A few weeks ago I spent the whole day—8:30am to about 7:30pm—in Washington, D.C., for a conference on affordable housing, and some welcome drinks and mingling after the last session. I met a bunch of architects, including one woman from the firm Torti Gallas—whose offices I was scheduled to visit the next day! (They built King Farm, a very nice New Urbanist-style housing development which I wrote about here.)

I met a young woman from Syria, who came here during her country’s civil war, and who works on affordable housing projects around the world. And I met a uniformed naval officer who was interested in housing because he was involved in shipbuilding, and nobody who worked in the shipyard could afford to live in the community where the shipyard was located. Affordable housing is a national security issue.

It’s such a small world that I met someone I actually know in real life there—who was also going to another event the next week that I was going to. It’s neat being somebody in a small world. But it’s also really nice to grow that world.

It’s so important to bring this all down to earth. Housing is about buildings, but it’s not about buildings; it’s about people. And frankly, a conference attended by a couple hundred people who already get this isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. For me, it was more about getting out than about the content of the speakers and panels.

I took a bunch of notes and I’ll probably do another more substantive piece, at least, based on or inspired by them. But I’ll say this: the organizers did a good job of representing the breadth of housing advocacy, from socialist-esque anti-gentrification voices to libertarian-ish YIMBY voices, along with some technocratic 15-minute city stuff, traditionalist New Urbanism stuff, etc. In other words, it was a good picture of the landscape.

But there are some real tensions if not outright contradictions between some of these factions, and I and other attendees I spoke with wished there had been a little more litigating of those tensions. You can’t have one speaker denounce people making a profit off of housing and another speaker talk about deregulation.

Or, I guess, you can.

Maybe it was valuable to have some of these market-skeptical voices included, though, because it’s very easy for me to forget, as a conservative who pretty much falls in with the pro-market YIMBYs, that a lot of people really do think developers are bad, greedy people, that neighborhood change means not only gentrification but actual displacement, and that public or social housing should be a much bigger part of the picture. I’m not used to sparring with folks who hold these views; the skeptics I run into are more likely to be the ones who think we want to take their cars away and herd them into overcrowded, crime-ridden cities.

People who hold that kind of skepticism are not represented at all in a conference like this. The ones who think the COVID lockdowns were the test run for 15-minute cities, and that the left hates homeownership and wants everybody to own nothing and be dependent on the government. Or, like the French guy on Twitter, who think “walkable” is code for “don’t have kids.” Yet you need to be aware of this sentiment, and even try to understand, if it’s possible to do so, what actual beliefs or preferences underlie it. Everybody does not agree that we have a housing crisis, that housing should be more affordable, that communities should be more diverse and inclusive, or that cities are good. And at least some people with these views will need to be won over. This is what I think about when I’m surrounded by people who mostly agree with me.

So even being out in person with people I agree with is being in a bubble, but it’s less of a bubble than sitting on the internet. It’s something everybody in this field should do, often.

Related Reading:

Gala Night

Slow Tech

The Real World

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