Can beauty solve the housing crisis?

Samuel Hughes has a new Works in Progress essay asking again whether beauty can solve the housing crisis. He distinguishes NIMBYs (locals who oppose development of all kinds nearby) from NITBYs (”Not In That Backyard”): people who live nowhere near a project but casually oppose it because it looks ugly to them. Hughes argues that NIMBYism predates modernist architecture by a generation (first-wave restrictive zoning swept Europe and the US while new buildings were still classically ornamented), so beauty alone won’t dissolve local opposition. But the historical conservation movement, which froze European city centers and large swaths of American downtowns starting in the 1960s, could plausibly be a NITBY response to modernism: thousands of years of demolition-and-rebuild stopped almost overnight once the replacements got “ugly”. For infill development, it appears true that sometime after WWII, American city residents lost faith in the future of what their cities would look and feel like.

But competing stylized facts remain: cinderblock strip malls and vinyl-sided “mcmansion” sprawl continues to be the central feature of the most rapidly-building metros in the US (a sharp difference from the UK’s strict century-old ban on “ribbon development” sprawl). Beautiful projects like I’On in Charleston and the Duchy of Cornwall’s Faversham still get NIMBY’d to a standstill, and Robert AM Stern’s traditionalist neoclassical limestone revivals brought favorable reviews but few permitting wins. Finally: beyond the uncontroversial option of preapproved “pattern books”, nobody has an obvious policy lever to make new buildings beautiful at scale.