PATRICK SISSON

Bloomberg CityLab

January 2021

Robert Futrell has spent decades studying right-wing militia movements. A professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he watched as a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, killing a Capitol Police officer. Four others also died in the attack, which was part of an ongoing effort by President Donald Trump to subvert the presidential election. Similar demonstrations, some violent, also erupted at several state capitals, including Salem, Oregon. 

The insurrection was a shocking but not unexpected illustration of the threat posed by militias and white supremacist terror — a danger he believes the nation is belatedly coming to terms with.

“My sense is we’re not ready,” he says. “We’re starting to take it seriously, but we’re really behind.”

On Monday, an FBI bulletin warned of the possibility of further attacks aimed at the literal and symbolic centers of representative government: “Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols” before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20, starting Jan. 16, and again at the U.S. Capitol beginning Jan. 17. In a briefing on Monday evening with federal lawmakers, Capitol Police also outlined three potential new attacks planned for D.C. during the inauguration period. (D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has warned Americans to stay away from the nation’s capital earlier that day.)

The threats might not materialize, but they should be taken seriously, Futrell says. “Most experts expect violence,” he says. “Street-level violence, maybe bombings. There are threats all the time, and it’s hard to pinpoint who spins out of these networks and commits the kind of violence we fear.” 

By the end of this week, three-fourths of all state legislatures will have opened their new sessions, as well as their doors to the public. What can be done to protect these halls of democracy, the workings of government, those who work inside, and the cities whose identity and economy depend on functioning state government? 

“That is the challenge, making sure the government can function and perform its duties and function in a free society, while protecting the people charged with doing that,” says Brian Lynch, a former FBI SWAT team member and executive director of safety and security at RANE, a security consulting and risk management firm. “What’s the priority, open and functioning government at the expense of the safety of those people doing the government’s business? That’s the issue, and there’s going to be plenty of ongoing conversation.”

A series of right-wing attacks on statehouses in 2020 helped set the stage for the violence in D.C. on Wednesday. On Jan. 20, 2020, participants in a pro-gun rally stormed Virginia’s seat of government in Richmond, while in April the Michigan State Capitol was overrun with armed demonstrators who objected to the state’s Covid-19 measures; 13 people were arrested in October after a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. (Some Michigan lawmakers now wear bulletproof vests into the legislative chambers.) Other attacks and armed protests have taken place in Georgia, under the eagle-topped dome of Idaho’s capitol building in Boise (maskless protesters barged into legislative chambers in August) and in Oregon (in December, a Republican state representative was later found to have let protesters into the capital through a side door). Some participants in violence in Salem went on to the Jan. 6 event in D.C. 

Statehouse threats have continued after the failed attack on the U.S. Capitol: In Frankfort, Kentucky, local militia held a rally in front of the state capitol on Saturday, with some participants brandishing zip ties. (Governor Andy Beshear tweeted: “We will not be bullied. America is counting on the real patriots. Those who condemn hate and terror when they see it.”) 

In response, a wave of new security measures is expected in and around the U.S. Capitol, which has already seen extensive limits to public access via bollards and fencing since the 9/11 attacks. But many U.S. statehouses are comparatively lightly defended, and the buildings themselves — sites of visitor tours and school field trips, centers of legislative work and representative democracy — could be dramatically altered by this past weeks’ events. State capitol buildings, built to embody the values of representative democracy, are the nation’s “unique contribution to monumental architecture,” wrote historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock in Temples of Democracy: State Capitols of the U.S.A. Most are grand, domed facilities that are designed to be open; Hawaii’s modernist statehouse even boasts an open-air rotunda, for example, that gives the public a view of politics in action. 

Balancing security, historic character and the functioning of an open government — with public space for protected First Amendment protests — is “very complicated,” says security expert Paul Joyal, a former Capitol Police officer and director of security for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who is now the director of homeland security practices at National Strategies, a consulting firm focused on local government, including safety and security.

The threats to state capitols in and around the inauguration should be taken seriously, says Joyal: He believes there’s a “broader conspiracy” at work, and right-wing extremists were waiting for a successful attack on the Capitol to launch other attacks across the country. 

