I don't think there's anything intrinsic to what makes good cinema here. Perhaps the most iconic Christmas movie of all time is a YIMBY movie – It's A Wonderful Life! George Bailey is a housing developer. The villain, Mr. Potter, wants to stop him from constructing new high-quality market rate housing in Bedfor Falls so the residents have to stay in his overpriced slum. And the scene where George and Mary welcome the Martinis to their new Bailey Park home has to be one of the most effective depictions of the highly personal and concentrated benefits of housing in the movies. I think this isn't recognized as much now because Bailey Park is a 1940s suburban tract, not a dense urban development, but it's very much a feel-good story about building valuable things to enrich your community.
>> Particularly frustrating is the argument that economic growth, development, and newcomers — the very things that ailing small towns desperately need — are actually the root of their problems.
One of the major complications of this argument is that for the last 50 years, the suburban development machine has meant that the primary way ailing small towns get new development is via soulless stroads, chain restaurants, and McMansions, instead of the charming Main Streets that have been zoned out of existence.
So, when they’re protecting some stupid old hotel, they’re actually grasping for the type of charming small town development that feels hopelessly out of reach.
I wish YIMBYs had more to say about aesthetics. If they could have some sort of policy answer to the fear that development will be ugly and soulless, I think they’d make more gains than they realize.
I feel like Marcus’s complaint, combined with your linked article, really just leads us into a sort of “NIMBY-22” mess:
1. The NIMBYs don’t like new buildings.
2. The buildings are built that way because of prior NIMBY complaints and regulations about stuff like massing and FAR.
3. Pacifying the NIMBYs’ latest complaint will maybe get a couple things built until the next complaint.
Something about this dynamic has to change. Because in the long run, they’re still winning. The odiously ideological/partisan conclusion I’m forced to reach here is that they’ll keep winning until we take the fight to them and stop playing their game.
I want to force every NIMBY to sit through a 5 minute presentation on why every building they supposedly fucking love is now illegal to build under their zoning regime, and how fast the original building was built vs how long it would take today.
NIMBYs are why we cannot have nice things, including nice buildings. It would, as you said, take years to approve, let alone build, and the patience of Job to slog through it. Meanwhile, maybe boxy “dingbat” bulidings are ugly, but hey, they house people, and that’s really the objective at least as far as I am concerned. An ugly apartment is at least an apartment, as in roof over head.
Meh, I wouldn’t go THAT far. I can’t stand the dingbat buildings.
But I’m also not as dumb as the average NIMBY, so I know WHY those buildings are like that.
I’d rather have the construction than not. But I’d also rather have by-right approval for any project that matched our existing historically protected buildings + the next increment of construction, than just keep getting the ugly dingbat buildings forever.
I was watching the series Resident Alien, about an alien (from outer space; I wish I didn't have to specify that) who passes as a human is trying to figure out how to get off the planet. It's based in a small Colorado mountain town that is struggling so much they can't keep one regular primary care doctor in town. It's fun with Alan Tudyk, if not terribly logical. Then in the middle of the show lands the standard NIMBY plot of the (rather inept) mayor bringing in developers to build a resort, and everyone trying to convince the mayor's bossy wife to be anti- resort to convince her husband to stop.
Pretty standard NIMBY shit. I only mention it because it also brings in another tired trope. The protagonist is Native American, and so the ideas of community and family as rooted in stasis and never building anything new is sealed with the moral force of vague pro-indigenous sentiment.
One of the difficulties you hint at is the fact that a new housing development that helps 100 families get a better place to live is hard to make a story out of.
It’s like the flip side of that Stalin quote - one family losing their house is a tragedy, 100 families getting a place to live is a statistic.
This kind of discussion focuses on the plots and overlooks the setting, which has just as powerful an effect on our imaginations, if not more.
How many cities glorify life in America’s biggest city, New York? Every movie that glamorizes taking the subway, walking down the street, having friends in your neighborhood is also a yimby movie.
There's a YIMBY episode of "Star Trek Voyager," of all things. In the episode "11:59" there is an extended flashback to 1999 where a ancestor of Captain Janeway persuades a stubborn small bookstore owner to sell his store to a developer. It's a pretty nuanced episode, the bookstore owner is sympathetic, but he ultimately realizes that he is living in the past. Every other store owner in the area has already accepted the developer's offer and are angry at the bookstore owner because if he doesn't sell the developer will move the project elsewhere and they won't get any money.
I think the episode works for a few reasons. Since it is a flashback, we get to see positive results the developer brings to the community (Captain Janeway explains the the complex was later used as a prototype for the first Mars colony) instead of them being purely speculative. Showing the rest of the community as being on board with and excited for the development also helps. It is also implied that the bookstore owner will be able to open a new store in the developer's complex, so it isn't a total loss for the past either.
Is the problem with NIMBYism really that they want to preserve lovely old hotels, though? It seems like the bigger issue is using restrictive zoning to “preserve” parking lots and shuttered blockbuster videos. A YIMBY Hallmark movie seems easy to make! Just have the protagonists try to tear down an abandoned shopping center to build a cute walkable housing development.
