think small and the planning profession, in a lot of cases, 50, 60 years and in a lot of ways it brought places like detroit to start thinking about local, roundup, restoring places -- >> that is a great place to wrap things up on this third panel. in just a minute we move into the second panel. we ask you to bear with us thanks to all the folks standing in the back. let's have a round of applause. [applause]

>> if people take their seats they are ready for the next panel to begin. so first, let me thank lewis for the first panel and jason and gracie, let me say how grateful i am to all of you who made this possible, i can tell you those working on this and people everywhere who pump up who are conservative and interested in the city. and they have a lot of questions that have been asked and a lot of questions that we are now going to ask. as long as i have been following urbanism as a policy area.

never have i seen such emotion is on march 25, 2017, when a columnist dared to write in the new york times break up the liberal city. we are fortunate to have delta, been engaging in a series of what he described as implausible, insane and interesting argument to really get our political and policy conversation going in new directions. everyone, after great political disruption in stagnant tracks.

let me bring an excerpt of it here and kick off the conversation. and formerly atlantic author of brand-new -- with bad religion. and american conservatives. and the atlantic where he is literary editor and a senior fellow from the manhattan institute. and the cosmopolitan panel, in real america. and i'm looking forward to

having a robust discussion in american cities, and polity related to each other. and we should treat liberal city the way liberals treat corporate monopolies. with gross -- growth enhancing assets which concentrate and inspire against public good. and we should make teddy roosevelt and break them up. and the reasons this is so important to me is coming off of this particular election and in

certain places. how much political persuasion was concentrated in those places and because of that super concentration, a popular vote you may have heard does not match the elect oral vote for one of the rare times at the end of history. most have decried that but it always struck me that may be akin to the system. and the compromise in place, the electoral college and try to balance. they are concentrated commercial wealth. let me allow you to address these fine city folks. and with the trust possibly.

>> thank you for having me, honored and flattered to be here. i appreciate you having me. let me preface basically everything i say by noting i am a newspaper columnist and the requirement of that job description is to make outlandish suggestions about areas you are underinformed and attends to a higher level of knowledge and you can have. and i will not attempt to revitalize the city of akron. i lived in cities for much of my life and to burnish my urbanism i lived in this neighborhood in capitol hill for 7 or 8 years

and we have been in semi-rural connecticut for the last two years and for various reasons some having to do with text, that has been an unsuccessful experiment and returning to walkable urbanism this fall for at least a year. so i am an admirer and enjoy your of walkable urbanism and urbanism in general. that being said, america's biggest cities are bad. they are bad in several different ways. they are effectively intertwined. one of the biggest stories in our society over the last 30 or 40 years since the 60s in 70s has been a socioeconomic, educational sortie where you have these recent concentrations of college graduates and people with postgraduate degrees into a

particular set of knowledge economies, symbolic analysts cities mostly on the east and west coast but also around major colleges and universities in the heartland. this concentration has upsides or people wouldn't be doing it. urban quarters, i lived in them, i like them, wonderful places to live, they have a lot of beautiful architecture that is much more attractive than split-level ranch of an sprawling cul-de-sacs and they bring people together who work together and go to coffee shops together. all of that has an economic multiplier effect, economists assume it does, it has an innovation goosing effect and people who do it like it. those are all good things. unfortunately it is also meaning

that american society is segregated by education and social capital as never before and it is segregated in ways that have political consequences where the democratic party can claim 48% of the vote and discover it rammed into a small geographical area, even if you undo every republican gerrymander you still might not get the representation democrats feel they deserve. it has consequences for republican this because as you were discussing it gives republicans a disincentive to compete in urban areas which blinds republican politicians to the important ins and outs of good policy. it is related effects, the effect of cities against cities. i lived in connecticut my last two years, connecticut is a lot

of trouble, connecticut is a state of cities which small cities, more livable and humane. major companies and younger driven twentysomethings they want to hire don't necessarily want to live in small cities when there is a bigger city available, happening in connecticut cities, at yale university, has been a departure, this happened in connecticut suburbs. the city of hartford is the insurance capital of the united states. wallace stevens wrote poetry. it is a beautiful city with a beautiful art museum, literary tradition on the river and so on. companies don't want to be based