Other experts on right-wing extremism are similarly alarmed. “This threat will absolutely not go away after Biden’s inauguration,” says Hampton Stall, the founder of MilitiaWatch, which tracks the right-wing militia movement. “I’m not sure what future mobilization towards the national capital may look like in the future, especially from militia organizations I’m most familiar with, but state capitals have been a target for their mobilizations for years now.”

In the past, militia groups have targeted state buildings because “they believe that the government as it stands isn’t a government of the people, it’s one of the elites plotting to control the population,” says Futrell. “Militias don’t see the government as it exists today as a defensible one.” 

Responses to the rising threat have been varied. In Madison, crews are boarding up ground floor windows of the Wisconsin Statehouse. Washington Governor Jay Inslee activated hundreds of National Guard Troops to help keep order at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia. South Dakota has set up new security screenings in Pierre, even creating a TSA PreCheck-style Fast Pass for frequent visitors. Michigan legislators banned open carry of firearms inside the capitol in Lansing on Monday, even as Texas legislators discussed bringing more guns into session in Austin. “Pretty sure more #txlege members are going to start carrying inside the Capitol,” Republican state representative Briscoe Cain tweeted. 

Joyal has four immediate recommendations for state leaders and law enforcement seeking to shore up defenses in the coming days. First, he proposes expanding the investigative capabilities of the FBI and state police agencies.Giving law enforcement the power to categorize right-wing militia groups as domestic terrorist organizations, for example, would allow the FBI the full use of all its investigative tools to surveil such groups for advance knowledge of any impending attack. 

Second, and perhaps most important for state capitols, ban weapons from statehouses and any government buildings or facilities. “If men in combat fatigues with beards and regalia show up, people are intimidated, and so is law enforcement,” he says. “Half the time, they have better weapons than the cops do. This type of intimidation must be deterred and prevented. The more guns on public display the more dangerous the situation.” If there’s pushback from pro-gun legislators, Joyal suggests citing former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who, in 1967, signed legislation banning guns at the statehouse after Black Panther activists brought weapons with them as part of “police patrols.” 

Third, he says statehouses and other state offices need to make sure all computer systems can be shut down remotely, to prevent bad actors from hacking into state systems or planting malware. 

In the longer term, state capitals can look into structural security measures, such as reinforced doors and hallway barriers that can be closed if mobs storm the building, creating safe rooms to protect officials and legislators who may be trapped inside, and pre-positioning portable fencing that can be swiftly put in place to impede attacks or encroachment. 

But turning statehouses into impregnable fortresses surrounded by armed troops could bring its own risks, Futrell says. “The more the state arms up against their claims of violence, the more it feeds into the conspiracies that they hold.” 

When asked about new measures being taken in response to the FBI bulletin, law enforcement agencies in Georgia and Michigan refrained from providing many details. “We do not share our operational plans,” a Georgia Department of Public Safety spokesperson told Bloomberg CityLab. “However, we are prepared to respond in the appropriate manner as we have always done in the past. Our primary concern will always be the safety of everyone who works at or visits the Capitol grounds.” In response to queries, the Michigan State Police, one of three agencies guarding the capitol, said, “We do not comment on security measures at the Capitol. We do continuously monitor and re-evaluate security protocols at the Capitol.” For example, the Michigan legislative buildings closed in December during the counting of electoral votes, due to a credible threat of violence.

After Jan. 6, Joyal expects such threats will be taken even more seriously.

“It wasn’t a failure of intelligence,” he says of the U.S. Capitol attack. “It was a failure of political will and the leadership of the police to think the unthinkable. We face a very troubled time.”

CityLab

November, 2020

When a tub of popcorn can run nearly $10, renting out an entire theater for $99 seems like a steal. For AMC Theatres, the mega-chain that recently introduced the private screening plan as a Covid-era concession to safety and shrinking audiences, it’s more a desperate ploy to keep the lights on as the American megaplexes face the prospect of a final showing. 

Recent coronavirus case spikes, new lockdowns and the expectation of minimal family outings during the holidays has turned a year of bad news for the country’s cinemas into an outlook that’s simply bleak. In early October, when Regal Cinemas shuttered all 500-plus locations nationwide, that darkened more than 7,000 screens alone. The industry has already seen a cinema cull in the U.S., per the National Association of Theatre Owners, with the number of movie theaters shrinking from around 7,200 in 1996 to roughly 5,500 as of late 2019. But that may just be a preview. John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, told Varietythat unless Congress passes the Save Our Stages Act, a bipartisan push to support concert venues and theaters that have seen their businesses decimated by Covid, “probably around 70% of our mid- and small-sized memberswill either confront bankruptcy reorganization or the likelihood of going out of business entirely by sometime in January.”

