Dense, walkable neighborhoods do not have to be dystopian, family-unfriendly hellscapes

Plus: padlocked playgrounds, 'come as you are,' and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Dense, walkable neighborhoods do not have to be dystopian, family-unfriendly hellscapes

(via)

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech this week at a National League of Cities conference in Washington. In the back half of the talk, Vance veered into immigration—read about it at Reason if you like—but the first half focused on the cost of housing in America and the government’s role in its rise. This part was pretty good, and there are three comments I’d like to make.

First, if Vance is to be taken seriously here regarding the White House posture on these matters, he’s signaling a big swing from the first Trump administration. Here’s Vance on federalism:

Most Americans, of course, they interact with their state and local governments far more regularly than they do their federal government, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way the Constitution sets it up. […] Now, the Trump administration believes in the wisdom of federalism and leaving local issues to local officials …

As they say: Big if true! The first time around, this was not how President Trump talked about this stuff.

On the contrary, in the waning days of his first term, he got on a kick about Democrats trying to “destroy” the suburbs. As I wrote at the time, this was mostly about local and state zoning ordinances. In Trump’s telling in 2020, destroying the suburbs meant light upzoning, like allowing property owners to marginally increase residential density by building duplexes and granny flats in neighborhoods otherwise dominated by single-family homes. Accordingly, he fiddled with federal subsidy rules to reverse an Obama administration policy that had incentivized a little land use deregulation by local governments.

As I said then and still think now, this makes no sense for the GOP given its purported principles. Upzoning (and the housing cost reductions it can produce) ought to tick a lot of boxes for Republicans: property rights, freedom, federalism, family, even (indirectly) natalism. I’m chary of putting too much trust in this one speech from Vance, but what he’s saying here is at least a step in the right direction.

The contrast between the first and second Trump administrations is even more apparent when Vance addresses zoning specifically. He starts by reiterating the federalism preamble (“zoning is an area where federal authority is actually quite limited”), then makes an appeal for zoning reform that amounts to an endorsement of upzoning:

I would ask everyone in this room is to be good partners with us, and certainly partners with your citizens, and think about how we can improve the costs of housing for our citizens. And I think one of the ways that we’re going to have to do that is by being a little bit smarter about our local zoning rules. […]

If we actually want [our cities and towns] to be magnets—not just for jobs and investment, but also the dreams of our young people—we’ve got to actually make it easier to build homes. And in particular, I think the city of Austin has done a pretty interesting job, because in Austin you saw this massive increase of people moving in, the cost of housing skyrocketed, but then Austin implemented some pretty smart policies, and that brought down the cost of housing. And it’s one of the few major American cities where you see the cost of housing leveling off or even coming down.

What were these smart and interesting changes in Austin? Well, they relaxed lot size rules and also upzoned, allowing townhouses, duplexes, and triplexes in areas previously held exclusively for single-family homes. This is a straight-up reversal of Trump I.

That positive treatment of neighborhood density brings me to my second and titular point: Dense, walkable neighborhoods do not have to be dystopian, family-unfriendly hellscapes.

There’s a common NIMBY claim (e.g.) that people who advocate for zoning reform and related changes to building codes and urban design are trying to make everyone live in high rise apartments with no green space, no privacy, no quiet, no separate bedrooms for kids, and maybe even—because there are no cars—no freedom of movement.

This is demonstrably, laughably false, both in terms of present-day goals and the well-established history of the many government regulations and subsidies that got us the expensive, car-centric, homogenous, alienating, family-unfriendly built environment we have today in many rural, suburban, and urban environments in America. (See this post from

Urbanism Speakeasy with Andy Boenau

for more details.)

There’s also a common YIMBY trope that everyone enjoys dense, walkable neighborhoods, but we only realize it when we’re on vacation in France or Downtown Disney or an all-inclusive resort large enough to emulate a small town. This is true, but it can mislead us to forgetting that there’s still plenty of very pleasant density in America, most of it grandfathered in from a time before modern zoning and building codes meddled with how we build our lives. (See

Addison Del Mastro

’s whole Substack for more details.)

I live in just such a place. My neighborhood in Pittsburgh—which is not the neighborhood in the photo at the top but looks a lot like it—is technically a suburb. It began as a spot for the wealthy to escape city smog, then rapidly grew as a streetcar suburb in the first 25 years of the last century.

