For any loyal fans of the Murphy-bed studio, don’t worry - I’ve happily passed it on to a family friend. The bed lives on and last I saw, even the rainbow rug was still in there!

Aaron and I are now living in the West Village, which is equal parts embarrassing and amazing. On the one hand, you live in constant fear of someone opening a Greek froyo shop or a L’industrie pizza outpost or a bespoke pancakery in front of your apartment and a line of tourists just completely takes over your block (on Friday and Saturday nights we are contending with the line for the club in the basement of the vegan Mexican restaurant… see what I mean!?). But on the other hand, we are incredibly well located, it’s easy for friends to come visit, we have great gym options, lots of grocery stores, and for every over-hyped restaurant (ahem… bar pisellino), there are 3 that are actually worth the value (Buvette, Commerce Inn, Malatesta)

Overall, the greatest pleasure of the West Village for me has been the vibrancy of the activity on the street. Some of it is the charming liveliness that Jane Jacobs cherished about Hudson St back in the 60s - being on a first name basis at the laundromat, a jazz combo that plays in the square at the end of the street on weekends, being close to an amazing Ace hardware. There’s also a more frenetic energy of contemporary TikTok New York: in the last couple days I’ve seen a man rolling a giant tumbleweed of wigs down Bleecker, a guy in a Spider-Man suit jumping off a fire escape, and countless 14-year old girls doing photo shoots outside of Taylor Swift’s old Cornelia St. townhouse. The neighborhood is not without its quirks, but it’s been treating us very well so far. Besides I think when I’m walking our frenchie, Gus, wearing big sunglasses, house shorts, Merrells and a ‘get out of my way’ frown, I think I’m a welcome addition to the neighborhood tableau.

If you have any familiarity with NYC real estate, you know that the West Village is STUPID EXPENSIVE. So you may be wondering how I even ended up here without some fancy new job in finance. Well, the truth is that this place was actually the cheapest apartment we could find.

The apartment search really put us through the ringer this spring - we were primarily looking at places in Brooklyn, and applied to places in Clinton Hill, Cobble Hill, and Vinegar Hill, all of which rejected our applications. All of our rejections were for different reasons: the apartment went to a different applicant, we didn’t have enough money in our bank accounts, they suspected our dog was more than 25lbs (he’s 27.5).

After three rounds of sending all of our personal financial information to random brokers we don’t know, we were just about ready to give up. That’s when we got the text from Aaron’s old super that he knew of a place in the west village that might be a good fit for us.

We went to go see it the next night, fingers crossed that this could save us from rejection hell. As soon as we step into the apartment we both give each other the ‘I could live here’ look. We know we have a winner… with reservations.

The apartment is a great size, perfect layout, a better-than-we-imagined location, and it’s only $3200 (for those not steeped in the NYC rental market there are one-bedrooms on the same block going for $6000+). It was also in a completely unacceptable condition for any self-respecting person to live in it. Two NYU seniors had been living in the apartment and completely trashed it. There was a soiled gray shag carpet in the living room, the butcher block counter was waterlogged and moldy, the kitchen cabinets were disgusting, the floor in the kitchen was so sticky that you can’t walk on it, tiles were falling off the wall in the bathroom, the paint was cracked, and there was food waste and clothes and trash just EVERYWHERE. Our dream apartment was also a nightmare. Harrowing evidence below:

However, Aaron and I sat down for a beer at Duplex after the first showing to talk things over, and we agreed to see this opportunity through. After seeing the apartment, we called the landlord and created a list of minimum requirements for us to move in - rip up the carpet, fix the floors, paint, redo the countertops, and address the water damage behind the tiles in the bathroom. The landlord knew the apartment was in rough shape and was excited to have some better tenants in there, so he was willing to work with us. Aaron and I talked about - a lot - and decided we were game to fix this place up in exchange for what could be the deal of a lifetime.

Those of you who know me know that I have a delusional sense of confidence (I mean, that’s what it takes to have a Substack), and I will say, this project pushed me to my limit. The combination of the short timeline, existential stress of not having safe housing, and the emotional challenge of tackling difficult home projects was a brutal combination. It’s one thing to move in with your boyfriend, it’s another to flip an apartment in the process.

Shit hit the fan about 6 days before move-in, when we got the keys from the landlord and it became clear that several of his promises were going to be unfulfilled - while they hired someone to rip up the shag carpet, lay vinyl in its place and redo the hardwood floors in the unit, they weren’t going to replace the kitchen counters or address anything in the bathroom. We also found out that there was real water damage behind the toilet where the tiles were falling off - it was wet to the touch. This is the part of the HGTV show where you realize the problems are worse than you thought and you’re going to have to adjust the budget.

I have to give credit to Aaron for understanding the gravity of the situation before I did, and for guiding us to the reality that we were going to have to fix this place up ourselves. And that we were going to have to complete several major projects before we move in and our stuff was in the way. So we then proceeded to have one of the craziest weeks of my life:

• We removed all of the kitchen cabinets to clean, sand, prime, and paint them. Then we replaced all of the hinges and reinstalled them in the kitchen

• We removed the butcher block counter and replaced it - we bought laminate wood veneer counters from IKEA (KARLBY) and cut, sanded, installed, and sealed them in place

• We bought stainless steel restaurant supply shelves and installed them in the kitchen (shoutout to Laura for helping with these!)

• We purchased and installed a new kitchen sink that we hooked up to the plumbing ourselves (my proudest accomplishment and my favorite feature of the entire apartment)

• We purchased an assembled an IKEA PAX closet system for the bedroom

• We bought a new toilet (only $99 at Lowe’s!) and a new bathroom vanity, both of which the landlord had installed for us

• Cleaned both Aaron’s old apartment and the new one (shoutout to Aaron’s mom for scrubbing 2 bathrooms and 2 kitchens!!!)

• Made countless trips to Lowe’s, Home Depot, IKEA, and Ace Hardware, and rented multiple U-Hauls (Yes I was driving in both lanes of the West Side Highway on PURPOSE)

• Made infinite decisions, mood boarded our new apartment, cried some tears, laughed a lot, listened to a lot of music, and said ‘babe pass me the tape measurer’ more times than I’d like to admit

• Listened to the Knicks win the NBA championship on the radio while we finished assembling our closet

In the end, we’ve ended up in a place that we really love. It’s just the right size for us, in a great location, and a price we can afford. We just had to put the effort in upfront. There’s a lot to say about the unfairness of the real estate economy in New York and the U.S. in general, and whether a tenant should put time and effort and money to make a place more habitable when they don’t have an ownership stake in the unit.

If you’ve been following this Substack for a while, you know that I’ve been thinking about the idea of real estate ownership for a while, and I’ve strongly considered buying an apartment. Although I don’t have the financial means to do that right now, Ive learned a lot about what it looks like to take ownership over a space and leave it better than we found it.

But in this case, it’s worked out pretty well so far. By doing the work ourselves, we only had to spend ~$2500 on improvements we can’t take with us when we leave. When you consider the fact that we were ready to sign on apartments in the $4750 - $5250 range, and we were collectively paying $5850 in rent between our two apartments, we recapture that in rent savings in just a couple months. It certainly was a big and expensive project, but in this moment in our lives, it just made sense. We still don’t have financial equity, but we created value for ourselves in the form of an apartment that we love to live in and plan to stay in for a long time. It was refreshing to take a break from thinking about an apartment as a financial product with returns and start thinking about it as a place to live.

To that point, my favorite moment was when the landlord, who grew up in this apartment until he was 7, came into the apartment after we had been there for only a week and said “wow you guys have really made this place a home”.

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City Speak #56

Bennett Capozzi

In 2024, the bus network cost $4.9 billion to operate - but we were left with the question - is that a lot? It sounds like a lot, but in the context of other major NYC services, it doesn’t actually seem like that much. For example, the NYC Department of Education budget for the 2025 - 2026 school year is $42.8 billion.

So my takeaway was that we need a better metric to understand how efficiently the MTA is running bus service. This will help inform our opinion on whether free bus is a smart policy for New York City.

Before we dive into this discussion, I just want to do a quick austerity mindset check to make sure we aren’t over-indexing on cost-effectiveness in our analysis. While it’s important that our public services are delivered effectively and cost-consciously, it’s important to remember that these are inherently public services, and public good and efficiency are often at odds. For example, the MTA has an obligation to provide extensive coverage as a public good - this means that the MTA has an obligation to keep fares low and routes frequent in places even where routes are not making money. Because the transportation does not exist solely to earn revenue, it exists to facilitate mobility for New Yorkers, allowing them to affordably access jobs, friends, family, fun, and the city that they love.

