NIMBYism, Nostalgia, And Place Final FINAL

Don't take any argument too far

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I have a some further thoughts—concluding thoughts for now, but as always, to be continued—on my recent piece on NIMBYism as a kind of mis-directed (and sometimes weaponized) mourning, and Andrew Burleson’s response emphasizing that good placemaking could blunt the impulse to mourn ordinary, small-ball change in the first place.

Burleson is kind of arguing against my point, but also adding a different dimension: I, inspired by a great comment from Sonja Trauss, was arguing that a lot of “NIMBYs” aren’t really NIMBYs; they’re just regular people who, quite naturally, miss things they remember about the places they live or grew up in. But that natural sentiment gets hijacked and weaponized by 1) a general cultural idea in America that change is bad, developers are bad, etc., and 2) a much smaller subset of actual NIMBYs who subtly turn “I miss this old thing” into “never change anything ever.” The regular people find that nostalgia is “bundled with” NIMBYism.

What Andrew adds to this is that 1) there are reasons why people miss things, and you can’t just sort of argue them out of those feelings, and 2) the reasons they miss such ordinary and seemingly unimportant things is at least in part that they have almost nothing else to love or, in his estimation, worth loving.

Most of the American built landscape is so denuded of landmarks, continuities, real places, that we cling to (one of his examples) a rundown old movie theater on a stroad, These sorts of things have become our landmarks and emotional anchors and, such as they are, public gathering spaces.

What Andrew concludes is that instead of dealing with NIMBY-ish sentiment, or calling normal people who miss things NIMBYs, we can preempt some of these feelings of mis-attachment by building better communities and better places. Places which do have a sense of continuity, such that the elements (individual stores, for example) can come and go but the overall place still coheres and feels recognizable over time.

Now I’m going to add some points of disagreement/elaboration to his points and about this whole issue in general. None of my quibbles here mean that I think placemaking and great overall urban design are not really important. They are important, but they’re not cure-alls (because nothing is a cure-all). This is messy stuff, and you will never please everybody. You have to discern who you can please, who is worth pleasing, and at what cost. And also what is worth doing regardless of what people feel about it.

Here I am identifying some of the hidden bones of contention here between Andrew’s Strong-Towns-infused view versus the YIMBY worldview. And I also want to note how cool it is that a comment from Sonja Trauss, one of the original YIMBY movement founders, inspired my original piece, and that I got to publish Andrew Burleson, a Strong Towns cofounder.

This might seem like a bit of inside baseball to someone outside of the urbanist movement. But these are two major but slightly different parts of the broad urbanist coalition, and it’s really, really cool to be part of the coalition-building, communication, and ideas work here. This is why I started, and keep writing, this newsletter.

Read Andrew’s piece and my original piece, and then my further kind-of final notes.

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Even suburban hellholes can be “real places”

Andrew writes, partly about his own hometown (or “town”):

Almost everyone in America lives in a post-war landscape that is nearly devoid of meaningful place. You could say that Americans are place-malnourished.

I’ll try to illustrate what I mean when I say that, because I know that even my own family wouldn’t understand what I mean. I love my family. They’re all highly educated and thoughtful people. But they’re also Texans, and Texans are uniquely place-blind because there are almost no places of consequence in the state of Texas.

To what extent does good urban form imply the whole package of urbanism? I’ve written about this before—here I lean more towards thinking that form is very important, while here, and here, I go in the other direction, thinking about “urbanism” as a kind of idea that can subsist outside of “proper” form.

Here is a nice comment on Andrew’s piece from Lee Nellis, who argues, as I often do, that “place” or “character” is something deeper than, and not necessarily dependent on, urban form:

There’s a small sandstone building in a tiny, dusty cotton gin town somewhere between Waco and Hobbs. We were starving and it looked like the only provisions available might be truck stop sandwiches. But then we saw that old building with a hand-lettered sign advertising burritos, tacos, etc. Inside we found the original hardwood floors and tin ceiling, a friendly proprietor, and excellent food at an amazingly low price. So, now we have a story that we are unlikely to forget.

I worry that urbanists and YIMBYs focus on the physical (and at a given moment, static) aspects of a place rather than on the experience, on the stories the place prompts.

This reminds me of something I was warned of, very early on in my career as an urbanist writer: we should not take too narrow a lesson from the tragedy of urban renewal, and conclude only that bulldozing historic cities is a bad idea. We should take the broader point that writing off any place—including seemingly ugly and rundown suburbs—could be a big mistake. We should not be confident of our ability to judge the worth of a place.

