Well, We've Got a New Dumbest Article I've Ever Read
Well, not Dumb so much as thinking you're too dumb to fall for the propaganda. It's just disingenuous.
I’m going to start out here by preëmptively taking credit for and clarifying all the ad hominem attacks that would be hurled at me if these two authors would hurl at me. You can’t hurt me!
Yes, I’m relatively progressive/liberal/Democrat. I have long-standing issues with New Urbanism as a concept, but as we’ll explore in this text, it’s on ideological and pedagogical lines, and not on neo-reactionary and unsubstantiated ones.
Yes, I’m relatively small-time. Attacking the size of my audience is not the flex you think it is. I’m a nobody as much as you’re a somebody.
No, I’m not “anti-car” or even “anti-suburb.” The automobile is a fantastic invention that’s allowed for rapid development, both urban and not. Many of my effete, elite friends, including planners who fight for walkable places, own or have access to and use a car for many trips they’ll take.
Owning and using a car should be a choice and not required for access to society’s opportunities, including making trips to and from work or work-related events, school, medical care, places of play, and yes, even places of worship! My issue is that we’ve abandoned our suburban, low-density places to car dependency: how free are you, really, if you’re beholden to overwhelming car payments, insurance, gas, and time—as the nearest one of the above locations gets further and further away.
I take rideshare trips in New York City all the time—even though I know there’s a public transit option, or I could bike, or walk. There are many factors that contribute to this decision but the point is I’ve made a decision and haven’t had one made for me by the nature of the space I choose to live in.
Yes, I agree with some parts of your points, but that doesn’t mean I’m a flip-flopper or an unserious critic. I know this trick. It won’t work.
Yes, I’m going to write thousands of words to critique a several hundreds-of-word article. This is part of the problem with flooding the zone. I pick this to deep dive/critique and everyone’s already moved on. I think it shows my tenacity and veracity to critical thought and not an overreaction or whatever smear will be thrown at me.
Yes, I know this is ragebait. And I’m going to take it because the name of my literal newsletter is “Exasperated Infrastructures.”
‘New Urbanists’ Want To Bulldoze The Suburban American Dream by Jonathan and Paige Bronitsky for The Federalist.
I’ve been told that I should stop writing these posts because I shouldn’t argue with people who buy ink by the barrel. The metaphor doesn’t really work in the information age, but you get my point: for every methodical, good-faith argument I put out into the world, five more will pop up arguing a similar point from a different angle. Or the same angle. The villains1 will change but the point remains the same: so much “conservative” thought about urbanism continues to be unserious because it’s fueled by rage and outrage and a truly unbelievable amount of fallacy that doesn’t hold up to the de minimis amount of scrutiny.
This article is no exception.
I, a stupid observer of those who disagree with me, must not understand the gist of this article, so let’s go through it with a fine-toothed comb. As I mentioned above, I’m going to refrain from ad hominem attacks against these authors—and commenters and other readers should do the same. Assuming the worst about someone you or I don’t know doesn’t help me scratch my head any harder.
Let me factor an important point out of every sentence below: I don’t know why right-wing rhetoric relies so much on inflammatory language—mostly adverbs—and blame rather than reason. Lots of people who straddle center on many issues—housing, transportation, resilience, sustainability—or who haven’t yet made up their minds would be drawn to a well-reasoned and internally consistent conservative argument. On many issues, I straddle the center: I seek fiscal consistency and justification and deep engagement with many viewpoints on the root of the problem, especially those with which I disagree before a single tax dollar is spent on a project.
This is already too long of a preamble to hedge what’s coming next, so here we go2:
‘New Urbanists’ Want To Bulldoze The Suburban American Dream
Right from the outset, this article seeks to prime its audience on its key thesis. This is a perfectly reasonable tactic for an opinion/essay3. My umbrage is not with the tone of the title, it’s with the immediate assertions and assumptions it makes and then doesn’t back up in the article below. Here are the three immediate questions I have:
What is a “New Urbanist”—and what do the authors define as a “new urbanist,” and is this definition the generally accepted one, or the one cited or defined by both self-styled “New Urbanists” and other critics?
