These lines always fall on deaf ears, but one line I pointed out to my local NIMBYs recently was that rather than being a conspiracy, our town's development is a direct result of their own mandates to the city government.
To wit, the mandate for many decades now has been "more jobs". If you strip out the school board fights and usual NIMBY nonsense, pretty much all that's left in local politics ANYWHERE is "more jobs".
But there's no magical Jobs Fairy that comes in the middle of the night and makes you richer with zero other impact. Jobs are people. People have to live somewhere!
The saddest thing about the NIMBY conspiracy view is that they ARE the victims of a sort of conspiracy... just not the one they imagine. The suburban "preserved in amber" ideal was an invention of 1950's marketing brochures steeped in Space-Age optimism. It may not have been an intentional conspiracy -- I grant the benefit of the doubt to leaders who were staring down their own epic housing crisis (from the Baby Boom) and were just hoping that eventually the numbers and growth would all work themselves out. [ed: And also to the marketing-brochure writers who were just coming up with ad copy and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict the next 70+ years of development trends and discourse thereupon.]
But the conspiracy is that there was never a true reckoning. Massive amounts of debt were required to finance building out these Amber Suburbs. The math simply never worked out, and instead of explaining this to their constituents and dispelling the marketing myth, they just kept sweeping the problems under the rug. It was easier to take mountains of crap from people for raising their property taxes just enough to kick the can a little further down the road, than to tell them their streets would have to densify to become sustainable.
Addison, sadly I don't know if the Boomers or Xers can ever be convinced of this true conspiracy against them. But at least our generation can go forward, armed with this new understanding of what actually happened, and what it will take to prevent it happening again.
I lived for a quarter century in a close-in suburb of Milwaukee WI, and I got to watch this play out in real time. We moved to a little bungalow among tidy streets of the same sort of bungalows. Postage stamp yards, big trees, narrow and shady streets....this half of the city was the legacy of a building boom a century ago. Tidy, homey, and slowly deteriorating when we moved there, although with a reputation for really good schools. The complaints then were about city revenues, taxes, loss of population, jobs. Then, across more than a decade of efforts by the city and county governments, a curious thing happened - development and new jobs came. The county made a big effort to expand an existing medical complex, new tech businesses moved in around that, new shops and restaurants opened, the city became a more desirable place to live. For me these were the Grand Days. I had good restaurants, 3 or 4 decent coffee shops, a taproom, grocery store, pharmacy....all within easy walking distance. Property taxes were stable thanks to the new businesses. Schools had been good and they stayed that way. Job done, yes? Victory laps all around...
Well no actually. Now more people wanting to visit the trendy new restaurants, bars, businesses meant more cars. Now people complained about traffic on their formerly quiet streets, about side streets being parked up. Somehow, no one liked any of the parking solutions proposed by the city. Worse, now it became a more desirable place to live, which bid up house prices. Good? if you already had one, not good if you wanted one. The question mark is because rising property values led to increased property taxes, which some people couldn't afford and others resented even if they could pay them. And when some developers proposed to build a few 4-plex apartment buildings on some neighborhood lots there was a furor. These will wreck the neighborhood's character!!! No matter that 2-story duplexes (2 separate apartments, one on top of the other) are a long-standing Milwaukee tradition. You can see century-old ones sprinkled through my old neighborhood. There's no pleasing everyone...
Anyway, after 27 years my wife and I left. We concluded that the neighborhood had outgrown us. Our kid was grown and out the door, we were retiring, a quieter, less busy location felt desirable. But the city, in my opinion, did it right. They made good efforts to reverse the decline of an area, to keep the city a desirable place to live, and in the main they were successful. Yes, the character of the neighborhoods changed somewhat. Younger me, working professional with a kid in high school, found the change exhilarating. Retirement me, less so. But that's on me. As a community, there's a choice: keep the place interesting, dynamic, desirable so people want to be there; or preserve what you have now and watch it slowly degrade.
What's lamentable to me is that it didn't even have to end that way. A Strong Towns approach would have seen those 4-plexes get built, and more after that, and so on. Over those same 27 years, the area would have densified more gently, and probably preserved even MORE of its character! Property taxes would have been lighter, and new solutions to address the "growing pains" (like perhaps a parking garage!) would have been easier to implement.
It's tragic, in a way. So many of the best places in our country have been forced to stagnate until they broke and then had to be dramatically changed. So much loss, so much waste. As someone who appreciates these kinds of areas -- as you once did! -- and lives in one myself, it's just heartbreaking that instead of making more of what we LOVE about them, they're either locked in amber by NIMBYs/preservationists, or we get paved over with big ugly high-rises.
For audiences inclined to Biblical interpretation, you can ask - why is heaven described as a city, e.g., the New Jerusalem, and not something like the Elysian fields?
