. But when I read, Ed,
economists, they define creative cities differently. There's Richard Florida,
I don't know if he coined the phrase creative economy,
but he certainly made himself synonymous with it. - The creative class.
- Huh? - The creative class. And he expands it quite a
bit to just, I think it's all of your parasites. It's anybody who doesn't
physically make something. He expands it, I believe
to lawyers and accountants. Ed, how do you, what is a creative city? How do you think about that phrase? - You know, I think about
city as about density, as coming from the desire
to eliminate transportation costs for goods, for people and for ideas. That's how I think about it. And when I think about
creativity, I think about it as being one of the byproducts
of reducing the cost of moving ideas readily across space. It's the combination of new
ideas, of old ideas into new ideas as Jane Jacobs talked about it. I don't think it's very helpful. I don't think it's a very helpful term. In my book review of Richard's
book, whatever it is, 15 years ago, I pointed
out that the one fact that was well-known and someone
remembers being in the car when I told Richard about
it, the one fact that was well known was that the
share of the population with college degrees in a city
was a very strong predictor of which cities managed to come back. That's the fundamental fact. And certainly education has
been the bedrock on which cities have thrived in the
U.S. and elsewhere in the past 20 or 30 years. I think trying to pin down
which well-educated person is more creative versus
less creative, I'm not sure that that's a very productive
activity on some level. On some level, in fact,
the question of who's parasitic and who isn't is more relevant. And there, I think it is a
complete mistake to confuse making stuff that's physical
with being, versus being parasitic or not. No matter how widespread
you think parastism is, I would resist the urge to
connect physical productivity with not being a parasite. - Seth, when you worked
for the City, do you, we don't have to have exact
numbers, but broadly speaking, I've heard people say the economy of the city is Wall Street,
that the rest of the city is a byproduct of Wall Street. But then I've heard other
people tell me, no, no, it's the diversity, it's
that we have publishing and insurance and real
estate and all these other, and fashion, and et cetera. How do we think of Wall
Street, how do we think of these other fields as
providing the economy? - One of the challenges
that the city has faced over the last several decades
is that on the one hand we had, continue to have, one
of the most well diversified economies in the world. If you look at the number
of industries, for example, in New York City that employ
at least 100,000 people, it's 10, 12, something
in that neighborhood. You're not gonna find that
in most other major cities. But even with all of that diversification, there had been for quite some
time a first among equals. And that first was clearly Wall Street. And to a certain extent,
continues to be Wall Street. Again, my statistics may
be off by a couple of percentages, but at the
height of the last boom in 2007, Wall Street
accounted for somewhere around 8% or 9% of all private
sector jobs in New York City, but accounted for something
like 34% of all private sector earnings in the city. - In 2007, 43% of the payroll
on the island of Manhattan was in finance and insurance. That's a hard fact. - And I'm pretty sure that
the numbers I gave for citywide are also correct. So in many ways, the city's
economy was being driven by Wall Street, and one of the things that Mayor Bloomberg observed
when he came into office, was that for the long-term
health of the city, this is problematic. First of all, you're
not hedging your bets. You're heavily reliant on
one particular industry. If that industry runs into
problems, as it ultimately did, then that means the entire city will run into problems as well. Second of all, Wall Street
itself, if it is gonna be the one industry
that you're betting on, is a highly cyclical industry. And so when Wall Street would cough, the city would catch a cold. And one of the things that we worked very hard at in the
Bloomberg administration and I think that we achieved a certain degree of success in, was seeing to try to hedge those bets. And what that meant wasn't necessarily shrinking Wall Street, although that is, in fact, what has happened,
although not as much as people might have predicted in 2008, but it's more about growing other parts of the economy more rapidly. And one of the areas where we believe that there was a real opportunity was in this, what we referred to, and I think this is actually a more helpful
term than creative economy, the innovation economy. And that spans the creative
economy, but it also includes things like
technology, all of which has been growing very rapidly in the city and has allowed us, even
with the relative decline in Wall Street in recent
years, to weather that storm and to continue to grow
as a city, to continue to produce jobs. And that's very important for our future. - I want to get to the
innovation economy next. But David, I'd be curious,
I also was surprised by talking about Google as a rent seeker. And quickly, for those
who don't know that term, I didn't know that term. Rents to economists is not
what you pay every month, it's sort of you can make
money by actually providing productive valuable
goods and services that someone else wants, and gladly pays for, or you can extract rents,
which is basically by dint of your power or just
controlling land, or having political power, you can
basically steal or take money from others who aren't happy. A friend of mine defined
rents as if the guy's rich and you're glad he's rich,
then that's not rent seeking. If he's rich and you're mad at
him, then it's rent seeking. And he actually used the
Google guys as an example of I'm glad they're rich
because my life is better and I see that. So I was surprised, also,
David, that you felt that way, because I think, something
I know that I don't know that everyone knows, is that
you can get a very broad far left, far right,
center left, center right consensus among economists
and economically minded thinkers that Wall Street
is at least, to some degree, a rent-seeker. And I think, you can
correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a large percentage
of even right of center, Mitt-Romney-voting Republican
economists would say, yeah, they are major rent seekers. I think you could find
