Brownstone Institute
Are 15-Minute Cities Smart?
From the Brownstone Institute
The 15-minute city (FMC) – a neat idea, a new way to control the populace, a trendy blip in the public planning industry, a long-term insidious scheme – all, some, or none of these?
If you have questions about the concept, here is what you are already being called.
As with the gas stove “debate,” any questioning of the latest coolest way to reorganize society is a sign of madness. This haughty reality-shifting attitude somehow pervades the elites despite the deserved devastation of the public’s trust in its institutions in the wake of the pandemic, the response to which involved lies, half-truths, spin, lies, mistakes, lies, the threat of force, lies, the threat of unemployment, the ordered home confinement, the mass destruction of small businesses, and lies.
All of that should be a bit of a tip-off as to the true intentions of the supporters of the idea, but, that being said, let’s discuss the basics.
The idea essentially is to reinvent the neighborhood idea by trying to ensure that pretty much all of the goods and services a person could ever want are readily available nearby. Jobs, schools, doctors, and cultural activities are also meant to be easily accessible. To get to the “15-minute” part, the area would be (based on typical walking speeds) about a square mile or so.
At its heart, the idea harkens back to the village of yore – a place of belonging, simplicity, of knowing your neighbors, of creating a community you can count on in a pinch.
While this may be a key selling point, it cannot be forgotten that for literally hundreds of years people have been purposefully leaving villages to try their hand in the city with its chaos and opportunity, its risks and rewards, and, most importantly, its broadening experiences.
Cities of course already have neighborhoods that are somewhat similar to FMCs, but they tend to be organized around an activity – a meat-packing district, the financial hub, etc. – an ethnicity – Little Italy, Chinatown (sorry, Seattle, I mean the International District,) a socio-economic cluster – the westside of Los Angeles versus the eastside of Los Angeles, or even an entertainment activity – Broadway in New York or edgy, anything goes red-light districts like the Tenderloin in San Francisco (NOTE – defining what is happening in the Tenderloin now as entertaining is admittedly a stretch, but before the current stumbling nightmare it was for decades a “rough trade” pleasure zone and one supposes that’s a form of entertainment.)
The idea of the FMC, however, is to eventually smooth these differences and create zone after zone of similarly homogeneous neighborhoods throughout a city. As equity is one of the hallmarks of the concept, it might not be terribly fair to have one FMC be notably richer than another, notably different from any of the others.
How to implement an FMC – short of the bulldozer, anyway – is rather complicated because people tend to already be in places targeted for such modification. Zoning, government incentives, planning regulations, public enticements, or simple declarations by fiat have all been proposed to mold existing neighborhoods into FMCs.
In other words, even proponents know that they will not occur organically and need significant government intervention to even get off the ground (another tip-off as to the true intent behind the push.)
One of the most important aspects is the elimination of the necessity of a personal vehicle. If practically everything a person needs is so close – literally within walking distance – and if everything else that doesn’t fit – stadium, airport, university, massive hospital and/or museum, etc. – can be easily traveled to by public transit, then do you need an evil, polluting, selfish mobility device? When FMC ideas are rolled out, they do tend to have rather limited parking options – on purpose – as another “benefit” of them is that they are supposed to be better for the environment, more sustainable, more equitable, more whatever woke/equitarian buzzword of the moment you want to use.
Now on to smart cities.
This is a bit simpler because pretty much everything about FMCs applies except with the added bonus that your neighborhood is watching you at all times. Using cell phone tracking, defined shopping habits, health information from your smartwatch, your social media presence, your credit report, you familial status, your hobbies, your habits, and your opinions, a smart city will figure out everything you need even before you know you need it and encourage you to be an overall better person as it defines better people.
In other words, the definition of a needs-taken-care-of, stay-in-your-house-and-shut-up-or-we-will-take-that-away-from-you Nerfified mere existence. You know, hell with ice water.
Not every FMC is a smart city, but most smart cities must be (or at least start out as) an FMC.
Smart cities are currently so controversial that even Toronto – central driver of the Great Woke North – abandoned the idea .
But the smart city has its supporters and projects are underway building them from the ground up, bypassing the need to shoehorn the debilitatingly intrusive, soul-crushing tech into places that already exist. Here’s a somewhat jaundiced look at the giant mirrored line city Neom – – a bit more, um, hopeful look at other smart city projects underway. (NOTE – I chose videos for those links because they really have to be seen to be believed.)
And one of the advantages – or hallucinatory disturbing problem – of the FMC is that it is extremely convertible – once established – into a smart city.