there anymore, and the last major insurance companies moving its innovation and young people and technology focused offices to new york city, new york city is a place young people want to hire want to be, what is getting richer and afford the tax cuts and all the different things that lure vibrant companies into chelsea or whatever whereas hartford with a shrinking base and company can't afford that. that dynamic played out between new york city and boston and connecticut, in between them is played out in certain ways in the country at large, the greater the revival in the united states is a revival of megalopolises and not necessarily a revival smaller cities that in certain ways a certain conservative approach to urban policies are like that and

the final issue here and i won't talk about my solutions because they are crackpot ideas but that is the nature of it. the last issue, population sinks basically. that has implications for conservative politics because conservative politics are boosted for various reasons and implications for the future of growth in the united states, if you grow the western world, it has complicated implications i have written other things about for the polarization of politics and how i talk about racial demographic change, a lot of unfortunate implications. while i am supportive of this sort of what you might call the

urbanist consensus. and centerleft policy wonks and so on. you have big cities that are centers of economic growth, and of housing so everybody can move there and they are not effectively serving the engine of working and middle-class prosperity functions, and new york much more dense, i agree with that sort of. if you make san francisco a lot denser you are not going to be building houses, and live there for 25 years, much more likely to be building more urban standard space which is a good space to live by yourself or a roommate or girlfriend or spouse

and a good space to have one kid and if you squeeze a good place to have two kids but it is stressful and exhausting and so on but they are not places in the long run where if you encourage more people to move you are going to get any reversal of what i think of as the negative demographic trends in the united states in the western world. i can see the economic case for that consensus but basically support it but you need to think outside the box, think about, take us on polarization and politics. and sociologically and culturally in terms of its effects on the rest of the country and its effects on the lifecycle. which would lead me to a partial

defense of suburbanization but have gone on long enough. >> speaking of that penalty. and for the american conservatives, a cover story entitled cities that help children. jane jacobs and particularly her town. and that perspective to engage effective cities and families. and the village that she enhanced. >> the last panel we heard a lot

of talk, and connected with that family life. that is when you read jane jacobs. what you are really getting, what is memorable, a small town village life, and that was largely how she would describe, essentially gentrified. and working-class neighborhood, postwar new york. with the bohemian elements, with

those young innovative knowledge workers. >> the problem, i hate to -- i am a marxist conservative. i have to figure out i always have to bring things back. and economic and social relations. and the product of certain, gender realities, and going to something outrageous. we can't have community life, and very similar community life.

and you can't have that community life. this was dependent on women being at home during the day. the storeowner every now and then intervened, most we eyes and ears on the street, it is the mothers. the kind of suburbia, suburbanization, is really quite enticing, running from yard to yard, there are women at home, that community life is the

product, that is finished, if i'm not an urban planner i won't come up with that, i have seen a solution. certainly the major urban centers, increasingly and intensely centered young knowledge workers. politics in some ways is incidental. there is no way they are going to be havens for middle-class or working-class, and this makes us more interesting. if you look at charles murray's book, it is very eloquently

described. you couldn't get back to that working-class life. working-class is arguable, the family life and community life that it did back then. and exercise and not down to, for the most privileged among us to keep talking. that doesn't give us the kind of community and family life that jacob provoked and a lot of us want to get back to. final point, even in small towns, they want to walk to the stores. what was the streetscape of new

york. what was it like in the postwar decade? a dreadful monopoly or monotony, it served local population, there were some antique stores, some cafés but mostly local people, in neighborhoods that were very self-contained but now you get it. you can never go back there. i live in a small town in new hampshire. it is lovely, the downtown -- i would love to go to that store

downtown. i spent my time at home depot because home depot is going to have this election and the price of the consumer. if you want an important distinction, if you can't return, and return to those. >> a very interesting perspective, you grow up in a small town. the smallest of small towns, you put time in indianapolis, chicago and in new york city. just described how we are not going back to a previous era of

nostalgia where are we going forward? what is the future of the american city? >> that is a good question. one of the things i took away is the status quo is not an option. a particular recipe which is more of a thought experiment, we need to make some serious consideration this for fundamental change and there are three reasons for that. one is in the era called the triumph of the city economic results have been terrible in america. richard -- the rise of the creative class in 2002, released -- foretold the rise of superstar cities powered by hack account, densely clustered in