virtually no Capitalist economists who would say that of Google. Do you differentiate between
Wall Street and Google, are they of the same ilk? - No, they're not of the
same ilk, but they're both rent seekers from a different... In the same way as the
difference between people who get rents out of the
property market and out of speculation and housing
and all the rest of it. But let me backtrack a
little bit, we live in a Capitalist city. And one of the features
of Capitalism that I think is absolutely fundamental
is what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. So I'm not against talking
about what's getting created, but I think it's terribly important, also, to talk about what is getting destroyed. And I think it's also
terribly important to talk about who benefits in what gets created and who gets hurt by what gets destroyed. And if you could look at the
Wall Street thing and say okay, Wall Street benefited
from whole bunches of things that were going on in
the 1990s, right now. How many people lost their houses? What got destroyed in
the foreclosure wave? And that affected this city. There's foreclosures in
Brooklyn, everywhere else. So you see the rent
seekers are sucking it up in Wall Street, and people
are using their houses in Brooklyn. And you kind of say well I
can't actually draw a line if you like from one to
the other and say there, see that flow of money
from there to there? But if one group in the
population is losing catastrophically, and
the other group in the population is winning very,
very well, then you've got something... inferentially, you kind of
say there's some relationship here between what's going on. So the creative destruction
that goes on in a Capitalist city is, I
think, a terribly important thing to analyze. From my perspective,
that's where you start. And for me, it's fairly
plain, that in this city, there is a certain
creativity which is there. And yeah, it's imaginative
and some people do benefit for it, and in
fact the benefit can be very extensive. My point about Google was
that yeah, the benefit is extensive, but notice
that we are all actually, you say you're not
exploited, but in fact Google is exploiting all of the
information we give it. It sucks up all of the
information we provide it and it uses that information,
which it then passes on and sells to others. So it's our labor that
actually goes into producing what is constructive and
productive in Google, and they're the ones
who simply then take it and actually gain rents off it. I mean, that's why I
call it a rent seeker. So the creative destruction
that goes on in a city is incredibly significant,
and we look at the production of homelessness
in the city, we look at the production of
gentrified neighborhoods, we look at all of those issues. The negative stuff that's
going on in education, we look at how much the
city put into actually helping build the High
Line, which is okay, good in lots of ways, and you
can feel very good about it. But then you say that
amount of money, put in the schools, that would be much better. I mean, this is the sort
of thing that's being fought for in Brazil right now. It's amazing. There's this country
that's soccer mad, and it's going up the wall about
spending all this money on a soccer stadium. Why? Because they see all
this money being spent on soccer stadiums, which
is benefiting what, FIFA and the production
interests, and it's not going into schools and hospitals,
and it's not going into those areas where it's really needed. So for me, it's very important
to look at this analysis. - But you know I think...
- We found a common cause fighting against sports stadiums. Wonderful! (laughing) - Hey, you dislike
suburbs, too, so we're both on the same page on suburbs. - But you know, you
made a number of points and I won't address all of them, but just to use the High Line by way of example, the City invested a
substantial amount of money in the High Line, $125 or so million. Within the first few years
of that, there was $2 billion in private capital that
was invested in that area that I can assure you would
not have been invested there, had the High Line not been built. That $2 billion in private
investment, in turn, is taxed by the city and
allows the city to put significantly more money
into all of the things that you are describing
as being important. And by the way, it's not
an either-or proposition. At the same time that
the city was investing in parks like the High Line,
creating more acreage of open space, which by
the way benefits people throughout the city, than
any administration in half a century at least,
the city was also putting record amounts of money back
into its public school system. If you look at the amount
that the city was spending both to increase operating
funding and also capital investments, it reached
levels that we've never seen in the history of the city. We have to do all of these things. In order for New York to be
successful, we absolutely need to invest in education,
all levels of education. There's no question about that. But we also need to create
the kinds of amenities that attract people to the
city, that make the city a livable place, that bring
the creators to the city who create companies,
who work in companies, and who make our businesses
competitive, which allows our economy to thrive, which
in turn allows our city to tax those businesses
and to pay for all the things that all of us agree
are important as social goods. - And so what's happened
to prices, property prices around the High Line? Who's benefited from all that? - You know, it's interesting. Again, first of all,
the taxation is spread throughout the city. That is one of the advantages
that a government has, is that it can take benefits
that accrue in a certain part of a geography and
make sure that that money then gets spread more widely. And that's an important
thing to keep in mind. But second of all, it's also
important to keep in mind that affordability is definitely
an issue in New York City, there's no question about it. But it's also a symptom
of the city's success. The reason why affordability
is such an issue in New York is a simple matter
of supply and demand. It's because we have more
people who want to be here, because we've made those
investments in the city, and we've made the city
an attractive place, than we have capacity
to house those people. And if you actually remember
to the last time that affordability wasn't a
major issue in the city, it was when the city
was doing very poorly. And the easiest way to
address the affordability issue for us is to make
