The New American Dream: The Small Business Owner
When I first started the YIMBY Arts project some months ago I sort of had a vague idea in mind that Americans tended to be too attached to the single-family home as an “ideal” lifestyle and needed to be more open to other ways of living — especially in regards to condominiums and apartments. At the time I called this “new” outlook something like “high-density aesthetics” or “upzoning acceptance” but turns out there’s already a word called “urbanism” which I could’ve just used from the very beginning, lol.
So in order to be technically correct, YIMBY Arts shall now be known as a “pro-urbanist” artist collective and think-tank from here on out. Feels like I took a huge detour just to discover the obvious, but that’s life in a nutshell, I suppose.
Anyway, onto the main thrust of the article: the concept of the “small business owner” in relation to YIMBYism and urban policy.
Why Mixed-Use Developments are Critical to Better Urban Policy
As time goes on I find myself becoming more and more in favor of mixed-use developments and zoning policies that allow commercial and residential areas to be mixed…or at least much closer together than they are right now. It doesn’t really make sense to me that we spend so much of our lives driving from one place to another (work, food, entertainment, family) when the option to live right next to the things that we need and want is literally a few policies away from becoming a reality. Besides, cities that have liberal mixed-use zoning policies tend to be funner, more vibrant, and have better music and musicians by default, anyhow.
Convenience and improved quality of life aside, there’s another reason why mixed-use is a good idea: the closer proximity and increased interaction between residents and business owners can be a very politically healthy thing in the long run as well. There are very good reasons to be skeptical of capitalism and “market forces” at work, but in today’s hyper-partisan environment nuanced conversations on how “business” and “economics” works (words that have become profanities in some circles) have become extremely rare. The “Greedy Developer” strawman that seems to have made its way into the NIMBY lexicon is one symptom of this disconnect playing itself out in the political sphere today.
This partisanship, however, is ironically also a product of housing policy: residential and commercial developments have increasingly become isolated from one another, making it much less likely that residents and businesses interact with each other on a personal, neighborly level. The segregation between residency and commerce — a trend that has been ongoing for several decades now — has led to an overall de-sophistication in the understanding of business procedures and economics in a general sense overall. As YIMBY folks probably already know, this has led to situations where people flagrantly disregard basic concepts like “supply and demand” and even the idea that building housing during a housing shortage would actually do something to help alleviate the crisis. We are, in a way, encouraging people to become willingly ignorant on these types of issues, much to the detriment of society itself.
Self-Employment, the Second American Dream
When I first started the YIMBY Arts project, the initial idea was to try to get Americans to accept the concept of high-density and urbanist aesthetics as a whole. Japan does this very well and their housing/transit policies are great, so why not just copy what they do and fix everything all at once? An easy, one-step process.
Well, turns out that this is actually really, really hard since the single-family home ideal is something that has been drilled into Americans’ minds for nearly a century and this isn’t likely going to change any time soon. With our current approach I’d be lucky if this shift happened within my lifetime, if at all — I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ll admit that YIMBYism is the “right thing to do” but will not change their course of action because of the emotional attachment that they have to the status quo. In political situations like these, winning with “facts” unfortunately just isn’t enough.
So here is where the mixed-use thing comes in: rather than forcing voters to make a difficult decision regarding their lifestyle(s), have them choose between two American Dreams that they’re already familiar with — the dream of owning a single family home vs the dream of self-employment from their self-started business.
Americans Fear Density, but Love Self-Employment
I think that it goes without saying that Americans love the idea of owning their own shop/restaurant/business one day—the ideal of homeownership is basically everywhere in the media, but the dream of quitting your job and being self-employed isn’t too far behind, either. I say that Americans like the “idea” of it, because this dream is becoming harder and harder to achieve in the United States, also due to rising costs in housing. (Even businesses have to pay rent, after all.) The risks involved in opening your own business (especially in the city) has gotten so high that the act of doing so has become a political act in it of itself — if you look at cities where NIMBYism reigns supreme, brick-and-mortar business ownership has become so rare that it functions more as a status symbol for the wealthy, often eclipsing the need for the actual service that the business itself provides.
In contrast, Tokyo has many, many, tiny businesses pretty much everywhere, thanks to the abundance of housing and real estate locations in general. When I was there last month I found a cat-themed cryptocurrency-themed bar (above) right in the middle of the city. The place seated maybe 12–15 people at most, but it was clean, well-taken care of, and was built/designed with love and care. As silly as it looked on the surface, it had the marks of an inspired small business owner all over the place — in Tokyo, this type of inspiration is the norm rather than the exception, which is why the standard of quality of goods the city carries tends to be very high, no matter where you go.
It’s actually kind of ridiculous that a place like the Monacoin bar even exists, but when you have cheap real-estate flowing everywhere all the time, you can get away with the wacky, the innovative, the weird, the risky. Tokyo is also very loose with residential/commercial zoning regulations — which allows people to do things like convert their homes directly into tea shops or restaurants that they may have dreamed of doing for themselves for a really long time.
Wouldn’t you want that type of vibrancy in your neighborhood? Wouldn’t you want the opportunity to pursue your dreams? I think this might be the better angle to take when making a case for density or zoning reform — appealing to people’s hopes and aspirations increase the odds of them seeing change as being part of a future that they actually want to be a part of. Getting Americans to rethink the dream of the single family home may be a huge challenge, but having the dream of self-employment compete against their skepticism they have of density may be just the push needed to bring people over towards the pro-housing cause.
In a similar vein above, the YIMBY Arts project is currently working to collect pro-housing arguments that focus on the hopeful and positive. We’re looking to create a comprehensive list for 2019 so if you have any input, please let us know!