In past economic downturns, theater owners tried stunts like “dish nights” —  giving away different pieces of a table setting, such as a saucer or salad plate, to lure Great Depression patrons. That probably won’t work this time, leaving a lot of moviegoing real estate in need of a reboot. 

There’s a long tradition of adaptive reuse when it comes to the older generation of neighborhood moviehouses, many of which died off in the second half of the 20th century as new suburban multiplexes appeared. These smaller facilities often see a second life as community theaters, churches, gyms and bookstores. The electric vehicle startup Rivian recently announced plans to turn a 1930s-era Laguna Beach theater into an elegant showroom. 

But modern multiplexes can be poor candidates for adaptive reuse, theater owners and real-estate experts told the Wall Street Journal, because of their sloped floors and subdivided spaces. That’s especially true at a time when the malls they are often attached to are struggling reinvent themselves. Closed theaters may fare better on the real estate market as available land in need of a demolition; a shuttered Regal Theater in North Charleston, South Carolina, for example, was simply demolished, with plans to build an apartment building in its place. 

Some developers do see sequel potential in modern movie theaters, though. Last year, PMB, a development firm focused on the medical field, turned a 1980’s multiplex in Goodyear, Arizona, into a collection of medical offices. And Walter Crutchfield, co-founder and partner of the Arizona development firm Vintage Partners, turned a Flagstaff movie theater into perhaps the country’s most creative department of motor vehicles. 

The nine-screen theater, part of the Harkins chain, reopened in 2016 as a 72,000-square foot, two-story Arizona Department of Transportation headquarters and Motor Vehicles Division office. Reuse presented multiple challenges, such as cutting windows into the concrete walls to provide more natural light. But the end result, which split the high-ceilinged theaters into two stories with a mezzanine floor, speaks for itself, Crutchfield says.

“It was a great project because the poured-in-place cement building was designed for public access, so it gives you a pretty cool canvas,” he says. “There’s a huge four-story atrium. Now 200 workers, who used to be spread over six locations, can collaborate together in a brand-new office.” They even kept some neon lighting fixtures and the lobby popcorn machines for office snacks. 

He says that contemporary movie theaters offer plenty of valid reuse potential — prime locations with lots of empty square footage — if only developers get creative. 

“If you can make $5 million and do something that’s repeatable and easy, or make $1 million doing something that’s incredibly complicated, essentially building a battleship inside of a bottle, how many people are going to sign up for the later?” Crutchfield says.

On the south side of Pittsburgh, another theater-to-office space is in the works, set to open in May or June of 2021. New York City-based SomeraRoad Partners will turn a shuttered theater into a mixed-use development that includes retail, apartments and the aptly titled Box Office workspace.

Ian Ross, a founder and principal at SomeraRoad, says the project started pre-Covid, when they looked at the potential of redeveloping SouthSide Works, a retail site close to the city’s growing tech scene. Ross and his partners looked at options for upgrading the SouthSide Works Cinema, and decided a new movie theater wasn’t “the highest and best use of the land.” 

“We could have invested $5 million in it, but does it make sense investing in what we think is a dying industry?” he says. “I wouldn’t say we called the current demise of movie theaters, but in retrospect, we sort of shut it down before it shut itself down.”

While the theater did get foot traffic on weekends, it doesn’t create the vibrancy possible from alternative uses. Ultimately, the developers settled on office space that will float above the rest of the development, designed by architecture firm HOK, with tech and creative tenants in mind. Ross would like to say this concept could be reused for all closed theaters, but he and his partners don’t think it’s that simple. He sees this example working because it was already a distressed property that was incredibly structurally unique, with a strong three-story steel podium that could be repurposed. 

Shuttered cinemas have similar reuse possibilities as the neighboring big box stores across the mall parking lot, says K.C. Conway, chief economist with the CCIM Institute, a professional accreditation group for commercial real estate executives. Hard hit by the rise of online retail, many of those spaces are finding use as e-commerce warehouses and fulfillment centers. 