the city less desirable. Now clearly, that's not
the only way to address affordability, but we
should remember that the reason why we have this
affordability issue is because we've been successful as a city. - Just to follow on
that, and I don't want to lose the Wall Street
thread which I think also connects this. There are really two separate
Wall Street questions, one of which is, Wall
Street within the nation as a whole. And I don't think there's
any sensible economist who doesn't believe there are huge issues, huge issues with the way
that their public policy has worked towards Wall Street. It's a problem because
we do actually think, most of us who are not Marxist, (audience member scoffs) who actually believe that
you need some degree of... No, I didn't mean that,
I mean that you need some sort of private
allocation of capital to put stuff in decent hands. On the other hand, the
track record of private allocation of capital is
so deeply troubling that this current situation
is not at all palatable to any of us. It is worth emphasizing
that in some sense the debacle of 2007, 2008
was because Wall Street did what policy makers
asked of it above all, which was to make cheap credit
available to everyone, right? However, the down side of that is you make cheap credit available to
everyone, they buy things they can't afford, and
as a result, you end up in a catastrophic situation. We have not solved this problem. Dodd-Frank has not solved this problem. But this problem is also
not New York's problem, despite the prevalence
of Wall Street here. Because financial market
regulation is really not best done out of city hall. It's something that needs
sensible Washington-based legislation to handle. - Global. - Global, indeed. At the local level, it's
hard on one level, right, this massive cash-producing
thing is the engine that brought New York back on
some level, it provided the money that paid for
all those social services that the city provided. On the other hand, it
is also the thing that pushed up property values. So both those things are going on. So for a local level,
you should be cheering for Wall Street, because what you hope for is greater tax revenues and
a greater abundance of cash. And you should be jeering
if you'd rather have a city that was much more
affordable because there was much less demand for its space. - Let's go to Dumbo now. That's actually a natural place to go, which is our next stop on the chain. This is just a random corner in Dumbo. We assume that that building's filled with exciting co-locational (laughing) entrepreneurial incubators. So I grew up, the building
I grew up in Westbeth, the High Line used to
end there, and I used to sneak onto the tracks
when it was just a really ratty old train track,
and I love the High Line and I love what's become of it. And I can't afford to
live there in my wildest dreams, in that neighborhood. But I'll tell you, I feel okay about that. I feel like I miss the Greenwich Village of my childhood, but now that's a bunch of hedgefund people, or whoever
can afford to live there, and my dad, in artist
protected housing, one little isolated corner. But then there's Dumbo. And now, maybe Dumbo's too
rich, but there's Bushwick, and there's other places. And I, personally, I
like the New York that is constantly evolving in this way. And that, from my reading
of history, has been happening from the
beginning of New York, where there are these pockets,
these kind of Jane Jacobsian pockets of the right
mix of walkable streets and old buildings that
become the latest frontier of artists and new thinkers,
and then those move on to the next place. And I have to say, even
though I personally would love to live in the neighborhood I grew up in, I find it hard to be mad about it. Help me be mad about it. - You need a little outrage? - I need a little outrage, yeah. I'm mad about plenty, it's
just that particular thing. - Well, I come back to Seth's point. Yeah, the city's been successful. But successful in what dimension? It's done a wonderful job
of creating, if you like, an almost golden gated
community of Manhattan in which Russian billionaires
and Saudi billionaires were to have penthouses which
they're going to live in for about two weeks a year. I mean, yeah, this is great. This is where a lot of capital
comes, because it's safe. This is probably the last
place you'll ever see a revolution, except if I have my way. (audience laughing) So I think it's been
successful in certain ways. But it's been successful
in dealing with that. It's not been successful
in, for example, really pursuing the question
of affordable housing, really taking up the
question of homelessness, of really dealing with
the fact that many people are being forced out of
proximity to their employment opportunities by having
to live way, way out. I came into Kennedy
airport the other morning at 6:00 in the morning,
and I get on the E train, and it's packed. It's packed with women
of color who are coming into the city to wake the place up. They're living way out
there, that's the only place they can afford to live. But that is if you like something... The city's not entirely
responsible for this. This is what happens when
rental prices start to do their work, which is
starting to force things up. But this is actually something that is not unique to New York,
almost every city I know in the world has a property
boom going on, and prices are just sailing through the roof. It is impossible. Sao Paolo actually brags
right now that it's more expensive property-wise
than New York City. And you kind of say when
cities start to brag about how successful
they are by how high up the property prices have
gone, people in the... 50% of the population in
New York as I read it, try to live on less than $30,000 a year. Whereas the top 1% on
average is earning something like $3.57 million a year. And we have a city which is
great and very successful for those people. But it's not so successful
for all those people who are living on less
than $30,000 a year. And so when you start
to talk about a success, you have to talk about it, again, in terms of creative destruction. Who's really measuring this? What is it they're getting,
and what's happening to everybody else? I mean this is the kind
of thing we should think about in the city instead
of having bragging rights about we've done this, we've done that, look at the situation more broadly, and ask about is this a
good city, not only for the millionaires and
billionaires, is it a good city for people living on
$10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a year? - Go ahead.
