Some Very Good Sentences

From a post on family life and urban planning, by Matthew Schmitz at the smart-looking new group blog Plumb Lines:

Unless we can build cities that accommodate children and retirees as well as they do young professionals, conservatives are likely to experience increased political isolation. The significance of geographic marginalization is already reflected in the cultural dominance of liberals. Indeed, the constant yet fleeting enterprises aimed at conjuring ‘conservative culture’ will have trouble taking hold so long as we refuse to create cities that allow for simultaneous participation in cultural production and family life.  A vibrant conservatism, both culturally and politically, will have to elaborate family values in opposition to the the isolated, atomized nuclear family. ‘Family values’ should be reoriented in favor of broader social and familial networks that find a natural home in the urban context.

I recently wrote a bit about this topic here and here, and also took it up at greater length in these two (to my mind rather unsatisfactory) posts from this blog’s earliest days. (Also: here and here are Nathan Origer’s guest posts on conservatives and the New Urbanism.) Suffice it for now, though, to say that Mr. Schmitz is right on both counts: we need our cities to be more family-friendly, and we need our families to be more city-friendly, where that latter friendliness involves both a sufficiently wide conception of “family values” and a sufficiently modest conception of the amount of space (and hence the number of space-filling objects) that families need. There is much to be said for the understanding of home as castle, but metaphorical relatedness needn’t breed physical resemblance.

Filed under: conservatism, family, urbanism

Exurban Nation

David Brooks’s latest column is as fascinating as they get:

The Pew Research Center just finished a study about where Americans would like to live and what sort of lifestyle they would like to have. The first thing they found is that even in dark times, Americans are still looking over the next horizon. Nearly half of those surveyed said they would rather live in a different type of community from the one they are living in at present.

Second, Americans still want to move outward. City dwellers are least happy with where they live, and cities are one of the least popular places to live. Only 52 percent of urbanites rate their communities “excellent” or “very good,” compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 71 percent of the people who live in rural America.

Cities remain attractive to the young. Forty-five percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 would like to live in New York City. But cities are profoundly unattractive to people with families and to the elderly. Only 14 percent of Americans 35 and older are interested in living in New York City. Only 8 percent of people over 65 are drawn to Los Angeles. We’ve all heard stories about retirees who move back into cities once their children are grown, but that is more anecdote than trend.

Third, Americans still want to go west. The researchers at Pew asked Americans what metro areas they would like to live in. Seven of the top 10 were in the West: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Sacramento. The other three were in the South: Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio. Eastern cities were down the list and Midwestern cities were at the bottom.

Read the whole thing; I hope to find time to say more later on. My most recent thoughts on cities and family life are here and here; suffice it for now to say that I, though not yet 35, am solidly among the number with little to no interest in living in the Big Apple.

But Tampa?!

Filed under: family, urbanism

“Libertarian Progressivism”

Like Ross and Will Wilkinson, I think there’s a ton to be said for Edward Glaeser’s case for “small-government egalitarianism”, which would be worth reading in its entirety even if the only thing you took away from it was this quotation from Woodrow Wilson:

“If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now?”

(Concerning which, a case in point.) The central focus of this particular post is the logic of economic stimulus, and Glaeser argues – as he has argued before – that things like cuts in payroll taxes for working-class families would be much more egalitarian forms of fiscal stimulus than most of the kind of infrastructure spending that Tim Carney discussed in his main page article this morning. But Glaeser points out that this sort of logic extends to many other areas of policy-making, too:

Current American political discourse labels people as either anti-government or pro-equality, but wanting to help the poor should not require the abandonment of sensible skepticism about expanding the size of the state. Many of my favorite causes, like fighting land use regulations that make it hard to build affordable housing, aid the poor by reducing the size of government. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I also argued that it would be far better to give generous checks to the poor hurt by the storm than to spend billions rebuilding the city, because those rebuilding efforts would inevitably help connected contractors more than ordinary people.

