This is a thought-compelling piece. I certainly share the skepticism of Just-Add-Water (Instant) Urbanism. Even with proper form, the lack of fine-grained ownership should cause us to reject this model as a default just as one might reject the strip malls and subdivisions that this model is purporting to replace in certain communities.
On renting though, I have more mixed feelings. I just purchased my first home, at 35 years old, and as a city planner I have long heard that renters are second-class citizens because they aren't owners. It's that kind of thinking that banishes apartments to big complexes at the edge of stroads, rather than allowing a mix of housing in all neighborhoods. It's that kind of thinking that is used to justify listening to parochial homeowners at the expense of everyone else. It's that kind of thinking that makes people assume that you haven't "arrived" as an adult until you own a detached single-family home, regardless of whether that is a good fit for your life. It's that kind of thinking that makes no room for people to live lifestyles that don't include marriage, kids, and "settling down." This article can be read as a more sophisticated version of those arguments, which I reject as unfair, but I don't know if that was the author's intent.
Does the author intend to critique all renters as a class or is there something specific about the submarket that Fenton is targeted at that is faulty? Is there any difference between the renters at Fenton, the ones in a generic garden apartment complex, and the ones renting in a quad-plex in a traditional neighborhood? Does it mean anything to the writer's argument that even the most pro-social anti-commodity renter will find a scarcity of units that are built with pro-social/neighborhood co-creation embedded in their design? Does Fenton improve upon the garden-apartment complex alternative or does it matter? Is there an appropriate place for the Fentons (or a less commodified version of Fenton) in a community or do we all just need to focus on producing more TNDs and incremental infill?
By the way, I certainly agree with the critique of consumption-oriented life, but I would argue that many homeowners also treat their cities as places to consume rather than places to co-create.
Stephen, thanks for your comment, and congratulations on the purchase of your first home! Your concern about my treatment of renting was shared by my editors, and I think another essay's worth of thought could easily be put into something like a "philosophy of renting". Let me attempt a succinct response here.
To state it simply, I am not critiquing the renters. I am critiquing the landlords. And I am certainly not defending the stereotypically entitled, HOA-handbook-thumping homeowner who objects to a mix of housing types in neighborhoods. I myself am both a homeowner and a renter (having recently moved states). There is, emphatically, a need and a place for both renting and home ownership in a healthy society. A clarification, and a response.
Firstly, I tried to argue that the structure of society should privilege individual ownership over institutional ownership. This is derivative of a philosophy of the human person which emphasizes a certain kind of relationship to the world in which it is fitting that people own the property with which they live and work. I argue that this capacitates human flourishing, societal flourishing, and the possibility of generosity, of real gift-giving. I am inclined to think of marriage and children as inherent to the development of human beings and human culture: not incumbent upon all individuals, but not to be dismissed lightly as a "lifestyle choice". In this we may disagree slightly, but my argument for the priority of ownership does not stand or fall on the point. I object to Fenton on the grounds that it institutionalizes a PERMANENT rental class, and does not lead towards ownership as the normative destination of human development. Part of my objection is that Fenton seems to do exactly what you and I dislike: it treats the renter as a second class citizen. Renters at Fenton are shut away in a development world unto itself, occupied only by other renters, with every attempt made to make contact with the rest of the community needless. This, it would seem to me, is hardly conducive to real, healthy human society.
Is there a difference between the renters at Fenton, and any of the places you describe?
I think so. Renter's in a quad-plex are part of society, not cordoned away from it. Garden complexes range from excellent to terrible, but generally (as I understand them) they do not attempt to create a self-sufficient reservation. Whether or not this is good or bad, it is certainly different from Fenton.
As a final point, though I am strongly inclined to prefer traditional urban forms and incremental infill, developments like Fenton may be a stepping stone on the way to a better society. In critiquing Fenton I may find myself inadvertently critiquing "how the doer of deeds could have done them better". I do not object to stepping stones. I object to proclaiming that the stepping stone is as good as the finish line. We should not lose sight of the fact that, whatever else Fenton may be, it is not the proper habitat for human beings.
Nick, thanks for expounding upon your article. You've obviously put some thought into this. As someone who until very recently was a longtime renter, I'd be very interested in your "philosophy of renting." I appreciate your clarification that you were not disparaging all renters.
I wholeheartedly agree that decentralized ownership should be the preferred structure for society. I would add a caveat that today's version of an ownership society - owning a heavily subsidized detached single-family home and an institutionally-managed stock portfolio - is an inferior model compared to our ancestors' freedom to build and own a variety of individual buildings or enterprises.
I think your final point is incredibly strong, and I suggest that it all stems from the fact that Fenton is a financial product, serving a spreadsheet formula and institutional financiers, before it is anything else. Even if one could argue an improvement in form, it's still taking the anti-human approach of forcing humans and places to serve financial returns instead of making finances fit within the needs and opportunities of humans and places.* I think there's room to debate whether Fenton's design is superior to the auto-dependent single-use garden apartments and whether Fenton is an acceptable stepping stone to a better human habitat, but I wholeheartedly agree that this should not be celebrated as the "finish line."
