How to Build a Better Suburb: YIMBY Lessons from Disney, Houten, Japan, and Carmel
A thought experiment for mass scaling and integration of YIMBYism
“What’s funny is [Disney] built this idyllic town,” says
Allen’s observation about Main Street, U.S.A. captures something crucial: Americans recognize good urbanism when they see it. They’ll pay admission to experience it. The housing reform movement has made it legal again in many places. YIMBY Action, YIMBY Law, Abundant Housing LA, East Bay YIMBY (these groups have won California’s housing packages, Oregon’s HB 2001, Minneapolis 2040). The strongest chapters run local campaigns, build coalitions across business owners and families, win council seats, get housing built.
A gap exists between what these chapters accomplish and what most places have. Thousands of American suburbs. A few hundred with organized YIMBY advocacy. Far fewer with the capacity that sustained wins require: coalition management, infrastructure coordination, ethnographic sensitivity to local concerns. Suburb NIMBYs rarely stop there, as they lobby their state and federal representatives, including the president.
We also seen setbacks like the (former) YIMBYist town in America, Aurbun Maine voted out their YIMBY mayor, Jason Levesque, after he was unable to deal with growing opposition. Not to mention the growing tensions as Gavin Newsom delays signing a housing bill SB79, in part because of heavy lobbing from LA Mayor Karen Bass and other cites. On the note of government, American development already runs on subsidies (highway spending, mortgage interest deductions, parking requirements that force bundling).
We’re in a race. Can we scale effective local organizing to enough places, fast enough, before the political moment passes and backlash takes hold? Can we deliver visible results (roundabouts, family-friendly apartments, functioning density) before people lose patience?
I want to draw on my past interviews to sketch on a (pretty big) napkin a path forward:
on how universities accidentally preserved walkable urbanism; , well known for and a transportation planner fighting for, well, a car-free America; and Calvin Chua, a Singapore architect whose ethnographic research shaped planning for 1,800 hectares of heritage buildings. Could a complementary layer (nonprofits, for-profit developers, or hybrids) work alongside single-issue advocates while pursuing what those groups can’t: grants for family-sized apartments, coordinated infrastructure packages, converting soft opposition by delivering tangible results quickly? This wouldn’t replace single-issue advocacy; it would focus on interdisciplinary work.The strongest YIMBY chapters already do some of this. They coordinate with schools and parks. They build coalitions with family advocates and business owners. They think about how housing connects to transit, walkability, quality of life. Scaling these practices to hundreds of suburbs where organized advocacy doesn’t exist yet, fast enough that policy wins translate to construction before political windows close.
Understanding the Opposition: Structural vs. Convertible
The hardcore opposition won’t budge. Baby Boomers hold approximately $20 trillion in real estate, with sixty-one percent never planning to sell. For some boomers, housing scarcity is their retirement plan (though many are NIMBYs for less material reasons). Homeownership increases political participation on zoning issues, and property tax caps create lock-in effects. They shut down new housing near them, then blame young people for being unable to afford homes before 40.
But much opposition is convertible, even if conversion isn’t easy. I am going to take one of the many “soft” factions in terms of support and opposition: younger families and pronatalist advocates. Institute for Family Studies research surveying almost 6,000 Americans found that when shown identical-square-footage apartments with different bedroom counts, Americans who want families consistently chose units divided into more bedrooms. Some people, seeing the scarcity of family-friendly apartments, demand unit-mix mandates or single-family-only zoning. They fear pure YIMBYism would encourage only smaller apartments.
Why do they care? Bedroom count influenced willingness to have children more than almost any other apartment feature. Parents want more bedrooms for their kids. Developers assume studios and three-bedroom units have similar vacancy and turnover. They’re wrong. Family-friendly units have lower vacancy rates, longer tenures, lower nonpayment risks.
