EP.23 / Vishaan Chakrabarti
Los Angeles
Singapore
Most architects spend their careers talking to other architects.
Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA took a different path, and it's made him one of the most influential voices in urban planning today.
From his role as Manhattan Director of Planning under Mayor Bloomberg to founding Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), Vishaan has spent decades working across scales. His non-linear career path has given him a rare ability to speak different languages: government, development, academia, and design.
In his latest book, "The Architecture of Urbanity," Vishaan argues that the abundance agenda isn't enough. Yes, we need to build more housing, but if most of what gets built is poor quality, communities will continue to fight development. The solution isn't just quantity—it's quality.
The conversation takes on new urgency as we discuss the recent LA fires and what they reveal about sprawl, climate resilience, and the true cost of horizontal growth. Vishaan is direct: rebuilding exactly what was there is "suspended disbelief," and cities like LA need to confront difficult questions about density and fire buffers.
From Singapore's world-class infrastructure to Paris’s reduction in car dependency, Vishaan shares lessons from cities that are getting urbanism right.
These examples prove that investing in quality development and density creates virtuous cycles. More tax revenue funds better transit, housing, and public services. For cities like LA facing housing shortages and climate crisis, the path forward isn't choosing between growth and quality, but rather investing in both simultaneously.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify
About Vishaan Chakrabarti
Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect, planner, and author with over 30 years of experience shaping cities through both design and policy. He is the Founder and Creative Director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), and currently serves as the Thomas J. Baird Visiting Critic in Architecture at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
Previously, he was Principal at SHoP Architects and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM); President of the Moynihan Station Venture at the Related Companies; and Director of the Manhattan Office of the New York Department of City Planning under Mayor Bloomberg. He also served as Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and taught for over a decade at Columbia GSAPP.
Vishaan is the author of two books, The Architecture of Urbanity and A Country of Cities, and is a frequent contributor to the NYTimes. He has degrees in architecture, urban planning, art history, and engineering.
Topics Covered
Vishaan’s early influences and unconventional path to architecture
Takeaways from the Bloomberg administration
Why the commodity approach to housing development creates community resistance
Cities becoming self-sufficient as federal funding disappears
LA's infrastructure challenges and cultural barriers to gentle density
Mayor for a day: How Vishaan would approach zoning in LA
Notes from Singapore, Tokyo, Venice, Vienna, and Paris
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Sam Pepper 00:00
Super excited to have you on this podcast today. I want to give you a little bit of background for folks in LA who maybe have seen an article that you've written in The New York Times, but maybe don't know your full background. So Vishaan is an architect, planner and author with over 30 years of experience shaping cities through both design and policy. He is the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, PAU, pronounced pow. Previously, he was aPrincipal at SHoP Architects and an associate principal at SOM. He was alsoPresident of the Moynihan Station Venture at the Related Companies, Director of the Manhattan Office of the New York Department of City Planning under Mayor Bloomberg. He also served as Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and taught for over a decade at Columbia GSAPP.
Sam Pepper 00:53
Somehow between all these roles, Vishaan has managed to write two books and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He has degrees in architecture, urban planning, art history and engineering. As you probably gathered, that's quite an impressive resume. Vishaan brings a rare combination of design vision, civic leadership and academic insight into the question of how cities can be more equitable, connected and joyful. Wow. Vishaan, you've had a pretty inspirational, circuitous career. What have you gained from that arc? What's the lesson you would pass on to younger professionals in the industry.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 01:31
That specialization is a very, very limiting thing. It's interesting, Sam, I mean, I'm very much an architect. I spend most of my day dealing with deeply architectural things, sometimes things that come down to inches. I was at Princeton University on Monday looking at different mortar joints for a building that we're doing there. And so I do those things that I think people associate with architecture. I love the detail. We have six or seven air traffic control towers in the offing right now in our office, we're taking you through a full set of CDs and construction administration.
Sam Pepper 02:12
We need upgrades on those right now, for sure.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 02:14
Yes, we do. We do. I'm trying. But I did have a circuitous path to getting here. That's absolutely correct. I think of it more as non linear. That sounds better, for some reason. In architecture, I'm sure you're familiar with like this kind of idea that you're supposed to follow this monastic path. That you you get out of school, you either go to work for someone, or you immediately form your own firm and you start you're doing kitchens and bathrooms, not that there's anything wrong with that. And then you maybe you enter a competition and you scale up your practice, hopefully that way, or you have a rich uncle or both, and I don't have a rich uncle or both. I did not follow that path, and I'm not criticizing that path at all. I'm just saying that mine was a different path. And a lot of that had to do with working as an architect. And then 9/11 happened, and I was I just felt called to broader public service. I do have this urban planning degree that I got before I got my architecture degree, and so I'm constantly toggling across scale in my work.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 03:23
So that nonlinear path has given me, like, a lot of perspective, and ability to speak different languages, is the way I think about it when we're dealing with, like, really complex projects. So probably the most complex thing in our office is Penn Station, and our bid to fix Penn Station here in New York. And it's got to be the most complicated construction site in North America when you layer in not just the technicalities of the trains running below and smoke exhaust and all of the things that are pertinent to that, but also just the politics of it: multiple railroads, federal, state, local government, the business community, the residential community. And so having that non linear background has helped me be in a bunch of different seats. I've been in government, so I know when a government official, when I'm presenting something to a government official, I have some sense of what's going through her or his head. I've been on community boards. I worked on this joint venture for Moynihan station. And so I just none of it was planned, but all of it now helps and feeds the ability to do the kind of work that we do at PAU.
