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Blue City Blues

David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik

38 episodes

1 week ago

The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different soci...

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The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different soci...

Show more...

Episodes (20/38)

Blue City Blues

Neil Gong on How Class Dynamics Shape Our Approach to the Mentally Ill on the Streets of Los Angeles

The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different soci...

1 week ago

59 minutes

Blue City Blues

Best of: Sherman Alexie Talks “Monsters,” “Colonizers” and the Urban Left's “Minor League Maoism”

We invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities. Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the ...

2 weeks ago

54 minutes

Blue City Blues

Kelsey Piper on the Shameful Truth that Mississippi Beats Blue Cities on Educational Equity

This week we take a close look at the damning decline in the quality of public education in progressive cities where, as Sandeep puts it, the "glaring contradiction" between a fixation on equity and shockingly inequitable results "drives me bat shit crazy." Our guest, Kelsey Piper, formerly at Vox and now a staff writer with The Argument, doesn't pull any punches either, arguing that "illiteracy is a policy choice.” In a series of cogently argued recent pieces (links below), Piper has p...

3 weeks ago

58 minutes

Blue City Blues

Emily Hoeven on Whether San Francisco's Backlash Mayor Is Making Things Better

In November 2024, fed up San Francisco voters elected an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune the city's 46th mayor. Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and a newcomer to City Hall politics who largely self-funded his own outsider campaign, ran on the promise of fundamental change, reversing course away from the permissive - and often performative - radical chic progressivism of the peak woke era. For a city reeling from spiking crime and street disorder, he won by offering a return to what he call...

1 month ago

46 minutes

Blue City Blues

How a Broken Foster Care System Fuels Crime, Homelessness and the Addiction Crisis in Blue Cities

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Author Claudia Rowe exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster care system is a "major gear" driving mass homelessness and the incarceration crisis in American cities. She shares shocking statistics—including studies that found up to 59% of youth who grew up in foster care have been incarcerated by age 26—and outlines how the system's structural failures lead to such devastating outcomes...

1 month ago

1 hour 12 minutes

Blue City Blues

What Makes a Great City?

This Thanksgiving week, Blue City Blues sits down with former traffic engineer and urban planner Ray Delahanty, better known as “CityNerd” on YouTube. We get into the essential question: “what makes a great city?” Ray also shares his insights on the concept of "affordable urbanism" and gives us his honest assessment of one of modern transportation's most divisive projects, the "Vegas Loop." Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gm...

1 month ago

30 minutes

Blue City Blues

Danny Westneat on Why Seattle Can’t Seem to Solve Its Problems

One of Seattle's most insightful chroniclers, longtime Seattle Times metro columnist Danny Westneat, joins us in this episode to discuss the blues that have settled on one of the country's bluest (and most educated and affluent) cities. For more than a decade now, Westneat wrote in a recent post-election column, both Seattle city hall and the voting public have seemed torn between the agendas of the city's two competing political camps: on any objective scale Seattle's left and center left ma...

2 months ago

58 minutes

Blue City Blues

Nick Gillespie on Whether Socialism Is the Future of Blue Cities

In New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani routed scandal-tainted Andrew Cuomo, completing his at first unthinkable, then inevitable rise to become the next mayor of New York City. His David vs. Goliath triumph has vaulted Mamdani from backbench obscurity to political superstardom; progressives around the country are swooning, seeing his success as proof that the unapologetic embrace of bold redistributive policies and vastly expanded government interventions into the marketplace r...

2 months ago

1 hour 3 minutes

Blue City Blues

Can Blue Urban America Find Common Ground with Trump on Homelessness?

On July 24, Donald Trump declared war on the homeless. At least that was how his Executive Order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” was received in blue urban America by many homeless advocates and Democratic elected officials. With billions in federal funding at risk of being pulled from Housing First providers, who operate on the assumption that helping homeless people address their underlying issues like addiction or mental illness is most likely to be successfu...

2 months ago

59 minutes

Blue City Blues

Blue City Crime: What Both Sides Get Wrong According to Criminologist David Kennedy

Like almost everything else in present day America, crime in blue cities has become a deeply partisan and polarized issue. While progressives routinely downplay levels of urban crime and call for a singular focus on “root causes” like poverty and racism, Trump, with the enthusiastic backing of the MAGA law-and-order right, grossly exaggerates the dangers of blue cities. He has ludicrously referred to such cities as “war zone(s)” and "hellhole(s)" as, in a dangerously authoritarian escalation,...

