REDUCE THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT.

Federalist contributors Jonathan and Paige Bronitsky unleash a polemic.  "‘New Urbanists’ Want To Bulldoze The Suburban American Dream."  I suspect it's part of a Militant Normal pushback against California's nanny-state (excuse the redundancy) politicians taking advantage of the recent Los Angeles fires to impose their vision of urban renewal on Altadena or the Pacific Palisades.  But they have something more general in mind.

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.” 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 are the two faces of New Urbanism, an ideology that, masquerading as “traditionalist,” conservatives have tolerated for far too long. 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. 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.

It used to be those four-story buildings with apartments (or perhaps the proprietor) living above the storefront occurred as a matter of course.

There were no streetcars along Milwaukee's Ogden Avenue back in the days of The Milwaukee Electric Lines, and the tower block closer to the lake is newer construction; whilst tower blocks of about the same vintage as that three story building with residences perched atop something (part of the first floor is the church annex) are a short walk from this corner.

If you seek suffocating zoning at high prices, look no further than Cold Spring Shops's deck.

That's from the fall of 2009, suffice it to say that the wood-lot has grown some in the past sixteen years.  Yes, they look a lot alike because there are all sorts of economies in offering four to eight basic floor plans (accounting for some one-story plans or for the use of a basement for something other than a train room when topography permits it) and limiting the variability to the street side, which might include three or four concept porches.  "I was under the impression that contemporary builders of tract houses offered a limited variety of floorplans in order to amortize architectural costs and take advantage of learning curves (until a recession approaches: that's the time to talk about optimizing your basement for a train room) and that a subdivision would contain houses of comparable designs in a narrow price range as a consequence of those supply-side incentives."

But that sort of planned use development gets caught up in Federalist Culture Wars thinking.

Second, contrary to what New Urbanists claim, the suburbs aren’t some artificial contrivance foisted upon unsuspecting Americans. They’re the result of people voting with their feet. Suburban life offers homeownership, safety, and stability — values conservatives should champion. 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. 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.

It’s frankly absurd that conservatives — who are pro-family — would entertain the idea of cramming kids into tiny apartments with no yards. How exactly are parents supposed to raise multiple children in a 600-square-foot box? Where are kids supposed to play? On a rooftop patio shared with strangers? Instead of capitulating to left-wing planners pushing this dystopian vision, conservatives should be fighting for policies that encourage more single-family homes.

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.

Yes, there might be jobs in the suburbs, and yet, the logic of the rent gradient during the late Oh-Ohs, when Cold Spring Shops relocated, was people taking advantage of the cheap fuel and low mortgage rates of the era to find the largest house they could finance and then deal with the commute to Naperville for the office park or to Elburn for the train: and to an extent, that sort of construction continues in Maple Park for proximity to Elburn and to the Kaneville high school.

It's misleading, though, for the Bronitskys to bundle tract housing with freedom.

Planned use developments have long been with us, as have rent-seekers, and when it became clear that the private automobile was a Marshallian improvement, the rent-seekers started to push for expressways, and to set land aside for shopping centers (what we understand today as a strip mall was a Big Deal seventy years ago) that's where the political action went, and the neighborhood structures changed accordingly.  That the technocrats of the zoning boards could work with the technocrats of the highway commission and the rest of the Urban Planning Conceit simply made selling the latest concepts easier.

But then, they attempt to bundle Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn and Andrés Duany and James "Long Emergency" Kunstler and The American Conservative regulars Addison Del Mastro and Richard Driehaus as of a piece.  They're not.  Let Reason's Christian Britschgi elaborate.

There are plenty of critiques one could make of New Urbanism on free market and property rights grounds. It's a movement that does indeed have a highly particular vision for how communities should look that is highly critical of post-war suburban sprawl. They're more than willing to use regulation to set everything right.

Yet, the authors of The Federalist essay can't decide if they want to criticize New Urbanism for constraining people's choices or for giving people choices beyond the standard post-war single-family neighborhood.

The result is a contradictory tangle of critiques.

To say the least. Tract housing after the War took advantage of several developments that made possible a broader dispersion of population.  And like everything else in land use, centralizing forces came into tension with decentralizing forces.  Maybe the best thing for the policy types to do is place their bets.  On emergence:

Transit-oriented zoning can allow new apartments and shops near bus and train lines. The same zoning reforms can also ban new drive-thrus, gas stations, and low-density development.

Odds are that in any decent-sized American city, you can find zoning districts that offend the sensibilities of both urbanists and suburbanists. With everyone trying to impose their prescriptive vision on society as a whole, everyone has some basis to claim that land-use regulations are threatening their preferred community and lifestyle.

Truly, it does not need to be this way.

Despite the Bronitskys' pot-shot at "doctrinaire libertarians"(a pot-shot plenty of New Urbanists might nod along to), a libertarian approach to land use would allow both sides of the land use wars to disarm.

Free markets give people want they want at the price they're willing and able to pay. It's a setup that respects people's freedom while sorting out their preferences in the aggregate.

Odds are free markets in housing would produce lots of single-family homes in low-density suburbs, lots of walkable communities full of middle housing that's missing no more, and lots of urban blocks where apartments and ground-floor retail go together like milk and coffee.

None of these neighborhood types are bad things to want. None inherently conflict with each other. If one type of housing ends up predominating in this new free market in land use, so be it.

By overregulating what people can build and where, we have put ourselves in a position of trying to reverse engineer people's housing preferences with white papers, charter documents, and confused, contentious opinion essays.

It's exhausting and inefficient. There's a better way.

Indeed.  As Bill Buckley once put it, contemplating the net effect of government action on New York's housing stock, "the best thing for the government to do is go away."  That's true of urban form more generally.