Why Nothing Works

Progressivism struggles with a never ending pendulum swing between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses, bringing us to our current problem of inaction. Author Mark Dunkelman in his book, "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back", explains the origins of American progressivism as a response to the upheaval created by railroads and national-scale economic power, outlining these two competing impulses within the movement: the Jeffersonian push to break up big institutions and return power to smaller, local actors, and a Hamiltonian push to build strong public institutions capable of regulating large private entities. 

The discussion traces how the U.S. shifted toward large-scale governance in the New Deal and mid-20th century, then swung back in the 1960s–1970s as public trust eroded due to environmental damage, highways cutting through communities, urban renewal, Vietnam, and Watergate, leading to layered legal and procedural checks that can fragment decision-making and make it difficult for governments to act quickly. Dunkelman describes how the judiciary’s role changed over time and argues that today’s system resembles a “tragedy of the commons in reverse,” where widespread veto points prevent collective action. 

Show Notes:

• Further Reading: 
  • Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 by Lizabeth Cohen
  • Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America by Lizabeth Cohen
  • Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner
  • Find each on our Policy book list at https://bookshop.org/lists/theory-policy-history
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Transcript

Stephanie: [00:01:00] Welcome back Bookworms to another episode of Book Down Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Mark Dunkelman on his book, why Nothing Works, who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back In the episode, I mentioned how I had come across this book during the a PA Legislative Fly in last September.

Got a copy of it, totally blanked on what the group was that Mark was speaking for at the end of the fly. In remembered it during our conversation, it was the Up for Growth summit. But in that we were tying into housing. and his book I think, does a really good job of talking about the swings back and forth within the progressivism movement and how that ties into being able to accomplish anything like building more housing.

Jennifer: Well, and just a real quick plug, speaking of the A PA summit, if you guys haven't had a chance to go fill out some information on whether or not you would wanna be. A part of a book summit for booked on planning. You [00:02:00] can visit our socials and do that. We are thinking about tying it to the a PA fly-in. And Stephanie, when you brought this forward, I

Stephanie: I was really.

Jennifer: about it I just feel like so often nothing really works well anymore, and I thought that this might be a good insight into why, and I thought Mark did a really good job of explaining the two values of progressivism and how they're just always in constant tension and how that tension's not always working out in the public's best interest.

Stephanie: Yeah, and spoiler alert he does say he doesn't have the answers on how to fix it, but knowing what the issue is and why we're at this point is, you know, the first step forward and trying to come up with a way to balance this pendulum swing in order to be able to get things done while still including people to a certain degree in making those decisions, but ultimately having someone that can be that final decision maker and get projects going.

Jennifer: And make sure you say all the way to the end this episode, because Mark has some really great advice for planners too, on how maybe we can help bridge that [00:03:00] gap as well. Let's get into our conversation with author Mark Dunkelman on his book, why Nothing Works, who Killed Progress and how to Bring It Back.

Stephanie: Mark, thank you for joining us on, Mark, thank you for joining us on, booked On Planning to talk about your book, why Nothing Works, who Killed Progress and how to bring it back. And I just have to start off and say, I came across this book last September as part of a PA National's Flying Events. We joined the, I'm blanking on the agency name, but the summit that happened at the end of that fly in and you were the final person speaking.

We got a copy of your book. I was really bummed that I couldn't stick around and that I had a flight to catch. And so, this is my opportunity since I didn't get to stay and hear that, to ask my own questions. So starting off, can you give the backgrounds of progressivism and how it started.

Marc Dunkelman: Sure. So the. The progressive movement really starts at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th. To that point, America is organized primarily. Along what a [00:04:00] historian Robert Levy calls island communities. We live in neighborhoods, but in many cases towns and small cities that are really not isolated into themselves but they are separate in the sense that you are really oriented around the people that you live nearby just because it's so hard to get to the next town.

In the degree to which today, sort of national politics dominates our worldview, and you may, you're almost certain to know what's happening in Washington almost better than you are to know what's happening at City Hall back then. Like it was the other way around. Like you really knew what was happening around you and that meant that you had some agency.

