More Urbanism Myths
The anti-design YIMBY race to the bottom continues on the Daily Dish
Why do we keep getting the same shallow urbanist narrative, this time presented by the new Daily Dish podcast featuring Yoni Appelbaum, where Andrew Sullivan would be discussing the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity? It didn’t take long for the guest, of course on the side of unfettered tenement developments (who knew the Real Estate lobby controlled The Atlantic and New York Times?), to admit that yes, he is a property owner of a nice house and so is Sullivan, the host. Of course, the shallow YIMBY narrative is presented early: the “racist origins of zoning” as a means to justified unfettered Real Estate supremacy.
This YIMBY narrative, the developer-led “Yes” answer to the “Not In My Backyard” NIMBY is as equally shallow; therefore, it needs a historical revision to justify its existence. The uneducated (on urbanist and design issues) Sullivan is left passively accepting much of the historical slop, even when Appelbaum argues in favor of tenement housing on the Lower East Side of New York City.
I can tell you that dense urbanism can be much better designed than that. The pre-war art deco apartments in the Bronx are much more humane than what came before or after, like LES tenements or awful glass skyscrapers and micro houses. But more landlord-owned tenement housing should not be the goal. We need multiple layers of housing, intercity mobility (not macro mobility), wealth deconcentrating and a new industry of building design that makes NYC and SF obsolete. Overall, we need design vision on the scale of early 20th century thinkers like Howard, Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.
What is lacking on the Daily Dish is any design or urban design history. Nothing about Garden Cities, early industrial blight, pandemics and disease, wartime effects on density, great depressions and modern architectural history. Sullivan and Appelbaum are left crying at how ugly architecture is while also advocating for more of it, as well as everyone on Planet Earth to live in New York and San Francisco, for some reason. The ugly architecture is symptom of the same problem — globalized wealth consolidation. The physical manifestation of what 20th century planners worked against.
Nowhere does Applebaum advocate for home ownership within dense cities, which tips his bias towards landlords and developers. Renting and mobility is some kind of weird virtue, not a traumatic or difficult event.
A design history of American cities would offer a much different perspective. It was the British immigrant Ebenezer Howard who, after living and working in Nebraska and Chicago, returned to England to advocate for “Garden Cities” at the turn of the 1900s which morphed into New Towns in Europe and the early suburbs in America. These Garden Cities were separate from the industrial center and yet semi-dense, surrounded by green spaces. This kickstarted numerous visionary modernist plans from Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright to the FHA’s “Planning Profitable Neighborhoods” design schemes in the 1930s that outlined organic, walkable and stable housing for families.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City was especially visionary and influential. Proposed in 1934 and displayed at Rockefeller Center, the proposal combined dense and single-family homes along with some Wrightian features that are hard to argue with: an acre for every family. Division between public and private needs. No landlords.
In the first half of the 20th century, visionary urban design and architecture was in the bloodstream of culture. You get a visceral reaction to the disease, economic troubles and industrialization of the economy by people who don’t want to live next to it. Cities are able to expand because of the car, and single-family homes become the norm because that is where people want to live. Yet now historical revisionism paints these homes a blight and somehow an evil based on incorrect and falsified history about things like Redlining which in reality organized aging and dangerous buildings in order to build better ones.
Urbanist bureaucrats don’t know what they don’t know. They need designers to come up with a real vision — yes designers have failed too, likely because of their own professional stagnation and self-ghettoization into academia and professional credentialism that prevents any integration with urban issues.
What Appelbaum is arguing for, macro-mobility between states and countries, is not the same as an analysis of how healthy cities should grow physically and economically, which is mobility from within. Modern American cities were designed for the successful to gradually move outward, build families and more. They were built on self-sustaining visions of farming, industry, civic life and green spaces. If there is a new model for inner city family ownership, that would require a different design vision — a New Garden City.
Instead, we just get stale arguments from Real Estate lobbyists advocating for everyone to live in on top of New York City and the Bay Area, despite those two already being extremely dense. There are a lot of better design visions out there to be explored and envisioned, that could be applied to both power and wealth centers. Just thinking now about both the Bronx and Manila models for more efficient transit and housing construction. One could easily find a small town in upstate New York to build this if only a design-led government were in charge.
Regarding the rules of development, once again Appelbaum sees the right problem but not any solutions other than unregulated Real Estate development. Yes, we should be able to scale better buildings without dumb regulations, but there’s no intelligent analysis of what a new design vision for the city could be. The public just isn’t going to believe that you can do better until you show them.
Overall, the bigger problem is the wealth consolidation into a few globalized economic areas. Dumping more people in NYC and SF just isn’t going to solve this. The solution is probably connected — once other cities show a superior design vision for modern cities, they can jumpstart their own economy. It could be in the Rust Belt, within wide regions of livable space. It can integrate multiple design scales more efficiently and with an eye to health. It can merge the best parts of the city and country, much like Garden Cities, and account integrate new forms of transit from e-bikes to robotaxis to family cars not as an afterthought but as organic design.