New and Old #261
The beloved cities we're not allowed to build again, the return of the sedan, Jane Jacobs and urban planning, and a civic individualism
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This is a very important piece:
Dupont Circle. Georgetown. Capitol Hill. Mount Pleasant. Historic Anacostia. These historic neighborhoods — dense, walkable, and layered with small businesses and street life — are held as proof that DC works. They anchor the local economy and define the city’s image.
And yet, if DC tried to build a modern version of these neighborhoods today, its permitting system would likely prevent it, or stretch the process across multiple generations. One need only look at the history of Dupont Circle to see how painfully difficult it would be to repeat its success under today’s rules. Those rules don’t protect neighborhoods. Instead, they protect incumbents by turning delay into a filter only the well-resourced can survive.
More:
Imagine trying to create a modern Dupont Circle now, not through one megaproject, but the way it actually formed: through hundreds of ordinary, low-impact changes implemented over time. A mixed-use building opens with ground-floor retail. That retail space later becomes a café. A bookstore adds wine service. A restaurant expands its seating to the sidewalk. A bar replaces a shop as demand shifts. None of these changes are dramatic on their own, but as a whole, they made Dupont Circle what it is today.
Under today’s rules, however, each of those steps would trigger a new permitting sequence across multiple agencies.
Exactly. The fundamental fact about zoning, and the whole modern land-use planning regime, is that it builds in a presumption against the natural, organic development of cities—which is to say that it presumes nothing ever does, or should, change except as expressly permitted. This is, as Sturhan observes, diametrically opposed to the way that most of the places we love actually got built in the first place.
That’s the general point. But a more specific point is that this also concentrates economic power, because only larger players can afford the time and money sink that this regulatory regime amounts to:
Just look at H Street NE, where everyday business changes, like adding alcohol service to a restaurant or expanding seating, have been subject to repeated ANC protests and multi-stage approval processes that can last months. These processes have stopped the kinds of incremental evolution that once happened more organically. For instance, KitchenCray, a locally-owned restaurant, faced so much scrutiny and investigation over a proposed “substantial change” — turning its empty basement into a lounge — that its owners said they were forced to close.
For established corporate operators, delay is merely an inconvenience. For even established local DC business owners like those of KitchenCray, to say nothing of someone trying to open their first business, the delay can be the end of the line. This is how time and politics become a gatekeeper.
There’s more here. Read the whole thing. It’s basically an ode to the old-fashioned, distributed, small-scale, organic process that built our historic cities, and which has been squeezed out by the modern planning regime. This is not unrelated to corporate concentration, to the size and scale of new construction projects, or to the prospects for small enterprises of all sorts.
This is why urbanism is not just a wonky, arcane land-use issue. Housing, transportation, land use, urban design, and commerce, and entrepreneurship all tie together, and in pricing out or squeezing out a whole series of bottom rungs on the ladder, we’ve throttled immeasurable wealth and opportunity.
“Urbanism” is the rules of the game for the built world. There are few issues that touch more directly on so much of daily life. And all we have to do to unlock all this opportunity is stop locking it up.
America Fell Out of Love With the Sedan. Detroit Wants to Bring It Back, Wall Street Journal, Sharon Terlep and Christopher Otts, February 13, 2026
From tail-finned land yachts of the 1960s to hulking family haulers in the 1980s and then the 1990s bestseller Ford Taurus, driving for Americans meant driving a sedan.
Then SUVs and trucks won over drivers’ hearts and garages. Ford axed its sedan lineup in 2018. Chrysler-parent Stellantis essentially scrubbed its showrooms of passenger cars. The last General Motors mass-market sedan rolled off the line at its Kansas City, Kan., plant in November 2024—a cherry red Chevy Malibu.
I wrote about this phenomenon, once, and I compared the inexpensive, smaller cars being discontinued to starter homes, and noted how in both cases—mobility and housing—we were removing the entry-level options that most people at some point in life need.
In Japan, at a car dealership in Osaka, I spotted this Toyota Yaris, priced at the equivalent of $17,682. 2020 was the final model year for this car in the U.S. market.
The Journal piece continues:
Today drivers want lower prices and the automakers are considering the once-unthinkable: bringing back sedans.
“I would kill to have a hybrid-electric sedan,” General Motors President Mark Reuss said during a recent company town hall. “We’re working on how to do that.”
