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Few topics are as pressing as the future of our cities, as ever-increasing urbanization is set to define the face of global society and economic development in the 21st century. In his new book The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution, Benjamin Schneider examines the major crises and questions shaping North American city-building and urbanism. From the decline and revival of social housing initiatives to the role streets play in a city’s collective consciousness, Schneider offers a comprehensive exploration of urban life in a rapidly changing world. In a recent interview, Schneider and I discussed the specific challenges facing policymakers, urban planners, and the private sector as they work to address decades-old housing and transportation crises.
Opening the book with a vivid description of San Francisco’s glittering financial district, the home of some of the world’s most cutting-edge technological innovation, Schneider quickly shifts focus to the vast stretches of land surrounding this hub of height and ambition. He describes an almost endless expanse extending south along the San Francisco Peninsula and radiating outward around the Bay, filled with hundreds of thousands of detached homes. Frozen in amber since their construction decades ago, this sea of sprawl has remained largely unchanged even as the city at its center helped usher the world into the digital age.
Serving as a kind of ground zero for the contemporary North American housing crisis, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area have followed a path of housing scarcity that has become all too familiar to residents of major cities across Canada and the United States. Schneider traces how new housing was effectively prohibited for decades through restrictive zoning, a highly politicized approvals process, and layers of complex regulation, all in service of what he calls "the cult of the single-family home."
The result of a freeze on new housing in a booming urban centre is predictable: rapidly rising housing costs, the displacement of low- and middle-income residents, and the associated social problems of mass homelessness, overcrowding, and declining neighborhood vitality. Yet Schneider does not accept this dreary status quo as an inevitable outcome of shortsighted policy and entrenched NIMBYism. He details the various reforms implemented across the Bay Area over the last decade, which in some cases have produced more new homes in a few short years than had been built over entire decades.
While speaking with Schneider, he emphasized the importance of land use and regulatory reforms to deliver more market-rate housing, but felt such methods could only achieve true affordability when paired with public investment into subsidized housing, often referred to as social or public housing. Though supportive of the concept, the hurdles to achieving any significant number of social housing units is addressed in The Unfinished Metropolis, a welcome reprieve from the often fantastical speeches and ribbon cutting ceremonies surrounding these projects. Schneider brings attention to the particularly outrageous cost escalations found in California, where the cost to build affordable housing projects frequently top $1 million dollars per unit, double what similar sized homes cost to bring to market by the private sector.
For those familiar with Toronto’s ongoing struggle to deliver affordable housing at scale through its public builder, CreateTO, this story may sound all too familiar. Founded in 2018 after years of discussion, the agency was tasked with developing new homes on publicly owned land while aiming “to streamline planning and uncover large-scale cost savings.” Nearly a decade later, following an unprecedented condo boom and repeated difficulty navigating the city's own development review process, not a single unit has been completed. Construction on a handful of projects has only just begun over the past year, with occupancy still years away.
In a recent construction update for one of the agency’s mixed-income, midrise projects at 1113–1117 Dundas Street West, it was boasted that the “deconstruction” of a single house had been completed after an entire summer of workers dismantling the structure by hand in an effort to “reduce emissions.” For those unfamiliar with the construction industry, demolishing a house typically takes hours, not months. To some members of the public, such severely delayed timelines—further prolonged by literally medieval construction methods—may appear to reflect a deep inefficiency within the public sector, undermining confidence in the public sector's ability to deliver affordable housing at scale.
Turning from buildings to the spaces between them, Schneider highlights the growing success of "open streets" in cities across the United States, describing them as "some of the most striking and visible transformations of American cities that have ever occurred." One of the most notable examples in The Unfinished Metropolis is the expanding open street section of Broadway in New York City. Once dominated almost entirely by vehicular traffic, this bustling artery of Manhattan is now thronged by pedestrians and cyclists day and night, following a radical rethinking of what a street could be initiated in the 2000s by then-Mayor Bloomberg.
Schneider explained to me the extensive opposition his research uncovered to the initial Broadway proposal. Members of the business community expressed concerns about reduced foot traffic and declining revenues, fears that were difficult to allay without a local precedent to reference. Perhaps the greatest resistance, however, came from within Bloomberg's own municipal administration. Schneider detailed the intense "siloing" between public agencies, with transit authorities, departments of transportation, and infrastructure stakeholders all competing for priority during street redesigns, often resulting in institutional gridlock.
Conflict between public agencies with overlapping and sometimes competing mandates affects not only efforts to improve public spaces but also initiatives aimed at enhancing public transportation. Toronto is no stranger to this phenomenon, where attempts by advocates and the TTC to secure dedicated road space for the city’s busiest surface routes have faced years of delays, often attributed to resistance from Transportation Services and City Hall, which are hesitant to reduce space for private vehicles. In this context, San Francisco offers a success story that can serve as a source of inspiration
Unlike most North American cities, San Francisco's municipal transportation service and transit operator are one and the same, known as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Schneider claims this one-stop-shop method of municipal transportation has resulted in a drastically quicker and more widespread approach to bus lane delivery. A glance at the city's network of dedicated transit lanes appears to confirm this theory, with dozens of streets receiving transit priority measures, and plans for further expansion detailed on the SFMTA website. Compared to Toronto's paltry network of (dubiously enforced) transit-only lanes, such a network surely appears a dream to transit advocates and the TTC seeking relief from the city's endemic traffic.
To conclude The Unfinished Metropolis, Schneider reflects on what the future of American urbanism might look like, celebrating the major city-building achievements already realized while acknowledging the uncertainties posed by rapidly changing political realities. He presents a practical vision for 21st-century cities, complete with all the complexities that entails, and avoids the all-too-common historicist impulse to return to an imagined idyllic city of the early 20th century.
Schneider's first book is a valuable and timely summary of the challenges facing North American cities in the 2020s, thoughtfully considering solutions from across the political spectrum. It is refreshing in its lack of partisanship and absence of tired political tropes that so often derail discussions of urban policy, instead allowing his evident passion and desire to improve the urban form to guide his analysis.
That said, The Unfinished Metropolis leaves significant opportunities unexplored, as it does not dive deeply into any single issue. I often found myself frustrated while reading, as just when Schneider seemed to reach the heart of a topic and a valuable takeaway was emerging from his well-researched analysis, the narrative moved on to the next subject, returning to broad description and general breakdowns to repeat the cycle. For this reason, the book serves as a compelling introduction to the world of urbanism in 2025, but more seasoned readers may be left wanting greater depth and a more thorough exploration of the ideas presented.
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A copy of The Unfinished Metropolis can be purchased through Island Press and all major online retailers. Benjamin can be found online on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @urbenschneider.
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UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe—from proposal through to completion. Other services include Instant Reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from initial application.