The key is big and bulky items, Conway says: As online shopping continues to expand, last-mile delivery of oversized goods has become a tricky, and expensive, problem for retailers, especially home goods stores. Enter empty movie theaters: Their 24-foot-or-more ceiling heights offer more headroom than typical 18-foot-tall department stores, they’re often in dense suburbs near main commercial arteries, and they have upgraded HVAC and electrical systems. Those with flat floors and stadium seating can easily be gutted to make room for storage. Many even have special light industrial zoning, so unlike, say, a purely commercial property such a Best Buy, they don’t require time-consuming rezoning.

Big players in home goods and contracting are already looking at the potential of filling dead-mall megaplexes with pallets of lawnmowers and drywall, says Conway. The price is also right: New construction for last-mile warehouses can run between more than $140 a square foot in expensive markets. Theaters bought for a steal might go for $50 a square foot, and require just $25 a foot to retrofit for logistics, Conway estimates. 

“People have been slow to figure out the full potential of adaptive reuse,” says Conway. “Adaptive reuse helps by adding more affordable housing, reducing blight, gets old stores back on the property tax rolls, and it’s good for the environment. Lots of boxes get checked. Capital just needs to be less afraid, and the government needs to be more flexible.” 

 As the virus resurges and films get streaming-only premieres, the post-vaccine fate of the movie business remains murky; it may be months or years before moviegoers feel like packing into theaters for the latest blockbuster. Amazon was rumored to be looking at scooping up theaters earlier this year. Ross at SomeraRoad doesn’t think the industry is going to disappear, by any means, but it’s due for a correction; he thinks the bottom 20% of theaters — those already struggling — may go bankrupt and get repurposed post-pandemic.

Crutchfield predicts a higher percentage of cinemas will go dark than most other asset classes, such as offices, whether it’s the pandemic or streamers like Netflix that force them to close shop. And he’s confident that creative uses for these spaces will be found. 

“I just don’t know the life expectancy of the sit-down movie experience,” he says. “But the assets, and opportunities, are there.”

Bloomberg CityLab

October 2020

This summer, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti found himself generating international headlines for cracking down on a house party. On Aug. 19, city officials disconnected utilities at the Hollywood Hills home of Bryce Hall, Noah Beck and Blake Gray, young stars on the video platform TikTok who had turned their residence — a rented 8,500-square foot mansion known as the Sway House — into a “nightclub in the hills.” 

The Sway House stood accused of hosting parties “in flagrant violation of our public health orders” during a pandemic. Never mind that some of the footage that generated outrage — an Instagram video showing shoulder-to-shoulder crowds drinking and dancing on tables — was shot at a blowout party at a different home, in Encino, roughly 15 miles west of the Hollywood Hills. The Sway House had already established a reputation for bad behavior among its neighbors, creating a “party war zone.”

At a press conference announcing charges, city attorney Mike Feuer said, “We allege that in many cases these parties and the party houses associated with them have hijacked the quality of life for neighbors in the affected communities. If you have a combined 19 million followers on TikTok, in the middle of a public health crisis you should be modeling great behavior, best practices, for all of us, rather than brazenly violating the law and then posting videos about it, as we allege happened here.” 

Garcetti’s crackdown is indicative of how the contentious arrival of a relatively new kind of celebrity real estate has become tangled up in an older phenomenon: LA’s famously disruptive party house scene. During coronavirus lockdowns, rented mansions have been serving as ad-hoc nightclubs for illegal gatherings, creating tension, anxiety, and sometimes violence in affluent neighborhoods. At one early August party, a woman at a massive Hollywood Hills party was shot and killed, bringing on a pledge from city leaders to boost party house enforcement.

That pledge is focusing attention on high-end homes — variously called TikTok mansions, content houses, or collab houses — that are rented by talent management groups and filled with young social media stars and creators. The homes are used as backdrops for the video content that social media influencers churn out, and, as the Sway House incident in August shows, as headquarters for their antics. 

Collab houses emerged in early 2020, growing with the continued rise of the video app TikTok. “Call it the boy-band model but for Gen Z,” Rebecca Jennings recently wrote in Vox, “where stars leverage each other’s burgeoning fame against the backdrop of multimillion-dollar homes.” As chronicled by technology and business journalists like Taylor Lorenz and Amanda Perrelli, early examples like Hype House have spawned a host of newcomers, including the Clubhouse and Cabin Six (focused on LGBT creators). 

