Exploring the Evil Developer Trope in TV and Movies (Pop Culture Urbanism)

have you noticed that developers and movies and tv shows are always just kind of evil and i'm not talking about like you know impolite i'm talking bribe politicians steal from the poor sink the entire state of california into the ocean evil there's 50 more houses to tear down after yours seems to string a bell is worse than a drug dealer he's a developer this building is gonna ruin the views you jerk and you're gonna tear all the houses down yes sure there exists evil people just like there are

evil businessmen evil politicians evil in-laws but as a city planner i had the opportunity to work with a lot of developers and you know some are the big bad crony developers who would imminent domain an entire block just to make a project work but many more are small developers who don't want to play the politics and just want to build buildings and improve their community if we want our communities to grow and remain vibrant developers are a key part of that so when did the developer become th

e pop culture stand-in for evil the evil developer trope what exactly am i talking about well obviously i'm talking about developers what did you think i was talking about i'm talking about a person who renders lan usable for a new use and i'm not talking about you know a whole bunch of different kinds of developers like people who build infrastructure or natural resource extraction or anything having to do with pollution at some point the job of development became synonymous with being evil or

greedy where does this come from where are we now and if you're a city enthusiast like me what can we be doing better [Applause] the year is 1945 world war ii is over and millions of american servicemen are returning home they're getting married starting businesses and having lots and lots of kids of course contraception isn't a thing yet now if you're the smart urbanist who watches my videos you might be wondering where are they all going to live and you might be thinking cities well you'd be w

rong people didn't want to live in the city there was too much crime too much noise and of course it's the 1940s so there's a good deal of racism mixed in in 1946 a movie came out you might have heard of it it's called it's a wonderful life and it really tells the stories of these two different developers on the one hand you have george bailey he's a good developer he owns the humble building and loan association and they build housing for the good of the community on the other hand you have mr

potter who wants to turn into town into sleazeville usa it's here i think we get a lasting depiction of what development is going to look like in the decades to come development could be the american dream or it could be a pathway to corruption and degradation as you can probably tell from the title of the video we're going to talk about a lot of mr potter's but what about the george bailey's where did they go and we'll have the living room right in here for this first generation of victorious w

ar veterans and their families developers were held up as heroes this is reflected in the mid-century modern ideal of suburbanism the idea of progress the future and a great big beautiful tomorrow [Music] indeed walt disney is the hero of this generation building disneyland disney world and the experimental prototype community of tomorrow geniuses like disney were going to take us to the future on monorails and flying car super highways in fact between the end of world war ii and the early 1970s

there were very few movies that villainized developers and when you think about it it's kind of crazy i mean there really haven't been many movies that are super positive about change or development recently just off the top of my head the only one i can think of is 2013's her and at best that's really neutral rather than positive without the future why is that [Music] and the soul train gang earth wind and fire and mighty mighty [Music] case i have a crack the year is 1975 jaws is the biggest

movie of the year you're a young boomer you know what's hip you know what's up you know what's down your parents mortgage you're in the middle of a recession there's a little bit of inflation going on economists call this stagflation if your parents foreclose on the house you're going to lose the only home you've ever known it's going to get potentially bulldozed and turned into a shopping mall or a golf course or god forbid more housing that's right folks where development was previously about

futuristic modernism development today it's a threat to housing the bedrock of your nostalgia everything that's good about america and this is reflected in popular culture from around the time there are so many movies where evil developers are the main villain and i mean so many movies okay let's get through this before i pass out 1978 superman lex luthor is going to sink the state of california into the ocean in order to raise the property value of his desert real estate 1980 caddyshack nouveau

riche al shervik is a douchey developer and basically just wants to flatten everything 1980 blues brothers john belushi and dan aykroyd gotta get the band back together to save the orphanage from you know who developers 1982 poultry guys the family is haunted by ghost because oh housing developers were so stingy they built a house on a cemetery without moving the bodies who would do that 1985 the goonies the kids go on one last adventure because the developers ah those guys are so eager to fore

close on the dad's house and turned it into a country club for rich people 1985 summer rental john candy has to uh sail race with the douchebag real estate mogul to avoid of course getting kicked out of their summer rental 1986 one crazy summer john cusack meets demi moore and they have to save their grandfather's house from being turned into god forbid condos 1987 battery's not included cute little aliens help an elderly landlord couple fight back against greedy developers who try to rough them

up and force them to leave 1989 back to the future too where biff all that guy is basically mr potter turning their town into sleazeville usa 2.0 by the late 80s developers aren't the shiny futuristic hero of tomorrow they're greedy corrupt immoral pushy the types of people who would throw their own grandmother out onto the street just to make a penny now i'm not trying to say actually the bad guys are good most of these people what they're doing is unethical many cases flat out illegal but wha

