Have You Ever Seen A City?

When we talk about urbanism, most of us don't know what we're talking about

Back in college, I was involved in a food sustainability club. (I guess I had my progressive-cause-via-conservative-temperament routine down even back then. Most of the members were lefty environmentalist types. That wasn’t exactly how I arrived at it.)

I raise this because I’m going to go back to my piece from two weeks ago, “15-Minute Suburbs,” and sort of question what I wrote. In that piece, I asked why, exactly, somebody in a mostly car-oriented suburb with a lot of shopping/services/amenities should want more walkability. Why—unless you have an environmental or equity argument—should car dependence matter to you? If you’re not a progressive, is there a philosophical avenue to supporting walkable urbanism? (Yes, but I was wondering aloud.)

I received a lot of interesting and useful replies to that piece, and I’ll be rounding them up and discussing them in a later piece.

But today I’m semi-arguing against myself, which brings me back to my old food activism. While I was on the club’s leadership we went to a couple of national conferences, both of which I distinctly remember. During the first one, towards the end, after two or three straight meals of lentils or tofu or whole-grain bread, I ducked out for Subway and devoured it. I’d never ordered Subway before, and never have since.

My memory of the second conference is much more important. During the keynote address, the speaker started with a story from a visit to a school in an American inner city. He had asked a young African-American boy if he liked tomatoes. The boy was puzzled, and the speaker thought maybe he didn’t know the word “tomato.” So he pulled up a photo of a tomato on his smartphone and the boy was still puzzled.

“This boy, living in a food desert in the inner city, didn’t know what a tomato was,” said the speaker slowly. “He had never seen a tomato.”

Which brings me to this old tweet of mine:

In other words, when it comes to urbanism, we’re the kid who never saw the tomato. That kid didn’t know if he liked a tomato. He could guess—he’d probably had ketchup or spaghetti sauce before, and he could try to imagine what a pure tomato might taste like. Maybe it looked tasty or not tasty to him. But he wouldn’t really know. That’s our baseline when it comes to urbanism—we don’t know. The average American can no more imagine the texture, habits, and routines of everyday life in a walkable urban community than they can imagine completely cutting meat out of their diet. Maybe less so.

Asking questions about housing and land use in opinion polling, or having political debates about these issues, is largely fruitless, because we don’t actually know what we’re discussing. We may—and frequently do—say “no,” but that answer is often based either on incomplete knowledge or preconceived ideas.

Daniel Herriges of Strong Towns wrote a great piece back in 2021 on this, delving into why opinion polls finding that Americans love suburbia aren’t really telling us that, exactly. I’m going to quote a long bit of it here, but read the whole thing:

What are you buying when you buy a house (or rent one)? The answer is a “bundle” of housing and neighborhood attributes. These include the location, nearby amenities, and transportation options; the features of the home itself; the (perceived or real) quality of the school district; the local tax rate; the crime rate and your own subjective feelings of safety or comfort; and a community of people you might find like-minded and agreeable or otherwise.

You don’t get to pick these characteristics à la carte: they only come bundled. And it’s nearly impossible for a survey to neatly separate the pieces of that bundle for us, to the point where most respondents would make a dispassionate judgment about something like walkability separate from any other cultural, class, or lifestyle associations they carry in their minds.

The question of price also dramatically influences the relative appeal of different bundles. As Chuck Marohn memorably observes in Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution, “If the government were willing to subsidize lobster to be cheaper than hamburger, I’d continuously dine on lobster. More to the point, I’d express a strong personal preference for lobster. The longer this subsidy went on, the more entitled my expectations for lobster would become.”

Nearly every American alive today has only ever lived in a time when the suburban development pattern was deeply subsidized, while traditional urban fabric has been actively destroyed and disinvested in wherever it hasn’t been regulated into scarcity. It’s common—under these conditions of subsidy—for people to casually express sentiments like, “In suburbia, you can get more house for your money.” Such a belief will absolutely influence a question about where you would live, given the choice.