Mark, I resonate with your comment, with one caveat: Abraham looked for a city, but not one made with human hands. The New Jerusalem "comes down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband." Our human cities are built up of "creative destruction," a past always being erased or exploited for purposes that obey chimerical human intentions.
A fuller description of the Biblical city is much more complex than "city is good." The first city happens after Cain murders Abel. Babel and Babylon are cities. Cities are concentrations of power, and at first these concentrations are so out-of-proportion from the world around them that they are only created by sin. But as we are led into virtue first by the law and then efficaciously by grace, the ability to handle the power of a city does not necessarily overwhelm a man but instead can be directed towards a greater glory, e.g., the construction of the Temple.
On your last sentence, I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean to say that any sort of city-building is only ever erasing or exploiting, and so cannot be good? Or simply that, because the world is finite and material, the presence of a new thing in some place implies the removal of an old thing?
Thank you for the prospect of a robust exchange. Clearly, the biblical mandate is to look to the welfare of the city, whether Jerusalem, Rome, Babylon, even Sodom. But we must also hear the reckoning: "for here we have no lasting city." The great cities of the world are in states of "creative destruction," always being demolished, corrupted, or reimagined. Human genius is mingled with greed and sloth. Sometimes we experience a decade something like a golden age, but much of the time we lament a debacle: the disappearance or despoiling of something we thought might last forever, No, human beings are not being perfected by their works.
One of the funny quirks about humans is the way we look for labels to assign things we like and dislike. "Density" and "affordable housing" and "traffic calming" mean one thing to one idea team and something entirely different to the opposing idea team. For in-person convos, one way around that is using plain language to describe the terms rather than the terms. Won't work for the absolutists but I find it useful w/ the open-minded.
I agree with the thesis, but something about the bookcase metaphor doesn’t ring true to me. If you have a perfectly good bookcase which is full, I don’t think a natural next step is “get rid of it and get a taller bookcase.” That’s not what I think of as natural evolution, maybe closer to the blockbusting/intense development pressure and displacement that is seen in some neighborhoods.
You might instead get some smaller bookcases for other rooms, or bookshelves for the wall, in a kind of natural evolution, middle housing metaphor. A closer metaphor to suburbia for me is if you only had one type of large bookcase you could buy, and you had to constantly find new places in your house to fit them.
Suburbia's a lot of things. From 1950s bedroom communities on a grid, to modern wealthy suburbs covered with paths and trails, and everything from 800 SFHs to senior high rises to 5+1s to townhouses.
If you're seeing a only one type of bookcase in all of that, you ain't seeing suburbia.
One of the reasons we feel that density is a conspiracy is near pathological attempts to impose it everywhere.
Scott Weiner’s obsession with removing zoning everywhere in CA is a perfect case. If he said “We want to improve the living experience in existing cities through density” that would be one thing.
But he successfully pushes laws that remove local control of small rural towns that don’t drive density. It is insane.
The densityphiles always miss one critical dimension: some humans, like me, really really really hate having tons of people around. It is not that I don’t like people, it is that I am extremely oversensitive and introverted, and cities and crowds make me incredibly anxious.
I love cities - to visit. And I appreciate their value. Density drives so many important things. But diversity is just as important, and non-density is incredibly valuable.
Cities occur on the right and left - see Dallas, as an example on the right. Every city, as it grows, has two options - density or traffic. Or, the NYC model or the LA model, if you'd prefer.
Density isn't conspiracy. Also, urbanists should note that sprawl isn't really conspiracy - sure, the FHA encouraged it and a lot of home-building happened when sprawl was endorsed, but people chose it for a reason. Now, Urbanists should emphasize that now there's not much choice - NIMBYs have made it sprawl or degrowth - and we want to make the choice, traffic vs density.
I say this because, just as I prefer density - I get why people prefer sprawl. I get why they'd like to live on a quiet street, with an ample yard and garage, and sure a painful drive for everything and less neighbors, but also an easy ability to host and to build out "man-caves" and "she-sheds" and store boats or have other workshops.
I prefer impromptu meetups with other parents at the park and the convenience of having everything a short walk/bike ride/drive away. But the key here is - there should be a choice. And right now, there isn't enough choice and also there isn't enough housing.
Yes! I made this move a couple years ago. The big yard is both a joy (wildlife come to visit often, the quiet is pleasing) and a nuisance (mowing, weeding, tree care). No walking to the grocery any more, though I can bicycle it if I have time. Very few casual meetups with the neighbors. We do have room for our camper van, and my wife does have her wood shop...
These lines always fall on deaf ears, but one line I pointed out to my local NIMBYs recently was that rather than being a conspiracy, our town's development is a direct result of their own mandates to the city government.