What do the authors mean by “bulldoze” in this context? My first thought is metaphorical—surely it’s a metaphor—but it immediately leaves an image of carnage and destruction.4
What is the “Suburban American Dream?” I think we can picture what the authors mean here, but I’m not sold that every person or family—we love families—has the same idea of what this dream is.
Picture this: a four-story residential building perched atop an artisanal coffee shop and a yoga studio, its micro-apartments stacked like shoeboxes in the name of “sustainability” and “resilience.”
This sounds pretty great—a compromise between ultra-high density and ultra-low density housing that’s often not allowed anywhere.5 It’s curious that we’re immediately dismissing “sustainability” and “resilience” in the first sentence, though. By putting these words in quotes our authors decide to cast doubt that these are goals worth pursuing at all, and without evidence. It’s a provocative opening salvo, and it sounds like a pretty good deal to me: I get to consume the amount of housing that works for me with access to health and wellness without getting into my freedom vehicle.
Now picture something else entirely: a pristine, master-planned community where every house has a front porch, the streets are lined with picket fences, and everything looks as if it were plucked from a Norman Rockwell painting — except there are few if any houses of worship, the zoning codes are suffocating, and the price tag ensures only the elite can afford to live there.
These places are not entirely two separate living situations, but the ambivalent tone of this next sentence makes me feel like a flimsy shoe is about to drop. So let’s focus on after the — I don’t know why we’re singling out “houses of worship” here6 unprompted. The third point—good cadence—about affordability is a good one. Not only do the elite7 live in these places, but ordinary people are strapped and trapped in the suburbs because they can’t afford to live in their nearest city but also can’t afford to live in this suburb. It’s been documented before, but why not include this as evidence?
The second point is a good one: zoning codes are suffocating. I’m not a fan of how we manage land use in the United States, but the other alternative—performance zoning/market-based zoning—requires a cultural shift we’re so far from, that the status quo feels like a relief. More on this later, I bet.8
These are the two faces of New Urbanism, an ideology that, masquerading as “traditionalist,” conservatives have tolerated for far too long.
There are more than two ways “New Urbanism” is deployed. In fact, the new generation of New Urbanists is adamant that it be driven less by ideology and more by markets and people that exist within them. But: by presenting an oversimplification of the authors’ own creation the authors can paint a picture that begs their argument and not the other way around.
On one end, you have high-density urbanism, where developers — in cahoots with machine politicians — cram as many people as possible into apartment blocks, eliminating cars and personal space under the guise of environmentalism and a sense of community.
There are so many conflicting ideas in this sentence that I’ve lost the thread. So:
“you have high-density urbanism”—who is “you?”
What does high-density mean?
“[D]evelopers—in cahoots with machine politicians.” Sure: this is the nature of quid pro quo cronyism in cities, suburbs, and rural communities, vis-a-vis money in politics.9
“[c]ram as many people as possible into apartment blocks, eliminating cars and personal space […]”: if this were the case, we’d have a less acute housing problem in very localized places and fewer cars and vehicle miles traveled instead of the very observable, and reportable, opposite.
Lastly (phew): wouldn’t cramming people together force “community?” I’m not sure I agree that a community will naturally coalesce around proximity, but surely building places that prioritize car movements, where drivers and passengers are walled off from the elements by definition doesn’t create a sense of community, either?
On the other, you have the faux-traditional, highly regulated enclaves of Seaside and Celebration, Florida, prohibitively expensive and ironically more artificial than the suburban developments they criticize.
Here’s a fun example of weaponizing an adverb to create a sense of outrage rather than engage with a fact: “faux-traditional”—what does this mean?
But I agree: the point of Seaside and Celebration is that they’re highly regulated. People who live in these places choose to move there because a developer created a place a lot of people wanted to live in, or in a worse-case demand scenario, they didn’t know they wanted to live there until this option was presented to them.
