Today, I bring you an interview with Ryan Allen. Ryan Allen is a professor of international education at University of America in Southern California and the author of the newsletter "College Towns," which explores the intersection of higher education and urbanism. Our conversation covers his transition from academic publishing to public writing, the challenges facing higher education, and how colleges can better integrate with their communities through thoughtful urban design.
The PhD trap: "We probably got to start telling people don't go do PhDs" — the job market has collapsed while universities keep churning out graduates destined for precarious employment.
Universities as urban saviors: Colleges preserved walkable "pre-war" neighborhoods that would have been bulldozed for suburban sprawl elsewhere.
Everyone loves universities except their neighbors: The persistent "town and gown" conflict sees locals fighting against student housing despite choosing to live near campuses.
The common enemy isn't people—it's stagnation: Rather than fighting "NIMBYs," urbanists should unite against "freezing towns in amber and endless sprawl."
Disney's $130 urbanism irony: Disneyland charges visitors to experience the walkable main streets that once existed naturally in every American town before suburban development destroyed them.
Dave Deek: Hi Ryan, how are you doing?
Ryan Allen: Dave, doing well. Doing all right. It's not quite a sunny day here in Southern California, so I think I've been lied to with that PR campaign.
Dave Deek: At least it's not Houston where the weather just kind of been bipolar like it's hot and what you imagine Houston to be then it's suddenly cold and rainy and then go back to hot.
Ryan Allen: Sure. Yeah. I know we Southern Californians shouldn't complain, but we certainly do a lot.
Dave Deek: All right. But before we dive in, could you share what led you to write College Towns and what's your personal connection to both higher education and urbanism and YIMBYism?
Ryan Allen: Yeah, sure. I mean, the short story is I received tenure over the summer and I always said once I did get tenure, I was going to try to put more... I'm a professor. I guess I should say that I'm a professor at University of America here in Southern California. I teach international education. And I've always thought that academic publishing is just not very fast. I just had an article that came out a couple days ago that literally it's five years in the making and it just gets bogged down with—I mean peer review is good, but other ways around the sort of the journal system isn't good. The book publishing can be very slow in academic presses.
So I just told myself if I get tenure, I'm gonna start kind of putting myself more out there, writing quickly because it's really hard to get things out there quickly in academia. So I was like, "All right, I can kind of do this myself." So that's kind of the quick story.
I think the longer story is I've always had kind of this passion for public intellectuals or sort of public writing. I mean, I thought maybe at one time I would be a journalist. I had a fork in the road moment of going to a PhD or going to be sort of a journalist with a publication in China. I decided to go do my PhD and even my undergrad background was PR communications which is not really in my area now but it's kind of helped me think about writing and presenting myself.
And then even when I told myself I was going to start College Towns I was hesitant. I think I started in October and I received tenure kind of over the summer. So it's a few months of me just kind of thinking should I really do this? Should I try to write op-eds in popular publications? And I did that. I started kind of trying to publish op-eds in newspapers, magazines, whatever it was and I had two rejections right in a row and I was just kind of annoyed. I was like, "Man, two different rejections, two different articles, two things I wanted to get out there" and it was one of those things like you write it and then as time goes on it can't really be published again. This is kind of a waste of time.
I'm going to keep putting in all this effort and then the things don't get published. So I said, what, I'm just going to start this urbanism and sort of education together. And I love the idea of college towns. I'm passionate about higher ed, but just the college itself. I mean, that's where I wanted to work. My first job out of undergrad, I was a leadership consultant for my fraternity's headquarters. I would travel across the country going to different college campuses sort of helping the chapters or sometimes they would get in trouble because 20-year-old dudes do a lot of dumb stuff. So I got to see these campuses across the country and really was just an amazing experience and so I kind of chased that professionally.
And so I have an academic background in higher ed, but in terms of that urbanism, that's always kind of been a part of my life, sort of personally rather than professionally. Studying abroad in Italy kind of inspired me to think more along those things. And on Twitter actually is where I really started getting big into these kind of movements, connecting with Strong Towns. I end up writing for them a little bit, at least one article. And so I said, "This is actually much more interesting and important. People are caring about this than my other academic areas." And so I'm welding them together now in College Towns.
And so I'm writing a book and putting some work from the book there and connecting sort of aspects of town and gown and these types of things and it's been a lot of fun.