About what was going on directly around you, and you knew who your local enemies were and what you were competing against. And there was some sort of sense of The Hoi Pallo had their local machine politicians to help them and like the local political [00:05:00] operation was there to serve the interest of the working class.

And the courts were there to be the protectors of the money class. that wasn't perfect by any means, but there was a certain balance to that. And then came the railroads. And the railroads essentially changed everything because suddenly the. Ability to move things and people around the country made it so that the islands that people lived on were no longer islands. They were connected. And that meant that the people who lived in these various parts of the country. Had this thing, I almost imagine it like it's a flying saucer, flying over the horizon and casting its shadow on communities. It meant that suddenly people who were living in these towns were at the whim of these far away robber barons who were determining their livelihoods and what sort of the patterns of their lives. Because if the railroad came by or didn't, what railroad barons chose to charge [00:06:00] for whatever they were producing. If they decided to come by more or less frequently, if they decided to go to a different place that was selling something similar, all these choices are, could be made by people. people in local areas had really no leverage over. this was a huge problem for people and like to the degree that they used to be able to have some leverage over, like they didn't always win, but like they at least knew how to maneuver around the people who had power in their little island community, their town now.

it was some guy wearing a top hat in Philadelphia and like they had no idea. What to do. And so the progressive movement was a reaction to this feeling of having no agency over what was happening in life. the federal government at that point was just a piddling little version of what we think of today.

it was not a powerful institution really at all. And Progressivism was born from sort of sense of the burgeon in middle class wanted some way to react to this. They wanted to figure out some notion of what are we gonna do when [00:07:00] it just seems like don't work now.

There's some big change in the fabric of American life and we want there to be some sort of balance. So there's two underlying principles in progressivism I think which Progressives didn't even see then. And. Certainly don't see now, one is to react to the situation by saying, let's break up these huge institutions, these big, huge robber baron monopoly trusts. And that's the antitrust movement. And let's go back to smallness. So you see this in, primarily in, Brandeis. Louis Brandeis is the great Supreme Court justice from the early 20th century and who really believes in smallness. He'd grown up in Louisville, Kentucky and really like in the 19th century, saw the sort of, the main street of Louisville, Kentucky and sort the small businesses and everyone competing like he wanted to recreate that.

He wanted to. Make sure that was the spirit of American commerce in the 20th century as well. And that's where the Sherman Antitrust Act comes in. And the sort of, the spirit of, they call it Ian progressivism [00:08:00] that's still part of the progressive tradition today. But that's one element of the progressive tradition from the very beginning.

And the second element is we've got these huge, commercial institutions from the beginning, let's create big government institutions that can regulate them. Like the Federal Reserve, which should regulate the banks or later the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Trade Commission or the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is there to regulate the railroads, like that's the first big federal commission actually, which predates the She Antitrust Act.

And in all of these cases, the idea is not to return the smallness, but to accept that bigness is a big part of. The new American landscape, and we are going to create big institutions that can balance out the big private institutions. So both of these ideas pushing power up into big powerful public institutions that will face big private institution I call a Hamiltonian impulse that is part of the original progressive tradition.

And then secondly pushing power down to little businesses so that things can be small again, which I call it [00:09:00] Jeffersonian impulse return power to the yeoman farmer type or the small businessman or I guess small businesswoman now I call it Jeffersonian tradition. And that's where progressivism comes from. I.

Jennifer: And Stephanie and I both work for City. E government. So we are bringing I think, both perspectives into this conversation of, we believe in government, we believe that government can work and regulate, but we also work for small government, city government and bring that through. So what struck me was that the establishment or the elites, if we've come to know that group, was originally actually a beacon of progress.

And how did the establishment get scattered across the country and then create the silos that we're so familiar with now, even in our small city government.

Marc Dunkelman: So you're absolutely right that we do develop over the course of the 20th century an increasing at the federal level and at the. the city and state level increasingly we in government [00:10:00] are worried about overweening power of big powerful bureaucrats. This is after the fifties and sixties who would do huge things without any oversight. So this sort of fast forwards. Through the story the original progressives in this fight between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians. There's this battle within progressivism ideologically about whether we want to lean into the Brandis Jeffersonian model of trying to keep things small or do things big.

