When Babies Grow Up, They Become Neighbors

Why Catholics should be YIMBYs

Feb 20, 2024

I was in America Magazine recently—online and print!—writing a Catholic case for being YIMBY/pro-housing/whatever you’d like to call it. My argument is simple: American politics tends to silo concerns about the family on the political right, and about housing on the political left. But if we value actual, real-life babies and families, and we want society to value marriage, etc. etc., we have to make it so that, in the real world, people can do those things. And housing is a huge part of facilitating these things in the real world.

If people are good—if babies and families are good—the housing they need must also be good. Housing is an extension of people and of the family, and when babies grow up, they become neighbors. But in American politics, these concerns have been separated and siloed….I have never seen a bumper sticker that says Pro-life, Pro-family, Pro-housing. But these things are not separate or separable. In the Catholic sense, they are all part of a seamless garment.

I write a pretty familiar (to many of you) argument for allowing new housing growth in general, but with an emphasis on the fact that the physical form of a neighborhood we might associate with “good to raise a family” doesn’t mean very much if the average family can’t afford such a place. I write that while we can certainly feel frustration with traffic, or a sense of crowdedness, the sentiment that “there are too many people” should be closed off to us.

The latent Malthusianism in a lot of NIMBY rhetoric is misanthropic. It opposes housing because it opposes people. Most people don’t subscribe to such a view. But a lot of things people say implies it. And look—that feeling of being trapped in a mobbed parking lot is pretty frustrating. The Malthusian idea is tempting. But if we always put the needs of real people front and center, if we have our priorities straight, that temptation has less of a foothold.

I raise a famous passage from Edmund Burke, the conservative political philosopher and Anglican. His conception of the state strikes me as very much aligned with the spirit of Catholic communitarianism:

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, the political philosopher Edmund Burke, though an Anglican, described a worldview compatible with the Catholic ethic when he wrote of the state, “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Urbanism and the YIMBY (Yes, in My Back Yard) take on housing are particular applications of this idea. The neighborhood is the state, in this conception, writ small.

I think of city-building as a great and dignified enterprise: the work of building and maintaining the places that form the everyday settings of our lives. Conceptually, we broke with that in the 20th century, under urban renewal. I’ve come to see that break as something like a schism. And I’ve come to see mending that break, picking up that old project of urbanism, as almost akin to taking part in a secular liturgy of sorts:

To argue that a new building in an old town contradicts the character of the place would be like arguing that translating the Bible into new languages contradicts Scripture. We can instead understand new growth as the latest note in an ancient song, participation in one long, unfolding moment.

In a previous piece here at this newsletter, I took this idea even a little further, and this bit got some attention on social media, so I’ll share it here too:

It makes me think of the Christian idea of anamnesis: a Greek term that means, in this context, the bringing of the past into the present: the making present of a previous moment. Anamnesis underlies the Catholic (and some Protestant) doctrines of the Eucharist, i.e. that Christ and his sacrifice are not repeated in Holy Communion, but made present.
I get that feeling, in the secular world, when I see a new building going up in a small town. I don’t see the change from the present built form as much as the continuity with past construction—that the project of making this place hasn’t ended, that we are today invited to participate in the same project as the city fathers of the 19th century.
I often wonder whether the builders of Levittown, or the first strip plazas, or these Main Streets that are now designated “historic” and encased in amber, ever imagined that whatever they built would be the end. When we pretend that a place can be “done” or “full,” we are choosing an arbitrary moment in the long trajectory of a place to be final. Would those original builders have wanted that, if it had even occurred to them? I think most of them would instead have expressed something like, “Do this in memory of me.”

This might all sound a little abstract. And in a sense it is: I’m not advocating a specific policy here, and obviously this is one of those areas where Catholics are free to debate and disagree. The Pope has never made a pronouncement on zoning reform or car dependence, per se. But the spirit of Catholic social teaching, its communitarianism and its emphasis on the family, leans toward the body of policies and attitudes we think of as “pro-housing.”

I don’t blame ordinary people for disagreeing, or thinking they disagree—love the NIMBY, hate the NIMBYism. At the end of the day, these issues are not abstractions:

It is difficult to communicate to NIMBYs—many of whom simply like the places they now live in—that the quiet stasis they demand is a cost exacted on the future, on individuals and families who are no less real for not being currently physically present.

If that isn’t enough, consider your own children, or parents. Young people cast out of not only their neighborhoods, but possibly the entire region in which they grew up. Elderly or disabled people stranded by an environment too physically spread out by an orientation around the automobile to get around without it. The babies that are never conceived because of the sheer expense of doing what ordinary families have done for all of human history, in a place with economic opportunity in America today.

The housing shortage is not an academic matter, or a figment of overprivileged Millennials. It is a genuine crisis, squeezing ordinary people, boxing them into a set of artificially restricted and overpriced choices. Anybody who cares about these matters in the abstract has a special duty to care about them in the concrete.

Or the wood, or the brick, or however we literally build those values in the real world. Concerns over crowding or infrastructure or taxes, local character and historic preservation, mere nostalgia—these concerns are not invalid. But in some times, in some places, they come up against the flourishing of the person and the family, and in those times and places, the choice is already made for us.

Related Reading:

Construction In A Small Town

The Deleted Scenes

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