I tweeted this morning (actually it was a post I scheduled weeks ago) that I generally don’t understand why so many city-building issues become political.
The example I gave was corner stores, more specifically small-scale retail within neighbourhoods. Does wanting to be able to easily walk to amenities from my home place me on the left or the right of the political spectrum?
I thought of this because every now and then someone will respond to one of my posts and sling some political moniker back at me in an attempt to debunk my argument.
And each and every time it makes me stop and think: Am I really that? I don’t like the idea of being neatly placed in a particular bucket, and that bothers me far more than someone disagreeing with my point.
When I ask AI to tell me what it thinks of me based on over 13 years of daily city-building posts, it says this:
Based on your writing on brandondonnelly.com, you do not fit neatly into conventional partisan left/right buckets. Instead, your positions place you firmly in the pro-growth, market-urbanist / “Abundance Agenda” quadrant: culturally and socially progressive, strongly urbanist, yet grounded in market discipline, capital allocation, and regulatory pragmatism.
This doesn’t sound wrong.
But the result is that I often sit on different sides. I’m for bike lanes and neighbourhood retail, but I’m against inclusionary zoning and I don’t believe that rent control as a broad tool achieves its desired housing outcomes.
At the same time, I also think you can look at specific issues from completely different perspectives.
Bike lanes, for instance, are typically associated with centre-left progressives, but I see them as a capital-efficient, high-throughput form of mobility that increases individual choice and helps wean us off government-subsidized roads.
Road pricing (or congestion charges) can similarly be viewed as a left-leaning tool that curbs emissions, promotes transit usage, and assuages the bike-lane crowd.
But it’s actually the most fiscally conservative way to price roads. It’s classic Milton Friedman. Congestion is merely an economic failure: an artificial shortage caused by zero user cost on a scarce good.
If I’m an advocate for anything on this blog, it is looking at each issue independently, trying to arrive at some understanding of the truth, and then being open to completely changing my mind if I end up being wrong.
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