A city at human scale: A conversation with Mayor David LaGrand
What makes a city thrive? For Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand, the answer begins with public safety, affordable housing and competent government. Healthy cities also depend on trust, engaged citizens and the everyday habits that allow people to govern themselves.
In this conversation with Ray Nothstine of American Habits, LaGrand reflects on the human scale of Grand Rapids, the limits of government, and the civic character required to sustain a flourishing community.
You were born in Grand Rapids. When you look at the city today, what still feels most familiar from the city you grew up in? It has changed so much, even since I moved there in 2007, and every time I go back, it feels different.
Mayor David LaGrand: The big, shiny objects have changed, sure, and downtown has changed substantially. But the neighborhoods haven’t.
I’ve lived in Heritage Hill for 30 years, and it feels much the same as it always has. It’s a good mix and a strong community, and that doesn’t change much.
Some neighborhoods have experienced real change, but others haven’t. Ottawa Hills looks and feels much the same to me as it did 30 or 40 years ago. It really depends on where you are.
You have a diverse background. A lot of people are in politics, some mostly for ideology. I sense you are a little different. Your path seems to have run through law, business, state government, and local institutions. How does that shape the kind of mayor you are now?
LaGrand: It certainly has. And when you say ideology, frankly, I wish more people were guided by one. “Ideology” has become a bad word or at least gotten a bad rap. To me, saying someone is ideological simply means they are doing things for a reason.
My perspective is that I’m focused on the common good. That’s my ideology. I want to make the world better for everybody, and that has been the through line for me.
I’ve been concerned about justice my entire life, and that led me to become a prosecutor. My concern for improving neighborhoods led me into business. Public service offered another opportunity to do good, and that led me to the Legislature and, eventually, to becoming mayor.
I think I have a reason for doing everything, and if I’m grumpy about it, I’ll tell you. One of the weaknesses of democracy is that it can reward narcissism. Many people who enter politics are fundamentally interested in self-preservation and enjoy winning contests.
America tends to view things through the lens of winning and losing, and our politics fits that pattern. If you’re not going to be the star quarterback for the Steelers, maybe you run for office. You can get some of the same dopamine hits from politics that you do from competitive sports. That’s not why I’m in it. I think ideologues can be good.
The real question is whether the ideology is sound. I think communism is fundamentally misguided, and I think totalitarian or fascist instincts are fundamentally misguided. Having an ideology doesn’t necessarily place you at one end of the political spectrum. I tend to think mine is the ideology of a centrist. That’s territory I’m happy to defend, work in and talk about.
You mentioned the common good, a phrase that often emerges from church culture. Grand Rapids has a strong tradition of churches, philanthropies and charitable nonprofits. How much does a city depend on these institutions to do work that government may not be equipped or adequately funded to do?
LaGrand: Yes. That list, of course, doesn’t include the more granular forms of civic engagement. It’s not just philanthropy or formal organizations. It’s block clubs and book clubs. Tocqueville’s vision of democracy is very much about people coming together on a human scale, and those interactions have cumulative effects.
I think American democracy is imperiled on two fronts right now. One is hyperpartisan rancor: people dividing into two warring camps and attributing malice to those in the other camp. The other is people dropping out and simply not participating.
The liberal version of that withdrawal is, frankly, assuming government can or should do everything for you. If you have a problem with crime, get more police. If you have a problem with mental health, hire more people to address mental health.
The Catholic Church has a doctrine called subsidiarity, which I think offers a very healthy way to look at these questions. Most of the time, the best parents are parents. Government is not a very good parent. You rely on government in that role only when things have really fallen apart for the parents and when there are no grandparents, churches or civic groups available to help.
I tend to think of government as the largest and most porous safety net we have—an actor of last resort.
There are some things government simply has to do because they require broad, and sometimes coercive buy-in. And sometimes government must protect people from the will of the majority. If a majority voted tomorrow to do something plainly immoral, the fact that most people supported it would not make it right. If a majority wanted to execute red-haired people, that would not mean we should do it. Sometimes government is necessary to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
We also need government to do things that smaller civic groups cannot easily do, such as creating currency. Your book club cannot make currency very well. The same is true of maintaining an army, which I tend to view as an evil that may or may not be necessary. I’m close to a pacifist in my instincts, but these are functions that government must perform.