I suppose I would say that the Strong Towns emphasis on incrementalism possibly cuts against its arguments about suburbia as a dead end. What if we simply cannot see the future, and that people will—incrementally—turn these places into something more than they seem now?

Of course, that is exactly what all of us want, and at the end of the day there really is a bleakness, distance, and massive infrastructure expense built into America’s car-oriented suburbs. Nonetheless, I am very aware of the possibility that some urbanists are just missing something about these places, in precisely the same way that the urban renewal folks missed something about our legacy cities.

Classic towns/historic cities are not NIMBY-proof

Andrew’s argument goes that the more “real” a place is—the more of a civic and communal element it has—the less likely people are to feel upset over the loss of an ordinary business, or just the normal churn of the place:

The YIMBYs have brought tremendous energy to overcoming the barriers to housing. The next step in that evolution is to deeply understand placemaking so that we can leverage every new housing project as an opportunity to make the surrounding community better.

The more that we can create places worth caring about, the more we can meet people’s fundamental need for better, healthier anchors of continuity to hold on to. Then they can reminisce about the good old days and feel some nostalgia, without feeling threatened by change. I think that’s the most enduring path to unlock a healthier, more dynamic, and more responsive built environment.

I think this is probably correct, and even if it isn’t correct, placemaking is still important in and of itself. However, historic urban places have their own NIMBYs, though maybe of a slightly different sort.

San Francisco, which is one of America’s most classically urban cities, is, of course, a hotbed of NIMBYism. My own hometown, a little 5,000-person small town in central New Jersey, has a lot of people who tsk-tsk at every new thing that gets done or built there, who miss the good old days, etc. etc.

But, there’s an interesting subtlety here that I think backs up Andrew’s point. Someone else left this great comment:

As a YIMBY San Franciscan, I have to say your hypothesis fits the peculiar strength of NIMBYism in SF: we have a wonderful place well worth being attached to here, and we have seen around us the real tendency of American corporate-slop development to disfigure places like ours, so we YIMBYs need to get better at credibly committing not to be like the slop-mongers.

In other words: perhaps suburban NIMBYs are place-deprived people who get attached to things that are really just not worth getting attached to, because there isn’t much else. Urban NIMBYs, on the other hand, might be place-nurtured people who, because they’re rooted in a “real place,” are more defensive of it. But they grok that new development tends to be big, bland, and blah, and their “NIMBYism” is a defense of traditional, historic urbanism.

We can work with both of these sets of “NIMBYs” in different ways, because both of them have, ultimately, good-faith motivations, and in their different ways genuinely care about the places they live in, not (just) their own interests. In some ways, we all agree, but lack a common language.¹ (This is not true of all NIMBYs, and I’ll come back to that point.)

The people are not always right, and attachment to place is not necessarily a raw fact

Andrew quotes an essay from Chris Arnade, arguing that American elites tend not to understand that a lot of people are attached to the place they live, not necessarily for reasons but because it’s…home. That this is just a fact of human psychology we have to accept. From Chris’s essay:

It took me hundreds of interviews of people who had stayed for a lifetime in a town in open decay, that was crumbling around them, that by all I could measure had treated them badly, to understand how significant place can be.

When I asked them, “Why haven’t you moved?” the answers I received were a look of confusion, then a shake of the head that indicated that I was the one who was confused, and then a simple, “Because it is home.”….

When a direct question confuses someone because they don’t see it as a choice—certainly not something to be adjudicated in a spreadsheet—then you have discovered an epistemologically foundational belief. It rises from a small-g good (directional, but not intrinsic) to a capital-G Good (directional and an intrinsic part of life).

Place is still a capital-G Good for a large percentage of Americans…

I am a bit of two minds about this. On one level, it’s just true. On another level, I don’t know how far you should go with it.

Arnade is not exactly, but he is sort of, saying that we should apologize for being elites. That when the elites’ and the broad public’s opinion or perception clashes, the elites are the ones who are wrong. They (we?) might be! But what if the people are wrong? What if they’re, you know, morons?

Is it worse to think the non-elites are stupid than it is to think the intellectuals are stupid? I am absolutely not arguing that elites are always right, and in particular I think it’s true, as Andrew notes, that people whose life experience is a narrow slice of the broad country’s experience may not represent the people very well, as a practical matter. But if you take this inversion too far, you can arrive at an abdication of wisdom, ideas, and leadership.

