San Francisco taught me to be an urbanist. There are few better classrooms in America in which to learn the delight of strolling down a cozy street and turning the corner to an unexpected discovery in an alley or shop window; the freedom of having your daily needs within a short walk of home; or the excitement of stepping outside into a hyper-diverse milieu of people whose stories you'll never know and feeling part of something grand even on your loneliest days.

San Francisco also taught me to be a YIMBY. To live there in the past decade was to watch the mournful procession (if you were lucky enough not to be part of it) of those giving up on America's most expensive city or being pushed out of it—artists, immigrants, teachers, nonprofit workers, bartenders, cooks, people of color with roots in the city several generations deep—and to want to stop the bleeding.

As a result, I've never seen these two identities—urbanist and YIMBY—as in conflict. A human-scaled, compact, walkable city is the best and most sustainable (in every sense of the word) habitat ever created for human flourishing. And this is both the case for learning and respecting the accumulated wisdom of history on how to make these places beautiful and functional, and for welcoming more of our fellow humans to share them with us and being unthreatened by that prospect.

It's been my deep surprise to learn lately that there's a subset of housing advocates who seem to believe that supporting more housing and demanding good urbanism are in conflict now.

Specifically, some people seem to have concluded that since "neighborhood character" is often a smoke-screen for any number of selfish (and even classist and racist) objections to change, that therefore, neighborhood character (without the scare quotes) itself warrants discarding as a relic of a less enlightened time. And with it, concern for a sense of place, a cohesive and enjoyable (dare I say lovable) public realm, and design features that bring out the best in humanity.