Dave Deek: That sounds a lot of fun and I really do appreciate when professors decide to write directly more often. I've been reading and summarizing a whole lot of academic papers and besides the fact they're academic papers, there's actually a few good ones and a few of the professors who write them, the research students that write them, they just stick with publishing out papers. They don't have to elaborate, explain their thought process why they decide to research more often than not. And I really do appreciate when professors decide to write more, but I need to make sure that I don't get us off topic.
Ryan Allen: Yeah, sorry if I went a little derailed there.
Dave Deek: No. No. You can get derailed. You're the one being interviewed. I should be the one that should stick to the topic.
Ryan Allen: Okay, fair enough.
Dave Deek: So, let's get to a number of your articles. When you covered that homeless professor I believe his name was Dr. Daniel McKeown and the school was UCLA, is that correct?
Ryan Allen: That's right. Yeah.
Dave Deek: What do you think about these? We're seeing more and more stories especially now with the Trump administration about faculty working conditions not just declining from the universities taking advantage of the faculty labor market but also because the Trump administration is putting the pressure on academia, especially what academics could say speech-wise, and what are your solutions to this growing problem, if there are solutions?
Ryan Allen: Yeah. I mean, that interview even happened before Trump was elected so I hesitate to blame everything on Trump or even most of the things that are happening in our sector. It's sort of a long tale of 40 years of changes in higher education.
And in his case in particular, he had kind of been dangled—you go into a PhD program and often times they're training you for academia on the other side. That's what our programs are often training for, but the reality is there's just not as many jobs as they're allowing into these PhD programs.
And what ends up happening, a lot of people just go and they leave and that's fine. They're like, "Great, I got some skills, I got a PhD and now I'm happy in another sector" and we actually call that alt-academia even though that's what a lot of people are going to do, to be honest, more so than in actual academia. But he was one of these guys that sort of loved teaching and really saw himself as a professor. And so he got kind of—I don't want to say trapped but sort of funneled into what I call "adjunctification," although he kind of pushed back when I called it that. But essentially precarious jobs that don't pay much. From the outside it might seem really cool—"I'm a professor at UCLA" but what does that mean?
It's like, okay, I'm teaching 150 students per class and I am making 60 grand a year or whatever it was, maybe less in some cases. And there's just so many jobs like that. He's in some ways lucky. Sometimes you might get a job that's just giving you one class. So it's four grand for the semester. That's just like a basic adjunct job. He actually was a lecturer, sort of technically a full-time position, but it's this kind of package of positions that universities are doing due to budget cuts due to kind of just not—when they invest in a faculty who's going to be tenured, that's a huge commitment because we're there for 20, 30, whatever even longer years.
So I always tell people—like you said, how can we fix this problem?—we probably got to start telling people don't go do PhDs. Like I'm sorry, it might be your passion but the careers just aren't there. It's six or more years of your life where you're basically not really working. So I always hesitate to tell my students "you got to know what's on the other side for this." It's not just "okay I am going to this position and they're going to be paying me." Now they have PhDs that don't even fund and you pay them for six years of your time. And this is just not a development that I think a lot of people are ready for and then once they get into it, it's sort of like they feel like "I've already invested this much into it, now I can't quit now." And so you just sort of get funneled into these positions.
So I always tell people don't go do a PhD. Of course some people want to do it and that's fine. But we have to make it clear what's going to happen on the other side. How to fix that? I mean that's like a broader argument about fixing higher ed and properly funding higher education, going back to some kind of teaching focused, putting respect on people who are teachers. I don't think it's happening anytime soon because the direction that we're going is the opposite with some of the things that are happening with the Trump administration where they're cutting X, Y, and Z and we're in a big battle now.
So it's like the sector already had its issues. We have this new problem that I honestly don't really... I mean maybe you're going to ask me but I'm not quite sure how to exactly grapple with it. But at least right now I think telling people not to go to PhDs unless they have either independently wealthy or they don't really care if they're not going to be an academic and maybe they're an international student they just want to stay in the country... although again there's issues with that now. So that's kind of my take on my own field.
Dave Deek: That's very—how do I say here?—not very fun to think about, especially considering I believe you written an article about Deep Seek's AI team and their education backgrounds and challenging assumptions about universities overseas especially Chinese universities. With this in mind, with basically the decay of the American PhD, the American degree altogether, how do you see the landscape of higher education shifting especially between the US and China?
