Dream City

Bookstores enjoy a rare trait: To many, the store itself is seen as at least as important to the community as the product it sells. There are several reasons for this, which is why a Slate story published earlier this week called “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller” has sparked a small online uprising of indignant bookworms. In the story — so paint-by-numbers counterintuitive that it almost reads as a parody of a Slate piece — Farhad Manjoo argued that people should buy books on Amazon and let independent bookshops wither. “Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you,” he writes.

Authors and economists can duke it out over the first two claims. But “better for you” is a lot of B.S.  if you are lucky enough to live somewhere that has a quality independent bookstore. (And if you live in the suburbs, I bet it’s hard to find a parking spot by your local Barnes & Noble on a Friday night, just as it was at Borders, before bad business decisions pushed it into bankruptcy.) Unlike almost any other kind of retail establishment, bookstores operate as quasi-public neighborhood trusts that give city dwellers more than they receive in return. Like art galleries, they’re a free-of-charge indoor urban venue where you can make yourself comfortable without being expected to eat something, drink something, or even buy something.

This is why the most-loved bookstores tend to hang on: Kramerbooks and Politics & Prose in D.C., The Strand and McNally-Jackson in New York, Skylight and Book Soup in Los Angeles, Tattered Cover in Denver, Book People in Austin, Texas — the list goes on. Their patrons are numerous enough that even if only a fraction of them make a purchase it adds up to a profit. That doesn’t really make them like Whole Foods, as Manjoo suggests. Yes, both Whole Foods and independent bookstores provide a luxury shopping experience, but bookstores provide a cooperative aspect that goes well beyond that. No one goes to Whole Foods just to soak up the atmosphere — everyone’s ultimately there to buy quinoa and ramps. Bookstores, on the other hand, function as communal spaces, which makes them valuable urban amenities.

By the same token, bookstores are more similar to farmers’ markets than Manjoo admits in his piece — people feel strongly that they want farmers’ markets in their neighborhoods, and they shop there to show that. If they just wanted fresh ingredients sustainably sourced from local farms, there are plenty of cheaper places to find those in most cities these days. Yet like bookstores, farmers’ markets are packed with shoppers and gawkers alike. People go for the scene.

Like farmers’ markets, bookstores are an example of what urbanists refer to as “third places” — places that usually exist to sell something but that also contribute to a city’s public realm, like coffee shops. “In this way, ‘literary culture’ may also translate to ‘urban culture,’ and the appreciation urban residents have for the inherent qualities of urban life,” says Mike Lydon, principal of the Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm. “One might describe Amazon as the fast, cheap, standard, virtual suburban big-box model, while the indie bookstore is the urbane alternative that is seemingly rising alongside the rediscovery of America’s urban neighborhoods.” He may be right: after a long decline, the number of independent bookstores stabilized in the last few years and has even ticked slightly upward, according to the American Booksellers Association.

Lydon points to Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which was essentially funded through crowdsourced loans from people in the community who wanted a bookstore nearby. Locals loaned the prospective owners $70,000 in increments of as little as $1,000. “It was worth it not only because it helped us get the capital together, but because there are all these people who feel so invested in this store,” co-owner Jessica Stockton Bagnulo told the press after Greenlight opened in 2009. “Literally, they own a piece of it.”

All of which is to say, Manjoo’s argument that bookstores don’t really foster a local literary culture wildly misses the point. They foster a local culture, period. Bookstores provide a space to meet friends, cruise for a date, and hide out when you have nothing to do on a Saturday night. They provide a small slice of intellectual development in a retail landscape that’s otherwise dominated by denim, cupcakes and facial moisturizer. And they do so without asking much in return — just that we come in frequently, browse all we want, and occasionally buy a book at retail price. If people mythologize bookstores, that’s the reason. Rather than look for reasons why they shouldn’t be celebrated, you could just as easily ask why, even in the age of Amazon, they still are.

As they have every right to. But a census-busting generation growing unprecedentedly old while scattered so wide will make caring for aging boomers vastly more complicated. Yet rather than incentivize the next generation of seniors to move to urban areas — where transit, services and walkable neighborhoods abound — an array of factors actually discourage them from doing so. How do we fix this?

