2) a world where nobody in a position of relative privilege ever has to experience discomfort or give anything up
I'm not sure I agree with this characterization of the Strong Towns point of view. Chuck has written multiple times that no place should be frozen in amber, but also no place should have to experience destructive renewal. Our current system allows some places not to change at all, but then demolishes and completely rebuilds other places after they get too bad. I think in the Strong Towns viewpoint, everyone, even those relatively privileged, would experience discomfort but hopefully only a very small amount
Fair point. And I think part of the point is that there *is* discomfort in change, but that what you get from it outweighs the discomfort. And part of the problem is this may not be true in suburbia because suburbia isn't really designed to densify or absorb more people in a pleasant, functional way.
It is worth noting that, both here and abroad, governments and societies have decided, for better or worse, to create communal places by selling off tracts to developers & hoping they figure it out - and when they don’t, people tend to have rough feelings about the results (about “home” being mangled by greed and incompetence), and maybe they should. Maybe societal placemaking, at least the places that are crossroads and town squares, should be more in-control of the people (of course, while dodging the problems of bad bureaucracy, corruption and “anyone can veto” dynamics). Many small towns do have expansive “public squares.” Cities tend to have strip-mined or closed off what public space they started with, a trend that should be reversed.
The other thing I’d point out is that YIMBYs perhaps have the most difficult personal interactions (and the strongest feelings) about true NIMBYs, the ones who can never be placated and who manipulate well-meaning people into untenable political stances… but everyone suffers when broad obstruction wins. Obstruction is not a functional planning scheme, and planning is not a filthy concept. Maybe “home” elicits emotions, but “everyone is suffering from a housing crisis” has to have some level of emotional motivation attached to it too. It is hopeful to talk to regular people and find that, at the heart of their politics, they do believe places can change and grow. The dominance of graceless vicious arguments in planning/zoning may be a product of a broken discourse and a trend toward sensationalism - I find little to back up the idea, for example, that people who live in cities really despise tall buildings reflexively the way that a lot of quoted “advocates” do.
Thanks for writing this. I wanted but didn’t get around to commenting on Andrew’s piece. Andrew’s literal theory that people are more nimby is place starved places (and more yimby in place rich places) as you note doesn’t survive looking at San Francisco, arguably both extremely place rich and also one of the most prodigiously aggressive nimby places in the US.
However taking Andrew’s point more metaphorically, I think he’s on to something. People who have multiple sources of meaning, history or community identity in their lives are probably going to have a much higher tolerance for physical change and therefore be more YIMBY.
For example, I’m thinking of people who are deeply committed to preventing a bowling alley or bar or something from being torn down, because it was the site of many happy memories. The place genuinely stores and facilities those memories. When that place disappears, that person will in fact have a harder time recalling that part of their life and will in fact be a little more dead. Their struggle for the bowling alley is a subset of their struggle to live. However, if this person has maintained social relationships with the people they were friends with at that time, (and those people are still alive) then those people will be as good (or maybe better) repository of those same memories, and the need to maintain the place is lessened. Even more so if this person has a practice of keeping a journal, scrap booking, saving letters and photographs, and enjoys paging through them. It’s easy to imagine this person feeling secure in their ability to remember this time, and comfortable with the building giving way to something else.
So here is a version of Andrew’s point - it’s not that this person has more literal or physical places, but they have life places, social places, time places.
I appreciate this ongoing discussion! I agree with your contention at the end that "most of our political/policy arguments are a lot of talking past each other." I'd add that the talking past each other can take multiple different forms. Sometimes, each side is discussing different aspects of an issue/policy, which can be unproductive if they don't realize it's occurring.
Other times, as seems to be the case with the YIMBY/Strong Towns disagreement, it's a debate over strategy. And I think that debate reflects a larger one in politics. In a democratic society, there are two basic ways to win on an issue. One is to listen to your opponents and try to persuade them to side, which often involves phrasing your case in terms that appeal to their thinking and offering compromises to get them on board. The other is to out-organize your opponents and win more votes. In the long run, you need some of both strategies, but American politics is currently heavily oriented toward the latter one. I think that's unhealthy for our democracy, because the losing side will lose faith in the system if they don't feel heard or that they have a reasonable chance to win next time.
That's why I think the Strong Towns approach, even if they're wrong about the NIMBYs being persuadable, is probably better long-term for our society, even if it's less effective in the short term. And I say that as someone who tends to lean toward the YIMBY side.
