The more i read of YIMBY literature, the more i am convinced the YIMBYs truly are evil. Growth for the sake of growth. Destroying natural beauty. Trying to force other people into your dystopian crowded vision of the world.
I have lived in Poolesville and still visit a couple of times a year. While I appreciate the broader points about getting over some objections to development, the particulars with respect to Poolesville don’t really capture the reality.
Poolesville has been a small town for about 250 years. There is one stoplight, one road into town, no sewer system, no grocery store (there is a Dollar Store) and one fast food outlet. There is no transit connection within 30 minutes and has very limited (and rarely used) used bus service. Flooding is common.
Building a bridge to connect Poolesville with Northern Virginia would be, well, insane. The only people going to Poolesville are those who live there and a few visitors to local historical sites. Its not on the way to anywhere. There is no road infrastructure to support a bridge while building out feeder roads would not only be very expensive but completely unjustified by any serious projection of demand. In other words, the presence of conservation reserves and working farms in the area have little to do with the lack of interest in a bridge. It would be the latest bridge to nowhere.
Out here in Oregon, we have a reasonably pro-growth policy suite. They build a lot of housing in small areas but I’ve yet to drive through Portland, its west suburbs, and its residential east side and not see cranes and apartment buildings, and the state just legalized by-right development of commercial-to-residential conversions.
Oh, and Eugene builds A LOT.
Yeah, probably too much goes into the right amount of “affordable” but, in general, we build quite a bit.
An interesting trivial tidbit about the river between VA and MD/DC: The border between VA and MD/DC is the low-water line on the VA side. During low water times, the Potomac is entirely within MD/DC. If you take one step into the water from the VA side, you have left the state. During high-water times, VA has a very thin slice of the Potomac. The bridges over the Potomac are almost entirely within MD/DC and the MD/DC police have jurisdiction over them, except for the far edges.
Outside Prague, there's high-rise apartment complexes, like dominoes on end, with neighborhood stores in them on the ground level. Connected to the middle of Prague by subway, with a subway station in the apartment buildings. Built in the communist era. Can take an elevator from your apartment to ground level to go for a walk amidst farm countryside, do your neighborhood shopping, or quickly get by subway to downtown, where there's bus and light rail, and pedestrian zones. Average residential density is high. Rural countryside preserved.
I have mixed feelings about this. I am 100% on board with increasing density in the town itself and residential surrounds. 25 acre yards for mcmansions seems insane. But while I support attempts to add density to my own urban neighborhood and our surrounding suburbs. I would feel a real loss if some of the remaining agricultural areas in my region were developed. I think it is important for YIMBY people to recognized that cheaper housing and better access to public transit are very important that people have a diverse set of holistic needs.
I think we need natural spaces like large parks that allow for diverse wildlife and hiking. It helps us to experience the humility and awe that comes from connecting with and appreciating the wonder of the web of the living world that we are apart of. We need spaces for recreation and much of this should be public and easily accessible to all because humans find joy in play and connection in team sports and need space to exercise and connect with neighbors. All of that could be accomplished with just turning a bunch of this into parks.
But I think we do benefit from experiencing the way our food is produced and grown and having the chance to eat locally grown and seasonal food. It builds gratitude and a sense of our actual place in the natural and human web. It allows to experience the cycles of nature and connect to place that isn't always supported by an urban lifestyle that often operates mechanically in terms of time and place. The fact that Matt wants to go pick apples with his kids is telling of this sense of need. (My father spent much of his chaotic childhood of poverty in Eastern Washington supplementing his families income by picking apples. He does not do this now for recreation. It isn't an inherently fun activity absent its novelty and connection to seasonality and the natural world.)
There are ways to introduce this into urban environments. My city has an old orchard that is incorporated into park land and you can go pick apples there and participate in the community cider press. Several other parks have apple treats that are for the public too. I participate in the Wassail blessing of the apple trees at one of those parks as a delightful and fun part of anticipating the coming of spring in the depth of winter and acting out gratitude for the natural abundance that feeds me. We also have p-patches were people can grow herbs and vegetables if they don't have yards. I think we need to preserve these things as we increase density and we can. But I do love spending some time in the places a hour or so out of my city were growing and harvesting food is a real part of life. The skagit valley is beautiful and the tulip festival there is a big part of the local economy but they also have many places to pick berries, pick apples, pick pumpkins and also see fields of spinach and other crops. Those farms and tourism are pretty much the whole economy The Island of the Puget Sound have communities where a combination of harvesting shellfish and tourism are pretty much the whole economy. My life would feel less rich without having the chance to take a break from my urban life and spend time there and celebrate those harvests.
