Render of an apartment courtyard block generated by Alicia Pederson with the Courtyard Composer. | © Courtyard Urbanist, Treasury Spatial Data

The root of America’s housing affordability crisis isn’t complicated in the abstract: We need to build more homes (4 million more, to be more or less precise). More sprawl isn’t working — our dependence on it is part of what’s gotten us into a housing crisis in the first place.

We’re nowhere close to climbing out of this hole. Tariffs certainly aren’t helping, and making things more challenging is, as ever, the vocal minority of residents across American cities and suburbs who oppose new apartments, duplexes, or anything denser than a detached single-family home being built near them.

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Housing advocates and social scientists alike have long attributed NIMBYism to, at best, personal financial stakes (like property value) or logistic concerns (like traffic), at worst deeply rooted racism or classism. And all of those explanations are, to varying degrees, surely an important part of the picture.

But there might also be something more foundational at play here. People like neighborhoods with consistency and, it turns out, style.

Which may come as a surprise, given that for most of the last century, the US has been mostly building places that are ugly and a bit soul-deadening. You know the ones: sprawling subdivisions, giant strip malls and parking lots, 10-lane highways. It’s a strange feature of our age that although we now have spectacular wealth and greater technological means to create anything we can imagine than at any point in human history, “all of our buildings look like boring squares and rectangles,” as journalist Derek Thompson said on a recent episode of his podcast.

Alicia Pederson, a Chicago-based researcher, writer, and advocate for beautiful, livable cities who founded the organization Courtyard Urbanist, put it even more bluntly: The way we build today has gone fundamentally wrong and swung out of alignment with human needs, she told me in an email. “That disorder expresses itself in buildings that are widely experienced as grotesque and alienating.” Her words surface something that pervades American life yet is rarely confronted so directly: Is this really how we want to live?

All of this points to a tantalizing possibility: If modern sprawl shoulders a lot of the blame for both our housing crisis and our epidemic of ugliness, then perhaps we could start to repair both at the same time, with the same tools. Maybe housing abundance should be not just about building more of what we already have, but also about transforming and beautifying the way we build for the future.

What do looks have to do with solving the housing crisis?

It might feel a bit frivolous to fixate on aesthetics at a time when we face an acute housing crisis and urgently need to build lots of housing in the high-opportunity places where people want to live. But beauty matters, even if it’s harder to translate into wonk language than is something like floor area ratio. Our built environment is the physical container for our lives, shaping our entire daily existence and our interactions with our families and communities. A beautiful, humane habitat can be emotionally uplifting, inspire awe and lower the ambient stress of daily life; a bad one does the opposite. And NIMBYs are not wrong to feel that even if we are not the ones living in a new building, if it’s in our neighborhood or broader daily environment, we still live with it.

There is empirical evidence that beauty matters for making housing abundance work, too. A recent working paper contributes to a growing body of research finding that aesthetic concerns play a meaningful role in driving public opposition to new housing. People seem to oppose buildings that break the mold of what’s surrounding them, and they are less likely — a lot less likely — to support building new homes if they think they’ll be visually........

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