t these characters represent about american society is that americans have done a 180 on growth and change and the people who make that happen but why just a generation ago americans were excited about monorails and flying cars remember walt disney remember epcot remember george bailey ever happened to george bailey [Music] working as a city planner i've met a lot of mr potters trust me but i also met a lot of george bailey's in fact if you spend time with developers you'll find that often they'

re decent people who care very deeply about their projects and the neighborhoods they work in maybe some are trying to rehab a property so someone can have a home or they're trying to put shops near where people live building a walkable community but here's the rub the way we plan cities makes developers do bad things if you were to take george bailey out of the world of it's a wonderful life and drop him off into a modern city with all the zoning and regulations what would happen he'll have to

go through discretionary approvals get permits and insurance from all different kinds of agencies buddy up with all different kinds of public officials take jabs from every direction from city council here's what i'll end up having to do either sweet wholesome george bailey is going to realize he doesn't want to have anything to do with this political racket and he's going to find another career i don't need 24 hours i i don't have to talk to anybody i know right now and the answer's no no dog y

ou sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money well it doesn't mr potter or george ultimately comes the crony that the system forces him to be he's gonna have to play the game buddy up with power players and policy makers over time george becomes mr potter where's that money you silly stupid old fool the scene is all these bad developers who have stuck around and play the game but the unseen is all the good developers who never m

aterialize because they don't want to get involved in development looking at the system from the outside you might think oh my god developers are so evil and if you think like that well kid you got moxie you got guts you got what it takes to make it in this city get me jerry we're going to make a goddamn movie but this is where i want to pause for a minute because in the 80s it's mostly been a battle between good developers and bad developers developers could be good if they just wouldn't push p

oor mr walsh's house and try to turn into a playground for rich people as far as bad developers go their badness is individual to who they are but land development under this theory isn't inherently bad am i foreshadowing something the year is 2002 you're a young millennial you're going with your parents to see hey arnold the movie the premise future tech industries wants to flatten arnold's neighborhood they're going to build a shopping mall and the ceo is like what's wrong with old things so y

our little kid brain is thinking i don't want my neighborhood to get destroyed and have to change schools and lose all my friends and then you realize change is bad and then you realize in big people words development is bad where before movies had a bad developer fighting with a good property owner increasingly in the early 2000s you get a situation where change is befalling an entire neighborhood we go from the evil developer trope to development being inherently evil this is what some people

have in mind when they talk about the term gentrification essentially a neighborhood being changed to be more suitable to middle class preferences but often at the cost of the existing less affluent residents fast forward to today and this is a common storyline on starz's vita and is hentaified you have stories about the hispanic neighborhood of boyle heights in los angeles dealing with gentrification both shows depict the gentrifiers as being insensitive out of touch and working with them is a

betrayal of the local latino community there's nothing gentrifiers hate more than being called gentrifiers it makes sense if you've lived in a neighborhood for decades or maybe even centuries and the rents are rising and your community is getting kicked out and replaced by people who don't look like you or speak like you it can be frustrating but as with everything in urban planning it's a little more complicated than that let's think about it from the other direction imagine you're coming from

rural iowa you have a dream of making it big in la you work hard and save from every paycheck and eventually can make the move there are two ways this could go down the first would be to bid up the price of existing housing unseating someone else maybe a retired abuelita or we could allow enough housing to be built so that this newcomer doesn't have to push anyone out the reality is that zoning regulation and local laws basically force all change to only come in the form of kicking out current r

esidents instead of just making room for everyone and you see this gentrification theme in all kinds of shows unbreakable kimmy schmidt daredevil even king of the hill beginning in the 2000s the gang can't just get back together and fight off the evil developer and everything will get better no the threat is change and development itself today tv shows don't cast the developer as being evil because he's rude or greedy they cast him as evil because development is inherently evil he's just kicking

people out and replacing them with richer people instead of actually building more housing now these problems are real and complicated basically all of our major cities have a really serious affordable housing crisis but it's bad policy that makes development bad we have to remember that zoning and housing constraints mean that no new housing can be built so all the change that happens in our communities takes the form of painful evictions or rent hikes developers like farmers and doctors provi

de an essential service we should want them to do well and we should build a system that makes them do better evil developers are not likely to leave the silver screen anytime soon but they don't have to be in our communities if we want to build better stronger communities for everyone with more jobs and opportunity and better housing we need to build a system that gets us fewer mr potters and more george bailey's just remember this mr potter that this rabble you're talking about they do most of

the working and paying and living and dying in this community well is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms in a bath return to me that's all for this episode of pop culture urbanism i've been your host nolan gray go ahead and help us out hit that like button if you like what you saw today and if we missed an evil developer who you are particularly drawn to let us know in the comments below of course there will be more videos be sure to hit that subs

cribe button and hit the bell for notifications to me [Applause] actually the bad guys are good