To wit, the mandate for many decades now has been "more jobs". If you strip out the school board fights and usual NIMBY nonsense, pretty much all that's left in local politics ANYWHERE is "more jobs".
But there's no magical Jobs Fairy that comes in the middle of the night and makes you richer with zero other impact. Jobs are people. People have to live somewhere!
The saddest thing about the NIMBY conspiracy view is that they ARE the victims of a sort of conspiracy... just not the one they imagine. The suburban "preserved in amber" ideal was an invention of 1950's marketing brochures steeped in Space-Age optimism. It may not have been an intentional conspiracy -- I grant the benefit of the doubt to leaders who were staring down their own epic housing crisis (from the Baby Boom) and were just hoping that eventually the numbers and growth would all work themselves out. [ed: And also to the marketing-brochure writers who were just coming up with ad copy and couldn't reasonably have been expected to predict the next 70+ years of development trends and discourse thereupon.]
But the conspiracy is that there was never a true reckoning. Massive amounts of debt were required to finance building out these Amber Suburbs. The math simply never worked out, and instead of explaining this to their constituents and dispelling the marketing myth, they just kept sweeping the problems under the rug. It was easier to take mountains of crap from people for raising their property taxes just enough to kick the can a little further down the road, than to tell them their streets would have to densify to become sustainable.
Addison, sadly I don't know if the Boomers or Xers can ever be convinced of this true conspiracy against them. But at least our generation can go forward, armed with this new understanding of what actually happened, and what it will take to prevent it happening again.
I lived for a quarter century in a close-in suburb of Milwaukee WI, and I got to watch this play out in real time. We moved to a little bungalow among tidy streets of the same sort of bungalows. Postage stamp yards, big trees, narrow and shady streets....this half of the city was the legacy of a building boom a century ago. Tidy, homey, and slowly deteriorating when we moved there, although with a reputation for really good schools. The complaints then were about city revenues, taxes, loss of population, jobs. Then, across more than a decade of efforts by the city and county governments, a curious thing happened - development and new jobs came. The county made a big effort to expand an existing medical complex, new tech businesses moved in around that, new shops and restaurants opened, the city became a more desirable place to live. For me these were the Grand Days. I had good restaurants, 3 or 4 decent coffee shops, a taproom, grocery store, pharmacy....all within easy walking distance. Property taxes were stable thanks to the new businesses. Schools had been good and they stayed that way. Job done, yes? Victory laps all around...
Well no actually. Now more people wanting to visit the trendy new restaurants, bars, businesses meant more cars. Now people complained about traffic on their formerly quiet streets, about side streets being parked up. Somehow, no one liked any of the parking solutions proposed by the city. Worse, now it became a more desirable place to live, which bid up house prices. Good? if you already had one, not good if you wanted one. The question mark is because rising property values led to increased property taxes, which some people couldn't afford and others resented even if they could pay them. And when some developers proposed to build a few 4-plex apartment buildings on some neighborhood lots there was a furor. These will wreck the neighborhood's character!!! No matter that 2-story duplexes (2 separate apartments, one on top of the other) are a long-standing Milwaukee tradition. You can see century-old ones sprinkled through my old neighborhood. There's no pleasing everyone...
Anyway, after 27 years my wife and I left. We concluded that the neighborhood had outgrown us. Our kid was grown and out the door, we were retiring, a quieter, less busy location felt desirable. But the city, in my opinion, did it right. They made good efforts to reverse the decline of an area, to keep the city a desirable place to live, and in the main they were successful. Yes, the character of the neighborhoods changed somewhat. Younger me, working professional with a kid in high school, found the change exhilarating. Retirement me, less so. But that's on me. As a community, there's a choice: keep the place interesting, dynamic, desirable so people want to be there; or preserve what you have now and watch it slowly degrade.
I really appreciate your story!
What's lamentable to me is that it didn't even have to end that way. A Strong Towns approach would have seen those 4-plexes get built, and more after that, and so on. Over those same 27 years, the area would have densified more gently, and probably preserved even MORE of its character! Property taxes would have been lighter, and new solutions to address the "growing pains" (like perhaps a parking garage!) would have been easier to implement.
It's tragic, in a way. So many of the best places in our country have been forced to stagnate until they broke and then had to be dramatically changed. So much loss, so much waste. As someone who appreciates these kinds of areas -- as you once did! -- and lives in one myself, it's just heartbreaking that instead of making more of what we LOVE about them, they're either locked in amber by NIMBYs/preservationists, or we get paved over with big ugly high-rises.
We live in a day and age when it’s never enough to simply disagree with something. Has to be a nefarious conspiracy.
