{"id":99,"date":"2026-06-18T15:07:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T15:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbanatlasmedia.com\/?p=99"},"modified":"2026-06-18T15:07:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T15:07:40","slug":"talking-headways-podcast-so-what-is-urban-disorder-in-a-post-covid-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbanatlasmedia.com\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"Talking Headways Podcast: So What Is &#8216;Urban Disorder&#8217; In A Post-Covid U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>This week we\u2019re joined by Ryan Puzycki, who writes at\u00a0The City of Yes, for a discussion on \u201curban disorder,\u201d how it manifests, and how to address the upstream impacts instead of when it\u2019s too late. We also talk about enforcing norms and the impacts of media on our perceptions.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/urbanatlasmedia.com\/?p=97\">Driverless Cars Could Save Tens of Thousands of Lives. But We Must Treat Them Like Aviation \u2014 Not Like Cars<\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<iframe allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" loading=\"lazy\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-forms\" src=\"https:\/\/play.libsyn.com\/embed\/episode\/id\/41686525\/height\/192\/theme\/modern\/size\/large\/thumbnail\/yes\/custom-color\/3c849c\/time-start\/00:00:00\/hide-playlist\/yes\/download\/yes\/font-color\/FFFFFF\" style=\"height: 192px; width: 100%;\" title=\"Embedded content\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n<p>And, as always, let\u2019s review all the ways you can enjoy this spirited content:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Or check out the lightly edited excerpt below the player.<\/li>\n<li>Click\u00a0here\u00a0for a full transcript, albeit with some AI typos.<\/li>\n<li>Click the player below to listen.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Partial edited section:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jeff Wood:<\/strong>\u00a0You recently wrote a piece about urban disorder, and this is a topic that I\u2019ve long avoided actually talking about \u2014 especially here in San Francisco \u2014 because I feel you can really put your foot in your mouth pretty easily.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ryan Puzycki:<\/strong>\u00a0If you\u2019ve been living in any of the quote-unquote \u201chigh opportunity cities\u201d in the past 10, 20 years, you can\u2019t but help think about disorder because it is visible in many, many places. I\u2019d say certainly since the pandemic, that\u2019s become more true. You know, in that piece and others I\u2019ve written about, I\u2019ve talked about living in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District, just pre-pandemic and then while the pandemic was happening and, you know, homelessness, people shooting up was just part of life.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019d be taking the dog for a walk, and she\u2019d be sniffing something, then we\u2019d realize it\u2019s a used needle and immediately trying to tug her back.<\/p>\n<p>I was crossing the intersection at Van Ness and Market at one point, and there was just, like, a pile of hundreds of needles on the street, and I was like, \u201cDid these fall off of the back of a truck or something?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Like, what was this? So, you know, it was always kind of there. I kind of was like, \u201cThis is what it is to live here in San Francisco.\u201d But I did have an experience living in Manhattan for 10 years before that, and Manhattan didn\u2019t have that. Like, you know, there was certainly a lot of homeless people in New York, but New York had homeless shelters.<\/p>\n<p>You didn\u2019t really see the flagrant drug abuse and things like that. So I at least had an inkling that there\u2019s another way to go about this, not necessarily that New York has solved its problems or maintained the level that it had achieved. But certainly compared to San Francisco, at least there was a difference.<\/p>\n<p>And then I came to Austin, and Austin is somewhere in between those two. We do have a lot of visible homelessness. We do have a large total homeless population. You don\u2019t see the drugs so much, but you do see mentally ill people walking into the street.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/urbanatlasmedia.com\/?p=95\">Wednesday\u2019s Headlines Are Truckin\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I have to pass through the east side of downtown Austin, which is where we have our homeless shelter for men as well as one for women, but you see people who don\u2019t really have anywhere to go during the day or anything to do. Some of them seem like they need treatment or help, but they\u2019re standing in the middle of traffic or wandering into traffic, and they don\u2019t seem to be aware that they\u2019re there. And that\u2019s dangerous not only for those people but also for the people who are driving when somebody erratic enters the right of way. <\/p>\n<p>And so, it\u2019s a long way of saying that I think if we live in cities like this, we all kind of live with it in a certain way, and I just had a sense that maybe that we shouldn\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n<p>Now, why I wrote this particular piece was because I often see from certain center-right people or conservative-identifying people this idea, \u201cOh, you know, disorder is a function of American individualism.\u201d And, you know, that just didn\u2019t sit quite right with me. And so what I was trying to explore in this piece is this perceived tension between individualism or liberalism, or whatever you want call it, and public order.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jeff Wood:<\/strong>\u00a0[Substack writer] Chris Arnade\u2019s perspective is basically we\u2019re too individualistic as a society, and Addison Del Mastro\u2019s was that we believe too much in an American-specific folk libertarianism, or you-can\u2019t-tell-me-what-to-do-ism kind of feeling. And I\u2019m wondering what you took from those arguments, and specifically about this kind of idea of individualism, and specifically I\u2019m interested in the folk libertarianism aspect of it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ryan Puzycki:<\/strong>\u00a0So one of the things I wanted to do in that piece was to distinguish between various ways that we throw around this word individualism. I think we misuse, or abuse, the phrase sometimes to mean a whole bunch of things. So I was trying to separate political individualism, which I think is kind of the system of American rights, constitutionalism, institutional governance, from this idea of just basic individuality or, you know, flying your freak flag or whatever.<\/p>\n<p>These things do interact. They are related, but they are not quite the same thing. And I think what Addison was doing in this idea of folk libertarianism was identifying this kind of like \u201cmind your own business, don\u2019t tell me what to do,\u201d thing that definitely exists in the American spirit, I guess, in American culture.<\/p>\n<p>But it is not quite the same thing, or not necessitated by the underlying political philosophy aspect of it. So I was pushing back, I guess, on saying that that guarantees or defines this kind of realm of disorder that we inhabit.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/urbanatlasmedia.com\/?p=93\">Opinion: AVs Can Do More Than Just Serve People Who Can Afford A Cab<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Open air drug bazaars in San Francisco are one thing that we can agree need to be fixed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcast"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Talking Headways Podcast: So What Is &#8216;Urban Disorder&#8217; In A Post-Covid U.S. - Urban Atlas Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/urbanatlasmedia.com\/?p=99\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Talking Headways Podcast: So What Is &#8216;Urban Disorder&#8217; 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