Yesterday I wrote a long-ish piece here about the way we talk about cities and urban issues, and how turning this stuff into a culture war is basically barking up the wrong tree, sort of a logical fallacy. It’s the wrong frame/lens/etc., and it obscures the fact that we’re ultimately talking about real, hard, practical issues that impact real people. In that piece I wrote this:

“Safe streets, more housing, and useful public transit are bad because liberals like them” is a position that some people take, largely, I think, because they’re abstracting these things out of the real world. Once you see them as practical, on-the-ground questions, all of this resentment and nonsense just kind of evaporates.

There’s a lot more there. Check out the whole piece if you missed it.

And on Twitter the other day I expressed something similar:

When you have no idea what struggles and practical problems people face, you abstract their struggles into mere opinions or attitudes. And you just completely, totally miss the issue.

For a lot of NIMBY types who are well off, the human aspect of all this never really hits them. It just doesn’t register that owning one, let alone two cars is, for many people, a difficult financial choice, or an impossibility. They must just *intellectually hate cars.*

That’s the fallacy that gets you to bugs/pods/communism/Agenda 21 etc. That blind spot that assumes nobody other than the truly poor has real reasons for not being a two-car, single-family-household, and that therefore some malign anti-American ideology must lurk under that choice.

I’ve been thinking about all of this because of a tweet from a young conservative columnist which made the rounds a couple of weeks ago and, as expected and perhaps intended, got a lot of dunks from urbanists.

She said that every man should own a car, so that he could take a girl back to her place after a date, and basically that she saw owning a car as a marker of maturity. When pressed that it might not make sense to own a car in a big city, she responded that it’s a matter of principle.

The first consideration I can see (though it’s still just a preference). And it strikes me as the kind of thing a young suburbanite might say, who was raised being told that cities are dangerous, warned not to take public transit, etc. (Yes, I know women face increased potential for harassment on transit, but I’m talking about a higher level of paranoia about cities that conservatives often express.)

And I’ve seen plenty of tweets about meeting dates via public transit, or taking a bike, or what have you. Some people like to drive, some don’t; some women want a man with a car, some want a man who walks and bikes. Who cares? The tendency to turn what are really just personal preferences into ideologies is a mistake, albeit a common one that all of us can make.

But the second bit—the notion that the actual usefulness of a car in a big city doesn’t matter because it’s a matter of principle—is beyond preference. It’s rather an example of abstracting these issues in a way that rarely ever reveals anything useful or interesting. I’ve heard this argument more than once—driving is good because it forces you to take active responsibility for where you’re going, whereas public transit just passively takes you there. I guess I basically think this is a non sequitur; it’s like saying tigers are better than leopards because stripes are Good.

It reminds me of some of the COVID commentary back in 2020, that seemed to be way up in the sky, as if COVID-19 were not an actual disease killing actual people, spreading in certain identifiable ways. I see a very strong potential for talk about “virtue” and “principle” and what-not to simply obscure the actual issues at hand.

I’m beginning to understand, I think, where this comes from; how it’s possible for someone to think owning a car is a matter of principle (as if you don’t actually have to park the car somewhere, pay for it, move it through city gridlock, etc.), or that renting is morally inferior to homeownership. These are people who likely grew up affluent, in detached houses and with two cars, and probably most people they knew did as well. I grew up like that.

For them—and at one time, for me—that is just the default. As kids, we had no idea how much work or money it took to maintain that lifestyle. It just felt automatic, and a huge reason urbanism, housing, and transportation are becoming mainstream issues is because my generation grew up and realized our default was no longer the default, and for many no longer even possible. This is the grain of truth, I think, in the critique that YIMBY is an upper-middle-class movement.

So when you grow up with a house and a car feeling automatic, it never occurs to you that these are choices: big, onerous financial choices, which may not make sense or be within reach for a lot of people. That skews your psychology, so as I suggested, you think people without cars must not like them, as opposed to having some real reason. My family had a real reason for owning two cars too, because you needed them to get around where I grew up. But it was so automatic I never gave it any thought. I don’t think I ever imagined life without a car.

Basically, it’s a kind of luxury, a privilege, to be able to think that very expensive lifestyle choices are automatic things, and to abstract them into questions about principle, or deservingness, or however else people talk about housing and transportation.

In other words, what I’m saying is that most of this discourse comes from people who are well off and for whom owning a car has never really felt like a financial decision at all. I think that’s a big root of our culture war abstractions. Always, always, always remember we’re talking about real people with real, practical motives and reasons and struggles.

I realize this is a little bit rough/stream of consciousness, so leave a comment, elaborate, disagree! I want to hear your thoughts.

Related Reading:

What If I Want to Walk?

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

Urbanism and Perception

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