*I think there's a lot of work within the New Urbanism to be done to understand how the pre-WW2 traditional development pattern made good profits for our ancestors. After all, they weren't building out of altruism, and yet they consistently produced better human habitat than we do.
Couldn't agree more with your criticism of today's version of an ownership society as "owning a heavily subsidized detached single-family home and an institutionally managed stock portfolio". Hilarious, scary, and well put. Our ancestors would have considered this horribly oppressive, and I can promise you that when I say ownership I mean something far more radical and sensible than THAT. An exploration of what Real ownership might mean would be another great essay, though I suspect if I were to write it I would borrow very heavily from Leo XIII's "Rerum Novarum".
You nailed it. I've never been to Fenton, but I've also been dozens of times as well. And I don't need to go to "this Fenton" to know what I'm not missing.
The New Urbanism model was made real through design and massing, but was all based on the idea of building true community. Using streets to connect, porches to provide opportunities for relationships. Roof top bars are nothing when housing is temporary at best.
Indeed. Macro development is clearly Excel-driven rather than place-driven. When the primary end is finance, it will show up in the architecture and programming.
Nick, wow! Possibly the most insightful essay I have read on the devastating impact of absentee financialization on true community. The commodified "rentership" you describe is the exact endpoint of the top-down zoning templates currently being forced on historic neighborhoods nationwide. Instead of doing the hard work of community-led design, planners are using "academic bypasses" to drop copy-paste prototypes onto our streets. In the process, they are actively erasing the community’s voice and transforming our sacred neighborhood geographies into high-yield commercial assets for global capital.
The political rationalizations for this are exhausting, with planning issues converted into political feasting for everyone from virtue-signaling social engineers to trickle-down deregulationists. The establishment's goal is to force citizens into a defensive posture to ram the zoning through. But having spent my life in and around these civic crucibles, the truth remains: you cannot copy-paste a culture. We must return to the hard work of Community-Up planning. No matter how you shake it, neighborhoods build communities, communities build cities, and the Market builds buildings.
While I do agree that tenant-only, fully financialized development is not going to have the staying power that something with deeper resident stakes will, the question I have for ownership advocates is "are you advocating for ownership of _space_, or ownership of _land_"?
We need to make this distinction because only one of those two things is compatible with the goals of our broader movement, while the other leaves us "stuck" in an...intermediate state, neither quite where we are now nor where we need to be to accomplish what we desire on other fronts.
This is a thought-compelling piece. I certainly share the skepticism of Just-Add-Water (Instant) Urbanism. Even with proper form, the lack of fine-grained ownership should cause us to reject this model as a default just as one might reject the strip malls and subdivisions that this model is purporting to replace in certain communities.
On renting though, I have more mixed feelings. I just purchased my first home, at 35 years old, and as a city planner I have long heard that renters are second-class citizens because they aren't owners. It's that kind of thinking that banishes apartments to big complexes at the edge of stroads, rather than allowing a mix of housing in all neighborhoods. It's that kind of thinking that is used to justify listening to parochial homeowners at the expense of everyone else. It's that kind of thinking that makes people assume that you haven't "arrived" as an adult until you own a detached single-family home, regardless of whether that is a good fit for your life. It's that kind of thinking that makes no room for people to live lifestyles that don't include marriage, kids, and "settling down." This article can be read as a more sophisticated version of those arguments, which I reject as unfair, but I don't know if that was the author's intent.
Does the author intend to critique all renters as a class or is there something specific about the submarket that Fenton is targeted at that is faulty? Is there any difference between the renters at Fenton, the ones in a generic garden apartment complex, and the ones renting in a quad-plex in a traditional neighborhood? Does it mean anything to the writer's argument that even the most pro-social anti-commodity renter will find a scarcity of units that are built with pro-social/neighborhood co-creation embedded in their design? Does Fenton improve upon the garden-apartment complex alternative or does it matter? Is there an appropriate place for the Fentons (or a less commodified version of Fenton) in a community or do we all just need to focus on producing more TNDs and incremental infill?
By the way, I certainly agree with the critique of consumption-oriented life, but I would argue that many homeowners also treat their cities as places to consume rather than places to co-create.
Stephen, thanks for your comment, and congratulations on the purchase of your first home! Your concern about my treatment of renting was shared by my editors, and I think another essay's worth of thought could easily be put into something like a "philosophy of renting". Let me attempt a succinct response here.
To state it simply, I am not critiquing the renters. I am critiquing the landlords. And I am certainly not defending the stereotypically entitled, HOA-handbook-thumping homeowner who objects to a mix of housing types in neighborhoods. I myself am both a homeowner and a renter (having recently moved states). There is, emphatically, a need and a place for both renting and home ownership in a healthy society. A clarification, and a response.