Sam Pepper 04:39
You have four degrees: in engineering, art history, architecture and urban planning. I'm actually curious what the order of those was. And you've always struck me as being this person who has A) an insatiable curiosity about cities, but also just a desire to gain more and more knowledge about cities. What was the order of your degrees in the beginning? And I think is the vision of your career back then, do you feel like that was the right vision? Have you executed the way that you thought you would? Or was it more opportunistic than that?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 05:13
I think it was opportunistic, and it's not. It's not a path I'd recommend for everyone, because it wasn't the most efficient path. I mean, even before you get to the degrees. So my parents emigrated to this country when I was two years old through Tucson, Arizona. Grew up in like working class suburbs of Boston. Hated every minute of it. But the one thing that my parents did is, you know, my dad was a scientist, my mother was a classical Indian singer and a literature person. So there was this art science background, always in the background. And my dad would get lecture invitations in Europe or in Asia, and he'd get a little honorarium, and he'd splice it and dice it, and would fly in the baggage compartment, and we'd go see the world. And I loved every minute of that, and I think it was deeply influential in terms of becoming an urbanist. When I was about 12 or 13, my parents actually hired an architect to build a house in India, and I got, like very, very taken by the process of helping the looking at the planning for that house, drawing the plans. And what about this? What about that? I think that was deeply influential in terms of wanting to become an architect. So you had this arcane pole, this urbanist pool.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 06:26
But then, of course, you get to the degrees. And you know, my family is from Bengal, which considers itself the sort of cultural capital of India, but they all forced their children to be engineers and doctors. And like I was no different. And so I became an engineering student at Cornell. I was an absolutely terrible engineering student. I learned things that I consider to be very valuable now, but at the time like you couldn't get me away from it faster. And every elective I had, I was able to take either a studio art class or an art history class. And by my fourth year in engineering, I realized if I stayed one extra year, I could get a second bachelor's degree in art history, which is what I ended up doing. And loved that. That was one of the best years of my life. Went to work for SOM as a planner. Actually, I had done some internships and planning in Boston, and so I went to work, actually, for the Port Authority. And then SOM, as a planner, went to get my Urban Planning degree in the early 90s. And then at the end of getting my Urban Planning degree, it was clear that I was super interested in design. And actually one of the partners at SOM, I talked to her for an hour or so, and she really convinced me I should go get an architecture degree.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 07:39
So I went and I got my architecture degree, thinking that it made me a better urban designer, but actually having the net result of making me want to really practice architecture. And so I got out, and I got my license, and I practiced, and really loved practice, and was working on a project I really loved. And then 9/11 happened, and then I became a planner again and worked for the city as Bloomberg's Head of Planning for Manhattan, and then did a bunch of things that, you know, we don't have to go through the whole resume, but the point is just I took a 10 year detour from architecture after 9/11 until I came back as a partner at SHoP, when you and I met, and then worked In SHoP for four or five years, and then just realized I wanted to go out on my own, and did that about 10 years ago.
Sam Pepper 08:26
So the term thought leader gets thrown around way too much, but I think you are probably more qualified than most to be put in that category. Maybe the fact that you are landing on architecture now, as well as being an author and an academic, is there a particular role that you've had where you felt like you've had the most influence, you've been able to have the most impact on the way we think about cities, the way that cities are planned. I feel like architects are often pigeonholed into not being the key decision makers, but you seem to have broken out of that mold.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 09:07
I love being an architect, but the biggest mistake architects make is they only talk to each other. They talk to each other in school, most architecture programs are actually in schools that have urban planning and historic preservation and landscape architecture, and yet, all the schools talk an interdisciplinary game, but I actually find very few of them really exercise those muscles and actually encourage students to, you know, if they're interested in gentrification or sustainability, maybe instead of just like making conjecture about it during a review, they might talk to the planning professor down the hall who's written a book on gentrification or on sustainability, or talk to the landscape architecture person who's been thinking, you know, environmental issues for most of their lives. But instead, they just talk to each other.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 10:02
What I find to be so problematic in the way architecture is especially taught today is we treat knowledge outside of architecture like it is the forbidden apple, and if we take a bite out of that apple, we will be expelled from, if not, heaven, the world of biennales, and there is just this kind of willful ignorance, I would argue, that keeps us from being the impactful professionals. Then I hear architects complain that they don't get to be. The thing is, if you want to be impactful in terms of issues like like gentrification or sustainability, you have to get into the muck and mire of the world, just like the lawyers who do that, or the doctors who do that, or anyone else who because those issues are messy, they're not binary. They don't have clean design solutions, and they require more listening than they require assertion. So just to get back to your question, I think there's two parts of the question. Thought Leadership is something that, yes, I try to practice, and I try to be very intentional about, and I think it's important that people who are politicians or business leaders hear the voice of design professionals, and so I think it's incredibly important to take on that role. I think it's important for students to see people in our profession take on that role.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 11:36
In terms of the most impactful it's really hard to argue with government. I mean, look, I was Manhattan director after 9/11 in an extraordinarily ambitious moment in New York City history. The city could have failed. I don't think people understand the level of concern there was about the city not recovering from 9/11. And so the investments we made in quality of life, waterfronts, saving the High Line, extending the number seven line, letting the universities expand. In the year 2000 there was like one Google employee in New York, and now New York has the second largest pool of Google employees after Mountain View. And so those things were extraordinary to be a part of, and you felt that you could be deeply impactful. And so I always actually encourage young people that if they're really inspired by someone who's a public leader, to go work in government for a few years. You meet a ton of people, you understand the world through a completely different lens, and most people who work in government are honest, dedicated public servants. It's really unfortunate to me the way in which people who work in government are spoken about and treated. And by the way, not just by the right wing. I mean, I hear a lot of people of my own political persuasion talk about people in government in really ugly terms. And so that was definitely the most impactful. But thought leadership is something that's just a broader endeavor that I just try to do everyday.
Sam Pepper 13:14
Yeah, you make me think of we have a new city council member in LA, Nithya Raman, who was an urban planner at MIT, she has been this incredible advocate for improving the city, and has added to this dialog that is desperately needed in LA. You also touched on, I think, resiliency of cities, which is what I want to get into a little bit. But first I do want to talk about your book, which I actually have right here, and it's a dog eared to prove that I've read it. And so your first book came out, and I think in 2013 is that right?