Ryan Allen: Yeah, I mean I guess in two ways. So the Deep Seek thing was interesting because I think a lot of people when they saw Deep Seek, there's an assumption that those students were trained in the United States and they went back and we lost them due to brain drain. And what I found is that wasn't true. They had pretty much but almost all of them had been trained from undergrad to their PhDs, although not all of them had PhDs, in Chinese universities. And so that's like "Wow. Okay, they don't need us anymore. They don't need our expertise."
The second aspect of that was even I went back and looked at their professors that they had listed and even those professors for the most part had been trained in China. So now we're two generations out of this really advanced research that's happening in Chinese universities—you're right that they don't need the United States.
I will clarify I think sometimes when I talk about this I'm talking about PhDs broadly and there really is a difference between STEM, where you're in a lab or where you're doing some sort of technical work, versus maybe the humanities or the social sciences. The humanities and social science—it can be done but it's difficult to translate that into work, whereas the technical ones—I mean you saw that some of those students in that article they were bridging pretty easily into companies like Deep Seek or even others like Nvidia. There were people who connected to that because they have those technical skills and they are wanted in these other sectors. So the STEM sector is a little bit different in terms of the PhD.
But again you can learn some of those skills without a PhD. You can get technical training or even just a masters, and some of those STEM skills are enough for undergrads or people drop out. I mean that's the big thing—like you go to Stanford and you drop out. I think I saw a meme or even social media viral post this week where it was like "you go to Stanford and you drop out the first day because you meet people to start your AI company." Now again that's not everybody but it is kind of funny to think about. There is a difference between these kind of STEM fields.
What I'll say is that I think the US sector can and still is strong. We keep hurting ourselves in terms of the decisions that are happening right now. But up until two months ago, we still attracted students from around the world. Even if Chinese universities were getting better, we're still getting some Chinese students. Obviously, we were getting a ton of Indian students. Indian students in the past couple years had surpassed Chinese students. So, that was really our competitive advantage—like we're recruiting these people. They're the best minds and we're able to keep them. Right now, I am questioning that kind of future as we move forward just simply because of the stuff with the Trump administration and international students.
Dave Deek: All right. So one last purely higher education question before we move on to more about urbanism and YIMBYism. I just have to ask this question because I remember in the past right before the 1990s even the 2000s, the United States and a bunch of Western European universities were a bit more practical. I mean the Dutch used to have their entire agricultural industrial policy, the best way I could call it, revolving around Wageningen University.
Ryan Allen: Yeah, I mean—
Dave Deek: What do you think caused that change from practicality to academic publishing and do you think that might be one of the causes towards the decline of the American PhD or American higher education which was strong, which is strongish, but led to that decline?
Ryan Allen: Yeah, a couple things. First, the German, Dutch, some of the continental European systems are a little more practical. They have a kind of—I guess I can call it sort of like an academic type of practitioner kind of mentorship programs that are a little bit different than the American university and maybe the Anglo university. So they've always been a little more practical than our system. So that wouldn't be a surprise and I still believe they are that way with their technical track that isn't necessarily academic, although it's sort of welded to an academic system different than what we would consider kind of vocational ed in the United States. But I will say I'm not an expert on European higher education.
The second part of that and talking about our own is that I guess I would push back on the notion that the American system was more practical. I think it was actually less practical, and the problem is that we overproduced PhDs. So now there's all these programs and universities that are producing PhDs. There's just not enough spots. And so part of that is competition. So you have to now produce more papers for a PhD to get a graduate, to get a job—now they basically have to be as good as someone that was tenurable 20 years ago. And so it's just a nature of so many people trying to go into the market.
We're also chasing incentives of like you said papers which sometimes those don't necessarily help you or sorry maybe those don't have actual important information in them. It's just sort of like "okay I'm getting this out into the world because I need something checked off on my CV." That's not every academic paper but that's one of my critiques of the academic publishing space.
I'll also say I think in some ways chasing practicality has been a modern obsession with American universities. And when we were 40 years ago or even let's say when the GIs came out of World War II, we had the GI Bill, we really expanded higher education, the boomers came along—we weren't necessarily talking about job readiness per se or not in the same way we were. It was sort of universities had more of that liberal arts sense. The Soviet model was looking at work forces and this type of thing. Their universities were more focused on that. We were more focused on getting people in, having them think critically, have them just sort of a place to stay for a couple years, find themselves, understand, and then go out into the world. And I think that's when our universities at our best is when we're doing that.