I live near Berkeley. Locals try to preserve everything to block new housing. The latest was lamenting the loss of a brutalist bank that is slated to become apartments.
In some ways I do understand where they are coming from: they moved to berkeley 40 years ago when things were different and it had a smaller town vibe. They did not want to live in a big city like nearby san Francisco. They don't like their city changing. they don't identify with the younger, wealthier folks moving in. I totally get it. I just don't think we can make policy on it.
Berkeley is one of the most egregious cases. In some of these situations, you might feel sympathy that locals have developed a community and local culture that they feel at odds to give up. But Berkeley’s local culture is generated by the university, not the rich boomer ex techies who moved there later. But they also are incredibly at odds with the university rather than appreciating their status as remorae.
I think there are couple features of NIMBY movies that actually provide useful lessons for us pro housing folks. One is that often the people being afflicted by the potential development aren't the owners but are renters (the classic small business being kicked out by the developers). The other is that a different classic plot is the owner is being forced to sell to the greedy developer because her small business is failing, and the help of the townfolk turn it around.
I think the lesson is that what people are unhappy with is the reality of what's profitable to invest in. People want local small business -- restaurants, bookstore, toy shops -- to be more successful than they are, and people want service provision to out of town rich people to be less profitable. And more generally people don't like that local investments need to compete with investment generally and with the interest rate.
As you say one of the recurring plot points, that someone is being "forced to sell" for lots of money, speaks to people even if the implication is that the current owner is being made materially wealthy.
"My bespoke small business should be profitable even if nobody wants to purchase my goods/services" is unfortunately doing a lot of work in folk economic thinking.
It's not just that the owner wants it to stay in business, but that everyone else does too. People are unhappy that the small business is unable to compete with Amazon or Starbucks or Walmart, even when it's they themselves that don't shop there.
I think there are two possible explanations here. One is that people want the _option_ provided by the small business but are unwilling to pay for the option value in addition to the good itself and don't understand why options have to cost money. The other is that people face a coordination problem and would like to not shop at Walmart or Amazon but need to coordinate with everyone else to do so.
My father was happy when Walmart moved to my hometown, a town of 35,000 in southeast New Mexico. He found the local hardware store was charging a significantly higher price for something he needed, and was happy about the savings.
Meanwhile, my two sisters refuse to set foot in a Walmart. Neither is wealthy, but both are ideologically anti-business, convinced that businesses steal from ordinary people all the time.
There is some math to back up the latter assertion (though not in the way they phrase it). Walmarts tend to drive other more specialized businesses out of small towns, and because Walmart can negotiate a much lower tax rate being part of a very large nation spanning company it results in the tax base actually shrinking instead of growing.
The dollars used to purchase things from the Walmart also don't stay in the community, they go to a national company that's not especially invested in the small town in the same way a local business might be.
Now, personally I don't really give a shit about any of that other than the tax part. If you fix the problem where they tend to pay less taxes then you can take the tax revenue and use it to improve the small town.
(1) I think is probably an important part of it, but (2) seems less likely. There might be a coordination problem to bring small businesses back, but you don’t need everyone else to shop at a small business to shop there yourself!
Forced to sell in real life is typically following a death (or retirement) with no one with the capital or ability to keep it in the family. It’s based more on many people’s actual experience rather than “folk economic thinking.”
My cousin by marriage died in a farm accident working a farm that has been in my extended family for at least a hundred years. If his heirs had wanted to sell, I could not have coughed up seven figures of capital on no notice, but I would have been terribly distressed for us to have lost that long chain of shared family history to strangers.
That may not be economically rational, but it’s very real.
At least where I live, rural exurb, local restaurants and food trucks do quite well. Local businesses like farmers markets, wedding venues, bakeries, and specialty grocers do fine. Plumbers, electricians, contractors do well. Vendors for the many farmers markets, seasonal markets, and fairs (crafts and art too, not just food and produce) often do well.
I don’t think bookstores, generic independent grocers, or generic toy stores are generally viable small businesses.
I think that's accurate, but that's sort of the point. What people are unhappy about is what makes a viable business and what jobs are better paid in 2025.
Oh my gosh, now I’m remembering that old Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie, “You’ve Got Mail!” (Ryan owned a cute little indy bookstore that was being taken over by the evil chain.)
This reminds me that I’ve still prepared myself to be mad at the Pixar movie Hoppers if it ends up being as NIMBY as the premise and trailers make it seem.
On the more serious question of what motivates opposition to loosening zoning restrictions - ideas, interests, or some combination - Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress suggests that interests do matter, based on evidence from the history of zoning in Europe. https://morehousing.substack.com/p/great-downzoning
The show "How I Met Your Mother" actually had one of the more surprisingly YIMBY story arcs I've seen on TV, where the main character Ted is put on a project designing a new skyscraper to replace a derelict hotel, but finds himself at odds with his love interest Zoey, who leads the group opposing the hotel's demolition. The show characterizes the eventual destruction of the hotel as a sad but necessary act of progress and Zoey's zealousness in trying to preserve the hotel as driven by personal search for purpose (she's a stay-at-home wife because her husband is wealthy) that grows increasingly unhinged throughout the season to the point that her efforts begin to be played for laughs.