It’s easy, I think, to gloss most of this as nothing but a shift in rhetoric: rather than making the case for tax cuts or the repeal of overly restrictive land use regulations as economically effective, conservatives and libertarians should do more to point out the ways in which such policies can benefit those who are most in need. But ultimately there’s more going on here than that: Glaeser is arguing that policies like the ones he’s advocating here are also the most effective way to benefit those in need, and so are a better form of egalitarianism than the standard “progressive” fare that is so often put forward by big-government liberals:

Libertarian progressivism distrusts big increases in government spending because that spending is likely to favor the privileged. Was the Interstate Highway System such a boon for the urban poor? Has rebuilding New Orleans done much for the displaced and disadvantaged of that city? Small-government egalitarianism suggests that direct transfers of federal money to the less fortunate offer a surer path toward a fairer America.

This seems about right to me. Like I said, it’s good stuff, and well worth reading in its entirety.

Elsewhere: Ryan Avent on why progressives should listen to Ed Glaeser’s views on housing policy.

Filed under: economics, government/law, libertarianism, taxation, urbanism

The Child and the City (II)

Megan McArdle’s thoughts are similar to mine, though with some further, meta-observations that I’m happy to second:

Most people spend the majority of their lives these days neither being nor having small children.  And small children are the ones that make suburban living preferable.  Older children are much easier to deal with in a city, because after age eleven or so, they no longer need to soak up hours of Mom’s time being ferried around.

Not to mention the fact that there are many people who choose not to, or can’t have, children at all.

That’s not to say that we should force the suburbanites into the city, either.  To each his own.  But the mere fact that something is not convenient for toddlers, or their guardians, does not ipso facto mean we should discard it in favor of something that better pleases the Playskool set.

Indeed. And to the extent that zoning laws, transportation policy, and the like make higher-density living artificially expensive and so put it out of reach even of the people who do want it, the situation is one that all parties to the discussion should be able to recognize as less than ideal.

Filed under: family, government/law, urbanism

The Child and the City

Concerning errand running, Ryan Avent writes:

I’ve often been mystified by the notion that drivable suburbanism is the superior developmental pattern for getting things done quickly. Obviously a big trip to the grocery or hardware store is more easily done with a car, but when taking many small trips, rather than one big one, I think walkable neighborhoods win out more often than people think. Going from (say) the doctor, to the pharmacist, to a restaurant for lunch, and back to work is maddening in a car in a place like Raleigh. But when I was working in downtown Washington, it was fast and refreshing to walk the few blocks from each spot to the next.

Me too! Though in my case the various places I tend to need to go are usually spread out far enough that walking (or even biking) isn’t always or even usually the quicker way to get things done. But last year, when we had a borrowed car that is now back in the possession of its owners, I still found myself choosing very often to walk for fifteen minutes each way rather than drive for three simply because driving (and, yes, parking) was miserable, and because I’d much rather spend my time smelling flowers and listening to birds than trying not to run into parked cars or over cyclists on our narrow Berkeley streets.

That said, the realities of parenthood can often complicate this story quite a bit – and not just because children pine for open space to play in, and going to a public park, no matter how close, can really be a hassle. My son, for example, seems to have been constituted from birth so as to refuse to ride in his stroller more than once a day – and even then only after a fair amount of bribery. And so despite having taught him to “hurry” (which is hilarious), it still takes quite a lot of time (and effort, and patience, and …) to run errands with him in tow: this will get easier as he gets older of course, but then there will be another one, and so the story will repeat itself.

Now, all of that is made a lot more workable by the fact that my wife is able to stay at home, and I am very often able to work (or: pretend to work) from home as well. Which of course has profound influences on the ways we parent, and budget our time for running errands, and cook and eat, too: if both of us were coming home at the end of the day from full-time jobs, I can’t imagine how we’d manage ever to walk to the market instead of driving, or take Jack on weekday trips to the park, or feed ourselves in the ways that we do.