How is this ironic? And what makes this more artificial than any other development? I agree that overplanning a place can make it feel sterile—but why not say that? Why insinuate that someone’s choice to live somewhere is fake? Not for nothing10, the article’s header image looks like a snapshot of a planned community—which is fine—but it’s hard to make an argument like theirs and not see that they’re arguing both for and against themselves.
The argument the authors might promote here is that New Urbanism promotes placemaking on a density spectrum—“on one end […] on the other”—but their language doesn’t reflect it—that these are the only two choices and neither is compatible with a “Suburban American Dream.” In fact, many New Urbanists would argue for context-sensitivity: there are an infinite amount of ways to build places between the ultra-dense and the artificial enclave, and the “new” refers to thinking about the compatibility between place and its place.
Despite their aesthetic differences, both forms of New Urbanism share a common goal: reengineering American life by discouraging homeownership.
I like that this thesis statement begins with a strong assertion, but I’ll wait for the evidence that this is true or alluded to in the supporting paragraph.
The “planning and development approach,” as the Congress for New Urbanism puts it, champions “walkability” and “human-scale” design but, in reality, is about control — limiting choices and creating a transient, economically dependent population that tilts politics permanently leftward.
Where is the evidence for this assertion—it’s also a separate argument from the thesis statement? I do see the corollary argument to the “discouraging homeownership,” written obliquely here (transient); but I see no evidence for either argument.
Are we going to respond with a chart that correlates “New Urbanist” communities with voter patterns? What’s there to say that the opposite correlation isn’t true11—that people who vote a certain way choose to live near one another and build communities that adhere to some, all, or none of New Urbanist principles? I also don’t understand why “walkable” and “human-scale” is…bad on its face either. If the argument is that we’re building too many “walkable”12 places and it’s infringing the “right to drive where and when I want as fast as I want”13 then say that. Don’t dance around this argument; it’s honest at least.
Led by figures like Andrés Duany and Charles Marohn and pushed by crony capitalist “scholars” at libertarian think tanks, New Urbanism further advocates for zoning reforms that restrict homebuilding outside city centers and end up inflating the cost of housing.
Let’s attack the people behind the movement! I truly have no idea to whom they’re referring at the libertarian think tanks—but the ones I can recall here, like Reason and CATO, are ambivalent at best about New Urbanism, and will push ideas that align with larger goals, which include deregulation, individual choice, and getting the government to butt out of placemaking entirely.
Again, I do agree that zoning needs to be reformed, if not totally reworked, but I don’t see the evidence in this argument that New Urbanism—like it’s a living entity itself and not a body of people working toward a multiplicity of goals who often vehemently and publicly disagree with one another—advocates for zoning reforms that restrict homebuilding outside city centers.
Zoning sometimes artificially limits the supply of housing, which may inflate its costs, but it’s complicated. This argument is extremely reductive. Housing can be hedonic—and chaotic—meaning that its value is derived from a multitude of factors and is often resilient to broad market supply and demand changes. People, not just researchers and scholars, but capitalists and developers, spend their lives trying to figure out how to build housing. Dismissing this offhand is unhelpful in crafting a communicable narrative…unless this piece is not trying to be helpful at all.
At the heart of this movement is a fanatical hatred of the automobile.
I think this topic sentence is somewhat true—there is a loud sect of people who would call themselves New Urbanists who have a fanatical hatred of the automobile—and these very loud people create different problems in communicating the benefits of some of the placemaking principles New Urbanism attempts to convey. Are they the “heart” of the movement? Depends on who you ask.
New Urbanists dream of a “car-free” America, where individuals are herded onto public transit or forced to walk and bike their way through life, regardless of their needs or preferences.
Again, New Urbanists are not a single hivemind and there are prominent people who style themselves within the movement as car-free advocates. But many, many more would not. I am not in favor of herding people onto public transit or forcing anyone to walk or bike. And I am very in favor of building a system that centers needs and preferences into placemaking. My practice centers around the very idea of choice: should one’s needs and preferences dictate that a particular trip should be a car trip, then let’s design a place and a pricing mechanism to support it.