For the most part, rural areas and small towns today are very open to development. Regulations are flexible, land is plentiful, and communities are generally receptive, if you understand what is and is not tolerable to locals.
In general, getting new homes or businesses permitted in rural areas is pretty easy. How do you think New Kent County grew 22% since the pandemic? The values and preferences may be different, but homes and businesses generally get permitted unless they are at odds with community values or regulations. Pushback is more on things like landfills, uranium mining, or data center number 10006, not on building a house or a business or permitting a modular or tiny home.
But rural areas and small towns also tend to have a very strong sense of place and of history, so they do want to preserve continuity of area character and important buildings and locations. In the New River Valley, that might mean preserving river viewsheds and specific buildings of historic and cultural importance, while happily permitting new housing and new manufacturing elsewhere. In Tazewell County, it might mean preserving The Cove while encouraging development in other parts of the county.
Tearing down a historic hotel to build a resort is kind of stupid. Small towns have no shortage of places for greenfield development, which is cheaper and faster than teardown, plus is likely to have more space for resort amenities. You do not need to bulldoze historic hotels or symbolic buildings to build a resort. They often are important pieces of local revitalization and symbols of the area, whether it’s the Jefferson in Richmond or the Hotel Roanoke in its namesake. Both are centers for events and activities in their communities.
As far as why people prefer more space, if you look at the history, up until the 1920s, most people in the US lived in rural areas. Those areas were not dense, because farms are by definition spread out. Cities were seen as exotic and novel. That was followed by the Great Depression and World War II, neither particularly good times to buy homes. In the 1930s, only about 43-48% of people lived in an owned home. That jumped to 62% or so post war.
Boomers’ parents largely grew up on farms. After the war, those new homeowners wanted green space, a garden, a back yard to have friends and family over, just like they had growing up. Boomers typically had grandparents who owned farms, who they visited on weekends and holidays. Wanting to buy a hobby farm is very common for Boomers. What you are getting now is the expansion of that preference to other age groups.
Family and community are associated with tradition and stability. Stability is not at all equivalent to stasis. Families have new people marry in, children marry out, kids go away for college, children move away and move back. Community is built with personal ties, of friendship and of family, which grow over time, and those ties are extremely important to people.
These movies generally aren’t making an argument that growth, newcomers, and dynamism are a problem. They are making a point that you need to be aware of what you’re losing, not just what you’re gaining, and balance them. That does not block rural development.
Most small towns and rural areas that are growing have historic buildings as key attractions for residents and tourists, and attractive and bucolic countryside is often key for local identity and agri-tourism, general tourism, outdoor recreation, and other big pieces of rural economies. People do not visit or move to rural areas or small towns for density - they are looking for rural character and rural amenities.
More people in rural areas work in tourism than agriculture.
Manufacturing plants, which are generally neither in downtown nor in agricultural areas, are thus often better tolerated than, say, very large swathes of solar in very visible areas. “Invisible” solar well back off main roads is thus far better accepted than highly visible.
Rural areas are not setting local policy based on Hallmark movies.
My one NIMBY tendency as a VA born (technically Washington D.C., but we count those) person that still lives in the state is I hate, hate, hate new development that does not use brick or stone. Sorry folks, it's VA, the red clay state, you use BRICKS when you build not WOOD not PETROLEOM COMPOSITE SIDING you use BRICKS. I don't care how all, how short, how long, or how wide. You. Use. Bricks.
Now you might say, Alex, bricks are expensive, and I agree. that's true, and it's why I'm in favor of the VA government literally opening government run brick factories using VA clay to make bricks so nobody has that excuse any more.
The Mount Vernon link has a discussion about the techniques used for its wooden siding.
In general, farmhouses and many taverns historically had wooden siding. I would guess brick was more expensive, especially for small farmers. I have the strong impression that bricks were usually made by slaves in early Virginia, which might explain the regional patterns of brick versus wood siding in old buildings.
The mountainous western part of the state had far fewer slaves than the more level east. That is part of why Virginia split into two states during the Civil War, although a goodly chunk of the mountainous west was left in Virginia post split.
Many buildings near DC, public buildings like courthouses, mansions like Shirley, and almost anything built in the federal style used brick. As you note, clay suitable for bricks is abundant in Virginia, and the federal style is very popular here.
Brick was extremely popular and desirable, but not universal. I am from the western part of the state, so I’m used to seeing siding on very old houses.
Of course all of that is true! I also think the wood siding looks bad and ages very poorly without a lot of upkeep. Mount Vernon the park/land is very pretty....the house....not my personal favorite.
In regards to boomers (and earlier GenXers) and their dislike of cities: Jerusalem, you had an interview with someone in, I believe, Good on Paper, I forgot his name - he might have been one of the authors of that paper you cited. He said that in the 70’s and 80’s, cities were “basket cases” and most people had NO intention or desire to move to one - people who came of age in those decades wanted a house in the suburbs, no question. (I’d say a few exceptions: gay men moving to San Francisco, writers, artists and actors moving to New York or LA, but those would be in the minority.) Then with the 90’s, crime dropped, young people (the OG Sex and the City generation) rediscovered urban living, and now cities are cool, or rather, *certain* cities are.
