Night On The Town

Why real-life conversations matter

As occasionally happens in our small world of D.C.-region urbanists, housing advocates, researchers, and general urban planning nerds, there were two events on the same day, last Tuesday night in the city. They were perfectly timed to hit both, and I did.

The first was a launch event for something called Metropolitan Abundance Project, a project of California YIMBY, which is considered the first YIMBY housing advocacy organization. (Those folks held the colloquium I wrote about here, on the question of “new cities”). But I don’t particular know most of them the way I know a number of the folks involved in this stuff in the D.C. area. Obviously, there’s a whole east coast and Midwest and Southeast, but the D.C. region has a really highly developed housing advocacy coalition, so it and California are probably where most of us reside or work.

“Abundance” is one of those words that has an element of focus-group testing, but also an element of real ingenuity. It’s a way of getting past, or out of, accusations of being “left” or “right.” It’s a way of hinting at deregulation without deregulation being the end in itself. What do housing advocates actually want? Not just raw housing units. We want human settlements that are not artificially held back. I can imagine that “abundance” was almost coined by someone asking, “What’s the throughline in what we want in a more abstract sense?”

There is a little bit of an element of “trust the experts” (economists, developers, etc.) to this—which I touched on here—but one of the key insights is that when you regulate with a lighter and smarter touch, you often lower the barriers to entry. And that’s the opposite of “rule by experts.”

It was very cool having these two worlds in one room—a few dozen of the probably few hundred people in the country with some public visibility most involved in housing, zoning, and urbanist issues. On the one hand, you can say, this is such a small world, how much can it matter if you all fit in a conference space in a D.C. office building?

But below this group of people—with some sort of national or regional profile, who work in public-facing roles doing policy or advocacy or communication or public service—there are many, many more people out there doing the same work. People on town and city councils and zoning and planning boards, in traffic engineering departments and state DOTs, opening businesses or renovating historic structures on Main Streets, building small-scale multifamily buildings in mid-sized cities. The places with the worst housing crunches have the largest national saliency, but these things matter everywhere, and there are people doing this work everywhere.

Nonetheless, lots of regular people out there don’t know what we’re on about. Nolan Gray, one of the big names in housing advocacy, joked how easy it is to forget that the particulars of this stuff are still very niche. He said something along the lines of, “I’ll say to people ‘I worked with Donald Shoup,’ and they’ll stare blankly and I’ll say, ‘You know, Shoup! The parking guy!” Most of us laughed knowingly. (Shoup wrote the first book that really treated parking as a key urban issue.)

That’s the challenge. But over time, we’re meeting it. I remarked to one person that housing seems like one of the more successful stories of an advocacy movement gaining mainstream recognition and support, and he asked me why I thought that might be. My answer is that housing was a universal cause waiting for really good promoters/marketers/communicators. We have that now, and once that happened, it really raised the saliency of housing.

I’ve said before that housing advocacy, per se, shouldn’t even exist—it’s really weird that something so universal has to subsist within a movement. Our goal—perhaps like all advocacy movements—shouldn’t be to “win” per se, but to become unnecessary and redundant.

What I’m trying to say here is, we’re important, and we’re not important. Our success would in a lot of ways mean our irrelevance, and I hope we’re all good with that.

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At the next event—another Metro ride and a short walk through a few residential streets—I had a really important, interesting, heartfelt conversation.

But first, I had an interesting chat with an older fellow who wasn’t against development, but was skeptical of developers. He said that he’d like to see local people invited to be part of ongoing development in the places they live. Not just asked to say yes or no. That’s interesting. A lot of folks will write that off as NIMBYism trying to sound reasonable. But I don’t think it is.

I’ve articulated something like that before, with regard to my hometown, and the strangeness of living in a beautiful, historic place that you also want to never change. In some ways, love of place and cautious acceptance of change go together. We probably should devolve the scale and concentration of development, so that ordinary people can be and feel like participants in the places they live.

And then I had that really important conversation. I’m going to just say this was with a key person in D.C.-region housing/urbanism/transit advocacy, because this wasn’t an interview or anything. But we discussed history, historic preservation, and the idea of love of place. Of how she, and a lot of urbanists who get accused of wanting to tear down the past or whatever, really genuinely love and care about the places we live in.

I observed that to this day I still hear conservatives bring up something Barack Obama said many years ago: something about “fundamentally transforming” America. What the conservatives say is this: that was evidence that Obama didn’t like or love America, because why would you “fundamentally transform” something you love?

Maybe some people mean it that way. In my experience, this is just sort of how progressives talk about change and their preferred policies. But we got to talking about communication and trust and respect, and how we don’t always convey the complexities of what we feel regarding these debates over neighborhood change.

She said it was wild to her how many people assume she just wants to tear down the past, when something like the bulldozing of a historic building—which sometimes happens and sometimes has to happen—genuinely saddens her. She used a word—reverence—for how a lot of us urbanists feel about the history of the places we live in, work in, and advocate in. We want to see new growth in these places precisely because they’re places we love and care about. Because walling something off, declaring it “finished” or “full,” is, in a sense, killing it.

I can guarantee you what we both said is what we really believe. And I take that to mean that a lot of what gets said in these debates is oversimplification, or carefully curated rhetoric. That happens when your work involves communications. But our work also involves communicating: actually getting regular people to hear us. And those are not always the same thing.

These are the kinds of conversations you can have at a small gathering in a rented upstairs room at a neighborhood bar. These conversations in subtle, maybe non-measurable ways matter. Conversations like this can change how people think and talk, and the more in-person mixing you have like this, the more—hopefully—good ideas form. Often, I’ll chat about something I’m working on or thinking about at one of these meetups, and it’s like fun, social, laid-back feedback.

Another fellow who comes to many of these D.C.-area urbanist events told me his “urbanism origin story,” and we discussed a whole bunch of ideas and insights. Suburbia relies on the car but protects its residents from exposure to motor traffic, while cities are less reliant on cars but more exposed to them. Cities can feel so quiet and peaceful without the roar of traffic. Lots of people who walk around thinking they dislike “cities” either think it’s still the crime wave, or actually dislike the same things about contemporary American cities than urbanists do, and don’t even realize it.

But his “origin story” was very simple: he took an elective course in college on urban communities and sustainability, and found the lecture on zoning interesting. So he looked up the zoning code for his small Midwest city of 65,000 people, and it struck him that the urban forms he’d associated with capitalism or free enterprise or greedy builders—the strip malls and box stores and giant parking lots and subdivisions and “stroads”—were prescribed by the code. That understanding—that our governments have effectively mandated a pattern so few of us actually like—was what made him an urbanist.

I try to avoid the pose of “we’re right and everyone who disagrees with us just doesn’t know it yet,” but the other error is to assume that whatever anyone believes or feels right now is their immutable preference. We can very easily mistake liking what we know for knowing what we like. We can resist things up until we wonder how we ever lived without them. That isn’t arrogance; it’s humility. It’s the humility of knowing that if you’ve ever changed your mind, you may not know with absolute certainty what you like or want. That, again, is why scale is important and genuine participation in the project of building our places is important.

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There was a panel at the launch event, during which I took a lot of notes, and I’ll be writing that up soon. Stay tuned!

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Related Reading:

Gala Night

Book Talk III

Traffic Report

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