As you can tell, I’ve been in the midst of reading a lot of Wendell Berry so far this summer, which naturally has my mind focused on farming and rural areas and the depredations of big agriculture and urbanism. So I was especially struck by this piece by Freddie DeBoer this week, on how dense urban space are vital to the preservation of wild rural ones. Here is his argument in a nutshell:
So to be more positive here’s a pro-housing abundance messages that I wish was a little more prominent: higher housing density can actually protect the undeveloped spaces that make the country more verdant and beautiful. Increased density in higher-density places reduces building in America’s beautiful low-density places. This is good substantively and politically.
Freddie DeBoer, “A Housing Abundance Movement Can Help Save America’s Wild Spaces”
His argument continues on about how advocating for denser urban spaces – defined by vertical construction and reduced vehicle storage space – is far preferable to urban sprawl – suburban single family homes spread out on big lots. That sprawl inevitably builds over wild spaces, but it doesn’t need to be this way. If we want to preserve beautiful rural spaces – both for wildlife conservation reasons, and agriculture/rural-way-of-life reasons – we need to think differently about how we build our urban areas. This requires some top-down decision making, which many locales are seemingly quite hesitant to do, at least as long as that decision-making is more focused on reducing urban sprawl than it is restricting how buildings can be built and used in dense urban areas (height restrictions come to mind.)
Give Freddie a read for more on this debate. Matt Yglesias is a good voice as well, if you are interested in zoning and land usage issues.
Justin DaMetz 