All of which is just to say that these are complicated matters! I’m certainly grateful, as is Angela, for the ways that circumstances have conspired to enable us to live in a dense-ish, eminently walkable neighborhood like ours, and at this point in our lives we wouldn’t trade it for anything else. But change one or two factors – the weather, say, or our financial circumstances or our all-around good health – and the complex web that holds things together starts to fray pretty quickly. Which means that even if we leave aside the (certainly mystifying, at least by my lights) fact that some people actually seem to prefer driving to walking, there’s simply no one-size-fits-all solution to the need to get around town. I’m certainly not intending to imply that Ryan A. would disagree with any of this – indeed, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t. But many are the dreams of the committed urbanist that have died with the birth of his children.

Filed under: family, transportation, urbanism

Urbanism, Conservatism, Community, and the Public Good

by Nathan P. Origer

Scott Payne, in his response to my introductory post on (the New) Urbanism and conservatism:

My Mom used to have block parties with her neighbours in a gated community on their common lawn space. Surely we can find a way of doing the same with an urban twist to improve our collective quality if life. Perhaps, instead of national days of protest, we could organize a national day of block parties to celebrate, encourage, and raise awareness of the importance of community. I might be done with rallies, but I’ll go to a good block party any day. [My emphasis. - NPO]

This post raises something interesting, to wit, empirical evidence (scant as, on the whole, it may be) contrary to the stereotype that (theoretically) vibrant, diverse urban neighborhoods lay sole claim to facilitating and sustaining “community” — again, that nebulous term! — whilst suburbia is the retreat of those who don’t interact much with their neighbors, participate in their community, or care to establish roots. (We urban planning students, of course, absolutely loathe these insular, probably discriminating communities; just loathe ‘em!) Seems, though, that building social capital — building community — is just what Scott’s mom was doing. (And, of course, Scott is quite right to note that “we can find a way of doing the same with an urban twist to improve our collective quality if life”, both in arguing that we can do it, and that, sometimes, our urban neighborhoods fail to live up to the ideals we associate with them.)

Although I find fault with gated and similar communities for numerous reasons, I think that Scott’s example is important. The example of his mother’s neighborhood suggests that hope for building community, for developing those oh-so-important little platoons, should be greater than it sometimes is — that we should, rather than thinking so narrow-mindedly, be open to creative avenues whereby to build important social relationships. 

However, Scott’s example helps to raise an equally, if not more, important point, to wit that a troublesome aspect inheres in our conception of community: exclusivity. Gated communities are particularly guilty of this trait, but any example of community, community, community organizing, et cetera, suffers from this flaw. Richard Sennett, the renowned socialist LSE sociologist, has been particularly critical of this defect, and contrasts the negative “community” with the positive more inclusive “public”. Here, the communitarian right (and left; urban planners and community organizers, too) should look leftward for guidance.

Not having read nearly enough Sennett — although I emphatically recommend his The Conscience of the Eye, if only because of this great line

it is curious how the designers of parking lots, malls, and public plazas seem to be endowed with a positive genius for sterility, in the use of materials and in details, as well as in overall planning. . . .   The modern urbanist is in the grip of a Protestant ethic of space.

— I’m reluctant to engage in an analysis of his work (and uncertain of my ability properly to interpret the distinction and criticisms that he offers); moreover, I’m unwilling to denounce community in favor of the public. Rather, I submit that for both our little platoons and a broader, perhaps more abstract, but still important, society to thrive, we must view the two in proper relation. That the broader public society cannot function properly without being treated accordingly — without being participated in — seems to be obvious. When cut off from the perquisites stemming from any one of its sub-units, it becomes an incomplete entity, denying to its population intellectual, social, and cultural opportunities, both through amenities and through personal interaction. 

Perhaps more relevant, our communities risk desiccation if we conceive of them too insularly. Self-sufficiency is admirable and to be desired; however, such reliance upon one’s own surroundings, family, neighbors, and self must be limited, at least if we call ourselves conservatives, rather than individualists. Burke’s little platoons were not meant to be isolated, unconnected atoms, but parts of that larger whole, and we should recognize how we benefit from thinking of our communities as part of the public. Even a community composed of highly cultured, well-read, hard-working, self-sufficient members ultimately will grow stale without the influx of ideas from other communities. Keeping wholly to ourselves, we deny ourselves the pleasures of not only encountering (and challenging or accepting) new ideas, but of engaging with new faces, sampling new food, drink, and cultural artifacts. We become less conservative, and more standpat, ultimately instigating our own irrelevance, perhaps extinction.