For audiences inclined to Biblical interpretation, you can ask - why is heaven described as a city, e.g., the New Jerusalem, and not something like the Elysian fields?
Mark, I resonate with your comment, with one caveat: Abraham looked for a city, but not one made with human hands. The New Jerusalem "comes down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband." Our human cities are built up of "creative destruction," a past always being erased or exploited for purposes that obey chimerical human intentions.
A fuller description of the Biblical city is much more complex than "city is good." The first city happens after Cain murders Abel. Babel and Babylon are cities. Cities are concentrations of power, and at first these concentrations are so out-of-proportion from the world around them that they are only created by sin. But as we are led into virtue first by the law and then efficaciously by grace, the ability to handle the power of a city does not necessarily overwhelm a man but instead can be directed towards a greater glory, e.g., the construction of the Temple.
On your last sentence, I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean to say that any sort of city-building is only ever erasing or exploiting, and so cannot be good? Or simply that, because the world is finite and material, the presence of a new thing in some place implies the removal of an old thing?
Thank you for the prospect of a robust exchange. Clearly, the biblical mandate is to look to the welfare of the city, whether Jerusalem, Rome, Babylon, even Sodom. But we must also hear the reckoning: "for here we have no lasting city." The great cities of the world are in states of "creative destruction," always being demolished, corrupted, or reimagined. Human genius is mingled with greed and sloth. Sometimes we experience a decade something like a golden age, but much of the time we lament a debacle: the disappearance or despoiling of something we thought might last forever, No, human beings are not being perfected by their works.
One of the funny quirks about humans is the way we look for labels to assign things we like and dislike. "Density" and "affordable housing" and "traffic calming" mean one thing to one idea team and something entirely different to the opposing idea team. For in-person convos, one way around that is using plain language to describe the terms rather than the terms. Won't work for the absolutists but I find it useful w/ the open-minded.
I agree with the thesis, but something about the bookcase metaphor doesn’t ring true to me. If you have a perfectly good bookcase which is full, I don’t think a natural next step is “get rid of it and get a taller bookcase.” That’s not what I think of as natural evolution, maybe closer to the blockbusting/intense development pressure and displacement that is seen in some neighborhoods.
You might instead get some smaller bookcases for other rooms, or bookshelves for the wall, in a kind of natural evolution, middle housing metaphor. A closer metaphor to suburbia for me is if you only had one type of large bookcase you could buy, and you had to constantly find new places in your house to fit them.
Suburbia's a lot of things. From 1950s bedroom communities on a grid, to modern wealthy suburbs covered with paths and trails, and everything from 800 SFHs to senior high rises to 5+1s to townhouses.
If you're seeing a only one type of bookcase in all of that, you ain't seeing suburbia.
One of the reasons we feel that density is a conspiracy is near pathological attempts to impose it everywhere.
Scott Weiner’s obsession with removing zoning everywhere in CA is a perfect case. If he said “We want to improve the living experience in existing cities through density” that would be one thing.
But he successfully pushes laws that remove local control of small rural towns that don’t drive density. It is insane.
The densityphiles always miss one critical dimension: some humans, like me, really really really hate having tons of people around. It is not that I don’t like people, it is that I am extremely oversensitive and introverted, and cities and crowds make me incredibly anxious.
I love cities - to visit. And I appreciate their value. Density drives so many important things. But diversity is just as important, and non-density is incredibly valuable.
Cities occur on the right and left - see Dallas, as an example on the right. Every city, as it grows, has two options - density or traffic. Or, the NYC model or the LA model, if you'd prefer.
Density isn't conspiracy. Also, urbanists should note that sprawl isn't really conspiracy - sure, the FHA encouraged it and a lot of home-building happened when sprawl was endorsed, but people chose it for a reason. Now, Urbanists should emphasize that now there's not much choice - NIMBYs have made it sprawl or degrowth - and we want to make the choice, traffic vs density.
I say this because, just as I prefer density - I get why people prefer sprawl. I get why they'd like to live on a quiet street, with an ample yard and garage, and sure a painful drive for everything and less neighbors, but also an easy ability to host and to build out "man-caves" and "she-sheds" and store boats or have other workshops.
I prefer impromptu meetups with other parents at the park and the convenience of having everything a short walk/bike ride/drive away. But the key here is - there should be a choice. And right now, there isn't enough choice and also there isn't enough housing.
Yes! I made this move a couple years ago. The big yard is both a joy (wildlife come to visit often, the quiet is pleasing) and a nuisance (mowing, weeding, tree care). No walking to the grocery any more, though I can bicycle it if I have time. Very few casual meetups with the neighbors. We do have room for our camper van, and my wife does have her wood shop...
Density in and off itself isn't necessary efficient. Just as it take resources to grow horizontally, it takes resources to go veritical.