New and Old #177
Friday roundup and commentary
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Why am I saying all this? I understand why people fear change so much, more than they know, especially when it comes to their home and neighborhood. I love Silver Spring, and the thought of moving terrifies me, as does the thought of my friends moving away because we don’t build enough homes to keep them affordable. Many of them have already moved.
Like many autistic people, crafting a pretty elaborate routine is a fine and healthy way for me to give myself the comfort and predictability I need, but sometimes that change happens anyway, and resisting it at all costs is both impossible and unhealthy. I always make new routines and move on. And yes, then those new routines unironically become the ones I never want to change again.
This is basically my “if you build it, they won’t care” idea: the fear of change is real, but it’s also mostly forward-looking, in the sense that once the feared thing is done, it rarely turns into resentment looking back in time. It just dissipates. The new thing becomes old, and life goes on. There’s a real psychological truth to that, and the ability to understand that about yourself is difficult but worthwhile.
We all fear change and we are all very good at using that fear to justify why we and our neighborhoods don’t need to change. Even when we know deep down the fear is irrational, it doesn’t always stop that fear. The only fix is for the change to occur, and for us to realize that it wasn’t as bad as we feared.
Not approving zoning changes in Montgomery County won’t make anyone less afraid. And if we do approve them–and I believe the county should–people will move on to being afraid of some other changes, just as I will in my own life. But we can make sure that other people aren’t hurt in an effort to placate someone else’s fears, to meet their insatiable need for consistency, or to indulge the status quo.
Those of us who say stuff like this are accused of a couple of things: either being shills for real-estate or developer interests, or wanting to impose our own preferences on everyone else. The fact is, while lots of urbanists and housing advocates do love what they’re advocating for, some of us also have real trepidation about it. But not doing anything exacts its own costs. A lot to think about here.
The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives, The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, August 5, 2024
But, at the risk of giving Vance any credit here, I must admit that progressives do have a family problem. The problem doesn’t exist at the level of individual choice, where conservative scolds tend to fixate. Rather, it exists at the level of urban family policy. American families with young children are leaving big urban counties in droves. And that says something interesting about the state of mobility—and damning about the state of American cities and the progressives who govern them.
I’m going to use this one more time:
Because it captures what’s wrong with so much conservative policy commentary: it isn’t really policy commentary at all, but a fixation on culture and ideology, which allows you to sound like you’re really into some issue without actually doing anything at all.
But more of the article:
This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves. Yes, the pace of the urban exodus was fastest during the high-pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. But even at the slower rate of out-migration since then, several counties—including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under-5 population in 20 years.
It’s a really strange, scary thing to imagine that if these trends continue, there will be entire regions of the country that are “for” settling down and starting a family, and entire regions which are just for young white-collar professionals and childless power couples. That cannot happen. That is not a country or a society.
This is a really important bit:
“I’m deeply worried about a family-exodus doom loop,” O’Brien told me. “When the population of young kids in a city falls 10 or 20 percent in just a few years, that’s a potential political earthquake. Almost overnight, there are fewer parents around to fight for better schools, local playgrounds, or all the other mundane amenities families care about.”
In other words, without a minimum critical mass of children and families in a community, parents really do come to seem like just another special interest angling for this or that favor, or worse, not represented at all. That really is a problem, and any person should be able to see that. Just like bashing childless women doesn’t equate to pro-family policy, caring about the interests of the family doesn’t imply looking down on non-parents.
This is a really, really key related point:
Behavior is contagious, as the Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis has shown. If you have a friend who smokes or exercises, it significantly increases the odds that you will do the same. The same principle might hold for having or not having kids. As young children become scarce in big cities, people in their 20s and 30s who are thinking about having children will have fewer opportunities to see firsthand how fulfilling parenthood can be. What they’re left with instead are media representations, which tend to be inflected by the negativity bias of the news.
The same can be said of urbanism. A lot of young people have never had the family modeled for them, except (hopefully) in their own childhoods. A lot of Americans in general have never had urban living modeled for them. So much of what we understand to be our preferences are really our own restricted horizons.
Read the whole thing, which also includes some substantive critiques of urban progressive policy.
What Kalamazoo (Yes, Kalamazoo) Reveals About the Nation’s Housing Crisis, New York Times, Conor Dougherty, August 22, 2024
If you want to know what the housing crisis for middle-income Americans looks like in 2024, spend some time in Michigan. The surplus-to-shortage whipsaw here is a mitten-shaped miniature of what the entire country has gone through.
One of the arguments against YIMBY is something like this: the handful of really high-demand cities with acute housing shortages are never realistically going to be able to build enough homes to drive down prices. (Look how expensive Hong Kong is, for example.) Demand will always outstrip supply—maybe demand will even grow. Why ruin the character of these actual, existing places for a goal that can’t in actuality be met?
Aside from questioning whether making room for thousands or tens of thousands more people is “ruining” a place, the counterargument to this is that the acute housing crisis is no longer the province of a handful of high-demand cities. It may be true that in a small handful of localities, demand will always outstrip supply, but this was never true in the vast majority of places. But somehow, some form of this problem now is.
The housing crisis has moved from blue states to red states, and large metro areas to rural towns. In a time of extreme polarization, the too-high cost of housing and its attendant social problems are among the few things Americans truly share. That and a growing rage about the country’s inability to fix it.
So a few weeks ago I flew from California (where I live) to Michigan — from where the housing shortage started to where it’s going. I spent most of my time in Kalamazoo County, a region of 261,000 people in the southwest part of the state. It’s a good place to see how all of America, not just coastal cities, got into a housing crunch, and offers a look at some of the efforts to get out of it.
One more bit: this is what happens when people actually take the advice of “why don’t you just move?”
Whenever I write about California’s housing troubles — the $5,000-a-month studio apartments, the mile-long homeless camps — I get a certain kind of cranky email. The sender, whom I imagine to be an older homeowner with a paid-off mortgage, asks why all these people struggling with housing can’t move somewhere cheaper. Like Michigan.
In fact, this is exactly what people have been doing. Economic migration used to mean moving to a fast-growing city for a better-paying job. Now finding shelter has become so onerous that housing costs are one of the major reasons people move, leaving good job markets for places with a lower cost of living….
We’ve reached a point where the housing market is determining the rest of the economy rather than the other way around.
Read the whole thing.
When Did the Great Stagnation Actually Begin?, Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen, August 27, 2024
There are a few hypotheses here as to why in the early 1970s lots of things sort of started to slow down economically. The last one given, which Cowen sort of dismisses, is the one that has always felt really true to me:
I also wonder if there is some kind of natural rhythm to the social vitality of a nation, rising and falling along with changes in effort and inspiration. This was a popular idea earlier in the 20th century, though to many it sounds more like hand-waving than scientific explanation.
If there’s a word that seems to distill American life today, it’s stuckness. The initiative and good luck needed to do anything—get married, start a family, buy a home, build a home—is so high that these utterly normal things are increasingly difficult. That sense of stuckness—nothing is really ever going to change or improve, is it?—is how Americans used to think of the psychology of other countries, like those laboring under communism.
This is why urbanism is so conceptually important to me: it’s literally unsticking our everyday landscape, restoring a sense that things can happen which I really think would have all sorts of positive effects throughout American society.
Related Reading:
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I sent the Derek Thompson piece to a lot of friends
Kevin Erdman's thoughts on the Kalamazoo article were very interesting:
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinerdmann/p/what-kalamazoo-reveals-about-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=c8k75