I think there's some truth to the idea you can't go back - but also I don't think the only way for the country to develop is with this zoning. I think you've written - food trucks are an example of small businesses trying to find spaces within the regulations that allow them to operate with lower revenues. In Japan, they have food stalls and small vendors and other small retail/services - yes, the per capita material wealth in Japan is less than in the US, but it's pretty rare that any American travels there to visit or work/live and feels like it's a poorer society.
I think that we can create a wealthy society that can allow small businesses to open without relying on large revenues. We don't have that now, but it does exist around the world. I also think that urbanism isn't necessarily small apartments - it may mean smaller yards, it may mean apartments, but if you lift height restrictions then the apartments can be 2.5k SF, why not?
As long as we are talking about throwing current code into the rubbish bin and starting from scratch. When I hear "overlay district," I run as far and fast as my pathetic legs would carry me.
There's a lot of truth to this. As we became a wealthy country, with a large middle class, we developed class-based attitudes and regulations. People had nicer things, and wanted everything else to be nicer. And they advocated for this through regulation. Look at some of the writings of early 20th century developers, like JC Nichols, who hated the "chaos" of old urbanism, and wanted to clean it all up for the new middle and upper classes. Much of the discourse around zoning was really class-based, wanting to use regulation to keep out the "bad" stuff and improve everything. I think that's an inevitable part of what happens when a people and a society get wealthier.
We really don’t want to go back to what the Lower East Side once was. But a large amount of the resistance to urban livability is just a matter of land-grabbing - elites who legally control their own real-estate/domicile exerting control over proximal spaces that belong to the public or others. Zoning nowadays is less about planning and more about that control. Even statehouse fights about killing transit plans & expanding highways are, to a minor extent, about pacifying homeowners who are angry about “density” and who demand roadway enhancements (that they’re not willing to pay for in increased taxes nor are they willing to hear that it doesn’t have the effect on traffic that they want). Even seemingly unrelated things like developing outlet malls & leaving parks to rot is a choice toward consumption that only elites can fully take advantage of.
It’s not even a poverty thing. These trends hurt the middle class! The middle class can consume, but not every day? The middle class needs the parks more than the elites. Elites have resorts, estates, huge backyards, etc. Elites consume their “space”. Almost no one else can do that on a regular basis. So urbanism is not just about poverty, and “bustling streetscapes” are more frequently like college towns than they are like turn-of-the-century tenements.
I think about in relation to weather too. Like people complaining about Chicago and the Midwest being cold seems newish. Like Chicago has always been cold and I’m sure people have always made note of that. But it wasnt a determinant factor in how people decided where to live. With the rise of perfectly controlled temperature and comfort in all places, I think you this sort of weather complaint grow more prominent
No one was moving in droves to the South and Southwest prior to A/C. The population of Florida has increased eight-fold since 1950, (Arizona's ten-fold, Georgia a more modest five-fold) and there's no chance Houston and Phoenix would be in the top 5 cities by population without it. I think you're on to something pretty big there. As we here in the Mid-Atlantic are in week 4 of a heat wave I wonder when that colder climate is going to start to feel like a luxury to folks and we'll have a migration back north.
I also think that the AC settlement in the sun belt sorta hurts going outside - while 80 degrees is more pleasant for hanging out by the pool than 50 degrees (both Fahrenheit), 50 is demonstrably less hazardous to your health outdoors than 80 is. 68 is something like the "ideal" human temperature, yet the higher you go the more dangerous it gets more quickly.
It IS good for baseball tho, since you can play all year long at night in a way you can't in the Great Lakes. So there's that.
In much of America, it is now considered a luxury to live in a walkable neighborhood with good transit service, so I'm not sure if contemporary urbanism is related to poverty. I do agree, however, that a great deal of suburbanism arose in reaction to associations between city life and poverty in prior generations. Now, it's more of tradeoff. Do you want to spend more money on housing or transportation? Which is more valuable: a large amount of space to call your own or an array of nice restaurants and coffee shops within a few blocks? The worse case scenario, one which is becoming more prevalent, is suburban poverty, where people can afford to live only in places where a car is desirable, even if having a car is a staggering expense.