Sam Pepper 13:47
So that was A Country of Cities. The world is a very different place now to what it was in 2014. We've seen more climate disasters, unfortunately, probably worsening inequality, obviously, a pandemic. And now as we speak, a political climate that is very uncertain, I think, scary for a lot of people, in a very tangible way. I'm curious the reasoning behind the second book, and obviously you didn't plan for it to land in a time maybe like this, where we have the first few months of a Trump presidency. But I'm curious the reasoning for the second book, and what the difference is between this one and the first one.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 13:51
Yes.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 14:17
So the first book was basically a quantitative book that was making, actually a pretty similar argument to the arguments you hear today around abundance and the whole abundance agenda. That we needed to build housing, we need to build it around mass transit, and that was going to be better for the environment and the economy and social connection and all these things. And so it's great that, like all sorts of people, have gotten onto that bandwagon or making that argument, I actually think it's shifting the underbelly of a lot of democratic conversation, in particular right now, which I think is super interesting. The second book, which I started eight years ago now, was really an argument with the first book, because this is what you get to do as an author, you get to argue with yourself in front of the world. Because the question that first book did not answer, and I feel like the question this whole abundance agenda doesn't answer at all. Is not about quantity, but quality.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 15:26
Like, okay, we need to build a bunch of stuff. And there are a lot of groups that are against wanting to build that stuff. People have, I think, very shallow answers as to why communities, and especially progressive communities, don't want to see a lot of stuff built. And yes, there is a certain amount of people protecting their home values, a certain amount of racism and classism and all of those kinds of things. There are absolutely you can find examples of a lot of negative motivations that drive people's desires to not see new neighbors. But I think it's more complicated than that. And to me, one of the most central complications of it is that most of what the development industry builds is crap, and no one wants to seem to have this conversation.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 16:24
So let me give you an example. I said to you I was at Princeton, beautiful brick building, Danish brick handmade, beautiful detailing, and then I compare that to an all affordable housing project that we're doing and how difficult it is to advocate for budget when you're building housing in our cities. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that housing in our cities, and new housing, the multifamily housing we really desperately need their cities, is a commodity in our market. And not only that, it's a commodity. Its value is defined by what developers call its exit value, right? So everything's about what you can sell it for in three years or five years or seven years. And the problem with that is it completely disincentivizes investment in quality.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 17:21
So Princeton will invest in the quality, because they're a long term owner, and that building is going to be sitting on their campus for, you know, 100 years, 200 years, and they need to know that it's going to stand the test of time. Now, logically, a human being who just lives in a city, who's not an architect, not a developer, knows nothing about any of this, says to themselves, I live in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. I live in some of the greatest cities in the world. Why would anyone build anything that doesn't stand the test of endurance, doesn't stand the test of wanting to have the quality to be in our city for 100 or 200 years. But the way the market has created real estate development, there's no arguing for that.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 18:12
And what I find most developers are just blind to is the fact that, like, if they just add 5% to their budget for development quality, that maybe, just maybe, people would fight it less, and that maybe they could get things through more quickly. It'll take time, because no one trusts them, and this is why we do very few real estate developer projects, because, you know, I'm tired of getting phone calls saying, Hey, Vishaan, can you build that wall out of pressed feathers. I understand that people have budgets. I run a business, you know, I have to pay my people and all of those things. I have to make ends meet. I get it, but usually that pressed feather conversation is because someone wants to stuff an extra $100 bill in their pocket. And everyone's on to that, and we're gonna constantly have pushback against this abundance, against the things that we really need in our society because of this issue. And that's not just NIMBYism.
Sam Pepper 19:12
I mean, in contrast to, and this is a unique example, but kind of Vienna's social housing, right? The model here is if, and obviously, I'm sitting in a developer's seat right now, we're building a multi-family product, it's most likely going to be in someone's core fund, so in their conservative fund, where they're looking for stabilized returns, right? And that fund may be invested in by a pension fund that is operated out of the state of Ohio, for example, and so the entire purpose of it is to get a return profile that meets the criteria of a set of fiduciaries in another part of the country that is responsible for a portfolio of which your piece is a tiny sliver. It results in product that is undifferentiated.
Sam Pepper 20:07
If you're going between Cleveland, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, it's the same product. It's banal. There's often retail in it, but it's the retail as a Bank of America, right? So it's providing very little for the community, and as a result, I think you're right. I mean, if I'm a neighbor who has invested their life savings into a house that is around the corner, I'm going to be worried about development, which the quality may actually be detrimental to older stock that's in the vicinity, in the neighborhood, and so I'm going to oppose it. But it's very rare to have a developer, and they do exist, and I'm lucky to have worked for a couple of them, that is thinking a little bit more about the urban fabric and how the building fits into it, and in particularly that ground floor plane and how that works. But we've gotten into this process where it's rinse and repeat, and what we're repeating is really detrimental to the quality of our cities.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 21:08
So you basically just stated the thesis of the second book. I mean, that is what the second book is about. It's about, and I think this is a little again, this is kind of unusual as a concern for architects, I don't think, I think most architects are very focused. The people who do larger scale work especially are very focused on creating foreground buildings, you know, creating special buildings, often object buildings, often that carry the signature of their firm. And that's the quest. And we have our share of those. Domino, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Princeton, but they're great projects, and they're all one offs, and I love them dearly. But the thing is, I think we as architects and the development community have a fundamental obligation to think about the quality of the quotidian, of just the everyday building stock that we have to build.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 22:02
And again, I know there aren't endless budgets for these things, but just a little bit of, sometimes it's not even money, it's just thought, because that rinse and repeat is often just like a kind of laziness about how to do things, instead of thinking about how to do it better. And that, to me, is like an enormous problem in terms of meeting the core housing needs in particular that our society has. So at Domino for instance, two trees, they don't rent to chain stores. They just don't. Everyone's a neighborhood retailer. And so the thing is, they can do that because they do most of their financing themselves, and so they don't have a bank breathing down their neck about credit tenants, which is what results in the ATMs and the chain drug stores and all of that stuff that are just soul crushing for a city, they're deadening for a city. And that's our problem in terms of, like, what we need to do in the coming decades, which is build a whole lot of housing in place like LA, in a place like New York. And, you know, in New York, we've tried to do things with The Times that show how you can do this better, but it really requires a different mindset from the development community.