And we lean into the big so that's in the. and then we move into the New Deal and then we get to Tennessee Valley Authority and we get the Reclamation Service and the Bureau of Reclamation, and we get the Federal Highway Administration and these are huge bureaucracies.

There are able to huge things. The Hoover Dam, highway Administration, Nassau doing huge things a sort, awe inspiring for the average American. [00:11:00] And then we get to the sixties and seventies where the American people wake up and realize that the sort of, the generally the. Middle aged or older white men who are running these agencies are not the benign, thoughtful, wise characters that we thought they were. And they've been making choices that ordinary people wouldn't, in all cases think were so terrific. The dams are doing enormous ecological damage destroying species.

And the highways are running through cities and destroying poor communities. And urban renewable turns out to be a disaster, run by political machines or by, urban planners who only come from. one school of thought or one community and have not thought about the implications for one community or another.

The agricultural community they've thrown DDT on crops and there are all sorts of birth defects over, like in, in time and time again, they've thrown us in into Vietnam. Like the, there are lots of reasons to suddenly have doubts about whether the establishment is right and so to the. You've you've raised Jennifer. We [00:12:00] begin throwing new restrictions on these bureaucracies so they don't continue making these mistakes. and we begin creating processes designed to make sure that, a planner can't just throw or an engineer, probably more than a planner, an engineer can't just throw a highway through the poor part of town without the residents of that part of town having some opportunity.

First probably to be consulted and then potentially ask for an environmental impact report. And then third, if that report is being done, shoddily or not thoughtfully, to be able to sue and ask for a judge to ask them to do a more thorough. And if that hasn't been done to actually stop the thing from actually being built.

So we put on a whole series of checks into the system, which makes it so there's really a siloing. It feels as though if you were in the world [00:13:00] of highway management, it used to be that we're gonna look at the city as a whole and think to ourselves like what does the city of Memphis need to grow?

What is it that we are going to do? The schools the parks, the arts, the business community, everyone's gonna come together and think about holistically. And now what the feeling is that like the parks department and the schools department and the planning department, everyone's disconnected.

you have to go so many miles. Deep to understand what the process is of zoning or what the process is to plant a road or even just to understand what the federal regulations are, to plant a stop sign at a moderately busy sidewalk. No one can get it. No one understands. you have to understand three generations of law and federal regulation to understand that, that it ends up feeling as though only three people in town understand this stuff. And so there really is no common, you're living a little bubble. And I think that is both [00:14:00] perception and reality, but it is a far cry from. What the spirit was when we were island communities in the 19th century where there was a spirit of maybe you hated your neighbor, maybe you didn't want to talk to them.

Maybe you didn't want to interact with them but you were all in this together. And that's a very different notion than we have today.

Stephanie: So early on and you note this in the book, the judiciary was actually progressivism biggest adversary. How and when did this change? Because they eventually became a very big supporter of progressivism, or not necessarily a supporter, but helped to further progressives, aims.

Marc Dunkelman: The judiciary is a right. It's a funny beast has gone back and forth. It depends on what the movement's aims are. Think we, I can come full circle where at the very beginning of the progressive movement, when the Hamiltonians really took the reins and the idea was we really wanna let government cook.

the frustration many progressives had was that, these robber barons had taken over. [00:15:00] We had these huge corporations that were running amok. The political machines had taken control of the government the machinery of government. We want to let publicly minded experts do big things, build parks, build modern trolley systems and subways and public transit and sewer systems and school systems.

 we want big public improvements in that moment. The Lochner Court, which was 19th century old men, big beards that looked like Civil War veterans sitting on the court. Some of them were very conservative, very worried about big government, about protecting private property rights.

Very worried about letting the mob or the ho pallo the working class take control of government and somehow, eat into the prerogative of the old moneyed elite. They stood as a bulwark against big government doing big things. So they were a constant frustration.

And if you read the papers of the [00:16:00] progressives of the early 20th century in the Theodore Roosevelt Taft Wilson in the twenties, up through much of the New Deal, like there is this frustration, they call 'em the four Horsemen of the court. Who are these conservatives?

They're standing against the creation of robust government. the time you get to the court packing fight of the second term of the Roosevelt's administration is the turning point. At which point, sort of effort among progressives to convince the court that they should allow the executive branch to do more the executive and legislative branch.

