Blue City Blues

[This episode is a live taping of a panel discussion at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle on September 29, done in conjunction with the GeekWire podcast].
For this BCB episode David and Sandeep moderate an all-star panel about how the rise of Big Tech has transformed not only the economies, but also the politics and the cultures, of San Francisco and Seattle, the nation’s two largest blue city knowledge economy bastions. Joining us on stage are: University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara, the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, veteran San Francisco journalist Jonathan Weber, author of City on the Edge: Technology, Politics and the Battle for the Soul of San Francisco, and John Cook, co-founder and publisher of GeekWire, the Seattle-based technology news site. 
In our conversation, we dig deeply into why the wealth Big Tech has generated has not consistently produced better functioning cities, and explore the dimensions of the divide between tech companies that see themselves as engines of prosperity, and progressive city governments struggling with housing costs, displacement, public safety, and rising inequality. Amazon’s expansion into central Seattle becomes a central topic of discussion, exemplifying the collision between tech growth and urban life. From humble origins, the company's enormous hiring and office footprint transformed neighborhoods and brought thousands of highly paid newcomers into a housing market that could not readily accommodate them, heightening political tensions and spurring a backlash. This closely parallels what happened in San Francisco as the tech boom spurred gentrification, resentment and a rising cost of living. 
The panel describes a breakdown between companies that believe their job creation and economic contributions should be enough, and city governments demanding ever more tax revenues from these companies while struggling to deliver basic services or to provide a safe and welcoming environment for their workers. Cook emphasizes weak civic leadership; O’Mara highlights housing constraints and insufficient public investment; Weber stresses the limits of municipal government in addressing broader social problems.
We close by looking at how AI promises another economic boom, particularly in San Francisco, but also threatens layoffs, further disruptions and even deeper inequality. Our panelist argue that both cities need more housing, more effective municipal governance, and closer cooperation with business and tech leaders – alongside safe, lively public spaces and cultural opportunities that make them attractive to people beyond the tech industry.
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
"Jeff Bezos: Nerd of the Amazon," 60 Minutes, CBS (1999).
Jonathan Weber, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Simon & Shuster (2026). 
Margaret O'Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Press (2019).

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent NYT Magazine essay –  "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" – in which she offers her mea culpa for enrolling her daughter in poorly performing, mostly minority public schools in order to demonstrate her commitment to her systemic racial equity principles, has caused a huge stir online. The questions it raises – and to a significant degree, avoids answering – about how best to provide a high quality public education to children in a nation riven with racial and class divides, are at the heart of our latest episode. 
Jack Despain Zhou, better known by his social media moniker Tracing Woodgrains, in February 2025 launched the Center for Educational Progress, a nonprofit think tank focused on advocating for excellence in public education. CEP’s Substack page not only published Sandeep’s recent piece about the decline of Seattle’s public schools, but also publishes a wide range of insightful thinking about how to refocus public education on excellence, which Jack defines as in tension with the pursuit of equity that has driven American education for the last half century.  
We asked Jack to join us on BCB to talk in more detail about what excellence in public education actually entails, and why those concepts and approaches are so controversial. Jack contends, forcefully, that children enter schooling with different aptitudes and learn at different rates, and that any truly effective and excellent pedagogical effort needs to be built foundationally on that reality. 
Over the conversation, we discuss why the push over the last decade plus in progressive jurisdictions to unravel advanced learning opportunities and “detrack” students has produced poor results for students across the learning spectrum. We then dig into Hannah-Jones’ essay: while Jack praises her candor in describing her daughter’s unhappy educational experience in low performing schools, he argues that her explanation puts too much emphasis on the impacts of structural segregation and too little on the schools’ instructional choices, like eliminating homework in middle school or adopting equity grading policies.  
“You can teach people, and you should teach people, and it matters that education does, in fact, work to raise the absolute level of students,” Jack tells us. “That is what I think schools should focus on: not equalizing people, but how far can we push people?”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Tracing Woodgrains Substack page
Jack Despain Zhou, "Schools Should Pursue Excellence," Center for Educational Progress. Feb. 10, 2025.