There are duplexes and fourplexes and even much larger apartment buildings. A building with probably around 30 units is just a couple blocks from me, and it’s seamlessly integrated into the neighborhood. But the dominant housing style is single-family homes (most often with four beds and one bath) that take up a large portion of their small but perfectly adequate lots.

It’s dense and private, walkable and quiet, good for young adults and elderly people who need affordable housing and good for families with kids. I have my own yard and can walk to a grocery store, a hardware store, the library, multiple banks and shops and restaurants.

All this is very ordinary in Pittsburgh—indeed, very ordinary in a lot of the country, wherever pre-World War II neighborhoods weren’t blighted by the lie known as “urban renewal.” Many people like this kind of thing, and we certainly could be building more neighborhoods like this now if we were “being a little bit smarter about our local zoning rules.”

However, after that praise, my third point must be critique. Here’s Vance on housing for young adults:

I was talking with a relative a couple of years ago and she just made kind of an off-handed observation. As a younger person than I am, she was looking to buy her first home, and just mentioned that when her parents were growing up, they could afford a nice home on a single middle-class income. And she was sort of mentioning this as a sorrowful thing. She was sad that wasn’t true for her generation. […]

I read recently that the average income it takes to buy a new house is nearly two times the average salary of your typical American family. Not the average American worker, but the combined incomes of a husband and wife.

This strikes me as well-intentioned but misleading at best. Vance is right that housing is expensive, particularly with interest rates where they are right now. But it is just not true that homeownership is so categorically out of reach for young adults.

What’s out of reach is owning a large, new-construction house in a big city. What’s not out of reach is owning a not-new starter home in vast swathes of the country, including many perfectly respectable midsize metros where you can find a decent job (or work remotely) and even some good craft cocktails on the weekend.

Now, starter homes are in insufficient supply, again significantly because of onerous zoning and building codes. But no 27-year-old needs a brand-new house, and there are a lot of old, cheap houses out there. I’ve owned two of them, and I have lots of friends who’ve done likewise, including buying on a single, middle-class income.

And speaking of income, Vance appears to be citing something like this CNN report:

A household needed to earn $107,700 to afford a new single-family home and pay property taxes and insurance costs in the third quarter of this year, according to a new report from Oxford Economics. That’s nearly double the household income of $56,800 needed to afford a new home in 2019.

But again, that’s for new single-family homes, which on average have a price north of $400,000 and boast about 2,400 square feet. That is to say: That ratio is for houses Vance’s young relative simply does not need at her phase in life.

The mistake Vance is making here is a frequent one in housing discourse, which is dominated by journalists who live in coastal megacities where the housing situation really is untenable for many young people. But speaking as if the whole country has the housing market of Manhattan, Washington, or Los Angeles is distorting and discouraging.

Don’t tell young adults in Pittsburgh or Buffalo, Tulsa or El Paso, that they’re forever doomed to renting. They’re not, not even in the near-term. Local government could absolutely improve their situation with zoning and other code reforms, but even now, homeownership is attainable.

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Intake

• The Anatomy of Murder, by Dorothy L. Sayers et al.

• The Age of Diagnosis, by Suzanne O’Sullivan

• “Why do I keep finding padlocked playgrounds in New York City?” by Liz Wolfe for Reason

• “‘Come as you are’ is not a slogan for the church,” an interview with Stanley Hauerwas that was conducted by Plough but ran at Christianity Today

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Output

New work:

• The truth Trump owed Zelensky | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

Via

Joel Mathis

, looks like Trump has a plan to primary Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), posting this week that Massie is “a GRANDSTANDER” who made a “horrendously stupid move” and “SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him.”

Well, well, well, how the turn tables. Massie is libertarian-leaning on many issues, and I probably prefer his voting record to those of 95 percent of his colleagues. He spoke at some events for the college activism organization where I worked for several years more than a decade ago, and I think we shared an elevator once. On balance, I’m guessing I’d rather have his seat stay with him than whomever Trump might find to primary him.

And yet I also am compelled to note that this is probably the due result of Massie’s decision to court, in his own memorable and quite prescient phrase, the “craziest son of a bitch” vote. I wrote about this quote and its import at The Week in 2021 and at The UnPopulist in 2022.

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