Across town, executives at Ford are studying if a new assembly line set to go up in Kentucky next year could build not just small electric pickups, but sedans as well. Dealers for years have peppered the automaker with pleas to bring back the Fusion sedan, which the company stopped making five years ago.
“The sedan market is very vibrant,” Ford CEO Jim Farley remarked to reporters on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show last month. “It’s not that there isn’t a market there. It’s just we couldn’t find a way to compete and be profitable.”
So the automakers are admitting that the discontinuing of smaller and cheaper cars was not due to a lack of demand! Some of it has to do with competition:
Of the five cheapest vehicles on sale in the U.S. this year, only one—GM’s Chevrolet Trax—was from an American automaker, according to Edmunds. The Trax, a pint-size SUV made in South Korea, proved exceedingly popular: GM sold 200,000 last year. GM has one other small SUV with a starting price below $25,000; Ford and Stellantis have none.
All other budget vehicles—whether sedans or compact SUVs—were made by Kia, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen.
Although in the U.S., Hyundai discontinued the Accent, Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage, Nissan discontinued the Versa, and Toyota, as noted, discontinued the Yaris. Those were the smallest and cheapest cars. These companies mostly still make sedans, but the ladder starts higher up than it used to size- and price-wise.
This destruction of the lower rungs of the ladder is a general economic problem in terms of opportunity for people who can’t necessarily afford, or don’t want, an option higher up the ladder. But it can also be bad for business:
The lack of lower-priced cars presents a challenge for Matt Bowers, owner of a New Orleans-based dealership group that sells Fords, Chevys and Chryslers, among other brands.
“There were a lot of people that bought Ford Focuses and Escorts that ended up buying Explorers and Expeditions and F-Series trucks later,” he said. “It was an entryway, a gateway product to the brand.”
And this:
At a Ford dealership in Canton, Ohio, lube tech Brandon Burgardt perks up when he sees a Ford Fusion coming through for an oil change. He’s hanging on to his own Fusion as long as he can, since Ford doesn’t offer a new one anymore.
“Every Fusion owner I have talked to said Ford needs to come back out with a sedan and they really want the Fusion back,” he said. “I believe you have to listen to the customers.”
Read the Journal piece here.
This seems related to the gradual disappearance of cheap, casual restaurant options, or, as I noted, to the disappearance of starter homes. Life is expensive. There are a lot of threads here, and I can’t explain them all, but this is a problem. The other issue is that it’s difficult to find a substitute for a car, because our deeply car-oriented planning has made car ownership a near-necessary precondition of mobility. This was less of a problem when cars were broadly affordable. But as they become more expensive, this car-oriented landscape becomes an invisible but massive economic drag.
Cheap cars are an answer, but, of course, not the answer. A lot to think about here.
Addressing the fear among urban planners that their profession is basically ineffectual and irrelevant, Campanella writes:
Minority status by itself is not why “Trivial Profession” appeared on the whiteboard. It was there because of a swelling perception, especially among young scholars and practitioners, that planning is a diffuse and ineffective field, and that it has been largely unsuccessful over the last half century at its own game: bringing about more just, sustainable, healthful, efficient and beautiful cities and regions. It was there because of a looming sense that planners in America lack the agency or authority to turn idealism into reality, that planning has neither the prestige nor the street cred to effect real change.
This reminds me of something M. Nolan Gray noted in his book on zoning, Arbitrary Lines: urban planners basically don’t get to do very much planning at all. They are largely forced to simply execute bad land-use policy. And while the entire land-use regime should be substantially simplified, we would be better off if such a project left urban planners with more room to do their thing.
Back to Campanella, who, with many others, traces at least some of the planning profession’s irrelevance to its hubris in the era of urban renewal:
Postwar urban planners thus abetted some of the most egregious acts of urban vandalism in American history. Of course, they did not see it this way. Most believed, like Lewis Mumford, that America’s cities were suffering an urban cancer wholly untreatable by the “home remedies” Jane Jacobs was brewing and that the strong medicine of slum clearance was just what the doctor ordered. Like their architect colleagues, postwar planners had drunk the Corbusian Kool-Aid and were too intoxicated to see the harm they were causing.
I’ve been reading Jane Jacobs’s classic and most well known book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I’m struck over and over again by how little there is in today’s broad urbanist movement that she did not already explain or articulate in the early 1960s. It’s kind of ironic and darkly funny that the actual professions tasked with “doing urbanism” have tended to be poor at it, and tended not to truly understand cities.