2 months ago

53 minutes

Blue City Blues

Hard Hats and Blue Cities: David Paul Kuhn on the Roots of the Working Class Revolt

The modern Democratic Party has a class and culture problem. Blue city leaders struggle to understand their cultural and political disconnect with working-class voters. Why did so many, both within and beyond blue cities, cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who gives tax breaks to the wealthy? When and how did the Democratic Party lose the allegiance of the white (and increasingly of the black and brown) working class? In this episode, former politics reporter and author David Paul Kuhn join...

3 months ago

52 minutes

Blue City Blues

Whitney Tilson on Why Kids in Blue City School Districts Are Being Left Behind

Children in urban public school districts are falling behind. While a handful of lower spending red states – Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and, most notably, Mississippi – have delivered remarkable academic progress over the last 12 years, high spending districts in big cities like New York and Seattle have seen test scores plunge. And it’s not just because of Covid. While over-long school closures in blue jurisdictions did wreak havoc on the educational attainment of children in those ...

3 months ago

53 minutes

Blue City Blues

Has Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Cracked the Code on Progressive Governance in Blue Cities?

Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and Wu has delivered progressive wins (albeit incremental ones) on free transit, fair housing and a municipal Green New Deal. Wu, up for re-election this year, provided an eye-popping demonstration of her&...

3 months ago

40 minutes

Blue City Blues

Did Blue City America Get Covid Wrong, Too?

This week we take a look back at the COVID-19 pandemic with Steven Macedo, a professor of politics at Princeton University and co-author of "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us." The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions navigated the unprecedented crisis. Macedo makes a provocative argument: that cosmopolitan elites, influenced by political divides and class blindness, made some significant mistakes in pandemic response. The conversation h...

3 months ago

54 minutes

Blue City Blues

Nicole Gelinas: Blue City Lessons from NYC’s 100 Years' War Between Cars and Transit

New York Times contributing opinion writer Nicole Gelinas, who writes regularly on New York City issues, is the author of a deeply researched and informative book, Movement: New York’s Long War to take Back Its Streets from the Car. In this fascinating account, Gelinas cogently argues that NYC’s unwinding of its robust early 20th century streetcar system, followed by decades of relentless effort by the city’s political elites to remake the landscape of the dense urban city to be car friendly,...

4 months ago

54 minutes

Blue City Blues

Dispatch from an Urban Drug Market

In this special episode we venture outside our respective basements to explore a sprawling open-air drug market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which resembles similar drug markets in poor, blue city neighborhoods across the US that have been overrun by the urban fentanyl and methamphetamine crises. Whether it's the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or Kensington in Philadelphia, or Skid Row or MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, the well intentioned, largely permissive policies towards hard d...

4 months ago

47 minutes

Blue City Blues

What’s the Matter with Chicago?

The Windy City is not just a great American metropolis – the third largest in the United States – it is a world class city, recognized globally as a center of finance, trade and economic dynamism, and as a cultural and tourist mecca. But there is an emerging counter-narrative about Chicago, a declension story of a great and proud urban powerhouse now fallen to its knees, beset by incompetent governance, fiscal mismanagement, declining quality of life, and shocking levels of crime and vi...

5 months ago

48 minutes

Blue City Blues

Trump Just Defunded Public Media. Did NPR Help Bring This Disaster on Itself?

In the latest installment of Blue City Blues, we welcomed Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to join us in delving into the Trump-led defunding of public broadcasting. Zimmerman, whose incisive public commentaries have been published at the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, is the author of a recent op ed at The Hill in which he called on public broadcasters (and elite universities) to “openly a...

5 months ago

1 hour 1 minute

Blue City Blues

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on What Urbanites Get Wrong about Rural America

The political gulf between educated urban progressives and rural and blue collar Americans has accelerated in recent decades. The consequences for blue cities - and for the Democratic Party - are profound. In this episode, we explore the evolving rural/urban divide with Blue Dog Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington’s State’s 3rd Congressional District in Southwest Washington.. Outside the blue urban enclave of Vancouver, WA, the 3rd CD is largely red-leaning Timbe...

5 months ago

36 minutes

Blue City Blues

Celinda Lake on What NYC’s Political Earthquake Means for the Politics of Blue Cities

Zoran Mamdani's upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary wasn't just a win; it was a seismic event that's shaking the foundations of the Democratic Party. How did a self-described socialist unseat a political giant like Andrew Cuomo? And what does it mean for the future of progressive politics in America's blue cities? This week we spoke with leading Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake, who polled for Joe Biden in 2020 and polls for many progressives includin...

6 months ago

52 minutes