A Crosswalk, a Coffee, and a Country at Risk
The everyday is political. From public space to civic silence, it all adds up.
My apologies for resending this, but I made a mistake with the video upload on the original.
I’ve been critical of the U.S. for a long time — not because I left, but because the cracks have always been there. Urban planning that isolates. A culture that puts profit over people. A political system where silence feels safer than speaking up.
Today, I posted a Friki de Bici YouTube video about a simple crosswalk moment in Valencia, a Medium essay about why cafés and bars matter, and this issue of Never Retire. On the surface, they’re different stories. But together, they say something about where we’re headed — and why this moment in American democracy is pivotal.
And this isn’t abstract for me. This morning I got a tension headache watching late-night TV hosts apologize while Trump embarrassed himself — and his “supporters” — at the UN. Maybe it’s selfish, but I’m unwilling to spend the next 50 years living inside that cycle of anxiety and sadness. That refusal is what Never Retire is really about: not waiting for systems to change, but insisting on creating a different way to live, right now.
What follows is the YouTube video and Medium article — Stop Telling Me to Drink Coffee and Eat at Home — and how it connects to all of this.
I discuss the price of a cup of coffee or a beer with some frequency.
Because I think it’s important and that too many people overlook the bigger picture — how hospitality and culture are connected. How much it costs to get a beverage obviously matters in a super concrete way, but it’s ultimately it’s symbolic of something deeper.
Readers often jump in with the obvious retort:
Just drink your coffee at home. Cook your meals instead of eating out.
It’s an argument that treats consumption as purely individual, a calculation of savings and costs. But life doesn’t happen only inside the home. Cities don’t thrive if everyone retreats behind their own front door.
What I’m really talking about is access to public life. And how food and drink — hospitality — is the gateway to that access.
In Spain, ordering a coffee or beer is less about indulgence and more about participation. A café isn’t a splurge. It’s a civic space, a point of connection that remains affordable to most people.
In the U.S., where the same act can cost three or four times as much, stepping outside to take part in that public life becomes a choice reserved for those with disposable income.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Americans let this inequity slide. For decades, we’ve accepted the erosion of public space as if it were natural. We’ve long prioritized roads and vehicles over public places where people actually connect. When civic life is treated as secondary, inflated prices for something as simple as coffee don’t register as a crisis — they just blend into the background of everyday life.
Here again, it’s all connected. We just have to get over our brand of American apathy and move past the notion that everything is so black and white. That, if it’s about coffee and beer, it can’t be about public space, which is deeply about society and culture.
Social infrastructure is a term researchers use for the everyday physical places where people gather — cafés, small restaurants, community centers, libraries — those spots where public life happens in unforced, unbranded ways. When there’s abundant social infrastructure, people report stronger civic trust and greater well-being because they interact more often across class, culture, and income lines.
In his now-classic, yet simultaneously forgotten book — Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community — Robert Putnam sounded the alarm in what was really a series of alarms. For example, James Kunstler had written a more entertaining treatment of the topic in 1993’s The Geography of Nowhere.
People like Kunstler and Putnam put the writing on the wall before my 22-year-old daughter was even born. It has already been 25 years since Bowling Alone. Thirty-two years since Kunstler’s epic trashing of suburbia:
Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies… It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.
Kunstler’s comparison to pizza could not be more apropos to the present article.
I read his book — several times — as an urban planning student and researcher in San Francisco back in 2002. Nearly 20 years later, I got into hospitality, when I started really making the connection between city planning and hospitality.
Clearly, most of the United States didn’t listen to or think about any of this. Things have only gone from bad to worse if you consider public space, particularly safe and comfortable public space where citizens can eat, drink, and socialize.
In most US places (notice how I don’t say “America”), you can’t really walk anywhere meaningful — only about 12% of daily trips are within walking distance (15 mins) in a typical U.S. metro area. Of course, that’s because, according to conspiracy theorists, the 15-minute city is a conspiracy!
The 12% statistic strongly suggests that many people are structurally prevented from spontaneous access to cafés, small bars, grocery shops, or simple public gathering places.
Of course, road and highway building doesn’t help.
In a 2024 paper, Cornell researchers argue (quite effectively) that “Urban highways are barriers to social ties.” They map out how highways carved into cities reduce social connectivity among neighborhoods, even over very short distances. Sidewalks, local shops, places to stop and sit — all those drop off.
So — morning coffee and beers with friends distills down to these three points across most of the US:
Something you access with a car. Very Starbucks on the coffee and very dangerous on the beers.
Something inaccessible to large swaths of the population. An indulgence you’re better off doing inside the house because you’ll never retire if you do it in public.
Something that’s impossible anyway at any inviting human scale — even if it was widely accessible — because there’s (basically) zero real public space designed for socializing. Unless you call a bar stool public space. As much as I love bars, even I don’t.
It — the cascading degradation of US life and place — it all connects.
Which brings us back to coffee and beer. They’re not trivial examples. They’re shorthand for whether public life is affordable and accessible. When you can sit down for a €2 café in the city where I now live — Valencia, Spain — you’re buying much more than caffeine. You’re buying into the life of the city. You’re reminding yourself you’re not alone.
In the U.S., when that same act costs $5 or $6, it stops being a daily ritual and starts being a lifestyle marker. You either have the extra cash to take part or you don’t. And when enough people stop taking part, the very idea of a shared civic life erodes. Plus — even if you’re willing and financially able to participate — you’re often stuck with subpar urban or suburban surroundings.
Public health researchers have shown that the absence of affordable third places — of social infrastructure — correlates with higher rates of loneliness, depression, and even premature mortality. Economists have mapped how inequality in access to social infrastructure widens civic divides. Urban planners have been warning about this since at least the 1990s.
And yet, we still shrug and say: just make it at home.
Food and drink aren’t just consumer choices. They’re the most accessible entry points into public culture. They’re how strangers become neighbors, how neighborhoods become communities, how cities become more than collections of roads and private houses.
Coffee isn’t a human right. Beer isn’t a public service. But the ability to share them, affordably, in public — that’s part of what makes a place livable. Of what gives it a high quality of life. That’s what signals whether a city values connection over isolation, people over machines, culture over apathy.
And that’s why I’ll keep talking about the price of a cup of coffee or a beer. Because it’s never just about the drink. It’s about where we choose to value hospitality — as part of a healthy social and civic life, and as a cornerstone of how we think about our cities.