Why Ugly Buildings Are Holding Back Housing
Beauty in my backyard
Western countries once allowed landowners to build almost anything anywhere, but strict rules now freeze neighborhoods and ban densification. A common theory blames ugly modern buildings for fueling NIMBY opposition, but the evidence suggests ugliness is not the main driver of local resistance. Instead, it was the rise of modernist architecture that generated a powerful new group of 'NITBYs'—people who oppose development elsewhere—leading to the triumph of heritage conservation. This article argues that conservationism was less a reaction to what modernists destroyed than to what they created.
Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created.
- lkm0
The point about conservationism being not a thing until 1950s seems a bit blunt/misleading to anyone who's heard about Viollet-le-Duc and co. Conserving ancient building was definitely a huge thing in 19th century Europe. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc and Hugo's endless ramblings about medieval buildings in Notre-Dame https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris/Livre_tro...
- softwaredoug
I don’t think this is true.
Opposition is not really related to aesthetics.
People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.
- kalimatas
Unrelated to the article: The drawings in the top image are beautiful. What's the name of the style for it? I would love to learn this technique.
- throwaway63467
Most new single home construction in Germany is in the form of cubes with flat roofs, absolutely ugly and will look like crap in 30-50 years (for me it looks like crap now already), see e.g. [1]. Insanity but for the builder it makes sense as it’s the cheapest way to conform to the energy saving requirements and maximize living room per lot size which is restricted due to idiotic zoning laws. I don’t get how this can be considered sustainable… And each of these houses costs more than 1 MM EUR.
1: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/169220882?referrer=H...
- BrenBarn
This is interesting although a couple things raised questions for me.
One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago were making decisions based on zoning in Boston. For this argument to work, I would need to see more specific evidence that for each of a number of cities, downzoning in an individual city took place before modern architecture began to make inroads in that city. Also, ideally this would not be about "modern" architecture but just about "buildings that people thought were ugly".
Second, the article makes several references to how lots of buildings were torn down and replaced throughout history, but we only see opposition to it more recently. An obvious explanation for this is that it is only relatively recently that democratic decision-making (including at the city level) became widespread and entrenched enough that individual citizens could influence such matters at all. Until relatively recently large-scale development was often a matter of backroom negotiations between politicians and wealthy developers who ran roughshod over the wishes of ordinary folks (and before that it was even worse, for instance in systems where most land was owned by nobles). The NIMBY movement can be seen in part as a reaction to this.