I asked you, "Why does anybody still live in Scranton or Detroit?" You said, "Because buildings last a long time, even when you don't invest in them."

I have certainly made that point.

About 16 years ago, I published an article in the Journal of Political Economy with Joseph Gyourko called Urban Decline and Durable Housing that makes the point that the slow decline of cities is very much mediated by the stock of durable housing, that the homes don't disappear overnight.

And so year by year, decade by decade, the population slowly diminishes as the homes decay and are g- gradually left to be vacant.

One of the jobs of economists is to remind people that cities are not structures.

Cities are actually humanity.

That's the part of cities that matter, as opposed to architects who tend to think the important thing is the structures.

How does that jive with your own views of how cities work?

Thanks again for doing it.

Thank you, Markus.

Thank you for, thank you for having me on, and thank you all of us for, for joining me this, this morning.

Um, let me start with...

Ah, the wrong, uh...

Let me start with the, um, with the long history of, of pandemics in cities.

So cities have long done absolutely amazing things, but there are also demons that come with density.

How would you handle this if you were in charge to, you know, es- erode essentially people's net worth in housing by making it-

That's Ed Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University.

This combination of the availability of extra land due to the automobile with the manufacturing genius taking techniques that Henry Ford had put in his moving assembly lines and then bringing them to housing construction, this sort of method where the, the plumbers and the carpenters would just go up and down a street, adding their little bit to each house as they went.

That was sort of an amazing period in terms of post-war America of just making ordinary housing available to mid-income Americans.

Glaeser says today's neighborhoods have essentially closed their doors to newcomers.

Over time, housing morphs from being like a electric toaster, which you just spit out of the factory whenever you need it, to being like a Rembrandt, like a precious object that no one's making any more of it.

We've got to become a country for outsiders again, not just a country in which insiders get to freeze the, the community at exactly the level that they want when they bought it.