Sam Pepper 23:19
So you worked under Bloomberg, which is an incredibly ambitious, groundbreaking administration, I think that's fair to say. We're in a climate now where you've got a federal government that is looking to pull back on funding. I know there's a new HUD Chief, and we'll see how he does. But there's a fear about all the federal dollars that go towards cities. And these cities are attacked by the right wing on a daily basis, but there's federal subsidies that go to these cities to build housing, to build infrastructure, things like that. I'd say that's at risk. You also have cities, and Los Angeles has a budget deficit now of some extraordinary number. And so we're entering a territory where the amount of government incentives for projects like this will be scaled back. Are you concerned about the era we're entering and the fact that both the need that we have is getting bigger, but actually the solution to it, and is actually likely going falling out of maybe the public discourse because of the administration the way that we're going politically? I'm worried about it.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 24:34
Look, the facts are really simple. Our big cities generate far more tax revenue than they get back in federal funding, and so the fair share arguments have been there for a long time. But you know, the thing is, this dates back to Jefferson. Jefferson didn't want the cities to be able to control the means that their wealth provided and deeply bias things in this country towards a distributed framework of power that really cuts city government. So when people walk around and say, Well, how come London has Crossrail and the Paddington Express, and Singapore has all of those incredible transportation, and Vienna has its housing policy, and Tokyo has all of its infrastructure. Those are all relatively autonomous cities. I mean, everyone talks about the housing in Vienna. Austria is a very conservative country, but Vienna operates essentially autonomously.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 25:34
And so, yeah, I am worried about it, but the question is, then, what do you do beyond worry, and to me, that is about cities being as self-sufficient as possible by growing their own tax base as much as possible. When 9/11 occurred, the city's budget was about $43 billion. I think the budget that just passed was like $120 billion and sure, some of that is like they're not. Those aren't comparable, because they're not the same year dollars. But still, there's been a massive growth, right, largely because of the 12 years of Bloomberg, in terms of tech companies and all sorts of entrepreneurialism that's occurred, immigration that's fueled new businesses and a labor force. And so people need to understand that if cities are going to operate, if we're gonna have operating mass transit systems and be able to give money to our public schools and money into public housing and money into public parks, that we need to have a really strong tax base to be able to do that, and we're not going to be able to rely on the feds. So these investments that we need to make again like so this goes full circle the last conversation. It's not growing for the sake of growth, but knowing like a city like New York has eight and a half million people, it can easily house 10, 12 million people because of the legacy infrastructure we are lucky enough to inherit.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 27:04
We're the only city in the world that has express and local subway trains so people can live quite far out and still get into the center of town or other parts of town in short amounts of time. Those are extraordinary investments that if you wanted to recreate today would cost trillions of dollars, not billions, but trillions. And so doubling down on that, and building around that, and building both employment, housing, education, culture around those legacy systems is an incredibly smart thing to do. And that's what a lot of the Bloomberg administration did, which is why the city recovered after 9/11, it actually recovered after the pandemic, I think, relatively well and will weather the storm of federal pullback in terms of funding, because we've got our own tax base.
Sam Pepper 28:02
Was that a North Star for Bloomberg when he came in to increase the tax bases?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 28:08
It was a North Star for Dan Doctoroff, who was the deputy mayor under Mayor Bloomberg, who has written and spoken extensively about what he calls the virtuous cycle of growth. That basically, his argument has always been that a new New Yorker actually brings much more economic activity than they draw in municipal services. And so if we're going to take care of our elderly, if we're going to take care of marginalized populations, if we're going to take care of the homeless, we need to continually invite new New Yorkers. And we're stabilizing, but we just went through this very difficult period where we were losing New Yorkers for the first time since the 1970s. And that is a treacherous thing for a city to suddenly lose population. Like that is if you look At every major city downfall, New York in the 1970s the bankruptcy of Detroit. Every time those kinds of things have happened to cities, it's because they've lost population, usually because of crime or deindustrialization or some combination. So that's the thing. That's a vicious cycle versus the virtuous cycle.