- No, go ahead. - There is no question that
there has been and remains an issue with poverty in New York City. No question about that. There is no question that
there is a growing issue with affordability in
New York City, there's no question about that. But I think to say that New
York has not, in the face of global pressures, and I
think you are right about that, that these are the sorts of
phenomena that you're seeing in cities all around the
world, that New York has not actually done something to
try to address these issues is not fair. The Mayor had a $7.5
billion program to create affordable housing in the city. By far the most aggressive
affordable housing program anywhere in the United States,
and is actually leaving office very close to
achieving the goal of creating or preserving the 165,000
units of affordable housing that he promised. You also have the fact
that at the same time that poverty has actually gone
up in the United States, poverty has actually remained
the same in New York City. Which is not something to
say "we're done" about, but certainly relative to
the rest of the country is something that I think
is important to observe. It's also important to
observe that among, I think it's the top 15 cities in
the United States, when the Mayor came into office in 2002, New York had the sixth
highest poverty rate, now New York has the 13th
highest poverty rate. So comparing it to other
cities and the performance of those other cities,
New York has actually done a better job. Again, not addressing the
problem, not solving the problem, but relative to the comparable
cities, I think it's very important to understand
that in a context like this, that there's a lot that we
can do, but there's also a lot that we can't do. And it's not really fair
to compare the performance of the city against a
utopia, you have to compare the city against the reality. - Seth, I want to both
agree with you actually, and I think on one level,
I think unquestionably, the view of the Bloomberg administration as being a plutocrat's
paradise that wasn't committed to doing as much as it
could for social issues, I think is just wrong. - He was a plutocrat who was committed... - Who was committed, absolutely. It's just, as soon as he got
on that plane to Bermuda, that went pfft. But on the other hand, I want
to push back on the notion that the stability of the
poverty rate is necessarily a good thing. This is a central point. - To be clear, it's not a good thing. It's a less bad thing. - Well, I'm not sure, right? Because the key here is
that poverty, urban poverty is not the same thing as national poverty or global poverty. Because urban poverty reflects
the location decisions of the poor. And this is a point I
make over and over again, that cities often should
not in any sense be ashamed of their poor
people, because in fact cities don't make people
poor, at least not usually. Cities attract poor
people with the promise of economic opportunity, often,
as in the case of New York, with a much more robust social safety net, with public transportation. My own research on this area
shows that poverty rates go up near new subway stops. This doesn't mean that those subway stops are impoverishing the local residents. It means that the subways
are actually attracting poor people who can get
around without the ability to own a car. You want to know a place
that has no poverty? The completely homogenous
suburb in which I will go home tonight. Which it should be profoundly ashamed of, because in fact it has
made sure that there is no way that you can build homes for the poor, there's no access for
public transportation that's meaningful. So in fact the poverty
rate of a local area is a very weak measure,
because often poverty rates go up because good
things are happening to the poor, as in the case of
building subway stations, or they go down because
bad things are happening to the poor like they're
being priced out of a local market. Now I certainly worry a lot
about the poor in New York, but if you were going to ask
me the real missing group is actually the middle. That actually New York
has a lot of things that it offers for people with
lower income, like the ability to get around without
a car for every adult, like the ability to access
better social services, like the rich fabric
of ethnic neighborhoods that have sustained
the city for centuries. But what it does not do is
provide reasonably-priced income for housing for people
who don't naturally get into low income housing. What it doesn't provide
is widespread high-quality public schooling at the high school level. What it doesn't provide
is those ordinary things that middle income
Americans take for granted. In some sense, that's the
great, to me at least, that missing middle is what
troubles me most about things. - And David, before you
respond, can we go to the next image, because I think this
will provoke the conversation. This is actually I think the
building that you mentioned, the 157, this new, I think
the most expensive building in the world until the next
one on Park Avenue is built. I think you have the 78th
floor, is that right, David? (laughing) According to the New York
Times, I just wrote a column about this last week that will appear, that the first nine tenants were all billionaires,
at least half of whom, like you said, will
visit a few times a year. But it made me think,
as Ed just said, David, that New York's inequality
is a global phenomenon. If you're a city where Russian
oligarchs and Yemeni peasants both come to the city,
what can a mayor do, other than, like Seth said... - Let me make clear, I
don't think we want to go after the Bloomberg administration, because I think any
municipal government has limited possibility of doing anything. And I think he has a,
just personally think, that the Bloomberg administration
has a mixed record. It did some good things, it
did some not such good things. But what do you do about
the fact that in, say 2007 or somewhere around there,
about 10% of the rental housing stock in New
York City was taken over by private equity companies? And what were they doing? They were playing inflated
prices with the idea that they could actually
take a rent stabilized kind of apartments and
turn them market rents. I mean, what was Tishman
doing down in that disaster at Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village? This kind of raiding of
the assets of the city by private capital are
as serious a problem, far more serious a
problem, actually, to me, than whether the Bloomberg
administration did this or did that. And yeah it's a global
problem because right now Capital can't think of
anything productive to do. It's profitability and so
it's going after rents. It's doing it on
intellectual property rights, it's doing it in housing
and it's doing it in land. And there's a land grab
