Ep.279 - Michael Pollack on Sidewalks

Speaker A: Welcome to the Business Scholarship Podcast, a place for interdisciplinary conversations in the broad world of business research. My name is Andrew Jennings, and it's my pleasure to be your host. If you like what you hear today, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Plus leave a rating and let other people know about the show, too. And if you have ideas for the show, please let me know. My email address is andrewdrewkginnings.com and I look forward to hearing from you. All right, time for the episode. Our guest today is Michael Pollack, professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law. We'll be discussing his new book, Sidewalk the Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource. I'll, uh, have a link to the book's webpage in the show notes for the episode. Michael, welcome to the Business Scholarship Podcast.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me, Michael.

Speaker A: I am working from home today, so I have not journeyed out on a sidewalk yet. I think I probably will in a couple hours. You're in New York City, so I'm guessing the odds are probably pretty good that you have walked on a sidewalk at some point today or you will later today. We'll get to the business side of sidewalks in a minute. This is a Business Scholarship podcast, after all. Before we do that, I hope that you might introduce this project. What about your background made you want to write this book? What prompted this book? And why are sidewalks such a ubiquitous yet, uh, under considered part of life?

Speaker B: I teach and write primarily about property law, Han law, local governments. And my angle on all these areas of law is how do local institutions, whether they're government or private or business, how do local institutions make decisions about how to regulate and structure our neighborhoods? And how do those processes, how do the outcomes of those processes shape people's ability to participate in civil society and to flourish as individuals and as communities? When it comes to sidewalks in particular, sidewalks are at the center of many of our most significant public debates. That's something that I had not fully appreciated until I started getting into this work. What I started getting into this work from, um, is really during the pandemic, spending a lot of time, like a lot of folks did, walking around for exercise, walking around just to get out of the house, walking around to socialize because outside was a safer place to do that. And as I did that, I saw everyone else doing the same. I saw restaurants and businesses using the space. I saw communities, uh, using the space. And, and I started to think, gosh, this is a unique kind of public space. And it's unique because in addition to all of the ways in which sidewalks shape mobility for people, walkability, accessibility, they also implicate questions of business, of property rights, of taxation, of policing, homelessness, surveillance, free speech, public health, climate resilience, socioeconomic equity, racial equity. And so the vast array of issues that play out on the sidewalk or that have sidewalk implications locations makes them really worthy of closer study than they've gotten. The inherent flip side of all of this is that with all of these uses competing for the same bit of space, sidewalks are also serious sites of conflict. They're perhaps our, uh, most salient example in modern life of the tragedy of the commons, right? What had been the grazing field is now the sidewalk, where the risk of mismanaged, overuse or unpoliced, and I don't mean policing in the criminal justice or criminal law sense, but rather in the unregulated sense, where the risk of mismanaged or unregulated overuse can deplete that resource. And so sidewalks really deserve much more attention and much more investment than they tend to get from residents, officials, advocates, lawyers and scholars. And they deserve more efficient and more effective forms of both management and responsibility. And so I wrote the book to outline all of that and make a push and offer an agenda for that kind of shift that's rooted in real life explorations of cities and towns all across the country.

Speaker A: If a law professor is going to go out and write a big book on constitutional theory, I have some big new theory of the Constitution or the Supreme Court, or maybe even I have some big new book about the financial industry that I imagine is an easy sell for publishers. When you were going out and pitching this book and trying to find a, uh, publishing home for it, were editors instantly, uh, appreciative of the importance of this resource, the sidewalk, or did it take some convincing on your part to convey that, no, this is an important topic, and this is an important part of our lives, wherever we live, but particularly in suburban and urban areas of the country.