What Strong Towns and, to an extent, CNU argue is that the intense focus on car-only infrastructure is not fiscally sustainable (nor is it environmentally sustainable, but I feel like we’re not going to agree that this issue is even up for debate, let alone agree on the proper handle for it) and that I should not have to pay for your preference, in the same way that you HATE to pay for mine. #DontTreadOnMe
DPZ CoDesign, founded in 1980 by Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and the firm behind much of New Urbanism’s expansion, once gleefully tweeted, “We look forward to a ‘car-optional’ #Miami!”
Okay…? Is this the best supporting argument for the preceding sentence? Are we moving the goalposts sentence by sentence? Are we flooding the zone by the letter now?
Cars, however, epitomize freedom and choice.
So says you. I says differently.
They allow families to escape crime-ridden urban centers14, access better schools15, and enjoy homeownership in safe, thriving communities16.
That’s exactly why New Urbanists and their left-wing allies despise them.
There is no evidence that this is true writ large. I’m not going to make another argument against this repetitive assertion.
They yearn for us all to be confined to dense housing and reliant on mass transit.
We hate pronouns.
Yet Americans of all backgrounds overwhelmingly view homeownership as a cornerstone of the American Dream, representing stability, financial security, and the ability to build generational wealth.
I have no problem with this argument, but it is increasingly harder to do for people my age (36) and younger who aren’t born into wealth. If “New Urbanism” promotes more fake houses and apartments and there’s one for me that would be great and I bet many of people would agree. Or not. Because I don’t assert opinion as cornerstone fact and, I can make up numbers and facts, too.
Let’s not move on without once again pointing out that the authors have not yet made a compelling case of why homeownership is only single-family and suburban. Why are the authors choosing this for me? Unless this isn’t about personal choice and freedom, but making your preferences the parameters for my personal “choice.”
Meanwhile, the cities that New Urbanists17 idolize, such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, are collapsing under the weight of crime, homelessness, and deteriorating infrastructure.
These are huge issues and the reason I do the work I do is to help reverse these bad trends and attract people from all walks of life back to the city. If they want. Though I wouldn’t say these cities are collapsing.
Instead of addressing these failures, urban planners double down on the same policies that created the problems: more density, fewer cars, and an obsession with “public spaces” that inevitably become magnets for vagrancy and disorder.
I, a conservative, hate public spaces and would spend all my time alone in my living room, walled off from the world, sneering out my window at scary strangers.
Master-planned communities such as Seaside and Celebration, Florida, also sold a false bill of goods. They were initially marketed as idyllic, walkable neighborhoods that would foster affordability and community.
How is that a false bill of goods? I could see if they’re still selling the affordability part, but no one believes it because…
Celebration, just south of Walt Disney World Resort, envisioned as a nostalgic return to small-town life, now sees median home prices at nearly $619,000, almost 50 percent higher than the average U.S. home price, while its per-square-foot price hovers around $332. In the small zip code that contains Seaside, arguably the ultimate showcase of New Urbanism, the median home sale price has surged to $1.1 million, with median properties selling around $500 per square foot. These developments have largely shut out middle-class families. Predictably, they have become bubbles where exclusivity triumphs over affordability.
This argument makes the opposite argument they think it does. That these prices are high—and have increased over time—demonstrates that these places are highly desirable and that we should be building more as outposts, but more importantly within the cities we already have so long as our utility connections and resources exist or can be expanded to support them. I will join with the authors to call for more zoning reform to encourage this type of development.
The hypocrisy of New Urbanism’s leading figures is also staggering. James Howard Kunstler, one of the movement’s loudest voices, openly boasted that he chose to homestead in Greenwich, New York, complete with “a large garden, an orchard, and chickens.”
This statement feels like it reflects a larger conservative ethos the inability to empathize with someone who chooses a different lifestyle than themselves; or the inability to fight for a cause without reaping personal benefit. Kunstler can live however he chooses and still advocates for others to do the same. The word is right there. The authors themselves said it: “he chose to…” What New Urbanists—and urbanists and city planners in general argue for is the opportunity for people to choose to live in great places, and yes these places often skew denser, but there’s a whole group of planners—and New Urbanists—who fight for sustainable rural or, gasp, sustainable living.
Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, resides in a single-family home in Brainerd, Minnesota, a quiet, prairie town.
Chuck has addressed this on his Xwitter.
And then there’s Richard Driehaus, the late financier of New Urbanism, who endowed, among other initiatives, the now defunct New Urbanist column at The American Conservative. He owned multiple mansions, including a 40-acre estate in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which sold for a record-breaking $36 million in 2022. (Two Driehaus Prize-winning architects designed Celebration, Florida.)
This last point runs in circles: by tagging one of their own—a “conservative”—as a hypocrite the authors can distance themselves and their column from a full-on progressive hit piece. But again, we’re engaging in pedagogical paradoxes: their argument is a No True Scotsman fallacy. It goes something like this: unless Driehaus lived by the exact causes he financed, his lifestyle also fully discredits his contributions to the work he cared about. This logic is sometimes called an appeal to purity and is not internally consistent with the broader argument that “New Urbanism is killing the suburban dream.”
It’s high-density for thee, but sprawling luxury for me.
I really like this turn of phrase, actually.
Now it’s time to knock down three New Urbanist pieces of propaganda.
Uh oh!
First, we don’t have a “housing crisis.”
BIG GUNS. Who is we? America? States? Suburban voters? Also, why is this in “quotes?”18
We have an artificial crisis created by politicians and developers who restrict supply to inflate costs and further solidify Democrat voting blocs.
This is a massive claim and huge leap in logic from “we don’t have a crisis” to “we do, actually, but it’s a crony conspiracy theory and it’s all to manufacture votes to keep Good Conservatives from gaining a majority in traditionally Democratic strongholds. If only we were to…build more housing, the world would certainly no longer favor left-leaning politics. This is the issue. The only issue.
The answer is cutting red tape and unleashing the free market to build more homes where Americans actually want to live.
Mostly agree here; zoning codes, permitting, and design review need a complete overhaul to help address the “housing crises.”
Report after report confirms that Millennials are fleeing the cities faster than a hipster from a chain restaurant, trading urban grit for suburban bliss.
What if I find report after report that claims the exact opposite to be the case? None of these “reports” are definitive and allow the authors to plainly say that millennials—a huge, nuanced group—move any one way at all.
Also, that’s a very funny and clever bit at the end of this major slam because as all millennials know the epitome of a good life is unlimited access to chain restaurants. This author loves a chain restaurant, but wow can I be two things? Must I just be my median identity? Can I live?19
Second, contrary to what New Urbanists claim, the suburbs aren’t some artificial contrivance foisted upon unsuspecting Americans.
Is this a quote? We know this to be true because these Americans are very suspecting and like the suburbs. Developers can’t build enough fifty-mile commutes and nonscary single-family homes for people to move to. Bye-bye, urban grit!
They’re the result of people voting with their feet.
I agree with this. New Urbanists, again, is not a monolith, and its individual thinkers and doers argue a lot, publicly, about suburban history and development, supply and demand, policy and posture, and intervention and market solutions to the important questions of how and where Americans live.20 The history of American sprawl is complicated and doesn’t deserve a flippant, defiant article passed off as FACT. But nuance and deep thought are less easy to sell.
People voted with their feet, but the better line, to underscore the point is: people voted with their cars.
Suburban life offers homeownership, safety, and stability — values conservatives should champion.
I swear to you progressives value these offers, too. We just want everyone to feast on the spoils of our great national wealth as we grow the pie.
Yet Addison Del Mastro, formerly of both The American Conservative and The Bulwark, and his ilk sneer at the idea of single-family homes, dismissing many as “McMansions” and symbols of excess.
This is fair, but McMansions are also ugly and ostentatious.21 They are often symbols of excess—which Americans certainly should have the right to build and live in. We have so much undeveloped land in the United States that there really shouldn’t be a crisis anywhere. We’ve also done two things:
Tied both wealth/equity and self-worth to the status and standing of where and how someone lives that NIMBYs—who come from all sides of every political avenue—actively fight against housing in desirable locations.