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OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now. The transit industry has two standard metrics for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a system: (1) the cost per mile of service provided, and (2) the cost per hour of service provided. If you’re not familiar with how transit reporting works, a single mile of service is the equivalent of a single vehicle traveling a single mile. So if an agency has 100 vehicles on the road and they all travel one mile, the agency reports 100 miles of service. An hour of service is calculated the same way (100 vehicles X 1 hour = 100 hours of service).

I dug into federal reports on NYC bus service and found that the New York City bus system currently costs $49/mile and $301/hour to operate.1 The MTA reports its different bus divisions and service types separately, so we can see how these costs break down by service:

One of the most surprising things about this table is that the cost per mile does not vary significantly between services - I hypothesized that we would see higher costs for bus rapid transit and commuter buses because they offer a more robust level of service, but they largely have the same cost per mile as the regular shmegular bus. This indicates that the factors driving bus operation costs are not really about the service itself. In other words, running better and more efficient service may allow you to optimize at the edges, but many major cost drivers are external: union contracts, political priorities, vehicle maintenance, to name a few.

So let’s see how the MTA buses stack up against other major agencies as well as rail service costs in NYC:

Again, I think one of the most striking takeaways is the lack of immediately clear patterns in the cost data, and some surprising findings:

1. New York City has the most expensive labor market in the U.S., so I expected it to have significantly higher costs per mile and per hour than other large agencies. However, Boston’s MBTA is higher on both metrics (some more writing on last year’s union negotiation here)

2. LA Metro and CTA (Chicago) have cost-efficiency metrics that are orders of magnitude lower despite being large systems and expensive metros in their own right.

3. The commuter-heavy Long Island Railroad and Metro North services mimic the patterns of the commuter bus network, where there is a low cost per mile but a very high cost per hour of service.

4. And perhaps the most surprising takeaway is that the infrastructure-heavy NYC subway system has a lower cost per mile and per hour than buses in the city.

So what have we learned from this investigation of cost-effectiveness on the MTA bus network? First, it’s clear that bus operations are relatively expensive when compared to other agencies and local subway service (although not the most expensive, which is surprising). Second, these costs seem to be driven by yet-undiscovered factors and cannot be easily explained by the type of service, size of the agency, and local labor market conditions. In any case, I think the high costs of MTA bus service provision weaken the argument that fare-free service makes sense for this system. However, our journey is far from over! In the next edition, I’ll be looking at the demand side - fare collection and ridership - to better understand the full financial picture for the MTA bus system.

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Bennett Capozzi

City Speak #54

When we think of buses in NYC, we typically picture blue and white Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) buses; however, the bus network in New York City is multi-layered and complex, with a variety of operators - both public and private - offering bus-based transportation options to the city’s residents and visitors. Public bus operators include the MTA, New Jersey Transit (NJ Transit), Westchester’s Bee-Line Bus, and Nassau County’s Nassau Inter-County Express (NICE Bus). Private operators include commuter shuttles like CoachUSA; intercity buses operated by Greyhound, FlixBus, MegaBus, Lucky Star, et al; and dollar vans that fill gaps in the public bus network.

Since the proposal for fare-free buses focuses on MTA buses (as the MTA is the transit agency over which the Mayor of NYC has the most influence), we will look more closely at MTA bus service in this deep dive. For the uninitiated, the MTA operates the largest public transit network in the Western Hemisphere: in 2024, the system had a ridership of more than 2 billion.1 A little more than 400 million (~20%) of these rides occurred on buses. For context, everyone in the United States could ride the bus once, and you would still be 50 million rides short of the annual MTA bus ridership.

To support this level of ridership, the MTA operates a massive fleet of 5,800 buses that travel over 150 million miles a year. And the coverage across the city is quite impressive:

However, it’s also worth noting that not all of the MTA’s buses are created equal - there are five primary types of bus routes available to riders:

• Local buses: This is the normal, plain old bus. It stops at every stop on the route (as long as someone is boarding or alighting there), and riders pay on the bus when they board. Base fare is $3.

• Limited buses (LTD): LTD service was extensively rolled out in the ‘90s and 2000s. In my opinion, the most confusing feature of the bus network; they look like local buses, except for the “LTD” signage on the front. These buses run on local routes, with fare payment on board, but they only stop at high-ridership stops along the route. Base fare is $3.

• Select Bus Service (SBS): SBS was introduced in 2008 to provide a faster, more reliable alternative to local bus service. These buses make fewer stops, travel on priority routes, and have fare payment terminals on the sidewalk that allow riders to pre-pay for their ride and board at all doors. Base fare is $3.

• Rush Buses: This new route type was introduced in the 2025 Queens Bus Network redesign to optimize service on feeder bus routes to subway stations. Similar to LTD, these buses look like local buses and have fare payment on board. However, they provide a hybrid service, making local stops far from the subway and limited stops closer to hubs. Base fare is $3.

• Express Buses: Introduced in 1968, Express buses look like coach buses and are designed for longer trips that run between boroughs. Many operate only during weekday rush hours and focus on serving commuters who live in parts of the outer boroughs with limited subway access. Base fare is $7.75.

So what does it cost to provide all of this bus service? It’s a bit hard to say, as the MTA’s public operating expense dashboard does not break down service costs by service type (bus vs. subway vs. paratransit, etc.).2 It makes sense that the budget isn’t always broken down this way, as any large transit agency has shared resources across different services - for example, a vehicle maintenance facility that repairs both buses and paratransit vehicles, or a data analysis team that pulls reports on both subway and bus service. However, the MTA reports an Annual Operating Expense figure by service type to the National Transit Database (NTD) that serves as a good starting point. Here’s the breakdown of the costs reported in 2024:

In 2024, MTA bus service came with a nearly $4.9 billion price tag. This is about 75% the cost of running the subways, and more than 2x the cost of operating LIRR, and more than 2.5x the cost of operating Metro-North Service. So it costs a lot of money to run. In comparison, the MTA collected only $814 million in buses fares in 2024, meaning its fare-to-cost ratio, or operating ratio, was 16.66%. In other words, bus fares are currently covering less than 17% of the cost of service.

But what does this really mean? Is this a reasonable cost for 400 million bus rides? Is this a strong fare-to-cost ratio? If fares cover 17% of bus service costs, how is the other 83% covered? And how much should we care about cost-effectiveness when evaluating fare-free buses as a policy in NYC? I’m crunching the numbers right now, but this newsletter is already going on far too long, so you’ll have to wait until the next post to find out… ; )

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Before I wrap up, let’s check in on what we’ve learned today:

• The MTA bus network is big. Actually, it’s huge. And when comparing to other fare-free bus programs, we should be mindful that scale matters. An agency with 100 buses and one with 5,800 buses operate very differently, with different priorities.

• The NYC bus network is not monolithic; it is a complex, layered environment with multiple providers, service types, and fare structures. When we talk about fare-free buses, we need to be clear about which types of bus service we are talking about!

• Bus transportation in NYC is not designed to maximize profit; in fact, providing bus service costs the MTA a lot of money but yields very little revenue (comparatively, obviously $814 million is a whole lotta money). Fares are also not structured to maximize profit - buses that get you to your destination faster (SBS, LTD) cost the same as local buses.

As we continue to dive into the question of fare-free buses, we’ll keep all of this in mind. In the meantime, here’s some additional reading:

• New York Times OpEd on how free bus will have positive outcomes on the legal system

• Alon Levy writes in Pedestrian Observations about why fare-free bus is a bad policy for NYC because it de-integrates bus and subway fares
  

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City Speak #53

Bennett Capozzi

2

If you dig into the dashboard, you will find that MTA does report a set of expenses under the agency ‘MTA Bus Company’, which would imply that these are the full costs of providing bus service. However, the MTA Bus Company is a subsidiary created in 2004 to consolidate seven private bus franchises in NYC (primarily Queens), and represents only a portion of MTA’s bus service - the rest lives within New York City Transit (NYCT) under New York City Bus and the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transportation Operating Authorty. Please see the graphic created by Reddit user Donghoon for a simplified org chart of the MTA:

The idea that the bus could (or should) be free in major metropolitan systems has entered mainstream planning discourse with a shocking rapidity. I first encountered fare-free bus systems during my time at Via, when small agencies began dropping fares after COVID. Many systems found that, with reduced ridership and increased risks of driver-passenger contact during the pandemic, it wasn’t cost-effective to continue collecting fares. In the years following the pandemic, some large agencies also allocated funding from federal, state, and municipal sources to pursue free-bus pilots. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) in Boston and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in New York City each ran time-limited pilots on a small number of routes. The Kansas City Area Transit Authority (KCATA) made its entire system fare-free from 2020 to 2025. And now, fare-free buses are a key policy priority for the mayor of New York City, which hosts the most extensive transit system in the United States.

