Matt Yglesias sparked a debate about parks with his post How Many Parks Do You Need?, in which he questioned the wisdom of turning every available plot of land into a park rather than developing the land with productive buildings. Richard Layman chimed in with a typically verbose explanation.

The Yglesias and Layman posts are both good reads, but they’re both overthinking the issue. It’s not that people want parks; it’s that they don’t want anything. The average American has become so disillusioned with the typical way we build cities (that is, suburbs) that not building anything has become the default best use of land in the minds of almost everybody. In the minds of the parks-everywhere crowd “greenspace” is code for “no more traffic”.

Consider this case from Fairfax. Residents agreed to create a new tax specifically for the city to purchase new park land. When the city did so and came out with a design for a new park, residents went full NIMBY. They opposed the new park, because it had fields and playgrounds that might induce people to drive there. No, what Fairfaxians wanted was for the city to buy up as much as it could and leave it empty. They didn’t want parks, they wanted a shield from development. Similar cases abound across the country.

Of course, the sort of urban thinkers likely to read this blog know that spreading development out is utterly counterproductive, because development has to go somewhere and less here means more further down the road, which in turn means more congestion for everybody. But a lot of Americans don’t get that yet, and still think that development = cars. Until that paradigm changes, there will always be people clamoring for as much of nothing as they can get.