They should give the green light to a more robust role for government and public life more apparent. And that's when, from the late thirties to the mid sixties, seventies with the Warren Court the judiciary is in many ways, a. Help rather than a hindrance and really allows the government to do all sorts of big things.

And that's when you see, [00:17:00] this is when we have the Federal Highway program, and this is when we have the Bureau of Reclamation building all these dams. And this is when we have, urban renewal and housing and this is when the federal government in particular is doing big things, but so are states and cities in many cases we are now dealing with the after effects of the changes to the physical landscape of America that were born during this era. And then you begin to see the left itself recognize that. Having given government this sort of leash during those decades was not the godsend that they'd expected. And like very liberal justices, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall bill Douglas, these are democratically nominated, liberal members of the Supreme Court, looking at the environmental implications of many of these programs and saying you have not considered, what's happening here and putting more [00:18:00] restrictions on what government can do, willy-nilly.

And there are a whole series of Supreme Court decisions that. Increasingly handcuff federal bureaucrats and the executive branch such that it's much, much harder to build a dam without doing a study one of the stories I tell in my book is about an environmentalist. The last liberal senator from Texas, objects in the sixties to a plan supported by the business community in San Antonio and just about everybody in San Antonio to build a new highway from downtown San Antonio to the new airport that's built north of it, which is gonna go through the central Park of San Antonio.

 And so he writes a provision into the 1966 bill, creating the Department of Transportation. And it's meant to suggest if there's an alternative, you should build the highway around the park. that provision is used to challenge a plan in Memphis to build a highway through Overton Park, which is Memphis is to Central [00:19:00] Park.

Your, listeners will notice that I'm using Central Park because I'm a New Yorker and everything centers around New York for me. But Overton Park is the sort of, this the major park in the center of Memphis. And the community does not want the road to go through Overton Park.

And the business community, the leaders of Tennessee, the mayor of Memphis, the city council, all want this highway to connect the eastern suburbs to downtown. And the alternative is to go through one of the neighborhoods, north or south of the park, rather than going through the park. And there's this litigation.

And Thurgood Marshall writes judicial decision interpreting what the senator from Texas had written into the law and says clearly what they meant was not that you should just consider going through the neighborhood rather than the park, but that you should go through the neighborhood rather than the park.

Well, nobody was gonna go through these neighborhoods, these rolled, old, beautiful neighborhoods north and south of Overton Park. I 40 goes from, the Carolinas, I think all the way to California or to Arizona. And this is the only break in the highway across the entire country because they could never get it through.

And that was [00:20:00] indicative of this change in Supreme Court jurisprudence where suddenly they've gone from being very reticent to allow the federal government to cook at the beginning of the century under the certain, during the Lochner era to this sort of decades in the middle of the 20th century. from the Roosevelt administration, maybe through the Johnson Nixon. Years of giving the green light to then suddenly realizing, oh we're gonna put the reins back on. And now, it's a little unclear where we're going. it's a little unclear what progressives want.

Do do, we want a strong, robust executive branch today with Trump as president, or do we wanna put more restrictions on? It's a little unclear what we want. But the upshot is that with the exception of this period in the middle of the 20th century, there really have been a lot of restrictions on centralized planning and just doing things quickly for good and for bad.

Jennifer: I'm surprised to hear that people are surprised that the Supreme Courts reigned back in government as if the Warren era wasn't the anomaly. [00:21:00] Really, throughout the entire history of the Supreme Court, it always shocks me a little bit.

 As we were talking about earlier, the 1970s saw a major shift in the political zeitgeist, and Robert Caro wrote a book that our listeners are going to be so very familiar with the power broker. And Watergate happened and people began to lose their trust in government. So how did this shift ultimately render the government actually what some people would call quite incompetent at this point in many ways.