Speaker B: It's a great question. As one writes a book, one puts together a proposal and sends it out. And maybe on the one hand, it was obvious to editors why this was important. Maybe on the other hand, I'm just that convincing of a writer and advocate. I think it's a bit of both, right? I think that folks do recognize, and I should say as well, cities, officials, voters in many places are beginning to recognize the message of this book. So the book is drawing on their efforts and trying to broaden them, situate them in a broader scholarly agenda, and communicate that to an even wider audience. So I think, yeah, on the one hand, there are people who are beginning to understand this, perhaps with the same triggering event that got me turned onto the seal, namely or experienced during the pandemic. At the same time, there are a lot of folks who don't have that set of priors. When I talk about this book with friends or family, I remember when I first started writing it over Thanksgiving, I was talking to my extended family about the project. And for the first maybe two, three, five minutes of the conversation, you get folks looking at you like you're crazy, writing an entire book about the sidewalk. And then after that first five minutes, suddenly everyone starts having their own perspective to offer their own experience, their own story, their own. I remember, actually, yeah, that is an interesting point. I remember tripping over the sidewalk in this place. And here's how that affected my ability to get around or to get to work, or I remember what it was like when I was trying to run my small business and what I could or couldn't do on the sidewalk. The initial take of the conversation might be a bit, for some folks, perplexing. I hope that's true. I hope that folks are drawn into this book because they want to know, huh, huh? How could there be an entire book about the sidewalk? But then once they get into it, I think people do start to realize from their own life experiences just how much the message of the book resonates with them. And then they want to learn more about how do other places in the country handle these issues? What are other issues that play out that they haven't quite thought of before? What could we do to make things better?

Speaker A: So this book is about sidewalks writ large, but I want to focus the rest of our conversation on the thematic focus of this podcast, which is business and economics and commerce. So on that front, let's maybe start with the takeaway up front. Why are sidewalks a relevant topic for listeners of a business podcast? What would you want listeners to know and think about when it comes to the economic, commercial, business role of sidewalks in our lives?

Speaker B: So sidewalks are incredibly important for economic development and for community business. And this is true in a bunch of ways. One of them is the very concrete sort of adjacent businesses that use the sidewalk for commercial space, whether that's restaurants, cafes, or bars using the space to have more seating, to have more, more customers, whether it's a, uh, space for advertising, those, a frame, sandwich boards, or other Signs that businesses will put out on the sidewalk to draw customers inside their business, whether it's queuing. This is another huge use of the sidewalk that a lot of businesses do, especially where I live in Brooklyn. There'll be some bakery that goes viral on social media and there'll be a line around the block for folks waiting to get whatever the latest Cronut is. There's a great frozen yogurt place near Cardoza where I teach that often has a line around the block. And so that use of the sidewalk for the business to keep customers. And frankly that cue is itself a form of advertising. Right. Folks see it and say, uh, ah, whatever's going on in that business must be really great. I should get in this line and find out. So there are all of these literal tangible uses of the space for adjacent businesses. That's one sort of category of an answer to your. The other second category is businesses that are themselves just users of the sidewalk. And so that could be individuals, vendors, buskers, Girl Scouts selling cookies, things like that. And increasingly it's more uses of new technology to monetize a sidewalk deployment. There are in fact examples being rolled out or that some VCs are trying to experiment with essentially vending machines on wheels or robotic vending machines on wheels that would trundle down a sidewalk where folks could buy over the counter medicine or Q tips or whatever, toiletries or snacks. There's an increasing market for autonomous delivery robots. So these will be small robots that roll down the street either, I should say autonomously, sometimes remote controlled, that will deliver food from restaurants. There was a period of time where FedEx, Amazon, a bunch of other shippers and logistics brands were trying to pilot these sorts of delivery robots for the last mile deliveries from warehouses. That has seemed to fall a little bit to the wayside. But the biggest use right now of delivery robots is by doordash and other delivery apps essentially take the place of or augment the abilities of the human delivery drivers. And so you see these increasingly in cities, especially throughout the south and Southwest, where there's maybe more space or more demand for them. Pittsburgh piloted some version of this as well. So there are a lot of challenges for cities and other users of the sidewalk. And we can get into that. But that's another significant area of potential compromise commerce and business use of the sidewalk. And then third is the, uh, sort of intersection between business and politics on the sidewalks. Business improvement districts, which are a form of sub local government in many cities that essentially is a group of businesses in a particular Area will band together, contribute resources, contribute assessment funding to this sub local quasi governmental organization that will then spend that money to improve the physical area of those businesses to try to make it a more attractive climate for customers. And so that could be beautification, it could be trash pickup. Sometimes it's even additional security. All of these sort of private regulations on private management of the, uh, space plays out really significantly on sidewalks as well, and in fact, ultimately often influences the actual local government's regulatory decision making. So there's the sort of role of business at the level of management and regulation and politics, and then there's the role of business either using the sidewalk as an adjunct to its brick and mortar business or as the site of the entire business itself.

