In this episode, I talk with activist, sex advice columnist, and progressive journalist Dan Savage about the legacy of “The Urban Archipelago,” a groundbreaking piece he commissioned and edited two decades ago in the wake of GW Bush’s reelection, urging Democrats to embrace cities as their political base and future. We explore how NIMBY-captured Democratic city leadership has stifled urban potential — and why improving and growing cities isn’t just policy; it’s party building.
(PDF transcript)
(Active transcript)
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Greetings and hello, everyone. This is Volts for November 20, 2024, "Dan Savage on Blue America in the Age of Trump." I'm your host, David Roberts. Dan Savage is best known as the author of "Savage Love" a longtime sex advice column/podcast. Or perhaps as the man who forever associated the name "Santorum" with sexual effluvia. Or perhaps as the guy who started the "It Gets Better" movement for his fellow queers.
But Savage is also a fiercely engaged progressive journalist. He used to shape news and political coverage in Seattle as the editorial director of The Stranger, Seattle's stalwart, award-winning weekly newspaper (one of the few such weeklies still standing).
It was in this capacity that he commissioned and edited, in the wake of George W. Bush's 2004 reelection, a piece called "The Urban Archipelago," which at the time hit me like a ton of bricks. Part of it was the narrative, which crystallized a bunch of disparate things I'd been thinking about, part of it was the unapologetic tone, and part of it was the timing. It made me shout in recognition at a time when I, and others like me, felt extremely isolated and out of step with the national mood.
I scheduled this conversation with Savage to discuss the 20th anniversary of the piece before I knew the outcome of the presidential election, but in light of those results, the piece and its legacy are, tragically, more relevant than ever. I can't wait to talk to him about how he thinks about the piece now, what's changed since 2004, and what hasn't, and what it would mean concretely for Democrats to accept their status as the urban party. With no further ado, Dan Savage, welcome to the pod. It's a real honor.
Dan Savage
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
David Roberts
I'm pretty sure that most of the people listening to this podcast will know what an archipelago is, but just in case, let's start with what that is and then, beyond that, walk through the thesis of The Urban Archipelago piece.
Dan Savage
Well, an archipelago is a chain of islands. Indonesia is an archipelago nation. Archipelago is also one of those words that you read and rarely have a chance to say out loud or a reason to say out loud. So, you're never sure if it's (pronounced) archipelajo.
David Roberts
I looked it up before this pod, believe me.
Dan Savage
Is it a hard G, a soft G? And I've always felt — I'm an urban kid. I grew up in the city of Chicago, lived in a couple of other big cities before I accidentally wound up in Seattle — and I always felt at home in cities and afraid for my life in rural areas and suburbs. And when I was, you know, began to write and — I was always sort of politically obsessed. I was a politics junkie when I was a teenager. I cast my first vote for Mondale in 1984. So, not the first time I voted for the losing candidate in a national election.
And I always, you know, when the blue state, red state map thing took root after Gore's loss in the electoral college to George W. Bush, it didn't seem right to me to talk about blue states.
David Roberts
Right.
Dan Savage
Because when you looked at the electoral maps broken down by precinct, most by geography, states that were blue were red, almost entirely red. It's just that some reddish or red states had big enough blue cities in them to flip the state into the blue column. You look at a map of Illinois after the election and Chicago and the suburbs are deep, dark blue, but the rest of the state, most of the state geographically, is red.
David Roberts
This is very famously true in Oregon, where Portland is extremely blue and the entire rest of the state is extremely deep red and hates Portland so much.
Dan Savage
All along the ocean in California, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, even San Diego, blue, but inland, the Inland Empire, the rest of the state, red. And so when people would talk about red states, blue states, I just thought, "No, no, no, no, what you mean is blue cities." That cities, which are the economic engines of the country where most Americans live, where real America is, cities are the Democratic base. And I just thought that there was this kind of category error in the Democratic Party, especially after watching Kerry lose to Bush, when you would have someone like Kerry who's a blue-blooded patrician, as was George W.
Bush, but he did a better job faking working-class horseshit. You know, sending Kerry out in a hunting jacket to shoot at a duck. And Kerry having to pronounce awkwardly, "Who amongst us does not love NASCAR?" And the reality is, most people in urban areas do not love NASCAR, don't know what the fuck NASCAR is, or what the point is. And there's always been this pandering from Dems to the right when it came to small towns and this. I don't want to say they endorse the "real America is rural America" lie. But they didn't fight it, and they didn't fight for their base, which is, I think, real America, which are the cities.
David Roberts
And this is, just to make the obvious point obvious, this is the archipelago in question, this chain, this island chain of cities across the nation. Basically, that's blue, that's blue America.
Dan Savage
Yeah, and most of us, even though, you know, people who are well-traveled, will hop from island to island, will not spend a lot of time in small town or rural America. You know, if you're going to go on vacation and you live in Chicago, you go to Las Vegas, which is a blue island in Nevada. And if you live in Los Angeles, which is a big blue island in California, and you want to spend a week on the east coast, you go to New York or Boston or Philly or Pittsburgh. And we live most of our lives, us citizens of The Urban Archipelago, we live most of our lives on these islands. And what we wanted to do with The Urban Archipelago was to cheer everybody up because everybody was really devastated.
David Roberts
Yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe people listening even I forget how old we are, maybe people listening don't even have this context, but it was very much like George W. Bush screwed everything up, screwed up 9/11, screwed up the Iraq war, screwed up everything. And then it was very much like this past week's election, which was America saw the guy, saw him up close for four years and then chose more of him, which was at the time just incredibly disheartening.
Dan Savage
And the parallels are shockingly painful. Yes, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000, but by about 500,000 votes. Al Gore won the popular vote. If it weren't for the existence of the Electoral College, which wouldn't exist if it weren't for slavery, Al Gore would have been president in 2000, president on 9/11.
David Roberts
The first win was a fluke.
Dan Savage
Right, right. And you could say, you know, I'm with most of us. Most of us voted against this motherfucker.
David Roberts
Right.
Dan Savage
And then George W. Bush, really on the backs of an important constituency in urban America, gay people, because he ran 11 anti-gay marriage referenda in 11 states that drove out, you know, brought out a lot of right-wing evangelical voters who might have sat out that election in embarrassment over who George Bush had been in office and not a great president. And that swung some states, including a couple of swing states.