going on right throughout Latin America and everything. So yeah, New York City is
situated in a global economy where actually Capital
doesn't know what to do except to be a rent seeker, as
opposed to going investing and making something. I mean this is a gross
generalization, and you'll always find a few, obviously
some things are different, but that's essentially
what's been happening. And those people who are
managing that flow of capital, which is Wall Street and
London and all the rest of it, are actually chances looking
for, is there some place we can go to do this? So when they supported
what happened down in Stuyvesant Town and so on,
they were, what did they offer? They offered something like
$5.7 billion, and at the end of the day it was worth 1.4? You tell me the details. - Have any of the rents
been converted, though? - No, that is actually the
reason why they ended up losing the property was because
the courts protected the... - Well, the courts were
going to protect them. But they have other ways,
as you know, of getting renters out of places. When Big Capital gets in
there they know how to... But with that huge raid on
the rental stock, it forced prices up pretty much everywhere. Several of the private equity
companies went bankrupt. They were supported by one of
the New York community banks. So there are these processes
going on in the city, which a mayor is not really
able to do anything about. So I'm not gonna blame
you, and I'm not going to blame the Mayor for everything, so you're off the hook, okay? (audience laughing) - But can we talk about policy responses? - Yeah. - What, short of, or not
short of, a revolution, what can be done to... And what is the goal, actually? What would be the city... - What is my goal, or what is the goal? (laughing) - What is your goal? What would the city of New York look like? - First off, the only
bankers that have been put in jail are in Iceland. And maybe we should take
a few bankers and ship 'em to Iceland and put 'em in jail. That would be a good idea. I mean, seriously. I mean, seriously. It's all very well having
I don't know $13 billion or something like that
taken out of J.P. Morgan or whatever, it's all
very well doing that, but actually that's a
hit on the shareholders. The people who were
personally involved in it have got away with
absolutely ripping off people around the world at a huge rate, often through illegal practices
and predatory practices, and there's no accountability
on that at all. So one of the things to do would be... - Although I don't know that that helps your E train-riding... - No it does to some degree, because... - It'll make them feel really really good. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, they'll
be happy in the morning, instead of looking miserable as they did. I think there are a whole set of things. But I mean there has
to be tremendous curbs on speculative activity. The speculative activity
going on in property markets right now is a ruinous practice. And what's interesting
to me is, after the crash in the housing market,
you would have thought that people would have
shrunk back from it, but it's actually resuming. I mean property prices in
New York City right now are going up by the minute. - Would you have it that you can only buy if you're gonna live in the
house, something like that? - Well there are... - Speculation, of course is
always what the other guy's doing, I'm doing clever investment. - Prudent investment. - Well, there are ways
of organizing taxation and the like to be able
to deal with some of this. And putting curbs on what's
happening in property markets. I mean, the Chinese, by
the way, have this problem, and they're trying to
manage a property boom... - But they can hide the data better. (audience laughing) - Yes, right. No, they can. And they don't necessarily
do a better job, by the way. So it's a very... To me there's a lot of
things that need to be looked at and taken care of. I'm personally of the
view that when it comes to something like housing,
housing should not be actually furnished as a
commodity, it should be a human right. - But any house should be a human right? - Yes, yeah, it should be
a human right to decent housing and a decent living
environment, full stop. In the same way there
should be a human right to a decent education for everybody. - But anywhere? But his question was anywhere. On Fifth Avenue? - Yes, anywhere. - Everyone should have a right
to a house on Fifth Avenue? - Well, I wouldn't mind. (laughing) I mean, yeah, well there
should be a lottery. There should be a lottery as
to which house you live in. Something like that. I'm fantasizing now, but that's okay. The thing is that what we've
done, is we've been told that the only way in which
we can get the use value of, as I call it, of
housing and of healthcare and of education is to
let the market provide it, because it's more efficient
to providing the use values than some other system. Well that turns out to be a
very dubious story when we look at what's happened
in housing markets. A very dubious story. The exchange value system
works extremely well for certain groups in the
population, but it doesn't work at all well for other
groups in the population. And so when we ration
the housing possibilities of whole populations
through a market mechanism, you actually introduce
tremendous inequalities into a city, and into a society. - Ed, your book is, I'd
say a healthy chunk of it, is basically arguing that
many policies, well-meaning maybe, to make cities more
equitable, actually make them less equitable. Can you sort of fantasize
about your ideal city? I'm guessing rent control,
rent stabilization won't be a big part of it. - Yeah, although I
certainly see a healthy role for housing vouchers,
and I've certainly been convinced that there are
advantages to certain types of inclusionary
zoning, although I think it's a tool that needs to be used warily. I think Seth said it exactly correctly. I think prices reflect the combination of supply and demand. You can't have cheap
housing unless you either have low demand or abundant supply. Now, you can create a
small number, and that's exactly the lottery point
that was made earlier. You can create a small
number of low cost homes in an area, - Right, we do have a lottery. - Right, we do have them
and you get them in various ways, either you're born into
a rent controlled apartment or you're lotteried in in some way. And, you know, there
are arguments about this one way or the other
about why we want to take care of a favored group
of the poor but not create these benefits more widely. But if you want to create
widespread affordable housing, there's no real way to do
it other than building more. And certainly that's always
been my stance within New York. Now, the reason why I don't
like 157 is that in fact... - This...