And sometimes government has to protect us from ourselves. I don’t want to wear a seat belt. I need a law to make me wear one because I’m dumb and don’t want to do it.
You have a housing shortage, as most cities do. How do you make Grand Rapids more affordable for middle-income families so they can continue to feel like part of the community? More broadly, how do you address the housing shortage through new construction? Affordability is not something you caused, obviously, but what can you realistically do about it?
LaGrand: I’m not going to dodge the responsibility on that one.
I meant that you’re not printing a bunch of money, right?
LaGrand: Sure. Let’s take the 20,000-foot view.
The first point is that the human brain is hardwired to want silver-bullet solutions. But complex problems that have been building for decades are not going to have a single answer. They are going to require a series of 25% solutions.
There are a lot of good ideas swirling around, and you have to become comfortable with incremental responses. That said, government really has only two options for making housing more affordable. One is to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize it, which we do. The other is to examine the cost of construction and determine how government can affect it.
The good news is that the sun is still working, photosynthesis is still working and two-by-fours are still being produced. We don’t have a photosynthesis crisis. We have an affordability problem.
That problem comes from several sources. Almost every industry becomes more productive over time. Cars are much better and cheaper to manufacture than they were 50 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Construction is an unfortunate exception.
When you examine why, you realize that much of it has to do with regulation. In that sense, it is the government’s fault. Government has to own the regulatory framework that produced the conditions we have. That includes building codes, zoning codes and NIMBYism.
There is also a challenge we have to be honest about. In a healthy housing market, the house you live in and the house I live in would not increase in value faster than inflation every year. Why would they? They need painting. They need new roofs. Houses wear out.
Since World War II, however, houses have not functioned like cars. They have functioned more like Microsoft stock, but they are not Microsoft stock. They are not productive assets.
The primary reason houses have outpaced inflation is artificial scarcity. At the same time, we allow people to purchase houses with enormous leverage. You cannot buy a share of Microsoft stock by borrowing 90% of its cost, but you can do that with a house. We have built a regulatory and financial framework that strongly incentivizes people to buy homes and expect them to appreciate.
We create artificial scarcity, houses rise in value faster than inflation and then we face a supply-and-demand problem of our own making. The trouble with the law of supply and demand is that it is a law. You can ignore it if you want but try ignoring gravity and see how that works for you.
That is also why debates over short-term rentals and Airbnb can be a distraction. If you introduce a large number of short-term rentals into an inflexible market, then yes, prices will rise. But in a healthy housing market, if someone wants to build a new unit and use it as an Airbnb, why should you care? It is still a new housing unit. The more housing that gets built, the more housing prices are moderated.
You have to make building easier and less expensive. I’m doing a lot of work in that area. We could spend the next hour talking about it. I’m pushing for bills in the Legislature that would lower building costs, and we are working on local zoning changes that would do the same.
Asking how we solve the housing problem is a little like asking how you build a V8 engine. It is a complicated machine with many moving parts. You cannot simply say, “Assemble eight cylinders and turn them on.” That is not how a V8 works. The regulatory environment is complex and changing it is going to require a lot of sustained work.
That’s valuable insight. As you noted, houses were not always viewed as investments comparable to the S&P 500, but many people see them that way now. I don’t think any of the other mayors I’ve interviewed have framed the issue quite as you did.
As a former prosecutor, you’ve seen crime not only as a policy issue but through the experiences of victims, offenders, police and the criminal justice system. How does that experience shape the way you approach public safety as mayor? It’s a perspective that not every mayor brings to the job.
LaGrand: I’ve spent most of my life working in this space.
A couple of things are especially important to remember if you are working in a city right now. The first is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
At the foundation are the things people must have. If a city cannot provide them, people will leave, because we live in a mobile society. The next layer consists of the things that make people want to move to a city. If you have those things, you are likely to have a housing shortage.
Flint does not have a housing shortage right now. Detroit does not have a housing shortage right now. Grand Rapids has a shortage because people want to move here.
For the 200,000 people who already live here, what is the minimum necessary to persuade them to stay? It comes down to two things: a viable education system and enough public safety for them to feel secure. Those are absolute, nonnegotiable requirements for a functioning city.
This is not a new problem. The Athenians had to deal with public order. It is a necessary tension whenever you bring people together. If you are alone in the woods, you do not need public order. But when people live together, there is a tension between “I want to do whatever I want” and “We need to live in a society where what I do does not constrain you.”