Interesting. I see that, and it may be true, but I also see the “rip the band-aid off” element of the YIMBY approach. IOW, people really don’t care that much about any of this, they’re just set in their ways, and once you do things, the new way will feel just as normal as the old way. I’ve seen that, where once a big project is done it just kind of stops being controversial because now it actually exists and is no longer a thing you can imagine stopping.
I don’t know, I also have complicated thoughts about this. In many ways I lean naturally towards the Strong Towns approach but feel convinced that you sometimes need something a little stronger (heh).
I hear you, and you make a very valid point. It's really frustrating when you can't get anything done because of endless debate and convoluted process that make it vastly easier to stop something from happening than from making something happen.
That said, I've seen enough cases where one side loses on what seems like a minor issue, but they feel like they got steamrolled and decide, "That's it, I'm your enemy now, and I'm going to fight you to the death every chance I get."
Part of the problem is that NIMBYs have no sense of proportion; every single battle is the hill they're willing to die on. And it's easier for a smallish group of people who really care about an issue to beat a large group of people who either don't care or don't care very much about it. Especially in a system with a bunch of potential choke points.
As you can see, I have complicated thoughts about it too. But it's good to talk through it, and that why I'm glad you're doing this series.
I hate the term "NIMBY" - which is calling someone a hypocrite without cause because they see a change as hurting their neighbourhood. Sometimes it is about property values, but often people said "why us" when there was no clear reason, and maybe the process itself was bad. Nobody wants to live next to an incinerator, nuclear power plant, garbage dump, airport etc., and someone profits, while people who were quite happy to be left alone face some loss.
I have a degree in architecture, but lament the crappy nature of most of what gets built - buildings are commodities - office buildings and big box are the extreme, but condos are little different.
I grew up in Don Mills Ontario, which was planned suburbia with a "town center" and pathways etc. - not unplanned sprawl. In the 1990s the original homes by award winning architects started to become teardowns and replaced by tacky monster homes - stucco on foam etc. that were triple the size. I moved to a nice older streetcar suburb with a main street, which I thought has strong zoning laws and heritage protection, but these were even then being eroded. Toronto is nuts when it comes to the amount of redevelopment and the impacts... a story for another day perhaps.
But the original 1953 Don Mills plaza had meaning and worked, particularly before it was enclosed around the late 70s. It had stores people needed and used, and a public square and a department store where I worked in high school. The new Shops of Don Mills built around 2000 is too high end and lacking in things like a hardware store - it tries to have the charm of my current older area with an actual main street, but it failed in my view, even though the designers and architects tried hard to make a small town like feel to it.
A much loved landmark I eat at is a burger place from 1967 with gaudy orange painted walls and sign - Johnny's. Mike Myers are there as a kid when he grew up here. Eventually they will sell out or be expropriated when a transit line goes through.
The older I get, the less I like change. It is not that things cannot be make better, but we have planning processes that are too top down and focused on growth at any cost - which I thought we had come to realize in the 1970s is the wrong way.
I don't see our planning as really promoting growth at all, although maybe it really is different between America and Canada. If anything, our planning strangles growth in the crib.
For your monster house example, I think that's a direct result of zoning rules. When older homes age out and start to lose value due to atrophy, you end up in this weird grey zone where there are no really good economic options to fix the problem. The house probably isn't worth remodeling as-is since you'll spend more fixing it than the house is worth. And you can't really do a teardown and rebuild of the same thing for much the same reason. As such, the only real possibility is a tear down and replacement with another, larger single family house, often with cheap as possible materials to make it even remotely profitable.
This is a direct result of zoning preventing anything other than single family homes in an area. If you could build something of a higher intensity, like a duplex or higher, that could be more viable than even a McMansion. But we don't allow it, or make it otherwise so impossible that it doesn't pencil out. It's not growth that the zoning code causes, it's fear of growth.
Same thing with the big master-planned developments. Our zoning code makes incremental growth so hard that those big scary projects are the only projects that pencil out, since they end up cutting through all the bureaucracy by doing everything at once.
And if you're worried about places looking nice, our zoning code does little to nothing there. We'd probably have better luck implementing and enforcing architectural standards if we were serious about that.
Thanks Addison! I agree with all your elaborations about my piece, and I think you were right to say that my intent was to add another dimension to the conversation.
I will push back a bit on your description of how Strong Towns views NIMBY’s. First, I don’t know that we have a canonical “movement view.” But to the extent we do I think it’s roughly that “these people aren’t evil they’re self-interested” and that we should be interested in understanding why they are reacting as if development is a “threat.”