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Despite its political prominence, I’ve found this issue quite polarizing, even in progressive urban planning circles. To supporters, removing fares is a no-brainer, essential to building an equitable transportation system and ensuring economic empowerment for New Yorkers at all income levels; to detractors, it is a colossal waste of money that will hamper transit agencies’ ability to provide reliable service; and to many, the fare-free bus proposal has devolved into such a tangled mess of discourse that they don’t know what to think. It’s no surprise that the issue has become a political logjam at the state level.

As a complex, politically sensitive, and provocative planning topic, it is the perfect subject for a deep dive in City Speak. Together, we’ll look at the topic of fare-free buses from a series of different angles, such as:

• The responsibilities of politicians vs. transit agencies for fare-free bus service

• What it costs to operate bus service in New York City and how it is funded

• The nuances of the bus network in NYC

• Governance structures of the MTA and other similar transit agencies

• The social, economic, and environmental impacts of fare-free buses

• The political coalition behind fare-free buses

• The successes and lessons learned from recent prominent fare-free bus pilots

• Models of free municipal social services and how they apply to transit

• Other stuff that I realize is super important as I write this

I’ve developed my own opinions on fare-free buses over the years, but I’ll keep them to myself to avoid muddying the waters. However, I will credit much of my thinking on the matter to professional experience with transit agenceis and work undertaken during my Master’s Program, particularly in the Urban Transportation Planning and Policy class with former MA Secretary of Transportation (and free-bus advocate) Jim Aloisi. All opinions expressed in this substack are my own, but I hope to do justice to these discussions in my writing.

There’s much more to explore together, but as a starting point, I will offer an initial explanation for why the concept of fare-free buses is so maddeningly controversial. The concept of fare-free buses is inherently paradigm-shifting.1 In other words, making fare-free buses work is not just about finding a new funding source to replace lost farebox revenue; it requires us to fundamentally rethink how we manage, prioritize, and value bus transit in our cities.

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City Speak #52

Bennett Capozzi

After a busy fall (with very few blog posts from me… yikes!) I’m happy to share that I have started a new job as a Senior Account Manager at Swiftly.

Swiftly is a transit technology platform that develops tools to help transit agencies manage their rail and bus networks. Swiftly’s products enable agencies to do the following:

• Provide accurate real-time passenger information: Swiftly has a proprietary algorithm that provides accurate information to riders about the real-time location of buses and trains and estimates for their arrival at future stops. In cities where Swiftly is the real-time data provider, these tools power apps many readers may already use for trip planning (Google Maps, Transit, etc.).

• Review and assess system performance: Swiftly collects data on trips across an agency’s network to provide performance insights on individual trips and across the system. This enables the teams that plan and schedule routes to see more in-depth information on on-time performance, run-times, and vehicle speeds so they can make informed decisions about future operations.

• Manage live operations: Swiftly’s live operations dashboard allows dispatchers to track vehicles in real-time, identify and respond to issues, and make service adjustments to facilitate smooth operations.

In my role, I’ll be working with existing Swiftly customers, helping them get the most value from the tools they already use and identifying opportunities to further integrate with the Swiftly product suite. I don’t know exactly which agencies I’ll be working with yet, but looking forward to going deep with these customers and learning more about how they work.

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It was a tough decision to leave my last job at Kyanite Partners, which was a more traditional urban planning role focused on economic analysis and the development of policy initiatives for local governments, economic development organizations, and community groups. What I loved about that work is that the questions we were tackling were so open-ended, such as: “What economic development programs can attract residents to this county?” or “Which real estate projects will be most impactful for this region?” While it was a consulting role, there was so much to chew on - in many ways, it felt like applied urban planning research.

Even though my new job is more specifically focused on the intersection of technology and planning than general planning issues, I’m confident there will be plenty of tricky questions to grapple with. Namely, “Is the bus still running?”

Oh, and for anyone who is wondering, the apartment hunt has been on pause for a bit. Primarily because I started dating someone, and well… it’s been going well enough that I’d prefer not to be locked into a studio for the next 5 years. The pay bump from my new job has also impacted my eligibility for certain programs… but hopefully once I’ve settled into my new role you’ll hear more about that!

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City Speak #51

Bennett Capozzi

And even while they are on vacation in Italy, my team is working around the clock - this week my Mom sent me a listing for a studio in Brooklyn Heights. It’s in my price range and also in a super nice neighborhood (objectively, and also on the scale of the neighborhoods I could conceivably afford to buy in).

In fact it’s emblematic of a classic set of tradeoffs: in exchange for a more central location, I have to accept less space. And this is generally true across the apartments I’ve been looking at. If I want to find a 1 bedroom apartment (and preferably one on the larger side) in my price range, then I need to be looking in Crown Heights or Ditmas Park. However, if I’m willing to go for a smaller place, it would open up other neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn Heights or Fort Greene (there is also a lot of supply in my price range on the East Side of Manhattan, but I’m not sure if I’m emotionally ready to consider that).

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More importantly, this trade-off is non-linear. In some neighborhoods there are only ~studios~ available in my price range. For many people, and probably many readers of this substack, a studio is a complete non-negotiable. And for the uninitiated, a studio is like an apartment, except there are no doors. Except for the door to the bathroom, if you’re lucky. All of this is to say that we can add some nuance to the theory that apartment hunting is an exercise in trading distance from the center of town for space. Because at some point there is a precipitous drop off in quality of living space as we get to studio-only territory. We can call this the “studio cliff”:

Now many of you are probably aware that I already live in a studio, or as some people have called it, a micro-studio. And to be honest, I totally love it. So I know that I am capable of making these kinds of trade-offs. The problem with homeownership is that it is long-term. Am I long-term capable of living in a single room? Could I do it for 3 years? For 5 years? Forever?

The question also becomes about potential changes to my life circumstances - what if I want to get a dog? Or move in with a partner? Or have kids? All of these things that seemed like nebulous future realities are suddenly thrust into the foreground and must be examined in the harsh light of a poorly staged studio apartment. And due to the restrictive nature of co-ops (more difficult to resell, inability to rent out) these questions are uniquely pressing.

I’ve been looking at places for a few months and I must say that I still don’t have an answer. Maybe I would do it for the right apartment? Could a large studio work? Or is it really about being able to close a door? Potentially the hardest part of buying an apartment is all the soul-searching it entails.

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City Speak #50

Bennett Capozzi

As my followers know, I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect co-op in Brooklyn, and by “perfect” I mean something that a single-income 30-year-old earning less than $100K annually can afford. And in the last couple weeks, a seemingly perfect 1-bed 1-bath co-op in Brooklyn Heights appeared on my Redfin searches. And the algorithm was pushing this one hard. I got at least 3 automated emails about a “$395K Brooklyn home for you”.

Looking at the listing, this listing has all the classic signs of being too-good-to-be-true. It’s two blocks from the Borough Hall station in the original gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights. The unit is on a sunny southwest facing corner with windows on two sides. Not only is there a “king-sized” bedroom but also a small home office connected to the living room by French doors. The broker took the time to list the brands of all the light fixtures in the apartment (Serena and Lily, West Elm) and the kitchen even has a dishwasher, which is a luxury so preposterous I would never even dare to list it as a must-have. The entire thing reads like a stream of consciousness real estate literotica.