It's when people can really find their passion, when they're not being sort of funneled into a thing because it's for work. The problem is the way that we now fund students or students have to fund themselves, then it starts breaking down into, "I'm getting saddled with $100,000 in debt just to go think for a couple years. It's no longer worth it." And so then we have to sort of say, "All right, what job do they get? If I'm going into debt 100K, I need a job on the other end."
And so that's where the real problem is coming from. Where I think if we can sort of get away from that debt, it would be better if we go back to that kind of more liberal arts model where it's not about the job, it's about just thinking for four years.
Dave Deek: Okay, that sounds very familiar with the argument I read. I think it was W. Edwards Deming, I believe the industrial engineer who was arguing actually a lot of the same points you are, I believe in his book "The New Economics," and he was arguing that education should be more about learning critical thinking stuff like that here because systems are going to change, systems going to adapt, etc., etc., right? But I need to make sure I get back on topic here.
Dave Deek: Let's—that brings up another thought in my head. How do you see the ideal relationship between a college and its surrounding community? What examples have you found that demonstrate healthy integration especially on more of an urbanist vibe?
Ryan Allen: Yeah, I mean that's really like my love of college is the college town. And so one thing that I really appreciate—and I'll probably have an article about this soon—is that in the United States system for colleges, we have colleges in the middle of Manhattan, like Columbia where I went, or in the middle of nowhere—I don't know, let's just throw out Stillwater, Oklahoma. And they're dotting the country to suburban.
And it's really one of the true kind of national egalitarian systems where we don't—now a lot of the old universities are sort of centered on the east coast but there's great universities in Georgia, there's great universities in Texas, there's great universities really in every single state and that was a purposeful investment by the American government in terms of land grant universities and private institutions like churches and things like that that establish these places.
And you see in a lot of towns and cities even that a university was built—and we're talking 100 years ago or more—and then slowly kind of incrementally everything around the university starts to build up because it's not just the students who are attracted to that space. It's sort of businesses. It's regular people. It's nice to live next to a university.
And so a lot of the best urbanism that we can see in some of the small towns too come from university towns or areas around a university because they sort of act as a natural city because a lot of students are living right on campus. They often don't have a car and so they've been able to preserve some of those pre-war structures that often got knocked down when suburban development became the dominant way that the United States was kind of building. But around the university because they sort of kept—because there was always students there, because you couldn't really sprawl students out (you can but it's a little bit more difficult or a little more complicated than with single families)—it kept those structures around campus.
And so, my love for this is everywhere I go, I find places that keep that old world charm or that pre-World War II charm simply by the nature of what a university is. It's essentially a small city and everything around the city is operating within that. There's obviously problems we can get into but that's kind of my rosy picture of universities and how they act as a development model essentially.
Dave Deek: Speaking about rosy pictures, you documented a lot of the housing struggles from multiple angles, from the homeless professor that you interviewed to the student housing shortages. It seems to me that a lot of the businesses and a lot of the people that move into the college towns full-time and right are often the same kind of people arguing to restrict student housing, especially the whole "people pollution" thing.
Ryan Allen: Yeah, you're just making me laugh, but yes.
Dave Deek: I mean, I was about to ask you how do you view the irony and what solutions appear most promising to you?
Ryan Allen: Yeah. I mean it's tough because I often ask this question—why do you live next to a university if you hate universities and students? I don't understand. And let me be clear, it's not everybody, but I think we see this in the urbanism space where there's a subset group that is loud and that has time to go down to the city council. I think most people are just trying to live their lives. They don't really care if the university does X, Y, and Z. They enjoy living there.
And so I wouldn't categorize it as literally every single person living next to the university. That being said, we see this dynamic happen pretty much in every college town. There's even a term for it, "town and gown." I almost called the substack "Town and Gown," but I decided to go with "College Town" because it just sounded like a better name.
Anyways, this town and gown dynamic is often—okay, the university has some kind of dispute with the locals. And I'll say, I used to live in a pretty traditional college town in Orange, California, right next to my university. And I would see 20-year-olds, like I said, do stupid stuff. And they would run down the street at 2 in the morning screaming, chugging a beer or whatever. I saw that. And my neighbors, who are fine with the university, fine with anything that's happening, they would get angry. They would come to me and say, "Hey, Professor Allen, what's going on?" and I would have to send them over to—there's always a university kind of relations person making sure students aren't doing these types of things.