It’s true that some people may have irreconcilable beliefs that we can’t work out, as in your excellent example re: immigration. But as you said, most people aren’t “fundamentalist” NIMBYs. Some people have fears stem from incorrect information and could be allayed. Some people have actual physical concerns that could be addressed. And a lot of people just a deeply held conviction that anything we build will be *worse* which is based in the reality that we have only gotten worse at building for the last 80 years!
It’s that last point that I personally care so much about. The more we build good stuff the more we can break that idea that anything new will just suck compared to the old.
But my point is, it’s worth trying to understand the concerns of the non-hardcore NIMBYs because there are some real and fixable things mixed in there that we could actually deal with in a way that persuades people.
But the last thing I’ll say is that, you don’t need to have any sympathy for NIMBYism to justify this. The way I see it is basically, the vast majority of Americans are change averse and more NIMBY-leaning than YIMBY-leaning, therefore writing them off as bad people we need to steamroll won’t work. We have to actually persuade the persuadable, and find win-win solutions, if we want to make things better in an enduring way, given our system of government.
Yeah, thank you for this, and I agree you probably don't have a "canonical" view - I do appreciate how informal and ecumenical you guys are and it's part of why I like ST so much.
I think this split between the "fundamentalist" NIMBYs and the normal decent change-averse people is a really important and kind of under-discussed tension on the "other" side.
>And a lot of people just a deeply held conviction that anything we build will be *worse* which is based in the reality that we have only gotten worse at building for the last 80 years!
I think this is one place where Strong Towns’ “small c conservative” DNA comes out in a “back in the good old days…” way. Yes, we definitely got worse at building, decade after decade, for a long time! I walk around San Francisco and I can see the scars of lowrise apartment complexes oriented around their surface parking lots from the “urban renewal” era. I can architecturally recognize the trends of the ‘90s and ‘00s, and a lot of the stuff built then was shit. But the stuff from the last ~15 years is noticeably better! The good word of these urbanist organizations is spreading and making a difference, we need to take the W!
There are still regions where we’re building a lot of crap, to be sure. But we’re clearly demonstrating that we’re increasingly capable of building great new stuff. And not just in big cities - lots of suburban downtown redevelopments are super encouraging too!
Yay progress! The task now is finding out how to spread and scale the discoveries behind building better new places. The problem, in part, is that lots of people aren’t exposed to the places building great new stuff
2) a world where nobody in a position of relative privilege ever has to experience discomfort or give anything up
I'm not sure I agree with this characterization of the Strong Towns point of view. Chuck has written multiple times that no place should be frozen in amber, but also no place should have to experience destructive renewal. Our current system allows some places not to change at all, but then demolishes and completely rebuilds other places after they get too bad. I think in the Strong Towns viewpoint, everyone, even those relatively privileged, would experience discomfort but hopefully only a very small amount
Fair point. And I think part of the point is that there *is* discomfort in change, but that what you get from it outweighs the discomfort. And part of the problem is this may not be true in suburbia because suburbia isn't really designed to densify or absorb more people in a pleasant, functional way.
It is worth noting that, both here and abroad, governments and societies have decided, for better or worse, to create communal places by selling off tracts to developers & hoping they figure it out - and when they don’t, people tend to have rough feelings about the results (about “home” being mangled by greed and incompetence), and maybe they should. Maybe societal placemaking, at least the places that are crossroads and town squares, should be more in-control of the people (of course, while dodging the problems of bad bureaucracy, corruption and “anyone can veto” dynamics). Many small towns do have expansive “public squares.” Cities tend to have strip-mined or closed off what public space they started with, a trend that should be reversed.
The other thing I’d point out is that YIMBYs perhaps have the most difficult personal interactions (and the strongest feelings) about true NIMBYs, the ones who can never be placated and who manipulate well-meaning people into untenable political stances… but everyone suffers when broad obstruction wins. Obstruction is not a functional planning scheme, and planning is not a filthy concept. Maybe “home” elicits emotions, but “everyone is suffering from a housing crisis” has to have some level of emotional motivation attached to it too. It is hopeful to talk to regular people and find that, at the heart of their politics, they do believe places can change and grow. The dominance of graceless vicious arguments in planning/zoning may be a product of a broken discourse and a trend toward sensationalism - I find little to back up the idea, for example, that people who live in cities really despise tall buildings reflexively the way that a lot of quoted “advocates” do.
Great comment
Thanks for writing this. I wanted but didn’t get around to commenting on Andrew’s piece. Andrew’s literal theory that people are more nimby is place starved places (and more yimby in place rich places) as you note doesn’t survive looking at San Francisco, arguably both extremely place rich and also one of the most prodigiously aggressive nimby places in the US.
