I recently watched a live chat on Substack with Jeff Fong, Andrew Burleson, and Stephanie Nakhleh on a perennial question in housing and urbanism discourse: how much, if at all, is NIMBYism driven by aesthetic concerns?
Typically, this refers to preferences in favor of more traditional, ornamented, or “beautiful” architecture, raising the question of whether more aesthetically pleasing new construction would actually change the basic level of support for it? Or is this mostly either a secondary concern or a bad-faith argument? And further, can “beauty” or “good aesthetics” be codified into a style that most people would agree upon?
To put it a little differently, is ingrained opposition to new housing the fault of housing advocates who thumb their noses at the preferences of regular people, in favor of either modernism or lowest-common-denominator throwaway architecture?
While the chat covered these questions, it also zoomed out and attempted to define what is really properly meant by “aesthetics,” concluding that this should be understood not only as a question of architecture or styles, but also one of building and street design overall. That is to say that much of the popular demand for “better aesthetics” is in fact a shorthand for precisely the sort of old-fashioned, well-loved urban design which modern zoning codes largely prohibit.
I’m going to summarize the discussion—this is long, but I think it’s all important—and then, below the paywall, make a few further points of my own. (So scroll down if you want to skip the summary, but I don’t think you should.)
The genesis of this conversation was a social media post Jeff wrote, offering his opinion that he didn’t think the aesthetics question was much of a factor in pro- or anti-housing opinion, and that it should not be a major concern for public policy:
This is definitely a controversial opinion, especially among some of the more traditionally minded urbanists who find the YIMBYs to be too emphatic about “more housing units at any cost,” or however they would perceive the YIMBY position. It is a less controversial opinion among housing advocates in housing-crunched cities, where the aesthetics issue can seem like a distraction.
Jeff said he was surprised how controversial his opinion here was, and because of the conversation it sparked, this live chat came together.
Now notice that in his social media post, Jeff uses “prettier facade” as a stand-in for “aesthetic considerations.” This question—what precisely should “aesthetics” be taken to mean?—was the first topic of discussion.
Andrew defined “aesthetics” as “A complete sensory and emotional experience…what something feels like.” We experience it as vibes or as loose impressions, but there are real, concrete design details we are perceiving when we speak of a building or a place as having good aesthetics. However, because we lack a precise, commonly understood language for good urban design, we express these feelings in shorthand.
Andrew argues that if you really drill down into aesthetic differences, “you’ll find functional differences that matter underneath.” To flip this, he is arguing that what regular people perceive or describe as “bad aesthetics” is really their perception of design flaws.
Stephanie more or less agrees in different words: aesthetics is architecture and architectural style, but also urban form, and the relation between buildings and other elements of the built environment. She also adds that while aesthetics matter, we don’t have a good way of implementing those concerns. Discretionary design reviews or code elements that require large facades to be broken up with different materials, for example, rarely have the result of producing buildings that are generally considered aesthetically superior.
Jeff agrees with all of this, and adds that he previously used “aesthetics” to mean visual or style preferences, and assumed that the discourse around aesthetics was also mostly about this. He agrees that the expansion of aesthetics to include functionality and design considerations is very useful.
He then asks whether there is an objectively superior aesthetic, or a common enough set of subjective preferences, that rough general agreement could be had on “good aesthetics”? In other words, it is one thing to acknowledge that these concerns matter, but another thing to discern how, or whether, they are actionable in the realm of public policy.
It’s agreed that a simplistic idea of mandating beauty is not possible. Stephanie argues that it’s easier to exclude the things people generally don’t like than to define what they do like. (For example, green space yes, parking lots no.)
Andrew returns to the design question. He notes that a typographer can tell you what makes type more legible, or a tailor can explain why a shirt fits. Urban planning and architecture, he says, lack a language for objectively explaining good architecture or urban design. He argues that there are four distinct elements we should consider—scale (size), form (building type), orientation (to the rest of the built environment), and ornamentation (style).
Of these, scale and orientation are most important, because they define the feel of a place overall. Again, Andrew is emphasizing that the aesthetics discourse is largely a design discussion being had in the wrong language.
Andrew also says that because regular people don’t know this language, they will say, to use an example Stephanie offered, that the historic district of Santa Fe is cool because it has “Santa Fe style” brown stucco. And, as Stephanie notes, they know that a Lowe’s covered in stucco is not a true Santa Fe style building.
But people, Andrew says, lack the language to express their own preferences: “People are trying to say a thing they want, but they don’t really understand the thing they want.” In other words, “better aesthetics” or “ugly new construction” are imprecise ways of expressing why we like traditional, “fine-grained,” walkable urban environments over bland, spread-out car-oriented environments: “There are functional characteristics of old places that we really like and value and would like to see more of.”
Jeff asks Stephanie what specifically makes historic Santa Fe popular? Mostly, she says, that it retains its pre-WWII, largely pre-automobile urban form. It has the narrower setbacks (less distance between a building and the street), buildings in line or attached without gaps or awkward dead spaces, trees, plazas, small shops, and fewer parking lots. Parking lots, she notes, make buildings feel taller than they are, which partly accounts for the perception of four- or five-story suburban buildings as “high-rises.”