transit oriented walkable neighborhoods, 15 years later he has written a book called the new york crisis talking about the problems, the downside that followed from some of that. he saw the positives but not the negatives. since 2000, economic growth has been terrible. barack obama was the first president since herbert hoover to go to 3% gdp. george w. bush was just about as bad, his economic growth, in the 1980s in 1990s job growth in america averaged 1.9% per year. since 2000 we have been averaging 1/2% per year and inflation-adjusted median household income lower today than in 2000 so when you look at anemic gdp growth, job growth and declining incomes those are just bad results for the current regime. something needs to change. these liberal cities have

benefited from government policies around globalization. the sociologist, literally wrote the book the global city, the leading international theorist on global cities talked about how globalization produced the effect of thomas friedman that allowed factories and call centers to be shipped all over the world to wherever the talent is done most efficiently. she pointed out it is more complex to do business all over the world than one country. spreading the supply chain all over the world created demand for new forms of complex financial producer services in things like international currency, contract law, marketing, these required highly specialized skills to produce what you couldn't get, couldn't

do those things clustering together in a number of places like new york and chicago. in a sense, the rise of new york and chicago in this global city came in part as a result of the decline, globalization spread those factories all over the world which was not the only factor related to industrial decline but efficiency gain, globalization played some role, part of what you would rise for these cities and people like to think of globalization is something that just happened like a meteorite that hit the earth. globalization, technological improvements emerged out of the marketplace, globalization was a deliberate government choice. nafta was governor and policy in action. the uruguay round, trade talks, government action.

admitting china from wto government action, government has been a tremendous promoter of globalization in these policies, the intellectual classes which are disproportionately have been the biggest cheerleaders for the system because they are benefiting from it. you have to look at the globalization not just in building a global cities. lastly there has been a lot of help from any cities. washington is what washington is because of the vast expansion of federal government in every nook and cranny of american life. new york has benefited enormously from wall street bailouts and the last attitude toward prosecution or financial crime in the wake of the crash. silicon valley has accomplished what it accomplished in part because it has been given an exemption from ordinary

businesses which every american industry has to comply. ordinary american businesses can't just come into your town and say whatever the regulations we stop operating or american businesses could not operate with demographics of employees, young, white, asian males like silicon valley has been able to get away with so they don't have to pay taxes on an internet transaction for a long time so there were specific government actions the benefited many cities delivering government policy around globalization benefiting them and the era of dominance by coastal economic underperformance. whatever the answer is -- what do we think? [laughter] >> i feel like i have been out contrary and twice. i really am not sure what to

say. i feel like i would like to make a couple comments. one online discussion briefly about one of the questions you raised. i cited it in the original column saying whatever the concentration affects of having these knowledge workers living together produced anemic growth, noah smith, frequent twitter, sent me a bunch of research arguing all things being equal, these cities are increasing, more growth in countries that have more and so on. the argument that it could have been more targeted, global growth, with these. i am not enough to adjudicate

that. another thing that it is worth raising, one of the fascinating things, i wrote about we 10 years ago, another version of crackpot ideas, we were talking about the future of the working-class and the american heartland and so on and one of the things we found, the internet's, with decentralization. basically lots of people, with small size american cities, the middle of america, housing is

cheaper, the cost of living is lower and they are able to telecommute, they are spun off and sent out in different parts of the country. the internet will enable physical dispersion and might counteract this trend toward concentration of the hypereducated. that hasn't happened and the reverse continued to happen. all the people working in the most internet-enabled companies also want to be as close to each other as possible. in northern california living in the town, new company towns that are unlike old company towns, but it is interesting, i don't have a full explanation for that but it is an interesting fact of

america in the age of the internet. you do have people do have -- people moved to the sunbelt and we talk about big coastal megalopolises with plenty of growth in atlanta and phoenix and these texan cities, sprawling suburban cities that are more family-friendly, people keep moving to them. the hyper educated, this sort of class has not done that, the companies they work for haven't done that. new economy hasn't dispersed. there is an interesting sociological and psychological story about why that is, that i haven't completely figured out exactly.