Forced me to pay for your lifestyle—I think it’s fine, really, and I live to fight battles I can win, that suburbs exist and many people thrive in these living situations. But every additional mile of asphalt that my tax dollars pay for; every additional emergency service deployed to these places in times of crisis, that my tax dollars pay for; and every additional ton of pollution that my tax dollars subsidize is where I take deep offense. Live how you want, but get off my lawn. dOnT tReAd oN mE.
Hilariously, New Urbanists cheered Houston’s lax zoning laws as the perfect stage for their grand urban vision. But when given the freedom to choose, people didn’t flock downtown but instead stampeded to the suburbs.
Ha! All the New Urbanists got together and laughed at this. Houston is an enigma for sure and a great study in zoning from a legal and procedural standpoint. One correction: Houston doesn’t have “lax zoning laws”—they have no zoning laws. It’s not a free-for-all, but it is a natural experiment in how cities might grow without restrictive covenants about what’s not allowed.
No zoning plus incessant highway widening and expansion, which I pay for and don’t use plus acres and acres of open nothingness fueled the sprawl, among other factors, like generational lifestyle passed on inertly, equals a housing sprawl and a transportation asphalt that’s just ready for the next hurricane to wipe it all out. And I’ll pay for the clean-up, too.
It’s frankly absurd that conservatives — who are pro-family — would entertain the idea of cramming kids into tiny apartments with no yards.
Ah, yes because progressives are famously anti-family. Seriously, where is this true? We define “family” differently, perhaps, but you know we love the conservative approach of voting with our feet. Cities are tiny apartments with no yards. The yards are our massive—and too few!—parks and plazas; slow and car-free streets; public libraries and schools.
How exactly are parents supposed to raise multiple children in a 600-square-foot box?
Millions do it, daily, all over the world. This is some real anti-family rhetoric here. Are “real” families the ones who move away from loved ones and jobs because you say so?
Where are kids supposed to play?
You know, I love it when you make my argument for me! That’s what lots of New Urbanists are fighting for—an equitable public space without cars, that kill kids oh, so fast—so that kids can go play. Kids are killed by drivers on streets and sidewalks in suburbs, too. It’s almost like…wait…no that can’t be right.
On a rooftop patio shared with strangers?
Strangers! Scary! Strangers on a rooftop patio are gonna getcha! Boo!
Instead of capitulating to left-wing planners pushing this dystopian vision, conservatives should be fighting for policies that encourage more single-family homes.
I will fight for this policy too in the correct context. No one’s taking away “conservatives” ability to fight for more single-family homes; these policies win so much that are we just making up problems to implore people to get mad at nothing now?22
The reality, underscored by Covid lockdowns, is that the information economy has made living in the suburbs more affordable. Remote work also reduces the need for long commutes. Suburbs offer less crime, less noise, and more privacy. A third piece of New Urbanist agitprop: Everyone must endure a “two-hour commute.” Really? Jobs exist in the suburbs.
I don’t disagree with the thesis of this paragraph, but I don’t understand why the authors can’t just make one argument at a time instead of four half-thoughts. Yes, the remote, information economy (ugh, elite jobs!) made living in the suburbs a different kind of affordable—instead of spending time and money on inefficient car travel “the two-hour???? commute”—more of a household’s income can be spent on housing. Suburbs “offer”23 less crime, less noise, and more privacy…is probably true in many places, and wanting those factors in determining where to live is Good.
Jobs do exist in the suburbs, but by the nature of stacking poor people on top of each other, especially along Central Park South! Ugh! Richpoors!, more jobs exist in urban areas and the volume increases competition for the most skilled or desired labor, which draws people to these jobs. The wins are manifold: firms can grow and build quicker, job-seekers can find new or different employment faster, and the city reaps the tax dollars from both to…pay for suburban commuters to drive in and muck up my day.
As for the two-hour commute: what if we, as a society or whatever, offer a service that allows many people to move toward a single location at once and put it on tracks away from cars? This service can go really fast and runs really frequently. I dunno, I’m just a poor lib.
