What We Learned From Bogotá’s Buses

Dear Headway reader,

Recently, I traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, which is twice the size of New York, to report on a transit system that was once the envy of cities around the world. The system, a rapid bus network called TransMilenio, rolled out in 2000. Its buses weren’t as big or as fast as trains, but they were up and running in a fraction of the time and at a vastly lower cost. Millions of residents living in far-flung, formerly disconnected slums suddenly gained access to jobs and schools.

The idea of rapid buses became the rage from Jakarta to Mexico City, and Enrique Peñalosa, the Bogotá mayor who cooked up the idea for TransMilenio, became a globe-trotting celebrity after his term ended. Grist Magazine even compared him to George Harrison and the Dalai Lama.

Peñalosa is an outsized figure — literally; he is N.B.A. tall — with a gift for hogging the spotlight. But there was another colorful character whose contributions to TransMilenio I had to leave on the cutting room floor.

Super Citizen

Antanas Mockus served as mayor both before and after Peñalosa. A philosopher and mathematician by training, he first won election in a landslide, after being ousted as president of Colombia’s National University for mooning an auditorium full of booing student protesters. (He explained the dropping of his pants by citing the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence.”)

In office, he showered on national television and wandered Bogotá’s streets in a Spandex outfit, calling himself Super Citizen.

His antics were serious — and highly effective. TransMilenio would never have gotten far without him. He took over a city whose murder rate was among the worst in the world, more than seven times as high as New York’s at its peak. Bogotá’s streets were unsafe, congested and chaotic. As a Times colleague reported back then, traffic signals were regarded by drivers as “optional,” disputes resolved “with machetes, guns and grenades.”

Bogotá, Mockus believed, was paralyzed by a lack of local pride. So he hired mimes to shame jaywalkers; he wore the superhero costume to promote sidewalk civility and showered on television to encourage residents to save water. The homicide rate plummeted. And after he prohibited the sale of alcohol during the wee hours, traffic accidents did too. Residents living in slums got drinking water and sewers for the first time.

Building on What’s Been Built

With the city gaining a sense of possibility and progress, the groundwork was laid for TransMilenio. Then, crucially, during his second term, Mockus embraced Peñalosa’s rapid bus system and continued to build it out. His slogan was “build on what has been built.” But those who followed were less eager to do the same. TransMilenio suffered through the terms of subsequent mayors from different political parties who didn’t maintain and expand a project strongly associated with a rival politician.

Claudia Lopez, who just ended her term as Bogotá’s mayor last month, seemed to embrace Mockus’s philosophy of continuity — in her case, not only signing onto an expansion of TransMilenio but also breaking ground on the first line of a new metro, an initiative promoted by, among others, Gustavo Petro, another former mayor who is now Colombia’s president.

Lopez described her thinking to me as “political feminism.” “Many other women mayors I know take the same approach,” she said when I visited her palatial office in City Hall. “It’s about not needing to get all the credit but also about accepting that you are not as important as your constituents.

“In the end,” she told me, “TransMilenio does not belong to Peñalosa. And the metro doesn’t belong to Petro.”

That’s a lesson I took away from my reporting. We live in divided, short-sighted times. Transformative projects like TransMilenio require long-term “cathedral thinking.” They don’t conform to election cycles. They’re not the work of any single person.

They’re like cities themselves: endless, incremental, evolving and collective.

— Michael Kimmelman

Revisiting

In 2005, The Times profiled a recreational vehicle park sprouting on the edge of Austin, Texas, memorably described as “a bargain-rack version of the American dream.” The story noted the novelty of the idea of an R.V. park dedicated to lifting people out of homelessness, and introduced Times readers to Alan Graham, the former real-estate developer who came up with the idea.

In the intervening years, Mr. Graham’s vision evolved significantly. He came to believe that the best path out of homelessness for its hardest-hit victims isn’t, after all, a low-cost entry point to homeownership, but something money can’t buy: community.

Now, 18 years later, Lucy Tompkins, a former Headway fellow, has reported a deep portrait of the place Mr. Graham made his life’s work, which the city of Austin has made central to its plans for tackling skyrocketing homelessness: a place called Community First! Village.

Links we liked, housing edition

• When the Mayor of Detroit proposed raising taxes on empty lots and lowering them on occupied buildings, he didn’t realize he was tapping into a philosophy of a late 19th century populist named Henry George. Conor Dougherty, who writes about economics and housing for the Times, wrote a delightfully nerdy story about the Georgist movement — people long seen as “the tinfoil-hat-wearers of economics,” he writes — and how elements of their thinking are now being embraced by a new generation trying to encourage more affordable housing.

• New housing is critical for New York City. Vishaan Chakrabati and his team at the architecture firm Practice for Urbanism, mapped a way to build 500,000 new units of housing without substantially changing neighborhoods. For an ingenious visualization in Times Opinion, his firm looked first for vacant lots and underused sites that were not in flood zones and were close to transit. Then they explored how multifamily housing might be introduced. It’s a fascinating thought experiment — and, who knows, maybe it will give developers and city planners some good ideas.

• Abigail Glasgow, writing for Architectural Digest, highlights another vital aspect of addressing the affordable housing crisis: community building. In Vermont, Rhode Island and Texas, community engagement and participatory design strategies are being used to reshape perceptions of public housing. Evernorth, a Vermont nonprofit, for instance, creates spaces where residents can connect as they transition from homelessness to permanent housing, fostering a sense of belonging. A coalition in Texas unites diverse community members to collaboratively combat homelessness. These approaches seek to change stereotypes surrounding affordable housing, with an emphasis on empathy, compassion and ensuring equal housing opportunities.

Your turn

We’d love to hear from you. Where have you seen progress in your own community? Where are you not seeing progress, but wish you were? What links do you recommend to the Headway team? Let us know at dearheadway@nytimes.com.