Part of my motivation to want to increase density and decrease sprawl is to try to protect those areas from becoming boring suburbs or ex-urbs. There may be better land use ways of keeping these spaces than sweeping lot sizes. I know in the Skagit, a lot of the land is actually owned by a Farm Land Trust and farmers rent the land back to run farms. It makes getting into farming more accessible and makes sure that there is plentiful agricultural activity in the area. There is probably a way to define corridors that allow this to flourish that aren't as large as the area here and don't end up just encouraging the development of mcmansions.
But I don't think we should automatically throw the baby out with the bath water. We have a large ferry system in the Seattle Area. People use it to commute and for recreation. If they all became bridges we as a city would be less of who we were. I think we can all think of cities that have unique and vibrant cultures that we love to visit or could imagine living it. There are also some sad cities that feel more like a giant collection of chain stores and are pretty sad. In my experience, it isn't the case that the denser cities are actually the boring ones. I don't think maintaining what is unique and special about a city requires freezing growth and can be counterproductive. But the fun cities are ones that had and valued elements about themselves and kept those as they grew. I do think there may be rural places where being who they are as a community does require different land use rules.
Have you ever flow across the US? Like from NYC to LA? It’s (at most!) 4 minutes of some sort of development and then it’s endless farmland or nothing. Several hours at 500 mph of farms and nature.
I am aware that the middle of the country isn't lacking in farm land. But I think the need for small farm holding in easy driving distances is a different issue.
To be fair, our ferries don't look like this and haven't since the 1900s. That ferry looks very inefficient and replacing it with a bridge if it isn't irrationally beloved seems wise. I just don't think we should sweepingly ignore the desire to maintain ag within easy travel of cities.
MoCo resident here, Potomac-Rockville border. It has taken years and tons of disputes for the county to finalize plans to build a sidewalk on a particular street here. And the sidewalk still has not been built.
I like the second half of this piece, but I do think a focus on places like Poolsville, which is an hour from DC, brings diminishing returns, because no one actually wants to live there. Blue states have the opportunity to allow densification in towns where people already want to be, and that's the big magic opportunity of YIMBYism.
A workable version of Matt's suggestions here is to allow sprawl everywhere. That's my simple understanding of what red states do, and it seems to be why they have cheaper housing. So that's good. But I'd argue our limited persuasive effort can have the most impact by making dense places denser, partly because it seems like that's where the bigger supply gap is. I could be wrong about the size of the supply gap. I also believe sprawl is a harder sell in blue states. Could be wrong about that too?
My in-laws live in Poolesville (technically Boyds right next door). Every Fall / Thanksgiving we go through a ritual of them saying they'd love us to live closer, we saying it's beautiful up there, and then we look at the home prices and we say lol nevermind, Florida's ok. Now I have a Slow Boring article I can forward to my mother-in-law that explains why. This Substack is worth every penny.
As a native and present-day Montanan, I would like to remind you all that Greg Gianforte committed an unprovoked assault on a journalist, in front of multiple witnesses, lied about the assault to law enforcement and the media, and, despite eventually pleading guilty, continued to lie about the assault in subsequent interviews. While I agree that restrictive zoning is bad, Gianforte's plans for my state are less about easing housing burdens on Montana residents and more about opening up protected areas to extractive development and making it easier for macho knobs like himself to dot the countryside with their manors and estates. So maybe don't go tripping over each other to pat him on the back.
What are you referring to when you encourage us not to "go tripping over each other to pat him on the back"?
"Gianforte BAD" and "It is good for the YIMBY movement to have people like Gianforte on our side" do not seem like incompatible views.
In fact, I hold them both! Gianforte BAD! Gianforte VERY bad!