Your commenters seem to have precluded rural & small town America as desirable visions. It's as though the "what else" can't be seen. Some of us hope (impishly) that sentiment persists because it leaves the country for the rest of us. It's still possible (not just a memory) to leisurely drive from Portland, OR, to Kansas City, MO (approximate route of the Oregon Trail) without utilizing the interstate corridors or engaging any of the great western urban welters (such as Boise, Salt Lake City, Denver). In fact, you can bypass densification of any kind and book frugal, clean lodgings and eat superb home-style cooking on the way. I have done this ramble many times. There are alternative lives, like uncharted lands, awaiting discovery. But you must love relative silence, solitude, and the senses.
The population of the rural counties you're describing has been shrinking since the end of the 19th century, so it doesn't seem crazy to paint these places as broadly undesirable. People mostly want to live where they can get jobs, and in a modern economy that means places with other people.
As per US census data, the rural population grew by 2.7M from 2010 to 2020 (after accounting for definitional differences between the 2010 and 2020 censuses). This is a 4% growth rate compared to 8% for urban areas.
Furthermore, the 2020 census defines urban areas as any city with a population greater than 5000. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Glenwood, IA or Bethel, AK but there’s absolutely nothing “urban” about these places.
If we expand the definition of “urban” to be 100,000+ (think Chico, CA or Burlington, VT), non-urban areas grew at an almost identical rate as urban…7.1% vs 7.4%
So no: people aren’t leaving rural areas in droves to move to the city. Small town america is alive and well.
"Painting these places as broadly undesirable" is crazy when you consider the quiet, growing popularity of these lands among the cognoscenti. Yes, I mean the cognoscenti.
That observation probably seems odd to coastal data aggregators. Right now we have the delight of the "great emptiness" to ponder, but the cognoscenti have eyes just like our own. They recognize the value in prairie swales and chalk formations and land thirst.
My basic answer is no, the sort of fine-grained urbanism you describe and adore is totally compatible with a wealthy society. Small retail, friend, you Are the person who turned me on to the concept. Tokyo, the greatest, not only in the world but also in the history of the world, has all kinds of small retail and Mom and Pop shops. I've heard neighborhoods described as villages with distinct identities and a small, enclosed feel. You are talking about the effects of a laissez faire system, the natural flowering of commerce. You hint at it with your mention of the political, but the real question is whether we can actually claw back the regulations that stamp that stuff out. I think we can for a couple of reasons. The first is the basic reality of the housing crisis. Aaron Renn can say whatever he wants about ratcheting, the crushing climb of home prices continues. Even a modest decrease now would still leave us in a terrible state. The pandemic also caused a widespread vocational questioning and discernment. It led me into urbanism, for example. I bring this up because ambitious yuppies are looking for a way of structuring their economic lives different from entering a gatekept profession like law or medicine, or climbing the corporate ladder. I could frame vocational licensing in the same way. I suspect, or at least hope, that people are seeking more experimental, entrepreneurial career paths. A new way forward.
I wonder... if Strong Towns is right that the Suburban Experiment is basically unsustainable, does it not at some point return us to the level of poverty from which we arose?
I think that the poverty associated with urban living is merely a function of density. Poverty rates in non-metro (i.e., rural) areas exceeds that in metro areas in every US region. Because rural areas are both spread out and less traveled, poverty is largely hidden. Things like unpermitted street vendors don’t exist whereas farmstands and garage salesare considered quaint. Americans tend to see urban areas as more dangerous despite the fact that all-cause mortality, including from guns, is much higher in rural areas.
Urbanism remains fully entrenched where I live (Brooklyn), notwithstanding nosebleed average rents and a high-functioning economy. More cars, proportionately, than Hanoi but roughly the same degree of accessible chaos. Street life remains vibrant and a draw for residents and visitors. I don’t see how that will change as long as density exists. I hope, anyway.
"[I]s what we call 'urbanism' largely an element of poverty? Or, a little more specifically, a lower level of economic development?"
I think generally that spending more does not necessarily improve quality of life (qol). Many people would find this idea to be intuitive. But it's also too vague to get us anywhere.
It's instructive to understand how scholars think about and define "urbanism." The main part of the scholarly urban corpus is some kind of reaction to Adna Ferrin Weber and Louis Wirth.
Both of these are theses to define URBANISM in terms of URBANIZATION; that is, in terms of processes of urban growth, which are subjected to modern quantitative techniques. The New Urban History was basically a refinement and saturation of this approach. I just wrote a 1-page footnote on this yesterday! Urbanization have much value, but I think these are at their core regional or metropolitan studies, and not urban ones. This approach reduces URBAN as a quality to population, density, and land area (2 and 3 are at cross purposes here).