I think one of the problems—and trying to convey this to the town is difficult—but I think one of the solutions is building more on-campus housing. And often campus housing gets fought because the locals say it's going to be too tall. I always see that it's "too tall of a building" and you look around and it's like, "okay there's another building right across the street that's basically the same height."
"There's going to be too much traffic if these students live here." It's like the students can literally walk. We don't actually need much parking. But of course then you say that, and they say "okay now we got to build more parking because it's going to create more problems." And it's always these kinds of excuses.
But I think if we can build more campus housing, that stops students from living out in the houses that would be rented by people that aren't related to the university. And so that can help with rents and cost of housing that are outside of the campus space. It's just that we have to convince the locals that this is going to be better for them. And that is really difficult.
And if we can't convince them, in most cases, to be quite honest, we should just go ahead and build it if we have the right and figure out the consequences later. I know it's better, you want to have a good neighbor. But sometimes it just becomes unreasonable.
I covered this case in Lubbock, Texas, and Texas Tech, and literally the university had a stroad in front of it. Lubbock doesn't have the best urbanism and Texas Tech doesn't either. I sort of feel bad for the college. But anyways, they were trying to build this kind of campus housing right across the stroad from the entrance of the university and everyone was getting upset. The university apparently is going to go through with it. But the point being is that the problem isn't the kids. The problem is the road that's in between the university and these housings. It's a high-speed stroad. But I mean, it looks like a highway drag strip and it's literally between a neighborhood and the university. It doesn't make any sense to me. And we sort of have to convey that and talk about those things, I think.
Dave Deek: Yeah, that does not sound like a good idea, especially the fact that students tend to do weird stuff, but housing still needs to be built. So, I guess it balances out in that weird way.
Ryan Allen: Right. Yes.
Dave Deek: Besides talking about weird ways, I think I remember reading an article of yours that was talking about that students can handle smaller or weirder spaces, I think especially office hours and conversions. Could you talk more about that and how might colleges leverage that?
Ryan Allen: Yeah. This is something that I've gotten a lot of push back on. I always say that in urbanism we have all these regulations in land use and there's lot size minimums, room size, windows, there's all these type of restrictions and the idea is that we don't want to send somebody to live in a slum. That's the argument. Okay. And I get that. I understand that.
But our pendulum has swung too far and the American kind of conception of what a home has swung too big and so we're cutting out a lot of smaller housing units like the SRO (single room occupancy) which was a huge part of our cities 70 years ago, even more years ago. Young people or people moving to the city just trying to make their way, maybe some people who are trying to get back on their feet—we've essentially cut those out of our cities. We've either made them illegal and then when they shut down or they convert to hotels, this option doesn't exist anymore.
So what that does is without these kind of tinier spaces, it sends people to have roommates, to have somebody sleeping on the couch. That's what happens in these college towns—the students get crammed into a single family home in a neighborhood and they'll put two guys in one room and one guy's living on the couch or in the garage or something weird. Why? Because there's not these sort of tiny spaces that we used to have and that they're still around, especially if they're kind of grandfathered in. And students are happy to live there. They do all the time.
University dorms are exactly that. You have a little tiny room. Maybe you share it with somebody. You have a shared bathroom outside. And students don't mind living in the dorms. In fact, you can see it in the conversations with students. They would rather have a very tiny room that's their own space that they don't share with somebody, where they have their bed and their TV and their clothes and maybe a shared kitchen or whatever. They would rather have that than sleeping in a bigger room with somebody else in the same room. But due to some rules, we can't build these types of things. And it's cut out of an option.
I used to live in one in South Korea. Very tiny space. I mean, we're talking about less than 200 square feet or something like that. It was basically just a bed and I had a shower in mine which is kind of interesting—my bed bucked up against the shower and I really just lived there for a semester before I was able to move to a normal apartment with a couple dudes. And so that's the kind of thing that I think we need to start rethinking.
And again, I did mention I think in Boston, Mayor Wu has added universities into office conversion. And because offices are sort of often weird spaces with—windows might be an issue, of course it should be safe—but creating some kind of triangular room where the window is here and you have this weird space in the back. Students don't care. They're not a family. They're not going to live there permanently. They're going to live there for a year, semester, couple years, whatever, and then they're going to move out, but they need sort of this transition type space and office conversions can be—they're already a challenge. So, let's try this for students.