David Roberts
Yes, remarkably, remarkably parallel to —
Dan Savage
Right. And so now, and you know, in the morning after the election in 2004, you couldn't say, "Well, you know, it was a fluke that he was president and he didn't represent a majority of Americans." You know, he won the Electoral College, lost the popular vote. That was a comfort that we clung to after George W. Bush stole — look up the Brooks Brothers riot. You know, if you're younger than me and Dave and you don't know what we're talking about here, google Brooks Brothers Riot — stole the election and got away with it. And we had the sort of same security blanket after Trump won the White House, but lost the popular vote, this time by 3.5 million to Hillary Clinton.
And you could say, after Trump became president, "This is not who we are." And now we can't say that anymore and we should retire that Obamaism forever. This is who we are. Everyone knows exactly who Trump is, what he's about, what he plans to do, and can look at what he did when he was in office. All he's promised to do is make everything he did then much, much worse. And people voted for him.
David Roberts
He didn't lie. He didn't, you know, there was no hiding the ball.
Dan Savage
I was just going to say there was no hiding the ball. And now he won the — it looks like he's going to win the Electoral College, and although vote counting continues in very populous states, he is on track to win the popular vote as well. Which is such an indictment — not of our system, like, we could point at 2016 and say, "Well, it's an indictment of our system" — it's an indictment of us.
David Roberts
Yeah, although I'm going to go ahead and condemn our system, too.
Dan Savage
Well, I'm not saying we shouldn't be indicted. I'm not saying our system is innocent, isn't guilty. But you could blame the system and not the majority of Americans. And now you have to look and go, "Well, this is not something being done to us. This is what we're doing to ourselves. This is who we are."
David Roberts
I think it's probably always been true, even before there was an America, that people with generally more cosmopolitan values. I think this urban-rural tension has existed as long as there's been agriculture or whatever. But I don't feel like, in terms of the American political parties sort of cleanly dividing along these geographic density lines, I don't think that people in 2004, I don't think that was popularly understood. Today, I think it's almost like a truism. Anybody who follows politics at this point knows about The Urban Archipelago, has seen the map, but back then it was conceptually, it was very powerful.
I feel like it sort of unlocked a lot of things for a lot of people. So, of course, the piece didn't just point this out, that the blue base, the Democratic base, lived in cities. It very much encouraged Democrats to stop being embarrassed about that, stop apologizing for it, and to embrace it.
Dan Savage
And for people who live in cities to embrace being an urbanist or an urban person as a political identity, as a unifying political identity. Because when you think of why Republicans were campaigning against, attacking, and vilifying cities for decades and decades and decades, well, that's where most of the people of color are. That's where most of the poor are, and that's where most of the queers are. And people who aren't poor or queer or black or Hispanic and live in cities tend to be the kinds of white people who are cool with racial diversity and religious diversity and diverse sexual orientations and gender expression, and were kind of suspect by association or by their, you know, being fine with this kind of diversity.
And there was just this sense that there was this identity that transcended so much that we were told, you know, siloed us. If we could just name it, recognize that it was staring us in the face, embrace it, and then demand the Democratic Party recognize who and what and where its base was located, and stopped failing to defend cities and urbanism in national contests with people who would condemn "San Francisco values" before they got out of bed in the morning. And then play to the cities in the same way that Republicans play to and serve and deliver for rural America. Although you could argue that you look at red states where the Republicans control the trifecta and the legislature, and those places tend to be where the dying towns, the dying counties are and a lot of misery is.
And handing Republicans control of all of Mississippi and Alabama hasn't reversed any of that. They're the ones sort of strip-mining rural areas and setting up exploitative systems and then campaigning, running, and winning on "Well, you're this miserable, even though we run this state because of them — "
David Roberts
The immigrants.
Dan Savage
"San Francisco." Yeah, immigrants and San Francisco.
David Roberts
Which you probably haven't laid eyes on once in your —
Dan Savage
Right. Or those suckers in Chicago. It's their fault, right?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Dan Savage
And they've been able to do that successfully. And I was a kid listening to this 50 years ago, listening to Nixon say this. My parents argued about it at the kitchen table, condemning cities and condemning the people who live in cities when we're responsible for 70, 80% of the economic productivity and innovation. And it's where people want to live, choose to live, would live more of them if they could, if we would build some fucking housing.
David Roberts
Well, we'll get to that in a minute. This is also what I appreciated about the piece, and I don't even know that I had — I mean, at that point, I was still pretty new to kind of paying attention and engaging seriously in politics. But I had never, you know, I sort of knew all that vaguely, but I had never seen anyone take pride in it. You know, it's like the cities are where culture happens. You know, it's where, like, new things are born. It's where new mixes of culture are born and new things happen. It's where GDP is born.
It's where innovation happens and new businesses. And like, urbanity is the engine that produces all the things that sustain this country. The rural areas are largely consumers of all that stuff.
Dan Savage
And are subsidized.
David Roberts
And are subsidized by it. Like, you know, the cities produce the GDP that makes rural living possible at all in this country. But we're just always supposed to be kind of, like, embarrassed about it because there's always this idea that if you're proud of urbanity, then you're sort of automatically disdaining the good people of the heartland.
Dan Savage
And that's what we risked doing in The Urban Archipelago. In our anger, we heaped disdain. You did.
David Roberts
Well, that's another thing I appreciate about it. You're like, "Fuck it, let's disdain them."
Dan Savage
Almost as a thought experiment. Like, we're gonna talk about you right now —
David Roberts
Deliberately provocative.
Dan Savage
— the way you talk about us all the time, which is just with this kind of, not only don't we care about you, but you are the problem.
David Roberts
Yeah. Total contempt.
Dan Savage
And that was one of the, you know, — I reread The Urban Archipelago because we were gonna talk about it — and, you know, one of the things that gets liberals in trouble again and again and again is we care too much, and then we get slimed by the right for bothering to care. And, you know, there's a few things in there that I'm a little uncomfortable reading now because I kind of — I'm a liberal. I'm a bleeding heart liberal. I do care about getting gun locks onto guns and safe gun storage.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Dan Savage
And yet, every time I pick up a story, read a story in the paper about some kid blowing his head off, it's not some kid on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who blew his head off. It's not one of my people. It's some kid in a rural area with rube fucking parents with tons of guns laying around. Occasionally, it's a kid in an inner city where there are guns laying around, but almost invariably, it's an exurban or rural problem. And I was like, "We're losing votes because we are fighting so hard to get gun locks under the guns of these idiots in Iowa." Fuck them. If they don't want their own kids to survive being toddlers, why are we expending so much political capital and losing votes in these areas for being perceived to be anti-gun to save their own kids from themselves and from their parents?