The point here is not that people are stupid and don’t know what’s best for themselves and need government to help them out. Rather, it’s that our incentives largely inform our preferences, and furthermore, that urbanism, in a contemporary American context, has so few live examples that most of us don’t have a basis on which to like or not like it.

We like what we know. Sometimes, when an alternative comes along, we embrace it. Sometimes we have to be forced to embrace it and then marvel at the fact that we ever got along without it. We’re complicated. I don’t want the government to do that work for me—I want to be aware of how my mind works. And I want that potential alternative to exist.

A little more Herriges on this point:

It’s hard for people who live and breathe urbanism to grasp, but most people, thus, will answer questions like Pew’s based on gut reactions or emotional associations, not firm opinions grounded in true experience of what it's actually like to live in different kinds of places.

Most people do, however, like their own neighborhood. And most people also like the kind of place they grew up. They have fond associations with what is familiar to them.

That fact—familiarity—is what's driving these results, and the reason you see them map to political alignment is that there is a divergence in “what is familiar” that increasingly tracks with partisanship.

In other words, all of the left-right noise about this cluster of issues has very little to do with the issues.

And even if you’ve lived in an American city, or visited a European or Asian one, you still have a limited sense of what it would be like to live in the kind of pleasant urban environments urbanists hope to make. American cities need a lot of work, to be sure. Many foreign cities do things better, but few of us have ever lived in one. A lot of Americans live in cities for just a few years, and many move when they get married or have kids.

We have a sense of what living in a city is like, but we have much less of a sense of what maintaining a household or raising a family in that environment looks like. How would you buy and haul your groceries? Take the pet to the vet? What do you do with the kids? If car ownership is inconvenient or expensive, as many urbanists would like it to be, how do you take a breezy road trip?

We’re used to thinking of cities as destinations or shopping areas and not as everyday environments. The cultural narrative that you eventually “graduate” from city life—that adulthood, family, and suburbia are all vaguely joined together—makes it difficult to isolate the question of the built environment.

Even I don’t know how I’d adapt to living in a city. I do things like driving to four different supermarkets on a weekday afternoon to get just the right ingredients for dinner. Could I do that in a city? Maybe not. Would I enjoy certain things that don’t even occur to me? Probably.

So as I think about all of this, I realize that the average American who lives in the suburbs and drives most places doesn’t know what “urbanism” is. Of course it sounds suspect, or foreign, or ideological. Here’s normal American life, that I and everyone I know live every day. Over here are these people who don’t like it. That sort of vague suspicion may or may not make sense, but it’s understandable. Urbanists have to tell, but we also have to show. And instead of dismissing people who reject our ideas, even in seemingly absurd ways, we should consider that they may literally have no idea what we’re actually proposing.

Yes, American cities could be improved in many ways. No, urbanism isn’t an idealistic fairytale. Yes, it’s possible to go food shopping and run errands in towns and cities. Yes, your shopping habits and routines might change under those circumstances. Here are specific things towns and cities can do to improve pedestrian safety or downtown business or X, Y, or Z. Here are reasons why fast driving and easy parking are at odds with building places that are worth driving to or parking for. This, by the way, is small-c conservative: it understands trade-offs, that we can’t always get what we want.

Frequently the politics and effects of these policies are counterintuitive. My hometown’s previous mayor scrapped the downtown parking requirement, and a former administration in the nearby town of Somerville, New Jersey pedestrianized one downtown street. This helped business. The idea that limiting cars (the left!) and economic growth (the right!) can actually go together should tell us that our political framings around these issues are frequently not useful.

But the results? A downtown with marginally less parking and a lot more vitality? A loud, dingy side street that’s now a bright, fun place to take a stroll? That’s the tomato. We’re eating ketchup every day and telling pollsters we hate tomatoes. I don’t want to get rid of the ketchup. But I want to grow more tomatoes, and I want people to at least look at them and understand what they are.

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Related Reading:

Apartments, Ownership, and Responsibility

Cities Aren’t Loud, Cars Are Loud

Parking Anxiety

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