An Announcement

I'm writing a book!

Author

Ned Resnikoff
December 11, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

As you can probably tell, my plan to keep up a regular writing cadence through the early days of childrearing was over-ambitious. But I have some timely news to provide, and just barely enough brain cells remaining to provide it.

So here it is:

California YIMBY policy director and urban policy journalist Ned Resnikoff's CITIES FOR THE PEOPLE, tackling the dysfunctional housing, transportation, and urban governance systems ailing American cities, arguing that if we are going to secure democracy for future generations, we need to do everything we can to ensure that our great cities flourish, to Heather Boyer at Island Press, for publication in fall 2026, by Diana Finch at Diana Finch Literary Agency (world).

My goal with this book is to provide a pithy, single-volume overview of the 21st century American urban crisis, its causes and pathologies, and the urban abundance agenda’s proposed remedies. There are, of course, already many terrific books that approach this topic from one angle or another. But I haven’t encountered one book that integrates all the different threads into a single concentrated package. My hope is that Cities for the People (very much a working title) can serve as an entry point into not just YIMBYism but the interrelated issues of urban transportation and governance.

But while I want to make this book accessible to newbies, there will be plenty in there for the urbanism real heads. In particular, I think they’ll be interested in the sections of the book about state capacity and the structure of urban governance. It’s something that I know greatly concerns a lot of urban abundance types, but it hasn’t quite gotten the attention in the existing literature that it deserves. I’m hoping Cities for the People will help to push that conversation forward.

About the title: it comes in part from the social democratic tradition that has so profoundly influenced my thinking about politics and the proper role of government. By referring to “cities for the people,” I’m paraphrasing the term folkhemmet, or “the people’s home,” coined in 1928 by Per Albin Hansson, then the leader of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, Per Albin Hansson. This word, which implies that the state has an obligation to meet the people’s needs for shelter, sustenance, and community, “would eventually become the great unifying metaphor of Swedish Social Democracy,” according to the historian Francis Sejersted.

I want our cities to become a version of the people’s home: a place where everyone has their basic needs met and can live together in mutual recognition of their equal worth and dignity. Cities for the People is going to be a diagnosis of why they fall short of that goal and a prescription for how we can get closer.

I’ll probably begin proper work on the book in a couple of months, once it becomes possible do things besides childcare. Stay tuned for future updates.