By Christopher Legras

https://allaspectreport.com/2024/08/07/the-yimbys-are-wrong-suburbs-are-better/

The YIMBYs are coming for your neighborhood

Some of the most powerful figures and institutions in big finance, big business, big tech, and big philanthropy, who collectively refer to themselves as “YIMBYs,” for “yes in my back yard,” are on a mission to radically transform the United States. The YIMBYs central world view is that this country is a paragon of wickedness, if not evil, and it’s high time we took our collective medicine. It’s a quasi-religious belief that the way a majority of Americans live remains primarily, if not entirely, a result of historic racial discrimination and exclusion, in which slavery and segregation play the role of original sins that must be cleansed through sacrifice.

In particular, YIMBYs hear “single family neighborhood” as a dog whistle for racial segregation. Never mind the more than 20 million black Americans who own houses, the 15 million Latinos, or the 11 million Asians. Never mind the millions of mixed families who own their homes. Never mind the tens of millions more Americans of every conceivable background who aspire to homeownership and work hard every single day to realize that dream. YIMBYland is a world of simplistic, solipsistic dichotomies, like houses = racist. Single family and suburban communities, moreover, are unaffordable to all but the privileged, not to mention environmentally icky. So they say.

The 15 minute city, coming to your town

So, what’s the pitch? The “15 minute city” will be an idealized Utopia in which people can access all of life’s needs, from work and education to shopping, dining, exercise, health care, recreation, and socializing, all within a convenient quarter hour walk, bicycle ride, or transit trip. When people want to spend time in nature they won’t jump in the car and head to a hike in the mountains, a swim at the coast, or an adventure to the outerlands. They’ll just amble a few blocks to the local city park, where they can take a docile stroll through domesticated landscaping, or maybe just sit on a bench and take in the view of endless rows of apartment buildings.

If you’re one of the 270 million people who grew up roaming the seemingly endless hills, valleys, streams and parks of suburban, exurban, and rural America, even the gleaming jewel in the country’s crown of public parks, New York’s Central Park, is kind of meh. A swath of landscaped, city maintained open space surrounded by steel and cement towers. For those who grew up there, it’s cherished. And that’s great. For non-urban dwellers, it’s alien (by the same token, I’ve known plenty of New Yorkers who scratch their heads at Californians’ love of tromping off into the countryside). And unfortunately these days, like so many public spaces in the country, on a ramble you’ll be hit in the face with odors of marijuana, cigarettes, urine, and excrement. This is what qualifies as nature in urban environments.

I know where I’d rather roam. Left: Santa Monica Mountains, Los Angeles. Right: Central Park, New York. File photos.

The same goes for most urban parks, from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to Chicago’s Millennium Park and the Boston Common. All in their own way attempt to preserve and replicate nature. The results are living, breathing uncanny valleys. They have more in common with the Star Trek Holodeck than actual natural places. A few retain some wild character, like Seattle’s Discovery Park or L.A.’s Griffith Park. The majority, though, are a plunge into the uncanny. It’s nature as artifice, flora and fauna distilled through years of city planning department meetings. Be sure only to include “native” plant species! These are the YIMBY ideals. No more driving your polar bear murdering death machine to your favorite hiking trail or beach, peasant. You leave those carbon emissions to the private jet setting, multiple estate owning elites (the vast majority of whom, of course, call themselves environmentalists).

Again, I know where I’d rather live. Left, suburban San Anselmo, California. Right, the “dynamic living environment” of Manhattan. File photos.

They are particularly offended by any notions of tradition or history. In this they have much in common with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Guards, fanning throughout the country to expurgate the “old ways” that stand between the present and the Utopian future. Love your single family neighborhood? You reactionary revanchist! You’re probably a secret white nationalist on top of it, even if you’re black. It’s an odd, grasping, dismal sort of militancy. YIMBY social media feeds are full of combative, even threatening imagery. You’ll see a surprising number of references to guns and violence, aggressive imagery repurposed from movies and video games.

It’s peculiar to be so enraged at people for daring to care about where they live.

Not that it matters: The incoherent twaddle is just glossolalia that obscures the YIMBYs true agenda: You will live where and how we want you to, work and go to school where we want you to, shop, exercise, and socialize where we want you to, and you’ll get around how we want you to. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s right out there for all to see, like in the image below from a YIMBY Twitter/X feed. That’s San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district, currently a community of low density single family homes, duplexes, and fourplexes. If the YIMBYs have their way it will become a miniature Hong Kong. And they want to do this everywhere.

The YIMBYs’ vision for San Francisco’s Outer Sunset. From a Twitter/X.

Room to roam

By the time I was 11 or 12 years old, I was exploring the hills around my family’s suburban home with my dogs almost every day. I would stray miles from home and only return, grudgingly, when my mother’s dinner call echoed across the canyon. Over the years I discovered a network of sandstone caves just down the street, explored the ruins of an old house at the top of the street, collected dozens of fossils, and blazed my own trails crisscrossing the glen. I palled around with coyotes and red tail hawks and rattlesnakes. I carried a wrist rocket slingshot and a pocket full of rocks in case of danger. Sometimes I explored with neighbors and school friends, often I was on my own. Other times I rode my bicycle or skateboard down our quiet residential streets, never once concerned about getting hit by a car.