However taking Andrew’s point more metaphorically, I think he’s on to something. People who have multiple sources of meaning, history or community identity in their lives are probably going to have a much higher tolerance for physical change and therefore be more YIMBY.
For example, I’m thinking of people who are deeply committed to preventing a bowling alley or bar or something from being torn down, because it was the site of many happy memories. The place genuinely stores and facilities those memories. When that place disappears, that person will in fact have a harder time recalling that part of their life and will in fact be a little more dead. Their struggle for the bowling alley is a subset of their struggle to live. However, if this person has maintained social relationships with the people they were friends with at that time, (and those people are still alive) then those people will be as good (or maybe better) repository of those same memories, and the need to maintain the place is lessened. Even more so if this person has a practice of keeping a journal, scrap booking, saving letters and photographs, and enjoys paging through them. It’s easy to imagine this person feeling secure in their ability to remember this time, and comfortable with the building giving way to something else.
So here is a version of Andrew’s point - it’s not that this person has more literal or physical places, but they have life places, social places, time places.
I appreciate this ongoing discussion! I agree with your contention at the end that "most of our political/policy arguments are a lot of talking past each other." I'd add that the talking past each other can take multiple different forms. Sometimes, each side is discussing different aspects of an issue/policy, which can be unproductive if they don't realize it's occurring.
Other times, as seems to be the case with the YIMBY/Strong Towns disagreement, it's a debate over strategy. And I think that debate reflects a larger one in politics. In a democratic society, there are two basic ways to win on an issue. One is to listen to your opponents and try to persuade them to side, which often involves phrasing your case in terms that appeal to their thinking and offering compromises to get them on board. The other is to out-organize your opponents and win more votes. In the long run, you need some of both strategies, but American politics is currently heavily oriented toward the latter one. I think that's unhealthy for our democracy, because the losing side will lose faith in the system if they don't feel heard or that they have a reasonable chance to win next time.
That's why I think the Strong Towns approach, even if they're wrong about the NIMBYs being persuadable, is probably better long-term for our society, even if it's less effective in the short term. And I say that as someone who tends to lean toward the YIMBY side.
Interesting. I see that, and it may be true, but I also see the “rip the band-aid off” element of the YIMBY approach. IOW, people really don’t care that much about any of this, they’re just set in their ways, and once you do things, the new way will feel just as normal as the old way. I’ve seen that, where once a big project is done it just kind of stops being controversial because now it actually exists and is no longer a thing you can imagine stopping.
I don’t know, I also have complicated thoughts about this. In many ways I lean naturally towards the Strong Towns approach but feel convinced that you sometimes need something a little stronger (heh).
I hear you, and you make a very valid point. It's really frustrating when you can't get anything done because of endless debate and convoluted process that make it vastly easier to stop something from happening than from making something happen.
That said, I've seen enough cases where one side loses on what seems like a minor issue, but they feel like they got steamrolled and decide, "That's it, I'm your enemy now, and I'm going to fight you to the death every chance I get."
Part of the problem is that NIMBYs have no sense of proportion; every single battle is the hill they're willing to die on. And it's easier for a smallish group of people who really care about an issue to beat a large group of people who either don't care or don't care very much about it. Especially in a system with a bunch of potential choke points.
As you can see, I have complicated thoughts about it too. But it's good to talk through it, and that why I'm glad you're doing this series.
I hate the term "NIMBY" - which is calling someone a hypocrite without cause because they see a change as hurting their neighbourhood. Sometimes it is about property values, but often people said "why us" when there was no clear reason, and maybe the process itself was bad. Nobody wants to live next to an incinerator, nuclear power plant, garbage dump, airport etc., and someone profits, while people who were quite happy to be left alone face some loss.
I have a degree in architecture, but lament the crappy nature of most of what gets built - buildings are commodities - office buildings and big box are the extreme, but condos are little different.
I grew up in Don Mills Ontario, which was planned suburbia with a "town center" and pathways etc. - not unplanned sprawl. In the 1990s the original homes by award winning architects started to become teardowns and replaced by tacky monster homes - stucco on foam etc. that were triple the size. I moved to a nice older streetcar suburb with a main street, which I thought has strong zoning laws and heritage protection, but these were even then being eroded. Toronto is nuts when it comes to the amount of redevelopment and the impacts... a story for another day perhaps.