It’s not new or exclusive to the TikTok platform; stars of YouTube and Vine established their own such setups, including 02L Mansion and 1600 Vine Street. Back in 2017, Vine and YouTube celebrity Jake Paul famously posted the location of the Team 10 House in Hollywood online, which was flooded with fans. The trend has also migrated beyond Los Angeles: A sextet of UK influencers has occupied a lavish English country home and dubbed it the Wave House, the Daily Mail recently reported. 

James McClain, editor-at-large for the celebrity home site Dirt, sees collab houses as just the latest example of the intermingling of entertainment and real estate in Southern California — from the star mansions of Hollywood’s Golden Age to MTV Cribs. While Dirt tracks housing sales for all manner of celebrities, it’s the influencers that are getting the most attention now. “Jeffree Star’s house was the biggest story for us in terms of traffic,” he says, referring to a popular YouTuber and makeup artist. “The concept of fame has changed for a new era.” 

Collab houses may be new, but the market for these types of homes in Los Angeles isn’t. According to real estate agents who have sold to these types of clients, or work with high-end rental homes, many of them are spec homes, built in expensive areas with beautiful properties with lots of land: Burbank (FaZe Clan), Beverly Hills (Clubhouse), Bel Air (the Sway House) and Hollywood. Investors had previously made money on these properties by renting them for one-off events or film, TV, or commercial shoots; more recently, Airbnb and short-term rental sites provided another revenue option. 

If you are in the market for a TikTok mansion, you’ll be shopping for a property with “awe factors” like an elevator, pool and a great view — features that lend themselves to the medium and can become video backdrops. “It should have all the amenities you’d want if you’re spending $30,000 to $50,000 a month, including plenty of space and parking, large kitchens and common areas, and lots of bedrooms,” says Josh Picker, an agent at Douglas Elliman. “You’re basically paying for a place you don’t need to leave.” 

Michael Senzer, vice-president and head of business development at TalentX, which represents the Sway House crew, says he wants properties that give the talent a beautiful place to live and “take all the thinking out of their daily lives so they can focus on what they do best — monetize and strategically grow themselves.”

Same goes with the interiors. The Sway House was outfitted with items picked out by the TikTokers or donated by brands hoping to be tagged in a video.

Sally Forster Jones, a Compass agent who has worked on rentals for location scouts and YouTubers, says it can be difficult to find properties open to the number of people, and parties, that come with these content houses. The right properties can be rented via short-term rental sites, or more formal, year-long leases. Stars often pay their rent, especially in homes sponsored by management companies or brands, by producing a set number of social videos every week “as a form of in-kind rent,” according to Lorenz of the New York Times. 

Young stars living together amid the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles may be a concept as old as the entertainment industry. But for residents of many of the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods where this type of real estate exists, having a crew of selfie-shooting teen influencers move in next door can be a major headache. 

Kristen Stavola runs We Are Laurel Canyon, a community group for the affluent hillside neighborhood. She says that these management companies, who are “fronting for YouTubers, Instagrammers, and TikTokkers,” have caused numerous issues.

Laurel Canyon, often called party canyon, has drawn high-living celebrities since the 1960s.

“We love our heritage up here and celebrate it,” says Stavola. “We’re all about people having a good time.” But “social media has put it on steroids.” Residents are weary of late-night noise and traffic jams of Uber or Lyft vehicles on the narrow, winding streets. The blind curves and dirt roads near more remote locations don’t mix with inebriated drivers. “We’re anti-party house when the neighborhoods, hillside and wildlife are being threatened,” she says. “Anybody running a party house during Covid is incredibly reckless.”

Some collab homes went undetected for months, but when the coronavirus pandemic arrived and more people began working from home in March and April, it became hard not to notice the sound of live DJs playing in the middle of an afternoon. (Other influencer collectives do not lay low: Hype House, in Mount Olympus in the Hollywood Hills adjacent to Laurel Canyon, had a signature painted school bus parked in front of the entrance.) “Earlier this year, some genius at a management firm said, ‘Let’s put these kids together in a Big Brother-type setting and have them earn their rent with posts,’” Stavola says. “The problem with collab houses is that it’s encouraging the problems we’ve been trying to curb for years. It’s actually monetizing them. It’s turned homes into businesses, whether or not they’re having parties there every night. You’ve turned a nice house into a dorm or frat house.” 