It’s worth recalling that the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule aimed to reshape suburban demographics under the pretense of promoting so-called equity.
I think it was just called equity, but it’s fun and conservative to add pejorative adjectives to sentences to stick to the people who care about other people’s well-being by default. I’m hurt!
This initiative sought to impose high-density housing in suburban areas, effectively eroding local control over zoning laws.
This is just not true. The AFFH rule, long and more complicated than sentence-long throwaway, sought to clarify provisions in the Civil Rights Act/Fair Housing Act such that Federal programs or programs that received Federal money should proactively end segregation and discrimination; President Obama’s 2015 changes asked these recipients to prove it; President Trump’s directive told them, “Nah, we trust you,” while somehow providing no clarity at all.
What the authors, are alluding to here, I think, is the outcome of some of the reporting to HUD about progress toward desegregation demonstrated that some communities should consider using the Federal money or programming allocated to them to build or restore housing in areas whose local demographics don’t match their regional populations. Sometimes this meant densifying a place. But no we can’t have that because…
The true objective was to fundamentally alter the American political landscape by turning traditionally conservative suburbs purple and eventually blue.
Also not true. Wow, project much? A politician exerting influence to win more voters! Couldn’t be me.
During the Trump administration, there was an opportunity to dismantle AFFH and defend the suburbs.
Attack! Seriously, during any administration, there’s an opportunity to dismantle any rule. Also, that’s how politics and legislative bodies work. Also, Ben Carson did dismantle the rule.
Alas, some self-proclaimed “conservatives,” much to the delight of developers poised to profit from these changes, resisted efforts to repeal the rule. Their actions betrayed the very principles they claimed to uphold, all in pursuit of financial gain.
This makes no sense to me. Oh, wait, so if a “conservative” disagrees with you they’re not conservative and should be shunned? Don’t you guys love making money? Or do you hate segregation more than you love making money? Look I’m not saying that’s true. I’m just asking questions.
The right has mistakenly accommodated doctrinaire libertarians, neoconservatives, and, yes, New Urbanists.
I don’t know if this is the intended use of neoconservative here, but I don’t have enough context to know whether the authors instead meant neoliberal and just found it icky to type the word liberal. Generally, neocons are more about statecraft on the interventionist front and espouse similar, if not parallel economic views about markets (yes) and government interventions (no).
But just as we’ve exposed the deep state and fake news, it’s time to unmask the New Urbanists’ left-wing assault on property rights and personal mobility.
I am the deep state. But I thought one of the biggest proponents of New Urbanism was some hypocritical rich guy who lived in a mansion…in the suburbs. I can’t keep up! Consider it unmasked: property rights and personal mobility are on the docket. We’re getting to it. It’s just damn liberals preventing us from running the world.
The future of America is not a high-density, corporatist nightmare. It’s the spacious, family-friendly suburbs where liberty thrives.
I agree: and here’s my take. The future of America depends on a great mix of housing of many different densities such that people can choose how they want to live, everyone who wants a home can afford one, and neighborhoods reflect the populations they house. I agree that a future America isn’t a corporatist nightmare, but for that, we need money out of politics. Please join me for a pledge to fight to repeal Citizen’s United.
The pandemic put New Urbanism on life support.
And post-pandemic, it’s off life support! Love modern medicine.
Now it’s time to flick the switch. As true conservatives, we must stand firm and defend homeownership, a pillar of the American Dream.
New Urbanism and homeownership are not at odds with one another; this is a false choice we’re being asked to consider here.
Look, did I just write several times more than needed to respond to an article written to an audience already convinced of its outcome? Sure did. I did it to demonstrate the massive gap between uncovering—and seeking—truth and/or pattern in conflicting or disparate topics. The authors cover a lot of ground here: the “American Dream,” New Urbanism, housing, transportation, federal and local policy, etc. And they’re all related but it’s just not as simple as the authors assert.
My real issue, almost as always, with conservative writing is the tone and reductiveness of the point. Their vision of America is reductive and not expansive; it seeks not to convince but to confirm its readers’ biases that their way of life is not only better but that other ways of life are worse thereby. I don’t understand this vision for America, that somehow other people existing makes you worse off. But that’s me.
