Devon Zuegel
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Devon Zuegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I think a lot of people don't realize that that is possible. And so maybe don't take the step to try and don't get me wrong. You're not going to convince everybody, but many people I think are much more amenable to conversation and trying to find common ground than you might originally think.
Yeah. So first, I want to say I am not anti-car. Actually, I really love cars. And I think in my ideal world, they would still be there. But I think of cars the way I think of horses, where they're a really cool hobby and they have some cool applications. But we maybe shouldn't be shaping our entire cities around horses. So first, I want to say that up front.
Sometimes people think that I hate cars or people in this direction hate cars. So you were asking earlier about why people don't build new towns anymore. And I think another answer to that question is at different times, there are new frontiers that open up.
And so when railroads started to become a big deal in the United States, suddenly land that was previously inaccessible from transportation ended up having a train station on it and towns would sprout up around those transportation hubs. And cars had a similar effect, which was previously people had to stay within walking or pretty short distance of their home and their work.
And maybe they had some public transportation, like trains or trams, that could take them around. But they were constrained in how far they could go easily. The car opened up a new frontier on the outskirts of cities, and that's how we ended up getting most of our suburbs in America. And on one hand... it really increased the opportunities that people had.
People were excited to suddenly be able to go a little farther off the periphery and have more space and have more land. So I think in some ways it was great. However, I also think of cities as a bunch of coordination problems. And there's many we can get into, but I'll speak to one in particular, which is that
everybody's always making a trade-off between, on one hand, people generally want more space. All things equal, people will take more space.
If you could have a mansion in the middle of Manhattan and have the one house in the middle of Central Park and have all of Central Park as your own private yard, and then also have all the amenities of Manhattan around you, I think a lot of people would take that trade. That would be the most popular house on the market, probably in all of America.
But on the other hand, people want access to amenities. They want access to their friends. They want to have access to job opportunities. And those two goals are directly at odds with each other. If you just think of the geometry of it, if you are closer together, there are more things close to you, but it also means that you have less space.
One thing that happened naturally before we had the car was that people naturally stayed close together and there was very high amenity value. You could access all sorts of things within walking distance because everybody else was also within walking distance. As the
the Pareto frontier shifted as people could make different trade-offs and as more space opened up on the periphery of cities because of cars, suddenly people could make unilateral decisions to say, actually, I prefer more space over more amenities. And for any given individual, that trade-off may have made a lot of sense. The one challenge with that is that
you now are also affecting the rest of equilibrium for everybody else. Because when you go farther away, then suddenly you're also reducing the number of opportunities and interesting things happening in the core of the city. And so to me, one of the key things the car did was it changed the balance of that coordination problem.
And I think one of the effects that I see is there are a lot of people who... would love to live in a more dense, walkable place. And they would actually make the trade to say, I'm happy to have a slightly smaller home in exchange for more access.
But because society at large in whatever city that they're in has decided that they all want to be a little farther away and they prefer the space over the access, it makes it so that there aren't a lot of options for people who prefer that one. I don't think that everybody wants to live in a really dense, walkable city.
I think there's plenty of people who actually just want to live in a rural place or maybe a suburban place. But I do think that there are more people who want to live in a walkable community than there are walkable communities in large part because of this coordination problem.
Such a good question. They shape things a lot. Do we have 10 hours to go into this?
So start with mortgages. A mortgage is a loan. And it's really important to look at the structure of what a loan is. So when a bank lends you money, If things go really well with whatever you're doing with that money, they will get some interest on top of the principal that they gave you. But they don't really get the crazy upside if things turn out really well.
However, if things go really badly, they lose their principal and they're screwed. And this is important because it means that lenders are inherently cautious. They do not want the What this means in practices is that mortgages and other forms of debt end up locking in a status quo because the lenders want to see that there's comparables or comps. They're used in the real estate industry.
They want to see that there's comps for similar homes or units or buildings on the market. If you come in and say, I have this crazy new idea. I think it's going to change the world. They go, that's nice, but what do we get out of it? So that's one really important dynamic. Another important piece is through the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration. So during the Great Depression,
A lot of people had taken out short-term, what are called balloon loans. And they were a few years, maybe five years long, very different from the 30-year mortgages that we had today. That was a huge part of the problem with the Great Depression. A lot of people's loans came due just when the Depression was hitting and they were not able to get new loans. So many people lost their homes.
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