Talent management groups Influences and FlipMgmt didn’t respond to CityLab, and TalentX didn’t want to talk about recent incidents involving the influencers at their collab house. “It’s a level of accountability they have to have on themselves,” Michael Gruen, a founder of TalentX, told the New York Times in response to questions about their talent hosting and participating in parties. 

Dirt’s McClain argues that conflating the rise of collab houses with the broader party house issue misses some important distinctions. “These kids, and young adults, see what they’re doing as a legitimate business,” he says. “The whole reason they enter into these collaborations is because they have sponsors or investors behind them. They don’t want to do anything to mess up their future earnings, or get in the way of how they earn a living. It’s a new phenomenon and a lot of people don’t understand this.” 

Picker also doesn’t think his clients should be blamed for the problematic party houses; companies are fronting big money for content and the talent is on the line if something goes wrong. Many influencers have apologized for large parties, and even called out those organizing such events. “Just because they’re in their early twenties doesn’t necessarily mean they’re causing the problems,” he says.

Still, it’s not surprising that Angelenos would connect influencers with the party house scene. Several social media stars have indeed been liberal with social distancing practices and thrown Covid-noncompliant events this summer, with some even arguing that it’s part of their job to entertain (and facing few consequences from sponsors). And the Hype House was established in a Hollywood Hills home that already had a notorious pre-TikTok reputation for hosting such events. 

Numerous attempts have been made to crack down. Los Angeles signed a Party House ordinance in 2018, and on Aug. 4, issued a warning about large parties held during the pandemic. Airbnb issued a global party ban on Aug. 16, saying that “we do not want that type of business, and anyone engaged in or allowing that behavior does not belong on our platform.” In addition, the company launched a city portal to help track nuisance properties, and banned one-night stays over Halloween weekend. 

One of Stavola’s Laurel Canyon neighbors (who wishes to remain anonymous), says his family has been traumatized by a party house incident next door. Over the long 4th of July weekend this summer, a group of young men rented the home next door and threw a series of parties, including shooting mortar-type fireworks over a tinder-dry hillside. When the neighbor contacted Stavola, who reached out to Airbnb about the issue, the service canceled the booking and later banned the guest who reserved the home from making future bookings, but the guests remained (it’s up to the property owner to call law enforcement or evict the short-term tenant). Over the next few weeks, the three renters would occasionally taunt the neighbor and his wife and young child, spitting at them and calling them “Karens.”

“It was disheartening,” the neighbor said. “Ultimately, the sites can do what you request, and if the owner doesn’t kick them out, they may be here for another two weeks. My wife and I are both lawyers, and this was crazy to us.” 

Stavola says that despite more vigilance from Airbnb and local officials, she fears the issue isn’t going away. “As long as the clubs are closed in Hollywood, this won’t stop.”

The collab house trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down either. Even during the coronavirus pandemic, more houses opened, though some have shut down after the promised sponsorships, fame and payment never materialized, as Vox’s Jennings wrote. 

At TalentX, Senzer says they’re looking at opening another home, and are in talks about a potential reality series. They have a big financial incentive to keep the party going as long as possible. After the city unplugged the Sway House in August, the erstwhile TikTok stars recently found a new sponsorin the video platform Triller, a TikTok competitor, which pays the rent and other expenses for a new Sway House in Bel Air in return for talent postings on their platform. That arrangement has “generated a significant amount of revenue for these guys and our business,” he says. “It’s hard to say it wasn’t worth it.”

Bloomberg CityLab

November 2020

As a nail-biter U.S. election creeps to its resolution — and tallies in urban areas decide key battleground states — a few things are clear. While the ideological cleavage between urban and rural parts of the country continues to grow, progressive candidates at the local level had a strong showing on Tuesday. There’s a “dramatic progressive turn” taking place on the local level, says Richard Schragger, a University of Virginia professor and author of City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age.

