there is, in fact, no general urban-housing
crisis. Kevin Drum, of Mother Jones, has
made this case at length and with detailed
data. Housing prices are about where
they have always been, with the excep-
tion of a handful of places—including
New York and the Bay Area, where, not
coincidentally, a lot of people who write
for a living about their problems living
live. Nonetheless, a new movement, sym-
pathetic to Logue’s old dream of massive
building even at the price of remaking
neighborhoods, has arisen in the past few
years. This YIMBY movement (for “Yes,
in my back yard”) says that the answer
to the housing problem in big cities is to
build more housing in big cities, even if
that means building high-rise buildings
in low-rise neighborhoods and ugly new
spaces in quaint old ones, because the al-
ternative, the monochrome suburbaniza-
tion of the urban, would be worse.
The attendant ironies are hard to
overlook. Traditional progressives have,
in effect, aligned with real-estate devel-
opers; the truth is that big buildings get
built by big builders, even if they are
subsidized by the state. Community
control, always an ambivalent concept—
it was embraced by Logue’s segrega-
tionist enemies even more than by Jane
Jacobsian preservationists—is once again
becoming an evil to be eradicated by
state power in the state capitol. Local
zoning that protects low density, and
with it, supposedly, real-estate values,
has to be trumped by state law, as is al-
ready under way in California.
Though the problem of building new
housing is usually discussed in terms of
plans and zones and taxes, it is, in some
largely unrecognized part, also an aes-
thetic and architectural one. Logue tended
to treat the architectural issues of his re-
developments as secondary. How the
thing was to be planned and paid for was
what counted most. How it was going
to look and feel was a Christmas-wrap-
ping problem. Yet, since the time of the
great critic John Ruskin, in the mid-nine-
teenth century, a central lesson in think-
ing about building is to think about build-
ings. The small stuff—style, scale, façade,
signs of life, the richness of decorative
detail, variety rather than uniformity, the
encrustations of ornament—counts big.
Putting up tall buildings in the West
Village is one way to get more supply to
meet the demand, but the demand in
this case—or, at least, the acceptance of
new buildings by local incumbents—will
alter as the supply becomes unappeal-
ing. It is not location alone that makes
such neighborhoods attractive but what
is local about the location, its particular
spell of kinds and purposes and incomes.
Change zoning laws that prevent mul-
tifamily housing in single-family pre-
cincts in Seattle, and you may have served
the many, but only by breaking down the
reasons that the many want to be there
in the first place. If people thought that
the new buildings going up in cities would
be appealing to live in, they would not
protest new building in advance. If we
knew how to make new buildings bet-
ter, we would accept new buildings more.
An odd alliance between progres-
sives and reactionaries arises as progres-
sive people blame modern architects for
the badness of modern cities, just as
their reactionary counterparts did. The
magazine Current Affairs, firmly on the
left, not long ago published an eloquent
piece called “Why You Hate Contem-
porary Architecture,” tracking almost
argument by argument, without quite
acknowledging it, the Reaganite Tom
Wolfe’s polemic on the topic. Singling
out a building in Logue’s Government
Center project as “a hideous concrete
edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable
shape,” where “terrified immigrants at-
tend their deportation hearings,” theauthors seem unaware of the plaza’s im-
peccably progressive origins. Where
Wolfe insisted that postwar American
architecture was a leftist conspiracy, in-
flicting its vision of socialist workers
barracks on comfort-loving Americans,
the new progressive story is that mod-
ern American architecture is a right-
wing corporate insult inflicted on us all.
Both stories could be true, of course—
or neither of them. The complete con-
demnation of modern urban architecture
is obviously unconvincing: some build-
ing types are universally seen to be suc-
cessful. City museums—whether built
anew, like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggen-
heim, or rehabilitated from old industrial
buildings, like the Tate Modern—play
the kind of social role we associate with
medieval churches, attracting a crowd
of peddlers, lovers, gawkers, dogs, and
loiterers. The original Guggenheim, in
New York, violates rules of scale and
neighborhood harmony, but it creates the
neighborhood around it. It is the neigh-
borhood. Much the same is true of the
steps of the Met, or the new Whitney,
near the High Line. Nor are these “élit-
ist” projects; as museum people never tire
of pointing out, more people go to look
at art in museums each year than go to
stadiums to watch sports.
Not élitist projects, they still are reflec-
tive projects. The pioneer baseball ana-
lyst Bill James once said that money“It’s only sexy if the faucet isn’t on your side.”