Anyone who disagrees with them.
I’m going to quote this article directly and give my responses in bold.
See this article’s header.
But also one of “new beginnings.” My grad school professor*, Francesca Ammon, wrote a whole book about the significance and history of the bulldozer in city building and rebuilding. There’s a whole book about this subject and the word is tossed so easily here makes it challenging to take seriously—unless there’s a discussion about why the author chooses this term.
*Yes, I’m a liberal elitist feminst.
It’s called missing-middle housing, and we’re starting to see laws making this type of housing legal to build everywhere; that doesn’t mean that we’ll suddenly start seeing a “degradation of neighborhood character” even in the next 5-10 years. There still has to be supply and demand for this housing to be built. That’s the takeaway here: exclusionary zoning, or Euclidian zoning, doesn’t make it mandatory to build at the maximum density, but removing anti-market restrictions on certain neighborhood densities, allows developers and communities to decide what they want for their place. Surely, our authors would agree that the market should decide the appropriate housing density!
Yes, I do. This clause is meant to juxtapose people who want to live in either of these scenarios as Godless and lesser.
What does “elite” mean? I’ve never understood this term in the left/right debate. I think the picture being painted is highly educated, liberal, nonreligious people, but …????
Spoiler alert: this thread was abandoned.
I think this means our authors are in favor of repealing Citizen’s United!
Ironically.
Which variable affects which? There’s a word for this in statistics: endogeneity. And we’re going to be careful with statistics.
Too bad every driver is also a pedestrian.
This is not a right.
Evidence, please. What do you mean by crime-ridden? I don’t disagree that violent crime rates are likely higher in places with more means, motive, and opportunity to do crime, but it’s complicated! And reducing the complications by rhetoric and not by evidence is unhelpful and unmoving to readers who are already convinced by your argument.
Paid for by property taxes, which I’m sure is a big part of the Federalist “loves” list.
Right, but…why are these communities confined to the suburbs?
Ask a broad range* of Americans who have never heard of New Urbanism what cities they want to visit, despite the “crime,” “homelessness,” and “deteriorating infrastructure”: New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
*Not just people who are predisposed to dislike cities.
Let’s dig into this here: housing and land use is tautologically, definitionally, and legally local. You live in a domicile and it’s located at a certain footprint; group thousands of these living quarters together within a political boundary, and add places for people to go, and eventually the people, you’ve got a market, where, in theory, these people will consume the amount of housing that fits their utility: preference, budget, proximity, design, aesthetic, community, you name it.*
Most, if not all land use law, including zoning and other civil procedures, is local, which means the State will defer to the sub-State boundary (usually city, town, borough, etc.) and allow them to draft their own rules for how a city can (zoning) and should (planning) grow or maintain.
Zoning in America is exclusive and restrictive: the codes will determine what can be built at a certain place and all other uses are excluded—not allowed—without a variance or other exemption (sometimes called “by right”). Restrictive zoning laws have artificially suppressed the number of available places to live almost everywhere, and when places become more popular for whatever reason—including suburbs!—and supply does not match demand, prices will increase on their own.%
So, for the longest possible footnote, we don’t have a “housing crisis,”—we have thousands of housing crises that, in aggregate, make it increasingly hard for working families to afford to live in the places they have or choose to move to. It’s hard to spot if we take the one-argument-fucks-all lens argued above, but it’s right there with even a half-witted take at not cherry-picking a narrative to fit an argument.
*Hedonic demand!
%Rent control and subsidized rent, lots of non-profit-housing, city-owned housing, etc. are demand solutions to control prices without fixing them directly. Without more supply, these remedies, too, will break.
No.
And so, so, so much racism.
You don’t like it when I do it.
Oh, wait that’s the conservative playbook? Ah, okay.
This is a funny way to put this, but the image is not lost on us: suburbs are the white glove option and not-suburbs are not luxurious or befitting of someone of a Federalist reader’s status as a c o n s e r v a t i v e.