I define URBAN as living bound to neighborhoods. This has matters of degree. Historically, when people did live bound to neighborhoods, indeed, the masses lived in wretched conditions. I argue that this had little or nothing to do with living in PEDESTRIAN COMMUNITIES (Samuel P Hayes):
We need to understand how SOME modern technologies render dense living as healthful and enjoyable. For most of the history of pedestrian communities, people did not understand what caused most diseases. Understanding microbes and their threats to health was the start of modern medicine and the start of modern public health. Engineers responded with technologies for transporting and
treating water and human waste. Refrigeration!!! How great is that! We can supply people with healthful, potable water, we can transport and treat their waste in a sanitary way, and we have machines that slow or arrest the rotting of food. Water and sewer are most efficiently supplied in dense environments. These used to be unsolvable urban problems. Now they are best solved within urban contexts. These are not the only urban problems, but these are were the greatest threats to human well-being in historical urban communities.
I sometimes feel this way about choosing to bike my kids to school and around town instead of driving them around. They are not sheltered from the cold or the heat or the rain or the chaos of the streets as they would be inside of a car. In a way it seems like a choice to make them less materially comfortable than their peers. But maybe being exposed to the elements and life around you can be good for you in a way that wrapping yourself into a bubble can’t.
To me, it seems transportation is a key (the key?) driver of urban form.
More than anything else, cars killed the urban fabric we used to have in the US. While you can say cars are a natural progression of economic development and wealth building, there are plenty of counterexamples globally of rich countries that kept their dense, bustling urban centers (Japan, much of Europe, among others).
In the US, we made policy choices to prioritize cars—subsidizing highways, plentiful surface parking, low gas taxes—which stacked the deck against human-centered urban form.
Why speculate, at least about density? Upzone and let the market determine how densely people will live. AKA let people vote with their feet. With sufficient density—I.e. foot traffic—then can figure out if people want street vendors.
I think there's some truth to the idea you can't go back - but also I don't think the only way for the country to develop is with this zoning. I think you've written - food trucks are an example of small businesses trying to find spaces within the regulations that allow them to operate with lower revenues. In Japan, they have food stalls and small vendors and other small retail/services - yes, the per capita material wealth in Japan is less than in the US, but it's pretty rare that any American travels there to visit or work/live and feels like it's a poorer society.
I think that we can create a wealthy society that can allow small businesses to open without relying on large revenues. We don't have that now, but it does exist around the world. I also think that urbanism isn't necessarily small apartments - it may mean smaller yards, it may mean apartments, but if you lift height restrictions then the apartments can be 2.5k SF, why not?
Good comment.
As long as we are talking about throwing current code into the rubbish bin and starting from scratch. When I hear "overlay district," I run as far and fast as my pathetic legs would carry me.
There's a lot of truth to this. As we became a wealthy country, with a large middle class, we developed class-based attitudes and regulations. People had nicer things, and wanted everything else to be nicer. And they advocated for this through regulation. Look at some of the writings of early 20th century developers, like JC Nichols, who hated the "chaos" of old urbanism, and wanted to clean it all up for the new middle and upper classes. Much of the discourse around zoning was really class-based, wanting to use regulation to keep out the "bad" stuff and improve everything. I think that's an inevitable part of what happens when a people and a society get wealthier.
We really don’t want to go back to what the Lower East Side once was. But a large amount of the resistance to urban livability is just a matter of land-grabbing - elites who legally control their own real-estate/domicile exerting control over proximal spaces that belong to the public or others. Zoning nowadays is less about planning and more about that control. Even statehouse fights about killing transit plans & expanding highways are, to a minor extent, about pacifying homeowners who are angry about “density” and who demand roadway enhancements (that they’re not willing to pay for in increased taxes nor are they willing to hear that it doesn’t have the effect on traffic that they want). Even seemingly unrelated things like developing outlet malls & leaving parks to rot is a choice toward consumption that only elites can fully take advantage of.
It’s not even a poverty thing. These trends hurt the middle class! The middle class can consume, but not every day? The middle class needs the parks more than the elites. Elites have resorts, estates, huge backyards, etc. Elites consume their “space”. Almost no one else can do that on a regular basis. So urbanism is not just about poverty, and “bustling streetscapes” are more frequently like college towns than they are like turn-of-the-century tenements.