- This thing. Is that it shows a building
reaching to the sky, which is something that
I'm typically in favor of, is having more height, but
it does precious little to actually deliver a
large number of units to large numbers of people. You know, I am perfectly
comfortable making the argument that a large
scale apartment building in a tony area of New York actually does preserve affordability
in Queens or in the Bronx by alleviating some of
the pressure to gentrify. I think that's absolutely true. But look, this doesn't
alleviate much pressure for anybody to gentrify. These guys were not about
to go about gentrifying some area in outlying Queens. This is defensible as
architecture, perhaps defensible as property revenues for
New York, but it's not fundamentally the reason
why I advocate for allowing more building, for
reducing the restrictions on construction, which
is because I believe that those things, by creating
more supply, will make life more livable, more
affordable, for ordinary income New Yorkers, will make the
city a more inclusive city. - And Seth, if I'm not
mistaken, they got a pretty sweet tax deal, where
they don't have to pay... (laughing) - Yeah, they were, they
did well in Albany. And you know, there's also... - Can you explain what they
got in Albany, in rough terms, as I remember they got a
10 year, not a full tax abatement, but they pay a tiny,
tiny fraction of the taxes. - Yeah, this building was
essentially grandfathered into a law that was
supposed to have expired. And the building was entitled
to a fairly long term tax abatement, in exchange
for the creation of a relatively small number of
affordable units off site. And that kind of gerrymandering
of the city's tax base is definitely a problem. - That's rent seeking by
everyone's definition. - And actually a bigger
problem with buildings like this, actually
city-wide is the way that our property tax system works. The way that our property
tax system works, high end co-ops and condos actually pay a proportionately very small percentage of the total real estate taxes in the city. In fact, if you look on
a per square foot basis, the property tax that a lot
of people on Fifth Avenue, in your apartment, or on Park Avenue pay, is lower than what people
in poorer neighborhoods just a mile or two away,
in places like Harlem or the South Bronx are paying. There are huge inequities
in that, and also a missed opportunity because you
could make the argument that having billionaires
in a city is good because you can tax the billionaires,
but the fact is, if the billionaires aren't
living in their apartment, the only way you're taxing
them is through propery tax. And if you're under
taxing their apartments, you're not even getting that benefit. So I actually think this
is something that the next administration... - So the city would be
better off if that was a bunch of poor people
living in that property. - From a tax perspective, yes. But I think that, I
certainly hope that the next administration looks at
some of the inequities in the way our property
taxes are collected and tries to address
those inequities for the benefit of the whole city. - It is insane. I just want to make it
clear how much I agree with that, that New
York's property tax system is just absolutely insane. Famously so. - We ought to look into
alternative property rights, like limited equity co-ops
and things like that. I think there are on
the books legal systems which are actually capable
of providing affordable housing for a long period of time. I think if the city
government actually supports procuring of the land,
and of the properties, we could go a long way
to actually changing the property rights
structure within the city, as opposed to... There's many possibilities
there which remain unexplored. - Let's move on to the
next one, which is the Bowery Hotel. And this is another example of... When I was a kid, I was
really scared of this block. This was where CBGBs was,
this was where when people with a mohawk really scared you, it wasn't a cute thing that
six-year-olds have, it was, it meant those people
are doing serious drugs, and they might take my wallet. And that block in particular
was terrifying to me. And I did want to just
raise this broad issue of, I was born in 1970. I grew up in a really scary New York. And I have a two-year-old
who's growing up in a... - And by the way a much more affordable New York City also. - A much more affordable
New York City, true, although my parents never bought anything, living in Greenwich Village since 1963. (audience laughing) And my two-year-old, I
feel like, is growing up in a much better city. I like him growing up in a safer city. I like him growing up in a city that still feels vibrant culturally, even if he and I can't afford to live in the neighborhood I grew up in. And this block, I feel
profound mixed feelings about this block. I kind of like that it's nice now. There's that fancy
Bowery Hotel, and there's nice restaurants there,
and it's still a place where people are using the streets, and they're not scary junkies. And I also do, I have to
admit, feel pangs of missing that old, gritty New
York that I grew up in. But I just wanted to
raise this issue of crime and prosperity, because,
David, I am going to say, as someone who's... I think you've lived here
almost as long as I have. - No, no. - When did you move here? In the 80s? - No, no, I moved here in 2001. - Oh, I'm way off on
your biography, sorry. The city, I can't buy
any story other than even for poor people, even
in poor neighborhoods, this is a better city to live in. It's a safer city,
there's more opportunity. There's a reason that,
if you count immigrants and their at-home
children, half the people in New York City chose
to come to the city. They weren't...this isn't Appalachia or New Orleans before Katrina, where you have centuries of embedded
