I love when a comment from a reader is interesting enough to spark a follow-up. I’m bouncing off a comment today on my recent piece, “Don’t Say When,” on housing advocacy and densification.
My argument in that piece would be familiar to anyone in housing advocacy: NIMBYs are wrong that a community can be “done” or “full.” Change is part of life—especially in a community near a major national and global city. Protecting a suburban lifestyle as it was established decades ago, at the expense of both dynamism and affordability, just doesn’t work in a region like the D.C. area, or other major hotspots for the YIMBY movement.
I argue, further, that we need to explicitly draw out a metaphysics of cities and housing advocacy:
There is no “real” place in the ether, some Platonic form of it, from which the actually existing place on the ground is illegitimately diverging. There is no correct or final end state. Human settlements change every bit as much as humans do.
This is not a negation of community or local character; it is a more expansive understanding of community and local character. A place is what it is—and what it was, and what it will be. We are all, all the time, part of it. We are building it together. This is the philosophy that underlies urbanism and housing advocacy.
The comment I received was interesting, because while what the commenter writes is obvious on one level, I can’t say I’ve ever really considered it explicitly, or heard it discussed this way:
It is quite understandable that people are surprised by this sort of change. This generation is the first in a century that experiences land scarcity. Previously we got trams and trains, and then cars. Nobody needed to redevelop anything1 since there were always huge tracts of greenfield land available. There was no building up. There was drive ’til you qualify. But now this expansion has run its course and no new transport revolution has shown up to continue it.
That is so interesting. The argument here isn’t that suburbia is a product that was built, is finished, and ever shall be, amen. Or an argument against city life or density or multifamily homes. It isn’t an argument against anything.
It’s an observation that