It is for this need for proper interaction between the little platoon and the company and regiment, so to speak that compels us again to eschew post-war suburban design and to embrace New Urbanism — perhaps, in some instances, better understood as New Sub-urbanism. So long as community leaders and urban planners and designers keep in mind not to focus solely on the plot they seek to redevelop — unless they take up the oft-dubious task of building entire “new towns” —, traditional neighborhood design proffers the opportunity for better interaction. By connecting neighborhood streets, structured on the grid, with some deviation and employment of diagonals for the sake of visual interest, to larger streets as part of a clear hierarchy, we open our villages more easily to visitors and passers-by from other parts of the city. Multitudes of neighborhood and downtown (or down-village) stores that, by their decreased size and scope, encourage familiarity and interaction replace regional-serving “plazas”, malls, and shopping centers that, despite bringing together myriad people from across the area, by desire promote quasi-anonymity. The more compact design of traditionally designed neighborhoods contributes to a greater ability to incorporate ordered street trees, a means whereby both to promote environmental stewardship and to provide additional aesthetic pleasure. 

New Urbanism is far from perfect, as both its critics and supports recognize; from failures to live up to expectations to contextual issues I’ve previously discussed to a failure to understand the proper relationship between the community and the public, as discussed above, this comprehensive attitude about our public places often struggles when applied. However, better than the purportedly pro-free-market (and, thus, must-be-conservative) sprawl that has guided our development over the last sixty years, it offers the chance to promote our little platoons, as well as our companies and regiments; to steward God’s Creation, of which we are a part; to restore to it’s proper place aesthetics; and, however small weakly, to strengthen the local and particular against the incursions of the global and abstract, particularly as manifested in the State and the large corporation. 

Filed under: conservatism, urbanism

A lil’ bit on the New Urbanism

Hey, folks! Nathan P. Origer here, still not talking about federalism (because I really should know what I’m talking about when I embrace the invitation to contribute here!)

I hope that y’all will forgive me for doing this, but I’ve decided to break from the consistency of John’s typical font — and font size; if this troubles anyone (especially you, Mr. Schwenkler), please, inform me, and I shall revert, but, well, I really loathe sans-serif fonts, so, presently, I introduce you to Bookman Old Style. Perhaps my unique appearance will save me from having to annoy y’all with my fauxksy greeting.

Anyhow, as John and I have mentioned, I work presently toward a Master in Community Planning. Specifically, I’m interested in urban design and in design — and architecture; oh, how much I believe aesthetics matter! — affects the intangibles of community (whatever that is!), as well as quantifiable measures of well-being, e.g., car-to-pedestrian ratios and use of fossil fuels; obesity; and the ratio of local and independent business to chains, and how this effects that amount of money that remains in the local economy-community.

I believe that New Urbanism, in theory, presents a good practical solution to many of the problems that plague our cities, suburbs, and even, altered properly, small towns and rural areas. (The transect specifically addresses form and design from the city’s core to the most undeveloped natural areas.) More important, New Urbanism offers a particularly conservative approach to addressing, directly or indirectly, many of the problems in contemporary society (which, I submit, we must address before we can attempt to resolve our cultural problems). All of this, as I’ve promised, I shall address soon. Again, for a primer, start with the conversation, from early this year, at Mirror of Justice. Before you immerse yourself in that amazing(ly erudite) conversation, commence your journey into Catholic/conservative New Urbanism with Professor Phil Bess’s “The Polis and the Natural Law” [PDF]. Supplement this reading with Weyrich and Lind on New Urbanism as part of the Next Conservatism here and here, in The American Conservative. (For a more free-market-oriented defense, see Michael E. Lewyn, in R.E.P’s Green Elephant, summer and fall of 2002.)

