Recently I shared thoughts on getting to know my own place better—the area around Flemington in Hunterdon County, New Jersey—and I shared a few photos taken just about 15 minutes from my parents’ house. Here are a couple of them:

Inevitably, when I talk about urbanism, housing, or density with people from here, someone will talk about losing open space. I’ll often hear something like, “Do we really want to put ugly out-of-scale buildings in the middle of these beautiful views?”

But I’ll also hear a different sentiment, something to the effect of, “With all this space, why do we need to pack people into tiny little apartments?”

Well, pick one.

Look, when I visit home and I drive around these backroads, and I see the same garden center and ice cream stand I went to as a kid, and all the sleepy little Main Streets (many with commuter rail service to New York!), I like it. I feel a sense of relaxation, comfort, familiarity. I wonder sometimes about my commitment to growth and building and new this and new that. Do I really like those things? Or do I want the places I grew up in to always be there, waiting for me just like I remember them? And if I do, how can I advocate for more development? “YIMBY” stands for “yes in my backyard,” not “yes in someone else’s backyard.”

But there is some new housing around here, in the Flemington area. Below are a few of the new residential buildings in Raritan Township, along New Jersey 31 (the township borders the town of Flemington, and in many ways they’re one community across two jurisdictions).

Here’s one sandwiched between the Walmart and the Costco.

Here’s one behind the Stop & Shop supermarket and a separate strip that was added later.

And here’s a building under construction near the big health club/fitness center.

These are all along the commercial stretch where we went shopping when I was a kid. I still remember when the Stop & Shop (originally an Edward’s) was built, and the BJ’s and the CVS and, more recently, the Costco. Most of that space was forested. I once came across an aerial photo of the several square miles around my parents’ house, taken in the 1970s, and it was pretty much completely rural-agricultural. My parents’ own house had not yet been built, and its lot was still a farm field. Even in the 1990s, most of the big stuff had yet to be built.

Do these new apartments make the commercial strip prettier? Not really. Are the buildings ugly? I don’t mind them, but many would say so. But the space they’re taking up is not randomly selected land out on the backroads. It’s mostly just dead space between, behind, or in front of big-box stores. It isn’t the nicest place to put residences, but it uses land that has no real other use, and it also puts people within walking distance of lots of essential retail, which should do something to moderate additional traffic. The buildings turn this linear landscape of parking lots and stores into something ever-so-slightly more three-dimensional; a rudimentary form of mixed-use development. We already lost the open space; now we’re filling it in and thickening it up. I like that.

Nonetheless, sometimes you’ll hear that these new buildings ruin the view anyway, that the sprawling parking lots and deep setbacks of the big-box stores at least preserve a feeling of openness as you drive along. This is an interesting way of seeing it. I don’t mean that snarkily; it is interesting. What is it, exactly, that causes people to more or less not notice parking lots or box stores, but to really, really notice pretty standard modern apartment buildings?

Anyway, I said above that we already lost the open space. What I mean is we lost the open space along that commercial corridor. But when I get out on the little roads, I’m amazed by how quickly that impression of building and paving over dissipates. There really is so much land. Most of the county looks like the first two pictures, not the second three. The other day someone said in a comment on social media, “We’ve already lost most of our farmland.” Well, here’s a satellite view of the several miles around Flemington:

This brings to mind a bit of data from a piece I wrote recently on Lancaster, Pennsylvania:

One thing to remember is just how big Lancaster County is. “We lose about 1,200 acres a year of farmland,” says [Tom] Daniels, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The figure sounds alarming. “But,” he adds, “we put more than that under conservation easement every year.”

I think it’s okay, even good, to give up a little bit of marginal land in or immediately adjacent to stuff that’s already been built. Every unit in an apartment building on the main highway is one that doesn’t have to go somewhere further out. In fact, we’re preserving the landscape exactly by building more densely. The biggest threat to farmland and unbuilt countryside isn’t a 5-over-1 apartment building, but sprawling detached-housing developments. Not everyone wants that, but large-lot zoning forces it on everyone.

There’s a certain protectiveness that folks can have, to the point where they forget that this stuff is determined by markets, by supply and demand, by rational behavior and choice-making. “First they’ll build these ones here, then they’ll put them somewhere they really don’t fit.” The assumption seems to be that building homes (in an area that, maybe contrary to appearances, actually has a lot of nearby jobs) is letting the camel’s nose into the tent. That developers will take a mile because you give them an inch, that the demand for apartment living in rural-exurban New Jersey is infinite.

Same with parking and traffic. Many people won’t actually put up with daily traffic jams: if they live within walking distance of everyday retail and businesses, many will drive to the closer store, walk more, or even try ditching one of two cars. People my parents’ age are often skeptical that anyone would want to live this way. As someone in my 20s, I can tell you that the demand for more walkable, less car-dependent landscapes is intense, and is not currently close to being met. People tend to see urban living being foisted on a quiet, rural-ish area, but I have come to see it as an extension of the urbanism that already exists in the small towns, like Flemington, that were here for hundreds of years.

I used the word “perception” above, and that applies here too. So much of being a YIMBY comes down not to granular housing policy, but simply to believing that more people are not a bad thing. I understand the fear that growth will “overwhelm” a place or render it “unrecognizable,” especially in a sleepy rural-exurban area where nothing much seems to have changed for a few decades at least.

But that just isn’t going to happen; not that many people want to live here! But more do than can right now. They likely have good reasons for picking a place to live; people usually know what’s best for themselves. So instead of telling new residents they’re wrong to want to live near jobs, retail, and amenities; wrong for driving everywhere and creating too much traffic, or wrong for trying to live car-free; wrong for overwhelming the schools with their kids or wrong for being childless; instead of turning something as basic as housing and jobs into a culture war, what if we just trusted people to make choices, and loosened up our comically and criminally overregulated land use to work with them and not against them?

Related Reading:

Urbanism and Perception

Mental Separation of Uses

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