Blue City Blues

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....

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Drawing on the life stories of several foster children, author Claudia Rowe, a long-time journalist and now an editorial writer at the Seattle Times, exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster care system is a "major gear" driving mass homelessness and the incarceration crisis in Ame...

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 &...

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...

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...

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 ad...

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...

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 a...

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 closur...

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 mun...

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 " (Princeton University Press). The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions in government, academia, science and the media navigated the unprecedented crisis.  Ma...

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...

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...

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 gove...

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...

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...

Zohran 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 Democ...

In this episode of Blue City Blues, 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 Literat...

In 2020, when the power of social media – Twitter, in particular – to police the boundaries of acceptable thought in blue cities was at its cultural zenith, journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal launched their boundary-shattering podcast, Blocked and Reported . BARPod, as it’s referred to by its growing legions of fans (us included), is focused on “scour[ing] the internet for its craziest, sil...

In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted.  Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based thinkers, including Misha David Chellam, the co-f...

Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them with shelter and mental health and addiction servi...

Seattle venture capitalist and Democratic megadonor Nick Hanauer doesn’t fit neatly into pre-fab boxes. He’s a wildly successful tech investor who denounces tech moguls as “narcissistic sociopaths.” He’s a billionaire “class-traitor” (his term) who’s been sounding the alarm about what he sees as the dangerous obliviousness of the ultrarich to the resentment their class privilege engenders. He’s a...

In a quest to reinvent municipal governance, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is breaking ranks and breaking a few eggs. A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, he tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2023.  Along the way, Mahan has been more than...

This week, we take a close look at Trump's tariff-happy trade war and its impact on blue cities with New York Times global economics correspondent Peter Goodman , the author of Davos Man and How the World Ran Out of Everything . We explore the political tightrope blue city and Democratic Party leaders are walking on trade policy. Are they anti-tariffs or just anti-Trump’s tariffs? And we ask...

Donald Trump is in full retribution mode and the anxiety – and anger – in blue cities is spiking. Sex advice columnist and friend o’ the podcast Dan Savage joins us to talk about how blue cities should (and should not) resist an aggressively authoritarian administration that sees them as the enemy. We go deep on the April 5th protests, dissecting everything from the signs ("We’re all the couc...