Sam Pepper 29:20
Yeah. So New York's resiliency seems to be, from my perspective, I'm curious your thoughts, but A) it is a hub for so many different industries. And if you are going to have an office in the US, it is most likely you will be in New York City. It is a headquartered area. There are a lot of CEOs in New York, so there's a power center there, and it's not reliant on one industry. You look at other major cities in the US, and I'm obviously speaking in LA, in the West Coast, we have Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, three major markets. San Francisco is a little bit reliant on tech. I would say LA is very reliant on entertainment industry. Those two tech I think had during COVID I think there was a question mark over whether they wanted to be in San Francisco anymore. I think that conversation died down a little bit, but it's still there. LA, we have the challenge of the fact that there are now much more attractive places, and so the identity of LA as being the hub for Netflix, Paramount, etc, feels like it's thing slowly chipped away. This is like, I feel like the fundamental problem with these cities is how to diversify their markets in order to stay relevant over a long period of time. I mean, 100 years.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 30:42
So first of all, New York does have this extraordinary resilience because of the diversity of its economy, but that is very much by design. I mean, really, up until the Bloomberg administration, people had been talking for decades about the need for New York to diversify out of just what was called the FIRE industries, financial, insurance and real estate. So during the Bloomberg administration, we really doubled down on, how do we get tech companies here? How do we get more cultural institutions in the city? How do we get all sorts of different kind of forms of entrepreneurialism to happen. So that's a question of public policy. But I would argue that the California cities have a particular threat upon them now that is different for two reasons. Climate change and fires, which is like the most obvious one, and we, I'm sure we'll return to that. And you know, we lived in Berkeley during the pandemic, and actually, my wife, daughter and I were evacuated from the very beginning of the Glass fire that tore through Napa, and it was absolutely terrifying. So that's one thing, and again, I'm sure we'll return to it.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 31:56
But the other thing that I think is a really important thing for Californians to think about, and for people who care about California cities to think about, is the pandemic and the ability to work from home, it seems to me, posed a very particular threat to the California city, and especially, actually, even San Francisco, more than LA, which is if you go into the heart of New York or London or Tokyo or Paris and you ask people why they live there. They live there because of the city. The city is the reason they live there. If you do that in San Francisco, you get these kind of answers like, well, I can go kayaking in Point Reyes, or I can go hiking over here. And the thing is, that's all great, but it's strange to have a philosophy of like, I live in a place because of how easily I can get out of it. Because then the pandemic comes along and you can say to yourself, well, I don't just have to limit myself to the weekends in terms of when I kayak in Point Reyes, I can do that seven days a week.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 33:03
And so if that desire to get out into nature, which I fully understand, I mean, California is a beautiful place, and I've driven cross country a few times. And like, if you go camping in California or out west, it's sublime. You know, going camping in the Shenandoah Valley outside of New York City is less sublime. I totally get it. But what I worry about is the cumulative effect of all of that. I think LA has more intentionality about why one lives in LA than San Francisco does. My friends in San Francisco would probably shoot me for saying that, but New York City, at this point, I wouldn't say, has largely recovered from the pandemic. People are back in the office four, often five days a week. If someone says, well, I only want to work three days a week in the office, and then the office adopts that policy. Then like the pizza place or the taco place that's down the street has lost 20% to 40% of their business, which means they're out of business. That is a deeply, deeply troublesome thing that I think is particularly problematic for a place like California.
Sam Pepper 34:14
Downtown LA has been the biggest victim of this period. And when I arrived in LA in 2019, it was thriving, and it had about a decade of growth. The Arts District coming online, investments in culture, the Oswald, Disney Concert Hall, the Broad Museum. It was a destination tourists would go there. People were moving in. As soon as COVID happened, it immediately was shuttered, and we're now looking at incredibly high vacancy rates, restaurants and things closing all over the place. And it does feel like in LA, everyone has retrenched to their particular neighborhood. And it's that disparate quality of LA that worries me a little bit, where particularly folks that live on the west side. If you're in Santa Monica, you're in Santa Monica, you probably say you live in Santa Monica, not Los Angeles. Whereas if I lived in the West Village, I'd probably say I lived in Manhattan. And there's that disconnection that I think is troublesome where I can see.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 35:19
It's just a natural byproduct of sprawl.
Sam Pepper 35:22
Yeah, it is.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 35:23
You know, if you live super horizontally, people are gonna think that way.
Sam Pepper 35:26
So what I'm curious about is that whether LA, because LA's infrastructure, was obviously built in this 1940s-1950s ideal of the automobile, it's very much in contrast to New York City. And you know that model has been copied by a lot of other cities where we've had a lot of sprawl, but changing that to improve the resiliency of the city. Yes, we're investing in the metro, but it's not obvious to me how you can fix a problem like LA. It's going to take billions of dollars, and I think almost a change in the mindset of LA in order to fix that.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 36:07
That's the biggest thing. I think money is a difficult enough problem, but culture, changing the culture of a place is a really, really hard thing to undertake. I mean, I think we can't be dismissive about the extraordinary accomplishments of building out the metro system in Los Angeles. You know, it's interesting to me, most people outside of LA don't even know about how much subway construction there's been in LA, and how much multifamily housing construction there's been in LA. And to me, this is the future. I mean, what I really worry about coming out of the fires is they're just gonna rebuild what was there with like, an inch more insulation or something. Because California, it's just like Chinatown. It is really created on this soft, murky soil of suspended disbelief that it won't happen again. It will never happen in the first place. Of course, it's going to happen again, and that's tragic. And so the best thing to do is maybe not say we have to lunge to return to live the way we used to live, and instead say, maybe there are other ways of living in that beautiful place.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 37:34
I'm always tempted to do a diagram of like if you took all of the single family housing stock in Los Angeles, and just turned it into three story housing stock. And three stories is a very specific number because code says that you don't need an elevator at three stories, as long as the ground floor is wheelchair accessible. So you could build fairly inexpensively, using basically the same technologies as single family housing. I mean, three stories, you're not that far off in scale from single family houses. There are single family houses that are 35 feet tall. So you can imagine it in your mind, right? That if you just understood how much less land the city would require at three stories, as opposed to all the buildings that are one story, and what that would mean in terms of creating fire buffers and more biodiversity and creating mass transit that works. So I'm not arguing that LA should become New York. Manhattan is way beyond three stories, but there is a pretty genteel form of density that could really fix a lot of Los Angeles problems, it seems to me, but it's again, that would require a cultural shift that would mean sharing things in a way that I don't think is endemic to the city's ethos.
Sam Pepper 39:04
It's not. It's interesting, though, because a lot of the building stock that was actually built in LA in the 1930s-1940s including the building that I live in, is a small apartment building, and we live in a six unit apartment building. We love it. It's fantastic. And you're fitting six units on a small lot. Everyone still has a pretty large apartment, shared courtyard area. It's very much sort of quintessential LA that's seen in Mulholland Drive. And there's a beauty around that. There's a mentality shift that's needed, but that would certainly solve the problem, because when we look at LA, we look at the budget deficit, they have the amount of money that's spent in LA, a lot of it's because of the scale. If you have a bus system in LA, the amount of miles that a bus needs to go is staggering. And I was told, which I was shocked by, that the metro system in LA, you. Has the second highest ridership in the country, outside of New York, which I was shocked by, that it could have more than DC, more than Chicago, but it's true, and so people are using it.