But the Faulknerian density of the list of benefits for the apartment reads like a warning sign: hidden in that dense paragraph of apartment perfection is the catch: “The co-op's land lease expires in December 2043 and is reason the apartment is priced so far under-market for a typical one bedroom.” Excuse me, what? The expiring land lease means that the owner of the unit does not have a guaranteed right to live in the unit after 2043. More than that, a bank will not issue you a mortgage to buy this property because of the short timeline for occupancy (you can’t get a 30-year mortgage on a home you can only live in for 18 years). So if you want to prepay your rent for the next couple decades, I’ve got the spot for you :)

But this raises the question - what is a land-lease? This is an arrangement in which the co-op shareholders own the building that they live in but not the land underneath, which belongs to a separate owner. The land lease is an agreement between the two entities that allows the co-op to occupy the site for a very long lease term (typically 50 - 100 years).

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Even for the crazy world of New York real estate, this is quite rare - there are roughly only 100 land-lease buildings in the city. However, it appears that the expiration of the lease terms on these buildings does not necessarily mean the co-op owners need to vacate. Like most things in life, it is the opening of a negotiation. According to StreetEasy, there have been no instances of co-op owners becoming tenants or evicted after a land-lease runs out in NYC, but solutions to the land-lease question can come at a high cost. One co-op on the Upper West Side had to cobble together $185 million to buy the land underneath their building.

So it seems like the right buyer could take a calculated risk here: if you have the full purchase price sitting around, you could get a great deal on an apartment in Brooklyn Heights (amortized over 18 years, it comes out to $2K a month, which is much better than rent for a 1-bedroom in that neighborhood). And if the lease renegotiation is successful, you could have a much more valuable asset in 20 years.

It appears that the best way to get a deal in Brooklyn Heights is to already be rich. So THAT’S the catch…

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City Speak #49

Bennett

At first, I thought I could just ask some of my questions to the brokers that were showing me apartments to gather knowledge of how to understand the market, evaluate my options, and finance my purchase. It turns out that is not what brokers do. Mostly, their job is to unlock the door (especially when they’ve been hired by the seller to do exactly that). When I asked a broker about whether the co-op board of a unit I was looking at would be open to HUD-sponsored financing, he frowned and asked me whether that was something I really needed, or if I could just use a regular mortgage product. He admitted that he didn’t really know what the co-op board thought about that, but it appeared that his personal opinion was that this would be more of a hassle than it was worth.

Unfortunately, for the unit in question, some level of down payment support would certainly be required. In a follow-up email, the broker insisted that I “don’t let the process get in the way of buying”; however, the 1-bedroom apartment I was touring was listed for $560K and required at least a 20% down payment (also known as a minimum payment of $112,000). So I wouldn’t say that the process was really stopping me from purchasing the home, but rather the fact that the down payment was nearly triple what I could pull together from my savings. Nonetheless, I reached out to mortgage lender he put me in touch with to see how far into the “process” I could get.

Talking to the mortgage lender was somewhat more productive than my conversations with brokers, since he specializes in financing my purchase and could walk me through the costs in more detail. The conversation we had was focused on what I could afford: what kind of savings I had for a down payment, what kind of monthly payment I felt comfortable with, and so on. Then the strangest thing happened… I found that I was rounding up all my numbers: giving him an aspirational down payment if I saved a bit more or got a big bonus this year and signing myself up for a monthly payment that would only make sense if I got a raise or took more consulting work. We ran the numbers for a $330,000 1-bedroom I was interested in based on my ~optimistic~ estimates, and we determined that I could afford it. I sent over a few bank statements and paychecks, and got a pre-approval letter from the bank.

It was exciting news, but the ease at which I got pre-approved and the lack of rigor in the process was also nerve-wracking - what if I actually got approved for a mortgage that I couldn’t afford? Isn’t the mortgage lender’s incentive to give me as large of a mortgage as possible? Was getting the loan that I wanted actually going to cause more problems that it solves? Is being responsible for a mortgage even more stressful than being responsible for rent?

So after all of these conversations I found that I still had a lot of gaps in my knowledge. One major gap was in my understanding of an “all-cash offer”, which I thought meant that you needed to have the full purchase price of the home in cash and that you would not even need to have a mortgage. In other words, it was an option for wealthy people to buy homes without needing to take out a loan. While it may sometimes be the case that an all-cash purchase does not require a loan, it can also mean that the buyer promises to pay the full value of the home at the close but they can still secure financing separately. So the buyer is exposed to more risk by making the commitment to pay the full value before securing a lender, but it makes their offer more attractive by speeding up the closing process because you have decoupled the home sale from the lender underwriting and approval process.

If your head is spinning, so is mine. That’s why I reached out to the Mutual Housing Association of New York, a non-profit based in Brooklyn, to help me navigate the process. Unlike a broker or a mortgage lender, their paycheck is not contingent on making the sale of the home, and so their incentives are not to encourage me to buy in the same way. Their program includes a 2-hour first time homebuyer course that has a special focus on the types of mortgage products available to people in my situation, as well as a 1:1 advisor that will work with me to identify properties and facilitate the homebuying process.

But you’ll hear more about them in my next post.

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City Speak #48

Bennett

For those of you who know me well, it may not surprise you that I’m obsessing over trying to buy an apartment these days. As my friend Adrian frequently tells me: “if I hang out with you and your siblings for long enough, the conversation inevitably turns toward real estate”. And she’s right - we do have a dream of all buying a brownstone together and living on separate floors. So I guess you can say that the desire to own runs deep with all of us. Maybe our parents instilled us with the values of a sensible real estate deal, or it just runs in our blood.

In any case, home ownership is something I’ve been thinking about lately now that I’m out of grad school and the long arc of my career and adulthood are stretched out before me. And since buying a brownstone is not really attainable for the siblings at the moment (shockingly we don’t have the money for a $4 million house right now) I’ve been looking at what it would take to go it alone.

Now it may be the case this home ownership dream is exactly that: a dream. For starters, I’m a very atypical buyer: I’m a single 30-year-old man that doesn’t have the level of stability or certainty around my living situation that would ensure I could stay in a home long enough for it to accrue in value. For example, if I get a job in another city or want to move in with a partner (your guess on if this ever happens is as good as mine), then I may need to leave my apartment.

Second, I live in a rent-stabilized studio apartment, which means that my landlord is not able to raise my rent significantly year-over-year (the word in the building is that this year’s rent increase is going to be 2.75%). It may be ~small~ but knowing that I can indefinitely afford to live alone in this city is a rare gift, and something that gives me the opportunity to rent longer term than people in non-rent-stabilized units.

Finally, I just don’t really make enough money to be competitive in the contemporary Brooklyn real estate market. I make $93,000 at my current job, plus some money through web development consulting on the side (let us know if you need a website!). This is objectively a lot of money in the U.S., where the average individual income was $42,220 in 2023, less than half of what I make.1 However, it’s unfortunately not a lot in the New York metropolitan area, where the median 1-person household brings in $113,400 a year.2

Now I know you are probably thinking that I really have no business trying to buy an apartment, but I have some savings and an offer of parental support that have put this dream somewhat in reach. In a city where people’s parents are regularly subsidizing their lifestyles (especially when it comes to home purchases), I think it’s important to come clean about the fact that my parents have offered to help me with a down payment. At this moment, I’m being prideful about it and have not taken them up on the offer, but it’s something that I am considering. I also do not have any student debt, since my parents paid for my college tuition and I was able to pay for my own graduate education thanks to the generous tuition coverage at MIT.

There are also some public programs for first time homebuyers that may be difference-makers for me, including downpayment assistance programs and mortgage products with favorable interest rates. I haven’t quite figured out how to navigate these policies yet, but I might as well put this urban planning degree to good use!

In any case, my financial situation has limited my options to a very specific set of real estate options in Brooklyn: mainly, co-ops and income-restricted properties. While these properties are more affordable, they are severely limited in their ability to generate income: they are usually not allowed to be rented out, and are not allowed to accrue in value at the rate of a condo or apartment that is not subject to the same rules and regulations. Looking at these properties has been an interesting test of my values, particularly my belief that housing is primarily about shelter, not about stockpiling personal wealth. But it’s one thing to read Susanne Schindler’s case for limited-equity co-ops, and another to realize that you won’t make any money off the sale of your home in 5 years.

I haven’t figured out if this is right move for me financially or personally just yet, but I have started to work with a local non-profit that assists first-time homebuyers with the process. I’ll keep you all updated with what I learn :)

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City Speak #47

Bennett

I am interrupting my regularly scheduled programming to ask you, the readers of this substack (paragons of taste that you are) an important question: what do you like about this newsletter? What made you click subscribe and what keeps you from unsubscribing?

