Earlier this week, I wrote the first part of this post, elaborating on some of the points I made in an article about Somerville, New Jersey’s big new housing projects and downtown revitalization in City Journal. Find that article here, and the part 1 of this post here.

There are a few photos in the original article, but I’d like to share more here, from my October trip to New Jersey. (That trip inspired a number of posts, including, in my opinion, this very cool one.)

Anyway, Somerville has a population of roughly 12,000, so it’s a small town that’s almost a small city. It definitely feels a little more urban and energetic than a lot of smaller New Jersey towns. It has a rail connection to New York City, so that makes it an obvious place for a certain amount of new construction and population growth.

However, one thing that interests me is that the architecture in many big city neighborhoods, in places like Somerville, and in smaller New Jersey towns like the quaint (and very NIMBY) 4,500-strong Flemington, are really not all that different. These are settlements of different sizes—obviously—but they’re different more in degree than in kind.

Take a look at this snapshot of Flemington’s Main Street, for example.

There’s really no way you could tell this is a rural-ish small town and not a larger urban neighborhood. Somerville is just a little bit more intense than this, and has more of this.

So here’s Somerville. These are classic buildings on or near Main Street. Remember that the population was considerably smaller—less than half—when most of this was built. The surrounding area was also considerably less developed, meaning that the contrast between the urban town center and the countryside was greater. This is a level of urban intensity that was entirely normal to the average American in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is exactly the kind of urban fabric where we should be channeling growth, whether expanding the old grid or replacing aging or damaged buildings or vacant or underused lots. That this approach is relatively uncommon just doesn’t make sense. And neither, in my view, does it make sense for people who already live in these little cities to want to stop them from being more like they already are.

But Somerville, it turns out, is not particularly NIMBY, and the municipal government did a good job shepherding recent projects through. And most of all, the economic success of downtown has demonstrated that more people are not a burden, but an opportunity.

Here’s what the new construction looks like. I’m not a fan of the last one here, but the others fit in well enough. And this large one is not replacing older buildings, but the footprint taken up previously by an aging strip mall. (The rest of that old footprint is going to be another apartment building, still under construction.) This is restoring and enhancing the streetscape, not detracting from it.

And here are a few more pictures from the old portions of downtown, including a small pedestrianized side street.

Look at this tiny pizzeria nestled in the space between two larger buildings!

The big high-level point here is that Americans are largely accustomed to viewing places like this protectively, almost zero-sum: they’re great places because they’re exclusive and growing slowly or not at all. In other areas, we understand that people are a resource. Here, we have a blind spot, a notion that you can have great places without people. This is not a question of policy, per se. It’s a whole way of looking at what it means to build and sustain great places that work for everyone and are worth calling home.

New Jersey’s famously unfriendly reputation jibes with this kind of NIMBYism. But if even New Jerseyans can learn to love growth, can’t anybody?

Related Reading:

The Rest of Staunton

Can An Urbanist Own a House?

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