That is the problem of cities, and it is not going away. You have to manage that tension well enough that people remain willing to live in your city.
Public safety is therefore foundational. It should always be a city’s first priority. The next tier includes things such as good jobs, attractive parks and affordable housing—the things that make people want to move here. Then the icing on the cake is something like bike lanes.
Nobody is moving to Grand Rapids for bike lanes. They will move here if they think it is an attractive place and they can find housing. Public safety is the first tier. Housing is the second. Bike lanes are the third. They are dessert. If you look at urbanism that way, you prioritize public safety.
The second important point, and one I think many compassionate people working in this space miss, is that the human brain closely connects public order with public safety.
If you pass a man lying on the street, you may feel unsafe, even if there is virtually no chance that he is going to leap up and start wrestling with you. People sleeping on subway grates are generally not dangerous to the public.
But the leap your brain makes is not entirely unwarranted. You think: No one appears to be doing anything about this. If no one is doing anything about this, would anybody do something if I were assaulted in the street?
One of our basic measures of public safety is whether we believe there is accountability for behavior that falls outside accepted norms. Public order therefore becomes connected to public safety in the back of our minds—in what we sometimes call the lizard brain.
We are wired to be members of a community.
That means addressing public order is an essential part of public safety when your job is to convince people that living in cities is a good idea. It is not only about whether people are objectively in danger. My job is to make people want to live here.
My joke is that my job is to make everyone who does not live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, realize they have made a horrible mistake. I cannot do that if they feel there is no order.
As a former prosecutor, where do you draw the line between offering second chances and fulfilling government’s obligation to protect law-abiding citizens? At what point does repeated offending suggest that the system is failing to provide both accountability and public safety?
LaGrand: Sure. First, crime is going down significantly in virtually every U.S. city I know of right now. People can always point to anecdotal headlines because people tend to think in anecdotes rather than statistics. One Willie Horton can derail an entire presidential campaign.
The more productive question is whether policy X, Y or Z produces greater net public safety. By that measure, almost every second-chance program I’ve been involved with has improved public safety. This isn’t about letting people out of prison because we feel sorry for them. It’s about asking whether releasing someone earlier makes the community safer.
Here’s the thought experiment: Imagine that the same offense could put you in prison for either two years or 10 years. First, why are we putting you in prison? I don’t think revenge is a good motive. Deterrence is a legitimate motive, as is communicating society’s condemnation of the offense.
If we hope you learn something from the experience and deter others from committing the same crime, you probably aren’t going to learn anything during years three, four and five that you didn’t learn during years one and two.
If I want to convince you that carjacking is a bad idea, two years in prison will teach you that lesson. It will also deter other people about as effectively as a much longer sentence.
Many crimes are impulsive. People generally are not thinking, “I won’t commit murder because I would receive a particular sentence, but if the sentence were lighter, I would.” That is not the calculus behind the vast majority of crimes.
Then you have to ask a broader public-policy question: Does prison make people better? The answer is almost certainly no.
If I place you in an environment where you cannot make independent decisions and where you are expected to respond to every perceived threat with violence, and then leave you there for several years, what happens when you come out? You may have no discernible job skills, and you may be a much higher-risk individual. I did not necessarily make society safer by keeping you in prison for 10 years. I may have made it less safe.
The three biggest factors in reducing recidivism and offending are education, employment and age. I don’t have a time machine, so we can work only on the first two. I can’t make someone older than they are. Jobs and education are key.
Now consider someone accused of a nonviolent, low-risk offense, such as stealing a Snickers bar from a gas station. Suppose we lock that person up for 48 hours because they cannot afford a cash bond.
A cash-bond system isn’t saying, “David, you’re so dangerous that we have to keep you in jail because you stole a Snickers bar.” It is asking, “How much money do you have?”
Who wants to confuse liberty and wealth? Nobody. I’ve never met a conservative or a liberal who wanted to intertwine liberty and wealth. It’s immoral. Why would we use a wealth test to determine who goes home after being accused of a crime?
Imagine that you put me in jail for 24 hours. I could call my assistant and say, “I feel sick. I think I have the flu.” I could probably fake my way through that absence. People at the lower end of the income spectrum are much more vulnerable.
I own restaurants, and in that business there is a phrase: “no-call, no-show.” If you are a no-call, no-show at a restaurant, your job is gone because it’s a team sport. Nobody wants to call from the Kent County Jail and say, “Hey, boss, I got locked up. Can you keep my job?”