Marc Dunkelman: that is the pivot point. I've had this remarkable experience with the book, which has now been out almost a year. And one of the prouder moments I've had was that I got Ben Smith, who used to be the New York Times and now was in seven four. To write that I thought that, robert Caro, who of course wrote the power broker, was Abby Hoffman in a tweed jacket. that I meant that Abby Hoffman, who was, one of the, leaders the Chicago uprising during the 1968 convention was real hippie and down with the man wanting to stick it to the establishment kind of guy and, long hair really just trying to give it to [00:22:00] the, old Richard Nixon Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Richard Dailey establishment. And that, that zeitgeist, which was on the outside of the 1968 convention made respectable by Robert Caro, who explains how Robert Moses, the master planner of New York City, has essentially ruined the big apple with his planning over the course of the 1930s, forties, fifties, sixties. And they're the same person. Robert Moses, Richard Nixon LBJ. All of these characters are the central casting of the establishment that Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the old hippies, the new left, the beats, those who signed the Poor Huron statement, the students for a Democratic society, had all been fighting against. This thing. And so what you have is the old left the progressives of [00:23:00] the John Kennedy era who were, talking about big government and doing big things and sending men to the moon and the Peace Corps and building big public structures and planning. And that is not the progressivism that comes out of the Watergate era.

The new progressivism is one that doesn't want to build, but one that wants to constrict. The man that wants to stop government from doing the terrible things that it has now been revealed to have been doing during the era of big government from the New Deal through the great society. And so that means that filters down from this different zeitgeist to a different legislative agenda, which is one of putting restrictions on what government can do.

And that means in ways that you can't necessarily enumerate, but you can see in a composite sense, it means writing laws that are designed to put checks on government in every which way. It means creating historic. Building statutes so [00:24:00] that you can't touch buildings like, in 1963, they take down the old historic Penn Station in New York City, which creates a whole movement for historic preservation in New York, which like saves lots of buildings, which probably would've been taken down by developers including Grand Central Station and other important buildings, which probably were not profitable like the developers would've liked to replace with something cheaper.

Parking lots, you name it. But like effort is how do we stop the developers from doing bad things there? How do we stop people from doing further damage? To the environment through the National Environmental Policy Act or the Clean Water Act, or the Clean Air Act. How do we do zoning so that we don't have sprawl or how do we do zoning so that we don't move people out of neighborhoods?

 how do we do things to stop the bad actors from doing the bad things that they have done in previous eras the so progressivism rather than driving change in a sense that we're trying to change [00:25:00] the physical landscape in which we live.

We are trying to preserve what we still have so that people are not removed from the living environments where they are. And that is a fundamental shift in what progressivism wants to achieve. And I don't think anyone who's progressive would say or should say today that wasn't a reasonable reaction to like the horrors of urban renewal.

It's hard to read the power broker. It's hard to read just one mile and one mile continued, which I think are probably the two chapters that are most famous in the Power Book about the Cross Bronx Expressway and the degree to which Moses was the most powerful bureaucrat.

And everyone in East Tremont, which was a working class neighborhood in the South Bronx, pleaded with Moses. Not to do what he did, which is just to drive a a canyon of a highway through these vibrant working class neighborhoods. The mayor was against it. The community groups were against it.

Everyone was against it. Moses so powerful and so completely insulated. His office was on Randall's Island, which like, you can't get to [00:26:00] from here. It's in the middle of long Island Sound. it's not accessible to anybody. It's the island that, basically the pedestal of the Tribe borough or the Robert Kennedy bridges on now, unless you're going to a base, like an intramural, middle school baseball game you would never stop on it.

Like on the way between Manhattan and the Bronx or Queens you wouldn't know even where to petition it. And he was just completely impervious to anyone's. And he did this enormous damage to the city. It's quite reasonable. It's logical.

It's you can only be sympathetic to the people who would've said, we need to change the system and drive power down from the centralized star chamber of wand who imposed his will on this vibrant city. And, the book was written in 1970s. it was a period where New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy, like it was rife with crime. People were fleeing the city into the suburbs. Few predicted that the city would come back to be the beacon of fanciness that it would become once again in the nineties and two [00:27:00] thousands. And it really felt as though. The sort of retrenchment was warranted, particularly on the left. But, the question is today, have we overcorrected, have we now made it so that the corrections we've imposed legislatively regulatory through judicial precedent, make it now so that we cannot adjust to further changes in the way that we live and like the world as it is today because we're so afraid of another Robert Moses. And the, that is the challenge I think, for the present generation of planners and people who love, cities and want to adjust the built environment to the challenges of tomorrow.

