Alain Bertaud: evaluation

Transcript context

…If NIMBY is such a big problem, might it not — in some bizarre, second-best regard — make sense to put so much industry in the city center? Because as more growth comes, people will be quite happy to get rid of it. Yes, normally yes. But you see what happened with Amazon in New York not so long ago. It was interesting. I don’t know if we should talk too much about that, but I think Amazon had a terrible approach to cities by having them bid for each other because I’m absolutely convinced, being an urbanist myself, that they knew exactly where they wanted to go in advance. So that was a little unfair. And in a way, there was a grassroots movement against high-income people coming to the city. I found that very disturbing because, after all, high-income people create a lot of jobs for all sorts of income at the same time. In the same way as you should not exclude poor migrants from coming to the city, I don’t see any rationale for excluding high-income people either. Now, the fact that the city limits so much the construction of new housing — in my book, you see there is a chapter which has a table of New York City zoning, and it shows the incredible limit in the number of dwelling units which can be built, block by block, with completely arbitrary numbers. On one hand, you have higher-income people coming to the city. On the other hand, the city is blocking the development of new housing and controlling also the size of it, privileging in, in fact, larger houses than the demand. So, when higher-income people come in, yes, certainly it will raise the rent, but not because higher-income people are greedy or whatever. It’s because the city is blocking the supply at the same time. You cannot have an increase in jobs and a freeze in housing at the same time. So the problem is not the people coming in. The problem is the city refusing to admit that they need to build more housing. How well does the current version of Shanghai work, as a city?…

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