(please don’t unsubscribe)

I am seeking your advice and guidance because I am applying to the Urban Design Forum’s New City Critics fellowship, and as part of the application, I want to capture what makes my voice unique.

So I thought that there would be no better way to find out than by asking you, the readers!

So tell me, why do you like this newsletter? And if you have any favorite posts that I should include as a writing sample, let me know! Also if we don’t know each other personally, tell me a bit about yourself!

xoxo,
Bennett

To explain my absence, I, like most people in my life, will be choosing to blame Trump. As I discussed in previous posts, the widespread axing of federal programs and budgets has caused a chaos spiral in the world of urban planning: in some cases existing projects and grants are being cut, but the bigger issue is the lack of future federal dollars coming to fund city and state projects (and by extension, the consultants like me who work on them). What this means in the short term is that agencies around the country are all releasing proposals at once, getting the work that was funded by the Biden Administration out the door. So we have been in a mad dash to respond to as many as possible before the money runs out, and that’s why I’ve been too busy to write.

But that’s enough insider baseball. What I actually came here to tell you about is the fact that the block few streets over from my apartment has 47 manhole covers on a single block. I first got the tip-off about this from a friend who is working with a water systems non-profit, so I started to investigate. As I walked around counting the manholes, I noticed that not only were there dozens of them, but that they were aggressively sited, including on the sidewalk and even encroaching on some front yards. And for the skeptics out there, I’m not even counting the Con Edison manholes, which are for electric infrastructure and not for water (ConEd is one of the electrical companies in NYC).

Now I know it’s sort of hard to have a sense of these things to understand if this actually a lot of manholes, so I will give you a comparison: the next block over only has 9. So yes, this seems to be a lot. There also are different types of manhole covers with different inscriptions. For example, I saw, “Catskill Water Gates”, “Catskill Water Meter”, “Catskill Water Bypass”, “Catskill Water Manhole”, “DWS”, “NYC Sewer”, and just a plain hexagonal design.

I started doing some research online about what all these different manhole types mean, and while I was able to find information about the abbreviations (DWS = Department of Water Supply), the designs, and a collection of photos of all the different types in NYC, I couldn’t easily find out what makes a meter different from a bypass or a manhole. Even though the information was limited (which I think is related to post-9/11 fears about threats to the water system) we can intuit based on all the references to the water system and the Catskills, that below this block there is some major infrastructure related to the water supply of New York City, a massive system connecting the city to the Catskill and Croton watersheds.

The NYC aqueduct network, which spans over 100 miles, relies 95% on the power of gravity to transfer the water from the source reservoirs to buildings in New York City, with only ~5% of the supply needing to be pumped to its destination. The system achieves this by relying on the same principle that makes siphons work: that a liquid sent through a tube will always return to its source elevation regardless of the path of that tube. Since source elevation of the Catskill and Croton watersheds are far above the elevation of NYC, water is able to travel in tunnels hundreds of feet underground and still return to the surface in the city. In fact, at the point where it crosses the Hudson River, the Catskill Aqueduct reaches 1,100 feet below sea level. Here’s a diagram of the elevation change of the Delaware and Catskill Aqueducts:

When the water supply reaches the Hillview Reservoir in the Bronx, it is transferred to the “city tunnels” (City Tunnel 1, City Tunnel 2, and the recently completed City Tunnel 3), which are 300 - 500 ft underground and bring the fresh water to its final destination. Here’s a diagram showing how deep that is compared to subways, building foundations, and the East River:

As I was continuing to research the city water tunnels, I found it increasingly hard to find information on the specifics of their routes, and the information that I could find was buried deep in technical documents about the proposals for Water Tunnel #3. So you can consider this search far from over. However, it appears that I may live very close to the point where Water Tunnel #2 reconnects with Water Tunnel #1 in Brooklyn:

I’m not going to reveal the exact location on here because the internet is forever and I don’t want the NYPD knocking on my door, but I’m guessing that these manholes are related to this critical juncture in the water supply system that is essential for providing New Yorkers with safe and healthy drinking water. Or in other words, keeping New Yorkers alive. Water is such a simple and essential part of our existence that it’s rare that we give it any thought. But perhaps there is nothing more important to the survival of the city than fresh water, and though much of the infrastructure that supports it is invisible, it feels profound observe this important node in the massive system of tunnels that travel over 100 miles. It also shows us how something so boring, like manholes, are clues to the systems that support our lives.

I have to end this here because this post has been going on for much too long, but I assure you that I have only scratched the surface of the story of the water supply in New York City and if you’re lucky, there will be more! Here’s some of the things I wanted to cover but didn’t get to: In the 1990s, New York City struck a deal with the counties in the Catskill watershed to limit development to protect the drinking water; there are several former reservoirs in Manhattan, including on Chambers Street and in Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park; the first attempt to fix NYC’s water supply problem was in 1799, when the city gave exclusive rights to supply water to NYC to Aaron Burr’s Manhattan Company - the company did a terrible job of supplying water to the city and was replaced by the Croton reservoir in 1837, but they did use the profits from this venture to start Manhattan Bank, which is the oldest predecessor institution of today’s Chase Bank.

As a parting gift, here’s some engineering drawings of manholes:

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Bennett

City Speak #46

According to the New York Times, you could get a brownstone in Carroll Gardens for $20,000 in 1970. This brownstone in the same neighborhood is now listed for $9.9 million. How did we get here? And is historic preservation partly to blame?

I recently attended a talk hosted by Citygroup on two movements that have had a deep impact on the contemporary urban fabric of NYC: historic preservation and community-based real estate development. These two movements, which emerged simultaneously during the 1960s and 1970s, show how different communities addressed the failures of mid-century urban development and how today’s planners are grappling with a changing urban landscape.

First, some background:

The historic preservation movement was created as a reaction to the demolition of major buildings that represented New York City’s architectural heritage, most famously the original Penn Station. The push for historic preservation was led by wealthy, often white residents who were chiefly concerned with preserving the aesthetic characteristics of the city’s buildings.

Community development corporations, on the other hand, were primarily started by residents in low-income neighborhoods who were trying to find ways to finance the redevelopment of properties that had decayed due to abandonment and extreme neglect. Instead of preserving the aesthetics of a community, they focused on preserving a social life and culture in a neighborhood left to decay by city managers.

Whether they focused on aesthetics or culture, historic preservation and community development leaders sought to preserve features of their urban landscape that they felt to be fading away. However, they are also products of a specific time in NYC’s history, namely one in which the decay and demolition of buildings was rampant. In the 1970s, the city was giving buildings away for $1, making them either easy to demolish (cue the historic preservationists) or cheap for community developers to rehab. But the city has changed a lot since the 1970s, raising the question: how useful are these tools today?

The elephant in the room is that the NYC real estate market has changed drastically in the last 50 years. In June 2022, the average sale price for a single-family brownstone in Manhattan was $7 million. Now, there is a crisis of affordability rather than an oversupply of a crumbling building stock. Any dilapidated multifamily building is now a gold mine.

This real estate boom has now priced community developers out of certain neighborhoods. One of the speakers at the Citygroup talk, representing a community development corporation that uses Low Income Housing Tax Credits and state subsidies to build projects at affordable rates, admitted that they can no longer build projects in Manhattan and are focusing on the outer boroughs.1 However, there are not significant protections in place to prevent housing costs from rising significantly in the outer boroughs, as they have been for the past several decades. Existing housing subsidy programs are not enough to support affordable housing development in Manhattan and this problem is spreading throughout all neighborhoods of the city.

There is an argument to be made that the historic preservation movement is now exacerbating this affordability crisis. Some neighborhoods with sweeping landmark protections over them as “historic districts” including Greenwich Village, SoHo, and large swaths of brownstone Brooklyn have become some of the most expensive in the city. While these neighborhoods are important facets of an architecturally diverse and historic city, they are also severely limited in the type of development that can take place, and the strict regulation makes renovation particularly expensive. This calls into question the applicability of our historic preservation framework in the current environment because while it protects an architectural heritage, it is contributing to the displacement of residents and the cultural heritage that the community development movement sought to preserve.

