NIMBY's and "Preserving the towns character" name a more iconic duo. If the character you're preserving is impassable dirt roads and white people then eat my ass. The town needs paved roads!!
/rant
Lol some these people in my town literally can't get their cars out of their driveway in this road. They petitioned to have it paved because it's eroded to hell. People from across town are now driving around their road and telling them "it's fine". The town already agreed to the petition and to paving it. It's kind of wild watching these dorks on Facebook tell the people on this street they're wasting town money and ruining the town character.
A dirt road isn't exactly a pristine ecosystem vital for water drainage.
The phrase raises red flags to me, but I do think preserving “town character” is still interesting when applied properly. Like city blocks that preserve old, architecture instead of replacing it with depressing glass towers. Or neighborhoods that value physical activity and regularly host group activities with each other instead of empty, paranoid sprawls. Or a rural/mountainous region where nature dominates instead of gas stations every block.
But unfortunately what people mean by “preserving town character” is preserving
- Rich
- White
- Both
I think in an urban environment, this phrase definitely has a different meaning. However, I live in a very rural town that's abutted the largest university in the state. And as a result, the university absorbs a lot of the land mass of the town. So there's a valid concern with what happens to the remaining property in the town. The unfortunate reality though is the university encourages landlordism and short term rentals for the sake of profit earning off of the transient student population as opposed to ensuring that single family zoned homes are given to families who want to work, live and utilize public services in town.
The reactionaries in this town can't seem to understand that the university isn't going anywhere and what the real problems are that underpin the town itself. So they get pissy about paving a road they don't live on as opposed to getting pissy about all of the properties being bought up and then rented out as commodities to students who don't live here.
There's nothing more American than having a cardiac episode every single time someone asks for sidewalks or a traffic light
They put a sidewalk in that connected the elementary school to the public library and you would have thought it required a sacrifice to the Lord of Lies or some shit. Those kids use it all the time when the weather is nice.
Porkies when you tear up a nicely designed town for the car and evict a hundred families for street widening
Porkies when you suggest maybe we could put the streetcar back in and possibly even widen the sidewalk?
This is ruining Ireland in its entirety. People oppose building a metro station using this as an excuse. I hate rich people so much.
I'm conflicted about this because I think it requires some materialist analysis to be really complete.
Yeah, NIMBYs sucks and I agree with everything you have written in your post but at the same time I think of how the character of a town or local area is often crucial to liberatory politics; think the Castro district and it being a nucleus of queer liberation struggles like ACT UP or the migrant neighbourhoods which are the basis for local communities where people engage in organic forms of mutual aid or the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK aka Black Wall Street. (And yeah, I get that African American-driven capitalism is not a truly liberatory struggle but I think that the fact that the government directly intervened to destroy it is evidence that it posed a serious threat to the existing power relations of the time; Black Wall Street was never going to truly free anyone but it certainly allowed some black people to start wriggling free from under the boot of white supremacism. To deny its progressive nature is to engage in a sort of reductionism which reaches its logical conclusion in a position of infinite regress, where you find yourself asking: "Well, does this directly bring about the revolution? No? Then it is not worthwhile." And that's the death of praxis imo.)
"Town character" is itself almost a dogwhistle but genuinely working to protect and foster community through the maintaining of town character can be important. Although as we plumb the lower depths of late capitalism where the gig economy encroaches more and more, I feel like the workers will become increasingly itinerant and irl community will be a privilege afforded only to the people wealthy enough to be insulated from being on the receiving end of this set of economic relations.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, like everything, it's important to approach this stuff dialectically.
This is all true. This is a college town with a highly transient population of people who leave as the semesters come and go. The main corridor of the town struggles to maintain businesses because of the transient student population. The economic boom and bust as the semester starts and ends really destroys a lot of businesses. In my time in this town, I've seen at least a dozen businesses open and close in the main corridor as a result of this.
These same NIMBYs, who are trying to maintain the "character" of the town, are also using that same argument in regards to low-income housing. They do not want low-income housing in the town because that will ruin the "character" of the town. However, the town needs low-income housing so that it has a population of stable workers in order to maintain and shop the businesses on the off-season.
Because of the University, most of the town is very liberal, but it also means that the conservative element in the town is very vocal. I am regularly engaged with struggle sessions with these chuds on our local Facebook page, which, until I decided to get on there they had gone unchallenged.
They had similar complaints about the "historic district" which is really just a series of hundred-year-old homes on a main corridor, a state road, even. When they needed to expand the road to accommodate bus traffic for a new school that was built, which is also something that they vehemently opposed.
These reactionary elements in the town drive me up a fucking wall. So this is just me kind of releasing the valve.
In this case, preserving the character of the town really just means preserving its rural and impoverished elements for the sake of its farm town aesthetic while constantly complaining about the lack of businesses down the main corridor or the fact that there's nothing to do here.
The town in question? Innsmouth. Shambling fish-people showing up to get really mad in public because black people might be able to afford to live if housing gets built.