She says people think of this bundle of traditional urban characteristics as “aesthetics,” but it’s an urban form that was once allowed, and is mostly no longer allowed, by the land-use regime. “So much of what is perceived as aesthetic by people is actually pretty objective,” she says.
Andrew adds that zoning and the era of car-oriented suburban development were largely imposed in a paternalistic way: “We’re not in a world where we don’t have aesthetics governing us….We are in a world where aesthetics govern us intensely.” We cannot mistake the status quo for a state of nature.
Fascinatingly—and I would love to follow up on this with some examples—he says that developers in the transitional period of the 1940s and 1950s lamented that the burgeoning new regulatory regime no longer allowed them to build the kind of things they’d previously been accustomed to building.
Next, Jeff asks what regulations did look like in the old days. Andrew notes that cities like Paris and Washington, D.C. had strong urban planning, while other cities had basically none of what we would now think of as urban planning. There weren’t really that many regulations. Andrew says that the first laws that resemble modern zoning codes were designed in Germany, to deal with rapid industrial expansion and separate industry from the rest of the city. This separation, largely rooted in the even older idea of nuisance regulation, slowly accreted into “Imagine if we separated everything from everything!” Zoning quickly became an elitist, technocratic idea of imposing “order” on the “messy” pre-zoning built environment.
Stephanie adds that the progressive movement in the early 20th century, which largely supported zoning from this technocratic-moralistic perspective, was also motivated by xenophobia, and that eugenicists of the era also supported anti-urban policies.
All of that, believe it or not, is just the first part of the chat, trying to work out a definition of “aesthetics” from which the question of the role of aesthetics can then be answered.
Jeff observes that obviously these things matter, but is good aesthetics—properly understood—actually a useful way to change anyone’s mind, such that with the current political process we can get more housing where we need it?
Stephanie feels that refusing to raise these issues leaves a lot of potential support on the table. “Supply, demand, and units” just doesn’t resonate. “People don’t want their cities to look like shit,” she says bluntly; a pro-housing pitch that addresses the pervasive feeling that new development is “ugly”—meaning largely, to Andrew’s point, poorly designed—would help bring people in. Furthermore, find good ways to explain how good aesthetics and traditional urban design elements work together.
Stephanie also says that the people who go to the public hearings to make comments are a very narrow slice of the general population, and that most of them, despite raising seemingly reasonable objections, are probably not appeasable. But again, she emphasizes that the question of convincing the professional NIMBYs is a different question from reaching neutral, mildly skeptical, or mildly interested people.
Andrew agrees that there is an intransigent minority of people who use bad-faith arguments as a way of simply saying no. But some of their objections might still have merit, or be shared by people who do raise them in good faith. There is not a monolithic anti-housing sentiment or coalition, and much of the “opposition”—a term to which Andrew objects—can be reasoned with.
The bigger answer is to reform the “10 angry people” vetocracy, and have a more democratic and less arcane process for gathering or considering public opinion. And, I think, a greatly simplified ruleset in which fewer projects trigger discretionary reviews and public input hearings.
Andrew gives specific examples where taking aesthetic concerns seriously moved certain housing reforms forward. He points to a building type called “slot houses” in Denver, which have entrances along alleyways and often present a blank facade or garage to the street. The code was altered to require an entrance/front on the street-facing side, such that the buildings interacted with the main street. This is one of those functional and aesthetic elements, and he says that this increased support for these houses.
He also points to some new rules in Denver which are close to being passed, which would increase the number of homes allowed on a single lot in exchange for requiring the new multi-unit buildings to resemble houses. He thinks that many regular people really do object to the garish or incompatible appearance of much new construction, and not to the number of housing units they contain. Taking these considerations seriously really can get more housing built.
Given this full discussion, Jeff says he sees the value of aesthetics, again properly understood, as a relevant concern for housing advocates and housing policy. However, does this actually peel off NIMBYs, or mostly bring in weakly pro-housing people with more intensity?
Andrew says it’s difficult to say who’s being added or peeled off, but his experience above from Denver suggests that a lot of people who initially got involved for NIMBYish reasons ended up supportive of the final policies after these concerns were considered. He believes the majority view is that more homes are fine if they look nice. The citywide nature of the reforms he noted is also important, because there is no narrowly targeted redevelopment.
Making a similar point, Stephanie says that by-right development—that is, projects simply allowed under the rules and not triggering discretionary reviews and public input—needs to be a big part of this discussion. The discretionary review/public input process creates a vetocracy. We would get a better outcome “in every way possible” if we basically let people do their own thing, within a legible and greatly simplified regulatory framework.
Jeff concludes by agreeing that aesthetics probably does matter within our political process, in terms of raising support for new housing in some way. However, it probably does not peel off hardcore NIMBYs, which still points to the need for process and regulatory reforms. Everyone agrees with these conclusions or finds them acceptable.
This discussion was fascinating and very productive, in my view. There are subtle disagreements, or differences of language or emphasis, which are difficult to discern except when the intent is explicitly to uncover them.
This is what I mean when I write about applying the format of an ecumenical dialogue to questions or disagreements within the housing/urbanism world.