The Trouble With QUIMBY

Every so often I read posts on the new urbanist-dominated PRO-URB listserv saying: “I’m not for NIMBY or YIMBY*, I’m for QUIMBY — Quality Urbanism In My Back Yard!”  After reading this sort of thing a month or two ago, I asked listserv members what they meant by “Quality Urbanism.”

Needless to say, there were a wide variety of responses. Some people focused on details of urban design; for example, buildings dominated by depressing blank walls are not “quality” if you value walkable surroundings. One person argued that every dwelling should have a certain number of windows to facilitate sunlight. Some other people argued that new buildings should be the same height as existing buildings.

This diversity of responses exhibits one problem with QUIMBY; quality is inherently subjective, and different people value different things. Having said that, there are certainly types of streets and buildings that I do not consider to be “quality” urbanism. I don’t particularly like blank walls, and I think buildings surrounded by parking make walking less safe and comfortable. So it seems to me that some versions of QUIMBY might be a useful guide for individual architects and developers. However, I'm not sure how much I want these sorts of aesthetic judgments to affect zoning; it seems to me that any idea of “quality” needs to be weighed against the risks of making housing more costly. 

Some posters responded with the idea that "quality" means that new buildings should never be taller than their older neighbors. I suspect that many people, even skilled professional architects and planners, believe that the lion of taller buildings can never lie with the lamb of smaller buildings without disrupting the tree-lined tranquility of residential streets. 

But I have lived in (and visited) more than one street where tall and small buildings coexisted.  For example, take a look at 108 East 38th Street in Manhattan on Google Maps (where I lived from 2017-19).  This street has one twenty-four story building and numerous brownstones; the larger building does not prevent East 38th from being a quiet, tree-lined street. And when my wife and I honeymooned in Chicago, we visited Astor Street in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, where old brownstones and newer, taller buildings seemed to coexist amicably.

But even if I found such a mixture of buildings aesthetically offensive for some reason, it seems to me that such matters of taste should be outweighed by other concerns. Americans get married later in life (if at all) than they did 60 years ago, and longer life spans mean that more parents are likely to become “empty nesters” without children in the house. This means that household sizes have become smaller over time, which means that cities need more houses and apartments to serve the same number of people. So even in a slow-growth city like Chicago, more housing is necessary to accommodate the population.

But if cities can never build housing that is taller than existing buildings, built-out neighborhoods can never change to meet increased demand for housing — which in turn means that the citywide supply of housing can never expand to meet changes in demand. And that in turn has contributed to some of the economic pathologies of the past 30 years: rents have risen, forcing some Americans to live on the streets and in homeless shelters, while middle-class Americans are forced to live in cheaper suburbs or even move to a cheaper part of the country. New Urbanists oppose placeless sprawl, but the housing status quo creates more sprawl as Americans are forced into suburbia or into the car-dependent Sunbelt to find affordable housing, which in turn leads to more demand and higher housing costs in those places. New Urbanists tend to worry about car-related pollution, but when people move to car-dependent places they create more pollution. 

Is a streetscape of homogenous buildings really worth the homelessness, sprawl and pollution caused by the American housing crisis? I think not. 

Some QUIMBY supporters may dismiss such concerns by claiming that new housing won’t affect housing prices. But if you believe that housing supply doesn’t affect rents, your basic economic assumptions are no different from those of the NIMBYs you claim to be different from (i.e. that new housing provides no social value because housing costs are not affected by the law of supply and demand). And as I have argued many types on this blog, this assumption is wrong: otherwise, why would some places be more expensive than others?**



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*NIMBY= Not In My Back Yard (in the context of this post, generally used to describe people who don’t want new housing for human beings near them); YIMBY= Yes In My Back Yard (generally used to describe people who support such housing, and favor reducing or eliminating the layers of government regulation prohibiting such housing).

** I realize that there are many non-supply explanations of housing costs — but nearly all of them, to the extent that they make any sense at all, are ways of saying “demand matters too.” For example, if you believe that inequality leads to rich people bidding up the cost of housing, which in turn leads to higher rents, you are essentially saying “housing got more expensive because demand increased.” But if demand affects the cost of housing, it logically follows that supply affects the cost of housing as well.