Now, I have every intention of expanding on my praise of New Urbanism from a conservative perspective (and incline more each day toward proposing such a task to my Master’s program director as a plan for the one-credit independent study that I’ll need to complete to obtain sufficient credits to graduate); before I can do it, though, I want to address a serious complain that I have with the application of the philosophy. Others offer often-valid complaints about the failure of the New Urbanism to address issues such as sprawl (Wendell Cox, far less cool than the more familiar Wendell about these parts, especially) or the negative “gentrification” effects.

Tailgating before Notre Dame’s rain-soaked near-loss yesterday, I, as is inevitable, found myself discussing urban planning with my friend Nathaniel, who graduated from Notre Dame a year before me, significantly influenced me in my following the urban planning path, and earned his Master in the field from McGill in Montréal; quickly, we realize that such conversation precluded us from Irish car bombs and the like and eschewed it. Before we did, however, he proclaimed, “I hate New Urbanism”; he immediately, at my urging, corrected himself, complaining about the post-modern problem of New Urbanism, something that troubles me greatly, too. By this, he meant, and I mean, that New Urbanist development, at least with respect to architecture, all too frequently forswears context — sometimes for the worse, and sometimes for the worst.

Respecting the latter, I refer especially to developments such as this, which, though perhaps site-designed well, presents what, probably wrongly, I’ll call neo-international architecture (compare to 1930s international as exemplified by the Roosevelt Administration-planned Greenbelt, MD): In the modern example, the façades display more depth than in the model, but fenestration placement and proportion show little regard for the public sphere and the recessed, darkened entryways hardly welcome the passing pedestrian. Moreover, the place looks planned; where is the organically grown community here, or at least a realistic replica thereof?

When New Urbanist architecture lacks context not for the worst, but for the worse, we get the oft-praised Kentlands, Gaithersberg, MD. It is important to note that the retail development in and around the Kentlands has not lived up to potential, and a typical shopping plaza borders one edge of the neighborhood, dominating the economy. Returning to my architectural complaint,though, have a look: Main Street; residential. Beautiful, ain’t it?! But where is it? Maryland? Or maybe Celebration, Florida?

For the liberal (contemporary or classical) or the archi-politically indifferent, this genericism may be acceptable — perhaps even welcome. However, if, as I aver, we ought to embrace conservative New Urbanism, this should give us pause. If conservatism is about the patria, or in the United States, the locality, our closest approximation, and we strive to create a sustaining, rich culture — real culture, that is, whatever it may appropriately be in any given place, with its texture of traditions, heritage, and surroundings — then we cannot permit our communities to reflect the selfsame banality

No Place-Anywhere, USA

that we seek to escape. Even the most wonderful architecture, when out of place and/or when undeniably planned, with no serious variation, denigrates the public space that we seek to grow and quashes any nascent cultural revival — at least beneath a superficial veneer of seeming vibrance.

The New Urbanism is not without models from within: Notwithstanding the sorts of failures you’d expect from a town foolishly plotted amidst nothing (Another, no less significant sort of context problem!) save prime vacation land, Seaside, FL, offers an important set of lessons: First — and I cannot stress this emphatically enough —, permit no architect to design more than a small percentage of the homes, shops, and civic buildings in the community; even the most like-minded architects do some things differently, and to mix them, and to mix their designs throughout the area, allows more naturally to present a seemingly organic community. Second, rather than rely on strict zoning, following place-sensitive form-based coding: For instance, Seaside requires the use only of materials traditionally employed in coastal homes built in pre-war Florida, including tin roofs. It would be absurd to build Georgian-style homes in the Florida panhandle, just as a faux-cabin looks stupid pretty much anywhere other than in the woods. This is not merely a question of architecture, but of culture and place.

It’s now three o’clock ante meridiem here on the East Coast, so I should probably bring this to an end. I hope that, somewhere amidst the incoherence, I offered a cogent point about the importance of New Urbanism to conservatism, society, and culture, and the troublesome shortcomings that we must address.

(Image via Brand Avenue: Place, Space, & Identity.)