Speaker A: At the top of our conversation, you describe the sidewalk as being a place of conflict or rivalry. Could we zero in on the rivalry that takes place in the, uh, commercial setting? And you alluded to this a little bit in terms of the different competition for the use of this commons, but could you set up the rivalry that exists between, let's say, merchants and the public, between merchants and each other, Whether they're brick and mortar merchants or they are more itinerant merchants. Tell us a little bit about that rivalry.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a huge history in this country, actually, of rivalry between brick and mortar businesses and what you call more itinerant merchants or vendors on the sidewalk. This has played out, particularly since the era of expanded immigration and immigration conflict and politics, into the beginning in the late 1800s and through to today. What some scholars have referred to as the vending wars played out in California, in San Francisco, in New York, where one of the sort of fronts in the public's sometimes hostility toward immigrants has been this exact conflict between brick and mortar businesses and vendors, many of whom were often immigrants. And so you had conflicts between brick and mortar grocery stores or other fresh food sellers and vendors selling produce on the sidewalks as well. You see it now in that same vein, but also in the conflict between restaurants and food trucks or other mobile food offerings like hot dog vendors or things like that. Sometimes you even do see this when in the context of, for example, a brick and mortar bookstore. There are fewer and fewer of those these days. But a conflict between a brick and mortar bookstore and a book vendor on the sidewalk. For many years, brick and mortar bookstores thought that the main threat to their business was vendors on the sidewalk selling periodicals and stuff, selling books. They didn't realize or didn't anticipate, perhaps, that the real threat to their business model was going to be the Internet and Amazon and other online retailers. So there's been a lot of conflict between these businesses and what they view as competition from sidewalk vendors and curbside vendors. Sometimes that competition is quite real. Sometimes it's more perception than reality and sometimes it's less about the competition and more about, I don't know, a ah, vibe that might undermine the business. So one example of this would be you have a very fancy four star restaurant that is trying to have a particular kind of ambiance inside or just outside. But on the sidewalk or on the curb there is a vendor that undermines that ambiance. There's an episode of Friends from, I don't know, back in the 90s early 2000s where Monica, the character who has a restaurant, she's a chef and it's a very fancy restaurant and her friend Phoebe is a guitar player who would play on the sidewalk or in coffee shops and they're having a fight and Phoebe plays the guitar badly and loudly just outside the restaurant on the sidewalk. And the two of them have this interpersonal conflict and it's meant to be obviously humorous on the show and more of a reflection of their personal fight at the time. But that kind of conflict really does happen all the time. And it leads business owners to try to establish, assert a degree of control or ownership over the public space beyond their front door. And on the one hand that's understandable because they perceive that space as within their sphere of influence or where things that happen in that space can influence or affect what goes on in their business. But at the same time that is public space. And so that tension between the perhaps understandable desire to reach out and regulate it because of the negative externalities that might be generated by sidewalk users that conflict with the business's goals or ambiance, that can all be very understandable, but it is ultimately in conflict with what we understand to be or ought to understand to be the values of this public space. But business efforts to reach out and control that space have been quite successful for decades and decades. When I say that, I mean they've convinced local governments to give them power over that space that they wouldn't otherwise have. So in some cities, for example, a person cannot operate a food truck within a certain rate tedious of a brick and mortar restaurant without that restaurant's permission. In some cities in New York City, for example, if a person wants to sell Christmas trees on the sidewalk, which is a very common thing that happens around the holidays, they need the express permission of the adjacent property owner to set up the Christmas tree stall on that sidewalk, even though the adjacent property owner does not own that space. And even if they do own that space, there's a public easement for everyone to be there without their permission. So we carve out in our law many of these specific grants of authority and power to adjacent business owners that we would not otherwise do for any other adjacent business owner. And that's because of how business owners have viewed the space as belonging to them, or have viewed what happens in that space as potential competition.

Speaker A: You also mentioned a few moments ago that the rivalry that we see between merchants and each other, and maybe merchants and the public over the use of the space is no longer simply local, but we increasingly see national firms with distribution and scale across the country that are backed by venture capitalists seeking to carve out their own uses of public sidewalks. Could you tell us about that dynamic that we've probably seen over the last decade or so? And what are the political economy implications of, uh, Silicon Valley now vying for this space in competition with pedestrians and mom and pop merchants? Obviously, the financing for a startup is going to be different than for a mom and pop brick and mortar merchant, although many merchants are part of national companies as well, or certainly let's say a non fixed merchant who might have a vendor card or something like that. What are the political economy implications there?