Even 24 hours in jail can cause the most vulnerable people to lose their jobs. If someone could not afford a $500 bond and then loses a job, what are the odds that person keeps their housing?
Losing housing is enormously inefficient. It is expensive for landlords, expensive for the person being evicted and expensive for the community. A mattress in your home is worth something. A mattress left in the rain on the side of the road is worth nothing. Now it is a garbage-collection problem. Evictions destroy enormous amounts of wealth, not only for the people directly involved but for the broader economy.
And remember: One of the best ways to keep someone from stealing a bicycle out of my garage is for that person to have a job. If the cash-bond system causes people to lose their jobs and housing, and perhaps forces the government to step in to care for their children, how is that improving public safety?
The government creates a situation in which someone fails as a parent, an employee and a consumer of housing, and then we blame that person for failing. Those are terrible outcomes produced by terrible policy.
Pretrial detention also places enormous pressure on people to plead guilty. Prosecutors can offer them credit for time served and say, “You can go home if you admit you did this.”
I’ve had clients say, “Tell me what I did so I can tell the judge. Tell me what I have to say. I don’t care.” They want to get home to their children. They want to find out whether they can keep their jobs and housing.
We pervert justice through badly designed systems, and we produce bad public-safety outcomes. Your North Star has to be this: Will the policy we are discussing make society safer or less safe?
There is so much low-hanging fruit in this area that we don’t need to begin with extreme hypotheticals about a terrorist who has locked someone in an airtight box and given us only 30 minutes to find them. We can have a beer and talk about that sometime.
I’m talking about whether low-dollar cash bonds for people who pose no genuine safety risk destabilize large numbers of lives, push people toward crime and ultimately make the public less safe.
You offered quite the rebuttal to some of the doomsday headlines we see on crime. A lot of the national conversation about cities focuses on what is going wrong—crime, affordability, corruption and political dysfunction. But a healthy city also depends on the habits and virtues of its citizens.
Grand Rapids clearly has many people who care deeply about their community. What qualities and habits do citizens need for a city to thrive?
LaGrand: Engaged citizens.
When you mention crime, it is almost always true that cities are safer than people assume. One reason is that cities have engaged citizens. If you are being mugged alone in the forest, crying for help probably will not do much good. If you are being mugged in front of my house, I’m going to run outside and help you.
The greatest deterrent to crime is the presence of witnesses, and cities have witnesses. If you look at crime statistically rather than anecdotally, a city of 10 million people will naturally have more crimes than a sparsely populated area of Montana. If you compare crime by geography alone, Montana may look safer. If you compare it on a per-capita basis, cities can look very different.
The bottom line is that an engaged citizenry is the whole game. Public safety is not simply a police officer’s problem. It is your problem and my problem. It is every citizen’s responsibility to say something and, when appropriate, take action.
Here is a trivial example. I went to a University of Michigan football game and spent the entire halftime monitoring the exit to the men’s restroom because people kept trying to enter through it, preventing others from getting out. Somebody needed to step in, enforce the rules and fix the system.
You can hire someone to do that, or you can have an engaged citizen who is willing to say, “The entrance is over there. Play by the rules.”
If you see someone drop trash on the sidewalk, say something. If you see someone mistreating a dog, say something.
We are wired to be members of a community. We want to belong to a community in which people hold one another accountable. The more we preserve those habits, the more we will not only protect democracy but improve our quality of life.
Government has very little to do with our day-to-day quality of life compared with a more basic question: Do you have decent neighbors? It goes back to the old question in Genesis: Are we our brother’s keeper?
Yes, and when civil society erodes, people look to other things. You served in the state Legislature before becoming mayor. Steve Johnson is one of my colleagues, so you know him.
LaGrand: I’ll tell you, if you want to know, Steve made me the de facto minority vice chair of oversight when he was on there because Steve and I get along great.
What do you understand better now from City Hall than you did while serving in Lansing? Are there areas where Grand Rapids needs greater flexibility from the state or more state support to address local challenges?
LaGrand: If states are the laboratories of democracy, we may eventually want to give cities greater autonomy as well.
There is an increasingly sharp divide between people who want to live in cities and those who do not. It may make sense to let cities make more of their own decisions, including decisions about taxation. But that is tricky.