Sam Pepper 40:13
But in order to I think solve problems, we do need to find certain areas where instinctively people want to be. Maybe that's downtown Santa Monica, Downtown, West Hollywood. That's debatable. But to densify those areas in an intentional way, because every piece of legislation that comes out has very much been overly debated, to the point where there's an ability to rezone but it's really limited to really small areas. Maybe it's going to be next to a high street. It can't be too far into a single family residential zone. And so every time there's a new piece of legislation that comes out, and there's all this fanfare about, oh, it's going to solve our problems, as soon as you look at the text, you think, well, this actually really applies to a really small amount of lots. And there's a lack of that big, bold vision that I think Bloomberg administration had, and we're not seeing that. We're not seeing that in LA and I think it's a problem where, again, there's a little bit of lack of thought leadership, but there's lack of that strategic vision of the North Star moment, of looking at repeating a phrase I don't like, but of understanding what is the end goal for LA. Because if it's just housing people in affordable housing, that's a great goal, not saying that isn't. But if there's no businesses and they've all left to go to other cities that are attracting them more, then what kind of city were we creating?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 41:38
You spoke about something that I think we don't talk enough about, which is the cost of the infrastructure to support horizontality, endless horizontal growth. I did my architecture degree at Berkeley, and I arrived in Berkeley a year after the Oakland fires, and I'd never seen anything like that in my life. The fire just decimated the Oakland Hills. And then, of course, you go there now, and it's all been rebuilt again, as if, like it's not going to happen again, God forbid. But I also just think about the fact that we take it for granted that it's then government's job to get water up there and sewer lines up there and fire trucks up there. And like builders and developers come along and they make all this money on these houses with these views, but that everyone else is stuck with the bill of how you service that. To me, we have a problem of economics in that we don't price negative externalities into the cost of anything until it's too late.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 42:39
So then we need FEMA bailing people out and so forth. And where I think the rubber is really going to hit the road with all of this stuff is insurance, where we keep, I mean, there's a natural I mean, you're talking about, well, the Bloomberg people were visionary and stuff and so like, you know, what's government going to do? And can we have visionaries who do that? I think we are now at such a crisis moment with these kinds of issues, that what's really going to step in well before regulation is just the cost of everything. that it's going to get more and more difficult, if not impossible, to insure a home that's in harm's way. That it's going to get more and more expensive. So if you look at what's happened in Detroit, Detroit has recovered, but Detroit is a very horizontal Motor City, right? It was built around the idea of sprawl. You know, there have been years where Detroit couldn't plow certain streets. The municipal government could no longer afford to keep street lights on in entire neighborhoods, couldn't pick up trash in places because it's just so bloody expensive to deal with that horizontal expanse of everyone living on their little homestead. And so that's the stuff that I think is really going to come home to roost before vision and regulation catch up to it.
Sam Pepper 44:01
Is it a zoning question? Then I agree with you, because there's conversations right now happening about.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 44:05
Of course it's a zoning question. But the thing is, who's the politician who's going to stand up and say it makes no sense to rebuild what was there. Everyone that needs to move closer in, into some gentle density that's much more serviceable by mass transit, creates a fire barrier around the city. Who's the politician who's going to do that exactly? You know, you're going to get a fair amount of hate mail just for having me on your podcast talking about this. And sure, could you use zoning to solve the problem? Of course, but zoning requires, as well it should, a democratic public process to be enacted? I just don't think that's going to happen in a lot of these places. And therefore, what I'm saying is, when the democratic process fails, what's going to end up happening is the market's going to step in and say, we just can't afford this anymore.
Sam Pepper 45:01
There is going to be, I'm sure the Palisades will get rebuilt and Altadena will get rebuilt. There's two very different neighborhoods in terms of there's a lot of wealth disparity, and unfortunately, there's a lot of reasons why Palisades is in the news, probably 90% more than Altadena, which is quite unfortunate. But you have a demographic in Palisades that, generally speaking, had more resources. And I think there will be a rebuilding effort there that will, there's two approaches, because I think the reality is they're going to rebuild. One is that each home is built to a fire resistant degree, which is at least mitigate some of the challenges of building that area. The other is that we look at the areas where there are homes that are at fire risk, which is a lot of areas in Los Angeles, both high income, lower income communities, and we're not gonna be able to say, Well, you can't build there and you gotta move. That's not realistic. But there may be a solution where we say, Okay, well, we're not gonna build further into these areas that are at risk, and for the ones that are, whoever funds it, that's a big question, there needs to be some sort of infrastructure solution, which I agree is gonna cost a lot of money to ensure that there isn't this huge loss in the future.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 46:32
I don't know what that is. I mean, the problem is I just don't know what that is. I mean, I've read all the articles. I read that amazing article about that architect couple that saved their house, but they're going to sell it anyway, because everything burned down around them, and they just never want to go through the horror of it again. And look, I fully respect that. I'm talking about people's communities, especially in the case of Altadena, where you can't just say, Well, if you all just relocate to like some three story village somewhere else, you're going to have the same kind of community and history that Altadena has. I get that those are all really sensitive topics. I think, especially as Americans, we just imagine that there's going to be some silver bullet solution that we're going to come up with a technology, or a wall, or an insulation system or a glass dome that's going to somehow protect us from all of this stuff, and I just don't think it's possible. And even if we could, whatever we did would have all these unintended consequences that would screw us up in some other way.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 47:36
I don't think this is a conversation that is about technology. I think it's a question of like, how do we want to live and what is a city at the end of the day? Because a city that is composed largely of sprawl on its perimeter that's incredibly vulnerable to climate change is a community that's deeply in trouble. And I say that as a person who loves Los Angeles, I mean, I love the spirit of it. It's a deeply unique city, and one that violates every rule of, quote, good urbanism, and yet manages to be this extraordinarily urbane place. Yet, I really fear for its future in terms of this now and I, you know, look, this is not to say that New York doesn't have immense problems in front of it, from flooding to all sorts of other things, but I don't think it is really at the same level alarm.
