Readers: I’ll be in Woodbridge, Virginia this Thursday, June 22 at 2pm at the Potomac Library (2201 Opitz Blvd, Woodbridge, VA 22191) to talk about land use, development, and traffic in outer suburbs. Stop by!

An article appeared in Slate recently titled “In Defense of the Lawn,” written by Ben Mathis-Lilley:

A crazy thing happened when I moved from the big city to a house in the suburbs a few years ago. I liked it!….

The unexpected thing that I liked, rather, was the physical responsibility of having a house and a yard.

I was not a handy person; I didn’t know anything about home or yard maintenance except for having mowed lawns as a kid. I was also conditioned to view the suburban home—and particularly its lawn—with skepticism and even contempt. The cultural and political literature is nearly unanimous on this front….

As for the lawn itself, whew. Grass yards are said to be terrible for the environment and especially problematic as a matter of zoning, but that’s only the most tangible of their faults. If a suburban lawn appears in a movie, you can be sure it’s to show that the character responsible for it is struggling under the weight of conformity—or, even worse, not struggling under it. Academic histories of the lawn treat its existence in North America as an imperialist pathology, the obsession of manic social climbers who have essentially been tricked by the lawn-care industry and its Mad Men–era advertisements into believing that the quality of their grass and the frequency with which it’s mowed are paramount expressions of wealth and social status. Lawn keeping is an unnatural impulse that “had to be taught” to Americans by the “arbiters of taste,” one historian has written….

Out here, four years later, when I finish mowing my lawn and stop to wipe the sweat off my forehead with the bottom of my shirt, and look at what I’ve done with satisfaction, I sometimes have to wonder what all these people are talking about.

Two things. First, this sort of writing is almost entirely a creation of the internet and social media. In this case it goes like this: take a boutique left-wing idea that most normal people don’t hold anyway; skewer it in a somewhat tendentious, exaggerated, navel-gazing manner; push your “unpopular opinion” out and wait for the snark and hate-clicks to pour in. Success. Rinse and repeat.

The details are different, but it reminds me of this article by Josh Barro about how grilling is bad. It’s one of these quasi-sincere, quasi-tongue-in-cheek pieces of writing whose primary purpose is not to seriously argue the purported argument. Unlike Mathis-Lilley, Barro got a rise out of conservatives, who were upset, or playing the role of upset people, that somebody would question the red-white-and-blue ritual of the summer cookout.

This noise, which takes up so much of our mental space, is a sort of simulacrum of discourse and argumentation. It isn’t real. If something disappears when you put your phone down, you can probably safely not think about it.

So that’s one thing. The other thing is this: I largely agree with Mathis-Lilley. In fact, I wrote a piece here—“Homeownership, Family, and Competing Responsibilities”—probing my own realization that despite my views on housing and land use, and my strong belief that there is no particular virtue or “responsibility” in homeownership, that I quite enjoy the feeling of being responsible for a house and a yard, and I do feel, in some ways, as if it has activated some “responsible” part of me that apartment living and then condo living rendered somewhat dormant:

Despite the manifest inconvenience of being on my own when it comes to maintenance and repairs, I like it. Part of the reason, I think, is that it’s an excuse to put down the phone and laptop and engage with the real world. Some of it, no doubt, is just the excitement of doing it all for the first time. But—dare I say it—some of it is almost a kind of gratitude at being forced to take responsibility for the building I live in: for having to expand my knowledge and mental world a little bit.

You could argue, of course, that this is itself a dilettante attitude. It’s all well and good to wax poetic about “tactile reality” and “stewardship” when you have no kids and no commute (and when even home improvement adventures are fodder for newsletter pieces). But if dealing with these problems competes with the limited time you have to be responsible to your family, then the truly responsible thing would be to outsource that “tactile reality” as much as you could, for a different and higher one, right? 

And yet—perhaps there is something to the idea that being forced to steward the stuff in your house, being forced to maintain it and be a part of its rhythm, in turn reinforces the virtue of responsibility in general. Specific house responsibilities might compete with specific domestic duties. Yet perhaps the character and habits that drive one also drive the other.

Now, I reject—forcefully, and completely—the implication that renters are somehow people of deficient character. I reject—forcefully, and completely—the notion that “homeownership cultivates responsibility” as a prescription or as an ideology. Yet, I think it might be true in my case, as a practical if not a moral matter. I’m not sure what to do with that.

Perhaps what is being awakened is not some virtue, but just a narrative that I learned as a kid, growing up in a house in the suburbs. Maybe Mathis-Lilley and I are mistaking our own half-forgotten memories for revelation.

And certainly, this is also true, from another piece I wrote on this broad question:

I think of one of my friends back home in New Jersey, who we visited earlier this summer. (That trip inspired these pieces, too.) He’s expressed the desire to own, rather than rent, his own place. But he’s also uninterested in a detached house. For as long as he’s been old enough to think about living on his own, he’s wanted a condo or a townhouse: a modest place to come home to, but something that wouldn’t be a money pit or a labor sink. He’s less interested in hosting dinner parties and backyard barbecues and patio nights; more interested in traveling and experiencing new things out and about.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I realized something. His parents, like mine, were the first people in their families to own a large detached house on a decent piece of land. (My parents’ house and my friend’s house growing up both have spacious front and back yards and a fair bit of forested land.) They were not from families that had been in America for generations; they were still climbing the ladder in the 1980s or early 1990s.