>> you know, a little denser. and so there are two ways of talking about cities. one is talking about new york city and its, you know, large urban core. and the other is talking about urbanism, which is urban form. and, you know, the new urbanism initiative has always been focused on repairing urban form. and showing that, in fact, the

booming tech cities -- if you go to them -- they are establishing downtowns, they are, you know, creating that walkable environment because that is what the market is demanding. and even through american zoning the market works. now, and i also want to bring up what you mentioned about anemic economic growth, and aaron might want to chime in here because there has been the barrage of studies from ed glaeser, from many others who posit that we have had economic growth precisely because we have had such limited cities. cities are the economic engines of america right now, that lovely word just rolls off the tongue. as you were talking about

allowing that economic growth to roll forward. and we have frozen those cities with zoning. so, aaron, should we deregulate the city? what would we get from that? which is, after all, the free market position. >> right. well, in theory if you have higher incomes available in some of these coastal cities, that should draw people from around the country to want to come there. unfortunately, those high wages are often offset by high housing costs which make it prohibitive to people. and so what you see is that these coastal cities have become progressively more and more elite in their character. new york is still the center of the financial world, but much of the finance industry employment and back office is being offloaded to places like charlotte, to salt lake city where goldman has a guy didn'tic office. -- gigantic office. there was just an article in is

the journal the other day about denver out of san francisco. so a lot of the lower and mid-value are moving either offshore or to signed of sun -- to kind of sun belt boom towns, and these urban areas are becoming more elite as they've effectively become frozen thanks to building regulations. in san francisco you cannot build anything as of right in the entire city. meaning you have to have special permission in order to build literally anything in the city. so definitely it would be to a great advantage to be able to build more and to be able to bring those housing prices down so more and more people could enter, and we'd see a much more normally functional market. it's hard to see how that happens politically in those places. for a lot of people there, high housing prices are not a bug, they're a feature. right? they are a form of functional exclusion that is still legal to pull off in the united states, at least for the time being. and so that's what they do to,

basically, price people out. secondly, a ton of people have bought houses at these high prices, and therefore, there would be tremendous destruction of wealth if there were, in fact, housing price declines. so anyone who owns a condo or a home or property is going to fight tooth and nail to keep it off. and then you're just in a pro-regulatory, pro-red tape environment. so the dynamics kind of don't auger well for the kinds of, kinds of development that might relieve some of this pressure and break up some of this concentration through naturallal market forces. you also do see -- >> but would it -- and i, this is, again -- >> yeah. >> so but when you say break up the concentration, this is my sort of -- it means if the unleashing market forces though in that sense would not break up the concentration. it would bring jobs back from

salt lake city and ten very, right -- and denver, right, to san francisco and new york which would effectively, it would limit the concentration of sort of the uber-wealthy, but it would bring the jobs it brought back would be still upper middle class, you know, highly educated jobs. so you would have, you would have an increased concentration in certain ways. and that would be more economically efficient, but it wouldn't be, it wouldn't have a source of disperseive effect, right? >> it would have sort of -- again, it's speculative as to what would happen. >> right. >> it would have some sort of dilutive effect. and a lot of these jobs are jobs that employ people who have families, you know, the married, middle class family with children, often commuting in from the suburbs. and having those kinds of people creating more diversity, demographic diversity in the

city as opposed to just having the uber-rich, kind of young singles is probably good for the politics. you're just side by side working with people who are different. it kind of reduces -- it would reduce something of this, you know, kind of mis-sorting. >> but what, but what if those people become different people? because they're living in san francisco or new york, right? instead of being, you know, they say, all right, i want to start a family, but my job, you know, it can keep me in new york, and i can afford to live here in a smaller apartment or home than i'd have in charlotte, and so i get married a little later, and i have kids a little later or not at all. and suddenly i'm not, you know, i mean, this is just the question that i'm trying to wrestle with, right? those people then are -- like, it's nice to say, yes, we should have, you know, sort of north carolinian republicans working

cheek by jowl with big new york city democrats. but those north carolinian republicans or centrist democrats or whatever they would become would not be republicans had they stayed in new york city and continued to work for their company in their culture potentially. >> right. and they wouldn't even be, if they send their kids to the colleges and universities that the aspiring class wants to send their kids to, their kids will also change. i mean, there isn't this intense culturallization, you know, to fit in is to, you know, you want to at least be able to talk about what you listen to on npr on the way ohm home. if you are talking about that, there's a whole sort of mindset and world view that comes with that. i wanted to ask you about because, i mean, my family -- i come from a long line of back