But sometimes you need to work with bad people in order to do good. I don't see any suggestion in Matt's piece that Gianforte is anything other than bad. So I'm assuming that the very mention of him as a good ally in this fight amounts to patting him on the back, as you called it. So I wanted to clarify if there was something else that you think qualifies as patting him on the back.
As an ex-pat that lived most of my life in Montana and worked on water issues for the state, I have viewed the supposed successes of Gianforte with suspicion. It seems to me more about owning democrats in places like Bozeman and Missoula. To my knowledge, he has not tackled the real intractable issues limiting development.
I’m called back to the “politics as mood affiliation” construct. The blue tendency is fundamentally an aesthetic preference, that wherever (activists tell us) economic growth and human flourishing are in conflict, then damn the economy, put people first.
Housing puts unique pressure on this worldview because it is clearest how “the economy” is actually an element of human flourishing.
Great piece..this is one of the reasons I think Yimbyism will ultimately fail to have much impact..
Scratch a YIMBY and 99-100 you'll find the only kind of development he's a YES on is high rise, mid rise apartments with set asides for "diversity." He's totally against development of the kind most people actually want...at least want to raise families in...the SFH with yard in good school district.
The whole state of California more or less has adopted the Poolesville anti growth strategy, where 95% of buildable land is completely off limits to building of any kind...and we're left huffing and puffing about an ADU here, a highrise building there, oh, can I please turn my garage into a granny flat back there.
I grew up in Columbus Ohio..there used to be an apple farm where my Dad would take me to pick apples, pumpkins, eat donuts and drink cider..it was fun while it lasted..but in the 80s it became the site of a major mall and townhouses. Yeah it's sad...the new developments are ugly, dirty ticky tack... maybe they could have been built to a higher environmental standard today..
But the thing is, Columbus Ohio is still kinda sorta affordable..Moco Maryland isn't!
The more i read of YIMBY literature, the more i am convinced the YIMBYs truly are evil. Growth for the sake of growth. Destroying natural beauty. Trying to force other people into your dystopian crowded vision of the world.
Matt - great piece. You golf? Want to play Poolesville sometime??
I have lived in Poolesville and still visit a couple of times a year. While I appreciate the broader points about getting over some objections to development, the particulars with respect to Poolesville don’t really capture the reality.
Poolesville has been a small town for about 250 years. There is one stoplight, one road into town, no sewer system, no grocery store (there is a Dollar Store) and one fast food outlet. There is no transit connection within 30 minutes and has very limited (and rarely used) used bus service. Flooding is common.
Building a bridge to connect Poolesville with Northern Virginia would be, well, insane. The only people going to Poolesville are those who live there and a few visitors to local historical sites. Its not on the way to anywhere. There is no road infrastructure to support a bridge while building out feeder roads would not only be very expensive but completely unjustified by any serious projection of demand. In other words, the presence of conservation reserves and working farms in the area have little to do with the lack of interest in a bridge. It would be the latest bridge to nowhere.
Out here in Oregon, we have a reasonably pro-growth policy suite. They build a lot of housing in small areas but I’ve yet to drive through Portland, its west suburbs, and its residential east side and not see cranes and apartment buildings, and the state just legalized by-right development of commercial-to-residential conversions.
Oh, and Eugene builds A LOT.
Yeah, probably too much goes into the right amount of “affordable” but, in general, we build quite a bit.
An interesting trivial tidbit about the river between VA and MD/DC: The border between VA and MD/DC is the low-water line on the VA side. During low water times, the Potomac is entirely within MD/DC. If you take one step into the water from the VA side, you have left the state. During high-water times, VA has a very thin slice of the Potomac. The bridges over the Potomac are almost entirely within MD/DC and the MD/DC police have jurisdiction over them, except for the far edges.
Outside Prague, there's high-rise apartment complexes, like dominoes on end, with neighborhood stores in them on the ground level. Connected to the middle of Prague by subway, with a subway station in the apartment buildings. Built in the communist era. Can take an elevator from your apartment to ground level to go for a walk amidst farm countryside, do your neighborhood shopping, or quickly get by subway to downtown, where there's bus and light rail, and pedestrian zones. Average residential density is high. Rural countryside preserved.
Matt, I'm a new subscriber.
Can you explain what you mean by " anti-trans leadership"?
