Lots of people are puzzled about how Joel Kotkins can get away without "doing the math."

Living as I do in one of the bluest cities in America -- Seattle -- I wonder what Joel Kotkins means when he  writes :

Cities must return to a progressive focus on fixing their real problems--that is, the problems of the majority of the people who live there--not serving the interests of artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons.

Who can disagree with the basic point? i.e. fixing "real problems."

But who can support the underlying assumption -- that cities don't try to do just that, albeit imperfectly, fumblingly and with many idiocies, as is so with any political process? Can Joel offer any support for the idea that cities, any of them, are in fact focused on serving "artists, hipsters, and their wealthy patrons." It's just too bizarre a claim for me to take seriously without some serious supporting financial analysis of city budgets.

One specific which might be offered is the squandering of money on Rem Koolhaas' flashy Seattle Central Library design (assuming he was able to squeeaze a starchitecture premium out of the Library Board). Yes the design fee could have been better spent. But building a new library was totally consistent with Kotkins' urging, at least for those of us who think that public libraries are an essential, core city service which serves, if any group, the middle class family.

If you read Kotkins' article even remotely carefully, the first thing to notice is that there are no facts in it -- some vague anecdotes, to be sure -- but no real analysis based on "doing the math." The article seems to me to be a somewhat misleading one. Take his long paragraph on using gays to attract development. How does it start? "Spokane and Oakland, for instance, have considered projects to lure gays." They "considered" but presumably they didn't follow through or else Kotkins would have seized on it as a foolish action (and I would agree). But Oakland and Spokane didn't do anything - they merely considered. The rest of his paragraph, however, is built on something which didn't happen. I call that shabby.

Matt Yglesias is also puzzled.:

I continue to be puzzled by the implication that the real problems here have something to do with the massive political clout of "hipsters" who, in my experience, are all for better transportation infrastructure and tend not to be the ones pushing massive public subsidies for sports arenas.