Firstly, I tried to argue that the structure of society should privilege individual ownership over institutional ownership. This is derivative of a philosophy of the human person which emphasizes a certain kind of relationship to the world in which it is fitting that people own the property with which they live and work. I argue that this capacitates human flourishing, societal flourishing, and the possibility of generosity, of real gift-giving. I am inclined to think of marriage and children as inherent to the development of human beings and human culture: not incumbent upon all individuals, but not to be dismissed lightly as a "lifestyle choice". In this we may disagree slightly, but my argument for the priority of ownership does not stand or fall on the point. I object to Fenton on the grounds that it institutionalizes a PERMANENT rental class, and does not lead towards ownership as the normative destination of human development. Part of my objection is that Fenton seems to do exactly what you and I dislike: it treats the renter as a second class citizen. Renters at Fenton are shut away in a development world unto itself, occupied only by other renters, with every attempt made to make contact with the rest of the community needless. This, it would seem to me, is hardly conducive to real, healthy human society.
Is there a difference between the renters at Fenton, and any of the places you describe?
I think so. Renter's in a quad-plex are part of society, not cordoned away from it. Garden complexes range from excellent to terrible, but generally (as I understand them) they do not attempt to create a self-sufficient reservation. Whether or not this is good or bad, it is certainly different from Fenton.
As a final point, though I am strongly inclined to prefer traditional urban forms and incremental infill, developments like Fenton may be a stepping stone on the way to a better society. In critiquing Fenton I may find myself inadvertently critiquing "how the doer of deeds could have done them better". I do not object to stepping stones. I object to proclaiming that the stepping stone is as good as the finish line. We should not lose sight of the fact that, whatever else Fenton may be, it is not the proper habitat for human beings.
Nick, thanks for expounding upon your article. You've obviously put some thought into this. As someone who until very recently was a longtime renter, I'd be very interested in your "philosophy of renting." I appreciate your clarification that you were not disparaging all renters.
I wholeheartedly agree that decentralized ownership should be the preferred structure for society. I would add a caveat that today's version of an ownership society - owning a heavily subsidized detached single-family home and an institutionally-managed stock portfolio - is an inferior model compared to our ancestors' freedom to build and own a variety of individual buildings or enterprises.
I think your final point is incredibly strong, and I suggest that it all stems from the fact that Fenton is a financial product, serving a spreadsheet formula and institutional financiers, before it is anything else. Even if one could argue an improvement in form, it's still taking the anti-human approach of forcing humans and places to serve financial returns instead of making finances fit within the needs and opportunities of humans and places.* I think there's room to debate whether Fenton's design is superior to the auto-dependent single-use garden apartments and whether Fenton is an acceptable stepping stone to a better human habitat, but I wholeheartedly agree that this should not be celebrated as the "finish line."
*I think there's a lot of work within the New Urbanism to be done to understand how the pre-WW2 traditional development pattern made good profits for our ancestors. After all, they weren't building out of altruism, and yet they consistently produced better human habitat than we do.
Couldn't agree more with your criticism of today's version of an ownership society as "owning a heavily subsidized detached single-family home and an institutionally managed stock portfolio". Hilarious, scary, and well put. Our ancestors would have considered this horribly oppressive, and I can promise you that when I say ownership I mean something far more radical and sensible than THAT. An exploration of what Real ownership might mean would be another great essay, though I suspect if I were to write it I would borrow very heavily from Leo XIII's "Rerum Novarum".
You nailed it. I've never been to Fenton, but I've also been dozens of times as well. And I don't need to go to "this Fenton" to know what I'm not missing.
The New Urbanism model was made real through design and massing, but was all based on the idea of building true community. Using streets to connect, porches to provide opportunities for relationships. Roof top bars are nothing when housing is temporary at best.
Thanks for the insight.
Indeed. Macro development is clearly Excel-driven rather than place-driven. When the primary end is finance, it will show up in the architecture and programming.
Nick, wow! Possibly the most insightful essay I have read on the devastating impact of absentee financialization on true community. The commodified "rentership" you describe is the exact endpoint of the top-down zoning templates currently being forced on historic neighborhoods nationwide. Instead of doing the hard work of community-led design, planners are using "academic bypasses" to drop copy-paste prototypes onto our streets. In the process, they are actively erasing the community’s voice and transforming our sacred neighborhood geographies into high-yield commercial assets for global capital.
The political rationalizations for this are exhausting, with planning issues converted into political feasting for everyone from virtue-signaling social engineers to trickle-down deregulationists. The establishment's goal is to force citizens into a defensive posture to ram the zoning through. But having spent my life in and around these civic crucibles, the truth remains: you cannot copy-paste a culture. We must return to the hard work of Community-Up planning. No matter how you shake it, neighborhoods build communities, communities build cities, and the Market builds buildings.
Chris Remke @builttothink.substack.com
You cannot copy-paste a culture. Well put.
While I do agree that tenant-only, fully financialized development is not going to have the staying power that something with deeper resident stakes will, the question I have for ownership advocates is "are you advocating for ownership of _space_, or ownership of _land_"?
We need to make this distinction because only one of those two things is compatible with the goals of our broader movement, while the other leaves us "stuck" in an...intermediate state, neither quite where we are now nor where we need to be to accomplish what we desire on other fronts.