poverty without escape. This is, as Ed was saying,
poverty coming here. So I just wanted to
raise this issue of crime and prosperity in a city,
and as a public amenity. Shoot me down, make me, what would... - I mean, I've known New York City. I knew it quite well in the
1960s, and I knew it some in the '70s. Actually I know a lot of
people who are very nostalgic about the '70s. Extremely nostalgic
for exactly the reasons you point out, that they
could live down in SoHo and actually I've met a lot
of people who lived down there, no rent at all,
because some of the owners preferred to have
somebody living there than nobody living there at all. So that was kind of a
great place, and of course, that was a time when it was
culturally very creative. I mean, where did punk
rock come from, and... There's a lot of stuff
that came out of that, because people could live in the city. Now if you're an aspiring
artist, where do you go? - Bushwick.
- Yeah, right. - And actually I was...
- What's wrong with Bushwick? - This is a real problem. - But I would jump in, I
mean, the people that you're describing lived in SoHo,
the people that you're describing would never
have lived in Bushwick. And the reason for that
was because it wasn't safe. And I actually think that
one of the great revolutions in the city with respect
to affordability, actually, is the revolution in public safety here. The great safety valve that
has been created within the five borroughs is the
fact that whereas in the past, if you were priced out of
certain parts of New York, and you wanted to live
decently and affordably, your only choice was to leave. And that today, what we've
seen is that neighborhood after neighborhood,
including many neighborhoods that were literally
abandoned, where very few people lived have been
revived because it's possible now to move to those places
and live there safely. And to the extent that people
have been priced out of the East Village, which they
have been, and look, I have the same nostalgia that
a lot of people have. I think there was something
very exciting about New York in the 1970s. But the people who were
priced out of the East Village had an option other than leaving. They could move to Williamsburg. And as Williamsburg has
become more expensive, they moved farther east than Williamsburg, and now they're moving into Bushwick. And eventually they can
move into Ridgewood, and all of those things
are happening because the city is a safer place. And the reason why we
still remain, I think, a vibrant cultural mecca in
New York is because these neighborhoods exist, and
because people have options. I really think that public
safety has been the most important thing in making them an option. - Great cities are
archepelagos of neighborhoods that are constantly in flux, right? This is a great thing
about New York that people have options. The exact locations that
deliver different things change over time, but this is a triumph. And public safety is absolutely critical. Now, I would have said the
right left-wing argument against public safety, and
one that I happen to share, is the fact that we've
achieved public safety by locking up and involving
millions of Americans in the criminal justice
system, which is an unfinished half of the public safety war. The larger tragedy to me
of New York becoming safer is not that some people can't
afford to live in Tribeca, it's the fact that we've
got five million people involved in criminal
justice, which feels to me like a far more pressing
problem for our crime concerns. Now I just will say one
other thing, because this is such an amazing street, right? I think Wikipedia's
actually right on this one, that it is the oldest
thoroughfare on the island of Manhattan, it was a
Lenape path, it was an area that was fancy in the early 19th Century, that went through a long period of decay, and then has come back. But when I see that, I can't help thinking it should be taller. You should be able to deliver a lot more apartments on that area,
instead of these tiny buildings. They could actually do
more to make this area more affordable, but that's just me. (laughing) - I agree with you, by the way, about the criminalization of the population. I think that's the
other side of the story. And I think that's very, very significant. - In your work, David,
you talk a lot about this concept of the right to
the city, and it is one, I have to admit, I've struggled with. I think it's not a Capitalist concept. It's not one that comes out
of the training I've had. Can you just talk about
what this means, the right to the city? - Well, you know, the right
to the city is what we call technically a kind
of empty signifier. It just depends who gives it meaning. Clearly, the rich have a right to the city and can exercise that
right because they have the economic power. Other elements in the
population don't have as much economic power, and
therefore find themselves circumscribed in what they
can do and where they can be. And there is an attempt,
I think, on the part of many organizations to
put together an alliance of social movements in
the city that are trying to exercise a certain right to the city, in terms of both
influencing what political power is going to do, but
also trying to sort of open spaces in the city
where they have a presence and can open up possibilities
for affordable housing in areas which are at this point excluded. - I feel like I'm trying
to translate the idea into my training, which
feels like trying to speak Yiddish with Chinese words or something. It doesn't quite work,
but is it saying the city should not be seen as a
bunch of discrete, private properties that are owned
however they're owned, but the city as a whole, is
a thing that the citizens... - Well, I look on the
city as a sort of commons, if you like, which is