The 2020 results, so far, shows that trend will continue, even if it doesn’t trickle up into control of state legislatures or executive leadership. Schragger sees the range of policy that prevailed at the polls, from housing and transit to new ideas for land use and economic development, broadening significantly in cities of all sizes. 

Moving forward, many political observers and leaders tell CityLab that action will continue on tenant and worker rights, criminal justice reform and transportation. And with evolving vote tallies in battleground states pointing (as of Nov. 5) towards a Democratic White House, and Senate control decided by runoffs in Georgia, they feel it’s imperative that cities continue to advance progressive policies that reshape the local economy.

Tory Gavito, president of Way to Win, a progressive political coalition and PAC, points to the passage of Proposition A in Austin, a $7.1 billion transit improvement initiative, after the city council passed a Green New Deal last year as an example of progressives pushing big reforms when they have the votes and the power. 

 Wins like that stand out in a more muddled national picture, as predictions that voters would deliver a resounding repudiation of the Trump-era GOP have given way to a mixed assortment of results — and an ever-deeper gulf between urban and rural America. Still, Gavito sees the results so far as a step in the right direction for the progressive agenda. “The first thing to note is that Democrats are winning the popular vote, and their numbers are only increasing in urban and suburban areas, with demographic change in the south and southwest,” she says. “Arizona flipping, Georgia in a dead heat, Texas moving left, and wins down ballot are a sign this country is shifting.” 

Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founder of Run for Something, which backs state and local progressive Gen Z and Millennial candidates, emphasizes the generational shift in local politics. Overall, Run for Something endorsed 525 candidates this cycle, with 202 victories, 77 races left to call and three runoffs as of Nov. 5. Among the winners: Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, an Indigenous candidate who declared victory in her race to be the new Pima County Recorder, which oversees elections in the Tucson area; she ran in response to other Native Americans being disenfranchised. And Nikil Saval, an Asian-American architecture critic and first-time candidate just elected to the Pennsylvania State Senate, ran in part on a “housing for all” agenda. 

Rocketto also pointed out a pair of congressional winners who come with progressive credentials: former nurse and Ferguson activist Cori Bush, the first African-American woman to represent Missouri in the House of Representatives, and former middle-school principal Jamaal Bowman from New York City, who has promoted restorative justice and increased community investment.

These political newcomers, Rocketto says, reflect a generation that grew up watching Democratic leaders from Bill Clinton’s “big government is over” school of politics try to solve massive social problems with small fixes and slight shifts; now, they are loudly asking why government can’t do more. Rocketto doesn’t see it as an ideological fight as much as a demand that things get done. “Democrats have been in control of most major American cities for decades and Black people are still being killed on the streets by police,” he says. This summer’s racial justice protests fueled a surge in interest from younger people interested in public office, he says. “It was already too late to get on the ballot, but we had literally thousands of people contact us about running. We haven’t come close to seeing all the young candidates running for office in cities, counties and school boards. There will be a wave of new people in 2021.” 

Some victories could beget future wins. Rocketto points to Lina Hidalgo, judge for Harris County, Texas, which included Houston. Her election in 2018 and subsequent work to encourage and support increased voting access fueled early (albeit overly optimistic) Democratic hopes of a blue wave in Texas, and shows the power of putting progressives in local office. “In 2018, Harris County spent $6 million on their election,” says Rocketto. “This year they’re spending $36 million. It may feel small — $30 million isn’t a ton of money — but that small change impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, who saw an example of the government impacting their daily lives.” 

Local progressives have already succeeded in shifting the national conversation on issues such as affordable housing, says Maurice Jones, president and CEO of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a national community development financial institution. “Local government is chomping at the bit for a federal partner, and if they saw one that wanted to be more aggressive, they would get more aggressive themselves,” Jones says. 

Tara Raghuveer, co-founder of KC Tenants and director of the national Homes Guarantee campaign, says that this election has already shifted the terrain of ideas in terms of raising awareness of the affordability crisis. “On the state and local level, we’ve seen a proportional shift,” Raghuveer says. She points to candidates like Nithya Raman, a 39-year-old urban planner who’s holding a strong lead in her bid for a city council seat in Los Angeles. “She’s running front-and-center and saying that incrementalism is dead, and L.A. can solve homelessness tomorrow.”

