Housing
All I Really Needed to Know About Cities I Learned From ‘Jaws’
Want to understand how public meetings work, the power of place-based branding, and why bad mayors keep getting re-elected? Look no further than Amity Island.
A few weeks before the off-year elections of November 2017, this tweet appeared:
In the 1975 blockbuster Jaws, Mayor Larry Vaughn’s decision to keep the beaches of Amity Island open for the 4th of July weekend contributes to the deaths of five constituents. In the time since, he’s become a kind of shorthand for incompetence-gone-unpunished. Somehow, voters in the Town of Amity failed to hold Mayor Vaughn accountable for his leadership: Three years later, in Jaws 2, the guy’s still in office.