Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?

For this month's book club, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the 1961 classic that changed how everyone thinks about neighborhoods. Rereading it as YIMBYs, they find a book that's right about what makes a street feel alive and wrong about almost everything that followed: Jacobs's push to devolve power to the neighborhood level became the veto that now blocks new housing everywhere. They also get into why Jacobs ignored the economics of citie...

For this month's book club, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the 1961 classic that changed how everyone thinks about neighborhoods. Rereading it as YIMBYs, they find a book that's right about what makes a street feel alive and wrong about almost everything that followed: Jacobs's push to devolve power to the neighborhood level became the veto that now blocks new housing everywhere. They also get into why Jacobs ignored the economics of cities, what Austin gets right that Greenwich Village lost, and the one place Jerusalem agrees with Jacobs completely: city parks are overrated.

Plus a peer review of a new paper on how the typewriter transformed women's economic lives.

(00:00) Rereading the most famous book about cities
(06:00) Greenwich Village, gay bars, and what made her neighborhood special
(15:23) Jacobs's four principles: mixed uses, old buildings, density, and small blocks
(23:17) The blind spot: cities are economic engines
(27:47) How Jacobs's victory became the NIMBY veto
(36:03) Height limits and what Americans actually want
(44:40) The zoning contradiction at the heart of the book
(46:18) It's the people, not the buildings
(49:58) Montreal, Berlin, and why isn't everyone moving to Philadelphia?
(55:21) What would Jane Jacobs think of Austin?
(01:01:15) The case against city parks
(01:16:41) Peer review: How the typewriter changed women's lives

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The Argument is produced by Justin Zuckerman, fact-checked by Eli Richman, with music by Breakmaster Cylinder and art by Ben Tousley.