10 Principles for a New Democratic Urban Agenda Amid the Big Blue Reckoning
Fixing Cities and Rebuilding Democratic Strongholds in the age of La Sombrita
“How have they not called New Jersey for Harris yet?!” I wondered aloud, looking down at my drink while MSNBC glowed in the background. It was 8:30 PM on election night, just 30 minutes after polls had closed in the state. Little did I know, the reckoning I had been denying to myself was just around the corner.
Weeks later, the post-mortem on the election is clear: voters swung against incumbency across every demographic and geography. The most pronounced shifts, however, came from deep-blue cities—urban strongholds once seen as Democratic bedrocks.
I don’t believe Kamala Harris—or any Democratic leader, for that matter—lost their vote share in cities because of a specific policy. Rather, I see the defeat as the result of urban governance failures. America’s cities are riddled with inefficiencies, housing crises, and declining public trust. This isn’t about one election; it’s about a broader erosion of faith in the ability of Democratic leaders to deliver.
I write this from a cramped New York City studio apartment where my rent far exceeds the average mortgage. One more increase after countless before, and I’ll be priced out entirely. This story isn’t unique—it’s the reality for millions of Americans. Transit systems are neglected, rents keep skyrocketing, and anti-social behavior is present in public spaces (amplified by right-wing media). Meanwhile, bloated bureaucracy keeps even basic services—like installing a bus shelter—mired in dysfunction.
Take Los Angeles’s “La Sombrita.” The much-maligned, bus stop “shelter” was supposed to provide light and refuse for bus riders but achieved neither. It became a symbol of a broken system where delivering shade required navigating 10 departments, four commissions, and years of red tape. Democrats’ obsession with process over outcomes is destroying public trust.
La Sombrita didn’t cost Democrats the election, but it represents the failures that did. If cities are to remain Democratic strongholds, they must deliver results, not excuses.
There will undoubtedly be plenty of soul-searching, policy debates, and messaging discussions within the Democratic Party at large. While I won’t pontificate on all of that, I want to focus on what I believe should form the principles of a new urban agenda going forward (which will no doubt evolve).
The 10 principles for a new Democratic urban agenda:
These are principles only, the in depth policy solutions is what I plan on covering in subsequent blogs. I didn’t want this article to be too long.
1. Get the basics right
La Sombrita became a punchline because it embodied everything wrong with urban governance. It wasn’t just a failed design—it was a symptom of a system incapable of delivering something as simple as a bus shelter.
Democrats have spent years clinging to outdated bureaucratic processes that prioritize procedure over results. In 2017, a report highlighted the dysfunction of LA’s public space governance (shown below). Nothing changed.
Leaders stuck with the status quo, even as bus riders baked under the sun and rain. If Democrats want to win back urban voters, they must start with the basics: functioning transit systems, clean streets, and timely service delivery.
Get the small things right, and trust in your promises will follow.
2. Stop Reinventing the Wheel
There are no urban governance issues that haven’t already been solved by another local, state, or federal government somewhere in the world. Act like it. The push to be "innovative" when proven solutions haven’t even been adopted or implemented properly is nothing more than a distraction from tackling the hard work.
Take San Francisco, for example. In an effort to combat overflowing trash, the city spent nearly five years and $550,000 designing bespoke garbage cans. The chosen design may look sleek, but it performs no better than any other trash can and still suffers from overflowing garbage. Meanwhile, Copenhagen—one of the cleanest cities in the world—uses simple open-top barrels with liners.
Maybe, just maybe, the sleekness of the garbage can wasn’t the root cause of San Francisco’s trash problem?
3. Prioritize a High Quality of Life
A livable city is clean, safe, and orderly—not because it’s politically convenient, but because it’s essential to a functioning society. Democrats have struggled to balance compassion with enforcement, allowing both social disorder and inadequate support systems to persist and worsen.
Letting unhoused people sleep on the streets without access to medical care isn’t social welfare—it’s cruelty.
Removing benches from subway stations to deter homelessness is both inhumane and counterproductive.
Beautiful parks, clean subway cars, and public schools with adequate heating and air conditioning aren’t luxuries; they’re necessities.
Democrats must deliver these essentials not to win elections, but because all citizens—and especially the most vulnerable—deserve nothing less.