Speaker B: The implications can be really quite large and have been so far. So there's the, as you said, Silicon Valley backed firms like the delivery robots, also Scooter Rentals, Lime Bird, others. These make use of the space in ways that are not only in conflict with adjacent businesses, but also, as you said, with pedestrians and other users of the space. So the delivery robots, for example, I mentioned this pilot program out of Pittsburgh. One of the concerns that they identified was that the delivery robots are often going to take up most of the width of the sidewalk, which isn't a huge problem for a relatively mobile and active person on two feet to, uh, walk around. But a person who uses a wheelchair, a person who is pushing a stroller, or just a person with some other mobility limitation often will find it much harder to get around or past that robot. And sometimes the robots stall out in the middle of a curb cut or get whatever their AV technology is, not quite letting them cross the street. And so they'll hang out in that curb cut for a long while and folks behind them will essentially get trapped on the sidewalk because they can't get around the robot. You see this too, with the Scooter rentals. For a long time, many local governments allowed the companies to deploy this technology in such a way where when a customer was done with a given scooter, they could just leave it kettled over on the sidewalk and the next customer would be able to pick it up and activate their rental and ride away. But while the scooter is laying there, again, it's a trip hazard. It's in the way for everybody else. For a long time this was just the status quo. And part of the reason why I argue in the book is again this lack of attention to the sidewalk, this governmental recession from the space and the private enterprise filling the vacuum. We have seen governments try to reassert some control over the space. One successful example I talk about in the book is in Colorado, in Boulder in particular. Denver's working on it too. These are both jurisdictions with high uptake of scooter rentals and therefore a lot of scattered scooters all over the sidewalk. But in Boulder they've worked with lime to create what they call lime groves, which they've painted lime green rectangles on the sidewalk, which are essentially places where people are supposed to park the scooter. And the company will use its ability to geolocate the scooters to either lock them out or penalize the renter if they don't put them into the correct parking corral. So there are ways for government and business to work together to make this an effective use of the space that is also effective for everybody else and that is regulated and governed by local government. But you asked about the political economy of where this comes from. One of the reasons why a lot of these solutions have been slow going is a local governments feeling like they either don't want to deal with regulating that space or like it's too big of a challenge, they have too much else going on, they're cash strapped, they're resource strapped, and so let it all play out there. That's a very common dynamic, and frankly it's one that's not entirely un understandable. Municipalities, especially smaller towns and smaller cities, really are limited in what they have the capacity to do. I try to grapple in the book with how they might expand that capacity for everyone's sake, but I understand their limitations. Another sort of interesting dynamic that I try to explore in the book about this is on the firm side. They also face the difficulty of thousands and thousands of different regulations enacted at the local level. So firms would often prefer to see some sort of state based regulation of the deployment of their technology in a given jurisdiction that they know how to work with, they can make only 50 choices instead of a thousand choices. And so. So this vertical federalism question is one that plays out in so many aspects of local decision making. But it's one of the many features of conflict that I talk about in the book as it applies to the sidewalk, which is, even if you get to the place of, okay, we do want government to regulate this space, the question then remains, which government? And how do we make that regulation actually efficacious and efficiently so for the firms that want or need to play out their business on the sidewalk. So a lot of these firms, as I said, want to see more state level regulation. But the problem with state level regulation is that it's not always as sensitive to local difference, local difference in circumstance or local difference in preference. So this tension between the sort of efficiency of uniformity on the one hand, and the lack of democratic responsiveness, or at least the slightly less responsive way of making policy at the state level, that's a tension that plays out throughout local government law. But it has this particular impact here when it comes to these especially large scale national firms trying to apply their trade on the sidewalk.

Speaker A: Bridging your teaching in both property and local government. I talk in the book about business improvement districts, which I had some passing familiarity with, just in that I've seen signs that say this or that business improvement district. But I learned quite a bit from the book about the role that they play in governing the use of the sidewalk or the environment around the sidewalk. I wonder if you could introduce bids or business improvement districts. Are they a good deal for the public interest? Are they acting in the public interest? Or are there aspects of bids that should give us some pause?