If pronatalists and family advocates push for unit-mix mandates or single-family-only zoning, NIMBYs (especially Boomers) will weaponize these tools to block all housing. But if YIMBYs don’t deliver family-friendly units, this convertible faction turns against them. The same dynamic plays out across other soft opposition groups. Deliver results or lose allies. Fail to deliver, and those allies become the next generation of opponents.
That’s just one of *many* factions with their unique needs and what they focus on.
“Soft” opposition that sounds ideological often masks practical concerns. Parents don’t oppose density but question whether apartments can work for families. The IFS study found developers systematically underbuild family-friendly units because they misread the market. Residents oppose parking changes until they see that narrower streets reduce accidents. Business owners resist bike lanes until retail sales data proves increased foot traffic. Neighbors fight apartment buildings until they need downsizing options themselves.
Allen distinguishes between loud opponents dominating city council meetings and most residents who “just try to live their lives. They don’t really care if the university does X, Y, and Z. They enjoy living there.” Brown watched advocacy groups kill their own bike projects “because the proposed bike facility wasn’t the type they preferred.” The persuadable middle and the ideological allies both need different approaches than the hardcore 20%.
Chua’s ethnographic work with Strata Malls in Singapore gives another example. His team discovered shopkeepers viewed stores as retirement communities, refusing million-dollar buyouts. This finding reshaped how they preserved 1,800 hectares of heritage buildings. “Activist without a large manifesto banner,” Chua describes his practice. “It’s more of a quiet way of revealing these conditions and hopefully, it could inspire change.”
Learning from What Works
Soft opposition converts when you address their actual concerns, not when you trick them. A lot of pundits advocated to use strategic dishonesty when dealing with allied factions: obscure the changes and get what you want before your allied factions notice. This is *incredibly* stupid. It burns trust, creates backlash when people realize what happened, and hands NIMBYs ammunition for every subsequent fight. The hardcore 20% will oppose you regardless. Why turn potential allies into permanent enemies thinking that they have no where else to go? They will turn against you out of sheer spite instead.
That said, I see why a lot of others gawk at the alternative: the hard work of synthesizing the best models to meet the needs of factions you’re working with locally. Don’t moderate between competing visions. Build something that addresses multiple concerns simultaneously. Parents worried about family housing get the bedroom counts and school capacity. Businesses concerned about traffic get the retail data and bike infrastructure that increases foot traffic. Retirees wanting to age in place get the walkability and transit access. Mix and match proven approaches rather than compromising to the lowest common denominator. I’m making it sound easier than it is, but it’s the real way forward.
Where do you find working models? Some places designed comprehensively from scratch. Others evolved organically over decades. Some offer extractable design innovations independent of governance structure. A few demonstrate how sustained political leadership delivers results. And certain institutions accidentally preserved what most places demolished. Each offers different lessons for different contexts.
Houten: A Very Nice Dutch Biking Suburb
Consider Houten, Netherlands, a 50,000-person suburb southeast of Utrecht that turns American suburban assumptions inside out. Unlike Japan’s evolution over decades, Houten was intentionally designed from the 1960s onward by architect Robert Derks with a radical premise: prioritize livability for children over cars.
The design inverts typical suburban structure. The main east-west thoroughfare through downtown is a bike path connecting schools, city hall, and key buildings, not a road. Car traffic is relegated to a ring road encircling residential areas. To drive from one neighborhood to another requires returning to the ring road, making driving circuitous while cycling remains direct. The result: 66% of trips by non-car modes despite 415 autos per 1,000 residents and 36% of households owning two cars.
Houten demonstrates that car-light family suburbs work. Primary schools release children who bike home independently. Parents cycle with groceries and small children. Retirees age in place without car dependency. The density is moderate, denser than typical American suburbs with duplexes and apartments mixed with single-family homes. Car ownership and use coexist with cycling because the design makes cycling faster and more pleasant for local trips.