Those adventures imbued me with a sense of freedom and self reliance. Tens of millions of other Gex Xers, their parents, and their kids, of all backgrounds, had and continue to have similar experiences. These kinds of experiences go back millennia. They are essential.

New Yorkers and Chicagoans have their own versions of those fond childhood memories. Maybe riding the subway to visit friends in different parts of town, walking on their own a few noisy blocks to a movie theater or shopping mall. Visiting city parks, and hanging out on their stoop watching the world go by. For people who want that lifestyle for themselves and their children, those cities and others are ready to welcome them. But, again, that’s not how 80% of Americans live or want to live. One of the greatest things about this country is that people have a staggeringly array of choices when it comes to where and how they live. This is the singular feature of life in this country the YIMBYs most despise. Again, it’s rather curious for people to be that choleric about such a wonderful thing. It’s like hating sunshine, or puppies.

The fact is, suburbs are better by almost every measure of human happiness. Don’t take my word for it, listen to those 270 million Americans who live in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. Listen to the more than 2 million people who’ve moved out of the country’s 25 largest urban cores since 2020. Listen to the millions of New Yorkers who have moved to California over the decades. At least half of my friends, colleagues, and neighbors are from out of state, many from eastern cities. In contrast, in my entire life I have known precisely two people who moved from California to New York City. Two — and both were originally from New York.

As I write in my upcoming book, A Confederacy of Zombies, the history of humankind is a history of movement. Over the course of Homo sapiens’ 300,000 years on this planet, our instinct for movement took us from our southern African birthplace in the Makgadikgadi pan in modern Botswana to every corner of the planet, and eventually beyond. German historian Klaus J. Bade coined a term for this central aspect of human history: Homo migrans. In a 2003 paper he wrote, “‘Homo migrans’ has existed just as long as ‘Homo sapiens’, as moving from place to place is a condition of human existence – similar to births, diseases and deaths…. Therefore, the history of migrations is a part of general history and can only be understood in the context of general history.”

Over the last two years, California has lost population for the first time in its history. A key reason is lack of mobility, whether it be economic or physical. As Golden State cities become more like Manhattan, Homo migrans are voting with their feet. They’re not moving from L.A. to New York, Chicago, Boston, or other dense urban cores. They’re moving to Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami. Cites that look more like L.A. these days than L.A. does. Those sprawling suburban cities are attracting new residents from all over. In other words, people are moving from YIMBY cities to normal cities. Places where they can move around however they see fit, where they aren’t constrained by anti-car policies.

 To YIMBYs, this is not progress, it’s “environmental violence.” File images.

The canary in the coal mine, or the seagull in the offshore wind farm

I often cite Santa Monica as a case study and cautionary tale. The canary in the proverbial coal mine, though here in 2024 maybe the better augur is the seagull in the offshore wind farm. Both are doomed. Starting in the mid-1990s the city government embarked on a program of transit-oriented densification. Today, the city’s downtown resembles Manhattan that’s been shot by a shrink ray. There isn’t so much as a dog park, though if you’d like to take your chances with criminal vagrants you can stroll through the city’s central park, Tongva Park. Just don’t visit too long after sunset.

“I shall call him Mini Me.” Left, Midtown Manhattan. Right, downtown Santa Monica. File photos.

There are five main areas in the once sleepy, 7.8 square mile beachside town. Downtown covers roughly two square miles, centered on the Santa Monica Pier and the Third Street Promenade. North of Wilshire Boulevard and east of Lincoln Boulevard are blocks of middle and upper middle class single family homes and small apartment buildings. North of Montana is a wealthy enclave of multimillion dollar houses and estates. Finally, south of the 10 and east of 17th Street is the last remaining enclave of working class and low income residents.

Guess where a majority of the vacant units are, the ones offering months of free rent and other perks just to get warm bodies in the door, the ones increasingly dependent on Airbnb and other short term arrangements? They’re in the newly built, dense, transit oriented downtown. According to some estimates many new build apartment complexes are 15%, 25%, possibly even 50% vacant. In contrast to the cheerful artists’ renderings on the corporate housing websites you’ll see few people out walking, and even fewer riding bicycles. You won’t see social gatherings and communal spaces and organic gathering places. You definitely won’t see young families.

You will see a lot of concrete, empty city buses, dying trees, and curiously desultory appearing 20- and 30-somethings who will live there just long enough to save up for a down payment on a house. You’ll see a lot of homeless people. You’ll see a lot of dubious characters. You’ll see a lot of graffiti, litter, and not infrequently piles and puddles of human waste. At all hours of the days and nights you’ll hear mentally deranged homeless people screaming at demons only they can see. And the sirens. Dear God, the sirens.

“We swear, living here is awesome!”

