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Back in fall of 2022, New York City announced that it would swap snow days for “remote learning” days [ [link removed] ]. It’s not clear if that policy is ironclad, but when a big storm hit the city in early February and closed schools, city officials announced a remote learning day [ [link removed] ] (which didn’t go very well).
That was originally going to be the news hook for this piece. But then at the end of February Wendy’s, the fast food chain, announced [ [link removed] ] (and then semi-reversed [ [link removed] ]) its intention to test “dynamic pricing” at its restaurants.
The discourse over dynamic pricing got into attitudes about corporations and markets, and arguments over consumer advocacy versus mere complaining. (Are you against happy hour too? What about weekly supermarket sales? That’s dynamic pricing too!) I’m not completely convinced. This is where the temperamental conservative in me outweighs the philosophical one. “Sales” in retail stores are as old as supermarkets. Happy hours are fun. Besides, both are based on the idea that the price is sometimes, under some circumstances, discounted. That is subtly different from the inverse: that the price will sometimes—in potentially unpredictable ways or times—go up. Admittedly, we accept this with airfares and hotels and concert tickets. But to bring food into it crosses a line in the mind, if not in philosophy.
But this isn’t about dynamic pricing. That’s just one example of what feels like a trend. No more snow days. No more certainty in fast food prices. General inflation. “Extra-economy” airplane seats without even carry-on bags included. The Square kiosk asking you to tip 22% at a counter-service establishment. Paid vacation turning into “unlimited paid time off”—which corporate managers have almost certainly determined results in fewer total days taken off, because when everything is promised, nothing in particular is. Plastic bags at the supermarket being taxed or banned. $16 burgers served without fries. Fewer and fewer little perks, respites, luxuries. Every little bit of value, every last little treat, being squeezed out.
These might seem like small matters—no more than inconveniences, or perhaps the small costs we pay for the vast benefits of globalization and economic dynamism. They might even represent an increase in choices and options. But for many people, they upend a sense that everyday life is secure. The idea that you can’t even rely on the price of a burger to be the price of a burger captures a feeling of deterioration and precarity in America.
This makes me think, because everything does, of urbanism and housing politics. I very much support new housing and zoning reform. That’s the main topic I write about. People who, unlike me, like the American land-use status quo—lots of driving, mostly single-family houses, a certain privacy and distance—often react with what looks to me like paranoia or anger at the idea of even permitting any other option.
For example, proposals, like the one that passed in Alexandria, Virginia last year, to allow small multifamily buildings in single-family zones, generate intense backlash [ [link removed] ]. (They want to pack us like sardines.) Or people will react badly to someone on Twitter sharing a selfie happily biking in the rain as if it’s an attempt to personally shame them. (Well, I like not getting wet when I run errands, which is why I drive my car.) Sometimes this passes over into conspiracy theory of the very-online variety: 15-minute cities are about imprisoning us in high-rises and making us eat the bugs. I’ve seen this suspicion about lab-grown meat and products like Impossible and Beyond Meat. Sure, first they let you choose it. Then they force you to use it. Didn’t the telescreens in “1984” start as consumer items? (They actually did.) You can only take these things so seriously.
But back to housing. Most NIMBY arguments, particularly those which treat people like they’re a bad thing, don’t resonate with me. But this general line of argument—let us keep a few single-family houses, at least—kind of does. Not that houses or cars are going anywhere in America, to be clear. But there’s a certain honesty to a NIMBYism which owns the fact that restrictive zoning is a form of regulation which results in an artificially manipulated built environment, and which basically says yes, I want that, because I like it.
Now—I think it’s fine to lose single-family houses in an inner suburb a couple of miles away from the core of one of the nation’s most important cities, which is what Alexandria is. But nonetheless, I think it’s an effective argument. In fact, it’s a bit like the argument for unionization, or for the Post Office’s universal delivery pledge. In a pure free market, these things might not exist; but some things are in the public interest regardless of their potential for profit or efficiency. In a less socialist-esque way: Efficiency is a value, not an objective, let alone an ultimate, good.
I’m sympathetic, in theory at least, to the idea that if we don’t mandate at least some large yards, or detached houses, that we won’t get any; that the logic of efficiency will eventually squeeze them out—just like it’s squeezing out free carry-on luggage, snow days, French fries on the side and, possibly, burgers with known prices.
The counterargument, of course, is that none of these things were ever free. They were invisibly subsidized, paid for either by the beneficiary, in a less visible way, or by those who did not want, or did not avail themselves of, the “extra.” If you don’t like fries, why should you pay for the “free” fries on the side? Let the guy who likes fries pay extra. The same argument can be made for anything that is “free” or “included”—yards, carry-on luggage, whatever thing we might be paying for now in a time of inflation. While it might upset some people—those who felt they were getting some kind of “deal” which may have been illusory—it ultimately benefits everyone to unbundle these things and price them.
Yet for whatever reason, this doesn’t feel entirely convincing. First of all, it is far more frustrating to pay for something you used to get by default than to merely know that thing is somehow included in your price, even if you didn’t particularly want it. But deeper than that, some little respites, some little luxuries, seem worth keeping, even if—maybe especially if—they would go extinct in the absence of special efforts to preserve them. Why should the citizens of such an unbelievably rich country always have to be nickeled and dimed, always have to be hustling?
Making an affirmative choice is hard. Choosing to pay for something is hard. Being presented with such choices creates extra little frustrations, extra bits of mental work. Some people feel they will eventually be pressured or coerced to make one choice over the other. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and the unofficial neoconservative adviser to George W. Bush, said of traditional Christian belief, “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”
A similar supposition is made in a neat little story in “The Once and Future King,” in a dystopian scene where the protagonist is transformed into an ant and spends some time in an ant colony. He sees a sign hanging which reads “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”
What these (certainly debatable) aphorisms suggest is that if we merely allow something, we’ll eventually be forced to do it. By making the choice available, we ultimately take away the choice.
Once again, I think we need to build more housing and simplify zoning, which causes us to underbuild in the fastest-growing and most job-rich cities and regions in our country. I think unlocking economic opportunity for people and metro areas outweighs the interests of legacy homeowners or young people who—very likely mistakenly—feel that one of those million-dollar single-family houses from the 1930s or 1950s or 1970s will one day be theirs if we preserve single-family-only zoning.
But I’ve had too many conversations that go in the direction of you want everyone to live in an apartment building or you want to force people out of their cars or can’t we have any single-family houses for the people who do want that? to dismiss such concerns. Preserve some of these homes for us, people say. Perhaps I’m sympathetic because I know some of these people, or because I see how easily I could have been them, making those same arguments. I’m sensitive to the fact that many people perceive all of these things to be related—all fronts in a war against American comfort and convenience. I’m sensitive to how a narrative of decline and deterioration makes good policy harder to sell. And I don’t think it’s just a narrative.
Those who see nothing in these phenomena—fast-food dynamic pricing or extra-economy fares or even zoning reform—except burgeoning efficiency, dynamism and consumer choice—who dismiss “the vibes” against these changes as simply people not understanding economics—are whistling past the graveyard. But maybe that won’t be a problem, because they might charge us to walk there, too.

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