Talk Night
An evening in Silver Spring
Last Tuesday evening, I was in Silver Spring, Maryland to speak at an Action Committee for Transit meeting. They’re a local activist organization dedicated to improving public transportation, walkability, and other related concerns in Montgomery County. One of their organizers asked if I would speak at the meeting, as their audience would generally align with my work, or at least find it interesting. The fact that I lean conservative, and that most ACT members lean left, made it even more interesting. Of course I accepted. You can watch a video of my talk here.
We were in the Silver Spring Civic Center, in the middle of Downtown Silver Spring. I drove—the only reasonably timely transit trip involves two Metro lines and a diversion through downtown D.C.—got there early, and sat in the Starbucks right along the main drag. There’s a nice pedestrianized street along here, and a public plaza with a seasonal ice-skating rink.
It’s a relatively recent development—hence the capital D in Downtown—but it feels genuinely urban, in a fun, energetic way. It helps that Silver Spring is a “real” city beyond this development, with a nearby, small-d downtown and a street grid. Some people think the area has been overdeveloped; I think it’s a great example of putting stuff where stuff already is.
There was another event in the Civic Building, a housing forum with Kojo Nnamdi, a big local radio journalist, and some panelists. That one drew a huge crowd, and pulled some people away from my talk. We had a small crowd, skewing older and idiosyncratic. It was a good time.
I talked about how I got interested in urbanism—I wrote an article about an old motel in 2017, at my first magazine job, and my then-editor asked if he could run it under the magazine’s urbanism grant program. Sure, I told him, but what’s urbanism?
Over time I read through that section’s archives, wrote a few more pieces in a similar vein, and ended up realizing that I loved this whole cluster of topics, and enjoyed approaching it as a right-leaning, self-taught layman.
I spoke on two major themes in my work: the idea of the suburbs as interesting, complex places, and the idea of towns as fundamentally urban settlements.
On the first theme, I pointed to Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia and this shopping center with an informally repurposed parking lot in suburban Silver Spring. During the Q&A we talked about Beltway Plaza, a really neat mall in Greenbelt, Maryland with few vacancies and few chain businesses. These are typical suburban shopping centers which now feel like more than their form. They’re neat places.
I also drew on the themes and examples in my piece in Vox from the summer, about the evolution of many suburbs from bedroom communities to denser, more culturally interesting places of their own. For example, Rockville, Maryland and Annandale, Virginia, are relatively plain-looking, typical suburbs that now serve as major centers for the Chinese and Korean communities in the region, respectively. Some people don’t like that; other people don’t realize it has happened. I think it’s great.
It would be a shame, I said, if after all these decades of slow, organic, incremental growth in the suburbs—of these places maturing into something you can’t really build all at once—we wrote them off because of their suboptimal land use and treated them as blank slates for new development. We made that mistake with urban renewal, and we should not make it with our older suburbs today. I summarized it like this: I’m an urbanist for the suburbs.
The other theme is best explained by you reading this piece and this piece. But I argued, essentially, that what we call “towns” are fundamentally cities. They’re the same creature, at a different size or a different stage or level of intensity. But they’re urban. The fact that small towns are lumped in with the suburbs or exurbs, and “the big city” is seen as its own thing, is really an artifact of our culture war, not of anything true about what these places are on the ground.
What urbanists like me would like to see is not a world where the suburbs are turned into the city, but where the suburbs are allowed to mature in an urban pattern fitting their intensity. For some, that might mean a city. But for many, it would mean the gentle density, and the compact development pattern, of a town. I put it this way in one of the linked pieces:
Once it clicks that all of these settlements are fundamentally the same thing, the notion of “the city vs. the country” starts to feel like the wrong frame. Urbanism starts to feel like an American heritage, far beyond those places that happened to become large, mature cities. It sketches what might be the right frame: that the big difference is not between “the city” and everything else, but between urban settlements of all sizes versus the suburban development pattern.
We had some Q&A, and one question in particular was fun. I was asked an expansive question to the effect of how can we reform land use, when it’s really systemically broken. I think “capitalism” was thrown into the mix too.
I’m a conservative. I generally, with limits and exceptions, trust markets and people. One big reason why I’m an urbanist—why I look back to our history of building urban settlements before zoning, why I want zoning reform now—is because I want more room for ordinary people to do things and build things. You could really condense my whole body of work down to make it easier for ordinary people to do things. So I wouldn’t say capitalism is the problem, per se, but rather this bigness and centralization.
I made a related point at this juncture, about how big-box business and suburban land use reinforce each other, and it strikes me as something I might come back to. Every little town used to have its own small hotel, often centrally located on Main Street, I said. You ever notice how today, most hotels have two or three city names in their names, and often aren’t really located in any of those places? That’s centralization in scale, and it’s supported by a car-dependent development pattern.
At the end, one of the organizers asked about my top articles. I mentioned a couple and gave some quick top-line points, and then I told the audience that my most-read newsletter piece was actually this deep dive into the history of a non-standard Pizza Hut. You never can tell.
At the end of the talk, one attendee came up to me and said, “So you’re the guy who wrote the Pizza Hut article!” I will really never get tired of hearing things like this.
It was a great evening.
I also want to mention this. Dan Reed, an urbanist in Montgomery County, is referring to the other event in the building, the one that drew away some of our crowd:
I point to this because consistently, in these debates, it is the professional NIMBYs—not the people who are skeptical of this or that development proposal, but the people who invest serious effort into opposing things—who behave badly. The YIMBYs get a bad rap because some of them are snarky online, but the people actually starting antics at meetings, and threatening or doxing people, are almost always the professional NIMBYs.
I see this with the Northern Virginia housing group I belong to, with, for example, the Arlington Missing Middle Housing proposal. Our leader tightly polices the conduct of members, who don’t often need policing anyway. But members have found themselves threatened, and some are wary of even attending the public meetings, because of how they’re often derailed in what can feel like a menacing way. Shouting, booing, behavior inappropriate for a venue in which we’re supposed to be practicing self-government. The implication that you’re reneging on some imaginary social contract by supporting new development.
This is stuff housing advocates put up with all the time. That it’s common does not make it right.
Related Reading:
Housing and Pro-Family Conservatism
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