This Is For Real

Thoughts on the overall situation of the urbanism movement

On Tuesday evening, I was at a bar and restaurant by the Washington, D.C. waterfront for the 16th anniversary gala of Greater Greater Washington. I’ve done some writing for them—this one probably was the most widely read—and have followed them for longer than that. They’re great, and our metro area is fortunate to have an organization that really understands that the region as a whole is a single place in a certain sense, and rises and falls together.

This also happened:

It’s reassuring to me that we can be passionate about something and keep a sense of humor.

I always meet some new people at these kinds of events, and the mix of attendees is quite a diverse bunch. Age, race, but most interesting to me, occupation. I meet real estate folks, engineers (one fellow worked for Metro), and advocacy professionals. But I also meet a lot of people for whom all of this urbanism stuff is an interest or at most a side gig—not a day job.

Obviously, the people attending an event like this aren’t a cross-section of society. Everyone here is interested and involved to some extent (although I met one woman whose primary interest was that her husband was involved in urbanism advocacy). But I see this everywhere. I had this conversation a few times, and most people felt the same way. This whole cluster of issues—how orienting cities around cars is not good for them, how parking eats away at productive land use, the housing affordability problem and construction shortfall in most hot markets, and any number of other elements of urbanism—all of this is in the process of becoming mainstream.

My own interest in urbanism goes back to 2017, where the little right-wing magazine I worked for had a stuffy old-fashioned column on New Urbanism, funded by some very liberal foundation that nonetheless loved traditional architecture. Great stuff. I knew almost nothing about any of this, and I still thought most urbanists were car-hating weirdos. If I thought anything about them at all.

So maybe part of what I’m “seeing” is just my own increasing familiarity and changing views on these issues. But I also hear people in my local coffee shop talking about housing and land use. I even overheard a group of young people a few weeks ago chatting about a zoning board meeting they had attended—under the umbrella of Northern Virginia’s YIMBY group, whose founder is a friend of mine! Small world. But it’s getting bigger. General interest magazines run stories these days about zoning reform and parking minimums. Some hard research is beginning to back up the counterintuitive YIMBY claim that building “luxury” housing can lower prices across the board.

Even in these last five or six years, I think the salience and mainstreamness of this stuff has skyrocketed. The really acute housing crunch that followed the pandemic may have been the spark for this. Being a “housing advocate” or a parking reformer or what have you—you become that by looking for a house these days and understanding a little bit about why it’s like this. It doesn’t feel like some arcane corner of public policy wonkery anymore.

This sudden spike in salience looks suspicious to some people—it looks engineered, or like a fad or trend that doesn’t really matter. But these ideas aren’t new. I remember a book from the 1960s—God’s Own Junkyard—that raised the point, in the era of postwar subdivisions, that the population density and tax base of these new communities might not be sufficient to cover their infrastructure liabilities over the long term. Demonstrating that point and doing the actual math is why Strong Towns exists.

The basic ideas that car-oriented mobility and free parking are not compatible with thriving cities also go back to the 1960s and 1970s. It is true that many of these critics of suburbia and the automobile were on the left. Perhaps their politics informed their opinions. But they turned out to be right.

We’re now at a moment where that insight is jumping out into the broader world, and beginning to win in the public square. The metaphorical public square of debate, of course. But maybe, if we’re successful, a real one, too.

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Related Reading:

Gala Night

Day In The City

Mayberry Wasn’t a Subdivision

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