David Roberts
Well, to once again draw a parallel, like Biden's whole administration was devoted to policy meant to revive precisely those red areas of the country that have been hollowed out by globalization, et cetera, et cetera, minimum wage stuff and care stuff. Like Biden fought for those people and in response, they hated him. You know, like the working class in those areas, the white working class in those rural and exurban areas hated him like Satan. Even though on any sort of like tangible policy level, it was the most sort of like, you know, most working-class-friendly Democratic administration in years.
Dan Savage
And imagine, imagine if the same sort of investment and prioritization had been targeted at cities, not just during the Biden administration, but the Clinton administration, the Obama administration. There's this constant sense that, well, these people out there in rural areas will come around if we just shoot enough ducks and pour enough money into their communities, and we can take for granted — one of the lessons, I think, from this, what we're looking at from 2024 is that it was a mistake to take for granted the urban vote, which is also a way of taking for granted the votes of black and Hispanic people, queer people. Although LGBT people were one of the few sort of bright spots in this election where the Trump vote among LGBT fell from 2020, where it was an appalling, I think, 27% to just 12% in this election.
So, good on my fellow queers for recognizing the threat. But imagine if we had had the same campaign, not just of funding for the cities, building the cities, building public transportation in the cities that can alleviate people not of the freedom to own a car, but the burden of having to own a car, which is a form of anti-freedom, and building housing and poured money into the cities and encouraged in cities an identity among voters of "This is what Democrats do." Democrats build big things and cities are big things that Democrats have built and are going to continue to build. And we haven't done that.
David Roberts
So, here's my question. The conventional wisdom now, which still very much holds on kind of the center-left amidst the Democratic Party and the punditry, is that turning and explicitly embracing cities, explicitly embracing urbanity, branding as an urban party would be disastrous. Because if you clump all your voters into these cities, right, the US system of government rewards geography, you know, gives votes to geography. So if your rural people are spread out and covering more land and all your voters are urban people who are clustered into cities, they're going to win more seats in state houses, they're going to win more seats in Congress, and then they're going to screw you.
So, in other words, you can't get by with just cities. And of course, like, the big factor that I think the one thing you really did — sort of like were slippery on — in that piece is going back and forth between rural and non-urban, which are very different, of course, because non-urban also includes the suburbs. And it's the suburbs that didn't play a very, very big role in the piece. But it seems to me like suburbs that are at the absolute center of US politics because it's, you know, the rural people can't win alone, the urban people can't win alone.
Everything is sort of a battle over the suburbs. And depending on how you measure things, there are more people in the US in suburbs than either in rural or strictly urban areas. So, how do you, you know, it's clear enough if you set it up as being cities against rural areas and all the, you know, that division. But how do you think about suburbs conceptually fitting into this piece and this way of seeing things?
Dan Savage
One of the things we said in the piece was, "It's not just enough to serve the cities and identify with and campaign on the cities that already exist, but we need to grow the cities." And where do cities grow? They grow out into the suburbs. And to foster that sense of identification, not just with the nearest urban area, but as an urban area, as a city, which we've seen, you and I, we live in Seattle. We've seen Bellevue go from basically a red suburb to a blue city in the last 20 years since this piece was written.
And there's a new island coming up in Hawaii right now. There's a volcano under the Pacific Ocean that is going to eventually keep spitting out enough lava that it breaches, and there's going to be a new Hawaiian island. That's what we talked about when we discussed growing the Urban Archipelago. We also talked not just about, like, let's evacuate everybody from Iowa to Seattle. Although, if I grew up in Iowa, I would have been one of those kids who couldn't have waited to get the fuck out, at least to Chicago or Minneapolis.
David Roberts
I grew up in Tennessee and was one of those kids.
Dan Savage
Right. But when you look at that Urban Archipelago map, one of the things that the blue islands are, are college towns. In Iowa, Des Moines is a blue island. So when you talk about building up the cities and investing in the cities and identifying with the cities, not just talking about identifying with the coasts and Chicago, which is kind of a coast, it's sort of, I think — I think Chicago is basically an East Coast city having grown up there — you're talking about identifying and serving and campaigning on and for and with the cities. The blue cities that already exist in red states, they're not just big enough or blue enough yet to flip that state, but that is the only way Dems take a state from red to blue is if the city grows and the city grows and the city grows.
And the more you invest in that city and the more you as a politician speak to the people in that city and help them forge that identity as residents of the Urban Archipelago, you're gonna get more people voting, you're gonna get more people registered, you're gonna get more people to identify with the Democratic Party and grow those blue islands. So it's not just about everybody clumping up in these already existing big blue cities. It's about those of us like you and me who couldn't wait to get — or I grew up in Chicago, so I was already there, but I only ever wanted to get to another one or a bigger one — but those of us who wanted to self-sort to those big cities could. And people who wanted to stay, I think of people I know in Iowa who are queer who stayed and they're not in the small town of 500 people and falling that they grew up in.
David Roberts
They're in the college town.
Dan Savage
They're in college towns and they're in Des Moines or the Quad Cities, which could be bigger, could be bluer, could be denser, could have better transit, could have high-speed rail connecting them to Chicago. If you had high-speed rail that connected the Quad Cities, which are in Iowa and Illinois and are beautiful and have a really interesting old housing circuit. If you had a high-speed rail that connected that place to Chicago, it would be a suburb of Chicago practically.
David Roberts
I don't think people get how much it is true now and even more, I think even substantially more true today than in 2004, that density is almost mathematically one to one correlated with blue voting. Like you can see it at the level that you're talking about sort of in states, you know, like the cities or the dense parts, that's where the blue is. But even it's fractal, even if you focus in on cities, the more dense neighborhoods are bluer and like the little part of the college town that's dense which can sometimes be just like, you know, a few square blocks, like that's blue. It's really a correlation that holds almost eerily across the country and to me, like —
Dan Savage
So create more of those conditions.
David Roberts
That's to me the obvious conclusion for Dems is like densification is —
Dan Savage
Party building.
David Roberts
Party building. Right. It's the exact same thing. Densification is creating more blue voters. They are one in the same. Doing it to suburbs, doing it anywhere to any — doing it anywhere is the same as building up the Democratic party.
Dan Savage
And there's two reasons why I think that is. You know, you live in a very dense place and you get an immediate and very real sense of how interconnected we all are and reliant on each other we all are. You know, the rugged individualists out there LARPing in rural areas: Who built the road? You know, that's this idea that, you know, "I'm just, I'm self-sufficient, I take care of myself, I don't need the government" and yeah.
