University of California, Berkeley urban-policy professor Carol Galante, writing in the New York Times last week, argued that “now is the time” for cities “to embrace density.” She worried that NIMBY types might be emboldened by a coronavirus that preys on the closely congregated, and insisted that society has “an obligation to ignore the short-term reactionary impulse to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus and instead use this opportunity to rethink the policies that impede the construction of new housing, at more price levels, in the places where housing is most needed.”
Galante’s opponents — you will not be surprised to learn — have long “cloaked” their opposition to further development with feigned outrage over things like “neighborhood character and traffic impacts,” meant to conceal their ostensibly unsavory motives. COVID-19, she worries, will provide them with another “rallying cry to maintain [their] sprawling fortress neighborhoods designed to foster exclusion.”
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