I tend to think taxation is most effective at the highest level of government. If California adopts a tax policy aimed at billionaires, people can move to another state. The same is true at the city level. At the national level, leaving becomes considerably more difficult. You always have to account for people’s mobility.
So there are both opportunities and challenges at the city level. One challenge is that politics has become so nationalized. People come to City Hall and criticize me over federal immigration policy, but I cannot change federal immigration law.
I think our immigration system is badly broken. We need a rational path to citizenship for people who are already here and contributing to society. We need an effective way for people to come here legally and contribute to the economy. And we need rational screening and enforcement. Most reasonable people could agree on those broad principles, but the federal government has been unable to act.
Because city officials are more accessible, we often hear more of the public’s frustration than state or federal officials do.
The opportunity at the city level is that we can try to be as nonpartisan as possible. People who are genuinely willing to cross the aisle can be unusual.
What I like most about Grand Rapids is its human scale.
Steve Johnson and I worked very well together. But I had Democratic colleagues who did not really know their Republican colleagues. If I mentioned Steve, some of them did not know whom I was talking about and so I had to physically describe him. Steve and I spent time together, had many conversations and learned to trust each other.
Trust is the basis of any society, and it is the basis of effective government. Trust is a product of time and relationships.
I have two political mantras. The first is that you cannot work with someone you do not trust, and you cannot trust someone you do not know. The second is that you cannot have a second date before you have a first one. You cannot rush the process.
The opportunity at the city level is to say, “I’m not acting as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m trying to make the city better. Can we focus on what we want to accomplish rather than the points we want to score?”
The rhetorical temperature in politics has reached dangerous levels. Steve and I were serving on the Oversight Committee when Rudy Giuliani came to town and claimed that hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes had been cast in Detroit.
The numbers he cited did not make sense. Steve was among the first people to challenge them. He and I were working together as agents of reason, not agents of ideology.
The more politicians want to score cheap points, the more willing some become to distort the truth to score them. Nonpartisan offices will not solve the problem, but they can be one tool for addressing it.
A Republican colleague of mine, Rep. Ryan Berman, proposed making the offices of secretary of state and attorney general nonpartisan. I thought that was a great idea. Why do we need a partisan secretary of state? Do you need a Republican or a Democrat to renew your driver’s license?
I think most people just want that process to be convenient.
LaGrand: Exactly. And if we believe justice should be blind, why would we want a partisan justice system? The last thing I want is for the justice system to be weaponized.
I don’t think attorneys general, county prosecutors or sheriffs should hold partisan offices. We should remove partisanship wherever it does not serve a legitimate purpose.
When I first interviewed for a job in Grand Rapids, it was summer, and I thought, “Man, this place is awesome.”
My boss told me, “You have to find something fun to do outside during the winter.” Stupidly, I ignored that advice for about five years.
If you were trying to convince someone to move to Grand Rapids, what would you show them first? And would you bring them in the summer or the winter? For readers who may not know much about Grand Rapids or West Michigan, what gives the city its distinctive character?
LaGrand: Look, there are places in this country that are almost unlivable in the summer, and there are places where the winter gets rough. Fall and spring are better almost everywhere.
Grand Rapids can get a little too hot, but I would personally show someone the city in the summer. Then, if they said, “It’s a little too hot,” I’d tell them that in 30 minutes we can be at Lake Michigan.
You’re in North Carolina now, right?
Yes, but I was recently on Torch Lake in northwest Michigan. It’s beautiful.
LaGrand: Here’s what I say about Lake Michigan: It’s an ocean, except I’m at the top of the food chain. There’s nothing in it that wants to eat me.
There’s no salt, and we have gorgeous sandy beaches. What else do you want?
For about 12 weeks of the year, Lake Michigan is the most beautiful place I know on Earth. You can hold that thought in your head during February.
But I also think Lake Michigan is remarkable in February. It feels like a Martian expedition. The frozen lake is extraordinary because it freezes and heaves. It is not like walking onto an inland lake to play hockey. Being on Lake Michigan in winter feels more like a polar exploration.
What I like most about Grand Rapids is its human scale. As much as I sometimes want to be a big-city person, I like living in a city that I can wrap my brain around.
It has distinct neighborhoods that are genuinely different from one another. There is variety, but there is also enough cohesion to make the city feel connected.
I have a theory that there are water people and mountain people. We don’t have mountains, but we certainly have water.