I'm very disappointed to see someone who claims to do "slow boring" use such a reflexively negative phrase about a highly controversial issue.
You could start your slow boring at Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender:
https://www.di-ag.org
I have mixed feelings about this. I am 100% on board with increasing density in the town itself and residential surrounds. 25 acre yards for mcmansions seems insane. But while I support attempts to add density to my own urban neighborhood and our surrounding suburbs. I would feel a real loss if some of the remaining agricultural areas in my region were developed. I think it is important for YIMBY people to recognized that cheaper housing and better access to public transit are very important that people have a diverse set of holistic needs.
I think we need natural spaces like large parks that allow for diverse wildlife and hiking. It helps us to experience the humility and awe that comes from connecting with and appreciating the wonder of the web of the living world that we are apart of. We need spaces for recreation and much of this should be public and easily accessible to all because humans find joy in play and connection in team sports and need space to exercise and connect with neighbors. All of that could be accomplished with just turning a bunch of this into parks.
But I think we do benefit from experiencing the way our food is produced and grown and having the chance to eat locally grown and seasonal food. It builds gratitude and a sense of our actual place in the natural and human web. It allows to experience the cycles of nature and connect to place that isn't always supported by an urban lifestyle that often operates mechanically in terms of time and place. The fact that Matt wants to go pick apples with his kids is telling of this sense of need. (My father spent much of his chaotic childhood of poverty in Eastern Washington supplementing his families income by picking apples. He does not do this now for recreation. It isn't an inherently fun activity absent its novelty and connection to seasonality and the natural world.)
There are ways to introduce this into urban environments. My city has an old orchard that is incorporated into park land and you can go pick apples there and participate in the community cider press. Several other parks have apple treats that are for the public too. I participate in the Wassail blessing of the apple trees at one of those parks as a delightful and fun part of anticipating the coming of spring in the depth of winter and acting out gratitude for the natural abundance that feeds me. We also have p-patches were people can grow herbs and vegetables if they don't have yards. I think we need to preserve these things as we increase density and we can. But I do love spending some time in the places a hour or so out of my city were growing and harvesting food is a real part of life. The skagit valley is beautiful and the tulip festival there is a big part of the local economy but they also have many places to pick berries, pick apples, pick pumpkins and also see fields of spinach and other crops. Those farms and tourism are pretty much the whole economy The Island of the Puget Sound have communities where a combination of harvesting shellfish and tourism are pretty much the whole economy. My life would feel less rich without having the chance to take a break from my urban life and spend time there and celebrate those harvests.
Part of my motivation to want to increase density and decrease sprawl is to try to protect those areas from becoming boring suburbs or ex-urbs. There may be better land use ways of keeping these spaces than sweeping lot sizes. I know in the Skagit, a lot of the land is actually owned by a Farm Land Trust and farmers rent the land back to run farms. It makes getting into farming more accessible and makes sure that there is plentiful agricultural activity in the area. There is probably a way to define corridors that allow this to flourish that aren't as large as the area here and don't end up just encouraging the development of mcmansions.
But I don't think we should automatically throw the baby out with the bath water. We have a large ferry system in the Seattle Area. People use it to commute and for recreation. If they all became bridges we as a city would be less of who we were. I think we can all think of cities that have unique and vibrant cultures that we love to visit or could imagine living it. There are also some sad cities that feel more like a giant collection of chain stores and are pretty sad. In my experience, it isn't the case that the denser cities are actually the boring ones. I don't think maintaining what is unique and special about a city requires freezing growth and can be counterproductive. But the fun cities are ones that had and valued elements about themselves and kept those as they grew. I do think there may be rural places where being who they are as a community does require different land use rules.
Have you ever flow across the US? Like from NYC to LA? It’s (at most!) 4 minutes of some sort of development and then it’s endless farmland or nothing. Several hours at 500 mph of farms and nature.
I am aware that the middle of the country isn't lacking in farm land. But I think the need for small farm holding in easy driving distances is a different issue.
To be fair, our ferries don't look like this and haven't since the 1900s. That ferry looks very inefficient and replacing it with a bridge if it isn't irrationally beloved seems wise. I just don't think we should sweepingly ignore the desire to maintain ag within easy travel of cities.