Sam Pepper 48:33
This is maybe an unfair question, but if you were mayor for a day in Los Angeles, what would you do? What would be the first priority.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 48:41
I would go to a bunch of low lying communities and say, what would it take to get to live in denser circumstances closer to the center of town? That, to me, would be the priority. It's one thing to talk about Altadena and Pasadena. It's another thing entirely to talk about, really, the sprawling subdivisions that extend much, much further out than those communities. And so I feel deeply uncomfortable sitting here, thousands of miles away, telling an entire city of people what to do, but at the same time, having lived through 9/11, having lived through the pandemic, having been evacuated from wildfires, there's a basic kind of Goldilocks lesson to all of this, in terms of, you know, not Goldilocks, excuse me, three little pigs, which is, you know, I'll huff and I'll pop and I'll blow your house down.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 49:31
As far as I can understand, apartment buildings, very few of them burned down during the fires. I don't think there were that many in harm's way, but we know how to structure a three story apartment building with sprinklers and with the right materials, and we have technology today to protect that kind of housing, both from fire and earthquakes. That's not hard for a three story building. Like so to me, there's just going to end up being a natural direction to all of this. But I just worry about how much pain we're going to have to go through as a society before we start accepting the realities of all that.
Sam Pepper 50:16
I'm curious, you're an expert on cities, you travel with a lot of cities are there any right now, any country that you feel are really practicing an urbanism that is aligned with kind of your values and is being promoted and is also promoted maybe with the government, but also accepted by the citizens of that city?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 50:42
Singapore, Tokyo, Paris, Vienna. In Paris, things are controversial, but the mayor is really doing an extraordinary job lowering the amount of car use. You see bikes all over Paris in a way you didn't used to before. Madrid is doing some really interesting things. Just generally, obviously the European cities, they're more compact, they have legacy infrastructure systems, and they have a culture of density. Same thing with the Asian cities. Singapore is an extraordinary model, because Singapore operates with a different value system than we do. Singapore really operates with this idea that there is great value to central authority and that the citizenry will actually really benefit at an individual level, from increased central authority, which is anathema to the American way of thinking.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 51:39
And I'm not even debating which is better. I'm just looking at outcomes from the airports to the subway systems to the fact that, you know, like, there was this amazing article in The Times, I think it was about a year ago, about how Tokyo doesn't have a housing crisis, right? One of the most expensive cities in the world, and yet it doesn't have a housing crisis. People live in pretty small apartments, but like if you watch that movie Perfect Days, it is kind of about this, about how you can have an extraordinarily happy life, arguably a happier life, by worrying less about having lots of material stuff and having big homes and big cars that are constantly breaking down and constantly creating tension, and also what you can have a room that's 300 feet away from your kid. I think those things are cultural questions that every culture has to confront. But if you look at the healthier cities in the world, they're definitely the ones that have veered towards both density and quality.
Sam Pepper 52:54
You have a really interesting diagram in your book that I really liked, where you showed black and white ground diagram of Detroit. And you had the grid of Detroit, I think, back in the 1920s and then as it gradually, buildings got demolished and parking lots came in, how you could see the identity of the city literally vanish over a period of, I think it was like 50 years, it's not even that long.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 53:21
Yeah, I call it a tooth decay diagram.
Sam Pepper 53:24
It was quite shocking.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 53:25
Yeah, yeah. Look like I said, I've driven cross country. I own a car. I don't drive the car in the city, but I like driving across the American landscape. It's beautiful.
Sam Pepper 53:34
How many times have you driven across the country? You said a few times.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 53:38
Actually, if you count the time I did it with my parents when I was four. It's a total of six times that I've gone cross country.
Sam Pepper 53:43
That's definitely above average. That's for sure.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 53:45
No, and it's a strange thing, because as an immigrant, I'm a die hard American, and it's a beautiful country, and I never give up on it, even in these very difficult times we live in, I don't give up on it because of the nature of the people. That said, the diagram you're talking about. To me, the big issue with cars in cities, and again, I want to be specific, cars in cities, is not whether they're Uber or autonomous or electric, it's their size. The scale, because you then have to park them, and so they need a certain amount of size for the roads they operate on. And then if they're on freeway interchanges, you need big, curving, radial roadways so that they don't have to slow down on those interchanges. And then, of course, there's parking. And what the diagram that you're talking about in the book is really about the fact, and it's not specific to Detroit, you can go to most American cities and you will find that they've just been voraciously eaten by parking.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 54:51
A lot of our architecture projects are in the Midwest, and it's just extraordinary in me. I'll be standing in a city like Cleveland, and they'll say, Well, we think we need to build a parking garage for our project. And you stand at the site, and I'm not kidding, there's five empty parking garages within like a 200 foot radius, and you feel like not 200 probably more, but still. But people say, Well, yeah, but if our patrons park there, then first of all, they have to walk, right?
Sam Pepper 55:21
Oh, we can't do that, right?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 55:24
And secondly, we'll lose the revenue.
Sam Pepper 55:26
Yeah.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 55:28
and you just want to tear your hair out. I mean, you know, like, there's going to be some point where something's going to replace the car as the key for mobility, and even autonomous vehicles may not need that much like parking at the spot they might like drop you off and then go off somewhere and park in the outskirts, and you're sitting there, like, what are we going to do with all of these concrete behemoths we built? And so we have, we've just torn apart the density of our cities out of the need for this beast of a machine. And the thing that needs so I was just at the Venice Architectural Biennale last week. And of course, Venice, as Venice always is, is filled with tourists. Now, of course, anyone who knows Venice, knows you can't operate a car in Venice, most of the streets are barely narrow enough for two people to walk down. Then there's stairs everywhere to go over the canals, and so there are no cars in Venice.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 56:32
And so people who live in all of these sprawling circumstances then pay thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to go visit Venice or to walk around Paris, or to walk the little narrow streets of Tokyo. And it just amazes me that they like it, the disconnect between these things that you would spend thousands of dollars to go in a place where you can walk around, see other people, see things that are surprising, have serendipity, and then you're going to go home and get into your car and drive to Home Depot. And like the fact that those two things are never connected in people's minds, I find just extraordinary. As a lifelong New Yorker, I just if I can't walk every day to the places I want to get to, I would go crazy because of what it does for your mind. There's all this neuroscience around that,what it does for your body in terms of just basic health, but also just you can walk the same street every day and see completely different things, and that sense of variety and serendipity is so critical to keeping you alive. I don't know it all befuddles me a little bit.
