The Duty To Spend?

What do localism, community, Main Street, and neighborhood really mean?

Last week I wrote about how during and since the pandemic, I’ve gotten a lot better at cooking, and that now eating out at restaurants is less fun than it used to be. I want it to be fun, but I’m too aware of how mediocre a lot of restaurant food is now to enjoy the whole experience as much, especially with inflation. (I remember my grandmother talking about how hotdogs used to cost five cents; now I sound like the old person, talking about how Chinese takeout used to be five bucks.)

I didn’t really write about urbanism at all in that piece; I mostly wrote about food, cooking, and the satisfaction of running a home. (There’s so much more to that than cooking, but cooking is one of my favorite parts of it. The late nights figuring out where the pool of water in the basement is coming from? Not so much.)

Anyway, I got a very interesting comment on that cooking/homemaking piece, which dovetails with a question I’ve been playing with here for awhile, which goes something like, is urbanism “eating our vegetables”? Do we need to choose to impose some discomfort and inconvenience on ourselves in order to unlock a lot more beauty and pleasure that we have psychologically paywalled behind familiar, immediate comfort?

Here’s the comment:

As someone who, I assume, loves the concept of third places, including restaurants, do you grapple with the tension between cooking for yourself (and the savings) versus supporting businesses that add considerably to sense of place, urbanity, and all the things that quality independent restaurants bring to communities? Or, in the end, do you still go out plenty, making it a non-issue?

For my part, I feel a responsibility to patronize businesses whose presence makes me feel more positively about where I live. Obviously everyone has to live within their budget, and living modestly and saving is a critical virtue. Still, I bristle just a bit when I hear about the most strident commitments some people have to only eating at home when they do have the disposable income to eat out from time to time.

I think I’ve gotten a comment like this once or twice before, often assuming a tension between self-sufficiency and frugality on the one hand, and being a full member of your local community on the other.

I raised this question with my wife, and she was more or less like, “What kind of question is that!? How could someone think you have a responsibility to spend money?”

I’m honestly not sure whether there’s a tension there, but I lean towards my wife’s view. I feel that my first duty is to my own family’s finances (can we afford it?), then to our preferences (do we like it?), and then to other things. It’s one thing to feel good about supporting a local business when you also love the place. But that comes after you feel they’ve earned your money. It’s still business. The idea of thinking, “I can make X dish better than Y restaurant but we haven’t spent money in the community in awhile so we should eat there tonight” is not something anybody actually does.

And in case you think I’m a miser, I do spend money at lots of local businesses. I particularly like sitting and writing in a local coffee roastery. My wife and I like going to wineries and microbreweries and bringing food, often from a partnering food truck or local shop. We do like trying restaurants from new (to us) cuisines or ones that are difficult to make at home. But we’re very discerning and deliberate in where and how we spend money. I think my operating principle is something like “only buy things you want”—as in, avoid situations like “I forgot to plan a dinner tonight, let’s just get takeout.” I can’t see that as irresponsible from a communitarian or civic perspective.

Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by the idea that urbanists in particular should maybe have a less tight view of spending. A more explicit understanding that you can’t just conjure or manifest “community” or a local economy or third places or loose ties—commerce is a key part of all of that. Urbanism in a lot of ways is tied up with commerce as much as land use. If these things don’t imply some element of a “duty to spend,” what do they mean?

I could probably go on, and I’ll probably come back to this. But it’s not a question I’ve seen asked or discussed explicitly much, so I want your thoughts on this!

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Related Reading:

What If Urbanism *Is* Eating Our Vegetables?

Thoughts on Density and Distance

Kitchen Contentment

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