Stephanie: Yeah. This reaction that we had to Robert Moses, it demonstrates what you talk about throughout the book is this pendulum swing, back and forth between the extremes of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian styles and progressivism, and the harms that these extremes have on getting anything really accomplished. How do we stop this swing back and forth and settle into a more functional version of progressivism?

Marc Dunkelman: I think that's [00:28:00] exactly the challenge. I don't know that I have a great answer to it. , When I was a kid I I liked to watch, I forget whether it was GI I, Joe or the Transformers, tagline at the end was always, and knowing is half the battle. and I certainly didn't know that there was this challenge of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian progressivism until I really thought just, it took me years trying to figure out I could tell that there was some tension that I didn't understand about my own political movement. I didn't understand taking the train into Penn Station as I did for years. Like why was Robert Moses was able to do this terrible thing through the South Bronx while everyone screamed. No. And I was taking the train at Penn Station for years and years, and Penn Station is the, second most heavily trafficked transit hub. On the face of the Earth and more will go through Penn Station, they go through LaGuardia, Newark, and Kennedy. Combined a day like more will go through Penn Station than live in the city of Baltimore each day. And it is until recently like it's a shit hole, right?

Like it's the worst. or certainly it was, and like, why couldn't this be [00:29:00] fixed? And I didn't understand it. now we know those of us who care about cities, who care about, doing things we have within ourselves both the desire to improve things. And the concern that making change will hurt people. And we wanna balance these things and it's reasonable. And unless you realize that like these two things cut against each other, you can't think about how you can do it. In a reasonable way. but we all face these sorts of things all the time.

Like we, we want to go away on a fancy vacation and we also don't wanna spend a zillion dollars. So you figure out some way to balance those two things. And I think that we need to set up some parameters so that we have the ability to plan, and we have the ability to say, here are the things that we want to accomplish. And we're going to create processes that allow us to accomplish these things. But at the same time we'll push through opposition. At the same time, we are going to allow for those who are going to be hurt by things to express their concerns and [00:30:00] to have their voice heard. Robert Moses did not broach any opposition at all.

He didn't care. He hit himself off, and he did not listen whatsoever Today, no one is willing to offend anyone, right? Like we've gone to both extremes. We know that there is some place in the middle where everyone has a say but no one has a veto. And so businesses make decisions all the time. or three doctors are all standing around a patient in an operating room and they are all concerned about different systems of the body. A pulmonologist and a cardiologist and a I don't know I don't know other systems of the body but you can imagine that during a surgery, they all have different concerns about the short and long term health of the patient.

And that there's a juncture at the, during the surgery where they disagree about what is the next thing that we should do. They need some sort of protocol for making the decision about who wins. And the other two doctors are going to be disappointed. And we need a similar sort of protocol. In the [00:31:00] way that we make decisions at a city, state, federal level, so that we can get through things even when we disagree. And that's not an impossible protocol to imagine. That's not an impossible system for us to organize. And we've done before. sometimes it's not gonna work, not every patient comes out of surgery successfully. People make mistakes. we're gonna knock down some buildings that we wish we hadn't knocked down. We're going to fail to do some wind farms that we wish we had built. we're gonna make some errors, but like at the moment, in too many cases, we're stuck and we need to unglue some of those things. Aware that in some cases we're gonna make bad decisions. But that on the whole, we need to move forward.

Jennifer: Absolutely. One of the things that you mentioned is that the progressive situation that we have created now is a tragedy of the commons in reverse. Can you explain what you meant by.

