At the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s annual social gathering in Washington, D.C. the other week, I met a recent college graduate who grew up in China as a child and studied and lives in the United States.
We were chatting about housing and zoning, and I mentioned that one of my particular interests is the subtle way you see business done at a smaller and more informal scale in immigrant communities.
My two favorite examples of this are an old Kmart in Woodbridge, Virginia that’s now home to both a large thrift store and a marketplace of 10 or 15 semi-permanent stalls. They’re home to everything from a grocery store to a clothing store to what looked to me like a tiny defunct video game arcade.
The other is Eden Center, a heavily Vietnamese shopping center in Falls Church, Virginia. There, several old storefronts have been divided into dozens of small shops, very much like an East Asian mini-mall.
The story here isn’t just about immigration. It’s about this question of scale; scale, space, efficiency, hustle. There is a subtle relationship between the physical scale of a space, and the scale at which people can participate in economic life.
This young woman then noted that farmer’s markets—chic, quite possibly overpriced—run on the same basic insight that small spaces and a high density of merchants create more opportunity for the vendors and more potential products for customers. And the high density of vendors is especially important in markets—like the Washington, D.C. metro area—where land is scarce and expensive.
Why, then, is this basic insight, which is to some extent familiar to every American who has ever shopped at a farmer’s market or eaten at a food hall, also so seemingly poorly understood, and rarely capitalized on, in the United States?
The basic logic of density and proximity seems intuitive. She said, growing up in China, that people basically just lived in apartments. They owned them, improved them, raised families in them, hosted gatherings in them. There wasn’t a consciousness of living in an “apartment” as there is in the United States, as though it indicated an inferior status. Apartment life wasn’t something you did for a few years and grew out of, or a stepping stone on the way to your detached house.
She said that, growing up, she never heard the idea expressed that “we don’t have enough room.”
There are a lot of ways you could think about that. People get used to what they’re familiar with, or what they must accept. It wouldn’t matter if anybody wanted more space, because more space wasn’t possible. You could only have one child, anyway, in those days; try raising three kids (and a dog and a cat) in a high-rise with two bedrooms and a kitchen the size of a farmhouse sink.
But these don’t quite hold water; within living memory in the United States, such conditions were something to celebrate. Americans may have been happy to leave cities1, but they ended up in Levittown. They had kids, dogs, cats, hosted holidays, dinner parties, birthday parties.
The original Levittown houses were about 800 square feet. They had two bedrooms. One bathroom.
If something that was once near-universal seems unfathomable to us, perhaps we are the ones missing something. We are missing that relationship between scale, whether commercial or residential, and participation, whether economic or social.
We are much richer now, even if the postwar boom seemed like the top of the world. We are able to buy ourselves more space, more privacy, more distance. In some way, we imagine that we can buy our way out of the constant, quiet, grinding effort that got us here in the first place. We feel that the reward for a rich country is to throw money at the problem of unchosen human contact. We do not have a cultural memory, anymore, of what it took to get here.
“We don’t have enough room” is surely a feeling that people everywhere, of all incomes, have sometimes had. But that Americans experience this feeling almost chronically, despite living in larger houses with smaller families, defies rationality. It is a kind of complacency.
It is curious that we often look back with nostalgia on the times when we had less space and more human contact. College, with its tiny rooms and proximity to so many people and things, seems for so many people a high water mark in their lives.
My father remembers the big holiday gatherings his extended Italian-American family had, in a house not more than 1,000 square feet, with a little formal dining room and one dinky bathroom.
But nobody ever remembers that. Nobody talks 50 years later about how they had to wait five minutes to pee.
They remember crowding around the table, being a backseat chef in the kitchen, running around in the postage-stamp yard (or sending the kids out to run around), getting a drink, staying up late. Trays of lasagna, bowls of antipasto. How did so little make so much?
The price of that joy, in many ways, was the tightness and crowdedness. Of the homes, bursting with energy; of the neighborhoods, not yet so stretched out and separated; of the entire state of regional land use, with suburbs not yet creeping out an hour from the old city.
It is a tragedy that it is so easy to buy our way out of this immediate friction, discomfort, and frustration. It is a stumbling block; it is exceedingly difficult to choose immediate discomfort in the hope of reaping social and emotional dividends in the future.
It should be noted that our separated, distant, centralized, oversized world of sprawl is in its own way frictional and frustrating. There is a cost there, too. Nobody particularly likes the 15-minute drives to buy milk and eggs, the traffic, the traffic lights, the gas prices, the feeling of running around and going nowhere which even the most committed suburbanites occasionally feel, even if perhaps they lack a language to express or even understand exactly what they’re feeling.
But in replicating every element of public life in the suburban home which it is possible to do, and barring every other element of public life behind the automobile, we have made the default American experience one of comfortable, frictionless isolation. It is frictional in logistical terms, but it is frictionless in terms of unchosen social interaction.
This does not mean that suburbanites are quietly desperate drones with no social lives. Much social and public life still exists, but the difference is that in a car-oriented environment, almost all of it must be definitively, affirmatively chosen.
We have not “paid our dues” to crowds and strangers and unchosen exposure. We have not earned the right to buy comfort and privacy at the expense of enterprise. We have not banked enough work and effort and grit and sweat that we can rest on our laurels and have the immense fortune of the American standard of living guaranteed.
Those who know relative poverty can have no such misconceptions. Those who were fortunate enough to grow up with regular, unselfconscious, unchosen human contact—to have a childhood without “we don’t have enough room”—understand, if only as a vague worldview, the strange and necessary confluence between joy and wealth and hard, desperate work.
Those of us who have grown up otherwise have no doubt been spared the frustration of that metaphorical or literal waiting five minutes to pee. At what cost, we can hardly imagine.
Related Reading:
That Damned Elusive Parking Spot
Those who were able to, of course, which was not all of us.
I grew up in one of those post-war suburban housing developments; our house was about 800SF, 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom. The galley kitchen was so small my dad joked that he worried about my mom getting stuck in it when she was pregnant.
But, as far as they were concerned, they had achieved the American dream. After all, my mom had grown up with a family of 8 living in an 1100 SF house, plus they took in boarders during the Depression - she shared a bedroom with her five siblings.
Our neighborhood was one of those old-fashioned suburbs where everyone had small, detached homes with yards, but in a walkable town with easy access to shops, the pharmacy, the post office, and public transport. My parents only had one car, which my dad needed for work; so my mom and I walked to do errands. Many of the wives in my neighborhood were from the WWII generation and didn't drive at all, but it wasn't terribly difficult to get around as there were buses and the commuter rail.
I believe constraints are necessary. I’ve cleaned out houses where every corner is just full of things. We see bigger as better but smaller often means flexibility and choice.