David Roberts
Well, they're living in McMansions. They're driving giant trucks to Walmart. You know, like how many of them even —
Dan Savage
That's why we call them LARPing. Live action, role play, rugged individualism. When you live in a city, you can't maintain that pretense. You are dependent and reliant on each other's and cities are a collective project. And that sense of — I don't use collectivism because it's a commie tainted word, you get attacked for it — but there is a collective sense of "We're all in this together and how do we make this work?" And we have problems in cities because Dems have been captured by a kind of urban elite.
David Roberts
Oh, we're going there next.
Dan Savage
Who wants to McMansion the city.
David Roberts
Yeah. Just to top off this line of thought, I had some people on the pod who had moved from I think Vancouver to Delft, the Netherlands and they spent a lot of time in Amsterdam, wrote a bunch of books about biking, biking advocates. But their point was just: When you're navigating a city and everyone's walking or on bikes, there aren't and can't be enough signage to sort of determine exactly where you go. Everyone is constantly negotiating with everyone else in very small, very sort of like, you know, like fraction of a second eye contact sort of ways.
But you're constantly navigating through other human beings and negotiating with human beings about public space. It's not even something you necessarily notice consciously. But you are of these people, right? You're among these people. You are part of a unit, part of the same thing as these people around you.
Dan Savage
And what makes the news, and one of the ways cities are stigmatized or demonized by right-wingers, is what makes the news is the person who commits a crime on the subway. What doesn't make the news are that probably in a single day in New York, the hundreds of thousands or millions of small, momentary passing interactions that involved some sort of kindness, compassion, grace, tolerance, eye contact in cities. You can't navigate a city without making eye contact with a million people. Now, there are some people outside the Broadway QFC that I avoid making eye contact with, but for the most part, I make eye contact with everybody.
And there's this sense in the city where you're seen, right? And that what your friends talked about there, I think, is really important. I'm just, like, riffing on it. Like, I think that is really important. And who are you seeing? You're not just seeing people who look like you, act like you, dress like you, love like you.
David Roberts
Or your same age. Right. Or same professional class. They're not all Amazon workers, to pick an example.
Dan Savage
I mean, you look at the vote totals in Manhattan and, you know, the Upper West and Upper East sides, and there are very wealthy people living at the tops of those buildings who navigate, who leave every day and get on the subway and share and navigate the city, share the city with and navigate through the city, interacting with people of different classes. Then, it's harder to demagogue about class.
David Roberts
Yeah, and it's harder, I think, to blow, like, I don't know, trans people up in your head as some sort of, like, Gorgon, some sort of, you know, terrible beast that lurks around the next stall in the bathroom when you just, like, see them out on the street every other day. And you're like, "Oh, those are just goofy..."
Dan Savage
Those are the trans people that you recognize as trans. Like, beware, trans confirmation bias. I know a lot of trans people who pass.
David Roberts
But they're all just people. That's what — like, when you're walking around them, you're just like, "Oh, those are just like, people." People are people. Everybody's just trying to get on the damn subway.
Dan Savage
You see this, I think, you know, I hate to keep citing queer people, but almost all gay people are refugees. Even if the town of 500 you grew up in, in Iowa, happened to be, by some fluke, the most gay-tolerant, welcoming place in the world. If you want to have some choice about who you date, you can't stay there. You're going to have to migrate to the big city because we're such a tiny percentage of the population. And if you want a viable dating scene and a few options besides the Catholic priest at the truck stop, you've got to get to Chicago, you've got to get to Seattle.
David Roberts
And it's true of any niche. Like, it's true of that sexuality, but it's also true of, like, art. Like, if you're into a very specific kind of art, the likelihood of one of those 500 people in your town also being into that art is pretty small. You know, it's like evolution. You know, like, when evolution happens on islands, it happens faster than it happens on the mainland, you know, because of, like, if you want these little islands of subculture, the only place to find them is in cities. Cities are the only place where there's enough people.
Dan Savage
What I wanted to say about that kid, the kid coming to Seattle from a small town in rural Washington, like my husband did, is that he arrives at 18, 19, 20, with the assumptions, prejudices, politics that he was raised with, steeped in that he didn't question. And then he arrives in the city, in a dense neighborhood where he has a studio apartment, and immediately begins to interact with people who are Muslim, with people who are of different races, with people of different ages, with people of different backgrounds, people with different political assumptions. And what begins to happen is the questioning. And it doesn't mean that everybody's instantly turned into a lefty when they arrive in a city, but everyone has to question their priors in a way they don't have to if they stay in that small town.
David Roberts
It's the opposite of how conservatives characterize it. They characterize it as indoctrination, right? You leave your small town and you go hang out with the professors and the queers, and you get indoctrinated. It's really the opposite of that. It's showing people there's not just one way to live, there's a bunch of ways to live. That is the opposite direction of indoctrination.
Dan Savage
Right. But if you're the gay kid, some of it's by insemination, too. You end up having, you know, that's actually, there's a really terrific book, "Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington" by James Kirchick. And one of the things the federal government identified during the Lavender Scare, when they were purging gays and lesbians from federal government and federal agencies as a threat, was the fact that gay people, because of desire in our small numbers, intermingled across class and racial barriers that people who are straight didn't mingle across. There's a great scene in a gay bar that he describes where there are black guys who are porters, who are in the porter's union, hanging out, drinking with, hooking up with aristocrats from Europe who were visiting the city and forming these connections.
And that's what gay people often do in a way that straight people don't do, can do, but don't do, aren't forced to do the way gay people are forced to because our numbers are so small. And that's, you know, not indoctrination, not insemination — sorry for the dirty joke, probably not what people come to your podcast for — but just these interactions that people have. And it doesn't make, you know, I know gay Republicans, not anymore.
David Roberts
And there are antisocial assholes in cities. Let's not make any bones . There are plenty of people who are not made more humane by that exposure to other people.
Dan Savage
Some people would say I'm one of those people because I'm such an introvert, even though I live in the city.
David Roberts
Well, we're burning time, and I gotta get to my big question, which is probably the central question of this whole thing, which requires a little bit of wind up. So, the piece encourages Democrats to get serious about cities and to pursue growth policies that will cause urban growth and champion urban values. And this is a quote, this is from the piece where you're sort of like touting the merits of urban values: "Transit, like the monorail, in turn promotes density in outlying areas like Ballard in West Seattle, which leads to the creation of housing that's affordable to everyone, not just the proverbial penthouse-dwelling downtown urban elite."
So, this quote twists a knife in my heart.
Dan Savage
Mine too.
David Roberts
Because A) it's absolutely correct. Transit brings density, brings more housing, brings down housing prices. That dynamic is for sure. But as you and I know, the monorail, which Seattleites voted for a half dozen times, got nixed when we finally got light rail. It didn't go to Ballard or West Seattle. And the fight to get it to Ballard and West Seattle is taking literally decades. And then where we did put light rail stops in the city, we didn't put any density next to them. They're next to a bunch of parking lots and golf courses.
