Building Better Cities from the Bottom Up

Finding Community Among YIMBYs, Strong Towns—and McDonald’s

In towns across America, the most reliable place to find community isn’t the church or the town square—it’s the local McDonald’s. That’s the observation

Chris Arnade

has made after walking across entire cities around the world. In his keynote address at last week’s Strong Towns National Gathering in Providence, Arnade explained that “everyone needs and wants community”—it’s a fundamental human desire for connection, belonging, and shared space. Arnade has found that to be true everywhere he’s traveled—but for many people, community is found only at McDonald’s.

Arnade called this innate need for community “an urban planning lesson.” It might be the most important one—and yet it seems to have been forgotten in much of our modern urban planning.

Indeed, our built environment often works against community—through exclusionary zoning that separates people from each other and the places they might gather, policies that encourage stasis over opportunity, or subdivisions built without sidewalks, public spaces, or gathering places. In many cities, the only reliable option for human connection is a drive-thru you have to drive to, but people go there for more than just Big Macs and fries. As Arnade has written, people seek out McDonald’s not only because they’re often the only “third places” or public gathering spaces that exist, but because they are “welcoming, social, inexpensive, have Wifi, good food, and great coffee, and clean bathrooms.” The fast-food chain, he notes, is “wildly popular with every group of Americans, uniting every demographic in the US…with the single exception of the highly educated.”

Some highly-educated urbanists might turn up their noses: McDonald’s is unhealthy, car-centric, corporate, tacky. But sneering doesn’t solve problems. While planners have overengineered our streets, constrained our housing, and pushed people farther apart, McDonald’s has created a reliable place for people to gather, linger, and feel welcome. It’s done something the planning establishment hasn’t: it’s actually helping people build community.

There are others also fighting to do something about it—the YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) and Strong Towns movements, in particular. The two movements are sometimes seen as rivals, and so as a YIMBY advocate who was invited to speak at the Strong Towns Gathering, I wanted to better understand the differences between “us” and “them.” I came away with the realization that both are fighting for the same thing: making better communities possible.

In his opening conference remarks, Strong Towns founder

Charles Marohn

laid out three guiding principles for anyone wishing to improve their city: stewardship—taking responsibility for your own community even without formal authority; empathy—listening instead of imposing your views on others; and humility—leading with curiosity instead of dogmatism. These aren’t buzzwords; they’re a rebuke of the top-down, technocratic approach to urban planning.

And they align more closely with the YIMBY worldview than many Strong Towners (and YIMBYs!) might expect. At root, the “Yes” in YIMBY isn’t a command, it’s an embrace of human agency—one that shifts the default from what can’t be done to what might be, from scarcity to abundance, from stagnation to possibility, from control to empowerment. And it’s grounded, just like Marohn’s vision, in the idea that good places are rarely delivered from above—they’re built from below. Where YIMBYs differ is in recognizing that it’s often one’s next-door neighbors who are stifling bottom-up reform—and then they organize politically to change that.

In another talk, Providence-based writer and developer

Seth Zeren

sought to explain and reconcile the two approaches. As he sees it, the differences are mainly of culture and tactics. Strong Towns speaks the language of fiscal responsibility and incrementalism, rooted in the Midwest; YIMBYs speak the language of affordability and urgency, born in high-cost coastal cities. One emerged to address the unsustainability of suburban sprawl, the other to tackle the barriers to urban housing. One communicates ideas and seeks cultural change, the other pursues policy and political change. And while Strong Towns targets top-down planners, YIMBYs battle anti-growth resistance.

Both YIMBYs and Strong Towners are trying to solve the same basic issue—the breakdown of communities.

The key difference is framing, not purpose. Strong Towns says: “Let’s fix our broken towns before we go bankrupt.” YIMBYs say: “Let’s fix our broken housing rules before we displace everyone.” Both are valid approaches, neither in conflict with the other. Indeed, whether you’re fighting for a strong town or a big city, everyone should be pursuing policies that allow their communities to evolve organically. Both movements are fighting for places where people can belong.

Zeren argued that, despite their differences, both movements can learn from each other. YIMBYs could learn from the Strong Towns approach about the importance of fiscal sustainability and the limitations of centralized systems. Indeed, YIMBYism is not a complete policy platform for urban flourishing. Cities have thrown up obstacles to economic opportunity, entangled themselves in procedural red tape, and ignored fiscal trade-offs—concerns that also affect how housing gets built and for whom.

But Strong Towners can also learn from YIMBYs. That’s why Strong Towns board chair

Andrew Burleson

invited me and two other YIMBY advocates to speak at the Gathering about the practical politics of zoning reform. It’s one thing to have good ideas about resilient communities and affordable housing. It’s another to turn them into policy and political wins—and YIMBYs have shown how to do that.

Anyone wishing to make change in their own community could learn a lot from both movements about cultural and political change. Communities have different problems—some have a housing shortage, some have a people shortage, others have a dearth of opportunity. Fixing different problems requires different tools—but all can pull from the same toolbox.

But before communities pick up the toolbox, they have to agree on what needs fixing—and who’s doing the fixing. That’s where the question of the “highly educated” elites returns. Chris Arnade was critical of top-down urban planning, but ironically, he argued that anyone who cares about urban planning has to be “a bit of an elitist”—you have to believe you know what’s best for people.

On its face, this seems like a contradiction: isn’t elitism the enemy?

Maybe not.

If you understand the universal human need for community as an urban planning principle, then planning that enables the creation of places that foster community is what’s best for people.

Nevertheless, we ought to have some humility about what we can or will accomplish. As we were walking through Providence, Seth Zeren said something I’ve been thinking about ever since: “We’re living in the ruins of a former civilization, with no idea how they built it.” He’s right. After more than a century of exclusionary zoning and auto-centric planning, we’ve largely forgotten how to build beautiful, inviting places like historic Providence. Whether we are YIMBYs or Strong Towners, we can’t guarantee that our reform efforts will turn our communities into the vibrant, walkable, connected neighborhoods of yore—but we can guarantee that better places will remain out of reach if we do nothing.

If my elitist view is that we should make it possible to build places that are good for people, then here’s a populist one: if McDonald’s does a better job of fostering that sense of connection and belonging than our planners have managed to achieve, then perhaps the planners ought to spend less time micromanaging land use and some time managing a McDonald’s. They might then learn something about what people actually want. After all, that’s where community is already happening.