Meanwhile, I keep thinking that the Hallmark movie version of the small town is closer, in reality, to an affluent inner-ring suburb, the kind of exurb that is planned to have a small town feel, or else an equally affluent and “picturesque” urban neighborhood. A lot of small towns these days are hollowed out hellscapes, where Dollar General has replaced picture-postcard Main Streets. Hallmark needs to set its brand of cozy in Los Feliz or Noe Valley or Greenwich Village these days. (Though I suppose a small town in Montana that is a resort town would qualify…on a seven figure income!)
Everyone is going to hate me but I think there is a place for a single family home (or maybe a duplex home) with a yard. Probably not in the inner city but certainly in the suburbs. You can't garden without land, folks! And some of us really, really need to garden. Gardening is my passion; a passion I've cultivating since I was five years old. I do not care about the city amenities of cutesy coffee shops, art museums, walkable neighborhood etc. I care about having the land for a garden and I refuse to consider my need for garden less valid than someone else's need to walk to the art museum. My 1/4 acre suburban garden gives me great joy and I value it greatly. I also use it well-the entire non-house area is devoted to gardening. When my kids were little we had some grass for them to play on. It was well used. I believe it is reasonable to have traditional single family homes with yards in some areas and not have these yards overseen by a massive hulking, shade casting apartments. We need a mix of housing and single family homes (or duplexes like the Brit's build) need to be part of that mix. So I guess that makes me a NIMBY or at least a partial one. So be it; I'll own it and fight you over it.
I do see a lot of areas where it makes sense to put in high density housing. The Portland area has a lot of areas with ratty old houses and really ratty one or two story decrepit apartment. Knock those places down and put up a four story apartment. I also think we need to be more aggressive in building affordable housing. Where I see it being build around here it's on vacant lots, former industrial areas not in established residential areas so I don't know why people make a fuss about it.
City housing is an issue but making single family home owners the villain is not the answer.
I think of it as a tradeoff between time and space. Some people (like yourself) want more space and are willing to live further out, spending more time commuting to work. But there's also plenty of people who want to live close to work, trading space for time. Then they can get around by taking transit, walking, or biking, instead of living further out and spending more time driving to and from work, fighting traffic, and burning gas.
Prices are a pretty good indication of what people want. In a location where land prices are high, that means lots of people want to live there. You can either have a single rich person who outbids all the rest and puts up a single house, or you can have a bunch of people pool their money (via their future stream of rents) and put up an apartment building.
"City housing is an issue but making single family home owners the villain is not the answer."
Well, they are always talking about building more apartments and other forms of high density housing. Single family houses have a larger footprint per family particularly if they have any yard. I always get the vibes that a lot of YIMBYs would consider me and my husband social reprobates for living in a four bedroom house on a quarter acre lot. I also think a large percentage of the population really would prefer not to live as close to your neighbors as you do in an apartment. It only takes one bad experience with obnoxious neighbors to make a single family home look real good.
Maybe some YIMBYs, but I hope not very many of them. I live just like you and prefer it that way. At the same time, I don't think I have a right to veto denser housing being built somewhere in my vicinity. Indeed, some of my neighbors managed to kill a proposal to build *townhomes* about 1.5 miles away.
"And indeed, Broockman, Elmendorf, and Kalla found that voters are often evaluating housing policies based on their associations with various symbols like “cities, tall buildings, developers, various government entities, and the groups who might live in new housing.”"
Yea, I feel like the "groups" is a big part of it. THOSE people aren't part of our community.
Christmas movies are interesting because they're often a real celebration of the kind of populism Joseph Heath describes in his piece "Populism fast and slow."
A girl from the land of theory and abstraction comes to visit her family in the land of common sense and tangible things, helps stop a conspiracy against common people and falls in love with an honest guy along the way.
It's easy watching, because it humours our knee-jerk emotional reactions to change.
I don't think there's anything intrinsic to what makes good cinema here. Perhaps the most iconic Christmas movie of all time is a YIMBY movie – It's A Wonderful Life! George Bailey is a housing developer. The villain, Mr. Potter, wants to stop him from constructing new high-quality market rate housing in Bedfor Falls so the residents have to stay in his overpriced slum. And the scene where George and Mary welcome the Martinis to their new Bailey Park home has to be one of the most effective depictions of the highly personal and concentrated benefits of housing in the movies. I think this isn't recognized as much now because Bailey Park is a 1940s suburban tract, not a dense urban development, but it's very much a feel-good story about building valuable things to enrich your community.
>> Particularly frustrating is the argument that economic growth, development, and newcomers — the very things that ailing small towns desperately need — are actually the root of their problems.
One of the major complications of this argument is that for the last 50 years, the suburban development machine has meant that the primary way ailing small towns get new development is via soulless stroads, chain restaurants, and McMansions, instead of the charming Main Streets that have been zoned out of existence.
So, when they’re protecting some stupid old hotel, they’re actually grasping for the type of charming small town development that feels hopelessly out of reach.
I wish YIMBYs had more to say about aesthetics. If they could have some sort of policy answer to the fear that development will be ugly and soulless, I think they’d make more gains than they realize.