And consequently, housing is as expensive as ever. So, like, all of that, everything in that quote, Seattle just turned around and crapped on, which, by which I'm trying to get to a bigger point, which is: Half of this is like, "What's so great about rural areas? Screw those guys. Let's value our cities that we love." But the other half is cities have kind of blown it. Like blue governance in cities in the past 20 years since the piece came out have blown it. They haven't built much transit. They really haven't built much housing. They are choking.
These growth policies that you envisioned are getting choked by bureaucracy, red tape, historical memorial societies or whatever, NIMBY groups, interest groups, and even environmentalists. Everybody can slow everything down. So, blue city governance is a tangled failure, it looks like right now. And how do you think about this notion of urban pride and embracing urbanity when the examples we have before us are not super inspiring, at least in the U.S.?
Dan Savage
The problem, you know, in addition to Greg Nickels rat-fucking the monorail at the last possible minute, we would be riding —
David Roberts
That was the mayor of Seattle back then, everyone.
Dan Savage
elevated transit.
David Roberts
We were going to have a monorail all over Seattle. It was going to be the coolest, most futuristic thing. And by now, if they had just built the fucking thing...
Dan Savage
And we had the prototype, the fastest way to get from Westlake in Seattle to Seattle Center is the goddamn monorail. And we had the prototype you could go to. We wrote a lot about this in The Stranger, a lot. When I was the editor and the monorail campaigns were ongoing, I wrote a lot about the monorail. In Chicago, you have an example of elevated transit and that it works. And these arguments in Seattle that, "Oh, it's a blight that'll destroy neighborhoods. No one wanted to live near it." And then you can go to Chicago and you can see that everybody wants to live as close as possible to elevated transit to the L in Chicago, which was built 150 years ago and is noisy and loud and the monorail — anyway.
David Roberts
Seattle didn't want to build anything, though. They don't want to build a monorail, they don't want to build houses, they don't want to build bridges, they don't want to build anything.
Dan Savage
Oh, we didn't want to build a baseball stadium, but somehow that got built.
David Roberts
Funny.
Dan Savage
The problem in cities is these twin pinchers between which our political "leaders" have been captured, which are these NIMBYs who tend to be white, tend to be wealthier homeowners who don't want anything to change, who want to pull up the ladder behind them, who want to benefit from living in the city but never pay the price of living in a city, which is living with a certain amount of change and ferment and dynamism. Sorry, it's so early where I am right now. But also the left, which misidentified development as the driver of gentrification and displacement, when it's actually scarcity that is the driver of gentrification and displacement, that you can have density and development without gentrification and displacement if you don't have scarcity. We have scarcity because that's what the NIMBYs want, because it drives up their property values and it locks their neighborhoods in as these unchanging, frozen in amber Mayberry blocks like we have in Seattle, like the one I live on.
David Roberts
Like 80, there's something like 80% of Seattle still to this day.
Dan Savage
And I live on one of those blocks.
David Roberts
Same here.
Dan Savage
And I would, in a heartbeat, tear my house down and build a 4-flat —
David Roberts
Same here.
Dan Savage
— if I could, but I can't. If I could hand my house to a developer and say, "In exchange for a little less off the price of this land, which is served by four different bus lines and is a half a block from Volunteer Park and a walking distance from light rail, in exchange for a break, I get one of the apartments."
David Roberts
Yes, I get the upper floor. There's a name for that in Germany or something. That's some long German word, but that's actually a familiar enough arrangement that there's a name for it in other countries.
Dan Savage
So, I'm surrounded by wealthy white NIMBY homeowners because that's my block in Seattle, and they're my neighbors, and I love them, and I argue with them about this and other things.
David Roberts
They would not want you to put that 4-story —
Dan Savage
But the other thing that really galls me is the left in Seattle that continues for 30 years to campaign against gentrification, even as there's no stopping it. These are tectonic forces. People want to live in cities again. And rather than when we got the sense that people wanted to live in cities again, allowing the city to build again, we thought, "Oh, we can keep these people out of here if we just don't build." And that's not how anything works. And I would get in trouble when I wrote this at The Stranger, even with some of my colleagues. My perspective as a city kid, like, I grew up in Chicago in the 60s and 70s.
I remember, as a very small child, white flight. I remember my relatives moving to the suburbs. My dad couldn't because he was a cop. And you had to live in the city to be a cop. And God bless my dad that he didn't move us to the south side. He moved us to Rogers Park on the north side. Right. We didn't wind up living in Mayor Daly's neighborhood. We wound up living in a lovely neighborhood full of urban people with single-family homes in the middle of blocks and giant apartment buildings at the end of blocks as anchors. So everybody could live on this block.
David Roberts
And it worked just fine.
Dan Savage
It did. I remember white flight, though. Everybody was out and white people were fucked, we said, because they left because they didn't want to live in diverse places. They didn't want to live. Mickey D's, the Irish grocery store, became a Mexican grocery store and people were like, "We're out." And like, wow, you're a racist fuck. And then I lived long enough to see white people move back to the city and then we said, "Oh, you're a racist asshole for coming back." And I said, to the left: "One or the other." What drove the emptying out of the cities was white racism and the automobile, which we hate both those things, right?
And we should be trying to undo both those things. Here, the white people are coming back. People want to live in the city again. People want diversity. It's actually what they want. What you're doing is looking at them and saying, "Fuck you. Fuck you for going, fuck you for coming back." Sometimes it was the exact same person, who is as old as I was, who said "Fuck you" for going during white flight and then stood there during the "gentrification displacement crisis," saying "Fuck you" for coming back. You can't have it both ways. White people are terrible because they left or they're terrible because they came back, but not both.
David Roberts
But doesn't this put a dent in your thesis though, if even the urban people aren't urban in the way you describe urban values?
Dan Savage
I'm talking about lefty activists and I'm talking about white single-family homeowners. Those are the twin pinchers. And I don't think urban lefty progressive activists represent the majority opinion in the city as we saw in our city attorney's race just a few years ago in Seattle.
David Roberts
Right. Well, there's also the drugs and the crime angle because now we're seeing this sort of wave of like, kind of reactionary sentiment across even quite blue cities about petty crime and shoplifting.
Dan Savage
Made real gains in cities between —
David Roberts
Yeah, like what do you, what do you — I mean, that's, that goes directly contrary to our archipelago. Like what are we, what are we to make of that? What are we to make of the fact that blue cities can't seem to run themselves well enough to grow and attract people like you want? And their governance, their self-governance, is so bad that even now people within them seem to be turning in the other direction.
