I had a personal essay in The Bulwark last week about my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, and how a couple of big development projects in town have made me more excited to come visit, and rekindled my sense of it being home. It’s titled “NIMBYism is a Distorted Love.”

There’s a lot going on here. Some of it is similar to ground I covered in this piece here at my newsletter from last year, inspired by a different visit to my hometown and to my best friend’s house.

But here, I’ve done more than reminisce about my childhood or just disagree with the NIMBYism that defined development politics in Flemington and the surrounding area for most of my life. I tried to really put into words why, exactly, change doesn’t upset me, even as someone who loved Flemington as a kid, and has a lot of nostalgia for that period in its life.

I don’t see myself as just elevating some abstraction of “change” and “growth” over the on-the-ground reality of the place, or imposing my idea of the good life. Rather, I see some degree of change as evidence of life. Not for nothing do I use the term “encased in amber” a lot in reference to overly restrictive zoning, and not for nothing do urbanists sometimes talk about “the embalmed city.”

So there’s something new here, as my thoughts about stability and place versus change and growth have crystalized. I think this is the crux of it:

Instead of seeing the town’s current state as its essence, I’ve come to feel that it would in some way dishonor the people who built it—and other places like it—to decide that it has reached its final point now, with us, and to shut down all future versions of what it might be. If residents of Flemington in the 1880s had declared their Main Street to be a historic district that needed to be statically preserved, well, we wouldn’t have the Main Street we now love and protect.

We owe it to ourselves and to the future to keep building where we live, to keep iterating, to see people as a resource, and to see growth not like cancer but like childbirth: something painful and beautiful at the same time, something that takes away some things while opening up many more.

As I wrote on Monday, people talk about developers as if they have some nefarious agenda, as if giving in a little bit is giving away the farm, or as if the demand for housing in a place like this is so intense that it will completely remake everything. And yet at the same time, people seem surprised that anybody wants to live here at all. “I love this town, why would anyone want to move here?” I said rhetorically to a business owner on Main Street I know, who is also enthusiastic about the projects coming to town. He nodded as if he heard that before.

I understand the idea that preserving the town as-is would “dishonor” its founders sounds a little flippant, maybe. But what brought me to that sentiment was actually learning about the town’s history, and feeling this really neat feeling, difficult to put into words, that this place has been so many different things for so many different people, long before my experience of it:

I’ve learned about the small supermarkets that used to be right on Main Street; the history of some of the buildings, many of which are from the late nineteenth century, and which replaced earlier buildings; the local industries—peach growing, glass, ceramics—and the rail lines and once-active train station (now a bank) that put this little town on the map.

The realization brought on by all this is that Flemington has “belonged” to many different people, and does not “belong” to any single person or property owner or developer. Its history is granular, incremental, and distributed—by growing up in a place like this, I was lucky to wade into a stream that has run long before and will run long after.

This perspective helps me step outside of the narrow point in time during which I knew this place most intimately, and to avoid mistaking my nostalgic memories for the place itself. Our tendency to view quaint old towns not as functioning little cities but as suburban lifestyle amenities is anomalous. NIMBYism can be a kind of distorted love, one that conflates a place’s present physical form with its essence, and ends up destroying both of them. I keep thinking about something zoning scholar M. Nolan Gray said at his book talk in Washington last month:

Gray was talking about older folks in extremely expensive neighborhoods that were once middle class, and how these older residents will wonder why, for example, their children are leaving, and they feel lonely and isolated in their retirement years. “Their community has been destroyed by not allowing the built environment to change,” he said.

Their community has been destroyed by not allowing the built environment to change.

Change—to some extent, depending on so many factors—is, I conclude, the heartbeat of places that are alive. There’s a lot of Strong Towns influence here; I argue that the compromise is not no change or huge top-down projects, but rather a fundamental devolution of scale: squeezing out the dynamic of stagnation punctuated by huge projects, and replacing it with that heartbeat of distributed, small-scale, incremental change.

The projects in Flemington are bigger than many Strong Towns folks might like, but I believe them to be basically the best possible projects you could have gotten given the conditions right now. The most notable one, on Main Street, involves restoring the iconic Union Hotel and another brick structure next door, demolishing a badly decayed wood-frame structure, and putting in apartments and retail in the back. This has been paired with rolling back Main Street’s parking-minimum requirement in the zoning code, making it easier and less expensive for small businesses to open up shop. Here’s the back of that worksite:

The other big project involves a total redevelopment of the mostly abandoned Liberty Village outlet center. I can still remember seeing signs on the way into New York City advertising Liberty Village. People came from all over to shop and stay overnight. But there just isn’t much you can do with that property incrementally. It was once bustling with stores and funneled people into Main Street, but now it’s a hole in the street grid and a dead space, and the new housing planned for the space will fix that. Currently, it looks like this:

Flemington’s mayor told me that she was herself a fan of Strong Towns, and she wished more incremental and fine-grained development were possible. But zoning is only one part of that. Another big part is financing (although big players in town, she suggested, might be interested in financing smaller enterprises.) The biggest barrier though, she said, was finding people who actually wanted to knock down a wall to double a storefront, or build a third floor, or do some other small-scale incremental mini-project of the sort that once defined and built urban landscapes. My phone lines are open, she said; the small-scale incremental developers are not calling.

All of this is really complicated. My ultimate feeling is that we can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. A couple of carefully hammered out big projects can provide the sense of being on the upswing that attracts entrepreneurs and small developers. My understanding is that Flemington is already seeing that. Somerville, the county seat of neighboring Somerset County, saw that dynamic too. There, the local government sold new housing and mixed-use development with a simple but basically irrefutable argument: you can’t have a vibrant downtown without people.

These little towns mostly no longer have their own local industry to power a small local economy. They mostly no longer have something like Liberty Village, that brings in the needed people from the outside. Today, with the national economic and development climate we have right now, vitality has to come from the inside. I would rather see my hometown alive than preserved exactly as I remember it. I think more people are good, because I think people are good.

If I had not stumbled across urbanism five years ago, I would have inherited suburban NIMBYism. I would still be saying, as I remember saying in high school, that the people running Flemington’s large projects (that’s how long they’ve been under discussion) want to destroy the town.

I don’t, obviously, think that any more, and this essay is probably my best attempt to articulate exactly why. Read the whole thing!

Related Reading:

More on Pro-Family Urbanism

Pennsylvania’s Unique Housing Crisis

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