This week’s post is a follow up to last week’s post. We might call it a coda.

I recently read an article on housing and zoning in Current Affairs. It’s called In Sprawl We Trust, and it’s written by the consistently compelling Allison Lirish Dean.

Indeed, about a year ago, I wrote about her take on ‘strong towns.’ There we discovered the limits of the term.

In this article, Dean provides us with a different frame for thinking about debates over zoning. Housing, of course, is one major focal point of those debates. Rather than thinking about the debate as split between a NIMBY and YIMBY side, she frames the debate as one between private capital and people-powered planning.

We can surely see the appeal.

Both NIMBY and YIMBY sides reject popular power. But Dean calls these sides ‘market suburbanists’ and ‘market urbanists.’ This phrasing places the two sides within broader zoning debates. They share a trust in the free market to deliver the goods, differing only in terms of how they want to use market power to protect private interests.

This contextualization helps. Indeed, it takes us all the way back to the idea of tenants unions. After all, what better way to prepare people for democratic decision making?