As the city changes, these tools for urban preservation and development seem out of place. While historic preservation is essential for maintaining a city with character, we also must find meaningful opportunities to develop the 500,000 additional housing units NYC will need by 2032. Community development corporations and other mission-oriented developers should also be able to build affordable housing throughout the city - not just in the outskirts. Affordability is one of the primary problems of our contemporary housing landscape, and we must update our toolkit to address it.

The solutions to our problems may need to be drastic - one of the attendees at the Citygroup talk pointed out that the conditions of our current economy and housing shortage are more akin to the 1940s, not the 1970s. This was a time in which a major demand for housing led the government to build nationwide public housing at an industrial scale. Ironically, the slum clearance and public housing policies of this time period are exactly what prompted the historic preservation and community development movement in the first place.

When it comes to housing, history feels like it’s on loop. But this is exactly why we study it right? To do what we can to prevent ourselves from repeating it. While historic preservation and community development feel ill-equipped for our current moment, they can teach us valuable lessons about the power of place, the importance of community-based processes for development, and the value of creating an urban fabric that feels like home. As we seek to address our industrial-scale housing problem, we should keep these lessons close.

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Bennett

City Speak #45

On a recent trip to Palm Springs I was admiring the natural flora and fauna and I came across these absolutely delightful cell towers that are “disguised” to look like palm trees. I’m originally from the Northeast, so I’m familiar with the supertall “trees” that are actually cell towers, but I have rarely encountered this desert variety.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive on their history, check out this Vox article. The short version is that as the need for cell service has become more embedded in our daily lives, there has been an expansion of the infrastructure necessary to support it - even in places that we consider too naturally beautiful or historic to contain a big gray metal tower. So now there are entire companies that specialize in camouflaging cell towers, such as Larson Camouflage, which was acquired for ~$20 million in 2019.

I think these are funny because they’re typically not fooling anyone, but a lot of time and effort went into designing and building this fake palm tree. And they are reportedly more costly when they are more realistic - verisimilitude ain’t cheap. But at the end of the day, the impossibility of the task - to be simultaneously a palm tree and a cell tower - is so ridiculous and self defeating that I now find these towers to be endearing in their own right. It’s like… “Dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought / That could think of the dreamer that thought…”

These “trees” are a particularly whimsical example of the ways that architecture has been used to hide unsightly infrastructure from the landscape: Jefferson famously built cabins for his enslaved workers into the side of a hill, so you couldn’t see them from the main house at Monticello. And as we discussed a few weeks ago, historic districts enforce the preservation of the centuries-old character of neighborhoods through the use of particular exterior building styles and materials - even when the homes are filled with modern appliances. And this building in Cambridge that looks like a school is actually filled with Verizon servers.

Aesthetics are also political. Our obsession with hiding infrastructure for aesthetic purposes has also hampered progress on shifting toward greener forms of energy production. For example, Cape Wind cancelled plans for the development of an offshore wind farm five miles south of Cape Cod after over fifteen years of opposition from the likes of William Koch, who claimed the turbines would be “visual pollution”. Similarly, as large solar arrays become more common and are being sited on natural and agricultural land (as opposed to just the California desert) opposition to their deployment is becoming increasingly organized. Even though a natural gas plant is far worse for the environment than a wind turbine or solar array, the fact that it can be placed out of sight and out of mind makes it much easier to build and operate.

As we continue to transition to clean energy, much of it will be at utility scale - this means that this infrastructure will become more ubiquitous and at higher risk of becoming unsightly. Much like with cell phone towers, this raises an aesthetic question. I wonder about the ways we will apply the same camouflage techniques to this infrastructure as it proliferates. Or whether camouflage is out of aesthetic fashion altogether. Potentially, like the telephone wires in most American towns, we will just get used to it. For what it’s worth, Palm Springs has plenty of wind turbines, and none of them are hidden.

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Bennett

City Speak #44

As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to hack away at the United States federal government, I am shocked by how much the people running the government seem to well, hate the government. In fact, the general consensus among the leadership of the Trump Administration seems to be that it would be best if the government didn’t exist.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the two leading players in this drama, have not minced words here. Musk has referred to the government as a “weed” and argued that “we really have here rule of the bureaucracy as opposed to rule of the people — democracy.”1 Trump has been proposing to run the country like a business since 2015, and appointed Jared Kushner to make the government more efficient as the head of the “White House Office of American Innovation” during his last presidency. Kushner was less effective than Musk, but the narrative has always been the same: the government is bloated, inefficient, and not accountable to the United States public.

None of this should be a surprise, as Trump and Musk are in lockstep with a vocal conservative movement more broadly. Project 2025, the conservative governing agenda developed by The Heritage Foundation, uses similar and even more aggressive language calling for the dismantling of the federal government. Today, its website calls for a program to “take down the Deep State”, “Cut the growth of government spending to reduce inflation”, and “Make federal bureaucrats more accountable to the democratically elected President and Congress”.2 It also claims that the Trump Administration has enacted two-thirds of its policy proposals.

As you may recall, Project 2025 was widely publicized during the 2024 presidential campaign. While not all voters believed Trump would enact these policies, we all knew it was a risk. And yet, Americans elected him anyway. That is what little faith Americans have in the government’s ability to act in the public interest.

Americans have long been experiencing a crisis of faith in the federal government. Inflation, chronic underemployment, soaring housing costs, expensive foreign wars, and widening inequality are pushing people to question whether the government plays a positive role in their lives. It certainly doesn’t help that media conglomerates owned by billionaires who want to avoid any sort of global accountability are ceaselessly attacking the government on TV and online, but let’s take these beliefs at face value for a moment. According to Pew Research Center, Americans’ trust in the federal government has been stuck at record low levels for the past 20 years. In 2022, only 20% of Americans say they trust Washington to do the right thing, down from a high of 77% in the pre-Watergate 1960s.

To me, this illustrates a clear problem that any presidential administration must reckon with: how do you govern when a supermajority of your constituents do not have faith in your ability to do so? Trump and The Heritage Foundation have chosen the cowardly path: align yourself with the naysayers and do not govern at all. In doing so, you may gain some short-term wins when you slash the budget, but you trigger a negative feedback loop: recklessly slashing budgets fundamentally interrupts the ability of the government to provide services, which drives down satisfaction with the government’s performance and raises calls for more cuts.

What’s much harder is to actually try to govern effectively in a low-trust environment. Clearly the Democrats don’t have the answer, as they continue to play the straight man, pitching themselves as the party of reason, The Establishment. If 80% of Americans have been saying “burn the house down” for 20 years, it is challenging to argue that the house should be saved.

Yet if we agree that DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach to reform is irresponsible and disastrous, we are left with the question of what a responsible reform agenda can look like. The first step is to change the language from efficiency to public benefit, which is actually the realm of government. While businesses are designed to maximize revenue, the government is seeking “socially optimal” outcomes (to borrow a term from the late, great Donald Shoup). As a result, the government is doing lots of things that no business would do but we still believe have immense benefit for the American public, like operating the National Parks system, funding the fire department, and building the Interstate highway system. These things are not necessarily money-makers, but they create value in the form of recreation space and natural beauty, emergency response, and mobility.

So I propose a focus on programs that maximize public benefit, as opposed to those that are most efficient. Of course, defining social optimization is much more fraught than showing that profits are up - even more so in a moment where political divides run so deep. However, in the past several years, bread and butter issues have come to the fore as relatively non-partisan, and in my opinion, an opportunity to cut through the noise. Addressing housing costs, the price of consumer goods, and job creation and clearly communicating the links between government programs and public benefit may offer a path to a governing coalition based on good governance (as opposed to just less governance).

Sounds simple right? Not quite. In my opinion, the American public is quite conservative and many issues that I think are important are not broadly considered to have public benefit. For example, in a 2024 Pew Research Survey asking Americans to indicate whether policies should be a priority for the President and Congress, only 36% ranked “Dealing with climate change” as a top priority. This made it the 18th most important issue of the 20 options presented in the survey. Meanwhile, “Strengthening Economy” was a top priority for 73% of respondents and the highest ranked issue of the 20 options presented.

In my personal opinion, this sucks. I think that a justice-oriented approach to dealing with climate change is the only issue any of us should care about and I’m furious that Americans don’t care. But to some extent, electoral politics is about winning, not about being right. In that light, I think a political party struggling to build a governing coalition in an environment where the efficacy of the government is being so deeply questioned needs to focus on the issues that have broadest appeal. In the meantime, it is up to us, as citizens and activists, to show the country the importance of these issues and the role the federal government must play in resolving them, to keep pushing them into the realm of national politics.