So that's something that really a lot of people push back on and they say—I've had people say "I like all of your writing except when you say that because I don't want people to go to slums" and they think that we're going to send all the poor people into these types of terrible housing situations like they see these pictures of Hong Kong or something. And I don't think that's what's going to happen and I would rather have people in smaller homes or tiny rooms rather than living on the street, rather than living in their car, rather than having to sleep on the couch or whatever. I would rather have that, and those are the options that we're facing right now.
Dave Deek: But I'm shocked that you get a lot of push back for this because we have two models of that in the past. We had these old YMCA building places which have small rooms just to give young men a place to stay on their own. It's even in the song YMCA...
Ryan Allen: Yeah. Right.
Dave Deek: And then the second modern example is where storefronts are being converted into net cafes in Japan. And while there's a lot of moralizing about it, these net cafes again you have private rooms with sleepable couches in there. It helps young people at least have a place to stay and deals with the law and helps a lot of lower income or young people as you said who just want their own space. And for you to get push back to me is just absurd.
Ryan Allen: Yeah, I mean it is absurd. Even modern dorms—UCLA was trying to build a dorm on their campus and the dimensions were basically the same as the current dorms on campus and there was a lot of complaint, protest, and sort of basically the argument was "this is too small, it's inhumane for students." And how can it be inhumane when the dorms that they're already living in are that size and they're popular and people want to live there?
It is absurd. And for me, I mean, not everybody who's commenting on my articles, they're probably more sympathetic, but I do think there is a lot of obstructionism simply hiding in concern for students and those types of things, and they just would rather not have any building at all and they would want fewer students. I think in most of the arguments, especially in the real policy space, again, not necessarily my readers or people I engage with on Twitter, but those are often obstructionist when you talk about the real world that's out there.
Dave Deek: And before we start talking about obstruction of the real world stuff, I want—let's talk a little bit about more fiction, because I can't believe there's someone else besides me who appreciates Tom and Jerry's backgrounds. Those are awesome. Especially a lot of older Hanna-Barbera and a lot of the older American cartoon backgrounds. My gosh. Why did we ever get rid of those?
Ryan Allen: Yeah, I mean I saw that—it wasn't mine. I did write about it, but I saw it on Twitter. It has a vibe. It's making me want to go back and watch a bunch of old cartoons. I was thinking about going back and watching some of the old Speedy Gonzalez and see how they portrayed the American Southwest. I think that that could be really interesting. So, yeah, that might be like a future project, but if anyone's listening or reading, definitely go watch that.
It's very moody and it reminds me—we often hear this conversation about American animation and Pixar was awesome. It was cool back in the day in the 90s and the early 2000s, but now it's kind of dominated the way that we do our cartoons and drawings and animation, and things have gotten very ugly. Everything looks like either a second rate Toy Story or Rick and Morty. And there's not as much kind of beautiful animation like you might see in Japan or from our own history, Tom and Jerry or whatever that might be.
Dave Deek: But I would push back about that. I believe I haven't watched the show itself, but I saw some background images from shows I think it's called Steven Universe and Bee and Puppy Cat. I believe that's what they're called, these gorgeous backgrounds with these beach towns and stuff like that.
Ryan Allen: Interesting. I don't see that. That maybe is my own bias or bubble. I need to go and look at that. I don't really engage with that media, I guess. Fair.
Dave Deek: And so let's go talk about the real world and the ugliness stuff like that here. One of the things I've been noticing a lot here is that a lot of urban groups, a lot of these transit guys, they're constantly starting to infight more and more and more and more and more. And a lot of the YIMBY guys, not all of them, I'm a YIMBY myself, but a lot of these YIMBY guys are picking fights against—from what I see—are other groups that might be more sympathetic to urbanism. Do you have any thoughts on that matter? And bear in mind if you're uncomfortable talking about this or you just want to talk about this but want it cut out, those are both options.
Ryan Allen: No, I don't mind. I can see it certainly myself. I am in a fight—and I'll write an article on this—with fellow urbanists who I really like and they're doing great stuff over self-driving cars. I'm an advocate of self-driving cars. I think it's going to end up being great for society. But I understand the reservations and I've gotten into some debates with fellow urbanists and again I'll write some articles on that in the future.
So I recognize that when we say "urbanist" we don't even have a good word for it—whatever I just say sort of like "the movement" because there really isn't like one thing that unites everybody. There are kind of a set of principles or sort of loose—we understand that what we're doing now is bad but maybe we don't all agree on the same direction.
