New and Old #165
Friday roundup and commentary
The Weird Politics of Housing Abundance, Thesis Driven, Brad Hargreaves, May 15, 2024
I already know what some people will say in response here: trans rights or stopping civilian deaths in Gaza are not “politics” or “partisanship,” they’re basic litmus tests of human decency.
Look, if half the country is made up of moral monsters, you do in fact need to work with them. Or better yet, trick them to support at least some small piece of your progressive cause. Wouldn’t you want to see otherwise awful right-wing types embracing a pro-housing agenda? “We got them on one position, at least…”
But I think the average person probably does perceive those priorities in my first paragraph as “political.” At the very least, they’re much more remote, for most people anyway, than the cost of housing is. That’s the thing about housing that makes it almost unique: it may feel like one of these hot-button culture-war issues, but it almost lies below politics, because it affects everybody. It lends itself to a big tent because of its nature.
In other words, as Hargreaves spells out right at the start:
This [the attempt to make housing advocacy explicitly progressive] is misguided on several fronts. For one, housing advocacy groups taking a position on a divisive foreign conflict would not help Palestinians, but it might destroy the housing movement. Two, the pro-housing movement nationally is not even a Democratic (party) movement, let alone a leftist one. Some of the biggest housing wins of the past year—comprehensive zoning reforms in Montana and Florida, for instance—have come from Republican state governments in red states.
This is a good thing. Pro-housing policies are having success not because they’re right- or left-coded, but because they’re the right thing to do at a time when Americans of all political orientations are grappling with high rents and eye-watering mortgage payments. As a nonpartisan cause, housing abundance has succeeded by drawing support from both sides of the aisle.
Further down in the piece, he makes a really important point: the opposite of the pro-housing coalition—NIMBYs—are a political big tent too:
Interestingly, the right-communitarian’s blood-and-soil approach [local control over private property rights] is mirrored on the left with different political coding and language but identically poor results for housing production. Understanding this requires moving past the traditional left-right spectrum.
Also, perception is reality in politics, so this is simply true whether or not you like or agree with it:
I write all of this to demonstrate that the pro-housing movement is not a simple left-right issue. While plenty of leftists are in support of land use reform, it doesn’t have the same obvious partisan coding as something like abortion or climate change or Black Lives Matter.
This is important, because all those causes have been subsumed over the past few years into the Progressive Omnicause.
This is good. Read the whole thing.
The Lifestyle Ratchet Is Hard to Avoid, Aaron Renn, May 21, 2024
This is interesting, and it touches on a thread I’ve been pulling at with a few different subjects: to do with whether urbanism is “eating your vegetables,” with the downsides of work-from-home, and with whether it’s possible to put down smartphones. The big question being whether the mere availability of the easier but less salutary choice makes it almost impossible psychologically to affirmatively choose what you once just did. Does giving people “choice” actually restrict what we feel able to choose?
I also wrote about that with regard to manners and social niceties, which is adjacent to remote work:
Once something becomes or feels optional, you have to sort of work backwards to re-justify doing it—to justify affirmatively choosing it, where before you simply did it because you did it. Junk food does this to vegetables; contraception does this to having children; driving in a comfy private automobile does this to walking, biking, or riding transit. Being alone all the time does this to manners.
But here’s Renn:
Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them.
I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.
One kid per room is an example of such a standard. When I was a kid, I obviously would have preferred my own room. I knew that kids from families with more money did have their own room. But there was nothing unusual about sharing one.
Over time, as one child per bedroom became seen as the norm, not having that would mark a family as an outlier. The kids might feel poor rather than simply not rich - a big difference. As the article indicates, families might even decide to avoid having more kids if they can’t afford an individual bedroom for each one.
It’s similar for air conditioning, which is now seen as standard.
In other words—even though in some sense they’re the same thing—bunking up your kids or going without air conditioning is totally different in a world where neither of those things is normative than in one where they’re either common or essentially required. The new option isn’t really an option, because it forecloses the old one.
