Take a look at this image:

This is the town of Clinton, New Jersey, in Hunterdon County. I grew up in Flemington, the county seat, and Clinton was the other nearby small town. Clinton is a small but cute and surprisingly vibrant town—more so, at least for now, than Flemington, though I think and hope that is changing. (I wrote about Flemington here.)

Now do you notice anything in that image?

Well, look at this:

And now this:

The first image is a new typical 5-over-1 apartment building called View 22, which replaced a defunct A&P supermarket from the 1970s.

The second image is the core of Clinton’s old downtown/business district.

And these two things are almost exactly the same size.

Is that a problem? Well, I tend to think it’s not ideal. Here’s half the building out my window (Google Maps doesn’t know it’s completed yet.) It’s very, very big, and it dwarfs everything around it. At the same time, it isn’t mixed use and it doesn’t include public space. (There were supposed to be a few stores in the development, but as far as I can tell retail isn’t even mentioned on their website.) It is not an ideal form for housing demand to take in a classic small town—which is to say, a low-intensity but genuinely urban setting.

View 22’s slogan is “Clinton’s new suburban oasis,” which is a funny slogan for a huge building fronting a little commercial strip and a five-minute walk from a lovely, classic downtown.

I would say—though many NIMBYs would tolerate these other examples—that a big-box warehouse store or a McMansion development are symptoms of the same phenomenon. This goes far beyond aesthetics. Yes, people will call some or all of these things “ugly” or “hideous” or “soulless” or what have you. But what really distinguishes them is not their style, or size per se, but their scale. Not just physical size, but the scale at which they operate as enterprises.

When people say developments like this are “too big” or “don’t fit in,” they are really pointing at something real. The DNA—legal, commercial, cultural—that underlies a small town is very different from the DNA of these large projects.

Let me put it this way: I would absolutely love to see that massive parcel broken up into lots resembling the underlying subdivision of Clinton’s old downtown, and populated by the same sort of distributed pattern—a pattern, but one filled out by dozens of individuals and dozens of enterprises, not one single commercial landlord or developer. In other words, when we build in existing communities like Flemington or Clinton, I wish we would build more town.

Now, some folks would oppose that too, no doubt. But just because NIMBYs oppose everything, that doesn’t mean everything is equally good or desirable. It’s tempting to treat NIMBY opposition as a sort of reverse divining rod: if they’re against it, it must be good!

This, I think, explains a lot of the dysfunction and suspicion in our politics. It is, in turn, a factor in why a lot of folks out in a place like Clinton or Flemington oppose almost everything. Those left-wing European communist bike people want this, so it must be bad!

In either (or any) incarnation, this is a bad impulse. A broken clock is right twice a day; the worst person in the world has a good point. There’s a reason these expressions exist.

But then the question is, what form should new housing and development take? Because it has to take some form. It simply isn’t true that some places can be locked in amber and pretend they are “full” or that their evolution as places that real people live in has reached an eternal endpoint.

We don’t build “more town” these days for a number of reasons, and I guess I view massive projects like View 22 as stopgaps on the way to more broadly restoring property rights and distributed enterprise. I want to build, I want to let ordinary people build, and I think when we permit that, it will happen a lot more than many people think.

So I don’t oppose things like View 22, but I don’t exactly favor them. More precisely, I want a land use regime in which the incentives no longer point to projects this physically big and commercially concentrated.

Related Reading:

It’s the Scale (Is It?)

There’s a Small Hotel

What a Strip Mall Can Be

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