Inhabiting Old Ghosts

Long thoughts on conservative urbanism

I know a fellow who subscribes to this newsletter, and who owns a store in downtown Flemington, New Jersey. (I’ve written about New Jersey a lot recently because I’ve visited for the holidays. I also find it fascinating to look at a place I’m familiar with from the vantage point of my professional interests today.) Flemington is a small, historic town of about 5,000 people. In my lifetime, it’s gone from a reasonably lively place to a ghost town. Slowly, things seem to be getting better.

This business owner posted on Facebook a couple of weeks ago about how excited he was for his first holiday season downtown. He’s a youngish fellow, married, with a couple of kids. He’s also excited about a couple of big new projects in Flemington which would redevelop or renovate decayed parts of town and bring in new housing and businesses.

In some ways, this reminds of young people tired of screens who go and start a farm, or young Catholics who love the Latin Mass, or young audiophiles who think records sound better. There seems to be something of a trend where young people are rediscovering a cast-off past. Enthusiasm for towns and cities, and a shift away from the perceptions of the Boomer generation and the era of suburban expansion, is one of the most interesting examples of this phenomenon.

The Flemington old guard, concerned about the integrity of the town’s historic fabric and its quiet small-town feel, tends to oppose almost every new proposal. Local politics have been very NIMBY for at least a couple of decades. Yet they aren’t happy with the town’s stagnation, either. Now Flemington is by no means poor or lacking in money. (One of my friends asked me if it was common for affluent towns to look as run-down as Flemington did.) It merely doesn’t attract or contain enough people to support a lively urban environment.

Now I mentioned young people who like records. Let me go on a bit of a tangent here. I happen to collect old clock radios, which I wrote about here. I remember, years ago, finding a “flip clock” somewhere—one of those clocks with a woodgrain body and a digital display that uses flipping number cards. I was very excited, and I thought it was so cool.

My dad was sort of surprised. For him, these were just ordinary bits of consumer flotsam and jetsam. Every discount department store in the ’70s sold them. For me, however, they were completely new. And the passage of time had imbued them with a sense of embodied history.

Some, of course, were junk, and those are probably the ones that ended up in the landfill. But some were quite beautifully engineered, and like a solid, timeworn old building, they have a grandeur to them. (If this interests you at all, there are some pictures of my collection here.)

I go on this digression because I feel something similar about places like downtown Flemington, and all the other small towns and small cities I’ve come across in the work I do. Given our current manner of building things, they’re non-renewable resources. We inhabit these ghosts of another economic and social era, and most of us recognize something beautiful in them, and yet somehow that doesn’t inspire us to enliven them again or at least to build in such a manner again.

This is a great puzzle for me. Even the most ardent suburbanite tends to love the quaint small town he might visit for ice cream, pizza, or a stroll. What is it that causes the possibility of actually living there, or of filling in suburban landscapes in some such manner, to be completely walled off?

I saw another person on Facebook a few days ago remark that they couldn’t wait to live in Flemington itself, and would move into whatever new housing project got finished first. The NIMBYs who fight every project love their town. They believe they are protecting it from redevelopment, or overcrowding, or greedy developers. But at some level, many of them would also be surprised by a young person who couldn’t wait to live there.

They have trouble with the idea that anybody would want more people as neighbors, would want to walk more and drive less, would not mind or even welcome affordable-rate units mixed in with their market-rate ones, and so much more. That they might double down on this when they have kids, to reduce the chance of losing their children in an automobile crash and to teach them to take in so much more of the world with all their senses? Unimaginable.

I can attest that anyone who expresses these opinions in a lot of popular forums—Facebook, NextDoor, even, often, casual conversation—is often called immature, idealistic, or, of course, a “paid shill.” There are many people who find such opinions inconceivable—so inconceivable they nobody could truly hold them genuinely.

Such enthusiasm for the closeness and energy of urban living strikes a lot of older folks, and no doubt some curmudgeonly younger ones, as idealistic and unrealistic. Sitting in traffic—which is a poor proxy for density or population size—might do that to you, as will, in the case of the Boomers, living through the crime wave. I can understand that.

But critics of urban living tend to see only its downsides, and tend to argue that young people will grow out of their enthusiasm for it. But there are real material benefits to building places where you can walk to the store, where kids can walk to school, where a family can get by with only one car. Cars are expensive, after all, and so is gas.

“Drive less” strikes a lot of people as a kind of moral hectoring, like Jimmy Carter telling you to lower the thermostat and put on a sweater. I don’t think of it that way; I think of it as a call to thriftiness, ingenuity, and making the most of what you have. All of these, of course, are supremely conservatives virtues.

Another conservative virtue is continuity with the past. Take a look at this bit towards the end of a piece I wrote for Strong Towns, in which I cautiously praised a lot of the new “town center” development in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC:

Rockville is not an exurb; it is a former streetcar suburb to Washington, DC. The area’s new and rising apartment buildings and mixed-use projects are not out of place, even if they are a little bit out of scale. Far from an imposition or redefinition, they’re a sensible step up in the intensity of the area’s land use. The people who built the first or second generations of buildings along here would never have expected that landscape to remain encased in regulatory amber as long as it has been. They would have understood—they did understand—that dynamism, flexibility, resiliency, and change are all one package.

Consider this tidbit from a profile of Rockville’s trolley era: “In 1929, W&R [Washington & Rockville Electric Railway Company] ran 24 trips a day between 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. to connect Rockville and Washington.” It is almost as if places like this are awakening from a long slumber under the interlocking forces of suburban land use and car dependency, and picking up where they left off in the early 20th century. It is change, to be sure, but it is also a kind of continuity.

You may not agree with all of this—or any of it! But it seems to me that none of this is radical, nor does any of it constitute a departure from historic American life. Urban living, whether at the small-town or big-city scale, is not for everyone. But it is for many more people than our attitudes and regulations are currently willing to accommodate.

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Related Reading:

A Hint of America’s Lost Urban History

Mayberry Wasn’t a Subdivision

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