But the original 1953 Don Mills plaza had meaning and worked, particularly before it was enclosed around the late 70s. It had stores people needed and used, and a public square and a department store where I worked in high school. The new Shops of Don Mills built around 2000 is too high end and lacking in things like a hardware store - it tries to have the charm of my current older area with an actual main street, but it failed in my view, even though the designers and architects tried hard to make a small town like feel to it.
A much loved landmark I eat at is a burger place from 1967 with gaudy orange painted walls and sign - Johnny's. Mike Myers are there as a kid when he grew up here. Eventually they will sell out or be expropriated when a transit line goes through.
The older I get, the less I like change. It is not that things cannot be make better, but we have planning processes that are too top down and focused on growth at any cost - which I thought we had come to realize in the 1970s is the wrong way.
I don't see our planning as really promoting growth at all, although maybe it really is different between America and Canada. If anything, our planning strangles growth in the crib.
For your monster house example, I think that's a direct result of zoning rules. When older homes age out and start to lose value due to atrophy, you end up in this weird grey zone where there are no really good economic options to fix the problem. The house probably isn't worth remodeling as-is since you'll spend more fixing it than the house is worth. And you can't really do a teardown and rebuild of the same thing for much the same reason. As such, the only real possibility is a tear down and replacement with another, larger single family house, often with cheap as possible materials to make it even remotely profitable.
This is a direct result of zoning preventing anything other than single family homes in an area. If you could build something of a higher intensity, like a duplex or higher, that could be more viable than even a McMansion. But we don't allow it, or make it otherwise so impossible that it doesn't pencil out. It's not growth that the zoning code causes, it's fear of growth.
Same thing with the big master-planned developments. Our zoning code makes incremental growth so hard that those big scary projects are the only projects that pencil out, since they end up cutting through all the bureaucracy by doing everything at once.
And if you're worried about places looking nice, our zoning code does little to nothing there. We'd probably have better luck implementing and enforcing architectural standards if we were serious about that.
Thanks Addison! I agree with all your elaborations about my piece, and I think you were right to say that my intent was to add another dimension to the conversation.
I will push back a bit on your description of how Strong Towns views NIMBY’s. First, I don’t know that we have a canonical “movement view.” But to the extent we do I think it’s roughly that “these people aren’t evil they’re self-interested” and that we should be interested in understanding why they are reacting as if development is a “threat.”
It’s true that some people may have irreconcilable beliefs that we can’t work out, as in your excellent example re: immigration. But as you said, most people aren’t “fundamentalist” NIMBYs. Some people have fears stem from incorrect information and could be allayed. Some people have actual physical concerns that could be addressed. And a lot of people just a deeply held conviction that anything we build will be *worse* which is based in the reality that we have only gotten worse at building for the last 80 years!
It’s that last point that I personally care so much about. The more we build good stuff the more we can break that idea that anything new will just suck compared to the old.
But my point is, it’s worth trying to understand the concerns of the non-hardcore NIMBYs because there are some real and fixable things mixed in there that we could actually deal with in a way that persuades people.
But the last thing I’ll say is that, you don’t need to have any sympathy for NIMBYism to justify this. The way I see it is basically, the vast majority of Americans are change averse and more NIMBY-leaning than YIMBY-leaning, therefore writing them off as bad people we need to steamroll won’t work. We have to actually persuade the persuadable, and find win-win solutions, if we want to make things better in an enduring way, given our system of government.
Yeah, thank you for this, and I agree you probably don't have a "canonical" view - I do appreciate how informal and ecumenical you guys are and it's part of why I like ST so much.
I think this split between the "fundamentalist" NIMBYs and the normal decent change-averse people is a really important and kind of under-discussed tension on the "other" side.
>And a lot of people just a deeply held conviction that anything we build will be *worse* which is based in the reality that we have only gotten worse at building for the last 80 years!
I think this is one place where Strong Towns’ “small c conservative” DNA comes out in a “back in the good old days…” way. Yes, we definitely got worse at building, decade after decade, for a long time! I walk around San Francisco and I can see the scars of lowrise apartment complexes oriented around their surface parking lots from the “urban renewal” era. I can architecturally recognize the trends of the ‘90s and ‘00s, and a lot of the stuff built then was shit. But the stuff from the last ~15 years is noticeably better! The good word of these urbanist organizations is spreading and making a difference, we need to take the W!
There are still regions where we’re building a lot of crap, to be sure. But we’re clearly demonstrating that we’re increasingly capable of building great new stuff. And not just in big cities - lots of suburban downtown redevelopments are super encouraging too!
Yay progress! The task now is finding out how to spread and scale the discoveries behind building better new places. The problem, in part, is that lots of people aren’t exposed to the places building great new stuff