This afternoon, I went to the Hilbert Museum of California Art, which is owned by Chapman University. By sheer coincidence, it was the penultimate day of an exhibition of works by Millard Owen Sheets (1907-1989), who is best known for the many mosaic murals he made for buildings in southern California. One I used to pass in Santa Monica is now on the front of the museum. But as the exhibit highlights, Sheets worked in many different media.
“Family Flats,” 1934, and “One Sunday Morning (Chavez Ravine),” circa 1929 by Millard Owen Sheets (author photos)
Many of his works sympathetically portray poor people, not as victims but as human beings going about their lives. Above on the right is a painting of L.A.’s Chavez Ravine, where many Mexican-American families lived and owned houses. On the left is a print that served as a study for this oil painting, now in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, where it bears the more pejorative name “Tenement Flats.” It depicts the area of downtown L.A. known as Bunker Hill, where by the 1930s old mansions had become crowded housing for poor families.
Neither neighborhood exists today and they didn’t disappear because real estate developers came in and flipped properties bought at market prices. Both were involuntarily wiped out in mid-20th-century slum clearance programs backed by eminent domain. Bunker Hill made way for municipal office buildings and arts venues. Chavez Ravine became the site of Dodger Stadium. (Click on the links for photos and more detail on these complicated histories.)
As sympathetic as I am to the sentiment that “it’s time to build,” I worry that many of today’s would-be builders have either forgotten or never understood the mistakes of their 20th-century predecessors. Just because you’re smart and think something is a good idea doesn’t mean it is. The great thing about market prices is that they convey information about how much people actually value things. If Walter O’Malley had had to pay Chavez Ravine property owners high enough prices to get them to voluntarily sell, the Dodgers might still be in Brooklyn.1
This is the heart of my husband Steven Postrel’s comment, in response to my previous post, in which he denounces Steven Teles and Rob Saldin’s Hypertext essay on “the abundance faction.”
That one paragraph you quoted from Teles and Saldin’s Hypertext essay is by far the most congenial to dynamism. The rest of the parts that aren’t about political strategizing read like a technocratic screed, one innocent of the last 100 years of thinking about incentives and information and the hazards of government planning. It sounds like Robert Moses envy, or Chinese Communist Party envy, or Woodrow Wilson envy, or FDR envy….That they constantly talk of coalitions with “business” but never use the term “markets” is a warning sign about their vision, which seems to be less about permissionless innovation and private property and contract rights to build things than it is about empowering dirigiste bureaucrats to run transmission lines through your backyard in the name of amorphous climate change concerns.
I think he’s giving the essay an unduly uncharitable reading, but the point he makes is one many in the abundance coalition too often ignore. Right now, I’m happy to ally with people who want to jettison the precautionary mindset that demands ever-increasing regulation and continually multiplies veto players. But eventually, we’ll have to fight about just how much leeway the would-be builders get.
Many of our current problems stem from the backlash against the sweeping redevelopment efforts done by government at all levels in the mid-20th century. We replaced the top-down redesign of cities with procedures that made voluntary building more difficult. Simply going back to the “good old days” doesn’t solve the underlying problems of knowledge and permission. For that, you need to leave most building to markets and demand a high burden of proof—and true market pricing for eminent domain purchases—from government projects.
When today’s critics equate techno-optimism with techno-fascism, this is what they’re afraid of: Progress means smart people sweeping away whatever you value and deciding how everyone will live. Don’t be like that!
Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was part of a larger essay originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.
Header image: Author’s favorite image of technocratic progress glamour, from a 1930 radio ad