Speaker B: So business improvement districts are sub local government entities, and maybe, uh, I shouldn't even say government entities. They are quasi governmental, sub local entities. What generally happens is there is a state law that authorizes localities to create these entities, but what they are is essentially a coalition of businesses in a given physical space, a given area that create this entity, this bid, this business improvement district that will collect assessment revenue from the business owners or the owners of commercial property in the area, and then spend that revenue, spend those assessments on physical and other improvements for the space that are designed to make it more customer friendly, more attractive to do business. And so that might be beautif unification, Some repairs of sidewalks or plazas, benches, things like that. It might be trash pickup on top of what the city would otherwise be doing. It might be security on top of what the city might otherwise be doing. Where I work in near Union Square in New York City, there is a bid, a business improvement district there. And you will often see when you walk around someone in a uniform from the business improvement district emptying the trash cans on the sidewalk rather than the city's department of sanitation. So that's just one very visible example for lot of people. But when I talk to government officials and bid management throughout the country, on the one hand, the government officials view bids as really valuable partners because as I was saying before, governments are resource strapped. And so the extent that there can be another source of revenue that can be deployed to improve or manage sidewalk space in the form of these bid assessments and what the bid then uses that money to do, that can be really valuable for the government to be able to say, okay, we have this private partner and we can rely on them to do XYZ functions in the space. And then that means we, the government can save money not doing those functions and spend that money on other things or deploy that money in communities that don't have as many businesses and therefore don't have this extra source of revenue so they can be a valuable partner. And many of the folks that I interview and talk through with in the book are doing very good community oriented work. That is, it's not just designed to make the space better for business, but rather to make the space better for everybody. Because the kinds of things that generally make an area a more attractive place for customers to come do business are also the kinds of things that would just make it an attractive area for everybody. So sidewalk improvements that make the sidewalks more level, less dangerous, more accessible, wider, prettier, more able to do drainage when there's a storm. Right? These are all things that would just make it better for everybody, including the pedestrian just transiting through as well as for the neighboring businesses. So there's a lot of resonance and a lot of opportunity there for business, for firms, for these business improvement district districts to do really good work, to backfill where government might fall short. At the same time though, there is a very real concern that offloading responsibility away from the generally elected public government to the business improvement district, which is only accountable and only chosen by the commercial property owners in a given area. Offloading responsibility in that way can be anti democratic, can be exclusionary, and can reinforce that sense of territorial control over public space that I was discussing earlier as being a, uh, serious problem. So finding ways for government to partner with business without giving business free rein or sovereign control over the space is a difficult needle to thread. Some cities and towns have been doing it quite well. Others, as I was saying before, this, is that third role of business on the sidewalk, which can be as a form of regulation. And business regulation of public space is pretty close to privatizing that space, or at least it might lead us down that slippery slope toward privatizing the space. When we talk about the tragedy of the commons, which I opened the conversation with, in its classic formulation, one of the solutions of the tragedy of the commons is to privatize the commons. And so, in one respect, if one thinks as I do, that the sidewalks represent a tragedy of the commons, privatization is certainly a solution. But the problem in this context is that privatization of this particular commons eliminates the tragedy by eliminating the commons, not actually eliminating the tragedy. So it just makes the sidewalk no longer a commons. It drains it of all that it is used for, all that makes it vibrant, all that makes it part of a civic society. So you could, yeah, you could eliminate all the conflict, but in doing so, you're actually eliminating what the sidewalk is really for. And so the privatization solution is one that I think is highly unattractive. And the good news is most cities do too. We don't see very much total privatization of sidewalk space. But between the continue the spectrum of that extreme answer and total public control where there is no private responsibility at all, we've landed somewhere in the middle. And I argue in the book landing in the middle is where we've gotten a lot of things wrong. What I'd like to see is more government responsibility, more coherent and efficient government responsibility. Private partners, like bids, can be really valuable allies, but they have to be partners and allies rather than than replacements for public, uh, responsibility.

Speaker A: Are there any reforms needed around the economic, business, commercial use or life of sidewalks? And if so, what are those reforms?