4. Build Capacity in City and State Governments
Consultants have replaced public expertise, and cities are paying the price. New York City spent $4 million for consultants to recommend trash be placed in containers—a practice the Department of Sanitation used to do 50 years ago.
We need to invest in a civil service and retain subject-matter experts who can design bike lanes, manage construction of new public schools, and speak to the communities they're tasked with serving. Cities like NYC can do all these things in house.
Rebuilding internal capacity is cheaper, faster, and better for long-term governance.
5. Build Stuff. Quickly.
We've lost the ability to build efficiently in this country, and it shows. When new infrastructure is needed or existing systems require attention, we often pass spending bills, with politicians and advocates eagerly awaiting a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Yet, the gap between passing those bills and actually delivering results can take years, if not decades.
The Biden administration passed an infrastructure bill knowing its benefits would be seen in project groundbreakings and signage bearing his administration’s name, but not in ribbon cuttings during his tenure. For too long, Democrats have celebrated the passage of policy itself, forgetting, as Jennifer Pahlka, Executive Director of Code for America, noted in a recent Ezra Klein interview: "Political elites celebrate the policy, and the public feels delivery." Focusing on the actual implementation of policies—no matter how transformative—must be as much of a priority as passing bills in the Capitol.
Governor Josh Shapiro recently touted the rapid reconstruction of I-95 within weeks—a project that, under conventional processes, would have taken years. This success raises an important question: if emergency powers can bypass traditional environmental and bureaucratic reviews to rebuild a highway bridge with overwhelming public support, why aren’t we striving to bring this level of delivery to everyday governance as a core principle?
The public feels delivery and results more than they do policy.
6. Think Regionally
America’s three largest metro areas contain over 1,150 municipalities, each with its own zoning codes, governing bodies, school districts, and planning debts, etc. Fragmentation prevents regional solutions to housing, transit, crime and infrastructure challenges.
Take Chicago’s Cook County. It’s home to 134 municipalities, each with its own transportation plan. Regional governance structures can streamline policy and improve outcomes. A housing crisis in New York or Los Angeles isn’t a city problem—it’s a regional one.
Local issues are also regional ones.
7. Stop Studying. Start Doing.
Stop using studies as an excuse to delay politically difficult decisions. We study the shadows that desperately needed affordable housing might cast on nearby parks, analyze the impact of removing a parking space for a bike lane, and even commission studies to determine how to study!
Chicago is one of America’s finest cities and undoubtedly the nucleus of the Midwest’s economic engine. At a surface level, it’s a no-brainer that connecting Chicago to nearby regions—too far to drive and too short to fly (300–500 miles)—makes economic sense. Yet, since 1970, this idea has been studied and/or proposed at the state and federal levels nearly 12 times. While we study it yet again, the one daily, slow Amtrak Borealis service between Minneapolis and Chicago (one of the corridors) continues to exceed ridership targets.
The public doesn’t value the process nearly as much as it values results.
8. Reduce Friction.
California’s housing crisis is no accident. It’s the result of entrenched homeowner protectionism that prioritizes property owners over everyone else, creating the infamous NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) culture. This mindset stifles development, drives up costs, and gives residents excessive control over what gets built in their neighborhoods.
Take Jason Yu, who spent $150,000 and 16 months trying to open an ice cream shop in San Francisco's Mission District. After signing a $7,300 lease and hiring an architect and contractor, he faced an objection from a single neighbor. This forced him into a drawn-out Planning Commission process, where dozens of people weighed in on his small business. Even after getting approval, additional permits and fees delayed him until he gave up entirely. Five years later, the storefront is still vacant.
Who benefits from such a system? San Francisco crushed a native entrepreneur’s dream, saddled him with debt, and lost the economic benefits of a thriving business. The same is true for housing projects, which face years of delays under California’s notoriously cumbersome approval processes. It is 5 months longer on average to obtain a multi-family housing permit in San Francisco today than it was to build the Empire State Building (yes, without OSHA).
Democrats have placed process over progress. Why should a small business or housing project that meets all requirements face endless bureaucratic hurdles?
Unnecessary friction serves no one and hinders progress.
9. Don’t be afraid to Rebuild Institutions
I believe deeply in the importance of our institutions to protect and deliver for the public. But when those institutions fail, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend them with a "yes, but—" approach.