Filed under: conservatism, urbanism

"A Marginal Farm"

My column this week at Culture11 is about an urban farming and gardening program at the Alameda Point Collaborative, a community on the grounds of an old naval base in Alameda, CA that provides support for the homeless. Here’s a snippet:

Ultimately, [...] the goal lies less in the provision of fresh fruits and vegetables than a more wholesale shift in the ways that APC residents think about food. Before they came to work for her, Casale tells me, many of these teens “had never seen a tomato plant before” — and now they’re digging in the soil, chasing baby chickens, and praying that someday soon they’ll be able to get some goats. For the broader community, too, these closer relationships to the sources of their food will hopefully bring to light the importance of careful cooking and family meals. (This is one of the reasons why the City’s request that a fence be constructed to hide the farm from view — “they didn’t want it to be a blight,” Casale laughs as she gestures toward the abandoned buildings and empty lots around us — was so stupid.) Only by overcoming what Wendell Berry observes is the “thoughtlessness” with which our lives are drawn from the land can the damage from habitually bad eating be undone.

As a piece of writing I’m actually quite proud of this one, so read the whole thing if you have the time.

P.S. 317 brownie points if you can get the reference in the title, double that if you can do it without Googling.

Filed under: agriculture, food, personal, urbanism

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Developers?

I have been meaning for a while to say that I sympathize entirely with Ryan Avent’s ongoing frustration with the attitudes of my former Brookland neighbors toward the District’s plans (.pdf) to build up the area around the Brookland/CUA Metro station. I’ve recently been witness to a similar sort of hysteria over proposals to construct a mixed-use building along a similarly barren stretch of four-lane thoroughfare right near my home, and so I’m well aware of what Ryan’s up against. Obviously there are tricky issues here having to do with the rights of residents to make decisions that are not in others’ – or even their own – best interest (people are, after all, allowed e.g. to vote for John McCain), but the fact is that both of these look like clear cases where the residents are simply wrong, and the neighborhood commons simply aren’t theirs to ruin: the residents should be told this, and the developments in question should be permitted to move ahead. Density, especially of the pedestrian-centered sort, makes for economic growth, social cohesion, and safety for the surrounding areas – and when it comes to areas that already have an essentially urban character, there’s usually no compelling reason to stand in its way.

But I do think it’s worth remarking on how much of the anti-development rhetoric that holds these kinds of projects back involves exactly the sort of tropes that the Left has been so skilled at teaching people to play. It is always the People vs. the Capitalists, the Powerless vs. the Powerful, Green Space vs. Pollution, the Peasants vs. the Moneyed Class. That these are cases where such tropes are being misplayed – as I noted above, pedestrian- and transit-centered mixed-use development of these sorts is good for pretty much everyone affected, and helps to save the environment along the way – is not the issue: training people to think, and to articulate their blindly irrational fears, in these sorts of ideological terms leaves them unable to recognize a good developer when they see one. Once such styles of thought are in place, it is then immensely hard to remove the blinders and evaluate things in something more like an “objective” fashion.

That’s not to say that conservatives and libertarians don’t have their own such tendencies, and Matt Yglesias does well to note that folks on my side of the aisle have had an unfortunate habit of getting far less excited about the kind of deregulation that makes for healthy urban and suburban planning than they do about things like opening up the coasts and National Parks to oil drilling. He’s right, and while I am by no means convinced that increasing density is going to be a cure-all, there is no denying that the stupidity Matt is complaining about is a genuine scandal. When it comes to urban design, many of the issues at stake are ones where there’s no reason why pro-environment liberals, anti-regulatory and free-market libertarians, and traditionalist, anti-sprawl conservatives should be able to band together and work toward common goals. The challenge lies in finding ways to speak a common language.

(Image via Flickrer Tidewater Muse.)

Filed under: conservatism, politics, transportation, urbanism

The family and the city

As these posts from this blog’s very early days will happily attest, I agree entirely with Ryan Avent and Ezra Klein that the sprawling suburbs are not the only – or even the best – place to raise kids. I do, however, think that much more needs to be done to make the District in particular into a less awful place for children.

Filed under: family, urbanism