Gentlemen, Open Your Containers

Trends, amenities, and generational attitudes

I saw this post on Facebook, from the mayor of Flemington, my hometown:

This is, apparently, a big trend these days, having limited open container areas out on the street, in parts of town that are, or are planned for, renewed commercial life. I’ve seen everyone from a traditionalist Catholic to, well, Flemington’s very liberal mayor endorse this idea, as part and parcel of good urbanism.

It doesn’t bother me, though I’m not sure it’s the golden ticket to commercial revitalization. That will remain to be seen—the brewery she mentions, Lone Eagle, is a local fixture and has gotten pretty good over the last few years. I’d love to see my old town attract the kind of street life I remember from my childhood. I’d love for there to be a sense that there are places in the Flemington area to go other than the Walmart shopping center or the Applebee’s next to Home Depot (actually, that closed too.)

But there are also people who dislike this open container policy. They fear it will bring in vagrants, or promote disorderly behavior, or turn the slower, more dignified craft beer tasting experience into a rowdier bar scene. (The sheer popularity of breweries has probably already done that.) Or they just can’t connect with how it does anything for them or the town. So I can carry a beer across the street, big whoop. What am I gonna do, peer in the window of another out-of-business outlet store? they might say. Or simply, Who would ever want to do that? I wouldn’t want to do that!

Underneath the griping, I sort of understand what the critique is. I’m fluent in NIMBY-speak, because I grew up hearing it, so I’ll give my best shot at articulating why I think this bothers some folks:

Flemington is a quiet, family-friendly town where you go to get away from the hustle and bustle. You trade—or you decide you’re tired of—the energy of dense, hip places for more quiet and more space. You have kids here. You grow up. These young people today, and this mayor, don’t want to make those trade-offs. They want to turn our sleepy, pleasant little town into the cities they left.

There are very few people older than 30 who are going to grab a beer and wander around a “food hall” (is that what we used to call a “food court”?) None of these people have kids. They probably don’t have real jobs. Mature adults don’t have the time for this stuff. They don’t demand to live in “interesting” places at the expense of the culture and people already here. They go to work and run their households and act like adults.

The reality is nobody is going to drink beer out on the street anyway. The only people who are going to do that are drunks and bums. Are they gonna pay for the craft beer, or are they gonna bring a giant malt liquor and dare the police to give them a hard time? You know what this mayor will do next? If a cop hassles the “wrong person,” she’ll defund the police!

(Actually, she got a new, state-of-the-art police station built for the town’s police department.)

There are so many problems with that, but it’s a pretty accurate montage of the comments I read, and sometimes hear, when I talk or write about these things. One thing that stands out is how these comments frequently string together all sorts of vague culture-war grievances, such that the actual issue in question is barely even touched upon.

But I particularly think the parent/non-parent divide is a very powerful explanatory factor in a lot of these discussions. Many people feel, often only inchoately, that most of what typifies good, trendy urban planning today is designed by and for childless people. It’s the city or the town as entertainment. They view it as unserious. Why should we orient our whole place around at most a 10-year span of people’s lives?

I suspect there’s also some of this going on:

Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 @aaron_renn

The transformation of what was once a kids holiday in Halloween into an adult one is part of the transition of adulthood to a sort of extended or perpetual childhood.

And also just this odd, general attitude that not having any amenities is an amenity. I suspect there are huge cultural and generational things going on, just under the surface. I was at a Greater Greater Washington happy hour the other week—these guys, they’re great—and I was chatting with a few other people roughly my age.

Obviously this is not a random sample, but all of them loved living in dense places with lots of things to do and lots of things going on. None could imagine driving an hour or two into a major city for a commute. They were familiar with what I was trying to describe, from my childhood in suburbia—a certain suspicion of fun, trendy things, almost a conflation of crime and disorder with cultural amenities.

I feel like I might be reading something into the views of older suburbanites that isn’t there. But I’m also sure that I’m noticing something real.

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All of that said—and, if you’re a new reader, let me be clear that I’m portraying, not endorsing, the NIMBY viewpoint—what is the alternative for a place like Flemington?

Flemington has been economically adrift for almost 20 years now (with what looks like renewal beginning in the last couple of years). Its previous major driver of growth and foot traffic was a big outlet center, supposedly the first outlet mall in the United States.

During the years that the outlets powered the town’s economy and kept Main Street full and crowded, outlets were trendy. When outlets lost their luster and began to fall out of favor, in terms of the national retail landscape, Flemington’s outlets began to fail too. Whatever management errors there might have been, the mall’s decline happened under the backdrop of a national trend. As did its success.

That’s to say that the snobbish attitude about trendiness—the idea that it’s bad to do what everyone else is doing, that “they’re trying to make our special place like everyplace else”—typically just doesn’t describe what’s going on. Open container streets might be a trend, but so is craft beer itself. And if the craft beer scene begins to collapse over the next few years, and if the beverage world and its patrons and enthusiasts move on to some new trend, local craft breweries everywhere will suffer.

Small towns are not cultural and economic islands. In their heyday, they all replicated the same basic local economy, but with local versions of everything, and local stakeholders. That’s the best you can ask for.

You can’t centrally plan success. The town of Flemington isn’t going to be better than national business trends at picking a good economic growth strategy. They can make space for local businesses—who will open things that are hip right now. They can try to attract something that will obviously bring some people in, like a steakhouse. But beyond that, the fact that ax-throwing parlors or open-container streets or craft breweries or smoke shops or whatever it is are going up everywhere is mostly the result of the market.

The key is to do business at a scale where national trends won’t kill your town’s business model. A classic Main Street is endlessly adaptable. Every single storefront on Flemington’s Main Street has been many different things over the decades and centuries. But the big outlet mall that carried the town for a couple of decades? It’s not adaptable. It’s either an outlet mall, or it’s demolished.

I share concerns that towns and cities must be family-friendly. I think it is necessary to disrupt the cultural narrative that when you reach 25 or 30 or 35, you get married, have kids, and leave the city. That has already been disrupted, by the thickening up of the suburbs as “real places.” It will be further disrupted as younger generations age into policy and commentary to a greater and greater extent, and bring their own far less anti-urban views with them.

But it can also be disrupted simply by challenging the idea that nobody grabs a drink after 30. I think my parents’ generation viewed parenting differently. They might have been mature, but they were also more buttoned-up, which isn’t the same thing. I keep thinking of a mixed-use development I visited in Rockville, Maryland, which featured outdoor seating for a brunch joint right next to a kiddie park.

I can absolutely imagine having a young child, and meeting a couple of friends for brunch, and letting the kids play within sight while I have one drink. I think the only limit on doing pre-kid stuff for me would be energy and time, not some idea that having kids means giving up everything you used to do. I think my parents’ generation saw it differently.

It’s not just imagining; I frequently see young couples with young kids at wineries, breweries, and other “trendy” places out here in Northern Virginia. If this stuff really only served one narrow demographic, it wouldn’t be everywhere. Instead of asking why it succeeds and finding out, some people assume it is being imposed from above and go from there.

There’s so much here—I think of these pieces not as standalone essays but as little installments in an ongoing conversation. I’m especially keen to hear your thoughts on any or all of this. Leave a comment! Send an email!

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Related Reading:

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

There’s a Small Hotel

The Ice House

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