There are two sides to the problem: one is policy, and the other is urban planning itself. On the planning side, there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit, says David Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in urban planning at MIT. For instance, a big issue for seniors is range — how far they can comfortably get from their homes. In cities, that often boils down to where’s the next bench, and where’s the next bathroom? So when San Francisco tears out its public seating to keep the homeless from sitting down (a dubious policy anyway), it inadvertently creates an environment hostile to older people. Even just removing the metal spikes from low concrete walls — otherwise known as a loitering-teenager repellent — can make a big difference for old people. So can encouraging businesses to be flexible on their “restrooms are for customers only” rules.

“If you can use this kind of existing infrastructure to benefit seniors,” says Gleckman, then the city essentially begins to function like a giant assisted-living center. He points to the untapped potential of apartment buildings. “You could organize a building where younger couples might say, ‘We’ll shop for an older person if they’ll water our plants or sit for the kids.” After the tsunami in Japan, municipal governments facilitated such arrangements — some even built nagaya, traditional intergenerational tenements, so younger neighbors could help care for displaced seniors. It’s akin to co-housing, says Gleckman, “where people move into one building and provide services to each other.” A building full of seniors could even hire a single home health aide who sees them all in one visit.

This sort of urban collaborative thinking could extend to transit. Take “dollar vans,” those semi-legal armadas of jitneys that pick up anyone who flags them down. If more regulation made them feel safer, such an option could be a boon for seniors who can’t lug a cartful of grocery bags to the nearest bus stop but also can’t splurge on a taxi.

These low-tech fixes, however, only get us so far. “Almost every study finds that the elderly are most sensitive to cost of living and crime,” says Karen Smith Conway, an economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. These days, cost of living is likely to be the bigger issue, as fixed-income seniors are particularly vulnerable to urban real estate’s ups and downs.

Gentrification poses problems for seniors most of us would never even think of. It can wipe out the familiar visual cues dementia sufferers use to avoid getting lost. And trendy new bars don’t do much for an octogenarian. USA Today recently wrote about the disappearing neighborhood tavern, a cornerstone of urban senior social life. Where David Lee worked in Brookline, Mass., a McDonald’s had become the de facto neighborhood senior center. “It was the perfect place for seniors in the daytime,” Lee says: brightly lit, cheap coffee, and you could sit there as long as you wanted. But as the neighborhood upscaled, “it was replaced with something more high-end,” and an informal community group of seniors was dispersed overnight.

Giving older residents a buffer against these economic forces is key. Housing projects for seniors (that don’t feel like gulags) have actually been on the rise over the past 10 years. The new architecture emphasizes mixed-use developments and touches that feel like home: things like window sills sized for residents to lean on and look out of, like they used to do in the old neighborhood. Stoves in Chinatown housing have range hoods for smoky stir-frying. Security stations are positioned in a way that lets residents interact with the young guards. There’s also been a push nationwide to change zoning codes to legalize “granny flats,” helping older residents to stay in their homes while renting out the main part of the house to a young family.

Despite these efforts, using government to get old people to move to cities is still an uphill battle. “Older people keep moving to the same places, no matter how much policies change,” says Conway. She and Jonathan Rork of Reed College just published a groundbreaking study examining the effects of the myriad tax breaks states use to try to woo retirees. Their conclusion? These financial incentives have “no credible effect.” After 40 years, seniors’ migration patterns still lead straight to the same things: sunshine and fairways. “New York to Florida is huge,” says Conway. “It dominates everything else.”

It means cities must do the work themselves to become attractive to seniors. And they should, because older people have more to offer cities than just their pensions: “Tutoring kids, neighborhood watch programs, and just the institutional memory they provide,” says Gleckman. “One of the things we’ve lost in this country is intergenerational relationships.” Though we can’t always spell out exactly why, we sense these relationships are important. New York even awards an annual “Living Landmarks” honor to older New Yorkers without whom the city wouldn’t be the same. (“Now they can’t tear me down,” said Jerry Orbach upon receiving his.)

“Cities need old buildings,” Jane Jacobs famously wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”  “Chain stores, chain restaurants, and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops … studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies … these go into old buildings.” Her point was that what serves a purpose in cities isn’t always readily apparent. Cities need the giddy energy of youthful upstarts and the stability of middle-aged workers and parents. But just as as we’re surprised to learn that they sometimes need a McDonald’s, we find that they need old people, too.

Mass transit is its newest target.

