A Vision Or A Framework?

An illuminating Twitter argument with a Connecticutter

On Twitter last week, I had a friendly little argument with a development skeptic in Fairfield, Connecticut. I got involved because a Connecticut YIMBY shared one of my articles, arguing that homeowners don’t really “buy” a neighborhood, and that zoning isn’t a “contract” that promises a neighborhood in statis for the future.

So I jumped into the thread, and we ended up having a discussion about some of the underlying differences between reasonable NIMBY types—not the kind of folks who show up to meetings and make a scene, but normal people who basically like their neighborhoods as they are—and some YIMBY types who seem not to care about any of that.

The YIMBY said that Fairfield is a city, and being in range of New York City—the nation’s largest city—means it should expect much more urban growth. The absence of that growth is artificial, due to the very zoning that the skeptic felt was protecting his town from “overdevelopment.” The skeptic:

Fairfield is not a city. I agree that just because you buy in a town doesn’t mean you should expect zero change. My concern is a town like Fairfield has *very* little open space that can be developed on. So where does new building come from? That is what I mean by overdevelopment.

Then we discussed what “open space” means—what if multi-acre lots are actually a poor patchwork approximating green space? What about denser development with more, larger, unbroken parcels of space? (Too late for that in a place that’s already built out in a low-density pattern, maybe, but food for thought.)

But I pointed out one particular philosophical disagreement between us, which I’ve thought about before, but which this argument clarified for me. People against too much development start with the assumption that there’s such a thing as “too much development”—that somebody has the authority to determine, without consideration of the regional jobs and housing market, when a place is built out “enough” or when it is “full.” The fellow I was arguing with said, “So by your logic, overdevelopment doesn’t exist. Most people who buy in a town do not want to live in an urbanized setting.”

Well, yes. You will find very few urbanists/YIMBYs/housing advocates who believe that. Most of us believe that the housing market needs to be connected to the jobs market, which is to say, “full” is when private builders stop building, not when planners or homeowners judge a place to be “full” at some arbitrary point, based on an idea of a place at a particular moment in time.

If everybody in Manhattan 200 years ago had decided it were “full,” it would never have evolved into America’s greatest city. Anti-development folks are conflating the place they live in, as it happens to be right now, with a Platonic form of what the place is, and is supposed to be forever.

In other words, I’d say that most of us urbanists, especially the more right-leaning, market-friendly ones, don’t have a vision for what we want places to be as much as a framework. People ask questions like, “So how much housing is enough?” “What should our quiet community look like?” “How much growth would satisfy you?”

We don’t have an answer to these questions. I don’t, at least. It’s kind of like asking, “Well, how much should chicken cost?” The answer is price discovery. The answer is to have a reasonably free market to figure that out and tell us. (And to have SNAP for people who really can’t afford the market price for chicken.)

If we deregulated zoning and Fairfield stayed quiet and low-density, that would be fine. It would turn out that even in the orbit of New York City, there was enough demand for some of these quiet, affluent, semi-rural communities. It would be telling us that when supply and demand are allowed to find an equilibrium, that such places really are “supposed” to remain the way they are. But if instead these places grew up, well, that would be fine with me too. There’s not an infinite demand for housing—that vertical growth would be “saving” other communities from intense growth.

Which brings me to the last point I discussed. I said: “The irony is that if *everybody* relaxed zoning, nobody except a handful of high growth areas around cities would see huge change. The perception of huge change is a side effect of not allowing any.”

Again, the demand for housing is not infinite. One huge apartment building in a place that hasn’t added any housing in decades feels disruptive. It can even feel like some kind of…plot. Why are they putting this here? Hmm… But those housing units, there, are a consequence of others not being elsewhere.

We could distribute growth in a more or less organic matter—like a rain shower, where a little bit falls everywhere. Or we can find that the house has no shut-off valve and all the faucets are running, and make the mistake of thinking that the water (natural growth over time) can be stopped. So we can stop up all the faucets and then, when the faucets blow up, wonder who put all this water here?

As long as there are people moving and working and being born, there will be urban growth. We don’t have a perfect image of what it should look like. We mostly just think it should be allowed.

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Related Reading:

What Housing Crisis?

“Why Don’t You Just Move?”

Which Housing Is “Housing Crisis Housing”?

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