We have! I talk about it a bit here: https://www.vox.com/22650806/gentrification-affordable-housing-low-income-housing
But also here: https://archive.ph/xOUx1
I feel like Marcus’s complaint, combined with your linked article, really just leads us into a sort of “NIMBY-22” mess:
1. The NIMBYs don’t like new buildings.
2. The buildings are built that way because of prior NIMBY complaints and regulations about stuff like massing and FAR.
3. Pacifying the NIMBYs’ latest complaint will maybe get a couple things built until the next complaint.
Something about this dynamic has to change. Because in the long run, they’re still winning. The odiously ideological/partisan conclusion I’m forced to reach here is that they’ll keep winning until we take the fight to them and stop playing their game.
I think that’s barking up the wrong tree.
I want to force every NIMBY to sit through a 5 minute presentation on why every building they supposedly fucking love is now illegal to build under their zoning regime, and how fast the original building was built vs how long it would take today.
NIMBYs are why we cannot have nice things, including nice buildings. It would, as you said, take years to approve, let alone build, and the patience of Job to slog through it. Meanwhile, maybe boxy “dingbat” bulidings are ugly, but hey, they house people, and that’s really the objective at least as far as I am concerned. An ugly apartment is at least an apartment, as in roof over head.
Meh, I wouldn’t go THAT far. I can’t stand the dingbat buildings.
But I’m also not as dumb as the average NIMBY, so I know WHY those buildings are like that.
I’d rather have the construction than not. But I’d also rather have by-right approval for any project that matched our existing historically protected buildings + the next increment of construction, than just keep getting the ugly dingbat buildings forever.
I was watching the series Resident Alien, about an alien (from outer space; I wish I didn't have to specify that) who passes as a human is trying to figure out how to get off the planet. It's based in a small Colorado mountain town that is struggling so much they can't keep one regular primary care doctor in town. It's fun with Alan Tudyk, if not terribly logical. Then in the middle of the show lands the standard NIMBY plot of the (rather inept) mayor bringing in developers to build a resort, and everyone trying to convince the mayor's bossy wife to be anti- resort to convince her husband to stop.
Pretty standard NIMBY shit. I only mention it because it also brings in another tired trope. The protagonist is Native American, and so the ideas of community and family as rooted in stasis and never building anything new is sealed with the moral force of vague pro-indigenous sentiment.
Someone should introduce those writers to the Squamish people, who are opposing NIMBYs in Canada in order to build housing on their ancestral land. https://www.econlib.org/the-future-belongs-to-the-squamish/
One of the difficulties you hint at is the fact that a new housing development that helps 100 families get a better place to live is hard to make a story out of.
It’s like the flip side of that Stalin quote - one family losing their house is a tragedy, 100 families getting a place to live is a statistic.
This kind of discussion focuses on the plots and overlooks the setting, which has just as powerful an effect on our imaginations, if not more.
How many cities glorify life in America’s biggest city, New York? Every movie that glamorizes taking the subway, walking down the street, having friends in your neighborhood is also a yimby movie.
There's a YIMBY episode of "Star Trek Voyager," of all things. In the episode "11:59" there is an extended flashback to 1999 where a ancestor of Captain Janeway persuades a stubborn small bookstore owner to sell his store to a developer. It's a pretty nuanced episode, the bookstore owner is sympathetic, but he ultimately realizes that he is living in the past. Every other store owner in the area has already accepted the developer's offer and are angry at the bookstore owner because if he doesn't sell the developer will move the project elsewhere and they won't get any money.
I think the episode works for a few reasons. Since it is a flashback, we get to see positive results the developer brings to the community (Captain Janeway explains the the complex was later used as a prototype for the first Mars colony) instead of them being purely speculative. Showing the rest of the community as being on board with and excited for the development also helps. It is also implied that the bookstore owner will be able to open a new store in the developer's complex, so it isn't a total loss for the past either.
Is the problem with NIMBYism really that they want to preserve lovely old hotels, though? It seems like the bigger issue is using restrictive zoning to “preserve” parking lots and shuttered blockbuster videos. A YIMBY Hallmark movie seems easy to make! Just have the protagonists try to tear down an abandoned shopping center to build a cute walkable housing development.
I live near Berkeley. Locals try to preserve everything to block new housing. The latest was lamenting the loss of a brutalist bank that is slated to become apartments.
In some ways I do understand where they are coming from: they moved to berkeley 40 years ago when things were different and it had a smaller town vibe. They did not want to live in a big city like nearby san Francisco. They don't like their city changing. they don't identify with the younger, wealthier folks moving in. I totally get it. I just don't think we can make policy on it.
Berkeley is one of the most egregious cases. In some of these situations, you might feel sympathy that locals have developed a community and local culture that they feel at odds to give up. But Berkeley’s local culture is generated by the university, not the rich boomer ex techies who moved there later. But they also are incredibly at odds with the university rather than appreciating their status as remorae.
I think there are couple features of NIMBY movies that actually provide useful lessons for us pro housing folks. One is that often the people being afflicted by the potential development aren't the owners but are renters (the classic small business being kicked out by the developers). The other is that a different classic plot is the owner is being forced to sell to the greedy developer because her small business is failing, and the help of the townfolk turn it around.