“Federal transportation and infrastructure policy has traditionally been an area of strong bipartisan agreement,” says Aaron Naparstek, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and founder of Streetsblog.org. “Now, it seems, Republicans want to turn cities into a part of the culture wars. Now it’s abortion, gay marriage and subways.”

House Republicans seek to eliminate the Mass Transit Account from the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Mass Transit Account is where public transportation programs get their steady source of funding. Without it, transit would be devastated, and urban life as we know it could become untenable.

And there’s the rub. “The Tea Party leaders and the Republicans who pander to them do not care about cost-effectiveness in the slightest,” wrote blogger Alon Levy in a comment about the bill on the Transport Politic. “They dislike transit for purely cultural and ideological reasons.” To the Tea Party, transit smacks of the public sector, social engineering and alternative lifestyles.

How do we know this is a cultural battle and not an economic one? Because transit spending is far more fiscally fair than spending on roads and highways. Transit riders subsidize roads to a greater degree than drivers subsidize transit. And cities, which are the chief engines behind the American economy, rely on buses and trains to function. “The economic future for states hinges largely on the performance of their metropolitan economies,” determined a recent Brookings Institution study.

Tea Party leaders know all of this. But they also knew that defunding NPR wouldn’t help balance the budget, and they voted to do it anyway. They knew that by law no federal money can go toward abortion services, yet they voted to defund Planned Parenthood too. The Tea Party is superb at disguising cultural battles as the pursuit of responsible thrift. And mass transit exists at the vortex of many of their No. 1 ideological targets. It’s brilliant, when you think about it.

Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor.

Republicans haven’t pretended to care about cities for decades. In January, none of the candidates showed up to the annual Conference of Mayors. (Two of them didn’t even RSVP.) And even just a month ago, you could argue, as this website did, that “today cities are more ignored than attacked” by Republicans. But the calculus just changed. The transportation bill sends an aggressive message: “Tea Party to Cities: Drop Dead.”

It doesn’t matter to the Tea Party that Ronald Reagan, in 1982, created the Mass Transit Account that Republicans now want to kill. Reagan was no friend to cities. But even he earned a respectable share of the vote in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Things hadn’t yet gotten so personal.

That era is over. Over the past couple of decades, the GOP has found that bashing “elites” can translate into victory at the polls. And by “elites” they don’t mean folks with Chevy Tahoes and McMansions in the exurbs. They mean urbanites, no matter what their net worth. When they tar Nancy Pelosi as a San Francisco liberal, or Barack Obama as a Chicago politician, they’re not just referencing those cities’ stereotypes. They’re referencing the stereotypes of city culture itself: full of swindlers and gays and blacks and other suspect types. Calling Obama the “food stamp president” conjures up images of housing projects. Sarah Palin calling small-town folks “real America” states unequivocally that urbanites aren’t real Americans. The offensiveness of that statement still boggles the mind.

The Tea Party plan to decimate transit is no less explicit a statement. “House Republicans are, essentially, declaring war on cities in the federal transportation bill,” tweeted Naparstek. It’s not just that they know they can’t expect many votes from urban dwellers — that at least would be political calculus. It’s that they despise cities in general. They see “smart growth” principles as a U.N. plot, gun control as fascist, and funding for transit not just as wasteful, but un-American. Don’t like it? Get a car like the rest of us.

The House transportation bill will not become law, but that doesn’t make it benign. Like the debt ceiling battle, it could become a political bargaining chip, or reframe the national debate: Maybe cities are getting more than their fair share? Are we overspending on transit? Why should I help fund some faraway bus system? It plants these questions in voters’ minds.

This is why transit advocates are apoplectic, and why Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (a former Republican congressman) called it “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen in 35 years of public service.” If conservatives have truly decided that transit is next on their culture war hit list, anyone who believes in the importance of cities had better start firing back right now.

We all know this story. America’s urban sleaze centers have zipped up and retreated into the night. The Combat Zone was flushed out, the Sunset Strip sanitized, Times Square Giuliani’d. But almost as soon as they were gone, nostalgia bloomed. When Times Square’s last seedy strip club closed two years ago, New York magazine lamented that its streets had been “completely lost to Bubba Gumps and T.G.I. Fridays.” One poll showed 65 percent of New Yorkers preferred the Times Square of hookers and skin flicks. What could a neighborhood of peep shows, porno and prostitutes possibly offer a city?

