Top Three

Further thoughts on a few of your recent favorites

It’s interesting to watch the stats for the pieces I publish here. Of course, I look at the traffic/pageviews. But I also pay attention to the number of “likes” a piece receives. Most pieces average roughly similar pageviews within a relatively narrow range. But a handful of pieces get “liked” way more than most.

Today I want to share my three most-liked pieces from the last few months—really, from just about the whole year so far—and think about why they did so well. I also want to thank you for liking these long, thoughtful pieces that definitely cause some disagreement.

By the way, this is a good opportunity to briefly remind you that you can support the writing and thinking I do here by subscribing to this newsletter!

And here are the pieces!

If By “War On Cars” You Mean...

I took a look here at the allegation that bureaucrats/the left/etc. are biased against cars and motorists, or, in the parlance of this discourse, are prosecuting a regulatory and cultural “war on cars.”

I argue that the examples usually given are cherrypicked or don’t really fit the notion that motorists are being sidelined in some way. I go on to argue that everything in our culture, and much in our regulatory regime, suggest that cars are actually at the top of the heap, and that we could actually use a movement to deprioritize cars in dense cities, create more norms about taking driving seriously, and maybe make some regulatory changes like requiring physical knobs and buttons for controls in cars, or closing the loophole that allows many passenger vehicles to be regulated under a lighter set of fuel-efficiency standards.

There’s absolutely a point where regulation could overreach. For example, I would favor taxing heavier vehicles at a higher rate, since they are more likely to kill or injure people and they impose more wear on the public roads. But I’ve seen some urbanists suggest that a pickup truck should require a commercial driver’s license. That would be effectively a ban on an entire category of vehicle; I don’t think I favor that sort of thing.

I received one very long and interesting comment that I want to share. This is exactly the kind of engagement I love to see on these pieces:

As a conservative who loves good urbanism (StrongTowns’ fiscal arguments were what convinced me of its importance c. 2016, though I’ve since come to appreciate the aesthetic), I’d like to offer this quasi-syllogistic way of framing median conservative opinion that might help flesh out the problem:

A. Cash for Clunkers did (and onerous EV mandates will) tend to price cars out of the reach of working and middle class Americans.

B. The people who implemented Cash for Clunkers and who are trying to implement onerous EV mandates are Democrats / progressives.

C. Most urbanists are Democrats / progressives.

Therefore, D. most urbanists favor policies that will make cars unattainable for more and more working and middle class Americans (or in more inflammatory words, urbanists are making War On Cars).

Now obviously this isn’t a logically valid syllogism; parties and ideologies are diverse and it’s possible - maybe even likely - that the specific Democrats/progressives who support Cash for Clunkers and EV mandates are doing so out of environmental concerns and couldn’t care less about good urbanism, and therefore it’s not logically fair to blame the War On Cars on urbanists. But you’re not going to make much headway among Republicans/conservatives with “Not all Democrats/progressives...”.

Premises A and B are objectively true, whether one supports or opposes Cash for Clunkers / EV mandates. That leaves premise C.

I think you’re on the right track in citing self-identified conservatives who’ve questioned auto-centric urban design, but what I think would be even better is if you could point to conservative *places*: cities and towns that both 1) retain the traditional development pattern and 2) vote for Republicans. What places can you think of that meet those two criteria?

This is really interesting. I quibble with the bit about Cash for Clunkers. That actually raises another whole issue. The real point of the program wasn’t environmentalism, but saving the car industry by juicing new car sales. It’s true that by destroying the used car market, the program financially hurt many actual or future motorists. But can a program to help the car industry be part of a “war on cars”? I don’t know, maybe—because the interests of industry and the interests of consumers are not the same. Which is, classically, sort of a progressive point.

This is where there’s a bit of a breakdown in communication between these two sides. Urbanists see cars prioritized everywhere in everything. Yet some motorists feel like their experiences as motorists are being made worse. I guess these two things can both be true, whatever you think of them.

The question of whether “conservative urbanism” actually exists in the real world is also fascinating. I’d point to any number of conservative small towns which have “retained the traditional development pattern,” as well as to a small handful of traditionalist, conservative-ish attempts to build new towns in the old pattern. And I’d also say that in a pre-revolutionary world—before the land-use revolution of the 20th century—towns and cities were just places people lived. The accident by which land use became a partisan political issue obscures an underlying reality, so you can’t treat the fact that cities are associated with progressives today as a revelation or metaphysical fact.