office workers in finance and in law in new york. and those people never lived in manhattan. or they didn't live in manhattan for a very, very long time. i mean, if you wanted to -- if you were -- first of all, those back office jobs didn't go from manhattan to charlotte, i think they probably went from manhattan in the '70s to jersey city, from jersey city, and then from jersey city to charlotte. but, you know, the city always was, you know, for -- it's very hard to, you know, lead a middle class family life in manhattan. it's all but impossible. and it seems that with all this talk about how to revitalize major metropolitan areas, i think they begin and end with two words which is public schools. the, now, you know, new york has some terrific public schools, but they're extraordinarily selective, they're extraordinarily, you know, they're sort of reserved for the

merit of course rah city. merit of course rah city. if you want to raise a family and go to the kinds of schools they can go to in charlotte, my god, it's a revolution that you have to have in manhattan. i just don't see that happening. >> right. >> it's tough. i would just, i would push back. they will change you but you will never change them. it's similar to immigration. immigrants come to our country, and those immigrants are radically transformed generation by generation as they assimilate to the culture of the united states. however, they change the culture of our country as well. new york city's culture has been changed by the immigrants who came here. so it's a two-way street. and that's true even when you're commuting in from the suburbs. and i agree that the prospect for change is not high right now, but to say that basically

we're sort of doomed to have this high cost, elite, this kind of city full of effectively elite, very high-end people, kind of young, millennial-type singles, very few families and immigrants is to basically say structurally the commanding heights of the american economy and culture will be held forever by, essentially, the left because you're writing off the cities politically in a sense because the demographics is kind of destiny on that point. the reason that these cities are so far to the left today is because demographics changed. the people who voted giuliani into the mayoral, the mayor's office are either dead or in florida. [laughter] so, you know, the king can't afford queens anymore. you know, that kind of middle class voter's gone. so if not this, then what? and i think it's the question, you know, is conservativism just gradually retreating from greater and greater spheres of america on that, population wise. i think you've got to be in the

game, you've got to be in the game. >> and to that, let us get in the game of some questions from the audience here. let's see, we should have a mona is able to go around. this young man over here. >> [inaudible] something like two tracts of conversation today, particularly the global cities and also these kind of secondary, whether that be dallas or charlotte or others that we've referenced a lot. and the relationship between them has been maybe perhaps a little hazy, but i wonder if we could also introduce how new -- [inaudible] we can get. is there an opportunity to look to instead of there's a degree of resignation about some of these larger cities, and perhaps rather than looking to them for hopes of revitalizing urban life or detroit's or whatever, are there smaller cities that could

perhaps develop as well that we could, like, look to new urban centers with new cultural dynamics, just kind of bypassing some of the troubles of the moment? >> may i jump in with -- >> jump away. >> i'm wondering as far as your, the first part of your question, and this speaks to the point that you were just raising. the, a town i know well, and, ross, you must know this town at least indirectly because it seems half "the new york times" lives there is montclair, new jersey. >> i'm familiar with it. >> montclair, new jersey, has become over the last 30 or 40 years, it was always a leafy, liberal, high-minded suburb of new york. but it had its share of country club republicans. it has become, you know, it is

essentially where the journalists and labor lawyers and all sorts of lawyers, journalists and everyone in publishing moves to when they're priced out of manhattan. i mean, it's not for, it's not for poor people, but it -- and it's not for the, you know, it's not for secretaries. it's for working journalists and the few book publishers who remain employed. [laughter] but, so -- >> book industry's in better shape than journalism. >> but you have a, what you have in the case of montclair is, you could say the cancer has spread if you wanted to -- [laughter] of elite liberal mindset and