So for my parents and my friend’s parents, leaving the old city or first-ring suburb in their late 20s or early 30s and moving out to a big, recently built house on a piece of forested land in central New Jersey must have been absolutely breathtaking. I can’t imagine the feeling of pride and of being blessed that they must have had. It’s like seeing something new and amazing for the first time: like seeing Star Wars in the theater in 1977, but 100 times that.

But my friend didn’t ever know that feeling—and I’m not sure he or I can. We grew up in big houses with land. It was our baseline, our normal. My friend didn’t grow up dreaming of one day owning a property like this and achieving the fullness of the American Dream.

He grew up dredging the backyard frog pond and dragging around bags of corn to feed the deer. He grew up watching his dad commute two hours each way into Manhattan every weekday and then on weekends, labor away taking down and painting the shutters, power-washing the siding, repainting the deck, informally finishing the basement. He grew up seeing the burden of the housework and the maintenance, and the sheer amount of stuff that accumulates in a 2,000-square-foot house with a basement and an attic over 30 years. And he doesn’t want all of that.

You can call that selfish, I suppose. You can even call it ungrateful: How dare you not want the kind of life we sacrificed and labored to make possible for you? But it’s just…not. Sure, ownership might engender responsibility in the abstract. But when you’ve got a $15,000 bill to replace a roof the month after the sump pump fails and floods the basement, that’s a lot of things but it isn’t “responsibility.” What about making do with less? What about spending more time with family than on housework? What about stewarding things that simply matter more?

That last bit is key. It’s a good impulse to be, and to want to be, responsible for things. That’s not the error; the error is channeling that impulse into the care of a detached house with a lawn. Or, more precisely, socially privileging that particular expression of responsibility and turning it into the Platonic form of Responsibility.

But, because the internet is the internet and social media is social media, that’s not what Mathis-Lilley’s inevitable detractors said. Rather, they said things like:

“Slate is really putting out some urban policy stinkers the last few weeks.”

“Honestly a pretty stupid article.”

“You managed to write all those words without making a single point.”

TL;DR “sure lawns are absolutely horrible for the environment and zoning, but doesn't it feel kind of nice to have a project? That makes it worth it. Also lawn owners are an oppressed class somehow”

“This article kinda defends lawns the way people defend golf and it feels like it comes from the same place.”

“Yes, single family zoning is rooted in racism, is an environmental disaster, is a hallmark of capitalist alienation, and burdensome government regulations that make housing expensive. But have you considered I’m a middle class guy with vague cultural grievances?”

I don’t like this. And these comments are mostly from actual urbanists, not completely random Twitter accounts. And what it seems to me like they’re saying is, “No, you aren’t feeling a sense of responsibility, and if you are, well, that’s stupid.” Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

Now. I think their tone is a response to Matthis-Lilley’s tone. They read the article as navel-gazing and self-indulgent and they responded flippantly. Sort of, if you’re gonna be stupid, I’m gonna be stupid. And then, some of this stuff makes its way to normal people with no exposure at all to urbanist ideas—often via the game of telephone of right-wing media—and some of those normal people conclude, “Huh, these leftist ‘housing’ people really are socialists who want us to own nothing and be happy.”

I don’t do that, obviously. But nonetheless, I do think some urbanists have a blind spot for the fact that a lot of people do like having a little place of their own to take care of, and that that impulse is basically good. If you have the time for them, yard work and home maintenance are excuses to work with your hands and learn about things that have nothing to do with your job. A hobby does that, but you have to choose a hobby. House work presents itself to you.

Sometimes simply having to do something is refreshing and grounding. If, like me, you’re self-employed on the internet, you never really have to do any particular thing. It’s an immense privilege that I’m able make a living this way. But nonetheless, you need some grounding and some physicality.

Homeownership is one of the primary ways people satisfy these impulses in America, at least in the suburbs. Another big one, of course, is starting a family. And those two things are culturally fused together in a very deep way in this country. You can argue—again, as I do—that they shouldn’t be, and that cities can and should be family-friendly. But for now, they are.

Another thing that happens with all this is that, having observed urbanist Twitter apparently mock an article about ownership and responsibility, you might observe, as I did above, that some urbanists really do seem to view urbanism as merely one component of an anti-bourgeois ideology. There are here, in some respects, challenges not just to suburban land use but to a whole real or imagined American way of life. To which most real-life urbanists will say, “Nobody thinks that. Twitter isn’t real life.”

Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

It’s tempting to think, What do you mean, these people are saying this! It’s tempting to think they’re letting the cat out of the bag, and that all the seemingly reasonable people are either liars or dupes. Radical environmentalist David Brower supposedly once said, “The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.” I can guarantee you if you talk to conservatives about this stuff, one of them will trot out this quote, to imply that only the most radical voices are the honest ones.

It’s false, it’s toxic, and it’s a siren song. But nonetheless, for anyone on the internetnwho might think it is, urbanism cannot be a boutique ideology. Nobody politically owns property rights or entrepreneurship or a functional housing market or human settlements as they were built until the day before yesterday. These are not fronts or concealments for an agenda; they are the agenda, to the extent that such universals can even be called an “agenda.” But it’s mine, and it doesn’t come with socialism or side-eyes at homeowners or anything else.

Related Reading:

The Country and the City

In the Shade of the Maple

Main Street Supermarket

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