Renn is more conservative than I am, but I agree with this line of inquiry, and I think it explains a lot of the psychological frictions in society today. And I’m not sure, actually, that is a conservative idea, per se. I had a pretty lefty environmental studies professor in college who talked about this stuff all the time. It’s called in social sciences the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we adjust to improvements in standard of living and come to expect them, and so our subjective well-being never really improves even though our lives demand much more energy and resources over time.
And of course there’s something very Catholic about the idea of forgoing worldly comforts in order to devote more of yourself to deeper things.
Check out the piece!
Why Cars In The U.S. Are Not Smaller, Cornerstone, Luca Gattoni-Celli, May 15, 2024
Even Japanese Kei trucks and cars that have become a charming fad in the U.S. weigh about 1,500 pounds. The original two-passenger Smart car weighed about 1,600 pounds. So why are cars so heavy? And why do most of them end up being so big?
My answer is a combination of physics and economics. I will assume consumers have some desire to not be killed or injured in a crash and to save money on fuel, but I will set aside regulations, including fuel economy standards that let multi-ton pickup trucks off the hook. A vehicle able to convey at least two adults in reasonable comfort and safety has certain basic engineering requirements that pile on the pounds. And car buyers make decisions on a margin that pushes them toward four wheels, four passengers, and some cargo space, even a single person living alone who only needs a car to commute. This is really just my take as a car enthusiast, but I do feel confident in my reasoning (and I hope it will help urbanists understand cars a bit better).
That last bit is important. A lot of the loud voices on urbanist Twitter seem to sit in an echo chamber where cars are just bad, and while they have their reasons for their tone, they don’t match the way the average person thinks about a car.
Apparently, though, the average person may be right, because a tiny car isn’t really much more efficient or less polluting—and it is less safe—than a mere small car:
One might argue, quite reasonably, that the Smart still has less environmental impact, requiring fewer resources to manufacture, probably throwing off less particulate matter from its tires and brakes, and so on. But any such edge is probably quite modest. To find a practical, attractive car alternative that is significantly smaller than a Corolla or Civic, we will have to look beyond four wheels. What about three?
And this is where land use runs up against lighter, cheaper, smaller, less polluting transportation options. A three-wheeler or a tiny car is just fine in an urban context. But it’s a death trap on an expressway or a stroad. What’s missing in America are urban-scaled vehicles—what Europeans explicitly call “city cars”—and fully urban city environments (i.e. not beset by suburban-scaled vehicles and high-speed motor traffic in general.)
Read the whole thing.
This is very long, and politically leans fairly left, but it describes something real that transcends politics, and which I think I’ve touched on a lot, from a lot of different angles, in thinking about land use and human relationships. But obviously there’s more than that going on.
In October 2019, Robert and I spent a month in Trieste, Italy, while he worked on an article for National Geographic featuring the storied Northern Italian port city.
I was extremely burnt out. I was in the thick of it at CNN, coming off two years of utter insanity in the US political world. It was exhausting and also frightening to contemplate what was becoming of the US.
On a more personal level, I was frustrated by the lack of meaningful friendships in Washington, DC, where we live. Everyone was hyper-busy, overworked, and stretched so thin that it was hard to find the energy and the time to have the kind of regular, causal connection that used to be commonplace, even in cities.
While in Trieste, I signed up to take one-on-one Pilates classes from an Italian woman in her late 30s. As I shared my frustrations about life in America, particularly how lonely it could feel, she asked me how often I saw my friends. "About once a week," I said, even though as I said it, I realized it was much less.
She was shocked. "This is not normal," she said. "I see my friends every day." She explained that when she left that evening, she would stop to see her friends as she walked home—a glass of wine with one, perhaps dinner with another.
None of this was planned in advance.
It seems to me we have little understanding of why European life is so different than American life. What explains this? How is it even possible to have the leisure time to see friends every day and still be employed and a full adult? Or is it not possible? Or is America wrong about what “full adult” life entails? Etc., etc. Give this a read and a think.
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European workers are more productive while working shorter hours. In America we think constant work is virtuous, and we are ironically less productive.
It's a lot easier to drop by your friends if you are walking home than if you are driving home. The very act of walking gives you an incentive to stop.