The fact that we have the luxury of entertaining that question shows how orderly cities have become. “Now we’ve got great places where you can plug in your computer,” quips Josh Alan Friedman. As a journalist in the ’70s and ’80s, Friedman covered Times Square. “That type of lawless, sexual Wild West, a lot of people miss it. It was renegade, almost like a political statement.”

Governments don’t like renegade political statements. So, since sex-oriented businesses are protected as free speech, cities have increasingly turned to zoning and draconian regulations to disperse them — and sometimes to make operating them more trouble than it’s worth. “People say, ‘Hey, it’s adult entertainment, do anything you want to them. Regulate the hell out of them,” says Angelina Spencer, director of the Association of Club Executives, an adult-nightclub trade group. “But you have to think about the ramifications for that. We’re on a slippery slope.”

Spencer cites a new Missouri law that bans alcohol and strip clubs, sets closing time at midnight (prime time for adult entertainment) and makes it a crime for performers to come within 6 feet of a man. Last month, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that towns can restrict smut simply because it’s accessible close-by in New York. And last year, Louisville, Ky., banned nude dancing citywide, a move that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Welcome to another dreary winter’s day in your newly nudity-free city,” moaned LouisvilleKY.com. “This is not the America my dad grew up in,” declared the local blog Louisville’s Strange Brew.

There’s something about the death of urban tawdriness that gives some people existential agita. It’s been happening ever since VCRs turned every living room into the Pussycat Theater, dragging sleaze off the streets with an assist from politicians and developers. It’s bubbled up through the resurgence of titty-tassled neo-burlesque shows, scattered attempts at porn-theater preservation, a “Deep Throat” documentary, and dewey-eyed paeans to the bad old days. The Times Square visitors center even recently installed three genuine peep booths, complete with the refurbished neon “Peep-o-Rama” sign from the neighborhood’s last peep emporium, shuttered in 2002.

Of course, you won’t see nudes in those peep booths. Instead, you’ll feast your eyes on New York Times articles chronicling the neighborhood’s transformation. Like the bar at the W, it offers a stylized approximation of the scummy experience, without the weird smell. Or, from another perspective, makes “a mockery of what New York City is supposed to represent,” according to the New York Observer.

But what New York and other cities represent, sex-wise, isn’t so cut and dried. While the sticky-floor triple-X joints have declined, chains like Babeland and the Pleasure Chest have thrived, selling high-end dildos and in well-lit shops to a very different clientele. Yelp reviewers draw a stark line between “sex-positive” establishments like the Smitten Kitten, a sex-toy boutique in Minneapolis, and the “neon-signed sleaze-baskets, where you kinda feel you could catch something just by browsing.” As urban amenities of all types have upscaled, from gyms to coffee shops to cupcake emporiums, so too have sex stores, offering a gentler experience at a premium price.

These venues provide a valuable service, especially to women. They’re not degrading or leering, and they preach the gospel of sexual progressivism. But they also emphasize how startlingly appropriate our cities have become, at least outwardly. When we say we miss the old sleazy neighborhoods, we’re not really mourning the sex, which was always for a small number of men anyway. We’re talking about exactly what the respectable sex shops can’t offer: bawdy distastefulness, throngs of misfits, an unapologetic lack of decorum. These were zones where dysfunctional behavior was embraced. “I used to think of it as a loner’s paradise,” says Friedman of Times Square. “You could be all alone and yet you were in the midst of this teeming humanity.”

Mike Edison, who wrote about Times Square for Screw magazine in the 1980s and who just released a book about American pornography, agrees. “I think it’s important to remember that 42nd Street wasn’t just peep shows and porn. There were grindhouse movies, kung-fu double features, blaxploitation. You could see ‘Shogun Assassin’ and ‘Five Fingers of Death’ for a dollar. There was Playland, a big arcade with pinball machines. It was a great place for a juvenile delinquent like me to hang out.”

Jonathan Tudan, who lived in the Combat Zone in 1969, says there was “an excitement about it. The minute you stepped onto Washington Street you got a jolt of electricity.” These neighborhoods represent a particular fantasy of city life, one where you need to be streetwise to survive. “I learned not to be intimidated by anybody,” says Tudan, who moved to the Combat Zone an 18-year-old virgin from Connecticut. He managed an apartment building there, living rent-free among the sailors and prostitutes, and occasionally scuffling with johns. By the time he moved out, he had the respect of the street and was dating one of the top strippers in Boston.

