Recently I had a piece in Strong Towns, thinking about what exactly it is that makes (or, sadly, made) small American towns feel so much like little cities in their heyday, and why people miss that heritage but also resist trying to recreate it today.

In particular, I look at the fairly large buildings that characterized practically every American Main Street 100 years ago, and I think about how the very same building would be resisted today as somehow damaging the character of the place, or being too tall, or some such argument. For example, take a look at this pretty typical small-town hotel in Lambertville, New Jersey, built when the town had less than 2,000 people.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think it’s more than just NIMBYism. Yes, the nature of small-town buildings was fairly large compared to what we expect in our suburban neighborhoods today. (Many people tolerate or even embrace big-box warehouses, but not integrated with their homes.) Their physical scale was large. But the scale at which they operated—local ownership, serving a small trade area of the town itself and some outlying rural areas—was small, even hyperlocal:

Flemington—whose local politics for the last 15 years have been the poster child for NIMBYism—was once a tiny city proud of its few square blocks of elegant urbanity. Flemingtonians were people who lived and lodged downtown, rode trains around the region, and walked from their house on a street grid or their downtown second-floor apartment to buy groceries. Yet now they frequently view such things as suspect or as a threat to the character of their community. What happened? Well, maybe scale.

And:

These hotels might look and feel out of scale, and yet…they don’t. Indeed, the whole idea of hotels, tourists, travelers, and trains in towns of a few hundred people might feel discordant. And yet…it didn’t. The small population numbers bely just how cosmopolitan these little towns surrounded by countryside were. The Stockton Inn, for example, was the subject of the 1936 show tune “There’s a Small Hotel”—testifying to the curious fact that many quiet small towns were more “on the map” a century ago than they are today. Stockton, too, had a train station, which no longer operates as such.

And my hope:

So what if we could get back large buildings hosting businesses at a hyperlocal scale? Would that do anything to reduce the sentiment we call NIMBYism? Maybe it isn’t really about the number of apartments or parking spots or stories, and more of a sense of mourning that the old arrangements which created the town’s prized historic buildings no longer exist, and that few developers today can recreate it, or have incentives to do so.

What do you think? Anyone who’s more involved in the nitty-gritty of development fights or small business initiatives or related things: do you have any hopeful signs that making it easier for small developers or individuals to do business of various sorts at a small scale within their communities lessens the NIMBY impulse? Or helps people to clarify what it is they dislike, or think they dislike, about development?

What do you think accounts for the diminished but mourned urbanity of these small towns, which prize their history but also make it very hard to make again? Is that because they sense that if done today, it would treat the place as a blank slate, without that local buy-in and local economic ecosystem? Or is it really just about knee-jerk opposition to change? Are there other good (or bad) reasons?

I wrote here at the newsletter a photo essay about that briefly mentioned Stockton Inn, which inspired a Broadway show tune nearly a century ago. I’ll be touching on the current status of the Inn again, but briefly, there was a proposal to build a concert venue adjacent to the Inn that would have held more people than the population of Stockton itself. People resisted that, fearing the noise and traffic. I can see that. It feels like it treats the actual town as sort of incidental to the business.

But how do you get back to the hyperlocal scale? Can you? Lots of food for thought. Tell me what you think!

Related Reading:

When Small Towns Wanted Tall Buildings

A Little More on Rockville Pike

The Rest of Staunton

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