Eric Schmidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. This again came from the founders, who were interested in rethinking about cities along with rethinking about a lot of other things, which is why they’re so special. We were able to hire Dan Doctoroff, who’d done a lot of work in New York, to lead that. What he’s been doing is, he first assembled all of the new ideas about cities, and everyone has lists of complaints about cities a mile long, right? The traffic is bad, the air is bad, I can’t get a taxi, Uber doesn’t work here. There’s a long list of people’s complaints about cities. They’re not safe, the education system isn’t strong enough. The idea is to come up with urban settings where you can address a multiplicity of those. Another issue is housing costs are too high. Can we get the housing cost down? We are doing a process of thinking through that, working with the friendliest and most helpful, if you will, government regulatory body that you can imagine, and it still take years. It takes years. The model we’ve chosen is a consensus-building one, and I think you’ll see some interesting outcomes. The most interesting thing about city building is city building is extremely rare. Even in cities where they go bankrupt or they get in big trouble, it’s almost impossible to change the planning assumptions about a city because of the way in which the human incentives and all of the very special interest groups that have locked themselves into a state. So we won’t really see innovation in cities unless we’re willing to exempt from some rules or build completely new cities. You are seeing new cities built in China and in Saudi Arabia and maybe in a few other countries, and we’ll see how that goes. What kinds of innovations do we need in cities or suburbs to lower housing costs in the Bay Area? And what will happen to the tech cluster here if we don’t have those innovations?…

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