Speaker B: One of the things that I think needs to be made different is more efficient regulation of the space for businesses. So a lot of business owners find sidewalk regulation to be a byzantine mess of red tape. And, uh, one of the big reasons why is that there are many, many local government agencies that are responsible for various aspects of sidewalk life. So there is a department of transportation that, of course, regulates the sort of people getting from point A to point B. But in New York City, as well as many other big cities, there are departments of buildings, of health and safety, of community affairs, of business regulation. There's fire department, the police department, there's all of the public transportation that might take place there sometimes that's quasi private. Sometimes there are bus shelters that have private advertising, but public money in their construction. There are so many agencies that regulate the space. And if you're going to try to do business on the sidewalk, you have to contend with all of them. This, I argue, makes it really hard to do business effectively on the sidewalk. I would like to see more of a one stop shop for regulation, for permitting so that businesses can more effectively make use of the space. And on the other hand, hand, so that governments can more effectively monitor what's happening on the sidewalk. When you have all of these agencies that are siloed off, it can be difficult for them to know what the others are doing. And so one agency might grant a permit to do X and another agency grants a permit to do Y. And X and Y are highly in conflict with one another in the same space. And that's a real problem. We see this happen a lot, especially given how limited the physical terrain is. Granting of a permit, for example, business to operate a sidewalk cafe. Cafe. And at the same time for a large construction scaffolding to be put right over it. That's not good for the business. It's not really safe for the construction either. And so thinking through, we need one agency that can actually see all of these uses and make all of the decisions for the space would both be effective in terms of actually coherently regulating it. But it would also be more efficient for the firms that want to make use of the space by saying, saying, okay, I only have to fill out one form. I have to go to one agency to get permission. I only have one set of regulations I have to comply with. So permitting reform and regulatory consolidation are the kinds of things that I think would make life a lot better on the sidewalk. Not only for businesses though. Absolutely for businesses, but also for everybody else.

Speaker A: If you were to publish a second edition 10 years from now of this book, maybe you've added a new intro, maybe a new chapter, maybe you've revised some existing chapters. What do you think those revisions might say?

Speaker B: I like to Hope that in 10 years some progress would be made. And so I could talk about more successes. I could talk about more changes that cities and towns have made to make sidewalks more at the center of their decision making and more at the center of their civic life. I hope that I could talk about how our federal government has unlocked more grant resources for sidewalk enhancements and sidewalk safety. Safety. And I hope I could talk about how cities have consolidated their permitting and regulatory activities. I hope I could talk about how Cities have been making more of a transition away from private responsibility for the sidewalk and private feelings of territorial sovereignty over the sidewalk toward a, uh, government structure of law and of government that really treats it as the vibrant public space it is. And when I say I hope I can do all of these things, things I don't think that's a wildly optimistic thing to say, because we have seen cities start to make these changes, and I highlight many of them in the book, have already been moving in this direction. And when I talk to folks in local government who haven't yet made that shift, they're not opposed to it generally. Their reasons are the political economy reasons. We've talked about other economic constraints. Those are all very understandable reasons why they haven't yet made the move. But what I think is quite interesting, what was a surprise to me, frankly, in researching and writing the book, is just how much these concerns or these desires for more walkable space, for more vibrant use of sidewalks and for more economically efficient use of the space, how consistent that is across the country and across politics, across climate, across city size. It's very easy, I think, to caricature walkability or everything I'm talking about in the book as a sort of liberal coastal elite fantasy. But on the ground, that's just not true. You have folks in small towns in Texas, Louisiana, who want to see these same sorts of improvements, because at the end of the day, being able to safely get from place to place is a value that everyone can get behind, particularly at a time of increasing gas prices, of increasing cost of living in general. General, being able to get from place to place on one's own two feet, or in a, uh, wheelchair or in a stroller or what have you, to be able to do your life effectively and easily and safely, that's a value that everyone can get behind. And so I hope that we continue to move in that direction. And I hope that governments at all levels make the investments in financial resources and in really thoughtful redesigns of their regulation and their regulatory structures to make that dream a reality in more and more places. So I hope that's the future that's ahead of us. And I have a decent bit of optimism that it really is, or at least could be. And so I hope folks take the message and the lessons out of the book to, uh, try to implement that where they live in their own communities.

Speaker A: Our guest today has been Michael Pollack, professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law. We've discussed his new book, Sidewalk Nation, the Life and Law of America's most overlooked research source. I'll add a link to the book's webpage in the show. Notes for the episode Michael, thank you for joining the Business Scholarship Podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you so much.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Business Scholarship Podcast. If you like what you heard today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Rate the show and let other people know about it, too. If you have ideas for future episodes, let me know. My email address is andrewdrewkagenings.com and I look forward to hearing from you. Until the next time. I'm your host, Andrew Jennings.