In my latest piece over at Resident Urbanist, I discuss two related issues: one, the singular placeness of a metro area writ large, and two, the dynamic where people at the edges of the metro area oppose or resist development in general rather than explicitly supporting growth in the core and inner suburbs.

I introduce those two related ideas here:

The point is, in political terms, a metro area is a whole bunch of localities, some of which may not even see themselves as belonging to the metro area. But in geographic and economic terms, a metro area is a place.

This is intuitive or even obvious to urbanists and housing advocates, who think about how job markets and housing are related, or about the interplay between restrictive zoning in settled communities and exurban sprawl. This is not, however, intuitive or obvious to a lot of what I call “regular” people. We all see red-hot housing markets and sprawl and long commutes or inconvenient and poorly funded public transit. Most of us never think very deeply about any of it, or how it goes together. It can be easy to see all of these inconveniences are arguments against building anything anywhere.

I see this, for example, in my hometown, in semi-rural central Jersey. I’ve heard plenty of grumbling about the crowded places folks out here left, or about the new construction going on there now. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone express a regional understanding of any of this, however. Something like, We’re way out from the city over here, we don’t want all this development. But there are places where it makes more sense for it to go, and those places should get denser. Instead, if I hear anything resembling this, it’s more like First they ruined the places closer to the city, and now they’re trying to come all the way out here and ruin this place!

Some of this comes from outdated ideas about “the city”—in 1970, some of this was understandable. Not quite so much today. Some of it is a suspicion that arises out of genuine confusion or lack of understanding, coupled, perhaps, with not having braved a house search in a long time, and/or coupled with an assumption that nobody really affirmatively wants dense urban living. In other words, a lot of people implicitly hold the idea that density is a kind of conspiracy. But density is not a conspiracy or a plot, or even a thing we “invented” or necessarily plan. It’s simply the logical response to escalating land prices.

Most of our housing problems come down to the fact that we effectively prohibit this natural mechanism whereby escalating land prices and decreasing available land lead to more dense housing. Of course, cities have always growth both horizontally and vertically. But in widely suppressing the densification of existing residential areas, we have effectively prohibited urban growth as anybody in human history would have recognized it.

I wrote:

We have to break both the process and the narrative here: that development and density are like miasmas which spread inexorably further and further out from urban cores, chasing down people who only want a little space and privacy and ease of getting around. The irony is that this happens precisely because the urban cores and inner suburbs in desirable metro areas almost always have extremely high housing prices, and build far less than they naturally would without restrictive zoning, minimum parking requirements, and other land-use regulations.

When the city isn’t allowed to fully urbanize, and when old suburbs a stone’s throw from the city are locked by zoning into their initial 20th century patterns, development has to radiate outwards. For every person who affirmatively chooses an exurban, there is a person priced out of a more urban lifestyle. Every unit of urban housing unbuilt is a unit of exurban housing going up in a place that arguably should remain quiet, quaint, and “left alone.”

In other words, properly urban cities work in tandem with true countrysides and small towns. The folks out at the exurban edges and in the old cities that are becoming engulfed by sprawl should be urban YIMBYs rather than across-the-board development skeptics.

The response I get to this is sometimes that a lot of people do affirmatively want to leave the city, so they wonder how much sprawl we could really leave unbuilt even if we did let cities grow much more. The answer is that it isn’t a 1:1 ratio precisely: obviously some people want suburban/exurban living, and will accept or tolerate whatever its downsides may be for the relative peace and quiet. But one reason people move far out is to get more house for their money. That would make less sense if housing were cheaper and more abundant closer to the urban cores.

A closely related objection is that we would still have the typical “rings”: urban core, less-dense urban neighborhoods, older inner suburbs, middle suburbs, and sparsely populated rural-exurban areas. Yes, we would. But that whole set of rings would take up less physical space, engulfing and transforming fewer outlying non-urbanized areas. Put it this way: if we’d done this from the start in Northern Virginia, Fairfax County might still have a couple of dairy farms or fruit orchards. City folks might still be able to quickly access nature. Inner-suburban families might be 15 minutes from the country and its unique landscape and enterprises, rather than 30-45 minutes away.

But the bigger answer is that people are not infinite, and therefore housing demand is not infinite. Again, there’s this tendency to view very hot housing markets with a vague suspicion: what are all these people doing here, anyway? Who’s really buying up all these houses? There’s this idea that houses are like shares of stock, that there can never be “enough” of them. The answer is that people do in fact want to live in expensive places, because high prices indicate high demand. We have simply underbuilt across the board for so long that the status quo of not building feels normal.

(Here’s something to think about: even in shrinking cities, we probably need to build housing. Part of why those cities lose population is because the housing stock is old and deteriorating, and not competitive with newer and more distant housing in the same metro area.)

But the major point here, to recap, is that if you live in the country, or in a small town, and you dread the approaching urban sprawl, and you don’t want the city to come to you—and if you really care about this beyond grumbling about it—you should think about this as a regional problem, find a way to join with housing advocates in the city and inner suburbs, and affirmatively support growth in the places that are closer to jobs and amenities and which are already heavily built up.

The NIMBYs in these places are not your allies, simply because they don’t like development too. They haven’t earned your solidarity. They’re resisting natural urban growth in places that would long since have been more deeply urbanized in the absence of restrictive zoning, and in doing so have contributed to unnatural urban sprawl far further out than it would naturally have gone.

Sometimes you’ll hear a moralizing argument to the effect of, You may *want* to live in the city, but you can’t always get what you want. True, but if you don’t like the city, you should have a self-interested argument for its growth and success. Let every person who wants the urban life enjoy it, so that they aren’t priced out only to “bring the city to you.” There’s this idea that people move away from the city and then want to turn their new home into the place they left behind. The solution is to make it more affordable for people with those lifestyle preferences to live in places that truly meet them.

I’ve heard specific examples along these lines, like this one I recounted in a previous piece:

One member [of a Northern Virginia housing advocacy group] told us about a couple his family is friends with. They had to leave Northern Virginia and ended up all the way in Southern Maryland. (That’s not a generic term with malleable borders, like North Jersey; it’s the southernmost mainland region of the state, out along the Chesapeake.) It probably shouldn’t be part of the D.C. area, but our housing crunch has pulled it into that orbit. You pretty much have to drive everywhere there. There’s not all that much to do. Local old-timers don’t like the influx of urbanites. Urbanites don’t want to get pushed all the way out there. Local housing policy closer to the core forces these outcomes nobody wants.

Sometimes the stumbling block is the fear that urbanists are interested not in the thriving of cities, but in turning every place into the city: that they hold a doctrine that should be generally opposed, and not a set of particular, more or less applicable, policy prescriptions. Some of us may sometimes talk this way, and sometimes you get a nut on Twitter who says “there shouldn’t be any suburbs” or “rural people are bad,” but this is not representative. Nor are there enough people to urbanize all developed land in America.

I have confidence that if we pull down barriers to housing growth everywhere, that where we end up building and where we end up not building will basically make sense.

At least, a lot more sense than what we’re doing now.

Related Reading:

The Country and the City

What Housing Crisis?

Metro Areas Are Places

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