Santa Monica’s YIMBY urban planning failed because no one wants to pay a premium to live in a hamster cage in a community of soul-deadingly indistinguishable stack and pack buildings with no trees and no open space. And these buildings are blocks from one of the most famous beaches on the planet! Santa Monica is proof that even with perks like months of free rent people aren’t biting. Developers can add all the rooftop decks with ocean views and barbecues, all the movie rooms and pool tables and foosball tables and high end in-house gyms they want. The fact is, not many people are willing to pay those premiums to live in a building that was constructed as quickly and cheaply as possible, with hollow core doors, vinyl flooring, and fixtures and appliances that came off the rack at Home Depot. No one wants to be subject to a faceless corporate property manager that takes months to perform basic maintenance and simple repairs. And no one moves to Santa Monica to ride the bus.

The irony is that barely a mile north, when you cross Wilshire Boulevard, it’s a traditional “soft density” multifamily neighborhood. Most buildings have front yards, many have back yards, along with old growth shade trees and gardens. The units are on average 20% less expensive than those “luxury living environments” downtown. You can even rent detached houses! There are plenty of For Rent signs suggesting a healthy market, but no one is offering free months and gym memberships. They don’t need to, because people actually want to live in that part of town. It shows that density works, when it’s done with people in mind and not just profits.

Yet downtown Santa Monica is the YIMBY ideal. Seriously, they think it’s working! And they are expanding that failed model to those other neighborhoods. The YIMBY approach is excellent at producing thousands of housing units, and utterly inept at producing homes that actual human beings want to live in. They built it, but no one’s coming. Here’s a good recent summary of the situation by a long time resident in the local Santa Monica Daily Press.

When all is said and done, it’s just sad. Santa Monica was once a thriving, bustling downtown of low rise residences and mom and pop shops, with plenty of housing for people who wanted to live here. Now it’s corporate apartment complexes, franchise restaurants, venture backed business startups, and mass transit to nowhere. I cannot think of a single remaining local shop. Even the downtown bicycle shops have gone out of business.

Those rambling houses, duplexes, and small apartment buildings, those mom and pop shops, those walkable routes to the beach — none of them are coming back. Santa Monica is in the process of destroying itself, and it’s well on the way. Sad, and a warning: Don’t let the YIMBYs get their way in your town. That way be monsters.

But, but … sustainability!

The YIMBYs last line of defense is sustainability. Superficially, they seem to have a point. A 100 unit apartment building requires fewer resources and raw materials to build than 100 single family homes. Advantage, YIMBYs.

It turns out that dense urban apartment buildings are energy hogs. They consume electricity 24/7 to power lighting in hallways, stairwells, common areas, and garages, along with floodlights outside. They need to power 24/7 HVAC systems, elevators, security systems, and garage doors. Here’s a good summary from the New Geography blog. At this point, it probably will not surprise you to learn that most of the “studies” that favorably compare urban versus suburban environmental impacts are vague, based on generic, high level data, and are not peer reviewed. Like everything else with the YIMBYs, the eco-friendlieness of dense urban cores is more an article of religious faith than a consequence of rigorous critical inquiry. Wouldn’t want to knock the (electric) gravy train off the tracks!

YIMBY policies disdain setbacks, meaning modern apartment complexes rarely have open or green spaces. Replacing a block of single family homes with a block of stack and packs results in the loss of almost all trees and green space. Look at the pictures below, taken in West Los Angeles. These are adjoining blocks, only one has been “upzoned” to apartments. The single family block on the left has plentiful heat and carbon absorbing shade trees, lawns, and gardens. Sloped roofs deflect sunlight. In contrast, the apartment block has virtually no trees or green space, just those perpetually operating HVAC systems and flat, heat reflecting roofs and concrete, all combining to create a phenomenon known as a “heat island.” Consider how many trees had to be cut down to make this “sustainable” block. This is environmentally friendly?

Adjoining blocks, different worlds. Drone images by Christopher LeGras.

And again, which block would you rather live on? Where would you rather take a stroll or a bicycle ride? Where would you prefer your children play? More to the point, where would your children play on the stack and pack block? The roof? In the alleyway?

Depending on their budgets homeowners can take many steps to make their homes more eco-friendly. They can plant new trees and greenery and install drip irrigation. They can add rooftop solar, EV chargers, and battery walls and repaint their homes with advanced heat trapping paints. They can upgrade their appliances and replace aging insulation. Renters, of course, can do none of these things. They can pressure management, but that’s about it.

Take a walk through a suburban neighborhood at night. After bedtime, with the exception of a few night owls watching TV, you’ll see vanishingly few lights. Unless it’s a Beverly Hills or Saratoga estate, homeowners don’t generally leave their external lighting on all night. You’ll hear the occasional hum and click of an air conditioning unit or a pool pump, and that’s about it. It’s peaceful, even contemplative. In contrast, urban cores are perpetually alight, perpetually loud, perpetually in motion. For some it’s exhilarating. For most, it’s exhausting.