Urbanists: "They Not Like Us"
Today's urbanists are part of the problem -- and the solution.
Source: cnn.com
Every so often, the force that is contemporary urbanism in America reaches out to smack me in the face. It’s happened again.
Last Friday, I posted a piece that highlighted a critique I’ve had with the growing abundance movement, and with the YIMBY movement before it. For years, I’ve had a “great for thee, not for me” opinion of YIMBYism – necessary where it’s needed (i.e., coastal cities) but less so in places with lower rates of growth and greater distress. Like many cities in the Midwest, where I live. In fact, I’ve argued that unleashing virtually unfettered housing development in the 1960s and 1970s in the Rust Belt, which began its economic and population decline at the same time, played a significant role in putting them in the distressed position many are in today. Suburban expansion destabilized Rust Belt cities more than in any other region.
A quote from my piece:
“(T)his critique of the (abundance) movement by the Brookings Institution’s Timothy Bartik exposes what I see as a flaw in the movement:
“The movement is making a bold claim: Focusing on abundance issues is the key to unlocking a future of broadly shared prosperity. However, a critique of the movement is that it ignores the needs of most people in America’s distressed places.
That’s because the abundance movement mistakenly assumes that most residents of distressed places can be helped by migration policies that make it easier for them to move to booming places by building housing there. In doing so, the movement ignores the alternative solution of “place-based jobs policies”: the strategy of creating job opportunities in distressed places. Given that, the abundance vision needs to be significantly broadened if it is to address some of the nation’s most serious social, labor market, and inclusion problems, which tend to be concentrated in distressed places.””
That prompted a response from commenter PB, which I’ll show below:
“Why does YIMBYism need to have answers for every problem? I think that it is obvious that YIMBYism and abundance largely don’t have answers for metro areas with no or negative economic and population growth, with the possible exception that cheap energy/electricity should increase people’s effective incomes everywhere, and should also give a boost to manufacturing employment for products and processes that are very energy intensive.
However, I believe that a majority of people in the US live in metros where abundance really should have a positive impact. So it seems to me to be sensible as a national political project.
Also, given that YIMBYism and abundance largely is a response to and being led by people from the coasts (and to some extent the Sunbelt as well) it seems weird to look to them for answers as how to make life better in rust belt cities. They just don’t have the requisite knowledge to know what to do. There are some obvious ideas like moving federal jobs out of the DMV metro and into other metros. But even the people living in rust belt metros haven’t been able to find politically sustainable ways to revive their economies and/or turn the wealth that they have into a more broadly shared prosperity. I don’t know what sense it makes to ask people from NY, CA, TX, and FL to solve the problems of the rust belt.”
OK.
Then yesterday, I saw an article by Addison Del Mastro on his Deleted Scenes Substack that credits the success to the YIMBY movement to its laser-focus on problem-solving:
“A lot of advocates/activists, I thought, seem like this: like they secretly like the idea of their pet problem being an ongoing catastrophe. Like they find validation and purpose not in its solution, but in its existence…
All of this is to make the point that I never detect this dynamic with YIMBYs or housing folks. All of them, in my experience, actually want their problem to be solved. They would be happy to hang up their housing-advocacy hats and simply live in a political environment in which the need to build enough housing is simply as obvious as the need to grow and produce enough food. They are not invested in the housing shortage as their raison d’être.”
Alright.
Finally, today, Noah Smith’s Noahpinion Substack reposted an article from last December (with updates from recent news) that emphasizes the need for public order in American cities:
“For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.
But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century…
Americans are simply not going to accept a transit-centric lifestyle unless and until the incidence of violence on trains and buses goes way down.”
I hear one message. As Kendrick Lamar said, “they not like us.”
Here’s what I hear:
Urbanists don’t have any obligation to make our more distressed cities better places, or even the distressed areas of very prosperous cities better.
Urbanists are chiefly concerned with themselves and want solutions to their problems.
If folks who live in distressed cities or neighborhoods can’t get it together, urbanists won’t see the change they want.
Honestly, it’s an urbanist indictment.
Too many urbanists have chosen the path to improving their own quality of life, instead of the quality of life of the whole. Expanded economic prosperity, fueled by the greatest economic engine developed by humanity – cities – trumps housing affordability. Expanded economic prosperity trumps density. Expanded economic prosperity trumps transit.
There’s a reason our nation has found itself in this tenuous social and political position, a half-century in the making. Economic inequality has gotten us where we are. It spurred the violent unrest in American cities during the ‘60s. It turned dissatisfied, disaffected manufacturing and farming workers in small towns and rural areas into MAGA supporters. It’s catalyzed resentment. It’s brought back tribalism.
