Hit Me With Your Best (Anti-Urbanism) Shot
If we're wrong, how and why are we wrong?
There are times when I kind of feel like doing a gut check and preventing myself from accidentally or imperceptibly getting into a bubble, where what comes to feel normal, or barely needing explanation, to me sounds nutty to other people.
I saw this interesting thread on Twitter recently, asking: “What are the best arguments against urbanism or YIMBYism that you’ve heard or considered?” And it got me thinking about this.
I’ll give you mine, the thing that’s always in the back of my head and that I feel a need to reconcile in some way. People need familiarity—landmarks, markers, places to plant and gather memories. Individuals and built places and the communities that arise in that interplay are not abstractions. A lot of very NIMBY neighborhoods are also genuinely lovely, neighborly places to live. It’s difficult to pry apart their exclusive nature from their neighborly nature—from the social trust that you get when the same people inhabit the same place over time together.
When I hear someone—even in my own neighborhood!—say “Oh, it’s such a lovely place to live, isn’t it?” my first thought now is, “I bet you oppose new housing, huh?” And I realize that being an urbanist and housing advocate has made me have that reaction. I’m not sure that’s healthy—to see neighborliness as following from an exclusionary attitude, rather than perhaps seeing exclusion as the flip-side or cost of social trust. I don’t want to “ruin” anybody’s neighborhood or my own, but it’s hard not to think that there are some costs to growth and density.
It seems to me that if we focus on housing units only, we can lose the point of housing units. We can end up implicitly endorsing the atomization of American life instead of seeking whatever the right pathway is towards thicker and more neighborly communities. We can almost define “community” as some actual particular place out of existence.
Now, my way of reconciling this is to get a little mystical and argue that the “character” of a neighborhood is different from the current built environment. Or, even more mystical, the inward substance of a place is different from its outward form. I like this idea and it’s also true—as a city evolves, it does in fact remain the same place in some ways—but I recognize it’s a little bit of a device for explaining away or smoothing over what might be a real psychological cost to growth for the people who are already in a place.
Here’s a long piece I wrote about some big changes in my hometown, and how I understand my town’s future in some ways to be a picking up of the past—carrying on the same, old project of building it up—versus locking it in amber and treating it like a historical artifact. Nonetheless, I do feel a need to force myself to choose growth/housing/urbanism over my natural inclination to keep things the way they are.
So that’s me. There are some interesting answers to the original question on Twitter. Here are a few.
What’s the point of spending your time on this—most of America is unlikely to keep growing for long, and our development pattern is already way baked in.
In other words: it’s futile.
“YIMBros may technically be right, but the vibes are off”
In other words, housing advocates are annoying on the internet. There’s a “weak” version of this: “ They’re right but they’re annoying so I disagree with them.” But there’s also a “strong” version: “If these people are snarky and sardonic and uncharitable, maybe we should be a little suspicious of their policy priorities and how they’re going to implement them if given the political power to do so.”
The best argument against pure YIMBYism is basically that private building will never produce a supply glut that durably, substantially brings down rents, for a variety of reasons, notably the cost of construction, diminishing returns on new building, and interests rates.
In other words, contra some of the most market-/property-rights-oriented framings, there will always be a need for social/public/subsidized housing. I think most housing advocates are both/and on this, but you will find some market-only folks.
That it doesn’t deal with the issue of land speculation, and that the vacant lot continues to increase in value for doing nothing.
In other words, land-value tax would fix it?
The problem with living in the most desirable, densest, most convenient locations will always be higher land costs, so to some degree, urbanism always imposes a compromise on the amount of built space per person. This is a less of problem than imagined, but still a problem.
Pretty straightforward, but an acknowledgement that building housing would mean anyone gets to live anywhere they want is simplistic. Yeah, when I see someone say “I should be able to live anywhere on any budget” I get why people connect housing advocacy with entitlement. That will never really be the case.
I think the people that advocate for pie-in-the-sky urbanism as the end-all solution need to take a step back. What is better for a community overall? Having a high speed rail stop or building out your sidewalk and bike network? Choose the smaller options first.
This is an endorsement of incremental, “slow” improvement, like Strong Towns, over dreams of a national high-speed rail map.
Some others: people need green space, which might suggest walkable low-intensity urbanism but not super-dense Manhattan-style urbanism (unless, I guess, you can get your Central Park in there). Mixed-use development is difficult to execute well because architects and builders mostly focus on one building in one use segment (I guess this in increasingly not true, but it does take time to relearn the old skills.)
There’s more. Go peruse the thread if this interests you.
So I’m curious how you would answer this question—even or especially if you do support housing growth/density/walkability/the whole urbanism package. Leave a comment!
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I am 100% YIMBY but even I will admit the ideal will never happen. We can build all the housing we want but it we don't build the infrastructure and businesses needed to support all those people at the same time... it doesn't work. You end up with too many people in an area that is not designed to support them.
For me, there are two effective anti-urbanism arguments which are related but I see them as distinct.
1) If this was so great, we would be doing it already and probably at scale. The "If your clients had invented Facebook, they would have invented Facebook" retort.
2) This might be a rehash of point 1, but for me the futility argument really sticks. We, as a people, do not want this. Our collective identity (and resulting land use) is tied up with the automobile, its benefits (real and perceived), and everything else that goes along with it - highways, roads, repairs, the aesthetic of cars, etc. I may think that this is a blind alley, but I believe that the median American does not see it that way and the idea that this is going to change is a fools' errand.