To go back to the war on cars, though, one reason some of this is so potent is that people feel like the same progressives who want them out of their cars also don’t terribly care about making cities or public transit safe. “Fine, I’ll take the subway when you clean up the city,” they think. That opens another whole can of worms, but it’s one I opened in the next most-liked piece.

No Harm, No Foul?

This is sort of an opposite piece to the first one. Here, I put on my conservative hat and really argue that cities have to feel safe for everyday people, and that a preference for order and rule-following is much more than an aesthetic preference or a middle-class bias.

I think about how the victims of crime in cities are largely other relatively poor urbanites, so it’s hardly a question of suburban commuters imposing their desire for sterile order on the vibrant, living city. And I also think about how having kids changes all of this. The parent/non-parent divide, a really important but under-discussed phenomenon here, strikes again:

The problem is that disorder isn’t just aesthetic. It isn’t just graffiti. It’s also locked or “out of order” bathrooms, everyday products behind glass, store entrances closed off, parks the domain of the homeless. It’s a breakdown, a deterioration, in the ability of people to exist unselfconsciously in the city. At some point, instead of finding the values of the majority defective, you have to make some concessions to their preferences.

Much of this inconvenience and occasional sense of risk is bearable, or maybe even largely invisible, if you’re street-smart, or if you’re single and/or childless. But once you add kids, it gets so much worse. The danger and inconvenience is heightened. There’s a very real parent/non-parent divide in urbanism and cities. A kid can’t just hold it when the CVS or Starbucks bathroom is locked up; a kid can’t be trusted not to point at or say something to the strange fellow on the subway who may or may not react.

I remember, as a kid, learning not to point at or talk to random people when we visited the city. I think what I took away from that was that cities are places where you have to look over your shoulder and be on your best behavior. They’re places that take constant mental work to exist in. It took me many years to realize that this didn’t have to be true, and wasn’t always true; that cities were in fact places you could just casually go.

But many families, and many individuals with a low tolerance for risk, simply will not tolerate any of this if they have any choice in the matter. For all of its problems, suburbia is a place where you can feel completely safe walking (though not on an arterial road) and where you can still pop into a store and use the bathroom. In a way that is hard to quantify, that’s worth a lot to people. The very real dangers posed by cars are just, psychologically, not the same thing. (And, unfortunately, the danger from cars applies in cities too.) The risk, even very remote, of being hassled or assaulted while going about your business exerts a constant stress.

I also critique a certain kind of progressivism concerned with “harm” to the point where it becomes a kind of one-track-mind thing:

That idea that only harm should determine priorities seems very narrow and shortsighted to me; and beyond that, sort of metaphysically empty. It is curious to me that many of the same people who champion density and diversity also whistle past the graveyard when it comes to order, trust, and the other intangible things that hold communities together. In diverse communities without tight neighborly ties, these things become even more important. And they’re easier to maintain than to rebuild.

The comments were mostly great, but here’s (part of) a critical-ish one that’s interesting:

Now, I agree with you that cities can be clean, safe places to live, and a lot of US cities (including the one I live in) could do better in a lot of areas. I just don’t think that starting from “what would make this city feel more comfortable to people who are predisposed to dislike cities” is a particularly useful approach. For example, homeless people using public transit as shelter of last resort is a significant problem, but the solution should focus on sheltering the homeless. Otherwise, you end up with “solutions” that just push the problem somewhere else.

I didn’t really talk about solutions in this piece; it was mostly just frankly acknowledging this problem. This reader seems to assume that because I wrote frankly about the problem, my idea of solutions would be punitive and not practical. That’s interesting; it’s not a bad assumption, is it, given our politics?

Most people who talk a lot about urban crime and disorder are also law-and-order people whose solutions tend towards harsher policing. Most people whose solutions are more holistic and compassionate don’t like talking about the problem their solutions are designed to solve! As I wrote here, in a piece on Montreal:

Much of what passes for discussion of urban issues in America is the escalating argument between this permissive progressive contingent—which loves cities but seems indifferent to their thriving—and the often-cruel tough-on-crime crowd—which claims to want cities to thrive yet does not seem to like them very much.

We use people’s rhetoric on one issue as an indicator of their views on lots of other issues. Because my views are complicated, you can’t do this my writing!

Pair “No Harm, No Foul?” with a piece I wrote for The Bulwark on housing and homelessness, for a different emphasis on some of these urban problems.