Houten doesn’t threaten property values because it’s desirable. It’s won “Cycling City of the Netherlands” twice, consistently ranks highest in livability surveys, and attracts families willing to pay premium prices. The intentional design (underground utilities in places, dedicated bike infrastructure, prioritized green space) creates quality that justifies investment. Unlike sprawl that requires ever-increasing property values to justify car dependency, Houten’s model delivers quality of life that holds value even in flat markets.
Houten offers tangible lessons for American suburbs: prioritize directness for non-car modes, use ring roads to discourage through traffic, cluster density near key destinations, and design so comprehensively that quality speaks for itself. As Brown notes about successful infrastructure changes: “If there’s drone videos, that’s even better” for building support. Show the completed project working.
Japan: The Ordinary Romance of a Dense Suburb
Where Houten shows intentional design from scratch, Japanese suburbs demonstrate organic evolution maintaining family-friendliness at higher densities. For Americans frustrated by car-dependent sprawl, Japanese suburbs offer existence proof: density can be family-friendly, walkable, and full of nature all at once. The typical Japanese suburban neighborhood features mid-rise apartments clustered around train stations, single-family homes on quieter streets, and everything needed for daily life within walking or biking distance. The “kei car suburb” or “golf cart suburb” framing helps Americans visualize it (I would think the Netflix show of where kids can walk to stores and back would be enough, but hey): neighborhoods where children bike to school independently, parents walk to grocery stores, and retirees age in place without car dependency.
Thesw are good places to raise families. Parks and playgrounds are distributed throughout. Shopping streets (shotengai) provide fresh food and local businesses. Children commonly travel independently from young ages. The density that horrifies American NIMBYs produces family-oriented communities with abundant green space.
The structural enablers differ from America: Japan’s national zoning framework limits local veto power, private rail companies profit from real estate development along their lines (companies like JR East earn one-third of their $26 billion annual revenue from retail, real estate, and hotels rather than rail operations), and the fact they dense suburbs are nice places to live while being dense.
When suburban residents claim density destroys family-friendliness, Japanese suburbs demonstrate otherwise. When they argue walkability requires sacrificing space, the Japanese model proves you can have both. The example defeats the “it can’t work” narrative and gives permission to want something different than postwar American sprawl.
Disney’s Urbanist Innovations and Dreams
Where Houten and Japan offer governance and cultural models difficult to replicate, Disney’s Celebration offers extractable design innovations regardless of governance structure. While Walt Disney’s original EPCOT vision (an actual city of 20,000) died with him in 1966, elements survived in Celebration, Florida. Celebration was developed using New Urbanism principles, featuring walkable streets, mixed-use development, and ample parks and green space, with ground broken in 1994. Media often portrayed it as artificial and corporate-controlled, but this obscures reality: functionally, it works. According to U.S. Census data, roughly 8,540 residents called Celebration home in 2017, with a median income of $83,228 and a median property value of $401,600. It is a highly walkable community providing residents with access to a golf course, pool, and downtown filled with shops and restaurants. Celebration is safer than the Florida state average and safer than the national average, with the cost of crime per resident at $155 per year ($309 less than the national average and $91 less than Florida’s state average). The failure came from governance structure: corporate control without democratic legitimacy rather than physical planning problems.
