Book Report: The Fires, Part I

I am about halfway through The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities by Joe Flood. The book is about New York City mayor John Lindsay and his work with the RAND corporation to make the FDNY more efficient. Of course those efforts had disastrous consequences for housing in the Bronx.

Before I get to his story about RAND and the FDNY (Part II of this book report), I want to start with two other things that the author uses as background. First, he does a good job talking about the differences between Democrats and Republicans during the machine / progressive eras. He is clearly on one side, but it is interesting to think about the differences in respect to today's policy decisions. Second, he has a specific narrative about why the Bronx declined as much as it did during the 1960s and 1970s.

Progressive v. Machine
According to Flood, the main difference in methods between machine Democrats and progressive Republicans was the approach to decision-making. The machines received information from the community, through local ward leaders, about problems and then seemingly used trial and error to find solutions. This approach was often clumsy and responsive (and included a fair bit of graft), but according to the author was less prone to overreach and major mistakes of hubris.

Progressives on the other hand believed that data and science could explain everything and all decisions could be objective. Policy solutions would be clear based on the evidence, and government could identify and solve problems broadly and proactively. Flood will explain how often this method lead to bad policy because data is often misread or misunderstood or people don't see negative side effects until its too late.

Decline of the Bronx Explained
Flood's narrative of the decline of the Bronx comes down clearly on one side of this; he blames the decline predominantly on all types of central planning / urban planning / root approaches to policy.

He blames urban planning for driving industry out of the city, chasing hundreds of thousands of jobs out of the city just when African-American and Puerto Rican populations were entering the city. Flood is very critical of the belief that we can / should try centrally to create an ideal city. The urban planners thought we could drive industry out and create a clean and beautiful city. Unfortunately that had disastrous consequences for jobs.

Central planners also created redlining, where the federal government identified neighborhoods (often low income and minority) that were bad risks and therefore should be ineligible for bank loans. This left good building owners in those neighborhoods with no ability to get financing, which left them to sell to slumlords who would milk as much money out of the property as possible and spend as little as possible on the buildings.

Joe Flood also talks about slum clearance. Following the work of Jacob Riis to highlight the living conditions of the poor immigrants in the lower east side, city officials apparently cleared the slums to build new housing. Of course, this likely only shifted the problem and since they didn't create enough to match how much they knocked down, it increased homelessness.

Finally, Flood talks about everyone's favorite urban planner, Robert Moses and his destruction of poor neighborhoods either to create new highways without concern for the effects or for slum clearance to build public housing.

Lessons for the Future
As you can see from his examples, Flood comes down very negatively against the progressive movement and central planning. I think we'll see that the FDNY / RAND example will be the ultimate example against central planning / root approach.

In his narrative, and therefore lessons for current policy, I wonder if he exaggerates the effects of central planners. I don't think we can blame urban planning for the loss of industrial jobs in the city. And while redlining was appalling, I wonder how easy it was to get a loan in those neighborhoods before that. And I would argue that Robert Moses' projects had serious consequences only on some individual neighborhoods. As for slum clearance - I don't think there is an ideal solution for housing - either at the root or branch level - that doesn't involve more money than we are willing to spend or greater tolerance for dangerous conditions.

Either with the branch or root approach, policy makers make bad decisions. Sometimes the exacerbate already troubling trends, or marginally roll back good trends, but I just doubt how much effect they really have over broader trends that are often out of our control.

Basically, despite a compelling story, I am convinced that neither the bottom-up nor the top-down approaches are ideal by themselves. We can and should use data to inform our decisions and have broad solutions for problems. But we also need to have key involvement from people at the local level as a check against hubris, which can lead to very bad decisions. In other words, as is often the case, the answer is somewhere in the middle.