Dan Savage
Yes. Look at what's going on in California where Scott Wiener, State Senator, and Newsom are having to shove down the throat of San Francisco — which Scott Wiener represents and Newsom used to be the mayor of — shove down San Francisco's throat new housing and allowing the construction of new housing, allowing for the city to continue to build the city inside the city limits. And that's what we're going to come to. You can't win city elections in a place like Seattle if you run against single-family housing. I was really excited maybe Harris would get elected. And Harris and Obama both made a lot of YIMBY statements during the campaign and there was going to have to be a federal cram down.
We've got to like. It's going to have to be a situation where the people who run the city can turn to the single-family homeowners and say, "Our hands are tied. We can't prevent this." And it just fucking happens. But when you think about it, it is distressing. The fact that The Urban Archipelago vote, there was a big swing toward Trump. We're still talking about supermajorities in cities voting for Harris, but there was more movement in the cities toward Trump than anywhere else. And that's distressing. And I have a few theories about that, one of which is already getting me into a lot of trouble.
David Roberts
Oh, please, just share, because I'm wrestling with it.
Dan Savage
Everyone's acknowledged that Trump picked up a lot of Black, Hispanic, and Latino support. Where are those communities based? Where do they live? Cities. So, if he's going to pick up a lot of Black, Hispanic, and Latino support and voters and create more of a working-class coalition on the Republican side, you're going to see a movement in the cities. When people talk about Trump doing really well in the cities, there's not a city in The Urban Archipelago from 2024 that we identified where he won anywhere near a majority.
David Roberts
No, no, he didn't.
Dan Savage
Cities are still our stronghold. We need to shore those strongholds up. That's the lesson of 2024. I think, culturally, in the cities, you know, this is when I'm gonna get in trouble. Because I am a part — this is not me criticizing the left. I am of the left. And I am part of, I think, at times, the insufferable left as well. But cities are the places where people had the most interactions with the insufferable left, with the scolds, with the people who are policing language, with the people who are elevating.
David Roberts
Yeah, because one of the things you say in The Urban Archipelago is that one of the urban values is we like argument and speech and everybody getting their say and the bustle. And then, you know, we have not really behaved that way since then. Now there's this whole sort of, like, trope now of precisely those people in the cities, precisely those kind of educated, affluent people being the most naggy and censorious.
Dan Savage
Right. And that's the insufferable left. And somebody who lives in rural Iowa has had no interaction with, and therefore no reason to cast a protest vote against, the insufferable left. But someone who's lived in Seattle, who is a Democrat, a liberal, a progressive, may have cast a vote against the insufferable left after watching what went down over the last, I don't want to say four years. I don't want to tie it to the protests of 2020 and George Floyd. I think the last decade of this, I think it's a truism, I've heard other people use this, I don't know who to credit it to, but I think it's absolutely true that: The right seeks converts and the left hunts heretics.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's old. Old. That goes way back.
Dan Savage
You can agree with me about 98% of everything. But it's my mission to find that 2% or that 5% where we disagree and then drive you out, cast you out. You are impure. And that's not how you win elections, and that is how you lose votes in a place like Seattle or a place like Chicago, where Trump increased his vote share, or New York City. And when you look at where Trump's vote share increased in New York City, where the swing was in New York City, it's the Bronx, it's not the Upper West Side, it's not the whitey-whitey parts.
So, a lot of it is like, where are the voters who are black and Hispanic and Latino? And everybody acknowledged that he picked those voters up. So we shouldn't be shocked that he did better in cities this time than last time. But when I think of some of the people that I know who cast protest votes by not voting or by voting for a third-party candidate who is not Jill Stein, it's almost like we used to talk 20 years ago, 30 years ago. People talked about edgelords and shitposting. There are some people out there who edgelord shitposted a vote for Trump in Seattle, not because they necessarily wanted him to be president, but because they wanted to flip off the people who yelled at them for getting a pronoun wrong.
David Roberts
Yeah. So, there's a lot of self-criticism to be had here then on the left, among urbanites, that they have not passed the urban policies that would have made this vision real. And they haven't behaved—
Dan Savage
And those urban policies are the engine that creates Democrats. Right. We have gummed up the works that take people from small towns and rural areas and turn them into reliable blue Democratic voters by bringing them into the city, by helping them create a home, a life, and a family in the city. But cities have become these places that talk about tolerance, talk about inclusivity and diversity, and exist to force you out, to drive you out because of the cost of living, because of the cost of housing, which is impoverishing people.
David Roberts
It's terrible. It's become a macroeconomic problem now. But what do you —
Dan Savage
So, these Democrats and liberal politicians who run the cities have misidentified what it is about cities that they, as Democrats and liberals, should be running them to do, which is, you know, to create better places to live and work and innovate and GDP, but also great places for Democrats to farm new Democrats. And we have stopped that up, we have dammed that up in the cities because some people like you and me, we're like white guys in our 50s, right? Some people like you and me got houses and then immediately thought, "Well, the last thing I want is a condo next to my house or an apartment building next to my house. And I'm going to show up at some meeting at city hall and scream and yell and terrorize these politicians into backing the fuck off."
That we can't undo single-family zoning in Seattle is insane. Seattle, which prides itself on being anti-racist.
David Roberts
My favorite statistic, something like, I forget the exact number. I should look this up. Something like it's between, I think, 70 and 80% of Seattle by land area is less dense today than it was in like the 1970s when the population was like a third of what it is now. So, we've grown by almost three times while these vast swaths of single-family homes have been depopulated because the kids grow up and leave. Kids can't afford to come buy them. So, it's just a bunch of old people out in these single-family home neighborhoods and all the new population, all the new people are being shoved into these corridors along high throughput stroads. It's awful!
Dan Savage
Then, because the people in the single-family neighborhoods traverse those corridors to get from one part of the city to the other, they see that development shoved up along those stroads and think, "Oh, the city has changed. Look at all of this development." And it's really Potemkin development.
David Roberts
And they think this is what density looks like. It looks like a big, ugly apartment building alongside a five-lane road where you'd have to get in your car to do anything.
Dan Savage
Oh my God. And no, like 70% of Americans don't have passports. So, 70% of Americans haven't walked around Berlin, right, where there are seven-eight-story apartment buildings everywhere. And they form these lovely neighborhoods that create a lot of shade in which there are little parks, and it's lovely and possible, but we won't do it. I live right behind Volunteer Park on one of the 16, 17, 18, 19th streets there. And there's the number 10 bus, the number 12 bus, the 43. It's served by all of these buses that are empty. I am the only one on them because I do not know how to drive.