I think the lesson is that what people are unhappy with is the reality of what's profitable to invest in. People want local small business -- restaurants, bookstore, toy shops -- to be more successful than they are, and people want service provision to out of town rich people to be less profitable. And more generally people don't like that local investments need to compete with investment generally and with the interest rate.
As you say one of the recurring plot points, that someone is being "forced to sell" for lots of money, speaks to people even if the implication is that the current owner is being made materially wealthy.
"My bespoke small business should be profitable even if nobody wants to purchase my goods/services" is unfortunately doing a lot of work in folk economic thinking.
It's not just that the owner wants it to stay in business, but that everyone else does too. People are unhappy that the small business is unable to compete with Amazon or Starbucks or Walmart, even when it's they themselves that don't shop there.
I think there are two possible explanations here. One is that people want the _option_ provided by the small business but are unwilling to pay for the option value in addition to the good itself and don't understand why options have to cost money. The other is that people face a coordination problem and would like to not shop at Walmart or Amazon but need to coordinate with everyone else to do so.
My father was happy when Walmart moved to my hometown, a town of 35,000 in southeast New Mexico. He found the local hardware store was charging a significantly higher price for something he needed, and was happy about the savings.
Meanwhile, my two sisters refuse to set foot in a Walmart. Neither is wealthy, but both are ideologically anti-business, convinced that businesses steal from ordinary people all the time.
Very plausible that everyone is right here.
There is some math to back up the latter assertion (though not in the way they phrase it). Walmarts tend to drive other more specialized businesses out of small towns, and because Walmart can negotiate a much lower tax rate being part of a very large nation spanning company it results in the tax base actually shrinking instead of growing.
The dollars used to purchase things from the Walmart also don't stay in the community, they go to a national company that's not especially invested in the small town in the same way a local business might be.
Now, personally I don't really give a shit about any of that other than the tax part. If you fix the problem where they tend to pay less taxes then you can take the tax revenue and use it to improve the small town.
(1) I think is probably an important part of it, but (2) seems less likely. There might be a coordination problem to bring small businesses back, but you don’t need everyone else to shop at a small business to shop there yourself!
Forced to sell in real life is typically following a death (or retirement) with no one with the capital or ability to keep it in the family. It’s based more on many people’s actual experience rather than “folk economic thinking.”
My cousin by marriage died in a farm accident working a farm that has been in my extended family for at least a hundred years. If his heirs had wanted to sell, I could not have coughed up seven figures of capital on no notice, but I would have been terribly distressed for us to have lost that long chain of shared family history to strangers.
That may not be economically rational, but it’s very real.
At least where I live, rural exurb, local restaurants and food trucks do quite well. Local businesses like farmers markets, wedding venues, bakeries, and specialty grocers do fine. Plumbers, electricians, contractors do well. Vendors for the many farmers markets, seasonal markets, and fairs (crafts and art too, not just food and produce) often do well.
I don’t think bookstores, generic independent grocers, or generic toy stores are generally viable small businesses.
I think that's accurate, but that's sort of the point. What people are unhappy about is what makes a viable business and what jobs are better paid in 2025.
Oh my gosh, now I’m remembering that old Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie, “You’ve Got Mail!” (Ryan owned a cute little indy bookstore that was being taken over by the evil chain.)
This reminds me that I’ve still prepared myself to be mad at the Pixar movie Hoppers if it ends up being as NIMBY as the premise and trailers make it seem.
Maybe need a Beavers for Building movement
If you haven't seen this already, it's very funny. Joanna Castle Miller, December 2021: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-villain-who-plans-to-demolish-the-toy-shop-in-a-hallmark-christmas-movie-sets-the-record-straight
On the more serious question of what motivates opposition to loosening zoning restrictions - ideas, interests, or some combination - Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress suggests that interests do matter, based on evidence from the history of zoning in Europe. https://morehousing.substack.com/p/great-downzoning
Came to comments to share this, I was shocked it wasn't linked from the main article. :-D
The show "How I Met Your Mother" actually had one of the more surprisingly YIMBY story arcs I've seen on TV, where the main character Ted is put on a project designing a new skyscraper to replace a derelict hotel, but finds himself at odds with his love interest Zoey, who leads the group opposing the hotel's demolition. The show characterizes the eventual destruction of the hotel as a sad but necessary act of progress and Zoey's zealousness in trying to preserve the hotel as driven by personal search for purpose (she's a stay-at-home wife because her husband is wealthy) that grows increasingly unhinged throughout the season to the point that her efforts begin to be played for laughs.
I think this still misses what’s going on.
For the most part, rural areas and small towns today are very open to development. Regulations are flexible, land is plentiful, and communities are generally receptive, if you understand what is and is not tolerable to locals.