Marc Dunkelman: In a typical tragedy of the Commons, what you have is a notion that [00:32:00] because there is no centralized authority everyone is allowed to let their cattle feed on the common ground such that everyone suffers because everyone has access all the time. Here we have a case where, because everyone can say no, no one has access to the common at any time. And so we are all losing out on access to the things that we should all be able to collectively take advantage of. We've got, an incredible of clean energy. Available to us in this country. Sunlight, wind, geothermal, it's everywhere. The problem is that we can't get the clean energy where it is to the places where we need to use it. And why? Because we can't build the transmission lines, that go between the places where it is generated to the places where it would be expended. That's bananas. And so we're left reliant on fossil [00:33:00] fuels, not because we don't have the energy that we need and not because it's, somehow more expensive, but because the siding process, not even for the solar and wind because of the wires that would go between various things.

you can go through, chapter and verse of this sort of same phenomenon and over, but we are choosing through process not to take advantage of the bounty opportunity in front of us. And if you were to wipe the slate clean and say, kick away all the laws and the regulations and the traditions of the way we parse out what our we have communally you would never recreate, these sorts of barriers that we've imposed in ourselves.

there are reasons that we have them and I'm not advocating for, uprooting everything as it is, but I am saying let's just take a step back here and let's acknowledge the reason that we aren't building these transmission lines are born from incumbent [00:34:00] interests that are not working to the benefit of the whole. And we can do better than this. So let's realign our interests. Let's rethink it through so that we can get back beyond this, tragedy of the commons in reverse.

Stephanie: In another industry where everyone has access, and it's actually a real big issue in Congress right now, both from conservatives and progressives alike, is housing Senate and House has their own pretty massive housing bill. And just this week as we're recording the house actually passed their 21st century act trying to overhaul our housing system and get more housing built. But you note that decades worth of Jeffersonian reforms had made it increasingly difficult to build. What needs to change in order to start addressing these issues? Or are we getting there with bill's like 21st century?

Marc Dunkelman: I think it's incredibly heartwarming that both the House and the Senate. On this. I think it's also good on Elizabeth Warren, that the cool [00:35:00] abundance focused, housing bill is coming from, a member of the Senate who has been critical of the, abundance movement.

Like it just shows that within these OG camps and as people are having fights over words in, in fact. People from across the spectrum are recognizing that we need more supply of housing. And so I don't think that we should care about what words we use.

The fact is like people are aware that in order to bring the cost of housing down, we need more homes for people to rent and to buy. And generally housing has been a thing that is largely owned and regulated and managed by the private marketplace. But at the state and local level that's not exclusively true.

Like obviously the federal government plays a huge role. the financial part of it, I played a varying role in driving supply and in subsidizing it. eight In terms of zoning, in terms of building codes and whatnot, that has generally been [00:36:00] something that's been left to state.

And local government, there was big pushback that I know in the book. point, scoop Jackson from the state of Washington wanted to have national housing plan in the 1970s. And that was the tail end of the Hamiltonian push in progressivism. 'cause nobody wanted the federal government to take over that role, which was, largely state and local. I think that Within this burgeoning movement to take advantage of what America has and to increase supply, make things more abundant, and drive down prices by having more stuff. Housing is way ahead of the curve. It's really much further ahead than, infrastructure or energy.

Both parties and every wing of the Progressive movement is behind this. And this is the marketplace of ideas. Reacting exactly as the marketplace should because houses and homes apartments, whatnot, are too expensive.

And the best way for us to handle a problem is to bring more online and zoning by itself won't solve that problem. We've got financing issues as well, and like there, there's [00:37:00] more to it. But it's great to see that everyone is focused on this issue for the first time in a long time.

And not just on subsidizing what people would pay, but on actually getting into the root of the problem, which is the number of homes that people can rent and buy.

Jennifer: Advice would you give to planners, Stephanie and our planners? The profession that it feels like continually osculates between the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian ideals as we try to help our communities.

Marc Dunkelman: the planning community is just like incredibly crucial. The element that I think gets short shrift in your world is how we shape the process. I think for too long the world of planning and. This is generations before either of you were involved, public input as a waste of time and an annoyance and that you all have had it into you that is the worst mistake possible.