But then, Campanella goes on to identify the over-correction ushered in by Jacobs as itself a cause for the planning profession’s impotence!
This is a long and good read, and while I’m not sure I quite agree with it all, it’s worth thinking through.
Disorder in the Liberal City, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki, March 19, 2026
This is a nice piece synthesizing a few other pieces, including one from Chris Arnade, and one from me which I wrote with guest writer NickS (WA). It’s about the interrelated issues of individualism and urban disorder in America, with Ryan arguing for a kind of civically infused individualism. I’m going to quote a long bit here:
Chris Arnade, who has literally walked across cities worldwide, has written a lot about disorder on America’s streets. In a recent essay, written from “spotless” Seoul, he laments that “We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening.” Arnade blames our “culture of individuality,” which elevates self-expression over citizenship and fuels “antisocial tendencies” like drug abuse and mental illness.
Writing in response to Arnade, Addison Del Mastro shares his concern about disorder but diagnoses it differently. The problem, he argues, is not merely a culture of individuality or soft-on-crime politics, but a deeper strain of American “folk-libertarianism,” the instinctive belief that no one should tell you what to do. Reflecting on his travels in Asia—echoing Arnade’s observations from Korea—he found the orderly public behavior there almost oppressive: free of disorder, but also of spontaneity. America’s “you-do-you” ethos, which tolerates more disruption and rudeness, may be more appealing to American sensibilities. As he puts it, America’s “deeply individualist culture…really is incompatible with density and living in close proximity with a lot of people all the time,” although he thinks we’ve erred too far on the side of individualism.
I agree with Arnade and Del Mastro that culture matters here, and that ideas of American individualism shape how we experience public space. They’re also right that American society tolerates a wider range of behavior than many others. But what we are seeing on our streets is not simply the tail of that distribution. Shooting up on a street corner or screaming into the void are not examples of individualistic self-expression. They are symptoms of people who can no longer exercise their freedom within the bounds of a shared civic order.
Instead, the problem with our cities is that they aren’t individualistic enough.
This is where he is going with that:
Treating destructive behavior that imposes costs on others as “individualism” undermines the concept of political individualism and, with it, the system of equal rights that makes it meaningful. This conflation leads us away from solutions and toward the sad conclusion that urban disorder is the inevitable price of American liberty. But it’s actually the opposite that’s true.
And also this: “A society committed to equal liberty must enforce the norms that allow millions of strangers to coexist in dense urban environments.”
Of course, saying this doesn’t guarantee that the people who mostly run big American cities will do their jobs. But it’s a useful way to conceptualize the question, and it refuses to let either a certain kind of urban progressive or a certain kind of right-wing anti-urbanite to shrug off deeply un-civic behavior, or deeply inhumane social problems, as an inherent part of city life.
And just so it is clear this is not a winking argument for throwing manhandling law enforcement at homeless people, or something, Ryan writes: “This disorder is not only a violation of the public’s rights. It is also profoundly inhumane to the people living in it.”
I remember my mother talking years ago about how some of New York City’s bleeding-heart-liberal types, back in the 80s and 90s, used to talk about homelessness as a matter of freedom or preference—as if the people in these desperate situations had simply chosen their preferred lifestyle, and who were we to judge?
I’ve always felt that this attitude was really just the flipside of the city-hating from the right, and that it was also a kind of giving up, as if we have nothing to learn from nicer cities around the world. Perhaps it is one of the costs of American exceptionalism.
Read the whole piece from Ryan; it’s very good.
Related Reading:
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Thanks for sharing the GGW article on Dupont Circle. I have long used Dupont Circle (much as JJ invokes the North End in Boston) as a great neighborhood that would be impossible today. I have never succeeded in articulating this case well enough, so now I can just post a link. Even some of the wholly residential blocks are beautifully diverse in their architecture. John Norquist makes the same point in his talks about his favorite blocks in Milwaukee: these different styles of rowhouses would fail architecture juries and fail "the character-of-the-neighborhood" tests. Although this is an old talking point, we still need to find ways of re-articulating it until it catches on more, and Westley Sturhan's article is a masterpiece.
"Of course, saying this doesn’t guarantee that the people who mostly run big American cities will do their jobs."
Ha, it certainly doesn't! But reframing the narrative hopefully helps those who want their leaders to do better to have some moral clarity on the issue. Thanks for your response—and you're exactly right that I'm refusing to accept certain attitudes on the right and left that are essentially anti-urban.