Bennett

City Speak #43

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These past few weeks, as the news rolling out of the White House seems to get increasingly grim and intolerable, it feels more important than ever to get politically involved. On one hand, everything is making me depressed: community organizations we work with are never going to see the Department of Energy grant that they won, we now have to talk about equity in terms of “Return on Investment” and there are still no goddamn eggs.

But on the other hand, I’m inspired by my friends and family members who have been making calls, donating, and going to protests. Despite a prevailing sense of futility, I see people stepping up and getting involved in political discourse. It’s great to see involvement in this crisis moment, and it reminds me of the upswell in civic engagement we saw during the last Trump presidency.

I’m happy to see this involvement because I believe that it can make a difference in political outcomes (I guess I still have that much faith in American democracy). And while I think we’re already seeing how this work can impact national politics in the short term, but I’m also excited about what this could mean at the state and local level in the long term.

Let me put it this way: I think of civic engagement as a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it. The more you learn about political processes and how to navigate them, the more effective you become and influencing political will. The problem is that most Americans only get involved politically in presidential election cycles. We can look at voter turnout rates as an example: ~62% of eligible voters turnout in a presidential election, ~48% of eligible voters turnout in a midterm election, and only 21% of voters turned out in the NYC 2021 mayoral election. Ironically, we are most engaged when we have the least control (federal politics) and least engaged when we have the most control (local politics). This is like going to the gym once every four years and trying to deadlift 400lbs: impossible and demoralizing.

But I think one way to make it easier to get involved is to smart small. There may not be anything you can do today to stop an executive order, but there is probably something going on in your city, town, or neighborhood that directly affects your life that you can get involved with. In some cases, that means voting, but it could also mean getting involved with a group that is advocating on behalf of something you care about. For those of us who have been out of the “gym” for a while, signing up to be a member of an organization is like lifting a light weight to start building that civic engagement muscle.

Contrary to a lot of political messaging, it’s not your job to FIX EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW. In fact, I think that kind of rhetoric contributes to the exhausting feeling of endless urgency that permeates Trump-era politics. I personally find it hard to get involved with anything when everything seems to be on fire. But taking those baby steps - signing up for a cause, going to that first meeting, making a friend in the organization - can make all the difference. And as you start to build that muscle, you find out what you do and don’t like. For example, I’ve found that I like policy work as opposed to politics. That’s to say, I’d much rather organize around a political issue than a person running for office.

If you’re interested in getting more involved, here’s a few organizations in New York City that I think are doing great work:

• Riders Alliance

• Transportation Alternatives

• Open New York

• Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign

If politics aren’t really your thing, I still think there is so much value in joining something in this moment when we feel so disconnected and disempowered. Whether it’s a book club or a softball team or an olive garden supper club, I think that having a community to regularly connect with just feels good. And honestly, feeling good matters! This is a really challenging time politically, and it will continue to be hard and exhausting. Having people to talk to and rely on and sometimes just escape from everything with can make a huge difference.

So stay strong out there, and start small. And you never know: it’s often in those seemingly apolitical spaces that we learn about others and form our own values.

Bennett

City Speak #42

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Have you ever seen something in your neighborhood and wondered what the hell is going on here? Take a photo of it and submit it for the next edition!

Before we get started, I want to thank my friend Liam for suggesting this idea (he has a guest post coming soon!) and my sister Mae for sending me the first submission:

So on one level, this photo is showing the wheels of city bureaucracy at work. Someone is proposing the construction of a 4-unit building on a landmarked site, and the landmark status has triggered a public review process which requires them send their application before the local community board.

The origins of “landmarking” properties in NYC dates back to 1965 with the passage of the New York City Landmarks Law, which was passed to protect the architectural heritage of the city. This was in response to a series of high profile demolitions of historic buildings, including Brokaw Mansion and the original Penn Station. So many of the buildings we love in contemporary New York, including entire brownstone neighborhoods, owe their continued existence to this law. However, as you can see in this photo, the bureaucratic consequences are clear.

Today, the landmark status of buildings is managed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), which requires “owners to obtain permits from the Landmarks Preservation Commission before doing work that affects the exterior and, in some cases, the interior of a designated landmark property” (website). The law was initially protested by real estate developers due to the fact that it slows down construction timelines by adding red tape, and doing renovations in a historic district still requires a permit (and historic windows). As the city’s need for housing grows more desperate, these rules feel somewhat arcane and counterproductive. But as someone who lives in a brownstone myself, I appreciate the preservation of architectural history in the built environment.

But now let’s get to the interesting part. Did you see why the site is landmarked!!?! I had no idea that there was a plane crash in Park Slope in 1960 and the pictures are INSANE.

In a tragic aviation accident eerily similar to the plane crash in DC last week, two planes collided over NYC and one crashed on Staten Island and the other in Park Slope. The plane debris left a trench running down Sterling Place and damaged buildings on either side. Little evidence remains of the crash, but I’ll never be able to walk past that intersection without picturing this massive plane wing in the middle of it.

I didn’t make it to the meeting to see if the permits went through… but I’ll keep you posted if they start construction here. I personally think they should only be allowed to build if it’s shaped like a giant wing.

Is there something in your neighborhood or town that interests or surprises you? Or that you just want to share? Send a photo of it to bennett.capozzi@gmail.com and I’ll include it in a future Word on the Street!

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Bennett

City Speak # 41

In my circles, the last couple weeks since the Trump Administration took office have been incredibly demoralizing. As someone who works in the world of environmental justice, it’s devastating to see environmental and equity-based programs explicitly under attack by the federal government. As we recover from this week’s federal funding freeze whiplash, everyone seems to be holding their breath.

What’s most shocking about the anti-climate policies of the Trump Administration is that they deviate from the consensus opinion that global warming is real and happening. 70% of Americans believe climate change is happening, so how did we get a federal government that is actively working to accelerate warming?

I think the reasons are not informational, but rather political. We can all believe in climate change, but if we can’t get people to care about it or organize into a coalition that prioritizes it, then we end up with well… what we’ve got.

Anecdotally, this all makes sense. The people in my life can collectively agree on the problems on the world, but they feel powerless to do anything about them. When I look at my peers, I see a political disengagement problem.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot about civil society and the types of spaces in cities where we tend to gather. There are many aspects to consider when it comes to civic space (accessibility, cost, ownership, and programming to name a few) and they all impact the ways that people build social networks and interact with their communities.

Before we dive into this question, let’s talk about some definitions. To start, “civic engagement” is pretty poorly defined, but I interpret it as capturing activities that fall in two buckets: (1) participation in activities that are explicitly political and/or related to the functioning of the government (e.g. voting, serving on town council, reading the news) and (2) participation in organized group activities that strengthen non-work and non-family ties (e.g. going to church, joining a union, being on a kickball team, volunteering).

I know, this sounds like a pretty big umbrella. And there is a wide gap between things that are clearly more “civic” and “engaged” than others. But I think it’s also helpful to define civic engagement by thinking about what it’s not. It’s not being on a Zoom call for work, it’s not shopping at Target, and it’s not making dinner at home. And I don’t know about you, but I’m doing those things kind of a lot, which leaves very little space for civic engagement.

And according to the research, I’m not alone. The issue of declining civic engagement in the U.S. has been a hot topic for the past 30 years, ever since Robert Putnam published the influential book Bowling Alone. This book claimed that American civic life was in precipitous decline and this would have negative effects for the functioning of our democracy (no comment on the current state of our democracy).

The folks at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University seem to agree with Putnam. They found that 20 - 29 year olds in the 2000s were less civically engaged than their peers in the 1970s across multiple forms of engagement, including voting, community projects, club attendance, and trusting others. Out of ten types of engagement that they studied, only one, volunteering, increased from the 1970s to now.

The researchers argue that the reason for decreased civic participation among 20 - 29 year olds is that “it is simply not possible for most young people to achieve economic and psychological autonomy as early as they once did.” I’m interested in the way that these researchers draw a connection between economic autonomy and civic engagement; they claim that if young adults struggle to hold down a steady job, they may be less likely to accomplish milestones that make them long-term “stakeholders” in their communities, such as owning property or sending their kids to local schools. In short, these researchers conclude that instability leads to disengagement.