Old photographs reflect this fantasy: sneering kids drinking in cars, wild-eyed preachers screaming about Jesus, suggestive titles on blazing marquees. Times Square looked like an awesome nightmare. Why did people go there? “Why do people go to horror films?” asks Anthony Bianco, author of “Ghosts of 42nd Street.” “Because it transcends ordinary experience.” Friedman echoes that: “For me, it was like going through the looking glass. Times Square was a world that was upside down and in another dimension.” It was bizarro Disney, a fabrication that existed in the imagination as much as it did in real life. “The grim actualities of the Deuce in the 1980s seemed to matter less than the idea of it as the ultimate antistreet,” writes Bianco in his book.

The sex-oriented businesses that are succeeding in cities today do exactly the opposite. They bring sex down to earth, demystify it and make it easy to explain and digest. There are his-and-hers oral-sex seminars and intimacy-inspiring yoga classes. There are trained professionals on hand to help you decide which butt plug is right for you in a totally non-sleazy way.

And there are strip clubs: Costco-size franchises like Scores and 4Play, with VIP rooms and valet service. There are pole-dancing classes and strip-tease lessons. And there’s the new burlesque scene, which is more like a pantomime of an old-timey art form than what we normally think of as sexual. “I’ve been to the new burlesque places down in the East Village, but the girls are all comedians,” says Friedman. “I think it’s great what they’re trying to do, bring back some of the old burlesque. But they’re doing it for a laugh.”

Could these two worlds, the old Peep-o-Rama and the new Pleasure Chest, coexist in the same city? Of course. In fact, they do — there’s still plenty of filthy behavior going on. It’s just not out in the open anymore. Now sex clubs and orgies are something to find through Google, and prostitution is moving online. But it’s hard to imagine unabashed sleaze in concentrated neighborhoods as part of the new urban order. And maybe it shouldn’t be part of it. It wasn’t all fun and games. “People got hurt,” says Tudan. “Most of the folks who actually lived in the neighborhood, they don’t miss it.” Sex workers, some of them children, endured horrific abuse. And for women in general, these could be mean and outright hostile places. “If these girls had a choice to get a job as a secretary, they would have done that,” says Tudan. (You’ll notice that all the historians quoted on this topic, both official and armchair, are men.)

But the nostalgia persists. It seems like every time a new Rem Koolhaas tower rises, it inspires, along with the oohs and ahhs, a little wistfulness for the old grunge. “You did not have to actually roll in the gutter to take comfort in knowing it was there,” writes Bianco, “affronting bourgeois pieties by its very existence.” And if you did want to roll in it, no shame on you.

Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive. Los Angeles’s Westside subway extension is set to be finished in 2036. Just five years ago, New York’s Second Avenue Subway was supposed to be done by 2020, a goal that seems laughable now.

And while it’s not fair to compare American projects to China’s — where protections for workers and the environment are flimsy, and tight construction schedules can sacrifice workmanship — there are nonetheless several factors that conspire to keep American mass-transit projects in a state of perpetual limbo. Here are seven culprits, listed roughly in order of guilt.

1. Bureaucracy

Most big transit projects are partially funded through the Federal Transit Administration, which awards merit-based grants to cities in the president’s annual budget. These grants fund all sorts of projects, from a busway in Hartford, Conn., to a commuter train in Honolulu. But before the FTA decides who gets a chunk, each project has to prove its cost-effectiveness. That means providing the federal government with ridership estimates, possible alternatives and all manner of other analyses that can take years to complete.

Many of these studies are worthwhile. But Martin H. Duke, editor of Seattle Transit Blog, says it shows how government pinches pennies with transit even as it spends wastefully elsewhere. “Whether you’re of the right or the left, you can identify very large budget items that aren’t that valuable,” says Duke, “large enough to fully fund the fantasies of every transit advocate in the nation in a couple of years.”

2. Lack of Funding

The 2012 federal budget allocated $1.9 billion for large-scale transit construction, and the sad fact is, a couple billion simply doesn’t buy what it used to. The central link in Seattle’s light-rail system alone cost $2.4 billion. New York’s Second Avenue Subway is budgeted at $1.7 billion per kilometer.