The extractable innovations from Celebration and Disneyland have specific cost-benefits:
Underground utilities and service corridors: Disney’s most consequential innovation was hiding infrastructure underground. While expensive upfront (adding roughly 15-20% to initial development costs according to industry estimates), the long-term benefits are substantial. Underground utilities reduce the risk of power outages caused by storms, increase property values, and require less maintenance than overhead utilities. The primary benefit of placing distribution lines underground is that it reduces the frequency of outages, particularly those caused by storms, and substantially reduces the costs of tree trimming and other vegetation management. Studies show that having a home near a power line could decrease its value. Homes near transmission lines in Portland, Oregon, sold for about $5,000 less, while in Seattle the price gap was about $12,500. While the Maryland State Highway Administration lifecycle cost-benefit model found that in most scenarios analyzed, the net present value of benefits did not exceed costs, targeted undergrounding in specific contexts can be justified. A comprehensive analysis framework shows that undergrounding transmission and distribution lines can be a cost-effective strategy to improve reliability
Pedestrian-priority design: Celebration’s walkable street network with traffic calming costs slightly more initially (narrower streets with quality materials and landscaping versus wide asphalt) but delivers measurable benefits. Studies of traffic calming measures show that speed tables achieve accident reductions exceeding 40%, with speed reductions of 40-50%, while chicanes and road narrowing result in accident reductions always greater than 30%. Data from 187 speed humps demonstrate an average reduction in daily traffic volumes of 20 percent, with high-speed traffic (at least 10 mph over the posted limit) dropping from 14 percent to 1 percent of total traffic after implementation. Lower maintenance costs result from less wear from slower, lighter traffic. Research from New York City found that pedestrian and bicycle upgrades spiked retail sales by 49%, 46 percentage points more than the borough-wide growth of just 3%. When Lodi, California made improvements to School Street, 60 new stores opened, the vacancy rate dropped from 18 percent to 6 percent, and sales tax revenues shot up 30 percent. A study in Portland, Oregon found that traffic calming projects decreasing traffic by 16% raised home values on treated streets by 1%. Property values rise rather than fall, neutralizing opposition from asset-protective homeowners.
Mixed-use from inception: Rather than single-use zoning that requires retrofitting later, Disney integrated apartments above retail, homes near shops, and civic buildings near residences from day one. The upfront cost is essentially zero because it’s a planning choice, not a construction expense. Dense mixed-use/condo construction that rises six stories or more produces more than $250,000 per acre in taxes, while big-box stores generate only about $8,350 per acre (maybe $150 to $200 more per acre per year than single-family houses). A typical acre of mixed-use downtown development yields $360,000 more in tax revenue to city government than an acre of strip malls or big box stores. Smart Growth America’s analysis showed that walkable development generates about 10 times more tax revenue per acre than traditional suburban development, and in Nashville, dense mixed-use downtown development returned 1,150 times more tax revenue per acre than traditional suburban sprawl. This dramatically reduces per-household tax burden while funding better services.
Carmel’s Deliverism & State Capacity
If Houten and Japan provide ideals and Disney the design toolkit, Carmel, Indiana demonstrates a working (yes, working) governance model that actually works in American suburbs. Over 28 years, Mayor James Brainard transformed this Indianapolis suburb of 100,000 into what the Wall Street Journal called “the Internet’s favorite small city”.
Brainard’s approach was comprehensive. Carmel became famous for building over 150 roundabouts, the infrastructure innovation Mark Brown uses as a best practice example when building public support: “I’ve used case studies to show completed projects in other cities. If there’s drone videos, that’s even better.” The roundabouts improved traffic flow while beautifying streets, tangible results residents experience daily.
The city transformed decaying strip malls into thriving mixed-use districts: City Center with its $175 million performing arts complex, Midtown with offices and apartments, the Arts and Design District. The Monon Trail became a civic spine comparable to New York’s High Line. Embedded within this vision was significant housing density. These districts are all higher-density mixed-use. Carmel accomplished YIMBY-adjacent goals without making housing the primary pitch.
Property values increased rather than decreased, neutralizing the hardcore 20% opposition whose retirement security depends on housing scarcity. Quality execution addressed soft opposition: parks families actually use, roundabouts reducing commute times, cultural amenities enhancing quality of life. Carmel delivered both physical improvements and community benefits simultaneously.
The 2024 election provided the definitive test. Democrats saw opportunity in this upscale suburb trending Democratic nationally. Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain was involved in fundraising. The Democratic candidate attacked Republican Sue Finkam over culture war issues, demanding she denounce a Moms for Liberty chapter more forcefully. Finkam refused to get drawn in, sticking to her positive platform: continued infrastructure investment, quality of life improvements, the commonsense-center approach.
