The Old Frontier

Unlocking the freedom to build is about reestablishing continuity with ourselves

Bear with me here. Back in May I wrote:

Newslettering is like telling a long story in many pieces. Each article stands alone but isn’t necessarily meant to stand alone. The really fun thing about a newsletter is getting to write almost the same piece over and over—not beating the dead horse and filling column inches, but slowly sharpening an idea until it’s just right.

I guess I think of a series of newsletters on a topic—say, the urbanity of small towns—as a series of manufactured or handcrafted items, each a bit better than the last, reflecting the process of learning by doing. If the column is a mass-produced identical item, the newsletter/blog is an artisan one. And eventually, the idea gets there. When you’re baking something, there’s always a point in time when it’s half-baked.

This is one of those pieces—hopefully a fully baked one.

There’s this idea I’ve tried expressing here and there, that suburbia/car dependence/the current land-use status quo that emerged in the 20th century is a kind of rupture with or departure from an earlier American character to which we are now slowly returning.

In a long piece for Vox last year I touched on this, and challenged the idea that higher intensities of development in suburbia are “out of character” with those places. Rather, I suggest, their current form—and particularly the expectation that it will never or should never change—is out of character with their own selves:

Rockville, Maryland, a suburban community about half an hour from DC by car, didn’t always look like standard suburban sprawl. In the early 20th century, it had trolley service into the urban core. The trolleys completed “24 trips a day between 6:30 a.m. and 12:30 a.m.,” not unlike the region’s subway service today. The trolleys were scrapped in 1935, and it was not until 1984 that the Metro system was extended out to Rockville.

Looking back, scrapping the trolleys wasn’t Rockville’s only mistake. In 1962, the town embraced urban renewal and leveled nearly all of its original downtown, wiping not only the buildings but even the street grid off the map. In its place, they built a mall and office complex. That period, from 1935 to 1984, and especially from 1962 to 1984 — no rail, no downtown — typifies what we often mean by “suburban.”

Today, Rockville is very different, and in some ways it resembles its original state more than its “suburban interlude.” Rockville is widely considered to be the region’s main Chinatown, with a population that is about 20 percent Asian American, and an array of restaurants, Chinese newspapers, and other businesses that serve a predominantly Chinese customer base. In the 2000s, the mall that stood atop the old “downtown” was demolished, and a “town center” with gridded streets was built in its place. For curmudgeons or NIMBYs who think these trends are altering Rockville’s character, they just need to look further back for their baseline. The changes in Rockville aren’t turning it into something it isn’t; they’re turning it into something it used to be, and continuing a process artificially arrested by the suburban era.

And in this piece for Discourse Magazine, I wrote about the inversion of attitudes about urban growth in America. At one time, before this break in the 20th century, small towns competed for population, wanted taller buildings, saw themselves as potential future cities. I quote a newspaper article from 1912:

“The public spirit of the citizens … has again scored a victory. Some time ago the … Railway Company announced that it would erect a new passenger station. … The plans submitted by the railway company did not entirely suit the … people, and they at once started a movement to secure a better piece of ground in order that a more pretentious station might be erected. This is the spirit which builds cities.”

That was about Boyce, a tiny village in northwest Virginia which was home to about 300 people at the time. I went on to argue:

What the small town is, in essence, is an embryonic city. And what the big city is, in essence, is a small town all grown up. They are the same creature….

When I look at a small town today, I feel a little bit like an archaeologist who finds a strange artifact and puzzles over what its use might have been. Reading the Clarke Courier article on Boyce, it becomes clear that we have broken continuity with our old selves.

And I explored an adjacent idea in a totally different context here, writing about a buffet which reopened after COVID almost unchanged. I’m referring here to the Catholic doctrine of apostolic succession:

I think you can see a certain secular and broadly applicable idea in that Catholic understanding. It is a way of highlighting the importance of tacit or embodied knowledge; of learning by doing; of continuity. It’s an acknowledgement of something about human endeavor that is true: it is easier to maintain something than it is to resurrect it. Bringing something back requires a certain act of will that simply maintaining it does not.

And I wrote recently about the nature of housing advocacy/YIMBYism:

Because it was law and policy which ossified our housing market, it is law and policy which have to roll back those artificial restrictions. But that does not mean that doing so is a political project, per se….

What YIMBYs/housing advocates want is, for me, fundamentally a course correction, or restoration, of what is, or should be, or once was a kind of civic, social, economic, maybe even metaphysical normal.

So you can see, altogether, that I’m sketching this broad idea that our current attitudes toward land use are anomalous. And the job of folks in this broad land-use/housing/urbanism space is to heal the schism with ourselves that is the suburban revolution.

This is how I respond to people who see urbanism as a European import or a socialist plot, or who think the car is the soul of America. They see newness, innovation, departure. I see heritage, return, continuity.

More than 100 years ago, we competed to grow and competed to build. That attitude held in the very same places which today view their lack of change as an immutable characteristic.

Now you could argue, perhaps, that horizontal growth is also in our character. Maybe suburban sprawl radiating out from the city and developing the countryside is sort of like manifest destiny or westward expansion in miniature. Maybe there is something in the mind—at least the American mind—which favors settling a place rather than building it up. Maybe it’s similar to the human preference for building over maintaining.

But if there’s anything to that notion of suburbia as a frontier—or if our century-old pro-growth attitude was that of the westward settler rather than the urbanist—I’d like to offer urbanism as a kind of settling of a frontier in our backyard, settled once and then forgotten. As a picking up, once again, of the trajectory we sharply abandoned. Freeing our suburbs and small towns of the zoning codes which decree they will never be more than what they were when they were encased in regulatory amber.

There is so much possibility in these places, if we let people act on it. It’s so dismaying to me to hear people in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey fondly recall its glory days as a tiny working city, and yet fight tooth and nail all the projects pointing in that direction today.

I wrote awhile back about a young-ish guy in town who has a store on Main Street. He grew up in bland Fairfax County sprawl. He’s so enthusiastic about his classic store and his town. He sees it with fresh eyes, in a way that the old guard no longer can. It’s like they mistake the form for the substance. They recall what was; people like this business owner can imagine what it could be. Newcomers don’t take the place for granted.

Last time I was in Flemington, I wandered around the construction site of the old hotel undergoing restoration and redevelopment. Long ago, there was an oyster house nearby; that structure now houses a newsstand. The hotel’s restaurant probably served plenty of oysters too back in the day.

Just by the fence marking off the site, I picked this up:

A heavy, impressively sized piece of an oyster shell, buried for who knows how many decades; it could be from the 1800s. A little piece of the town’s history, unearthed and made visible again only because of a new development project. Continuity in change.

I guess it’s easy to take a place for granted, or to see it with a kind of familiar boredom, after decades. And the people who live in a place and like it for what it is right now have every right to their opinion.

Yet I see so much potential in these once-and-future cities. I see a frontier right here that we inhabit but do not recognize, calling out to be settled and stewarded once again.

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Related Reading:

The Old Normal

New Jersey’s Little India

Can a Catholic Be a NIMBY?

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