Part of the problem are these costs themselves. The Atlantic Cities recently examined why New York’s new subway line will be the most expensive in the world. (It’s not because it’ll be the best.) But the other half of the funding problem is the process by which it’s done. Federal funds doled out on a yearly basis keep work from speeding forward. Cities and states are expected to match those funds, and they sometimes refuse. And an enormous project years in the making can be killed by a single budget hawk. Some traffic-choked cities are trying to get around these obstacles with innovative funding solutions. Los Angeles’ 30/10 Initiative (recently rebranded “America Fast Forward”) seeks to complete 30 years’ worth of transit projects in a single decade by borrowing on taxes its residents have already committed to paying in the future. And just a few days ago, L.A. started talking with the Chinese government about possibly investing in the city’s subway extension, apparently hoping that some of that Beijing magic will rub off.

3. Politics

It only takes one politician to gum up a world-class transit plan. “If God himself, and Vishnu, Mohammed and Einstein said, ‘Build this route this way with these stops!’ politicians would still change it around for political reasons,” says land-use expert Roger Valdez. Voters want a subway stop on their block, so their elected officials fight for it, whether or not it really makes sense from an urban planning perspective. Or they don’t want the subway coming near them. Or they want light rail but not a bus. Or they want an airport link, but they want it to go around their neighborhood rather than through it. “Our system allows far too much input from John and Jane Six-Pack,” says Valdez. And every time politicians change up the plans, engineers must head back to the drawing board. “We end up planting seeds that, like a child would, we dig up the next morning to see whether it’s grown yet.”

4. Existing Infrastructure

“Gas mains, steam pipes, electric conduits, sewers, cables, sub-basements, and underground freshets add to the difficulties” of building a subway tunnel. That’s how Modern Mechanix magazine explained why New York’s new subway line was taking so long to build — the Sixth Avenue line, in 1937. Seventy-five years later, it’s even more crowded down there, with more pipes and gas mains and basements, plus newer infrastructure like cable TV lines and fiber-optic networks. “The projects are more complicated than similar projects might have been back then,” says Yonah Freemark, editor of the Transport Politic. “Compared to half a century ago, there’s a lot more to deal with.”

5. Mismanagement

This one should either be higher on this list or not on it at all, depending where you live. But for some cities, mismanagement — or outright corruption — is the biggest impediment to getting stuff done. In San Francisco, where a recent audit of the city’s transit agency found lax oversight of construction efforts, transit projects are averaging 529 days behind schedule.

6. Addiction to Cars

Just ask any bike-lane advocate: Try to replace a lane of traffic with a different mode of transportation and your city’s drivers will threaten to self-immolate. The light-rail project that will connect Seattle with nearby Bellevue is a perfect example. “The train will use two lanes of the freeway bridge,” says Martin Duke. “The state DOT is insisting that Sound Transit replace those two lanes before allowing construction to begin on the rail line. That’s pushing things back by years.” Simply put: Drivers’ demands often prevail, and the mediocre transit that results (streetcars that get shunted into traffic rather than having their own dedicated lane, for instance) only erodes the public’s enthusiasm for more of it.

7. Basic Fairness

Good public transit is a cherished ideal of many progressives. Ironically, progressive values can end up making transit construction take longer. Part of the reason we don’t build as fast as China does is because we have workers’ unions, ADA compliance rules, and environmental concerns that require time-consuming impact studies. “If we didn’t have to put elevators everywhere and we imported non-union Mexican immigrants to do the work, you could build a lot more of everything,” says Duke, who hastens to add that he’s not in favor of that. Good, affordable transit is a human rights issue too, though, and in many ways the common link in our desire for healthier, less wasteful cities that serve everyone equally.

But for all Yelp’s virtues, pre-screening every experience can inhibit us, too. These days, many of us wouldn’t think of trying a new hairstylist or hotel without first checking others’ impressions online. “There’s something about Yelp that creates hesitancy,” says Howe. “Before going to a trivia night at an East Village bar I check out the bar’s Yelp page to see what others have said about it, what it looks like, what types of people go there — what I’m essentially looking for is, does this look like me? Do people like me go here?”

I know exactly what he means. I pre-screen everything these days. Usually I’m trying to avoid feeling awkward — I’ve ended up at too many bars where I’m the only patron who remembers life before cable. Last year I decided not to attend the annual Time’s Up! “Fountain Ride” after a YouTube video of one of the past rides convinced me I’d feel insufficiently artsy.