Sam Pepper 57:45
There's no mystery in the fact that in Los Angeles, the most successful retail areas, the most successful commercial streets, are the ones that do the best job of imitating either a New York or a European street scale, and you're seeing all these developments that are happening that are pedestrian friendly or exclusively pedestrian where, I mean, it's a small area, we're talking about 20 retailers, but these places are hubs, because people, I think, are starving for that kind of social interaction experience where they feel like they're actually in a city. And LA because of the way it was laid out. I mean, the major street that I live near is called Beverly, and Beverly has a bunch of restaurants and everything, it has anErewhon, so it's successful. But it's four lanes with two lanes of parking. So it's six lanes, no median, and that is in LA terms, a pedestrian friendly road. And it's a huge fundamental problem that LA has, and the way it was laid out when they were first, and this is part of the fact that it's just a such a new city, but when it was laid out in the 40s, everyone was excited about the car, and so they made all these streets incredibly wide.
Sam Pepper 59:09
And so if you want to go and cross your street to go to the shop that's over there, you're crossing incredible amount of traffic. You're going about 200 feet, and you're crossing in August, asphalt that's very hot, and you've got palm trees and no trees actually provide shade, so the experience quickly becomes one that you think, Ah, maybe, maybe another day, because it's not that pleasant. And there's a few easy fixes. I mean, putting in medians, changing out some of the trees. I mean, again, all this costs money, of course, but there's some fundamental basics that LA could take on to at least emulate some of the successes of other cities. So you at least have streets that are pleasant to walk down, so that a retailer can actually survive on that street, rather than just driving straight past them. And it's, it's a challenge, for sure, yeah.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 1:00:04
I mean, I think it's happening in pockets. I mean, I'm fully cognizant of the fact that LA isn't New York or Vienna or Paris, and there's a culture of open sky that is understandably kind of endemic to the place, but I think even within that rubric, you could do what you're talking about, which is just create more amenity for people to walk around, more places for people to walk around. And again, LA has been building a lot of multi family housing, and so it'll be interesting to see what happens. It's one thing to talk about these things as amenities. It's another thing when you're talking about how that then ties to fire risk and that desire for all of that asphalt and what it that creates in terms of risk for people.
Sam Pepper 1:00:51
So Vishaan, coming to the end of the conversation, couple of final questions for you. So one is now that you've set up PAU and still relatively young architecture practice. You've got Domino Sugar Refinery as a major project. You've got the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building, which is a repurposing of an I.M. Pei building. So these major projects either built or on the horizon. Are there any projects that you are hoping that you would love to work on in the next decade?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 1:01:27
Well, we're still very much in the mix for completely redoing Penn Station, which is, I mean, we're a small firm. We're about 25-28 people, and so obviously we collaborate with larger firms to do work of that scale, but I think we're proving that we can do really complicated work, and so to build in big infrastructure like that. I mean, we are doing these air traffic control towers. We just finished this bridge in Indianapolis. So I love public infrastructure. I love things like train stations and airports. Someday I hope to do an airport, and I obviously want to continue to do cultural and institutional work like Princeton and Rock Hall. We've set up a practice that doesn't specialize, and that is a much, much harder road. But you started this conversation with, like, talking about, like, kind of my nonlinear roots, and I think that's led to a firm that is kind of not going to be a specialist in any one typology. So we're doing multifamily housing, we're doing infrastructure, we're doing cultural and institutional work, and we're doing a lot of advocacy work, and we're going to probably continue to do all those things.
Sam Pepper 1:02:40
So Vishaan on the last question is a question I ask every guest, and the fact that you don't live in LA may make this a little bit harder for you, but what are your three favorite buildings or places in Los Angeles?
Vishaan Chakrabarti 1:02:52
This is Sam's version of the Ezra Klein show, where you have to name the three at the end. Well, it would have to start with Eames House. I mean, really, all of the case study houses, it's hard to pick the Cappy House. And that's what's interesting. Like we've been talking about how to limit sprawl, and yet, I mean Los Angeles contributions to great houses. I mean Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler, the list just goes on and on, and it's hard to pick among any of them, but I probably would say Eames is still my favorite in there. I really like Michael Maltzan Star Apartments. I think that the work Michael does to house the formerly unhoused and just the Los Angelesness of his projects, he really, I think really feels the city. I'm a sucker for Caltrans. Tom Maine's a friend. And, you know, I think that work doesn't always translate in a place like New York, but it really makes sense in Los Angeles. I remember as a student going to a cancer center that Morphosis did, which is when they were a relatively new firm, and I thought it was exquisite. It's interesting. I think of those three, think of Eames House, the Star Apartments and Caltrans. They couldn't be more different stylistically, but they all channel a certain la energy I really admire. And none of it is work that we would do. We would obviously have very different approaches to these things, but they're really, really extraordinarily accomplished pieces of architecture.
Sam Pepper 1:04:29
Fantastic. Well, Vishaan thank you for coming on the podcast. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Your new book, or relatively new book, Architecture of Urbanity is obviously out, and I highly recommend it, and I hope that you come to LA soon and have a project out here and put your stamp on the city.
Vishaan Chakrabarti 1:04:49
That would be great. I'd love to do it.
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