values. but then i was just, i was, spent part of this summer, my son goes to a fancy prep school in new england, and at the end of the school he said i need to get as far away from this place as possible. we have to go to the south. so i took him to the south, and we spent some time in chattanooga and knoxville. and i don't know if any of -- >> i was just in that region this weekend. >> ah, yes. you know, very new urban-y. in a way. chattanooga, i'll just talk about that because that seems to be a place that's kind of, you know, really kind of on the cusp, you know? it's kind of gritty but kind of really kind of hip, and isn't that the problem? it's hip. it's like, you know, there's a lot of -- and i'm wandering around and thinking who, there is some young money here. people with disposable incomes. i don't know what they're doing, web design -- i don't know what

people do anymore, you know? [laughter] but the problem is i, again, this is chattanooga. if chattanooga is becoming a much more interesting, lively, vibrant -- that word again -- place. but it's all just young people without kids. so i don't know even, you know, this is chattanooga. if it's not going to work in chattanooga, i don't know where it's going to work. and, again, it won't work in chattanooga until families think they can raise their kids and educate their kids there. >> aaron, let me ask you to bring in some of your perspective from having lived in indianapolis, because we know some of the same people around there, and indianapolis downtown has encountered some of the same, you know, revival that chattanooga has. what was the experience there? were there, was it a childless city? >> well, what i would say is if you go to a city like indianapolis, it's dramatically different from new york.

first, if you -- i just go around to events in cities i travel to and look at how many people are wearing wedding rings. and in new york it's like a minority. in manhattan you walk around and look at how many people on the streets have wedding rings, it's not that many. a tremendous number of single people in manhattan. you go to a city like indianapolis, 75% plus of the people are married. so there's certainly much more married couples. definitely, you know, there are issues with urban schools and people raising their families in urban schools. but the primary population based in cities like that is suburban. these cities have -- to the extent that they have kind of an urban, walkable, dense neighborhoods, they're very small. they have nothing like new york city density or san francisco density. and so these are kind of regions that are definitely still shaped, you know, by the family, by married couples, by people with children.

and that doesn't always mean -- i think one of the things, it doesn't just always mean republican. that demographic just tend to shift republican, but i know very e -- eco-conscious people. they add a different voice to the city. so even people who had a different political persuasion i think who have children just bring a different conversation to the city, priorities about how do we design the city and what is it for. but definitely when you travel to other cities, you see a tremendous difference in, you know, percentages of people who are married and percentages of people who have kids. >> so it doesn't seem that the presence of kids, the presence of marrieds with kids inhibits or means that you are not getting the urban vitalization. in fact, many people who are engaged in that process are engaged in that process

precisely for their kids. >> well, i just have to challenge you on all of this. [laughter] first, i would say that, i mean, as you pointed out, they're using the downtown. they're using that, you know, they want to go on saturday night, and they want to walk around kind of a disneyland version of an you are babb space, you know -- of an urban space. they're not living there, they're living in the suburbs, as you said. they're living in the suburbs, because that's where the schools are, that's where they have to raise their kids. sure, they might want to live in that hip loft space over the, you know, over the coffee shop, but that's very expensive and, again, where are they going to send their kids? and then the problem is, and i guess i'm addressing mostly a conservative audience and conservative and republican, you know, we can draw, you know, find distinctions. but it's, the problem is -- and i think ross would support this following assertion -- the

people who are adhering to family and religious values, who are raising, who are raising their kids in stable families, no divorce, essentially no divorce, it's those uber-talented urbanites. now, some of them are republicans, some of them are democrats, as you pointed out. but it's the, you know, it is that group that is, you know, that is adhering to family values. and, you know, church-going, for instance, is much stronger among the economic elite than it is for the country at large. >> i think we have time for one last question. right here in the middle.

>> thank you. so i come from texas. i'm from a suburb of dallas, texas, and i have never seen a doggy water fountain until i went to alexandria. [laughter] so i texted my mom, mom, there's these doggy water fountains. she said, americans don't have kids. [laughter] the other thing we haven't talked about is crime. when we talk about where people want to raise their kids, you want to raise your kids in an area where you can be sure that when they're walking down the street, something won't happen to them. i think it's pretty accuracy, people talk about chicago -- crass, people talk about chicago, but it's a real point, right? that people want to have kids and raise kids in a place where you know that they're going to be safe. and so at the same time we're seeing this movement against the one thing that we know does decrease crime, which is more police presence. so what do you guys have to say