I will say that there are some genuine radicals who view urbanism as one arrow in the quiver of leftist social ideology. Most normal progressives and certainly most urbanists don’t think this way. But some do, and I think we probably depart there. I mean this, for example:

Middle-class Americans aren’t a special interest. Families with kids are not a special interest. They’re in many ways the median American. They’re not the last word, but they have to be the starting point. If normal Americans feel like progressives are concealing an ideology behind their advocacy for the city, they’ll recognize it, and they’ll say no.

When I Say “City,” You Say...

Two out of these three pieces fit comfortably within mainstream left-ish urbanism. Though in this one I also tried to further develop the argument that urbanism, whether at the town or city intensity, is very much the American tradition, up until a revolutionary period in the 20th century. Conservatism, of the philosophical or temperamental variety, or even the political variety, should look with horror at urban renewal, Euclidean zoning, and the other government policies which effectively destroyed our heritage cities and then prohibited us from rebuilding them.

This is one of my favorite pieces, because it puts in one place so much of my thinking about all of this—in particular, how it came to be that “city” is a dirty word in a country that was absolutely full of, and which built, classically urban settlements of all sizes, up until living memory.

One thing I suggested here, which feels like it probably deserves elaboration, is that the memory of the crime wave among the Boomers acted almost like trauma: actual crime became connected, in a lot of imaginations, with all things urban. A new building, a tall building, a homeless person, a street vendor, a busker, a bus—any and all of it triggers an actual stress response, or a kind of fear. Racism and classism definitely explain some of this—“We don’t want those people in our neighborhood,” “Only poor people ride the bus,” etc.—but I really think there’s more to it than that. I wrote:

Baby Boomers can be invincibly ignorant as to the pleasant reality of many cities today, and the desirability of urban life. Perhaps my generation, for its part, is invincibly ignorant as to the reality of many cities at their low point during “urban renewal” and the crime wave.

I think of the things my mother saw or heard about, growing up in Upper Manhattan. Stabbings; threats and menaces on the subway (not just uncomfortable situations, actually threatening ones); a troubled man on the street who meowed like a cat at the children (was that all he did?); an older classmate who threw a hardened mud ball at her for no reason….

Suburban NIMBYs should be urban housing advocates. But they seem to think that the city in its very essence produces “urban problems”; that it cannot be reformed. And they view those who desire urban living as naïve at best. You’re going to ride transit in the city? Fine, learn the hard way. And yet, when your sole visit to the old rough neighborhood in two decades results in your window getting shot out, maybe it is not psychological possible to feel otherwise.

This is not a veiled way of saying “We just have to wait for the Boomers to die or retire.” It’s an argument for putting forth a positive vision of what cities can be. A lot of people checked out decades ago and never looked back, and we owe it, if not to them, then to our cities themselves, to make that affirmative argument.

But here’s the main bit with that temperamentally conservative thrust. This idea that we underwent a land-use revolution, but also a sort of mass forgetting, is kind of spooky. But it’s become the most interesting aspect of the way I think about land use in America, and I just keep coming back to it and turning it over in my head.

Read this last excerpt, and, please, leave a comment on any or all of this!

We forgot what cities were in the middle of the 20th century. We forgot what our history was. We gutted cities and hollowed them out for the convenience of suburban commuters. We leveled thousands of homes and businesses in hundreds of neighborhoods to build car infrastructure. We destroyed in one moment what in many cases took centuries to organically build. We called it things like “urban renewal” and “slum clearance,” telling ourselves we were excising cancer as we hacked off the patient’s limbs.

We marvel today at Historic Annapolis, or Old Town Alexandria, or the old downtowns of Seattle and Portland, or Charleston and Savannah, as though every once in awhile, America was capable of building lovely urbanism at a relatively low intensity. Gee, some people may wonder with a glimmer of curiosity, if *this* is what cities were… And the tragedy is that they were and are. America’s “great cities” are mostly just America’s surviving cities. Like many antiques, they are not unique, per se; they are just common things no longer made, and once cast off.

The Greek playwright Sophocles penned over 100 plays. How many do we still have? Seven. That is the situation of American cities today. America’s urban problems could scarcely have been avoided, given what we did.

That was one tragedy. The other tragedy is the one still unfolding: mistaking the fruits of this destruction for some intrinsic truth about the places we destroyed.

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