It should be noted that Vehicle Miles Traveled taxes, low-emission zones, and other anti-individual freedom measures can also be used to set the stage for an incremental move to FMC and/or smart cities. That could be why protests broke out – and why foundations and governments and much of the media is calling the protesters right-wing conspiracy theorists and just plain wrong and that such schemes are not at all part of any attempt to modify personal behavior though oppressive regulation (another tip-off.)
In Oxford, England, protestors were told neighborhood travel cordons had nothing to do with the completely separate, no way at all tied together, FMC studies proposed at the same time; especially post-pandemic, with the lies and cudgels and censorship and confinements and lies – people are rightfully calling “bullshit” on such facile pronouncements, hence the tension.
But how would a big, diverse in the true sense of the word, city like Los Angeles, for example, be FMCed?
Going a step further than Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) – an existing government-funded trend to get people to live near bus lines and train stations – LA activists are pushing things like the VMT pilot program, dropping parking requirements, and incentivizing smaller, presumably rental (you will own nothing and like it) dwelling units to shoehorn the idea into existing neighborhoods.
Here are just a few of the benefits of FMC (lite?) being touted by the Livable Communities Initiative, a near-parody of an LA do-goodery factory:
- Benefit nearby homeowners and residents with a beautiful walkable street, shops and cafes, and access to transit and bike lanes
- Give every Angeleno the option of an affordable home without the $8,000/year cost and burden of a car
- Create attainable homeownership opportunities that can help close the racial wealth gap
- Reverse-engineer displacement by building in high-opportunity neighborhoods that have not built enough housing
- Address climate change by building car-light infill homes, 48 miles of transit-connected bike lanes, new bus lanes, and 48 miles of new tree canopy
“Building equitably and building near job centers reduces traffic,” LCI chief Jenny Hontz told the LAist. “So it makes life better for everyone and it helps the climate, too.” (Here’s the entire story; the comparison pics are worth the click )
In case you were wondering, the LCI partners with a bevy of the progressive foundational/movement suspects, from Extinction Rebellion to 15 Minute City to Young Entertainment Activists (again, another tip-off.)
Neighborhood and even city-specific plans are going to be rolled out by the LCI soon, though they already have “standard plans” that include such statements as “…human-scale, beautiful architecture above neighborhood serving retail. Imagine any of our historic main streets and villages – Westwood Village, Main Street and Abbot Kinney, Market St in Inglewood, NoHo Arts District, San Fernando Blvd in Burbank – with housing above the stores – creating small, affordable apartments for seniors, Gen Zers, people who don’t drive, and workers who are forced to spend 30% of their income on a car.”
LCI – as do basic FMC and smart city ideas – emphasize an imposed aesthetic as well – “But what if instead we could create streets with beautiful architecture – nourishing to the residents and the surrounding area? What if we intentionally designed our city? Cities all over the world pre-determine their architecture – it makes cities beautiful (Paris, Boston, Santa Barbara)”
LCI concepts, smart cities, and FMCs are oppressively top-down systems that shift power of one’s community to the bureaucrat class and intentionally and egregiously ignore same basic facts about how humans act and how a beautiful city like Boston – very very very much not by design – got to be that way.
The FMC movement goes beyond mere planning and architectural niceties. Even if they are not morphed into “smart cities,” certain other governmental agencies and societal elites have multiple reasons. FMCs would make it easier to establish specific community norms, norms that could be at odds with American notions like freedom of movement and speech.
FMCs could also play right into the hands of the forces that brought the world to its knees with their pandemic response. FMCs are not just looked at as making protocols like lockdowns and isolation far easier, they could even be sold as ways to “prevent” future pandemics.
In a 2020 Cell magazine article, Dr. Anthony Fauci – you remember him – cast at least partial blame for the most recent and past pandemics on how we as humans choose to live.
“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues,” Fauci and co-author David Mores wrote. “Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction?”
Another anathema of both smart cities and FMCs is that they need the resident to be the resource that drives them, that their consumer habits be mined and processed in order to make their existence feasible. They do not account for variety of thought or even the possibility of taking advantage of a unique local geographical or industrial or cultural benefit – they are mere consumption machines in which the human is the cog.
While natural neighborhoods can be wonderful supportive safe places, unnatural neighborhoods will exacerbate the problems that do occur in more tightly knit communities. Self-surveillance (if not actual real surveillance) and a sense of trepidation about leaving the comfortable confines can lead to a feeling of isolation from the larger world. In an FMC, that isolation could be seen as being not organic but ordered from on high, creating a mental box that can dwarf intellectual and emotional growth – in other words, a captive personality.
As we have seen from the Twitter Files and so many other recent (and not so recent) revelations about the Censorship-Industrial complex, the real danger of smart cities and FMCs is the potential for the elimination of freedoms, of options, of differences.
That’s not just censorship of thought, it’s censorship of life.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
Author
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