to making cities livable? what does that look like politically speaking? how do we be the ones arguing for more cops when we know that's the only real thing that actually decreases crime? have i just stepped into something here? [laughter] >> well, that's a -- >> ross, care to close us out on finish. >> on how to solve race and crime in america? [laughter] no, but you're right. there is a, an evasion around some of the issues we've talked about. and just to speak from personal experience, you know, we lived on capitol hill which is and became much more so over the time we lived there a highly gentrified, highly educated d.c. neighborhood with increasingly several good public schools that were good up through, like, fourth or fifth grade that parents had sort of, you know, gone in and sort of changed the culture of the school and so on and were sending their kids there. and, you know, crime has,

obviously, gone down in american cities dramatically over the last 20 years. but there was still, was still and is still a lot of crime in capitol hill. our car was stolen and taken on a joyride into alexandria where -- [laughter] where it was found and the cops called up and said so we're going through the items in the car, now, do you guys own the brass knuckles? [laughter] well, sometimes we get into it, and, you know -- [laughter] sorry. so, you know, that happened. there was a murder five blocks down from our house on christmas eve. you know, my wife's friend was mugged. i mean, i can go on with incidents in the time we lived there. and that, you know, was, it was not the only factor, but once we had small children, that was a factor in our decision that we now regret -- [laughter] to move out of the city. and it was a factor -- it's also just a factor sort of, you know, when we're talking about the

jane jacobs image too. you let your children play, you let them roam your neighborhood and so on. all of that, all of that plays a, it plays a big role in these dynamics. and, you know, the, i mean, you asked a specific policy question. i mean, i think there is, in fact, a kind of actual policy sweet spot, but it's a hard one to hit which is that, you know, you need a, you need urban police forces that are both, that are more numerous and more restrained in certain ways. and that the sort of, you know, the left and libertarian critique of police practices especially as white urbanites have moved to reclaim these cities is a legitimate critique. and, you know, the sort of worst case scenarios that turn into these trials and get caught on video and so on, all of that is

a real part of this, you know, this sort of tension of gentrification among other things. you have this sort of stop and frisk mentality among cops as part of what makes people, you know, let's be honest, white upper middle class people feel comfortable living in these neighborhoods, that they feel like the cops are doing these things. but at the same time, i remember from my own time on capitol hill reading online twitter threads of people saying, you know, white people moved in down the street from me and started calling the cops on me when i'd take a walk, you know? that's a reality too. and, you know, again, issues of race in america are extremely difficult to handle and finesse. but i do think that there is a lot of data on sort of police presence and numbers as a deterrent to crime that could be effective -- and, you know, is effectively put to use by some police departments. but i think you could have a world with less crime, more

police and less sort of overt stop and frisk. that is imaginable based on what i can tell about crime policy. is it actually achievable especially in the current climate? it's hard forker for me to -- harder for me to say. we were talking about the '50s and '60s and '70s and sort of suburban flight. obviously, the role of crime gets bigger and bigger in the '60s and '70s as the crime wave builds, but even when crime rates are very low, you know, in the '50s they're as low as at any point in american history, they're still much higher than in the suburbs. and people who are having kids are inevitably going to take that into account and find something attractive about being in neighborhoods like the neighborhood we live in now and will soon leave. [laughter] one of our, one of our intimates who thinks we're making a mistake by going back to

walkable urbanism will occasionally tell us we're moving to crime haven. [laughter] so it's all these issues, yeah, they're tough. >> and they will not cease. [laughter] being tough or being discussed. i want to just briefly thank again the american conservative and hillsdale for having us here. i want to thank ross, ben and aaron for joining us. and i want to encourage everyone to continue reading the people that have been up here today, because the question of cities and of the ways in which we live together are getting, if anything, just more and more relevant. and there is some fantastic work being done on that by people who have been on this panel and others. so, please, help me give a round of amaze. . -- of applause. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> former house speaker, newt gingrich, and white house adviser kellyanne conway will speak at the annual are national conservative student conference this morning. we'll be there when things kick off at nine a.m. eastern on c-span3, online at c-span.org or streaming on the free c-span radio app. >> the threat of lone wolf terrorism is the topic of a discussion hosted by the washington institute for near east policy. we hear from israeli counterterrorism experts and scholars from georgetown university and the washington institute. finish this runs about an -- this runs abou h