The Trump administration has weaponized time since the moment the president was sworn into office. Trump has signed more than 85 executive orders since taking office, the most of any president in the first 100 days since FDR. DOGE gave government workers a matter of days to decide whether to take a buyout. Then the administration delivered mass layoffs with no advance warning. Everything Trump and co-president Elon Musk have done has been animated by speed, the “move fast and break things” ethos espoused by those Silicon Valley titans who sat front row to the inauguration.
When the administration gets pushback, they delay — and yet here, too, they use time as a cudgel. The act of delaying creates angst: Could there be more delays? Could this action be reversed? The tenuousness of it runs entirely counter to what we would consider the tenets of good leadership: deliberation, input, steadfastness. Measure twice, cut once.
Trump’s base is cheering the pace of change. For everyone else, the change is hard enough; its suddenness is traumatizing.
While everyone is rapt watching the Trump administration’s moves, cities need to launch a counteroffensive.
By contrast to what’s going on in Washington, D.C., cities are struggling with their own inability to do anything fast enough. Most of the time, they cannot permit a retail space or approve a housing development or build new infrastructure in a reasonable time frame. We have enabled the molasses-slow pace because … well, how exactly do you get a city to accelerate its permitting processes or regulate construction more quickly? It is a hard problem to vote out of office.
But now, there are (at least) two ticking time bombs for cities.
Speeding up cities
First there’s real potential that cities will suffer devastating losses of federal funding while their local economies have not recovered from the pandemic, resulting in budget cuts and / or financial instability in the years to come. If cities do not figure out how to generate revenue quickly, they are in for trouble. They will have to balance the budget not just in 2025, but for the foreseeable future. Check the budget projections for everywhere from Portland, OR, to Reno to San Diego to Houston — it doesn’t look good.
Second, people who are not diehard urbanites are looking at their watches. They’ve been waiting for a turnaround in their cities for the past five years, and they see time is running out for change.
They’re saying: When will Seattle clean up its streets? When will San Francisco build its housing? When will downtown Cleveland turn around? Residents have already been waiting a long time for positive change and unless they start to see some soon, they will leave.
Yes, these both sound like rewarmed urban doom loop scenarios — but the distinction is that the wrench here is not remote work, it’s Trump and time.
Time is money, but cheaper
Regardless of whether cities want to pick up the pace, they will have to. The good news is that speeding things up doesn’t have to cost cities much.
For example, in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass created an executive order in 2022 to speed up affordable housing construction. Under Executive Directive 1 (ED1), L.A. city departments must complete the pre-construction review process for all 100 percent affordable housing developments within 60 days. Building permits must be issued within five days. Although this directive doesn’t create more revenue for the city, there are real benefits to the city in saving time and it shows that cities can do their work faster. Where else can cities shrink the timeframe for their regulatory processes?
Though the Trump administration’s speed is excessive and dangerous, the slow, deliberative pace that we work through big public urban decisions is also toxic.
In Philadelphia, we spent two years considering whether to allow an NBA stadium downtown only to have the developers abruptly pull out of the deal. Philadelphia won’t get that time and energy back. Could we somehow cap how long we debate these big projects in public?
But we shouldn’t pressure only city government to move faster. We need the non-functioning parts of the private sector to move faster as well. Many cities are struggling with vacancy, whether vacant storefronts in Boston or vacant lots in Detroit or surface parking lots in St. Louis.
What if we had a use-it-or-lose clause that had a countdown clock going into effect upon transferring a deed? These underperforming assets are a problem, but there’s no incentive for their owners to do anything with them. In fact, many owners buy vacant land and parking lots simply to wait until they’re worth something, depressing entire neighborhoods in the process.
The Trump administration is sending out incomplete versions of their policy changes as if they’re the minimum viable product of an app that their opposition has to debug. For example, when they posted their list of 443 buildings for sale and irked the GSA (General Services Administration) in the process, they rescinded it, and now we await the 2.0 version of the list. To many, this is chaotic and a sign of incompetence, but it may also be the quickest way to outsource the user feedback process while forcing opponents to do the work of pointing out what’s wrong with the policies.
While everyone is rapt watching the Trump administration’s moves, cities need to launch a counteroffensive. They need to move fast and build things.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
MORE FROM THE NEW URBAN ORDER