Can a Catholic Be a NIMBY?

Thoughts following a podcast appearance

Recently I was on AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast to talk about urbanism, NIMBYism, and faith, which you can listen to here.

Actually, we didn’t talk about faith too much (and I didn’t tell my host that I once compared watching a Japanese cassette player from the 1970s to attending Mass.) We did talk about an article I wrote about churches which want to make use of their parking lots—build senior or affordable housing, host homeless shelters, permit farmers’ markets—and how they run into zoning issues. The bigger point is that zoning is an invisible force that shapes so much of what Americans take as natural.

I was at a talk with a bunch of older, conservative Catholics a few months ago, and one of them asked me why I thought American churches didn’t try to build little villages, sort of like little neighborhood parishes in Europe might. Zoning. More often than you would think, at least part of the answer is zoning.

We talked about a lot of stuff, including this piece, “NIMBYism Is a Distorted Love,” which inspired my host to invite me on the podcast. There, I wrote about how we often suffocate the processes that create great, lovable places when we try to rigidly preserve whatever happens to exist at the moment we know a place. Growth should be done well, but it has to happen. When we love a place in the wrong way, we kill it, and foreclose to the opportunity of future people to make it their own.

One interesting point my host raised toward the end, which we didn’t really have much time for, was something I’ve thought about before too: at least in our political discourse, being pro-life and being pro-housing are generally opposites. Most urbanists in general are, or are seen as being, on the left, with all of the other positions that being on the left generally entails.

What that can do is lead skeptics, (often conservatives, often right-leaning people of faith) to assume that, because our politics bundles these things, that there’s some inherent bundling there. You know, something like, pro-housing people are pro-choice; I’m pro-life; I guess I should be anti-housing.

I’ve come across this logic before, often put even less thoughtfully—“leftists are perverts so anything they like is suspect, and they like cities”—seriously, I wish I was exaggerating—and it’s just…wrong. Our politics has created this accidental situation where being concerned about our built environment is a political issue. It shouldn’t be at all. Now, some Catholics might make a “seamless garment” argument for life and human flourishing in all cases—pro-life, pro-housing—and many progressives might make a different set of arguments from different principles. But in reality those issues really shouldn’t have anything in particular to do with each other.

A big part of what I do in my writing is trying to unbundle urbanism from progressivism—not in terms of taking it away from anyone, but trying to explain why you can be a conservative or a centrist and still care about these things. Of course you can, because everyone can and should! But some people just never hear any of this stuff presented in a way that is palatable to them. Some of these people argue in bad faith, but I’ve had enough conversations to understand that this effort is worth it.

At the end, my host asked me how, if at all, my Catholic faith informs or relates to my being an urbanist and a housing advocate. The obvious answer is that we’re supposed to care about people and families, and these are issues that really affect people and families. They can sound abstract and technocratic, but they affect all of us all the time. Our built environment is the context in which everything happens.

That’s true, but in some ways, it sort of goes the other way: being an urbanist, broadly understood, has made me a better Christian. I always go back to this piece I wrote the first Sunday I went back to Mass in-person after the lockdowns:

I was happy to be back, and yet when the priest began to prepare holy communion, I found myself muttering, “He’s using the long eucharistic prayer!”

The eucharistic prayer is basically the second half of the Catholic Mass, where the priest prepares and consecrates the bread and wine, and reads the associated prayers. There are several forms, of different lengths. Generally, if the sermon is long, the priest will choose the shortest of them. He didn’t preach very long last Sunday, and so in order to hit that one-hour sweet spot that Catholic masses tend to be, he chose a longer one.

Despite actually wanting to be at church, I still reflexively looked forward to getting out a couple of minutes early. I can still remember masses with my best friend growing up (also, obviously, Catholic), waiting to hit the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet with our families after church, and exchanging a satisfied look when we knew it was going to end at 11:55 instead of 12.

Patience is a virtue—secular, Christian, whatever—and this little moment of self-reflection hammered that home for me. I try to summon that same patience stuck in traffic, or trying to reasonably obey the speed limit, or looking for a parking space. Part of being an urbanist is in your mind; in how you perceive things. Understanding, to pull an example, that the reaction to a new restaurant or new apartment building you don’t fancy probably shouldn’t be “I don’t like that, it shouldn’t exist” but rather “Not my cup of tea, but I hope it works for someone.”

That way of seeing things has crystalized for me in the last few years as I have become interested in these issues. I’m thankful for discovering urbanism, broadly understood, because I like the changes in how I see the places I live and visit, and how they can work better for everyone.

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Related Reading:

The Train Not Taken

Housing and Pro-Family Conservatism

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

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