It’s been a controversial month on urbanist and housing Twitter—that’s an evergreen statement, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about, good, try to keep it that way—but one recent tussle particularly caught my attention.

It started with this tweet from a real-estate developer:

Bobby Fijan @bobbyfijan

Calling this "1039 homes" is either absurd semantics or lying Either way, it's a "trick" often employed by YIMBY's that I really hate. I'm convinced it's counter productive to the movement. Plays directly into NIMBY talking points Just look at the floorplans! ⬇️

M. Nolan Gray @mnolangray

A McDonald's turns into 1,039 homes in San Jose. (2017➡️2021) https://t.co/xnTfJpjbQc

September 8th 2022

1 Retweet53 Likes

The building in question is student housing, and the 1,039 figure refers to the number of beds, not the number of units. So the building houses 1,039 people. Does that mean it contains 1,039 homes?

The answer might feel obvious, but it’s not. This is not a dispute about facts. It’s a dispute about definitions. It’s actually quite fascinating and illuminating.

Another housing advocate wrote:

“The only thing strengthening the NIMBY talking points here is insisting that there is some objective definition of ‘home’ defined by the Proper Middle Class Committee. Homes are where people live. As much as college towns hate to admit it, students are people.

Of course Nolan’s tweet does not use the term in the same way some people do. That’s the point! No definition is static and YIMBY is about pushing people to think more creatively to get people housed.”

And another added, “There’s a common mentality (which NIMBYs often implicitly endorse) that where you live isn’t really a home if you’re not planning to reside there indefinitely (but at least a few years). In other words ‘transients’ like students don’t actually live in homes.”

Here’s another snippet of this overall exchange:

“Specificity and attention to detail ought to be OUR side. ADUs. Quad-plex. Single Family. Townhomes. Student housing beds. All needed. All different.”

Versus:

“Being rigid in adhering to traditionalist definitions instead of pushing people to think in terms of housing people has never and will never help.”

This reminds me of a tweet from Nolan Gray a few months ago where he referred to Rappahannock County, Virginia, a rural-exurban county at the edge of Northern Virginia, as “exurban DC.”

Rappahannock, or anything that far out, isn’t D.C., of course; it’s basically the country. It’s closer to Winchester and Charlottesville than it is to D.C. Here it is on the map:

But I think Gray knows that. What he meant was that, however much people living at these metro-area edges want it to be the case, they cannot secede from the city or the metro area and also reap its benefits. The exurbs are trying to have your cake and eat it too. By “DC” he means the whole economic area within the city’s pull, not the political borders. It’s a way of seeing a place, not a question of facts.

Similarly, whether or not you consider a two-bed student dorm room to be “two homes” depends on how you define “home”—what you understand it to be.

It also reminds me of the first time I saw the term “car storage.” I puzzled over it, wondering what the heck it meant. Then I realized, with annoyance, that it meant parking. I felt like a trick had been played on me, sort of. But being forced to explicitly see that what we call parking is in fact storage for cars probably changed how I see it, how it exerts an invisible negative energy on urban spaces, where space is at a premium. It drives home the visual of house floorplans where the garage is close to half the main level. I don’t think that way of looking at it would have ever occurred to me. Parking is obvious. It’s natural. It’s…parking.

This is really interesting stuff. It’s largely about language and perception.

I think some people who find housing advocates “radical” are actually picking up on this. Frankly, at times I find it a little uncomfortable to interrogate things I consider normal. To cast what feels natural as a specific viewpoint at all.

Growing up as a conservative, you learn to shy away from that kind of thinking, and view it with suspicion. Beware those people who want to redefine things as simple as “homes” and “parking,” your brain says. Who knows what they’ll redefine next?

But it’s not really redefining, is it? Because if a building that houses 1,039 people isn’t 1,039 homes, then what is it? Doesn’t it follow, then, that students don’t live in homes, and that their interest in being housed, even if just for one or two or three or four years, is unimportant?

Maybe the misfortune of being precariously housed makes this easier to understand, especially when you’ve done nothing wrong and made no poor decisions. Consider, for example, all the students in California who sleep in cars or otherwise live in very suboptimal situations, because enrollment simply exceeds reasonably affordable housing anywhere near many campuses.

In some ways, YIMBYs are not the market technocrats they’re often painted as, but folks making a deeply moral plea that housing is not just a wonky issue, but a fundamental and human one.

Yes, you might be most likely to see it in a house, but think of the little plaque that says “Home is where the heart is.” Maybe it’s that simple.

Related Reading:

What Housing Crisis?

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

Rooted or Units?

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