(More) Small Town Thoughts
Preparation questions for even *more* thoughts!
This is a preview of a longer piece, most likely. I have a few things I’m chewing on that will probably come together for that longer piece, and here they are:
Many of the loveliest, most classically urban small towns I’ve visited and written about are very exclusive, small, slow-growing communities.
How do you distinguish between a place that is expensive because it is truly worthy of being expensive, in some way, and a place that is expensive because of screwed up housing supply and markets?
Is “truly worthy of being expensive” a bogus idea in and of itself?
Is “exclusive” the same as “exclusionary”? Why or why not?
Actually, that’s probably more than one longer piece.
These are thoughts I have often, in some form or another, as I explore places and think about their design/history/etc., and what they say for urbanists today. For example, take Middleburg. It’s an extremely affluent town in Virginia’s “horse and hunt country,” past the exurban edge of D.C. in Loudoun County. There’s very strong NIMBY sentiment there against the encroaching D.C. sprawl, which has eaten up the countryside almost all the way to Middleburg.
Is that good or bad? Is it important to preserve the countryside? “Upzone the rich”? Grow in a smart manner, i.e. putting more density where we’ve already built as opposed to sprawling out at low densities for mile after mile? Is suburban sprawl with an urban form—mixed-use centers, for example—good? Or is location more important than form?
Do these little islands of stately classic urbanism mean much of anything for those of us who care about improving this country’s built environment, in the places where most of us actually live?
I write a lot about developing or reimagining the suburbs more along small-town lines. And I wonder a lot why suburbanites seem to resist that, even though most of them like small towns. Maybe they just think it’s not a feasible transformation. And maybe they’re right?
I mean, I don’t think they’re right. But I grew up in the suburbs, and I understand the anti-urban mindset to some extent, so as much as I’ve become committed to urbanism I try to be charitable to those who see it differently. And these are questions that arise out of my being a suburbanite and also an urbanist.
Lots to think about here. Leave a comment!
A little Substack note—Substack just released a new feature bestowing “verification” badges on writers who have achieved various numbers of paid subscribers. You may notice that I have the variant of the badge that signifies “hundreds of paid subscribers.” That’s right—I had no idea if I’d even get 10 or 20 when I started, but you’ve gotten me there! The next level up is “thousands of paid subscribers.” One day?
Related Reading:
Meat and Money in Northern Virginia
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The problem is that "development" in the USA tends to mean converting whatever is there into the same dystopian hellscape of six-lane highways, curb cuts, big-box stores, strip malls and fast food joints. Likewise, "densification" means copy-pasting in those vaguely inauthentic corporate "modern aesthetic" apartment blocks that look exactly the same on every corner of every city, with the highest number of floors the developer could possibly get permission to build.
There's an even worse variant of this in the "upzoning" movement - which in practice simply means taking the existing suburban infrastructure, built around highway strip malls and car dependency, and increasing the number of automobiles by 50%. It's no surprise that "NIMBYs" are against it.
What the USA desperately needs is a widely-accepted (in the professional circles of architecture, RE development, and urban planning) definition of what a "nice place to live" actually looks and feels like, along with rules or principles that are generally followed to achieve it. Thematically the "five minute city" is a good place to start, but the aesthetic aspect tends to be lacking.
Easton, Maryland, is a useful case study. A perfect small town in the model urbanism sense. Always been a moneyed place, but recently turning even more explicitly toward trying to be a place for wealthy people, esp. under the influence of a NYC energy tycoon.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/01/15/paul-prager-king-easton-new-york-energy-mogul-remaking-eastern-shore-town/
A number of gorgeous small towns in Western Mass. are the same way, and increasingly, in the Hudson Valley.