I think about in relation to weather too. Like people complaining about Chicago and the Midwest being cold seems newish. Like Chicago has always been cold and I’m sure people have always made note of that. But it wasnt a determinant factor in how people decided where to live. With the rise of perfectly controlled temperature and comfort in all places, I think you this sort of weather complaint grow more prominent
No one was moving in droves to the South and Southwest prior to A/C. The population of Florida has increased eight-fold since 1950, (Arizona's ten-fold, Georgia a more modest five-fold) and there's no chance Houston and Phoenix would be in the top 5 cities by population without it. I think you're on to something pretty big there. As we here in the Mid-Atlantic are in week 4 of a heat wave I wonder when that colder climate is going to start to feel like a luxury to folks and we'll have a migration back north.
I also think that the AC settlement in the sun belt sorta hurts going outside - while 80 degrees is more pleasant for hanging out by the pool than 50 degrees (both Fahrenheit), 50 is demonstrably less hazardous to your health outdoors than 80 is. 68 is something like the "ideal" human temperature, yet the higher you go the more dangerous it gets more quickly.
It IS good for baseball tho, since you can play all year long at night in a way you can't in the Great Lakes. So there's that.
In much of America, it is now considered a luxury to live in a walkable neighborhood with good transit service, so I'm not sure if contemporary urbanism is related to poverty. I do agree, however, that a great deal of suburbanism arose in reaction to associations between city life and poverty in prior generations. Now, it's more of tradeoff. Do you want to spend more money on housing or transportation? Which is more valuable: a large amount of space to call your own or an array of nice restaurants and coffee shops within a few blocks? The worse case scenario, one which is becoming more prevalent, is suburban poverty, where people can afford to live only in places where a car is desirable, even if having a car is a staggering expense.
Your commenters seem to have precluded rural & small town America as desirable visions. It's as though the "what else" can't be seen. Some of us hope (impishly) that sentiment persists because it leaves the country for the rest of us. It's still possible (not just a memory) to leisurely drive from Portland, OR, to Kansas City, MO (approximate route of the Oregon Trail) without utilizing the interstate corridors or engaging any of the great western urban welters (such as Boise, Salt Lake City, Denver). In fact, you can bypass densification of any kind and book frugal, clean lodgings and eat superb home-style cooking on the way. I have done this ramble many times. There are alternative lives, like uncharted lands, awaiting discovery. But you must love relative silence, solitude, and the senses.
The population of the rural counties you're describing has been shrinking since the end of the 19th century, so it doesn't seem crazy to paint these places as broadly undesirable. People mostly want to live where they can get jobs, and in a modern economy that means places with other people.
This is simply not true.
As per US census data, the rural population grew by 2.7M from 2010 to 2020 (after accounting for definitional differences between the 2010 and 2020 censuses). This is a 4% growth rate compared to 8% for urban areas.
Furthermore, the 2020 census defines urban areas as any city with a population greater than 5000. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Glenwood, IA or Bethel, AK but there’s absolutely nothing “urban” about these places.
If we expand the definition of “urban” to be 100,000+ (think Chico, CA or Burlington, VT), non-urban areas grew at an almost identical rate as urban…7.1% vs 7.4%
So no: people aren’t leaving rural areas in droves to move to the city. Small town america is alive and well.
Source: census.gov
"Painting these places as broadly undesirable" is crazy when you consider the quiet, growing popularity of these lands among the cognoscenti. Yes, I mean the cognoscenti.
That observation probably seems odd to coastal data aggregators. Right now we have the delight of the "great emptiness" to ponder, but the cognoscenti have eyes just like our own. They recognize the value in prairie swales and chalk formations and land thirst.
My basic answer is no, the sort of fine-grained urbanism you describe and adore is totally compatible with a wealthy society. Small retail, friend, you Are the person who turned me on to the concept. Tokyo, the greatest, not only in the world but also in the history of the world, has all kinds of small retail and Mom and Pop shops. I've heard neighborhoods described as villages with distinct identities and a small, enclosed feel. You are talking about the effects of a laissez faire system, the natural flowering of commerce. You hint at it with your mention of the political, but the real question is whether we can actually claw back the regulations that stamp that stuff out. I think we can for a couple of reasons. The first is the basic reality of the housing crisis. Aaron Renn can say whatever he wants about ratcheting, the crushing climb of home prices continues. Even a modest decrease now would still leave us in a terrible state. The pandemic also caused a widespread vocational questioning and discernment. It led me into urbanism, for example. I bring this up because ambitious yuppies are looking for a way of structuring their economic lives different from entering a gatekept profession like law or medicine, or climbing the corporate ladder. I could frame vocational licensing in the same way. I suspect, or at least hope, that people are seeking more experimental, entrepreneurial career paths. A new way forward.