Using Virginia as my go-to, almost every rural county in Virginia saw an influx of young people post-pandemic, with rural counties growing up to 22% from 2020 to 2025, in large part due to remote work. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/virginia/fastest-growing While you still have an excess of deaths over births in some rural counties, due to the older average age of residents, the demographic bleeding has largely stopped and the working age population is growing. https://www.coopercenter.org/research/young-adults-fuel-revival-small-towns-rural-areas
In general, getting new homes or businesses permitted in rural areas is pretty easy. How do you think New Kent County grew 22% since the pandemic? The values and preferences may be different, but homes and businesses generally get permitted unless they are at odds with community values or regulations. Pushback is more on things like landfills, uranium mining, or data center number 10006, not on building a house or a business or permitting a modular or tiny home.
There has been a surge of manufacturing permitted in places like Danville, Washington County (near Bristol), and the New River Valley region. See for example https://wset.com/news/local/danville-named-a-top-micropolitan-area-jumps-to-8th-in-national-ranking-growth-site-selection-magazine-us-pittsylvania-county-economic-march-2025
But rural areas and small towns also tend to have a very strong sense of place and of history, so they do want to preserve continuity of area character and important buildings and locations. In the New River Valley, that might mean preserving river viewsheds and specific buildings of historic and cultural importance, while happily permitting new housing and new manufacturing elsewhere. In Tazewell County, it might mean preserving The Cove while encouraging development in other parts of the county.
Tearing down a historic hotel to build a resort is kind of stupid. Small towns have no shortage of places for greenfield development, which is cheaper and faster than teardown, plus is likely to have more space for resort amenities. You do not need to bulldoze historic hotels or symbolic buildings to build a resort. They often are important pieces of local revitalization and symbols of the area, whether it’s the Jefferson in Richmond or the Hotel Roanoke in its namesake. Both are centers for events and activities in their communities.
Historic hotels are potentially very suitable for office or residential conversion, with hotels currently the leading type of commercial building being converted to residential. People LIKE those sorts of buildings and have strong emotional attachments to them, making them desirable places to live or work. See https://archinect.com/news/tag/2150566/office-conversion or see https://www.discoverdanville.com/news/danvilles-white-mill-restoration-project-began-with-a-tweet/
As far as why people prefer more space, if you look at the history, up until the 1920s, most people in the US lived in rural areas. Those areas were not dense, because farms are by definition spread out. Cities were seen as exotic and novel. That was followed by the Great Depression and World War II, neither particularly good times to buy homes. In the 1930s, only about 43-48% of people lived in an owned home. That jumped to 62% or so post war.
Boomers’ parents largely grew up on farms. After the war, those new homeowners wanted green space, a garden, a back yard to have friends and family over, just like they had growing up. Boomers typically had grandparents who owned farms, who they visited on weekends and holidays. Wanting to buy a hobby farm is very common for Boomers. What you are getting now is the expansion of that preference to other age groups.
Family and community are associated with tradition and stability. Stability is not at all equivalent to stasis. Families have new people marry in, children marry out, kids go away for college, children move away and move back. Community is built with personal ties, of friendship and of family, which grow over time, and those ties are extremely important to people.
These movies generally aren’t making an argument that growth, newcomers, and dynamism are a problem. They are making a point that you need to be aware of what you’re losing, not just what you’re gaining, and balance them. That does not block rural development.
Most small towns and rural areas that are growing have historic buildings as key attractions for residents and tourists, and attractive and bucolic countryside is often key for local identity and agri-tourism, general tourism, outdoor recreation, and other big pieces of rural economies. People do not visit or move to rural areas or small towns for density - they are looking for rural character and rural amenities.
More people in rural areas work in tourism than agriculture.
Manufacturing plants, which are generally neither in downtown nor in agricultural areas, are thus often better tolerated than, say, very large swathes of solar in very visible areas. “Invisible” solar well back off main roads is thus far better accepted than highly visible.
Rural areas are not setting local policy based on Hallmark movies.
My one NIMBY tendency as a VA born (technically Washington D.C., but we count those) person that still lives in the state is I hate, hate, hate new development that does not use brick or stone. Sorry folks, it's VA, the red clay state, you use BRICKS when you build not WOOD not PETROLEOM COMPOSITE SIDING you use BRICKS. I don't care how all, how short, how long, or how wide. You. Use. Bricks.
Now you might say, Alex, bricks are expensive, and I agree. that's true, and it's why I'm in favor of the VA government literally opening government run brick factories using VA clay to make bricks so nobody has that excuse any more.
Virginia has a long history of using wood siding (later replaced by vinyl or hardiplank patterned to look like wood). Some notable historic examples include Michie Tavern outside of Charlottesville https://www.michietavern.com Patrick Henry’s Scotchtown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotchtown_(plantation) outside of Richmond and George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Fairfax https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/the-mansion/siding#:~:text=Trapped%20Siding,also%20had%20“rusticated%20Boards.”
The Mount Vernon link has a discussion about the techniques used for its wooden siding.
In general, farmhouses and many taverns historically had wooden siding. I would guess brick was more expensive, especially for small farmers. I have the strong impression that bricks were usually made by slaves in early Virginia, which might explain the regional patterns of brick versus wood siding in old buildings.
The mountainous western part of the state had far fewer slaves than the more level east. That is part of why Virginia split into two states during the Civil War, although a goodly chunk of the mountainous west was left in Virginia post split.