My biggest fear is that this movement of building housing, transit, things like that gets stuck on either side of the culture war—basically every other issue that we have in the United States. And right now it actually doesn't track onto the culture war. There are right NIMBYs, there are left NIMBYs, there are left YIMBYs, there are right YIMBYs. And so that I think is great because we can sort of pull from this broad political spectrum. Although on the other side there's sort of a unified push back against building housing, things like that.
I think for me when I talk about these things I often point back to Strong Towns, I'm a big Strong Towns guy and maybe I don't agree with 100% of everything that they do—Chuck Marohn kind of talks about. In fact, I think they're not mostly in favor of self-driving cars, although I have a goal of trying to convince Chuck one of these days. But the point being is like they are this smaller organization that have these national grassroot movements. They kind of reject the label YIMBY even though Chuck, the founder of this organization, would say, "Okay, 90% of the stuff we agree with, maybe 95, but here's kind of the fringes where we don't." And that does bring up a lot of arguments and debates.
And I remember a few months ago or maybe last year I saw Strong Towns' Chuck Marohn arguing with sort of some YIMBYs who I really like. I think Nolan Gray and a couple other people and I was like this is like my two dads arguing or whatever, something like that—mom and dad arguing—because I really respect both of the movements broadly even if we do have those disagreements. But I think trying not to simply fall back into the labels—and that's what Strong Towns does—is helpful to gain people who might be distrustful of whether this is kind of left or right and just saying no, this is Strong Towns. These are some basic principles. So I do appreciate that and I think it could be helpful to follow their lead there.
Dave Deek: Yeah. But we at the end of the day, we all have the same common enemy that whether we're urbanists or YIMBY or whatever we call ourselves, and that's the NIMBYs. Especially it seems to me that NIMBYs of all colors, they just—as if they snap fingers—they unite, they attack, they seem instinctively willing to organize more. And what the only commonality that I see from the NIMBYs is demographics which always tends to be upper income, more so older folks, but some younger folks who just want to make impact—good or bad—seems to be a good chunk of them part of the NIMBY movement. And it's weird because you have these groups sometimes even headed by former investment bankers, executives, or whatnot here walking side by side with young leftists or these weird conservatives.
Ryan Allen: It's—I mean when you say we all have the common enemy, again Strong Towns tries to push back on that and tries to say OK and try to understand why don't these people want it and how to make an argument. Now sometimes I think OK you can make the argument, you could be rational, and they're still not going to take it, and Strong Towns I think would say all right then figure out how to do it or whatnot. But yeah, I mean I think rather than saying the enemy is NIMBYs, I think the enemy is freezing our towns in amber and endless sprawl.
I think sort of—what I would say the movement, most people would agree with those two things whether it's Strong Towns, broader YIMBYs—freezing in amber and endless sprawl, those two things to me are the biggest issue. And if we can rein in some of those things in the United States, like a lot of the problems—it doesn't solve everything—I think that's another issue too is people will point to YIMBYs or even just like public transportation or sort of urbanists and say, "You can't solve this. If we do this, it doesn't solve that." And it's like, if we said that with literally everything, we would do nothing. Not everything has to be solved by this one project or not everything has to be solved by adding a bus lane or whatever. Sure, we're gonna have other problems, but we can't put everything on these. Again, it goes back to the obstructionist. It's just throwing as many things at the solution to stop it from happening.
Dave Deek: Okay, that's a very good definition of NIMBYism—basically freezing our towns and promoting endless sprawl. And I think that might be a good rallying point for the groups, which I hope so, but I don't know if they're ever going to agree upon even that.
And this second thing here—I know I agree with you that YIMBYism reform or whatever is not going to be the one-stop shop to fix all our problems. But at the same time, I keep seeing especially among the abundance people sort of treating it like that when reality is that a lot of towns—even though it's not going to solve all their problems or most of their problems or even 10% of their problems—implementing some reforms like ADU reform or loosening up the zoning enables greater and greater paths forward to resolve their other issues.
Ryan Allen: I mean, I think that's one of the problems here is—maybe it's cliché, like we're this massive country and we're really diverse, but it's certainly true in terms of the sort of YIMBY or let's just call it urbanism or whatever we're talking about here. They're very different needs.