I wonder... if Strong Towns is right that the Suburban Experiment is basically unsustainable, does it not at some point return us to the level of poverty from which we arose?
Singapore is high wealth, developed, urban, and still has outdoor food vendors. These things happen if people let them.
I think that the poverty associated with urban living is merely a function of density. Poverty rates in non-metro (i.e., rural) areas exceeds that in metro areas in every US region. Because rural areas are both spread out and less traveled, poverty is largely hidden. Things like unpermitted street vendors don’t exist whereas farmstands and garage salesare considered quaint. Americans tend to see urban areas as more dangerous despite the fact that all-cause mortality, including from guns, is much higher in rural areas.
Urbanism remains fully entrenched where I live (Brooklyn), notwithstanding nosebleed average rents and a high-functioning economy. More cars, proportionately, than Hanoi but roughly the same degree of accessible chaos. Street life remains vibrant and a draw for residents and visitors. I don’t see how that will change as long as density exists. I hope, anyway.
"[I]s what we call 'urbanism' largely an element of poverty? Or, a little more specifically, a lower level of economic development?"
I think generally that spending more does not necessarily improve quality of life (qol). Many people would find this idea to be intuitive. But it's also too vague to get us anywhere.
It's instructive to understand how scholars think about and define "urbanism." The main part of the scholarly urban corpus is some kind of reaction to Adna Ferrin Weber and Louis Wirth.
https://archive.org/details/growthofcitiesin00webe/page/n7/mode/2up
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768119
Both of these are theses to define URBANISM in terms of URBANIZATION; that is, in terms of processes of urban growth, which are subjected to modern quantitative techniques. The New Urban History was basically a refinement and saturation of this approach. I just wrote a 1-page footnote on this yesterday! Urbanization have much value, but I think these are at their core regional or metropolitan studies, and not urban ones. This approach reduces URBAN as a quality to population, density, and land area (2 and 3 are at cross purposes here).
I define URBAN as living bound to neighborhoods. This has matters of degree. Historically, when people did live bound to neighborhoods, indeed, the masses lived in wretched conditions. I argue that this had little or nothing to do with living in PEDESTRIAN COMMUNITIES (Samuel P Hayes):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009614427400100102
We need to understand how SOME modern technologies render dense living as healthful and enjoyable. For most of the history of pedestrian communities, people did not understand what caused most diseases. Understanding microbes and their threats to health was the start of modern medicine and the start of modern public health. Engineers responded with technologies for transporting and
treating water and human waste. Refrigeration!!! How great is that! We can supply people with healthful, potable water, we can transport and treat their waste in a sanitary way, and we have machines that slow or arrest the rotting of food. Water and sewer are most efficiently supplied in dense environments. These used to be unsolvable urban problems. Now they are best solved within urban contexts. These are not the only urban problems, but these are were the greatest threats to human well-being in historical urban communities.
I sometimes feel this way about choosing to bike my kids to school and around town instead of driving them around. They are not sheltered from the cold or the heat or the rain or the chaos of the streets as they would be inside of a car. In a way it seems like a choice to make them less materially comfortable than their peers. But maybe being exposed to the elements and life around you can be good for you in a way that wrapping yourself into a bubble can’t.
To me, it seems transportation is a key (the key?) driver of urban form.
More than anything else, cars killed the urban fabric we used to have in the US. While you can say cars are a natural progression of economic development and wealth building, there are plenty of counterexamples globally of rich countries that kept their dense, bustling urban centers (Japan, much of Europe, among others).
In the US, we made policy choices to prioritize cars—subsidizing highways, plentiful surface parking, low gas taxes—which stacked the deck against human-centered urban form.
Why speculate, at least about density? Upzone and let the market determine how densely people will live. AKA let people vote with their feet. With sufficient density—I.e. foot traffic—then can figure out if people want street vendors.
I've been wondering about this in the context of how much wealthier the US is than other countries.