Many buildings near DC, public buildings like courthouses, mansions like Shirley, and almost anything built in the federal style used brick. As you note, clay suitable for bricks is abundant in Virginia, and the federal style is very popular here.
Brick was extremely popular and desirable, but not universal. I am from the western part of the state, so I’m used to seeing siding on very old houses.
Of course all of that is true! I also think the wood siding looks bad and ages very poorly without a lot of upkeep. Mount Vernon the park/land is very pretty....the house....not my personal favorite.
In regards to boomers (and earlier GenXers) and their dislike of cities: Jerusalem, you had an interview with someone in, I believe, Good on Paper, I forgot his name - he might have been one of the authors of that paper you cited. He said that in the 70’s and 80’s, cities were “basket cases” and most people had NO intention or desire to move to one - people who came of age in those decades wanted a house in the suburbs, no question. (I’d say a few exceptions: gay men moving to San Francisco, writers, artists and actors moving to New York or LA, but those would be in the minority.) Then with the 90’s, crime dropped, young people (the OG Sex and the City generation) rediscovered urban living, and now cities are cool, or rather, *certain* cities are.
Meanwhile, I keep thinking that the Hallmark movie version of the small town is closer, in reality, to an affluent inner-ring suburb, the kind of exurb that is planned to have a small town feel, or else an equally affluent and “picturesque” urban neighborhood. A lot of small towns these days are hollowed out hellscapes, where Dollar General has replaced picture-postcard Main Streets. Hallmark needs to set its brand of cozy in Los Feliz or Noe Valley or Greenwich Village these days. (Though I suppose a small town in Montana that is a resort town would qualify…on a seven figure income!)
Everyone is going to hate me but I think there is a place for a single family home (or maybe a duplex home) with a yard. Probably not in the inner city but certainly in the suburbs. You can't garden without land, folks! And some of us really, really need to garden. Gardening is my passion; a passion I've cultivating since I was five years old. I do not care about the city amenities of cutesy coffee shops, art museums, walkable neighborhood etc. I care about having the land for a garden and I refuse to consider my need for garden less valid than someone else's need to walk to the art museum. My 1/4 acre suburban garden gives me great joy and I value it greatly. I also use it well-the entire non-house area is devoted to gardening. When my kids were little we had some grass for them to play on. It was well used. I believe it is reasonable to have traditional single family homes with yards in some areas and not have these yards overseen by a massive hulking, shade casting apartments. We need a mix of housing and single family homes (or duplexes like the Brit's build) need to be part of that mix. So I guess that makes me a NIMBY or at least a partial one. So be it; I'll own it and fight you over it.
I do see a lot of areas where it makes sense to put in high density housing. The Portland area has a lot of areas with ratty old houses and really ratty one or two story decrepit apartment. Knock those places down and put up a four story apartment. I also think we need to be more aggressive in building affordable housing. Where I see it being build around here it's on vacant lots, former industrial areas not in established residential areas so I don't know why people make a fuss about it.
City housing is an issue but making single family home owners the villain is not the answer.
I think of it as a tradeoff between time and space. Some people (like yourself) want more space and are willing to live further out, spending more time commuting to work. But there's also plenty of people who want to live close to work, trading space for time. Then they can get around by taking transit, walking, or biking, instead of living further out and spending more time driving to and from work, fighting traffic, and burning gas.
Prices are a pretty good indication of what people want. In a location where land prices are high, that means lots of people want to live there. You can either have a single rich person who outbids all the rest and puts up a single house, or you can have a bunch of people pool their money (via their future stream of rents) and put up an apartment building.
"City housing is an issue but making single family home owners the villain is not the answer."
I always think of this video from a Bronx community board meeting: https://x.com/WaluigiSoap/status/1516913633791561731
I don't understand - why do you think YIMBYs are anti single-family houses?
Well, they are always talking about building more apartments and other forms of high density housing. Single family houses have a larger footprint per family particularly if they have any yard. I always get the vibes that a lot of YIMBYs would consider me and my husband social reprobates for living in a four bedroom house on a quarter acre lot. I also think a large percentage of the population really would prefer not to live as close to your neighbors as you do in an apartment. It only takes one bad experience with obnoxious neighbors to make a single family home look real good.
Maybe some YIMBYs, but I hope not very many of them. I live just like you and prefer it that way. At the same time, I don't think I have a right to veto denser housing being built somewhere in my vicinity. Indeed, some of my neighbors managed to kill a proposal to build *townhomes* about 1.5 miles away.
"And indeed, Broockman, Elmendorf, and Kalla found that voters are often evaluating housing policies based on their associations with various symbols like “cities, tall buildings, developers, various government entities, and the groups who might live in new housing.”"
Yea, I feel like the "groups" is a big part of it. THOSE people aren't part of our community.
Christmas movies are interesting because they're often a real celebration of the kind of populism Joseph Heath describes in his piece "Populism fast and slow."
A girl from the land of theory and abstraction comes to visit her family in the land of common sense and tangible things, helps stop a conspiracy against common people and falls in love with an honest guy along the way.
It's easy watching, because it humours our knee-jerk emotional reactions to change.