For more than a decade I’ve been trying to convince urbanists that the solution they want is out there. When urbanists in the 1990s and 2000s said “we want more mixed-use and multifamily development to make our communities complete” I agreed, but said we need to broaden the economy to support it. When urbanists in the 2010s said “we want to avoid gentrification; displacement is BAD” I said investment in urban neighborhoods is needed. When urbanists today say “we want more housing”, I say yes, but there is plenty of devalued housing in American cities that could really use the investment.
I’m not suggesting that all upper-middle class urbanists should subject themselves to being inner-city guinea pigs; I live in a comfortable suburb myself. I am suggesting that distressed neighborhoods, distressed cities, are part of the solution.
More importantly, urbanists are part of the solution. There is no isolation without insulation. Urbanists have become far too insular, and are continually shocked when isolation rears its ugly head.
Here’s a sports analogy for you. Cities across America are akin to Major League Baseball’s relationship with its minor leagues, or college football’s widening gap between its powerhouse conferences (specifically the Big Ten and SEC) and everyone else. Sadly, this isn’t like European soccer, with promotion and relegation – do well, move up; do poorly, move down.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution right now. Actually I do, but I don’t think the nation is ready for it. Expanded economic prosperity ultimately is a sociological issue, expressed in public policy. Expanded economic prosperity can break down the barriers that create isolation.
But are we ready to accept that challenge?
In short: I don’t think that it is possible to deliberately overcome the pull of industry agglomerations and natural amenities in a way to sufficiently alter patterns of migration and investment in the US. I think that is also true within metros as well. People will always want to live close to unique amenities and jobs, all else equal. Trying to constrain development in areas of high demand is most likely to just lead to more exurban development, not to more investment in areas of the core that are located further away from amenities and jobs than the areas of high demand.
I think that I simply have a different mental model of how the world works. I don’t think that it is really possible to avoid the kinds of concentrations of wealth, power, influence, etc. Wherever the largest industry agglomeration is for a particular industry, that is the place that the most ambitious people in that industry are going to want to be. For IT that is the SF Bay Area; for high finance and corporate governance that is NYC. Then you add on to those agglomerations the fact that a place like SF has amenities that no other metro in the US can offer. No where else in the US has the same climate, and the same access to natural amenities like the mountains and the oceans. The closest places to it are other coastal, high cost metros like San Diego and LA. People with money are going to want to live there almost no matter what anyone else in the world does, because most people would want to live in a warm, sunny, temperate climate by the beach with easy access to scenic mountains. Limiting the amount of housing in those metros does force people to either move out of those metros or never move to them in the first place. But it does so through the mechanism of high housing costs, which means that it doesn’t really spread the investment that goes along with being a premier hub for a certain (or various) industries, as the wealthiest people and the most highly paid workers stay put in those metros.
And within metro areas, there are also inevitably going to be geographic variations in proximity to amenities. Maybe it is going to be a hill with scenic views. Maybe it will be areas that are close to transit stops or close to major employment centers. Maybe it will be proximity to parks or trails. Whatever it is, there will be some parts of the city that more people want to live in than others, and people with money will bid up the prices of housing in those areas. But since the reason that demand is there in the first place is the proximity to unique amenities, constraining development in those areas isn’t going to push development into adjoining areas. If what people want is to live someplace that’s within a 15 minute walk of Central Park, constraining development of housing close to the park isn’t going to lead to more investment in a neighborhood that is say, a 25 minute walk from the park. If you want more investment in that 25 minute neighborhood, then you are going to need to do something that makes more people want to live in that neighborhood (like maybe building another park?).
Your critique of the abundance and YIMBY movements, and of urbanists in general, reminded me a little of some of the message of Pope Francis in his environmental encyclical {Laudato Si) published ten years ago, which was partly an indictment of environmentalists (my primary profession) but also included some critiques of urbanism. Following are few excerpts of relevance:
LS49: "This is due partly to the fact that many professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power, being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population. This lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor."
I believe the above excerpt speaks to "insulation."
LS 111. "Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system."
The abundance movement is arguably a "technocratic" approach - that doesn't really address the deeper social and economic challenges in our society.
LS150. "Given the interrelationship between living space and human behaviour, those who design buildings, neighbourhoods, public spaces and cities, ought to draw on the various disciplines which help us to understand people’s thought processes, symbolic language and ways of acting. It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance. Here too, we see how important it is that urban planning always take into consideration the views of those who will live in these areas."
I included this as an example of sections of Laudato Si that explicitly address urban planning and urbanism.
LS194: "Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress."
This is a more subtle and profound criticism of progressives, and specifically those focused on "technocratic" solutions or an improved bureaucracy (that for example, helps develop more housing by eliminating certain layers of "red tape"). I interpret to mean that there is no meaningful progress if it doesn't the distressed cities, neighborhoods, and left-behind people in the US (whether they live in forgotten inner city neighborhoods, or dying small towns, or rural areas).
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