Idea: build a bridge but ban cars on it. Allow only transit, bicycles and foot traffic. The problem is the cars.
We've got trouble my friends. It starts with T, which rhymes with P, which stands for Poolesville.
I think it rhymes with B which stands for Bridge
MoCo resident here, Potomac-Rockville border. It has taken years and tons of disputes for the county to finalize plans to build a sidewalk on a particular street here. And the sidewalk still has not been built.
I like the second half of this piece, but I do think a focus on places like Poolsville, which is an hour from DC, brings diminishing returns, because no one actually wants to live there. Blue states have the opportunity to allow densification in towns where people already want to be, and that's the big magic opportunity of YIMBYism.
A workable version of Matt's suggestions here is to allow sprawl everywhere. That's my simple understanding of what red states do, and it seems to be why they have cheaper housing. So that's good. But I'd argue our limited persuasive effort can have the most impact by making dense places denser, partly because it seems like that's where the bigger supply gap is. I could be wrong about the size of the supply gap. I also believe sprawl is a harder sell in blue states. Could be wrong about that too?
My in-laws live in Poolesville (technically Boyds right next door). Every Fall / Thanksgiving we go through a ritual of them saying they'd love us to live closer, we saying it's beautiful up there, and then we look at the home prices and we say lol nevermind, Florida's ok. Now I have a Slow Boring article I can forward to my mother-in-law that explains why. This Substack is worth every penny.
As a native and present-day Montanan, I would like to remind you all that Greg Gianforte committed an unprovoked assault on a journalist, in front of multiple witnesses, lied about the assault to law enforcement and the media, and, despite eventually pleading guilty, continued to lie about the assault in subsequent interviews. While I agree that restrictive zoning is bad, Gianforte's plans for my state are less about easing housing burdens on Montana residents and more about opening up protected areas to extractive development and making it easier for macho knobs like himself to dot the countryside with their manors and estates. So maybe don't go tripping over each other to pat him on the back.
What are you referring to when you encourage us not to "go tripping over each other to pat him on the back"?
"Gianforte BAD" and "It is good for the YIMBY movement to have people like Gianforte on our side" do not seem like incompatible views.
In fact, I hold them both! Gianforte BAD! Gianforte VERY bad!
But sometimes you need to work with bad people in order to do good. I don't see any suggestion in Matt's piece that Gianforte is anything other than bad. So I'm assuming that the very mention of him as a good ally in this fight amounts to patting him on the back, as you called it. So I wanted to clarify if there was something else that you think qualifies as patting him on the back.
It's weird to me that everyone has just decided to pretend that episode didn't happen.
As an ex-pat that lived most of my life in Montana and worked on water issues for the state, I have viewed the supposed successes of Gianforte with suspicion. It seems to me more about owning democrats in places like Bozeman and Missoula. To my knowledge, he has not tackled the real intractable issues limiting development.
I’m called back to the “politics as mood affiliation” construct. The blue tendency is fundamentally an aesthetic preference, that wherever (activists tell us) economic growth and human flourishing are in conflict, then damn the economy, put people first.
Housing puts unique pressure on this worldview because it is clearest how “the economy” is actually an element of human flourishing.
Great piece..this is one of the reasons I think Yimbyism will ultimately fail to have much impact..
Scratch a YIMBY and 99-100 you'll find the only kind of development he's a YES on is high rise, mid rise apartments with set asides for "diversity." He's totally against development of the kind most people actually want...at least want to raise families in...the SFH with yard in good school district.
The whole state of California more or less has adopted the Poolesville anti growth strategy, where 95% of buildable land is completely off limits to building of any kind...and we're left huffing and puffing about an ADU here, a highrise building there, oh, can I please turn my garage into a granny flat back there.
I grew up in Columbus Ohio..there used to be an apple farm where my Dad would take me to pick apples, pumpkins, eat donuts and drink cider..it was fun while it lasted..but in the 80s it became the site of a major mall and townhouses. Yeah it's sad...the new developments are ugly, dirty ticky tack... maybe they could have been built to a higher environmental standard today..
But the thing is, Columbus Ohio is still kinda sorta affordable..Moco Maryland isn't!