something which we've all helped create, and something
which we are perpetually involved in creating and
through our daily activities. And as a commons, it should
be managed as a commons, collectively, by everybody
who contributes to the production and reproduction of urban life. And what we see, in fact,
is a city where most of the people who are producing
and reproducing urban life have very little say about
the qualities of that life and what the city might become. - So how, can we just use this block? I don't know what it was,
12 years ago, 15 years ago, there was CBGBs, there was
a few seedy restaurants. Someone, somewhere along
the line, closed CBGBs, built this hotel. How would that work in
a right to the city, in a commons way? How would those decisions have been made? - Well the decisions right now are made by somebody looking at a
block and kind of saying, look, this is a speculative thing. If I procure the property on this block, I can actually then clean
it up and get it going and make a lot of money out of it. And so that's the main aim. If there are people there
who need to be displaced, there's quite a lot of
displacement around in Chinatown, and it's creating quite a bit of unrest. And again, what happens
is that poor people get forced out. So instead of that, you kind
of say, well, all right, maybe we should have a
collective kind of possibility of taking over buildings of this kind, turning them into, say,
limited equity co-ops where people can live in
perpetuity without necessarily having to face rising rents,
or anything of that kind. I mean, there are various
strategies in which you would start to think
about how in this area in particular you might
be able to mobilize the whole communal force
in such a way as to appropriate a neighborhood and turn it into something radically different. Now the interesting thing about this is, I know of several European
cities where people have done just that. And they've protected
areas from the developers, the result is that that
turns out to be one of the most interesting
neighborhoods in town. And so, you suddenly find... - What would be an example? - The St. Pauli district
in Hamburg, for example, where the developers got
hold of almost all of the harbor front and wrecked
it, as developers do. And there was an anarchist movement to it, which actually kind of
squatted in this whole area and produced a rather
beautiful, vibrant area, with lots of art. Now the developers are
coming in and buying up single houses and
advertising them and saying you can live in this
incredibly interesting and diverse neighborhood, where all these interesting things go on. But they didn't create any of
it, in fact, they wrecked it and much of the rest of Hamburg. So there's an interesting
way in which asserting the right to the city is
about trying to maintain a space in the city where
something different can go on, where collective decisions
can be made in such a way, it's almost like an autonomous argument. That collective, autonomous
activities can actually transform a neighborhood. And we've seen history of that happening, and has happened in the past. - Ed, I can tell from your body language, you love this idea. (laughing) - Well, it's just that the
rhetoric seems so similar to me, that the rhetoric that
was used in the formation of the Greenwich Village
historic preservation district in the 1960s. If you go back to those founding documents by very well-meaning
people who were trying to preserve the creativity
of the Greenwich Village that they had, and say
"No" to the developers, as well as say "No" to
the wrecking balls wielded by Robert Moses, what
that ended up producing was a place where townhouses
started at $8 million, right? Hedgefund managers only
can apply to live in most of the housing in the area,
your parents excepted. So I have trouble imagining
the idea of saying just "No," of just preserving
being a viable solution for long-run affordability. I think those things are desirable. I think certainly the city
has an appropriate role in land use planning that does
in fact try to push back on making sure that
every store front doesn't become a bank. I think that's an entirely
appropriate use for city power, but it needs
to be carefully done. I think certainly one thing
that we'd like to make sure is whenever you talk
about a public project on an experimental basis, to take
something over and turn it into a limited equity
cooperative, I'd like to make sure that we both agree
that we were not sanctioning the state's use of the power
of eminent domain to do that. That we were not going to say
that the state has the right to use the power, which is
so often abused, to actually expropriate private
individuals and use it for its own purposes. - I'd love the state to use
eminent domain to acquire all the foreclosed housing
and then turn 'em back to the people. (audience laughing) I mean, that would be a
great way to go, and some municipalities have
actually proposed that. - Except the more
enthusiastic we are about eminent domain, the more
sure we can be that it will be used for purposes
that you don't like, rather than purposes that you do like. - Well the fact is, it's
being used for purposes I don't like anyway, so... - Indeed, indeed. - I suppose if I'm
going to encourage it by actually using it in the other direction. - Indeed. - It breaks my heart to
end this conversation but we do have a hard stop. Because I feel like we
are so close to everyone agreeing. - Total closure. - Total agreement. (laughing) Total closure on these very simple issues. So I really do want to thank... This has been so much
fun for me to just watch this conversation and be
able to take a part of it. I just want to thank you guys so much, and I hope you all enjoyed it. (audience applauding) - Thank you. - Thank you.