But am I dodging uncomfortable situations, or missing out on great ones? “The efficiency that the Web has brought has downsides,” says Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture. “On balance, it works against happy accidents.” Tenner calls this counter-serendipity: when preconceived notions prevent lucky flukes. For instance, a poorly rated restaurant on Yelp might have a few die-hard fans — outliers who, for whatever reason, love the place. Their reviews might even be posted. But many of us go with the general consensus, writing off anywhere with a three-star ranking or less. “Is it possible that a place you really would have liked doesn’t have many positive comments, but you would have been one of the few positive ones?” asks Tenner.

Even if the ranking doesn’t deter us, by the time we do go to the club or the restaurant, we’ve sometimes seen so much of the place online that we’ve basically pre-experienced it. Having online access to so many venues might make us more adventurous in one sense, prompting us to try things we never would have tried or even have known about. But in another sense, it becomes a less-adventurous adventure, certified for us by hundreds of others who’ve already checked it out, assured us we’ll like it, testified to its quality, cleanliness and safety.

This isn’t the same, by the way, as choosing a restaurant based on a review in the paper. Now everything is reviewed — every bar, every corner store — everywhere, all the time. And if Yelp’s popularity is any indication (the site posted its 20 millionth review last July) our need to check these reviews before doing anything is becoming a borderline addiction. When you can no longer have a drink at a bar that wasn’t first vetted by 83 strangers, spontaneity — which, in some ways, is one of the best things about life in the city — is lost.

An example: A trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C. is preceded by a scan of its 1,400 Yelp reviews, from which you’ll learn some useful information: be prepared for a wait, there are vegetarian options. But you’ll also learn that if you sit at the counter you can chat with the cooks if it’s slow, that the TVs play footage of Barack Obama’s visit, and that the crowd swells with concertgoers whenever a show at the nearby 9:30 Club ends. Supplementing these descriptions are 431 photos of the space, the food, the cooks, the servers. No unanticipated curve balls await you. The scene has been thoroughly canvassed in advance.

Ben’s is an institution that survived the riots of the ’60s to become a D.C. landmark. On Yelp, it’s just another a three-and-a-half-star chili-dog joint. And in some ways, this is one of Yelp’s greatest services: providing a reality check for legendary places hawking average products at insane prices. (Canter’s Deli and the Russian Tea Room also get this treatment.) In fact, in a lot of ways, Yelp is a godsend for good businesses — it’s a meritocratic rating system that rewards quality service with a relative lack of bias.

But quantifying every service and product with a one-through-five ranking can also discourage innovation. One study showed that an extra star on Yelp can boost a business’s revenues by 9 percent. When your cumulative score is worth that much, doing something unorthodox that some people won’t like isn’t necessarily in your best interest. Economists call this the high-level equilibrium trap. Innovating can sometimes mean a brief period of declining quality as you struggle to smooth out the kinks — not such a big deal when you’re only being written about by a professional critic every few years, but a very big risk when you’re being reviewed by your customers on an almost daily basis and those reviews will drastically affect your bottom line.

Even just getting a good score isn’t enough — you need lots of them. “I’m looking for volume,” says Howe, describing how he uses Yelp to find things in the city. “I need at least 35 or 40 reviews. If there are 40 reviews and 4.85 stars, I know that’s going to be good” — a tactic that ends any promise of finding an undiscovered gem.

“And to actually choose … and then to stop looking is to limit your experience of the Internet,” writes cultural critic Lee Siegel in his Internet-skeptical book, “Against the Machine.” Siegel’s talking about the experience of buying watches online in that excerpt. But you could replace the word “Internet” with the word “city,” and the theory would hold up. Today, even a word-of-mouth recommendation can feel insufficient. We want to cross-check it with others’ opinions online, and search for additional options that we might like better. Life in the city is (somewhat embarrassingly) often about consumer choices. Crowdsourcing is supposed to make those choices more manageable, but somehow it also makes them feel relentless.

Too many choices. That’s the first-world urban problem we face. Yelp was created to deal with this problem. And like so much technology, there’s nothing wrong with it. Until we become reliant on it. Then, like Google Maps, we feel lost without it. And suddenly, making the trip to the far-flung neighborhood to check out that Turkish bath or Congolese cafe, having only a vague sense of what it will look and feel like, knowing only what we heard from a friend or read in a blurb in the local alt-weekly — this type of experience becomes a little too unnerving, something we’d better first check out online, just to see.