It’s not too often that a major motion picture by one of the greatest directors of all time makes a movie about urban planning, but that’s exactly what Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is. Megalopolis is the final film by Francis Ford Coppola, one that he originally conceptualized after the success of Apocalypse Now in 1979. Even as his stature in Hollywood grew, he could not find people willing to finance this movie, so he ended up selling part of his winery to allow him to self-finance it. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it received mixed reviews, underlined by significant amounts of bewilderment about the film.

My friend, Justin Chang, said in The New Yorker that, “the very nature of the movie, which is by turns aggressively heady, stubbornly illogical, and beguilingly optimistic, is to question our understanding of time as a finite resource.” While time is certainly a major feature of the film, as an urban planner I saw something much different.

The movie is about a city, New Rome (which looks a lot like a stylized New York, just like Gotham) that is descending into decay and debauchery. The film follows a tripartite conflict on how to handle the decline. A mayor who aims to distract the people from the decline while he tries to cling to power; a demagogue son of a powerful banker who is out to rally the mob for his own political gains; and finally, there is the hero protagonist of the film, Caesar Catalina, a visionary developer that wants to remake the city to reverse the decline.

Caesar Catalina is a Robert Moses-like figure that has seemingly unlimited power to raze communities and displace families to make way for his future development. As one would expect, this angers those who were displaced and provides a power base for the bank exec’s demagogue son to leverage for his own political gains.

In many ways, the parallels between the movie and reality are obvious.

Last week, UCLA’s Lewis Center published a report authored by Aaron Barrall and Shane Phillips taking the City of Los Angeles to task for excluding single-family areas from the rezoning the City need to do as part of its housing element compliance. However, rezoning single-family neighborhoods, especially high resource ones, would create considerable political opposition and generate little new housing. Zoning is not the only constraint to building multi-family homes in single-family neighborhoods. To build in these neighborhoods, development costs will need to come down significantly first, so attempting to rezone these neighborhoods now would generate opposition for no real gain.

Los Angeles’ proposed Citywide Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) has been designed to accommodate the 456,543 new homes the City must zone for as part of their Sixth Cycle Housing Element. CHIP largely builds on the City’s existing Transit Oriented Incentive Areas, which concentrate new higher density housing along transit lines and arterial roads with high quality bus services. The result of this is that almost no higher density housing is being proposed in existing single-family neighborhoods.

However, the City of Los Angeles, like all cities in California, has a duty to affirmatively further fair housing, not just accommodate more housing. This means that LA must provide more housing opportunities in high resource areas for households at all income levels. In general, this equates to building multi-family housing in exclusively single-family neighborhoods. As well documented in the Lewis Center report, LA is not fulfilling this obligation.

However, even if the City did permit multi-family housing in these high resource areas, would it get built? Generally, the answer is that it would not. This is the same challenge every place with high land and construction costs faces when it comes to building smaller multi-family buildings in single-family neighborhoods.

America finds itself in an accelerating age of decline. The past half-century has seen a slow decline in many communities, but with continued investment broadly speaking. With a new presidency looking to shrink the role of the Federal Government and a Court set on dismantling the administrative state, we’re about to see a much more rapid decline across the United States.

In many ways, I foresee this decline as similar to what most of Europe faced as the Roman Empire retreated from the continent. As the Empire abandoned places it once ruled, the quality of life and material wealth of those places also declined. Goods, once produced by artisans in far off cities, became simpler and locally produced by craftsmen without the skill or artistic style of masters of the craft, whatever that craft might be. Public spaces, once built with funds from Roman coffers, were maintained as well as communities could with local resources or fell into disrepair. Roads, aqueducts, military fortifications, and all manner of other public improvements slowly deteriorated over the decades and centuries. That is to say, it was a slow decline that many might have only noticed looking back over the course of their lives. As the power of the Roman Empire waned, local power structures took its place, often in the form of strongmen or the church.

Looking towards the future, it is easy to imagine the United States following a similar arc.

Anna Letitia Zivarts can’t drive. She is just one of the huge portion of our population that can’t drive because of their age, disability, or economic status. When Driving Is Not An Option is her account of the difficulties getting around in America when you cannot drive and what we could do about it.

When Driving Is Not An Option is a short book, only about 150 pages. The first half documents the number and reasons for non-drivers in America, and illustrates how difficult it is to get around for them. The second half cover what we can do to improve mobility for non-drivers.

Somewhere between a quarter and a third of people do not drive. In California, where most communities are completely car dependent, there are only 27 million licensed drivers in a population of nearly 40 million. That means more than 30% of Californians can’t legally drive.

Unfortunately, our communities are not designed to enable those non-drivers to get around. Public transit is typically show and unreliable, bike lanes are disconnected and unsafe, and sidewalks are narrow, loud, and unpleasant, if they exist at all. Even for able bodied adults, getting around without a car can be a challenge. For people with disabilities or who are young or old, getting around is impossible.

Last month, Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, directed State agencies to clear homeless encampments on State-owned property. Last week, he doubled down on this approach to addressing homelessness by threatening to cut State housing funding to cities and counties that don’t follow the same approach to homelessness. This will provide more than enough justification for cities and counties to turn away from their short-lived path of building permanent supportive housing and return to their failed methods of simply moving homeless encampments from one place to another.

Gov. Newson’s new policy of arresting the homeless and destroying their belongings has been made possible by a recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Grants Pass v Johnson. This decision overturned what had been the law in California and other western states created by Martin v Boise in 2018, which made it so cities and counties could not make it illegal to sleep outside if there were insufficient homes or shelters to accommodate the number of people that were homeless.

The result of the Boise case over the last six years is that California cities and counties have worked hard and expeditiously to open new shelters and bring new permanent supportive housing apartments online. This has been a dramatic change from how cities were addressing homelessness prior to the Boise decision. Before then, cities were either containing homelessness in designated areas like Skid Row in LA, or arresting people who were homeless and clearing out encampments. Neither strategy reduced homelessness.

Right now, every tech company is rolling out various AI tools to help brainstorm, write, and illustrate for all manners of industries. ChatGPT is being integrated into Apple products, Microsoft is forcing Co-Pilot on everyone, and Adobe is stealing our images and documents to train its AI. With all of this innovation, surely there must be a role for AI in urban planning, but there is not.

Urban planning and city building in general is fundamentally a community-based activity. Each community has a unique set of goals and desires that cannot be accounted for in a city plan written by machine. Even with the most well crafted prompts, machines will never be able to fully incorporate the nuances of a community as well as a planner who is physically present in the community, even if just visiting.

In Escaping the Housing Trap, Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges describe half of the housing trap as the American Economy’s reliance on high housing prices. A significant portion of both household wealth and banks’ balance sheets rely upon financial instruments tied to housing. If we build enough homes to meaningfully bring down housing prices, the wealth and balance sheets that rely upon those housing prices will be undermined. If that happens, our entire banking system will become unstable. This is exactly what happened in 2008 when the housing market crashed.

As the market crashed, and homeowners were unable to refinance their adjustable rate mortgages after their teaser rates ended, banks started foreclosing on large numbers of homes. As this happened, the mortgage backed securities that used these mortgages became worthless. The Big Short includes a great description of how this worked by Margot Robbie, but the entire movie is worth watching to better understand the 2008 crash and resulting financial fallout.