Those of you who aren’t on Twitter are fortunate to have missed a recent round of housing “discourse,” in which traditionally-ornamented urban townhouses were equated to fascism. Just another day on the internet, I guess.

But the issue at stake was actually an important one, one that all urbanists and housing advocates come across and must think about: do aesthetics in architecture matter? And do “ugly buildings” drive a meaningful amount of opposition to new housing or construction in general?

In City Journal, Patrick Brown argues that more attractive buildings would reduce or weaken NIMBY sentiment in housing fights, and smooth the path for more construction. The late British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton also argued that beauty in architecture could lessen opposition to new housing. It’s a fairly widely held view among conservative urbanists. (The website Curbed published a nuanced and informative piece on the question of architectural sameness or blandness, which is worth reading.)

However, judging from the reactions when this question comes up online, a good percentage of housing advocates vehemently disagree. At best, this subset considers the aesthetics issue irrelevant; at worst, they consider it to hint at something reactionary or right-wing. (Maybe Trump’s demand that all new federal buildings be built in classical styles didn’t help.) Some find it to be an unfair elevation of personal preferences to public policy: “Give us cornices, or people don’t get homes!” Others argue that anti-housing or anti-development sentiment has little to do with aesthetics or style in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about this, because I definitely do prefer ornamented or classically styled buildings to plain, boxy ones, and I’m also definitely not a fascist. It seems to me that part of the confusion here is that two things are true.

Number one: Lots of ordinary people really do earnestly prefer classical/traditional/old-style architecture. They dislike the mass-produced and impersonal look of so many modern buildings. These people very well might have a more positive impression of architects, new construction, or new housing in their communities if they liked the actual buildings more. I think this is pretty obvious.

Number two, however, is also true: Virtually none of the people who actually make an effort to stop new housing or construction—the folks I call “professional NIMBYs”—really care about aesthetics. Whatever their reasons are, the people who invest real time and money in stopping building projects tend to have pretty strongly held and immovable preferences.

When you come up against this enough—when you see the goalposts moved or contradictory arguments offered depending on the concessions made—you conclude that the actual arguments are not made in good faith. Yes, professional NIMBYs sometimes talk about beauty in architecture. Yes, they compare modern townhouses and office towers to East Berlin (I’ve personally seen this charge leveled twice!) But few of them will be moved if you swap siding for bricks or add a cornice.

Where I end up, then, is not that aesthetics don’t matter, that aesthetic concerns are classist, or any of the ideologically-tinged conclusions that some leftie housing advocates end up with. Rather, I think aesthetics obviously do matter, because art is an inseparable aspect of architecture, because everyone has to look at buildings, and because they do, after all, have to be built in some style.

But of the many reasons why this might matter, trying to convince professional NIMBYs is definitely not one of them. This is important to understand. And in a way, it’s liberating. It means that we can consider beauty not as a means to a political end, but as simply part of the process of building things. And let’s build more things, too.

Related Reading:

With Great Power

The Phylogeny of the Watch

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