And so that you should spend some great bulk of [00:38:00] your career asking people what they want. and that the great fault of planning would be not to seek public input at every juncture. and I think public input is important. I also think that ultimately the process that you advocate for needs to be one that. Ends with a decision maker that has been lost the process of our making decisions at the state, local and federal level. in too many cases, people who are involved in, community building live with the false presumption that if you just get everybody in the room and everyone just articulates point of view, if everyone can just out with their ax to grind, that once everyone sees the world from that perspective, will be able to find some sort of way to accommodate everyone's concerns. And the truth is that, that's just not possible. In many cases, there [00:39:00] are real trade-offs to be had here. If you're gonna build a high speed rail line and this is, even beyond the world of urban planning but the, analogy holds, if you're gonna build a high speed rail line, the key is to have straight track. And if you're gonna have that is straight, it means that you cannot move the track around every obstacle. You literally have to go through town. So you have to go through precious things that people want to preserve. Otherwise the train will go more slowly and then suddenly you don't have. fast trade. So you have to choose between speed and preserving those things. And the same is true in urban planning. there are gonna, people who want to preserve, this street or that street and people who want more housing and there is a trade off there. And it would be wonderful if you can find some way at a reasonable price to accommodate everyone.

But in most cases, the only way to accommodate everybody is to triple the price of the project and you can't [00:40:00] have all three things. And so ultimately you have to have somebody with a strength to say, in this particular case, these people will win and these people will lose. And maybe in, in the next fight, It'll be a different outcome. but that's very hard to do when you're an elected official. That's the thing that Robert Moses was able to do, with ity, because he didn't care. And that was too much electron me. But between Robert Moses being able to make decisions without needing to worry about the repercussions at all, and politicians today being afraid to do anything that would be even mildly unpopular is some modicum of people being heard and then someone making a decision that is in the best interest of communities to hold, even if it is unpopular with some subsegment. And I think that my advice to the world of planning is how do we, find a process that allows for people to make hard decisions. When they need to be made. And absent that, we just get [00:41:00] bogged down in process. And when someone doesn't make decision, they appeal it, or there's a lawsuit The problem is ultimately in the ability to make a hard choice. And so the more you can think about how do we shape the process at the beginning so that, when someone loses, they feel as though their objection's been heard, but another prevailing concern simply outweigh their own. That would be best.

Stephanie: I feel like any of us that have been in the field for any significant amount of time have had at least one project derailed or delayed indefinitely, or, ended with a much ideal outcome because we were trying to please everyone or get everyone's opinion. And then we tried to compromise on all the different things in order to get that outcome.

 you said this in the book and in your answer here having someone that can make a decision and just move forward I think is something really important that we need to take away. And as this is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our readers check out?

Marc Dunkelman: I mean there [00:42:00] are, so many great books out there. , Whenever I have a chance to recommend books, I always recommend that people read Elizabeth Cos making a New Deal. It's the best book of history I've ever read. Especi Chicago right before the New Deal and talking about how community works.

And though I don't know it has particular relevant to the world of planners, it's just terrific. She also wrote a drawing book it's about Ed Luke. Saving America Cities. So those are two Elizabeth Cohen books that I highly recommend. And then for all of those who read the Power Broker just to show that the power broker was not by itself it, it was not a book just about New York. It was not a book just about Robert Moses. He was of a piece of a broader critique of progressivism. I would encourage people to read Desert which is a book about the Bureau of Reclamation. And it's remarkably similar in the fact that it is not necessarily about. Urban America, it is a [00:43:00] similar arc of a similar bureaucracy about the Bureau of Reclamation and the building of America's dams.

And it is so similar in the sense that the guy, Floyd Domini is Robert Moses in all of the actual physical landscape of where he is originally doing good things to help people for the best reasons, and in the end doing abusive things. Just because the inertia of bureaucracy and the desire for power. And it's almost like it's a, Greek tragedy to the whole thing, but it contextualizes the power broker in the broader shift in progressivism. in that way, I. Puts the urban planning field in a political context that it in a broader national story.

Jennifer: I had to read Cadillac Desert for one of my water law classes, and excellent read, wonderful recommendation.

Stephanie: Well Mark, thank you for joining us today on Booked On Planning to talk about your book, why Nothing Works, who [00:44:00] Killed Progress and how to bring It back.

Marc Dunkelman: I'd love to talk to planner so look me up and

Hopefully I'll get to interact with more people in your world

Jennifer: We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Mark Dunkelman on his book, why Nothing Works, who Killed Progress and how to Bring it Back. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Public Affairs by supporting your local bookstore or supporting the show through our page at bookshop.org/shop/book on planning.

Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on. Booked On Planning.