And so, it's a dense, transit-rich neighborhood full of old people with cars. The block I live on is really near St. Joe's, which is a great private grade school, and Stevens Elementary, which is a great public grade school. And everybody who's bought a house on our block in the last few years is a childless retired couple because those are the only people who can afford houses on our block anymore, or afford housing on our block anymore. But if we were building, even if we just rezone the city, so at the end of each block you could build an anchor apartment building where people whose kids are moving out of their houses or young families can afford a two-bedroom apartment to rent it or swing it and buy it.
It would transform the city and bring life to the city. And I wouldn't be the only motherfucker on the number 10 bus 90% of the time.
David Roberts
This was my impression when I was in Hamburg recently. When I wasn't laid up in the hospital, when I got out and was —
Dan Savage
Oh God, I read that thread. I'm so sorry. I'm glad you're all right.
David Roberts
When I was walking around Hamburg, though, it's just as you say, there's all these six-story apartment buildings and little cafes and little playgrounds and schools and all the things you need to live mixed together. And so you'd see walking around an incredible age diversity. It really made me cognizant: A, when you walk around Seattle, just how few people you see. Full stop. Like, there's, you can't find anywhere in Seattle that has the sort of bustling street life of any, you know, like any given block in Hamburg. And B, just a diversity of ages, like all these old couples and then there's like parents with kids, there's teenagers riding around together on bikes.
There's just this sense of the fabric of life, like all the different ages, different people involved in different things. You just feel like you're in a web, you know, this web of interdependence that you're talking about. You can really feel it in a place like that. You just can't feel it when you're driving around a stroad in Seattle.
Dan Savage
And this is where people will jump in and say, "Well, go to Hamburg, go live in Hamburg."
David Roberts
I wish I could.
Dan Savage
We don't want everywhere to be Hamburg. And we're not arguing for everywhere to be Hamburg. Not everywhere in Germany is Hamburg, right? Not everywhere within five miles of the part of Hamburg you're talking about is like that.
David Roberts
Right?
Dan Savage
But the problem in America is we can't have Hamburg anywhere. That everywhere has to be a suburb and that cities are deconstructing themselves. You have neighborhoods where there has been no change to the actual housing stock, where fewer and fewer people are living because people are taking brownstones that were cut into four apartments and making them single-family homes again, which has also happened in Seattle. It has happened in my neighborhood in Seattle where there were houses that have been cut into two apartments that are now one home with two retired people living in them with six bedrooms, which is insane.
And so, like, we're not talking about, you know, I love Berlin, but I've also been to the suburbs of Berlin and little towns outside of Berlin that are well served by transit, where it is single-family homes. And the problem in America is we don't have both options. No one's saying if we built a dense Hamburg-like neighborhood in downtown Seattle, a lot of them or all of downtown Seattle became that, that everyone is forced to live there. It's that those of us like you and me who would like to live there can't live there because people are so paranoid that they might be forced to live there. We're not allowed to build that where it might be wanted and welcomed.
David Roberts
And it should tell us something that every place in Seattle or any American city that even gets close to that is instantly unaffordable because there's so much demand for it. Like, clearly there is way, way, way more demand for that kind of place than there is supply. Where's capitalism when you need it?
Dan Savage
Right. That kind of capital — I wish Dems would be pro-business in, like, "Let's build." People will make a lot of money. And that's good because the end result of people making a lot of money building is people have a lot of places to live. You know, I wanted to jump back to something you said earlier about how you build transit and you allow construction by it. I'm in a little city in Europe right now. I'm not in the United States, which has been a really freaky experience going through what we've been through last week.
David Roberts
You should stay.
Dan Savage
I was at a dinner party yesterday, had to answer a lot of questions about "What the fuck?" They just extended the tram system in the city where I am out into a field. If you look it up on Google Maps, you can do the 360 thing and there's literally nothing there on Google Maps still. Now, because they put a tram stop there and built a new tram line out into the middle of nowhere, there's a giant cluster of apartment buildings, high-rise apartment buildings, low-rise apartment buildings, and repurposed — because it was an industrial wasteland — old industrial buildings that are now community centers and not factory floors. There's a lovely little park at the center of it. It is gorgeous. Thousands — I've been going to this neighborhood since the first cafe opened and the first tower that they built. Because I come to this place, I am in Europe right now a lot and I have watched the place fill up with people. It's because they built a transit stop and then they allowed for the construction of tons of new housing on it. It is a vibrant, interesting neighborhood where people have the option to live.
And not everybody wants to live there, but you know, not everybody has to live there. But the people who wanted to live in a neighborhood like that prior to its construction couldn't because it wasn't an option for them. And that's what we don't have in the States. We need 10, 12 Pearl Districts in Seattle.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Dan Savage
But bigger because it's hoarded. Like, you've been to the Pearl District. It's great. It's great. And especially if, you know, it was in the Pearl District in Portland, Oregon before the Pearl District was allowed to happen. Right. And that's the other thing I just want to think, I want to say about development is like, people are like, "Oh, Seattle needs to build." No, Seattle needs to get the fuck out of the way and let people build in Seattle. It's not the city's job to build housing. It's the city's job to stop preventing the construction of housing.
David Roberts
The really depressing thing is Seattle, which, you know, as you're saying this about transit, just like if anybody out there listening doesn't know, Seattle finally, after voting for it 58 times, finally voted through several billion dollars for light rail and then decided basically to run it alongside the interstate and make it a park and ride tool for commuting, which is like 5% of the value of transit. You know what I mean? Like, we spend billions and then nickel and dime these stops. So we're not getting any of that burst of development and growth that you're supposed to get from transit stops.
Instead, we just parked them right by the interstate. It's obscene.
Dan Savage
And we pay for our politicians to go on these junkets to places that have functioning transit systems where they see with their own fucking stupid eyes that transit in places like London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York runs through neighborhoods. It doesn't run along freeways and interstates. There are no trains in Berlin along the horrible ring road that goes around three quarters of Berlin. Because there's the ring road. The trains thread through neighborhoods. There are trains in Chicago, the Brown Line, that go past some single-family homes on the same block. That's where that was part of the genius of the monorail — if we had had the courage to build it when we had the opportunity to build it — it was traveling along existing rights of ways through existing neighborhoods and it would have knit them together and it wouldn't have destroyed them. It would have made them, ironically — you know, like one of the problems we have with scarcity is high property values — ironically, you know, in a place like Chicago, the closer you are to elevated transit to the L, the greater your property values are. It's almost like we, you know, we send these politicians on junkets and they learn the — they see how it's done and they come home and say, "Let's do the opposite." And it's so infuriating.
