Craig Westover interviews him:
On “New Urbanism” and gentrification
…it goes with everything the “new urbanist” movement is all about, which is ironically in a lot of ways the abandonment of the project of dealing with the poor and disadvantaged and going for what they call the “choice rider” and a tool for gentrification. And not a very good tool for gentrification.
In a lot of ways what I think of the new urbanism as baby boomers wanting to move back to the city and those “really unpleasant, nasty to deal with minorities and foreigners and all these people are in our way — they ride the bus, so we don’t want to ride the bus, so we want a nice bright shiny train.”
Essentially it’s an attempt by all the white-flighters to take back something they thought they didn’t want. But now that they’re getting older — they’re empty nesters — they want it back, so they either reproduce it in the suburbs, which some of them do, or they want to take the city back and sort of gentrify this area — not through economic means, but by the government imposing it on people. “You go away. We take it. And we make it how we want it. And you pay for it, by the way.”
Say, David, next time why don’t you just kick them in the crotch, then have your dog mark them. They’d probably find it less painfula and humiliating.