This is more subtle than ever, the residential situation. [The neighborhood depicted in this slide] is in Palm Beach county, where there’s lots of landscaping and lakes, and it shows easily that the problem with the suburbs is not necessarily that they’re ugly. Palm Beach County is beautiful. It’s full of landscaping and golf courses. The problem is that it doesn’t work, and [more specifically doesn’t work] in a very insidious way, socially. You see, this system of planning by pods has attached to it a segregation by income. Everybody that lives in this pod has paid over 350 thousand dollars for their unit. Everybody that lives in this pod has paid about 250 or less for their unit. And everybody that lives in this pod, which is quadruplexes, has paid 100 thousand for their unit. What has happened in our suburbs is that, for marketing reasons which I believe are completely artificial– this element of snobbis[hness] which is pushed, which is “If you live in here you’re better than everyone else that lives outside, and if you live here you’re better than everyone else” and it sort of pecks on– there’s a pecking order all the way down.
If you were to offer to build a 250 thousand dollar house here in this empty lot, this homeowner’s association would have a major fit, because the real estate prices going– what has been happening is that people now have a great fear of anybody who isn’t making exactly their income. We’re not talking about bringing the homeless in from downtown Palm Beach. It’s someone who has a quarter of a million dollars to buy a house not being permitted to build it. That is completely insidious. The amount– the kind of political fragmentation that is taking place in the suburbs, the dislike and suspicion that people have for each other is making it virtually impossible to govern intelligently. And that’s been built into this system and it’s completely unnecessary. Look at the old system. Basically the American system. This [slide] is [of] Georgetown. On this street you have apartment buildings on both sides of the street, which is…quite affordable housing. Over on this street you have townhouses facing each other, which is…relatively more expensive housing. Then on this street you have big houses, which is…quite expensive housing. And, finally, here on this estate, probably one of the great famous fortunes of America living in splendid quarters. All within a very, very short distance from each other, and all sharing the same public realm. This is the way we used to do it.
Now, what’s interesting or, rather, important, about mixed-use planning is that it is not just important to have workplaces and shopping places and living places. It is equally important to have a range of incomes living together because, if you don’t, you have to begin importing people of different incomes to work for each other.
A typical situation in Palm Beach County: Palm Beach County has to send busses to Brower County to pick up workers to come cook hamburgers and mow the lawn. That kind of thing is…also going on in Cape Cod.
In [the older] system there’s the theoretical possibility that the person who mows this lawn can live within walking distance of one of these apartments. And there’s another thing that’s important: It isn’t just important to have the lower economic classes integrated into the upper. It is equally important to have extremely wealthy people distributed among the neighborhoods and villages. That can be seen all over the midwest and all over the northwest. There are two types of small towns in America. Those that have one wealthy family and those that don’t. The ones that don’t have that wealthy family have no [high] culture. They’re dead ends. Those towns that have the good fortune of having had one [*plausibly-nervous coughing from audience*] tycoon. One factory owner. Those are the ones that have the beautiful parks, and museums, and cultural activities. It is necessary, to have a full society with– with a cultural component, that there be people of wealth and leisure integrated into the rest of society. Because everyone else is working too hard, and doesn’t have enough money to actually pursue culture. Only the very wealthy can. So, it’s important to build all these things together.
In Europe, in any city, it’s not only in the United States that you find that this is the traditional pattern. In Europe– the great dukes, the Popes, and so forth– any European city you see has the palaces next to very humble artisans’ dwellings. All societies have been able to integrate by income. They have not been able to integrate foreigners, necessarily. There are Turkish quarters and there are Jewish quarters in Europe. But by income, yes. Because it is necessary and intelligent, in fact, to integrate by income. It is only now that we’re inventing this ridiculous system.
This is why I find it amusing when supposedly smart people turn their noses up at watching lectures. Academia’s literary advantage died the day David Deutsch made his QC lectures available online. The Andrés Duany lecture above was uploaded to youtube in 2006. I wonder if Murray and Putnam have heard of him because, well:
He has a short wikipedia page. He also (mostly coincidentally) shares a page with Murray in a book called “The American Paradox: A History of the United States Since 1945,” which makes sense.
A lot of this reminds me of the millyard in my hometown. Dean Kamen bought a bunch of the old buildings to use as maker studios. People get mad at Trump for naming all his stuff, but DeKa is Dean Kamen. Trump seems to be a democratic immune response manifest as a bizarro hitler grenade, possibly due to an accumulation of the toxins produced when beepboops and aristocrats fuck up.
At Christmas dinner, the side of my extended family that retired to Florida from being New Jersey executives was talking about how their community center offers Spanish lessons, which is a change from before when they taught the servants English
and I’m thinking “oh how woke” when they continue that it was because as soon as they learned English they’d been leaving for better jobs