Who do "green" buildings, "healthy" public spaces, and "resilient" planning ultimately benefit? For whom are "creative" and "livable" streets really intended? This paper presents findings from 47 interviews with professional urban planners, architects, and engineers in New York, Los Angeles, and several other cities about the place of social equity in ostensibly progressive urbanism. A culture of sustainable, livable, creative, and assertively "progressive" urban planning ideals has found a new level of prominence in recent years. The market-fundamentalist and auto-centric priorities of late-20th century urban policy, while far from diminished, are augmented by this rhetoric of a "better" urbanism. At the same time, cities have recognized the need to plan for resilience to climate change. These trends are more than a PR stunt: my interviewees referred frequently to a "shift" in their fields and a greater emphasis on ecology, human scale, and community. Yet they also recognized the limits of this change. As they effused about the opportunity to innovate and "do good," they returned time and again to political, economic, and regulatory realities, including a persistent growth imperative. Analyzing these individuals and the contexts in which they work, this study reveals the personal and social contradictions - and the political-economic logic - of an urbanism that is both tenuously progressive and unflinchingly neoliberal. It demonstrates how well-meaning individuals can be implicated in uneven development processes. And it shows just how challenging a course correction is required to steer the late-modern city toward a truly just, sustainable future.