Unfortunately, instability and disengagement also feed off each other: if we feel that our lives are precarious, we disinvest from political systems. If we don’t actively participate in civic life, it becomes weaker and less representative of our needs, making our lives more unstable and reducing the likelihood of future participation. This leaves everyone with a sense that politics don’t really matter and an makes the entire system quite anti-democratic.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

If we acknowledge that we are in a disengagement spiral, then how do we seed a countertrend? I think the key is in the mechanisms by which uncertain economic futures lead to low civic engagement. Is it a question of interest? Time? Access? I think if we start to better understand these mechanisms we can continue to work toward designing better opportunities and spaces for civic engagement. And hopefully, a political system that better represents our values.

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Bennett

City Speak #40

I know a lot has been written about congestion pricing in the past few weeks, so I’ve been wary about wading into the discourse. However, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about the program since it went into effect, and I thought it might be useful to share some of my thoughts here, particularly as the new toll relates to civic space.

To start, congestion pricing is not a radical program globally, but it is radical in the context of car-related policy in New York City (and by extension, the United States). On one hand, similar policies have been in existence around the globe for decades: Singapore pioneered the road pricing scheme back in 1975 (50 years ago!), while London has had a congestion charge since 2003, Stockholm since 2007, and Milan since 2012. When we look at this policy in the context of road pricing implementation in global cities, it’s hard to say that NYC is an innovator or even an early adopter of congestion pricing.

However, in the context of surface transportation policy in NYC, this is a radical step forward. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when Singapore was experimenting with road pricing, limiting car access wasn’t even part of the conversation. In fact, things were going in the opposite direction. In 1987, NYC mayor Ed Koch announced a ban on cycling in Midtown to cede more space to cars. The pedestrianization of Times Square, which has resulted in the permanent closure of five blocks of Broadway, didn’t start until 2009. And it wasn’t until 2018 that cars were banned from the park drives in Prospect and Central Parks (cars are still permitted on the grade-separated crosstown routes in Central Park).

What’s interesting about these policies to me is that they show the development of a new kind of thinking about public space: that a road is not just a road. A road is not a fact of natural law. In fact, we just decided in a political process that this sliver of land (100 feet wide on the avenues and 60 feet wide on the cross streets) should be allocated to driving. But this space could also be used for walking, cycling, sitting, eating, exercising, playing, etc.

Unfortunately, cars are very bad at sharing, especially when there are a lot of them. So driving typically precludes all of these other activities. In doing so, it generates a form of opportunity cost, or the cost of not pursuing an alternative use. In a city where many residents have limited access to park space, transitioning existing roads to recreation space could have immense economic, health, and social benefits. And for the first time in NYC, we’re putting a dollar value to that opportunity cost ($9). I think that many global cities have understood this trade-off well for the last fifty years, but the idea is still catching on here in NYC.

Nonetheless, congestion pricing feels like a big step forward. I’ll be watching this policy closely despite its disastrous rollout, low levels of popularity, and threats from the Trump Administration.

When someone asks me to tell them what I think about congestion pricing, I explain that I support the policy because it asks people to rightfully pay the costs of driving in the busiest urban core in America: costs generated in the form of traffic deaths, air pollution, congestion, and noise.

However, I also think the most compelling case for congestion pricing is its compensation of an enormous opportunity cost: the opportunity to build a large and robust network of public space in NYC that improves access to recreation, connections to nature, and climate resiliency.

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Bennett

City Speak #39

I hope you all have had a restful holiday season and happy new year!

In response to my last post about the gym, one of my subscribers asked, “[This post] Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity to bring (return?) the social connectedness that has been privatized in gyms and country clubs to the commons.”

I thought this was a very astute comment and it gets at the heart of what I’ve been thinking about these days with regards to civic infrastructure. The comment acknowledges that fancy gyms, for all the social benefits they provide their members, are lacking something because of their exclusivity. It raises the question of whether it’s possible to cultivate “social connectedness” in a new way - a way that cuts across class. In other words, what can democratic space look like?

As I mulled these questions over in my head this holiday break, I remembered a paper my friend in grad school sent me called “Rubbing Shoulders”. This study uses cell phone location data to identify places where people from high and low income groups mix, and found that full-service chain restaurants, such as Applebee’s and Olive Garden, produced the highest levels of social mixing.

According to this paper, these chain restaurants provided even higher levels of mixing when compared to more civically-oriented spaces such as libraries, churches, and parks. The authors cite high levels of residential segregation and the local nature of civic institutions as the reason for this discrepancy. If you go to the library in your neighborhood and your neighborhood is not income-mixed, then the library won’t be either.

So what do we do with this information? Do we hail Applebee’s as the savior of American democracy? Or do we panic? If Olive Garden is the linchpin of social integration does that mean America is basically the Titanic going down in a giant vat of Alfredo?

I’ll start by giving props where props are due: these restaurants have earned their broad appeal by offering a sit-down meal at an affordable price. They are family friendly, accessible, and provide an experience that is fun and fast. It’s not a surprise that people from across income brackets are willing to travel to them.

But I would be hard-pressed to argue that the quality of civic engagement is high at Olive Garden, even if the quantity of cross-class interactions is. I wouldn’t say that chain restaurants are necessarily the contemporary intellectual salon, but they offer us a meaningful guide to what kinds of spaces draw Americans across income ranges.

I also encourage us to consider the fact that the authors found that our traditional civic institutions, such as churches and libraries, did not generate cross-income mixing. To me, their finding that residential segregation, which has been increasing since the 1970s, is undermining the integrative potential of existing civic institutions, exposes the way that different types of segregation influence and compound with each other.

From a policy design perspective, I have two takeaways. First, if we are to design spaces to attract people from different income groups, we can learn from the chain restaurants that are already doing this by offering something affordable, accessible, and worth traveling for. Second, if we want to leverage the power of our existing civic institutions to bring people together, we have to think about what kind of interventions can create neighborhoods with housing opportunities for people of all income levels.

Until then, see you at Olive Garden!

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Bennett

City Speak #38

When somebody asks about my life in New York, I can’t help but start talking about the gym. That may surprise you because I’m known here on substack for my erudite observations about urbanism, but my other passion is becoming a huge meathead. (I’ve been calling it “meathead summer” since June 2023)

Of course, I didn’t just join any gym - I joined Chelsea Piers fitness, which is a fancy gym. It has free classes, you never have to wait for equipment, it has a steam room and a sauna, it has Malin + Goetz soap in the shower, AND it has a correspondingly egregious monthly cost. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I joined a country club in the middle of Brooklyn.

While there isn’t space for an 18-hole golf course at Chelsea Piers, the pampered exclusivity is certainly giving country club. And this is hard for me to admit because I’m an urban chauvinist, and I like to think I’m better because I live in a big city that provides a diverse environment with people from all different backgrounds. So I’m sort of embarrassed to say that I spend a lot of my time in an institution that is very obviously catering to a bunch of yuppies just like me. (You should see the 5pm work-from-home crowd. It’s like looking in a mirror).

These gyms, just like natural wine bars, specialty coffee roasters, and high end restaurants, are symbolic of the wave of preppies that have taken over Brooklyn in the last few decades. Aesthetically, we may be different from our parents (we dream of townhomes instead of McMansions) but as wealth and power continue to be concentrated in urban cores, they increasingly offer the services that drew wealthy people to the suburbs.

In fact, the more I see similarities between these gyms and country clubs, the more I see similarities between urban and suburban lifestyles. No matter how dense our neighborhoods are, we are drawn to institutions that provide opportunities for us to gather and get to know others. These institutions play a critical role in shaping our social networks - and when they come with a high price of entry, that creates a filtering mechanism for who gets included. It’s easy for us to imagine political deals being brokered in smoky rooms at country clubs, but maybe these days it’s more likely that they’re happening at the Equinox juice bar.

While they have their downsides, we seem to be drawn to social clubs across urban, suburban, and rural settings and they have major impacts on our social experience of a place. This may seem obvious, but it contradicts a traditional belief among urban planners: that if people live in denser environments, they inherently get to know their neighbors better (i.e. there is “more community”). I live in a dense urban neighborhood and my social network is far more driven by my job, my family, my college social network, and even the gym than by mere proximity. Perhaps if we want to create more integrated and equitable cities, we should focus our energy on these institutions instead of worrying about housing density.

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Bennett

City Speak #37