Disgusting

An older acquaintance who was raised in Louisiana told me that when she was young, her father couldn’t eat a meal if black people were in the room. Literally made him nauseous.

Sincere aesthetic reactions and reactions of disgust are deeply connected with our sense of morals and our religious and political affiliations.

I think the book “The Elephant in the Brain” by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler does a good job of describing what goes on when we engage in these sorts of reactions. My simpleton’s description of Hanson’s point of view is that, basically, we didn’t really need large brains to develop basic tools, etc. What we needed big brains for was to handle the complications of social life. It is broad specialization, coordination, and cooperation that has lifted humanity from the vagaries of the jungle, and social life is really hard.

One of the ways that it is hard is that communal harmony requires accepting a set of common beliefs. In fact, you could say that a community is differentiated by its incongruous shared beliefs - the things a person wouldn’t believe if they weren’t a member of that group.

Our brains had to be big and complicated enough to lie to themselves. To sincerely believe incongruous things rather than being troubled by the hypocrisies our communities ask of us.

My friend’s dad was doing that. I’m sure his reaction was completely sincere. His experience of the reaction was involuntary. But, with observational distance, it is obvious to us that the reaction was culturally implanted. And, self-serving. In addition to being learned behavior, it was a behavior motivated by status competition. It would not have served him to be disgusted by white people or wealthy people. It did serve him to engage in the communal, social oppression of black people.

But, I doubt there was ever a Machiavellian thought in that big brain of his. It would probably have been better if he had been Machiavellian. At least then a conversation or an argument could have been possible. But, his brain was big enough to lie to itself, so there was nothing to be said. You might say he was putting his big brain to the exact use nature had created it for. He was being quintessentially human.

Everyone Excluding Everyone

This comes up in housing because every local battle over building enough housing eventually comes down to “neighborhood character”.

Land use regulations and other housing regulations obviously have well-discussed racist and classist roots. And, obviously, the classist motivations for local housing regulation are barely under the surface when they aren’t explicit.

I don’t want this post to be taken as race-baiting or some progressive egalitarian hit job. As I have asserted in previous posts, it is likely true that much of the land value in cities with ample housing comes from the amenity of being surrounded by families with higher incomes. People are willing to pay a lot for that. That is also quintessentially human.

Urban living comes with a lot of conflict. It is natural that families would seek to reduce that conflict, and one way to reduce it is to seek some amount of class segregation. There is a range where this can be achieved. All of us would help our children find an apartment in neighborhoods with lower crime. That is an aspect of class segregation. Class segregation isn’t something we should amplify. But, the amount of class segregation we will and must functionally accept is not zero.

And, I would happily allow all the Beverly Hills and Paradise Valleys and Greenwiches that rich people wanted. The problem is that neighborhoods all up and down the socio-economic ladder are playing the same game. It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. When a neighborhood “defects” from generously allowing local growth in order to protect the socioeconomic status of their neighborhood, they gain at everyone else’s expense. When everyone tries to benefit at everyone else’s expense, it just adds up to collective losses. There are still poor residents and there is still crime. It’s still going somewhere.

All those city council meetings about neighborhood character might randomly move around the shifting socioeconomics of a city, but they don’t make them go away. In fact they make them worse by increasing homelessness, creating regressive cost of living pressures on the most vulnerable families, etc. So, instead of having a 12 unit rental building on the corner, the neighborhood ends up with a few tents down at the park.

This isn’t a crisis because Beverly Hills occupies a little pocket of Los Angeles space. It’s a crisis because this motivation has wrapped its tentacles around whole cities and made us all worse off. But, until someone comes up with a better solution than individually saying “Build all you want, just not here.”, then we can’t functionally let anyone say that.

Aesthetics in Housing

It has been a while since it was acceptable in most places to say you want to keep out minorities, and it is considered gauche in some circles to say, explicitly, that you want to bar families of a lower socioeconomic stature. You can worry about things like crime, and there are many worries like that which are legitimate, and which correlate with income. But probably the causation is mostly in the other direction - that poor families can’t afford housing where crime is kept at a distance.

This relates to the homevoter hypothesis, which is that homeowners capture local governments in order to maximize their property values. I think the causation goes the other way here, too. It is usually not helpful to assume that homeowners are primarily motivated by property values. My research pushes against the homevoter hypothesis, because what I find is that local land use regulations raise the values of the poorest neighborhoods the most. Property values go up the most where families are excluded to, not where they are excluded from.

Families want to live near rich families. They are willing to pay more to live near rich families. They also try to affect local regulations to keep poor families from living near them. One way to keep poor families from living near you is to enact regulations that prevent more accessible or dense housing from being constructed in the local area. These rules might keep local homes expensive. But high property values are a tool, not the goal.

These rules take the form of minimum lot sizes, rules against duplexes, triplexes, or apartments, or rules about lot coverage. Historic preservation is frequently a tool used to obstruct change. Design review is a useful tool because it opens up any new development to open-ended objections from the locals. Housing delayed is housing denied.