The result: Finkam won 57% to 43%, Republicans retained eight of nine city council seats. Democratic hopes collapsed against 28 years of tangible results. Suburban voters rejected culture war positioning. When offered a choice between continued practical improvements and identity politics, they chose deliverism overwhelmingly.
Deliverism wins. Brainard “talked climate” while delivering practical policies (bike paths, parks) without imposing mandates that would trigger opposition. He focused on items within city government’s control. As Mark Brown emphasizes: “Framing bike lanes as benefiting everyone, not just cyclists, is important. For every protected bike lane we build, we’re getting a lot of cyclists out of traffic and into their dedicated space.”
Universities as Accidental Urban Preservers
Ryan Allen identifies the same pattern: universities preserved walkable urbanism even as surrounding areas sprawled. “A lot of the best urbanism that we can see in some of the small towns too come from university towns or areas around a university because they sort of act as a natural city,” Allen observes. “A lot of students are living right on campus. They often don’t have a car and so they’ve been able to preserve some of those pre-war structures that often got knocked down when suburban development became the dominant way that the United States was kind of building.”
Universities functioned as protective zones for traditional urbanism precisely because they couldn’t easily sprawl students outward. The walkable neighborhoods surrounding campuses survived because student demand sustained them. These “natural cities” maintained density, mixed-use, and pedestrian infrastructure across generations.
Institutions with similar characteristics (large employers, transit hubs, hospital complexes) could anchor reform efforts the same way universities accidentally preserved urbanism. The key is institutional continuity and inherent car-light characteristics creating protective effects around them.
The Case for Integration Organizations
These examples offer different lessons: Houten shows intentional design, Japan demonstrates organic evolution, Disney provides extractable innovations, Carmel proves deliverism works in American politics, universities accidentally preserved walkability. No single model transplants directly. The work is mixing and matching: Carmel’s roundabouts with Japanese density patterns, Disney’s underground utilities where cost-benefit analysis supports them, Houten’s bike priority adapted to American car ownership rates.
State-level reforms created policy space. The strongest YIMBY chapters already do integration work and need more funding to scale. But single-issue advocacy faces structural constraints. Running council campaigns while synthesizing case studies while coordinating infrastructure dilutes what makes advocacy groups effective. They can’t do everything simultaneously.
The gap is adjacent capacity: organizations focused on synthesis, education, and demonstration rather than policy advocacy. Regional intermediaries collecting cost-benefit data on roundabouts. Research shops translating Japanese models into American contexts. Groups coordinating rapid demonstration projects that prove concepts work. This complements advocacy rather than replacing it.
The convertible opposition clarifies stakes. More young parents become allies when shown upzoning enables three-bedroom units with lower vacancy rates. Business owners support bike lanes after seeing retail data. Retirees back density when they understand walkability in practice (or at leat the AARP who been big into promoting “missing middle” housing). We already have the IFS study found developers systematically underbuild family-friendly units because they misread the market. The question is how can we close that gap using targeted education and demonstration, not mandates.
The window is narrowing. Ryan Allen: “My biggest fear is that this movement of building housing, transit, things like that gets stuck on either side of the culture war. Right now it actually doesn’t track onto the culture war.”
Carmel had 28 years of tangible results when national operatives tried forcing infrastructure into culture war frames. Most suburbs lack that armor. They need, we need, organizations education people about working roundabouts with drone footage before opposition crystallizes, pointing to family apartments that maintain property values, explaining how proven models address multiple concerns. Gap financing and demonstration projects remove the risk premium stopping development. Once developers see family apartments outperform studios, once neighbors see roundabouts improve traffic, people will see YIMBYs more broadly delivering.
Donate more to YIMBY groups like YIMBY Action or YIMBY Law or your state (or local if you have one) to help scale their work! Build complementary organizations for synthesis, demonstration, and education. We need to deliver more visible improvements before political windows close and backlash takes hold.