Most everyone I spoke to for this story wants to do away with the community input process for minor projects like small developments and bike lanes (although a few do not). Instead, most think there should be extensive and comprehensive community outreach programs to formulate citywide plans that actually reflect the reality on the ground so we don’t need permits to build basically anything that triggers community feedback. For transportation, even people who agree the current system doesn’t work are often unsure of how to fix it in a way that doesn’t itself require more time, money, and investment in community outreach, resources most transit agencies do not have. At the very least, though, most transit agencies need to transition to a rolling feedback model through digital methods—and prove they’re listening by actually changing things and letting people know they’ve done so—rather than relying on scheduled, structured, federally mandated meetings with one-way feedback.

Until any or all of this happens, we will continue muddling through using the current, failed system, with profound consequences for the affordability of and quality of life in our cities. We cannot build the things we need, like housing and transportation options, for many reasons, including soaring costs attributable to political and bureaucratic failures. People do not trust our decaying public institutions to do anything competently, so we underfund them and create obstacles to productivity which make them function even worse. A key problem at the center of this death spiral is the ceaseless and ever-present need for community feedback on most projects big or small. 

Along the way to this prescient analysis, Davis developed a string of astonishing predictions. He observed the “neo-liberal succession reshaping the [Democratic] party’s power structure, marginalizing labor and minorities” (a phenomenon that many even nominally on the left wouldn’t acknowledge for thirty years); he predicted the birth of a new “conservative populism” and “new economic nationalism,” bringing about the “militarization of the border” and threatening a “potential metamorphosis into a home-grown fascism”; he foresaw that the “middle strata and nouveau riches will have to confront . . . a closing frontier of income and status mobility”; he anticipated “an American West Bank of terrorized illegal laborers . . . a poor Latin American society thrust into the domestic economy”; and perhaps most startlingly, he projected offhand a new Latin American socialism “on a Bolivarian scale.” Such insight was a result of Davis’s unique brilliance, but it was more than that. It was a method.

The least interesting thing you can say about any dramatic work — and it’s a reading that’s ubiquitous in contemporary criticism — is that it’s “about power.” Because of course this is true: the way a scene is blocked (or, for that matter, edited) is meant to communicate these shifting advantages; how characters are dressed, cast, even named hints at hierarchies that will be upset or reinforced. It’s like saying a script is about “the human condition,” or “trauma.” King Lear is about power, but so is, say, Cruella. While TÁR notes with some derision the limits of its characters’ influence on anyone but each other, it also underlines their obsession with the social and professional strata they occupy. This is not its topic, but it is its architecture.

If that narrative sounds familiar, it’s because it’s become the standard bildungsroman in journalism covering business, tech, and, in some ways, sports. It’s how many journalists talked about Mark Zuckerberg and Paul DePodesta, the Harvard graduate who convinced Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s to build his team around analytics and “Moneyball.” In these stories, some young person who went to Harvard is always outsmarting the dumb establishment, the members of which all went to Harvard, too. The addendum is that the world will somehow be a better place if they win.