Seemingly overnight during the pandemic, there has been a proliferation of online videos and other media catering to an audience open to moving either out of their local metro area, state or even country to another locale. It is easy to find a ‘Living In [Major City]’ channel on YouTube promoting both the pros and cons of the creator’s particular place of residency. It is also easy to find videos from content farms about the best places to live and move. So, wouldn’t the average person not be somewhat happy to have their hometown described on the internet as a positive place to be? Depending on what you think that may mean for your community, maybe not. Let me explain.

I grew up in the New York of the 1990s and 2000s, in what could be deemed as the post-urban flight era that saw the return of young professionals to cities around the United States. On the one hand, it was a marked change in both demographics and economic vitality, rebuilding long strained municipal tax bases for the first time in decades. Capital followed and cities would see significant investments in real estate and infrastructure. But on the other hand, it meant a shift in local government priorities from trying to retain what had been rather lean public services to attracting and retaining large corporations in the hopes of encouraging further investment. Less focus on interaction with the public and more on developing at times elaborate schemes to recruit businesses rather than solving longstanding community problems and engagement with the public.

To be clear, the work of local governments is increasingly to strike a balance between these two conflicting tasks. However, how these tensions have played out in large cities across the country is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of everyday citizens, who for good reason, have deep suspicion of any talk of local infrastructural investments that citizens don’t explicitly request. Bike lanes, streetscape improvements, renovation of public spaces – all of these can incur speculation concerning who these positive changes will benefit, with the assumption that these updates generally aren’t for current residents. It also elicits negative responses to efforts by cities to encourage young mobile professionals to move to their regions. Enter the term “we’re full” or ‘we full.’

This common phrase is by no means new, and has been expanded in its use into immigration discourses, but it encompasses some nuances that aren’t always clearly articulated. Our cities are by no means full. As the video above illustrates, Atlanta isn’t full. New York isn’t full either, and it doesn’t take long to travel out of their downtowns of either city to notice that. But the underlying intent of those saying this can be bifurcated between wealthier residents, often at the edges of cities and who own their homes, and less wealthy residents who live closer in, probably don’t own a home and live in communities more directly impacted by large city investments. There is no shortage of homeowners hostile to any change in their communities, whether it is under the guise of preserving neighborhood character, property values or just a general sense of knowing who lives there and who doesn’t (and shouldn’t). There are also lower-income residents hanging on to a fleeting sense of cultural memory as their cities see the influx of newcomers who make much more than they do and are driving new housing development, location of businesses and government attention – often at their perceived or actual expense.

America, after being committed to the growth of its cities for its first century and a half, has now spent almost a full century at this point in subsidizing suburbs instead of our cities, constructing interstates, subdivisions, new schools and malls, all the things that come to mind in common visions of the American Dream. At the same time, our system of development has quietly instilled a perception that things shouldn’t change – really at all. In our nation’s wealthiest suburbs, one can see entire communities that look the same way they did 50 or even 100 years ago. In the struggling cores of our major metro regions, residents also have become used to a lack of change in scale. Buildings continue to age and slowly decline with no model for what the future can look like except for those glassy high rises. If people must choose between the old crumbling townhouse or the glassy condo building, they will pick the townhouse – regardless of what that may mean for the housing of new generations of residents.

The work of developing places is a marathon and not a sprint. We are here today based on centuries of small improvements and small investments that compound over time. To say “we’re full” doesn’t achieve what some are rightfully asking for when they say it: the maintenance of the community we have – the sidewalks, the roads, the sewer lines, the schools – the things that we need to continue to be able to call this place home before trying to bring other people into the mix. However, it doesn’t build the government capacity or remove the red tape to do that, nor does it generate the money this maintenance requires. This is a conversation that spaces such as Strong Towns do well, better than I can, but I will close with these questions. What does it mean to say, “We aren’t quite full but we’re struggling to keep what we’ve got. What can we do that gets us to some stability?” Let’s not chide folks who don’t quite have the language.