What I’m about to criticize now is not something Arnade is saying or that I think he’s saying, but it feels like a related idea out there that I want to address: there is a certain kind of bloodless, doctrinaire localism which is threatened by immigration and cosmopolitanism.

In this point of view, the mere existence of the immigrant is a threat, because the immigrant proves that attachment to place is not foundational or insurmountable. The immigrant is by definition someone who has left behind not just a place of birth, but an entire culture; an entire home. Quite a lot of people do pull up the stakes, throw in the towel, and strike out for greener pastures.

You will sometimes even come across the idea that immigrants, because they have left their home behind, are people of suspect character. People who lack loyalty or patriotism. This is a kind of mutant NIMBYism which ultimately thinks that people have a duty to remain attached to their soil, and that mobility, per se, is morally suspect. This is a monstrous and deeply un-American idea, and it should be separated from genuine love of place as the chaff is separated from the wheat.

The urbanist sweet spot lies somewhere between rhapsodizing about place in a mystical, abstract, disembodied way (the NIMBY/localist reductio ad absurdum), and an abstract, technocratic emphasis on economic growth or housing units, which ignores the human element of why we build housing in the first place (the YIMBY reductio ad absurdum).

The Strong Towns approach seems to rely on not accepting that real NIMBYs—as YIMBYs describe them—really exist, and on never just steamrolling them for the public interest

This is basically the YIMBY critique of Strong Towns, which is articulated well here by YIMBY activist Max Dubler. Dubler argues that Strong Towns is just a bit too abstract, privileged, and apolitical. It never wants to go in for the kill, because it has too much ultimate sympathy with the NIMBYs. (Read him in his own words too!)

I do not go as far as Dubler here, and I think Strong Towns is an extremely important part of the urbanist movement. I see them as constructing a path or creating a “permission structure” for people somewhat outside the YIMBY purview—right-leaning folks, people in small towns, people in cities experiencing decay rather than gentrification—to embrace urbanism without embracing the whole left-ish worldview that a lot of YIMBYs implicitly hold.

Nonetheless, there is a certain desire among Strong Towns writers to start with the base assumption that “NIMBYs” are good and well-intentioned, and that the “right” approaches to development will placate them. The bitter experience of YIMBYs is that this is simply not true.

Now almost all urbanists and housing advocates would, I think, accept that there are “professional NIMBYs” (who will accept no answer) and a larger number of people who have no malign motivations and mostly just like what they know (and who are convincible, or who can be peeled off from the professional NIMBYs). In other words, when we talk about NIMBYs, we’re talking about two distinct groups.

Nonetheless, I do think there is a bit of a substantive disagreement here. Ultimately, the Strong Towns worldview seems to think that what we call “NIMBYism” is a legitimate, if perhaps imprecise or overstated, set of responses to real problems that urbanists and housing advocates have a duty to solve.

YIMBYs, on the other hand, tend towards the idea that NIMBYism is often pointless, self-interested obstruction, to which we owe no real deference, and which, more importantly, people cannot be argued out of in many cases.

As David Roberts put it here (talking about Big Oil), if people have financial interests in an outcome, the answer is not ideas, because you can’t trick people out of caring about their material interests. The answer is power. Ultimately, a lot of YIMBYs see NIMBYism as self-interest which must be pushed out of the way. This is why housing is inherently political for YIMBYs. For folks in the Strong Towns world, it’s a more abstract question of getting ideas and arguments right, because the NIMBYs can’t be that bad. The YIMBYs who think about this in terms of politics and power see that as either privileged or naive.

On some level, Strong Towns does seem to arguing that it really is possible to create a world of both 1) housing abundance/affordability/your preferred term of art and 2) a world where nobody in a position of relative privilege ever has to experience discomfort or give anything up. That sounds narrow and idealistic, but the best way to look at it is that it is positive sum, and believes in growing the pie for everyone.

These tensions are not just about organizations within urbanism. They’re also specific examples of the tensions that often arise within movements, between the left and right, etc.

I believe that we don’t explore the origins of such disagreements enough, and that most of our political/policy arguments are a lot of talking past each other. So I hope this, and the other pieces like it that I write occasionally, are helpful in prompting clearer thinking on one of the most important policy problems we face today.

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Related Reading:

A Little More On Zoning Preemption

Urbanist Formularies

Do You Hear What I Hear?

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1. This is why I frequently compare the communications and ideas work I do in urbanism to religious ecumenism. A lot of what presents itself as substantive disagreement is at least in part 1) different language, which is based on 2) divergent interpretive ideas, and so it can be quite tricky even to figure out if we believe the same absolute, base-level thing.