David Roberts
It's been infuriating this way in Seattle for decades. But what I was going to say is, one of the most depressing things about all this is, like relative to most US cities, Seattle is growing and building relatively quickly compared to other cities. Like, as grim as the sort of urban landscape is here relative to a Berlin or Hamburg or something like that.
Dan Savage
Which are having their own housing crises.
David Roberts
You know, it's better than a lot of mid-size and large cities that aren't building anything. You know, it's just such a low base.
Dan Savage
Can I blow your mind, though? Can I blow your mind? Yeah, we are growing, but the people who are coming here, we're torturing.
David Roberts
I know, right? We're putting them by the stroads.
Dan Savage
We're putting them by the stroads. They're having to move into apodments, which are tiny little dorm rooms, because it's all they can afford. This is where the money is. This is where the jobs are. This is where the opportunities are. It's not an opportunity to have a decent living space that you might want to grow old in or have a family in. It's an opportunity to come here and be tortured because of the scarcity. Right. And then be resentful. And I think one of the reasons, because of this lost opportunity, the last 20, 30 years to build in cities and cities at a time when there was such demand for the city.
David Roberts
Yes. And such low interest rates and such good conditions for building.
Dan Savage
And one of the consequences is what we just saw in this election. Some of this urban vote for Trump, which was a vote against cities, was anger and frustration at what it means to have arrived in the city in the last 10, 20, 30 years. You arrive in the city to work for and service the people who bought the single-family homes 30 years ago. And what you get is an apodment on a stroad with shitty transit.
David Roberts
And I saw in a Seattle planning document, maybe you've heard this, a Seattle planning document where those apartments alongside the stroads, between the stroads and the single-family neighborhoods, were referred to as buffers for the noise and air pollution of the cars. So, we literally take the poor people who are doing the service jobs in Seattle, shove them into these corridors so that they can breathe the pollution.
Dan Savage
We stack them and their lungs up.
David Roberts
Yes. So, we can protect the people in single-family homes from all that unsightly noise and pollution.
Dan Savage
Which invariably, the people in those single-family homes are contributing the majority of. Because it's people in single-family homes who get in the SUVs and tanks and drive up and down those stroads to get to work, to school, to the grocery store, and then back to their single-family home where they park their fucking SUV.
David Roberts
Is it fair to say that if you were commissioning a piece like this today — which, like I hope somebody is, it's appropriate all over again — what would be the big change? Like, would the big change be, like you said, "Democrats get serious about cities and pass pro-growth policies in cities"? They didn't. I guess you could just repeat that louder with more exclamation points. What would you emphasize differently or what would you do differently if you were putting this piece together today, given what's changed since then?
Dan Savage
I think when we wrote it, we thought Democrats who are actually running the cities would recognize their own self-interest in allowing the cities to build and building the cities. Now, I think we would try to pit national Democrats and Democrats at the state level against the kind of NIMBY-captured Democrats who are actually running the cities, who are a huge part of the problem.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's wild that we have to have state Democrats overruling our city Democrats now. The ones who should be the champions for cities.
Dan Savage
Right. Well, the NIMBY-captured Democrats who run the cities are often NIMBYs themselves. And my problem with Seattle, going back 30, 40 years to the monorail, to the commons, is there's just a sense of somebody's going to lose, right? There's going to be a commons or not be a commons, somebody's going to lose. There's going to be transit or not be transit, somebody's going to lose. And there's just this desire to — cliche about Seattle, like studying something is doing something about something. Process. And process is kicking the can down the road so that nobody ever has to lose.
So, you don't piss off the progressives who regard any construction as evidence of gentrification and displacement. You don't piss off the NIMBYs who regard any new construction as an existential threat to their precious way of single-family home life. And you just do nothing.
David Roberts
And if you piss off the poor people who are living on the stroades, who cares, right? Because they're just poor people living on stroades, right?
Dan Savage
And if we had Democrats at the national level and state level registering those poor people in the apodments to vote out the kind of NIMBY captured Democrats who are running the city and ruining the city by trying to freeze it in amber, maybe there would be progress. But there's a battle coming, or it's here in California. You see it between the state level Democratic elected officials and the city level Democratic elected officials. And I think that's what we would write about now. We would be less sanguine about, "Hey, like Democrats, if we point out this is like where your voters are," we're all going to get on board with creating more of those voters by allowing more people to move into the cities and inhabit them.
And that transformative process that we talked about, about people making eye contact and sharing spaces and meeting people who are different from them, allowing that to grow and grow and grow exponentially to create more democratic and liberal progressive voters. Like, we thought that if we identified that Democratic elected officials recognize their own self-interest in getting out of the way of the city being a bigger and bigger city, of growing these blue islands in The Urban Archipelago. And that just hasn't come to pass because of NIMBY capture. And that's what the back has to be broken of, NIMBY capture.
And there's got to be some cram downs of apartment buildings and not just rezoning a little bit here, a little bit there, and then the Seattle Planning Commission fucks it all up and we end up with development that indicts more development, self-incriminating development, but just like to get the fuck out of the way and allow people to build again. And I'm ranting. I'm ranting. You can tell that this is like, people think I just think about sex, and I write my crazy sex jokes in my column and I think about them, but I walk around the city that I write about sex in, obsessed about this.
David Roberts
Well, there's nothing worse than that first few weeks after you come home from a delightful European capital and drive around the stroads of Seattle for a while. That's a real, that's a real comedown period. I was just going to say, by way of wrapping all this up and, like, putting an exclamation point on all of it, is like: This seems like the fight of our times now. Like, the most important thing going on. Because the larger picture, the bigger picture is like modernity itself on trial. Do you know what I mean? Like, we're having a reactionary backlash that wants to take us back — to steal Kamala's doomed slogan — that wants to take us back, literally, to pre-Enlightenment times.
And it is in cities where those Enlightenment values find flower and play out and advertise themselves and propagate themselves. So, like, it's not just that, like, I want to live in a brownstone where I can walk to a market — although that is very, very true. It's not just a, it's not just a personal taste thing. This is, like, existential shit here. You know what I mean? This is like. This is like humanity here, fighting out what kind of species it wants to be, what kind of future it wants to have. Just to make the whole thing much more grandiose than it already was.
Dan Savage
Well, that's a good wrapping up, because I have nothing to say except I completely agree and I am distressed.
David Roberts
We'll end there, then. Thanks so much, Dan, for coming on. I wish it were under more pleasant circumstances.
Dan Savage
Thank you, Dave. I really enjoyed it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
Share this post