Raghuveer sees the election of representatives Bush and Bowman, and the reelection of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “the Squad,” as a “deepening of the bench,” with more representatives headed to D.C. with lived experience to understand the impact of housing policy on urban America. It gives voice and platform to the tenant’s rights movement, and could push a potential Biden administration to feel pressure to address the issue and “force a reckoning.”

Early 2020 results also suggest more ambitious local transportation policies, again filling the gap left by federal inaction during the previous four years of the Trump administration. Romic Aevaz, a policy analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, says that regardless of exact ballot initiative results, there is movement towards significant local investments in new rail and mass transit, such as Austin’s Prop A, as well as more measures to fund Vision Zero and bike lane safety improvement. “There’s more optimism, more enthusiasm for big-ticket proposals in Austin and the Bay Area,” he says. “If local governments put the funds up and we get a Biden administration, we’ll have a better chance to get federal matching funds, too.”

But cities in red or battleground states may soon face bigger challenges. As of yet, there haven’t been any Democratic takeovers of state legislatures in places like Texas, meaning preemption of local powers will continue to be a problem. Schragger points to Virginia, which saw its House of Delegates flip to blue last year, as an example of how such a change can create a state much more responsive to urban constituencies. “The anti-urbanism of the Republican party will be magnified if Trump is re-elected,” Schragger says. “No support at a minimum, as well as outright hostility in the form of ‘anarchist jurisdiction’ declarations.”

Gregorio Casar, a city councilmember in Austin, Texas, laments the lost opportunity to turn the state legislature blue this year, as it would provide a better chance to make sure the work progressive cities do holds — a paid sick leave law he championed was later struck down — and hold other more moderate politicians to account, who can’t blame preemption fears for their refusal to take bold action.

“Every time we have a good idea in our cities, we have to ask, will this be stopped by the legislature, will the governor have a press conference to bash it?” he says. A less-hostile state government could also increase voter participation and turnout. “Texas has been a non-voting state, not a red or blue state, and I can understand that, since it’s been so gerrymandered.” 

Even with a more helpful executive branch, local progressives may still be forced to do much of the heavy lifting of enacting change themselves. That often starts with budgets, which have been under the microscope of activists since the summer’s reckoning with police violence. 

Eunisses Hernandez is a longtime criminal justice advocate with Re-Imagine L.A. and a supporter of Measure J, an approved Los Angeles County initiative that calls for redirecting more than $360 million to community investment and alternatives to incarceration. She’s seen increased activity around budgets and funding for years as a progressive coalition has formed around longtime community frustrations. Hernandez says that the diverse campaign around Measure J grew out of decades of activism and community demands for jobs, housing and health services, including East L.A. protestsof the 1960s and the work behind Prop 47, a statewide ballot measure that reduced sentencing for nonviolent crimes.

“Now, with younger people, you see that demands are shifting,” she says. “I’ll say radical for lack of a better term. Instead of asking for a piece of the pie, it’s about asking for the entire pie. There’s a demand for deep reform, and not leaving people behind. Black Lives Matter really set the stage for us to be able to make these demands of the bureaucracy. What’s happening here is a blueprint to show what your tax dollars can do, and how they can represent your values.” 

Elise Buik, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, says that the younger generation leading the charge is “bringing focus and scrutiny to public budgets in a way I’ve never seen,” she says. The group is part of a coalition supporting Measure J, which she says could be “a really important model for California and the country. L.A. county is bigger than 41 states in terms of population.”

Campaigns like the one for Measure J may represent Rocketto’s vision of how to expand the progressive coalition beyond its urban strongholds. “The real opportunity at the local level across the country, is to fundamentally talk about local problems,” he says. “It’s not about running on ideology. Connect with voters over shared values. That’s how you get a Republican, who only sees a Democrat on Fox News, to trust and vote for a Democrat.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of contrast in a time of polarization,” Gavito says. “The more you can tell a story of how progressive policies are helping a multiracial coalition succeed, the more you can pull people into the coalition who are natural allies.” 

Raghuveer observes that it’s become something of a radical notion, in a divided nation, that the government should be the source of power that can fix serious societal issues — especially after seeing how ineffective it has been in protecting jobs and lives during the coronavirus pandemic. 

“The clarity provided by the last several months,” she says, “is that almost nothing about the way we’re set up allows cities to care for people in the way we need them to care.”