“No neighborhood should be exempt from change. No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change.”

This is a principle that I and other Strong Towns writers have invoked repeatedly over several years in talking about development, growth, and local regulation.

A quotable, memorable rule is always a useful thing—but not if it becomes a hardened dogma. A shorthand soundbite is powerful if you use it with an understanding of when, and more importantly why, the idea is relevant. Otherwise you simply have a rhetorical cudgel to be wielded in service of whatever you already wanted to support or oppose. People will see that for what it is, and you will sound insincere and be ineffective.

An article published here in December, “Legalize the Village” by Charles Montgomery, calls for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, to permit six-story apartment buildings on residential lots citywide. (The article is an account of an ambitious experiment in developing a cohousing community; it’s inspiring and I strongly recommend you read it.) At some point, a Strong Towns reader asked me if we weren’t being philosophically inconsistent by running the piece. “Don’t six-story buildings next to small houses count as radical change?”

It’s a good, valid question. The truth is, I don’t think that’s something you can answer on sight. Fundamentally, the notion of “radical change” we’re trying to get at is not a statement about the built environment at all. It’s not defined by the height of buildings, the density, the aesthetics, or how many new ones there are. It’s about the human community that exists within a physical place.

Neighborhoods Can Change “Radically” With or Without Development

In the case of Montgomery’s “village,” the crucial context is the recognition that Vancouver has one of the most acute housing affordability crises in the world. As of 2021 the region had a staggering price-to-income ratio of 7.4. You would need to make $230,000 to afford the average house.

In this context, the project is explicitly designed to maximize affordability and provide a viable home for a broader spectrum of Vancouverites than most new construction is able to achieve. Both its six-story height and its cohousing design (which economizes on private space in favor of shared space) are in service of this goal: They reduce the per-capita consumption of staggeringly expensive Vancouver land.

And so this project, which might appear “radical” in its physical form, needs to be understood in the context of a city which is already radically changing as a deliberate attempt to mitigate that change.

You can have radical neighborhood change in the complete absence of new construction. In the book Generation Priced Out, Randy Shaw observes that San Francisco is full of neighborhoods that gentrified beyond recognition in the late 20th century as scarcity and high demand led to buyers bidding up existing homes. One of these is Haight-Ashbury, the famous epicenter of the hippie movement and 1967’s Summer of Love. In 1973, a duplex in the neighborhood cost the equivalent of $176,000 in today’s dollars. Now, that same house is over $2 million. The young and countercultural types that put the place on the national map would have no hope of getting a toehold in Haight-Ashbury today.

For every neighborhood in a high-cost “superstar city” where gentrification is accompanied by dramatic new construction and buildings totally out of scale to their older surroundings (think Shaw, in Washington, DC), there’s at least one other where the process takes place quietly behind the unchanged facades of existing buildings. Consider Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where Census data in these tables reveal that the median household income has jumped from $45,000 to $75,000 from 2010 to 2020. There has been some new construction in Crown Heights, but not much of it is out of scale with what was already there. For the most part, you can pick a random street in the neighborhood and it looks in 2021 about like it looked in 2011.

None of this is to say that buildings can’t ever be the direct source of radical change that is disruptive to the people in a community. Nor that land-use policy and regulation can’t directly bring about such change. Of course they can, and often do: From urban renewal to contemporary redevelopment schemes, the public sector has a long history of acting as handmaiden to the forces of cataclysmic money.

As community builders, or planners, or advocates, though, the thing we need to set our sights on is the effect of development on people. That, not newer or taller buildings themselves, is the actual “radical change” that our two-part prescription is meant to address.

What’s the Point of Worrying About the Scale of Change?

There are a few obvious reasons an advocate for strong communities might be concerned about the pace of change or disruption within those communities:

Places in which people and institutions are rooted are more resilient to economic and social shocks, because they have devoted caretakers who won’t abandon them during hard times.
Communities draw wealth and stability for their members from the accumulated social capital that results from a dense network of interpersonal ties rooted in a physical place. Those ties might be the way you get a job, obtain child care, find help with a household need or a health crisis, or keep ethnic traditions alive, among other things.
As Jane Jacobs put it, "new ideas need old buildings." When a place is physically transformed wholesale, leaving few traces of what it was, it disrupts this economic process of adaptive reuse and repurposing.

Constancy or stability in the physical environment is not a goal in and of itself. It’s a means to an end. One such end is communities in which people can make the choice to be rooted, if they wish to. (Not all will, and that’s good.)

Sometimes that goal will require change in the built environment, and sometimes it will require continuity in the built environment. That doesn’t mean you should be totally agnostic to how that built environment evolves, though.

As a general rule of thumb, we do find that places developing incrementally provide much more opportunity for locals to take ownership of the change, and to capture the benefits of growth within the community. The participation of many hands in development, rather than few, is also an important factor in long-term resilience, as it produces a place that adapts better to feedback over time. It also is more likely to maximize the value of development, as small-scale caretakers of a space tend to sweat the details, while large-scale developers take a 30,000-foot view and ultimately leave value on the table.

Small-scale, incremental change can happen where you live.

Learn how through our Local-Motive session, “Identifying Obstacles to Development and Making Way for Small-Scale Change.”

This means one building at a time, not master-planned superblocks, and in smaller steps, not giant leaps in intensity. The goal of imposing some sort of limit on “radical change” of a physical sort is to nurture that process of incremental growth rather than extinguish it.

But that approach to physical building is, again, a means to an end. If you try to draw from that an absolute rule about what increase in height or density ought to be allowed, you’ve lost the plot.

Allowing too big a development increment is not the only way to doom the incremental growth and evolution of a place; so is allowing one that is too small. Seth Zeren points out in “How Big is an Incremental Step?”, if the allowable amount of change to the development intensity is not great enough, nothing will be financially viable for a developer, and you’ll get stasis. And, given enough demand pressure, this lack of new building will lead to rising prices for a scarce supply of real estate, and ultimately to radical change in the form of the displacement of people, businesses, and community.

This means sometimes you need to allow the look and feel of a neighborhood to change, maybe even dramatically, in order to preserve the things that make a resilient community in that place. There is no cookie-cutter answer to “How tall should we let the buildings be here? What should be the density?”

I’ve said before that planners ought to be the conservation biologists of cities: intervening with a light touch to fix things that are out of balance, with the understanding that the city is a complex system not amenable to simple rules. This is not easy work. It’s humble, careful, and context-sensitive work.

Conservation—of the good things about a community in all its complexity and richness—is the right mindset. But fixating on the aesthetics of the city, rather than the people of the city, as the object of planning is not conservation. It's taxidermy.