The old rulebook says people fight new housing because they’re selfish. Protect the property value, block the newcomers, done. Turns out that map’s wrong. A piece over at Works in Progress makes the case that a big chunk of the opposition is aesthetic. People fight the buildings because the buildings are ugly. Bland glass boxes, beige stucco slabs, the kind of thing nobody would miss if it fell down.
Run the experiment and the numbers move. Show folks a handsome building and the same folks who’d have grabbed a pitchfork go quiet. Show them the beige box and they lawyer up. So the standard fix, override the locals and build anyway, keeps punching the same wall. The argument here is simpler: make the thing worth looking at, and half the opposition stops being opposition. Whether any planning department actually wants to hear that is a different question.
Every project fight you’ve read about (“residents pack council meeting to block 40 units”) is partly an argument about how the thing will look, even when nobody says so out loud. If your town keeps killing housing, the fastest unlock might not be zoning reform. It might be design rules that make new buildings something neighbors don’t dread.
So watch what your own council actually rejects. A blocky glass box gets torn apart. A brick building with a decent street front tends to slide through. That gap is where more homes get built, and where prices eventually give.
The pitch for decades was that opposition to new housing came from selfishness. People just didn’t want their property values touched. Turns out a chunk of it is that the buildings are ugly, and everyone knew it but nobody was allowed to say it. Make a thing people don’t want to look at every day, then act shocked when they fight it. The builders who figure out that beauty is cheaper than a five-year zoning war are the ones who’ll actually get the permits.
Sources: worksinprogress.news
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