And I think one of them is—and again I'll probably write about this—I have a word document on my computer with 200 article ideas and I only publish once a week, and new ones come every week, but one of them is talking about how YIMBYism from New York and San Francisco often cloud the national conversation. And so I think that happens sometimes where it's like, "What do we need in California? What do we need in New York" is very different than potentially what they are going to need in—again I always go back to my hometown or my home state—like Tulsa, Oklahoma. Those are different things in the rust belt where maybe they have good bones but they have abandoned—those principles. Two very, very different places and needs.
And I think the movement is big enough for both of us. It's just sometimes the arguments get kind of centered on New York or congested pricing and San Francisco or whatever's happening there and the rest of the country just kind of is forgotten. Again that's why I go to Strong Towns because it's in Brainerd, Minnesota and they often are looking at small towns in this space. And for me with college towns—and them by name are often small places, not as big places—but they're often doing really interesting stuff that we can take lessons from that might be broader applied than what's happening in maybe New York or San Francisco.
Dave Deek: And just to wrap up, I'm going to ask two questions because I would love to go more into detail about that. Maybe hopefully if you're interested, you come back for a future interview to talk more about this stuff. But the last two questions here: what do you think of the Walt Disney—I would even just say Walt Disney here because his brother is also responsible for trying to promote urbanism in his own sense like the Disney brothers urbanism, EPCOT and stuff like that here. And the second thing here, we've seen—not a de facto, that's the wrong word—we don't see guys like Miyazaki talk about urbanism but you could see the sheer amount of urbanism through his work and through his art and what does it mean for a living, breathing town. What are your thoughts on both those?
Ryan Allen: Yeah, I also have a Disney article on the docket that I don't know when it'll come out. I live very close to Disneyland here in Southern California. In fact, I used to live so close where I'd hear the fireworks every single night—a little bit further now.
But what's funny is that Disneyland has that kind of main street, that classic idea of what a city is. And Disney himself was inspired by his hometown and his wife's hometown—sort of these ideas of an idyllic version of a city or a town that was no longer existing. The post-war America was—even before post-war, they had started kind of ripping up, defunding these street car lines and gearing up for the automobile. So that was kind of already happening even though we sort of broadly label it post-war.
And so what's funny is he built this idyllic town, but the problem is it costs $120, $130, whatever it costs now—it just keeps going up—to go in and walk down this town. And that feeling used to be in every town across the country, that little area where it was safe to walk, where kids could run around, where there were small businesses, where there were little trinkets, where there was sort of civic pride.
And he tried to sort of create a Disneyfied version of that. But that used to exist everywhere, including the town that it is in, used to have this really nice little main street area and you can go back and look at old photos. I've done a tweet storm about it. And it had this great little downtown. What did they do? They knocked down the housing. Some of it was racial animus actually to Hispanics who were living in the area. Some of it was just related to California's appetite for sprawl. And so now when you go to that area, it's just these department stores. There's no urbanism. There's one maybe house that doesn't have setbacks. Everything else is really wide and it's a really unpleasant place to be. There's not that much good urbanism happening in Anaheim, but it used to have it, unless you go to Disneyland. That's where the good urbanism is, in Disney.
And it's just—I find it ironic that we had to recreate it and now we have to go pay for it when this was our normal standard for years. And I can see the relation to Miyazaki there too in some of his movies. I know you've written about that a little bit as well. And I think part of that is Miyazaki is tapping into full-blown nostalgia on a lot of the things that he's doing in terms of childhood and Japan and another era. And he's really focusing on Japan. He's not really focusing on western nostalgia even though again we can see a lot of meaning and messaging in his work and that's relatable to us.
But I think both of them, Disney and Miyazaki, tap into a nostalgia for structures and forms and society before modernization, before—whatever our societies look like. Japan looks very different now and I think they're doing a lot of good stuff. But it certainly is true that a city like Tokyo had absorbed all these areas that might have been idyllic countryside.
So it's different forms of urbanism certainly but they're both tapping in on the same type of nostalgia.
Dave Deek: Okay, I think this is a great place to wrap up the interview.
Have you lived in a college town? How did you experience the "town and gown" relationship - as a benefit to the community or a source of tension?
Would you accept living in a 200-square-foot apartment if it meant having your own private space at an affordable price? Or would you prefer a larger shared living arrangement?
Is the American PhD becoming obsolete? With countries like China developing their own academic excellence, and the job market for professors collapsing, should we be rethinking doctoral education?
What public spaces in your community charge admission that were once free? Are we increasingly creating "Disney versions" of what used to be naturally occurring public amenities?