The City of Yes and the Culture of No

Looking Backward and Forward in 2025

What is a city without people?

As cities continued to struggle with rising home prices despite population decline in the aftermath of the pandemic, that was the question on my mind when I started City of Yes. In the very first essay I published on Substack, I argued that cities must say “yes” to people—to think of themselves, and especially their downtowns, as not only office districts and entertainment zones but as places for living, too. In that essay and follow-ups, I explored how cities have used exclusionary zoning and other restrictive policies to effectively say “no” to whole categories of people: to middle-class families, lower-income people, minorities, working seniors, weirdos. I lambasted politicians who have only pointed fingers, blaming landlords, institutional investors, and domestic migrants for policy problems they have failed to solve.

Ultimately, though, it’s not about land use—it’s about the people, for a city without people is a ghost town, or a ruin. City of Yes is a celebration of the human potential in and of our cities—as well as an exploration of what happens when we lose sight of what our cities are all about: all of us.

Last year, I wrote extensively about this anti-human “Culture of No.” I found urban malaise in the waters of New York (“The City of No”) and San Francisco (“The City That Can’t”)—but later celebrated New York’s passage of the mayor’s “City of Yes” zoning reforms and urban Americans’ embrace of better governance, even in the tarnished Golden State. I wrote about the big-tent YIMBY movement as a model of nonpartisan coalition building, but I also pushed back against the surprising small-mindedness of YIMBY activists opposed to an ambitious plan to build a new city on urbanist principles.

There I invoked a phrase I first heard used by Virginia Postrel, the “NIMBYism of the soul,” an instinctive resistance to change or growth that lurks in us all. One of the underlying questions I explore in my writing is: to what extent do culture and policy shape each other, and what is just in us as human beings? What’s in our souls? My most popular essay on that theme was “Jerry’s Apartment,” in which I wondered whether the elusive “pop in” was merely a television phenomenon or, instead, a lost vestige of walkable or transit-connected neighborhoods, or something else. I didn’t find the answer, but I did have to face the question in real life a few weeks ago when a friend popped-in on us one weekday night. It ruined our perfectly good, perfectly ordinary evening routine—and it was great.

That essay made me wonder how land use patterns have shaped American behavior, so I wrote an extended series on the history of suburbanization in America. This was not “brat summer” but the season of the “Wet, Hot American Suburbs,” a celebration of America’s love for smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism—as revealed in our preferences for this country’s many delightful historic small towns. I explored America’s long-standing love-hate relationship with our cities: an anti-urban bias evident from the founding that would be romanticized into “The Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” But those early streetcar suburbs looked a lot more like our small towns, developing with a familiar urban form; the onset of the automobile radically changed the pattern of development, but it was turbocharged by sustained government intervention, including mortgage and highway subsidies. Urban highway construction accelerated these trends, siphoning cities of their residents and resources.

In all of these essays, there’s a common throughline addressing something deeper in our humanity: our need for connection, how we create it, and the effort required to keep it. This deeper need is especially critical when so many of us have little to no access to third places where we can commune, or to secular sacred spaces where we can contemplate the sublime. Covid has only made these problems worse, and our social muscles are atrophying because of it—so much so, it seems, that we are losing sight of each other’s basic humanity, the theme of my final essay of 2024, “The Hinge of Our Humanity.”

My most underrated essay of the year (IMHO) was a survey of Robert Moses—a man lacking in humanitarian instincts—and The Power Broker on the 50th anniversary of its publication. In “Go Down, Moses,” I argued that the most important takeaway of Robert Caro’s masterpiece is to understand how Moses and his midcentury ilk pursued “progress” in a top-down, heavily authoritarian, deeply dehumanizing manner that ultimately spawned a NIMBY backlash against progress as such. Our inability to build the future we ought to has its roots in our history of building a future that literally excluded and dispossessed many. The antidote to the culture of NIMBYism, I countered, is to (re)discover a framework that simultaneously eschews authoritarian overreach and disarms the neighborhood vetocracy.

And that takes power—which was my other big takeaway from The Power Broker.

Indeed, my this-stage-of-life’s work is operating at the nexus of theory and practice: when I’m not writing, I spend a lot of time working on local urbanist advocacy. My writings about the various land-use reforms Austin has undertaken recently are from the perspective of someone who was in the room where it happened. In particular, I wrote about the minimum lot size reforms I worked on as a grassroots organizer, as well as the neighborhood commercial zoning recommendation I co-authored as a member of Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission. While I’m proud of the progress we’ve made here, Austin was able to overcome its Culture of No only through years of effort and advocacy by a small group of persistent people who worked tirelessly to raise the salience of the issue and get good people elected to office. There’s more work to do.

Little by little, we are dismantling the Culture of No and rebuilding Cities of Yes.

Across America, the urban public has revolted against misgovernance and the status quo, perhaps signaling a political shift. Certainly, the realignment happening within our political parties is well underway, but there’s one happening out in the broader culture: it’s progress versus stasis, abundance versus scarcity, growth versus decline, YIMBY versus NIMBY, the future versus the past. In Austin, for instance, our housing reforms have been carried forward by an all-Democrat YIMBY supermajority against anti-growth, largely Democratic opposition; at the Texas statehouse, the YIMBY reforms have been championed by Republicans. Meanwhile, those of us who spend too much time on Twitter saw a variant of this play out as the national Republican Party’s DOGE and MAGA wings debated high-skilled immigration. These competing visions are not yet Republican- or Democratic-coded, but which—and who—will govern our future?

That’s just one of many questions I’ll be exploring on these digital pages in the coming year. I’ll inevitably return to my favorite haunts—Austin, New York, and San Francisco, the three cities in which I have spent most of my adult life—and I hope to cover interesting policy developments, especially as Austin contemplates what’s next on the reform front. I’ll surely throw out some hot takes and travel tips along the way. I’m also interested in exploring more of the upside this year: how cities have recovered from and thrived after past disasters; the limits and necessity of planning; the positive potential unlocked by technological change; and how cities, so often their own worst enemies, might continue to realize that they are the ones they’ve been waiting for—especially urgent as Donald Trump returns to power with a coalition that might not want to make American cities great again. Invariably, I will return to the throughline: finding the humanity among the spires and streets of humanity’s greatest inventions. Always, always we are in search of that literal and figurative place, that living, shining city—the City of Yes.

Thanks for being here.