The Men's Room Analogy
The Men's Room Analogy
A funny way to think about housing choices
In a line at the men’s room in between conference sessions the other week, I thought of a cheeky analogy I haven’t seen made before. Call it the men’s room analogy.
Most of us need a quick moment at a urinal. A smaller percentage—much smaller, probably—need a stall. Ten to one, I’d guess. But when there’s a bit of a line—even the men’s room has a line at a conference—sometimes the urinals are all taken. Sometimes you want to get back to your seat for the next session really quickly, or you just really need to go. And a funny thing happens. If a stall opens up—they’re usually all full, too—someone will inevitably quickly take it. But there’s a 10 percent change they actually need a stall.
So if you’re one of the minority in the line who does need a stall, you’re being delayed in your…business by someone taking up a stall who only needs a urinal.
If you need a stall, and the stalls and urinals are all full and there’s a line, which kind of facility should there theoretically be more of? Counterintuitively, I’d say, if you want a stall, you should want there to be more urinals.
Theoretically, of course, we could just make bigger bathrooms with more (and nicer!) stalls. But you run into space and costs pretty quickly. The comparatively more compact urinal, which serves more people more of the time more efficiency and precisely, is a better way to make sure the people who need a stall get a stall.
Yes, I’m talking about houses and apartments and suburbia and cities.
The point is that by forcing single-family houses to predominate in residential development, even in most land area of most cities, we almost certainly end up with a lot of people in a single-family house who don’t actually need or even want one. And while the abundance of such houses might be seen as a good thing, they ultimately cost more, in a pure market and in public expenditures such as infrastructure, than smaller, denser housing. They impose extra costs—more space to maintain and decorate, lawn and garden care, etc.—on some people who don’t want them, and because some people who don’t want them end up in them, some people who want them pay more than they need to.
What’s missing is that we don’t have enough smaller units and more proximate (to the city) units. We underbuild the kinds of housing students, single people, retired people, and young couples need. Think of older folks with the kids out of the house who are still in a 2,000 square foot, four-bedroom house, because there’s no easy, affordable way to downsize without leaving your whole life behind. Think of young couples who move to suburbia but don’t quite want to, because even a smaller home closer to the city is eye-wateringly expensive.
If you are a person who affirmatively wants that suburban house, you should support urbanization and densification of our cities. What we want is a housing mix where most people can afford the general arrangement they want/need, and where people don’t end up “under”- or “over”-housed because prices are screwed up by imposed scarcity.
I’ve done, and many other urbanists have done, the food analogy to housing. I compared our housing shortage to a famine. We talk about how the idea of “housing advocates” itself assumes housing scarcity as normal rather than insane. There was a Twitter thread I wish I could find comparing housing to oranges, and how the idea of segmenting off certain oranges as “affordable” makes no sense. Etc., etc. We do that because food is a necessity which operates according to a reasonably free or at least sort of discernible set of market mechanisms, while housing is so overregulated the market is basically broken.
The used car market during the pandemic demonstrated this point too—in a shortage of new cars, used cars ended up getting “luxury” prices. This is what happens in housing, when a general undersupply of housing drives even the less desirable units up to very high price levels.
But this men’s room analogy is interesting to me because it isn’t about prices, but about geometry and about needs. Taking up a stall because the urinals are full is like that older couple sticking with an oversized house simply because there’s no small, senior-friendly apartment nearby.
The key is that it is both empathetic and self-interested to make it easier for the market to produce the thing you don’t want, because you want others to get what they need, and you also want less competition for what you want.
And we all need a roof over our head, as sure as sometimes we just need to go.
Related Reading:
What If Urbanism *Is* Eating Our Vegetables?
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Unfortunately, I think this drags us back into the ever-tedious debate about preferences... but in a kind of hilarious manner!
After all, the usual suburbanist retort is that "people want suburbs", right?
Under the bathroom analogy, this is like the person who's waiting in line just assuming that if there's a 40-60 split of stalls to urinals, then 40% of people must actually be needing to use a stall at any given time.
Which is INSANE if the true proportion is actually only 10%!
But it also kind of makes sense. Stalls have more privacy. They're isolated from each other. No one wants to sit there policing what everyone at the stadium is doing in that stall, they just want the line to move faster, amirite? There's an information/values-communication problem here, where we imagine we don't have any preference information from "overhoused" suburbanites, mostly because we file away most of their complaints about homeownership into the bin of "well, that's just what it means to own a house, you lazy dolt!" -- but also, because we aren't asking them the right questions.
After all, in the same way that no one asks people in a stall whether they're going 1 or 2, no one goes around asking overhoused suburbanites whether they'd have preferred a smaller place, a smaller yard, a corner bodega, or any of the other pros/cons of urbanism.
I actually thought the analogy was going to be about bike lanes and car lanes! I've learned to never, ever make the "gets the bikes out of the car lanes" analogy. People want respect for their needs, not efficiency. In this case, as a pooper, people want politicians to see and hear their needs, not just make short lines to the bathroom.