Late last year, I traveled to a conference to meet one of my favorite writers, Matthew Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy and is best known for Shop Class as Soulcraft, his meditation on the dignity of manual work, and how trade work—the act of building or fixing something—is inherently character building.
Spending a few days around Crawford put me in the mood to dig back into political classics writers I studied in college, like de Tocqueville and Nietzsche, who wrestled with a question that still shapes our cities today:
Why do some people build while others stand on the sidelines and sneer?
There are a lot of people who hate homebuilders. Or, more specifically, there are a lot of terminally online people who seem obsessed with hating homebuilders.
You see it in every internet comment thread about development, every neighborhood listserv, every “concerned citizens” meeting. Case after case, where builders take risks, their critics frantically engulf civic conversations, moralizing about the heinousness of the act of homebuilding itself.
