Stop blaming ugly buildings for the housing crisis

Voters' aesthetic objections to apartment buildings are about size, not beauty.

People don’t like it when apartment buildings go up in single-family neighborhoods.

A transatlantic divide has opened up in the YIMBY movement, pitting American advocates against a mostly Anglo-Irish group centered on Works in Progress magazine and their patron Patrick Collison.¹ The Americans are accustomed to dismissing aesthetic objections to new housing as pretextual, while their Old World interlocutors insist there is a profound connection between the anti-growth turn in the last quarter of the 20th century and popular distaste for modernist architecture.

This latter account — grounded in part in Tom Wolfe’s 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House, which posits the existence of a kind of conspiracy by left-wing European emigre architects to foist weird-looking buildings on an unwilling American public — has some natural appeal to YIMBYs whose primary intellectual home is on the center-right. But the aesthetics theory of NIMBYism speaks more to European, not American, issues.