Nostalgia Should Not Be Locked Behind NIMBYism
It's okay to mourn the past and build the future at the same time
I’m not at all subtly pointing out that one of the founders of the YIMBY movement reads my newsletter; she’s just very insightful, and there’s a reason she’s a major figure in this issue area.
Sonja Trauss left this comment on one of my recent pieces, which I thought was important enough to quote and elaborate on. It touches on something I’ve thought about for a long time. Specifically, on one of the disconnects between YIMBYs and a lot of NIMBY-leaning people who don’t think much about, basically, any of this.
Trauss makes a really important point, which I think is not articulated nearly often enough:
Many if not most people can or would overlook the negatives of neighborhood change and appreciate the new if they had a way of mourning the old.
Unfortunately, for a person who intellectually could be OK with some neighborhood change, but wants to get together with other to process their grief, the only available place is in the group that is organizing to stop the change. That’s where you’ll find neighbors who want to reminisce and validate your sadness.
If we had unlimited resources, we would organize neutral neighborhood change grief circles, or some other kind of way for people to get together and just feel sad and move through it.
The idea that nostalgia is typically locked behind, or bundled with, NIMBYism is really important. I think there’s room to unbundle those, and get people who think of them as the same thing to see it differently.
That’s why I try to do things like find a way to see change as honoring a place’s own history, which often has a lot more change and dynamism in it than people remember, or reminisce about old places while also noting that they may not be worthy of physical preservation.
Furthermore, because of this interlocking/conflation of a natural human sentiment (nostalgia) with a specific approach to land use policy (NIMBYism), a lot of regular people who might not really be NIMBYs nonetheless end up perceiving YIMBYs/urbanists/pro-urban-growth people in general as attacking the past.
What the pro-growth philosophy, broadly, really boils down to is not attacking the past, but rather something like this: Whatever we think of these old things and remember about them, they’re not necessarily viable as business enterprises anymore—which is what they always were—and so it’s time for what comes next. Not in a metaphysical sense, but in the nuts-and-bolts sense of allowing places to evolve as conditions and trends and demographics change. This means understanding that the past that we view as hallowed may be in some sense, but is also just, ultimately, what served people here in a previous time. It isn’t inherently more worthy than whatever does or will serve the people who are here now.
YIMBYs are not really advocating anything except to allow the regulatory regime to align with economic and demographic reality. Ultimately, we are really describing the current landscape, while old-timers hear us as attacking the old landscape they don’t really see as having had its time and being in the past.
Sonja’s point, as I take it, is that this can be disrupted to some extent by finding a way to make room for that sentiment of missing or mourning these old things without also demanding that they somehow be preserved by force of law.
You can see how these sentiments are bound up together when you read about vanished restaurants or other businesses on old-timer Facebook groups. For example, here are some comments I found online about a defunct indoor amusement park in Rockville, Maryland (which happens to be the subject of tomorrow “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” piece):
“When life was easy”; “That was a major staple of my childhood. Oh how the years went by, losing many precious things in MoCo…”; “Gosh those were the good old days”; “Nothing exists like this anymore.”
There is sort of an implication in these comments, and many others on many other similar places, that these wonderful old things were taken from us by someone. You’ll see comments like “I bet they’ll replace it with more unaffordable condos.” What these comments reveal to me is 1) we have trouble seeing things that mean a great deal to us as fleeting and contingent on passing economic circumstances, perhaps because this seems to strip them of meaning, and 2) that we don’t have a good cultural script for dealing with the inevitable sense of loss as you grow up, things change, and the places that felt like landmarks to you, that gave a context for your life and stored your memories, inevitably pass away.
NIMBYism really is the closest thing we have to that, right now. But it is both too much and not enough.
What would it look like to build some kind of “grief circle,” as Sonja puts it, to mourn an old building torn down or a multigenerational local business closing down? What would it look like to “preserve” things in some kind of collective, local memory without actually keeping all of the artifacts themselves?
Would more serious attempts to document and remember the past of a place—to make even the loss of things part of a story of a long evolution to which everyone belongs—really move the needle on NIMBY sentiment?
I’d like to think it would. What do you think?
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this is a really important point! Change absolutely does bring loss, and dismissing people's feeling about that is no way to win them over. And this extends to more than just nostalgia for the look of the past. I live along the Purple Line construction in Maryland, which required the cutting down of numerous huge mature trees along a street I have to walk along to get almost anywhere. Along with the aesthetic loss, especially with climate change it's now a huge hit to my quality of life to have lost the benefit of their shade.
But at one point I saw an advocate (who I otherwise am usually 100% in agreement with) seem to kind of poo-poo this loss and it made me very angry. The project has to plant saplings in some other neighborhood entirely to compensate for the trees, apparently? But how on earth does this address MY loss of shade and all the other known benefits of street trees? It does not, and it's dismissive to imply that it makes up for the fact that my life has gotten objectively worse on this point. I absolutely understand that sometimes the good of the many has to outweigh the good of the few, but I think it's vital to acknowledge when some people actually are making a sacrifice for the good of the many.
This is a great question to raise. And maybe, somewhere, for some people, grieving is an answer. My experience, though, is that nostalgia can at least sometimes be overcome by demonstrating sufficient respect for the past in the way change is designed and managed. In communities that have history (which some suburbs don't, and that's a problem), you can even remind people that the past was, in fact, one of very different living arrangements.
But in many places, the NIMBY position is fraught with moral judgement that is hidden behind the nostalgia. I will add that the YIMBY position is also, at root, a moral one. And when different moral visions collide, change can only come through force (the application of power), or the difficult work of trying to change how people view the world. Unless we want to sow bitterness, as Alex points out in his comment, through the use of force (and more to the points, ignore the universal law that what goes around eventually comes around, that the force you apply to others will be applied to you) that means we need strong moral leadership.