Anyone who has been in the trenches as seen this play out. Developers are required to seek community input. And the NIMBYs among the neighbors demand shorter buildings, fewer units, and various other relatively arbitrary demands. Where rules allow it, everything is on the table. The pitch of the roof. Colors. Elevations. Etc.

As these norms have hardened into place, aesthetic complaints have become central to the process. Here is one that crossed my Twitter feed recently.

This is very common. Aesthetics are the last refuge of a NIMBY. It is a complaint that can be universally applied and is unanswerable.

I attended a legislative committee hearing recently about a bill which would limit minimum lot size rules and local design review, reduce some lot coverage restrictions, etc. Generally, the objections were in the form of aesthetics. The fear was that constituents who bought into a nice neighborhood with big yards and lots of trees could wake up one morning and find that someone is adding 6 new little units to a lot down the street, and they would have to look at those units every day as they passed by.

If you haven’t attended or watched many of these meetings, you might be surprised at how often citizens are moved to attend a city meeting to object that they would have to look at something as they drive by, and the thing that would be offensive about it is that it is 10’ taller than other local buildings, or fills more of the lot.

For those of us who don’t find a lot of reasons to attend city meetings, that might seem like thin sauce for motivation. And, it is tempting to ascribe ulterior motives. But I think the conscious motives are sincere. I think they are sincere like my friends old Louisiana father’s nausea was sincere. It takes a big, human brain to be so motivated by aesthetics. There is nothing dissonant about having a reaction to aesthetics. There are no moral principles to risk. These are just involuntary reactions. “That building is ugly to me. What can I possibly do about that?” Sincerely. What could you do?

Aesthetics As Status

Aesthetics are status. By that, I don’t mean that people with high status like or appreciate nice things. I mean that their expression is a reflection of status. The Louisiana father.

A 30 foot high building or a six-plex aren’t inherently ugly. In fact, one might wonder why we would presume to react against them at all. The reason they are sincerely perceived as ugly or problematic is a result of zoning. A century of increasingly severe and arbitrary limits to neighborhood structures has led us to associate neighborhoods full of unchanging single-family homes with status and wealth.

There have been times when being stout was considered attractive, and other times when being trim was considered attractive. Times when tanned skin was attractive and other times when pale skin was attractive. Etc. Etc. These flexible notions are usually associated with status.

One might go so far as to observe that the more arbitrary the standard, the more strong and sincere (truly, sincere) it will be felt.

With a different historical path, high status could very well have become associated with density and novelty, and old neighborhoods that never change might have been considered unappealing. That is how cities developed until the 20th century and zoning.

I happened to come upon a booster reel from Los Angeles that looks like it dates to around the 1940s. It was played as a bumper after a televised movie or a sporting event. I wish I knew its source, or that I would have taken a better recording of it. This was a film intended to sell Los Angeles to you. LA’s growth was a major focus. In this clip, the narrator says, “There is no place in America that can compete with Los Angeles in the construction of architectural oddities. For here, one may find anything from a brown derby to a shoe transformed into practical use with little or no concern for the consistencies of orthodox architecture.”

We could have developed a social norm, like in historic Bologna, where building tall towers was high status. Or, like in early-20th century Los Angeles, where novelty was high status. For roughly a century, status has been conveyed by imposing control, by stopping change in housing infrastructure at a very local level.

You couldn’t build Paris in most American cities today. (Actually, you couldn’t build American cities in most American cities today.) That isn’t because Paris is objectively ugly. It’s because local stagnation is high status in America.

The Stories We Tell

Along the same lines as Hanson and Simler, Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Aesthetics are one way that we fool ourselves. Aesthetics interrupt the opportunity for reason. It is difficult to reason with someone who sincerely but unwittingly isn’t engaged with it.

That will make housing reform difficult. There will be many residents who oppose changes. They will be angry because they will feel steamrolled by changing policies. But, they will be unable to offer an alternative process, because aesthetics will be the only channel through which they are able to engage with change. They will be sincere in their opposition and sincerely aggrieved when change happens.

It will take a plurality of residents who are able to engage with the challenges posed by the competing demands of our populace to move ahead without them. It will be difficult. But not impossible. It was done before. It was done to my friend’s dad. I’ll bet that by the end of his life, he had learned to eat with black people. I know that his daughter celebrates diverse community which used to make him ill.

It is possible that today’s Los Angeles children will someday celebrate a duplex down the street, or even a giant shoe next door. Historically, these changes are probably more common than stasis is, especially when the status quo has become so lacking. It seems like it will take forever when we’re in it. It seems divisive as it happens. But, when we cross a tipping point, things can happen fast. As recently as the mid-1990s, a minority of Americans supported interracial marriage. Today, 94% do. Divisiveness can quickly become consensus. But, it doesn’t become consensus by compromising with the immovable.