If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026 
Elizabeth Glazer is a former law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and federal prosecutor who prosecuted violent gang activity, who then went on to serve first as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and later as Director of the Office of Criminal Justice under progressive New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio. Now Glazer is the founder of Vital City, a respected and influential urban policy ideas shop housed at Columbia Law School in New York City. Launched in 2022, Vital City puts a particular emphasis on championing innovative public safety policies that get past the typical blue city divides between movement left and center left.  
Some of Vital City’s public safety ideas have caught the attention of New York’s socialist superstar, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, so we asked Liz to join us on BCB to talk about how to do public safety right in big blue cities with fractious left vs. center left politics and fraught racial and class dynamics. At a time when democratic socialist insurgents are capturing mayor’s offices in cities like New York, Seattle and Washington, D.C., and are then faced with reconciling their progressive ideological commitments with the need to deliver safe and welcoming environments for their constituents, we wanted to explore with Glazer how best to fill effectively the ideological and policy no man’s land between old school, largely discredited “blunderbuss” policing and the willfully naïve anti-enforcement utopianism of many present day progressive activists.  
In our conversation, Glazer argues that public safety in blue cities, properly construed, should be understood less as an ideological contest and more as a basic function of effective government. The author of a recent Atlantic piece, “A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime,” that provides a fascinating (no shit, really!) argument that dramatically enhanced lighting and making other landscape improvements in high crime neighborhoods can dramatically reduce violence and other criminal activity, Glazer argues that smart policy choices that marry environmental design, prevention strategies, and social services with carefully targeted law enforcement can deliver the promise of successful progressive governance. 
As the discussion continues, we discuss with Glazer how her thinking about public safety has been informed by the original meaning of “broken windows policing,” but how that concept evolved over time into the mass police stops, sweeping gang prosecutions, and police targeting of entire neighborhoods, resulting in racially biased and overly intrusive policing. Liz expresses her optimism about the direction of public safety thinking in blue cities. Ideas once considered radical—civilian mental-health responders, violence interrupters, diversion programs, and summer employment as crime prevention—have entered the mainstream. The next challenge, she says, is integrating those innovations with policing instead of forcing cities to choose one side or the other.
Cities should combine restrained, targeted enforcement with violence prevention, mental-health response, youth employment, good lighting, maintained public spaces, and strong social infrastructure. “There is a way to create a safety strategy in which police are one civic service—but they’re just one—and there are many other civic services that can be woven together in order to provide a safe and vibrant city,” Glazer tells us.
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Elizabeth Glazer, "A Cheap Fix for Urban Crime," The Atlantic, May 19, 2026.
George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety," The Atlantic, March 1982. 
And you can learn more about the work of Vital City at www.vitalcitynyc.org. 
If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026

Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi came to national prominence in 2003, as the mastermind behind then-Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s internet-fueled insurgent bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. That groundbreaking campaign effort, which presciently harnessed grassroots and online Democratic base energy to challenge a seemingly out-of-touch party establishment that had coalesced early around John Massachusetts Senator Kerry, fell short – remember the “Dean Scream” implosion in Iowa? – but it nonetheless set the stage for a new paradigm in political campaigning. 
Trippi then went on to further build his career boosting Democrats willing to challenge the inside-the-Beltway party power structure, working with candidates like Jerry Brown, who crushed former eBay CEO Meg Whitman in the 2010 California gubernatorial race, or former Alabama Senator Doug Jones, now running for governor in that ruby red state. So we asked Trippi, who also hosts his own entertaining and informative political podcast, That Trippi Show, to join us on BCB to dissect the current state of the Democratic Party, and assess the party’s prospects in the upcoming midterms.
Our conversation begins with Trippi explaining how the Dean campaign pioneered a direct relationship between candidates and supporters through blogs, online communities, meetups and small-dollar fundraising, which created a new campaigning infrastructure that made Barack Obama’s successful 2008 insurgent campaign possible: many early Obama supporters and digital organizers, Trippi says, came out of the Dean movement. But Trippi argues that Democratic leaders learned the narrowest possible lesson – how to harness grassroots enthusiasm to raise contributions online – while Republicans eventually grasped the deeper significance of bypassing traditional media and communicating directly with voters. Donald Trump, he says, is the candidate who best recreated the Dean campaign’s direct connection with supporters by turning Twitter into his personal political platform.
When then turn to the current divided state of the Democratic Party, with left-wing candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or Graham Platner (before he dropped out) winning swing state primaries over more traditional Democrats. Trippi argues, contra the conventional wisdom, that these sorts of energized leftist candidates are actually more likely to unify the party and increase turnout from more infrequent and politically alienated voters than conventional centrists, and therefore have better electoral chances this November. In answer to our objections – don’t these candidates run the risk of turning off more culturally traditional black voters, or working class voters? – Trippi strongly argues that the midterm elections are about one thing: Trump’s chaotic, destructive, and corrupt governance, and that for increasingly angry voters faced with Trump’s insanities the divides within and amongst Democrats fade into irrelevance. 
Based on polling, special-election results and his own focus groups, Trippi suggests Democrats are poised to win back the Senate and score unexpected victories well beyond the usual battlegrounds. He identifies races in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, Maine, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Kansas as potentially now competitive. His work for Doug Jones in Alabama has convinced him that Trump’s position has deteriorated even in deeply Republican territory, and he compares the approaching election to the Republican landslide of 1980, when numerous Democratic senators thought to be safe were unexpectedly defeated. This time, he believes, Republicans could suffer the surprise losses.
“Forget about a ‘blue wave,’ this is a massive shock wave in response to Trump and what he’s done,” Trippi argues about the current psychology of the midterm electorate. ““There’s something that has become more toxic in the second [Trump] term than any concerns about what this Democrat or that Democrat might do.”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Sandeep's early profile piece on Howard Dean and his presidential campaign: "Tough Guy," The Stranger, May 15, 2003. 
Joe Trippi, "That Trippi Show," weekly podcast.
If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026

Elected on a law-and-order platform, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs with a June 1971 press conference in which he declared drug abuse on the streets of American cities to be “public enemy number one.” Or so the conventional narrative goes. But drug historian Emily Dufton says that the true story is much more complicated, and interesting.
In fact, Dufton writes in her fascinating new book, Addiction Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, between 1971 and 1973 the Nixon administration presided over a massive expansion of publicly funded methadone clinics and other treatment services that began to deliver real results in addressing the country’s burgeoning heroin addiction crisis, before largely abandoning the effort in the face of political backlash and public misunderstanding. And that was just the first of many systemic failures in a maddening, decades-long history of missed opportunities and failed approaches to dealing with the opioid addiction problem that plagues blue cities, which Dufton lays out in her book.
So we invited Emily to join us to talk about the history of what has gone wrong with our efforts to treat opioid addiction. That initial, promising early ’70s effort to build an expansive treatment system of methadone clinics was fully defunded once Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. After that, she tells us, the clinic system was largely privatized, and efforts to effectively and comprehensively help people with addiction became secondary to the profit motives of drug manufacturers and clinic operators. This was, she says, the rise of what she terms Addiction Inc., and she points out that today only about one in five Americans with addiction receives medication-assisted treatment (via one of the three approved drugs: methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone), which is the gold standard for treating opioid addiction.
As the conversation continues, it turns personal, as Sandeep explains both his deep reluctance to treat his own spiraling addiction in the ’90s with methadone and how, once he overcame the stigma, “methadone saved my life.” And Dufton tells the story of Dana, a close high school friend whose debilitating opioid addiction led to his suicide shortly after his 30th birthday, a tragedy that inspired her to spend eight years researching and writing the book.
As the episode concludes, we come to the disheartening conclusion that the American debate on addiction is trapped between two poles: either punishment without treatment or, as is too often the case in blue cities, tolerance without intervention. Emily then points to the counterexample of Switzerland, which in the 1980s faced an addiction crisis similar to that in the U.S., but subsequently developed an effective, multipronged approach that combines law enforcement with robust treatment interventions to greatly reduce the suffering and social harm addiction creates.
“Other countries don’t have the same issues with medication-assisted treatment that the United States does, and of course their overdose deaths are significantly lower,” Dufton says. “We should be almost embarrassed in the United States about how poorly we treat this issue. But I think we’re just too angry at drug users and simply too ready to transform their forms of treatment into additional forms of punishment to actually change our way of thinking.”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Emily Dufton, Addiction Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, University of Chicago Press (2026).