"I'm An Antisocial Urbanist Living In Suburbia, Ask Me Anything"
The tension between living in a place and wanting it to change in the abstract
Today, I want to think through something I’ve realized I’m doing, living in a nice house in suburbia but having this set of ideas that kind of cuts against that. When I hear people talk about what a nice neighborhood we are, or “oh yeah, that’s a great place to live,” my gut reaction is “Oh, you must be one of those people who doesn’t want to build any housing” or “Oh, care to elaborate what makes it ‘nice’?”
Of course, this sounds like hypocrisy: interrogating someone else’s motives, but not my own. It isn’t hypocrisy, though. It’s more that I’m not quite sure how these abstract ideas I hold about housing and community and not putting up walls around places and not being exclusionary intersect with living in an actual place with actual characteristics with actual people who were “buying” those characteristics when they bought homes here.
We talk about how NIMBYism is sort of an ideology or something, but I don’t think my neighbors (who may not even be NIMBYs—and in any case we have an HOA that preempts any zoning reforms) would think of it that way. We housing and urbanist people often think of NIMBYism as a viewpoint or ideology. But it is just the expectation most regular people have that neighborhoods and places can be counted on to more or less be a certain way, in general.
It would seem to those regular folks like a bloodless ideology to come in and say that you aren’t buying anything except the four walls of your house when you buy a home in a place. In its most annoying, very-online form, YIMBYism can sound like a belief that there is no such thing as a place at all, just individuals and housing units. And sadly, the least interested or informed regular people will probably be more familiar with that stuff than with what the majority of real housing advocates are saying and thinking.
I guess I have this feeling that I’m almost supposed to respond, when a neighbor or some person says something nice about the place we live, with something like “Yeah, but you know, it would be nicer if more people could live here” or “it would be nicer if we could build stuff, don’t you think?” Do I have any sort of duty to be a YIMBY first and a neighbor and resident second? Or does this look like a contradiction to me because there’s a NIMBY somewhere inside of me?
I suppose a place is reducible neither to its buildings or its people. And I think my answer to this problem is that we simply have to rediscover the idea that natural, organic change in our places is the default. But I can sense the pressure that exists, when you live somewhere desirable, to want to keep it the way it is. And I can see how being a loud YIMBY in such a place can make you seem resentful or unneighborly or even something like traitorous.
Anyone here who lives in suburbia but dislikes many of the high-level issues with suburbia: how do you think about this tension? How do conversations with “regular person” neighbors and locals go? Leave a comment!
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You mentioned something in passing that I think is actually critical: you have an HOA presumably with a very small land area that it controls, but a high degree of control such that you do not need to worry too much about what is going on beyond your HOA boundary.
One of the reasons that Houston is such a permissive place, that allows housing supply (and development in general) much more easily than other places, is that it delegates most land use restriction to the level of the HOA. This means that people self sort. The people who cannot sleep peacefully at night with the idea that their neighbors house might get a shed in the back or be painted a different color, get to live in an extremely restrictive HOA that micromanages everything everyone can do with their house. The people who want to live and let live, have plenty of places they can pick that do not have restrictive HOA’s, or HOA’s at all. (There’s quite a spectrum of different levels of permissiveness.)
In practice, this takes the temperature of land used debates down dramatically. And as it turns out, there’s quite a large percentage of the population that likes live and let live, and is truly happy to have mutual freedom to do what they want with their property. Large enough, that Houston keeps being able to make room for more people, even as a non trivial number of neighborhoods are frozen in amber.
Great musings and I hear you 100%. I'm in very much the same situation in Annapolis as I like in what would be considered a "street car suburb" in a larger city. While fortunately we do not have any HOA (I would/could never like where there is one, they would kick me out with the amount of boat stuff I have) we do have R1 zoning despite there being a number of nonconforming duplexes and other structures since the development way predates the zoning. With that context, the way I discuss this with people is neither with a NIMBY nor a YIMBY voice, but with a Strong Towns voice of allowing organic change and I love the line "no neighborhood should undergo radical change but no neighborhood should be exempt from change. The metaphor I use is earthquakes. When the pressure builds eventually you will have a dislocation, the longer it builds, the greater it will be. With respect to neighborhood change, fighting any and every change will only last so long and when the change happens it will typically be at a large scale, paradoxically exactly what people were fighting against. When discussing this with neighbors, I try and not use loaded terms and judging language, just neutral cause and effect language. I'm not sure what the end result of that is, but if nothing else I hope it gets people thinking about this in a rational way and not just a knee jerk "they're trying to destroy our way of life" way.