Why Would Anyone Live Like That?
Freedom of choice is at the heart of the housing debate
Today’s piece is a guest piece from fellow urbanist/housing writer Jeremy Levine. Check out his Substack here!
In the many public meetings about local housing developments I have attended, local residents don’t merely oppose apartments because they worry about how they will impact them. They oppose new apartments because they cannot imagine anyone would conceivably want to live in them.
Too little space, no yard, insufficient parking, excessive noise—opponents of denser housing have their laundry list of complaints as to why it is uninhabitable. One elected official in my home county, who herself lives in a single-family subdivision of standardized homes, calls apartments “ticky tacky boxes stacking people like rats.” It’s vivid language. Nobody wants to be forced into flimsy, generic structures with no light or air.
This strain of thought has a longstanding (if not outstanding) pedigree among American thinkers. In Crabgrass Frontier, a book about America’s relationship with suburbs, author Kenneth Jackson quotes an 1882 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article:
Myriads of inmates of the squalid, distressing tenement-houses, in which morality is as impossible as happiness, would not give them up, despite their horrors, for clean, orderly, wholesome habitations in the suburbs, could they be transplanted there and back free of charge. They are in some unaccountable way terribly in love with their own wretchedness (Crabgrass Frontier, p. 117)
On one hand, the Harper’s article asserts that happiness is impossible in the tenements of yore. Yet the author also finds many tenement residents preferred living there so much they would not leave even if they were paid to do so. Might some people have been happy, maybe?
This sentiment prevailed among many of the Progressive Era reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As quoted in Stuck by Atlantic editor Yoni Applebaum, reformer Lawrence Veiller argued:
Tenements had a ‘very bad effect on American life’; even ‘an apartment house of the highest type’ couldn’t provide ‘proper homes.’ The trouble, he continued, was that a disconcertingly large number of Americans liked apartments. (Stuck, p. 127)
Veiller wrote in 1913—a period in time when more than 60 percent of Americans rented. In any given year, a third or more of Americans moved houses. Upward mobility was widespread. Many people used that mobility to leave the tenements and apartment houses for other options, including suburban single-family homes.
Yet at the same time, many people preferred mobility over stability. Newly built apartments included new amenities, building materials, features that improved quality of life. The older tenements themselves provided a launching point for new immigrants or transplants leaving family farms for the big city: low-cost, lower-quality housing in exchange for proximity to jobs, community, culture, and opportunities that launched people up the income scale, and eventually up the housing ladder.
These comments reflect a duality: Some people, for their own reasons, prefer living in denser housing. Others may deem such housing undesirable, even distasteful. Fair enough; everyone should be entitled to live how they prefer.
But that’s precisely the point. Veiller and many of his contemporaries instead embraced a much harsher response: zoning codes that restricted such “distasteful” housing by force of law. He helped craft New York City’s first zoning code, with the explicit intent to kneecap new apartment construction. Not only would detached homeowners have the freedom to remain in their homes that they had always had, but fewer and fewer people would have any choice but to become detached homeowners. Or, barring that, to leave New York City entirely.
Over time, more and more cities embraced Veiller’s thinking with codes that increasingly restricted housing. Restrictive zoning banning apartments on most land and limiting their size in the few places they are allowed has become nearly universal among American cities. It’s hard to imagine what we’ve lost by denying so many people the ability to live how they choose.
Addison Del Mastro summed up a modern version of apartment skepticism nicely in a recent article:
Who the hell wants more traffic and construction noise and crowding? What kind of lunatic wants more neighbors? Etc., etc. It would never even have occurred to me that there was an actual other side that wasn’t a conscious attempt to ruin nice places. I too would have assumed that “housing advocacy” was a Trojan horse for greedy developers/corrupt politicians/etc. What other explanation could there be?
As Del Mastro and many housing advocates and urbanists have said many times, however, the other explanation is straightforward: Even if it’s not right for you, some people like to live in apartments. Our land use regime should let them.
Related Reading:
Hi, It’s “They,” We’re The Problem
The French Revolution For Buildings
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An interesting thing about the point the Harper's article made about tenants not wanting to move. Chesterton made the same observation, in his case being critical of the progressives at the time, pointing out that peasant peoples (a term he used positively) often also resisted moving into social housing because it generally broke apart their social bonds. Jane Jacobs made much the same case of Project housing decades later.
Great conceptual piece, Jeremy. There's still a lot to unpack here, though. One thing is the sense of *tenement* in contemporary vernacular. Second, Veiller also complained about *the lodger evil* and that concerned reformers of the day much more than apartments did.
However, let's consider the fears of the moral reformers that were correct. In the cases of boardinghouses and lodging houses, whether they were owned or leased by the landlord, it was most often older buildings, which were lacking modern amenities, such as running potable water and toilets and plumbing. The older building stock was unsanitary and retrofitting them was expensive. In addition, these houses could be overcrowded. Therefore, the public health threats were real even if some of the prescriptions were not.
So the positive case for urbanism is that dense living and group quarters are beneficial with the proper public health and safety precautions.