I’m not naive. The way this country builds infrastructure is fundamentally broken. While institutions like the MTA, FTA and U.S. DOT remain critical for achieving goals like high-speed rail, simply hoping they will reform themselves feels both futile and disheartening.
Liberals often hesitate to acknowledge institutional failures out of fear it will arm bad actors intent on dismantling them entirely. But this reluctance only perpetuates the dysfunction. Take subways: while we spend decades and billions of dollars building a few miles of subway, countries like France and China are constructing entire rapid transit systems. To match their efficiency, we’d need to overhaul how agencies like the MTA operate, reform union job mandates, rethink federal project requirements, and streamline environmental review and community engagement processes.
Alternatively, we could continue funding the MTA’s $68.4 billion four-year capital plan and hope it somehow fixes the deep structural reforms needed to make that money stretch further. For perspective, France is building 124 miles of automated heavy rail and 68 stations for 80% of that budget.
You can’t download more space onto a computer or renovate a home that’s on fire. Reforming and rebuilding our institutions is healthier than watching them decay while working within arbitrary boundaries that limit progress
Clinging to broken systems only ensures their continued failure.
10. More Money Doesn’t Equal Better Outcomes
Advocates and officials often assume more funding will fix broken systems. But money without reform is wasted.
Delivery, not dollars, is what voters notice.
I want to be clear: I do not believe Donald Trump or the current Republican Party will do anything to address the issues outlined above. In fact, Donald Trump repeatedly demonized cities throughout his campaign. My hope is that by adopting the principles I’ve outlined—ones I admit are somewhat off the cuff—Democrats can establish a platform that is tangible in people’s daily lives. The fact that Florida and Texas are growing in population while California, Illinois, and New York are losing residents should be a glaring indicator that the status quo isn’t working.
While this wasn’t the first blog I intended to write, it felt the most pertinent, especially given my public frustration with the mechanics of blue state and city governance. Where I went wrong was failing to recognize just how strongly people feel about the status quo—strong enough to turn to Donald Trump.
Going forward, this Substack will focus on how we can govern better, the principles of great cities and transit, reviews of “fantasy” and real transit projects, the historical context of why cities and transit systems operate the way they do, and fun deep dives into whether we can build a railroad between Russia and Alaska.
My next blog will explore the politics surrounding Canada’s decision to close very remote towns and villages.
Sources:
https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2017/17-1311_rpt_CAO_11-21-17.pdf
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/housing-permits-san-francisco-17652633.php
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sf-may-halt-rollout-of-new-trash-cans-18621606.php
https://www.cnn.com/travel/paris-new-metro-network/index.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/8i4hwr/the_empire_state_building_was_built_in_just_13/
https://www.hsrail.org/midwest/
I like #3 the best and it's where I've turned my attention. The other thing I will say is that more and more I find myself realizing that liberal policies, unfortunately create the least liberal outcomes. This is manifested mostly in the cost of living and specifically the cost of housing. To move forward, we might want to acknowledge the staggering reality that is the day-to-day economics of the poorest Americans. Building an America where they can thrive, in my mind, is the essence of the American spirit.
Most of this feels like collective action problems. Everyone in these systems probably agrees with these precepts, but when, for someone at an agency reads it, they all read it as, "yes, there are too many agencies, they should be rolled into mine!"
To fix this, we'd need:
1. a Trump-like figure*, who's happy to piss off lots of people in their coalition. Sorry unions, f off. Sorry municipal agency #104, you're gone and a lof of you are fired. Sorry non-profits and advocates, we've listened but are rejecting your concerns. F-off. Sorry courts, you're suing too much and we're going to (legally, but w/ extreme hardball) neuter you.
2. Liberal citizens of these cities to not clutch their pearls when that Trump-like figure tries to make this happen -- the second it does, everyone in these ciites be up in arms about the poor union workers, civil servants, non-profits workers, etc. on the losing end.
It's much easier to go along to get along, results be damned.
*Trump is awful, but we need someone like him in urban leadership, but with better politics and without the self-dealing. Dems either go-along-to-get-along, or are firebrands but for the "downtrodden" (unions, civilian voices etc.) - neither of those modes are going to fix the problems listed in this post.