The Congress of the New Urbanism is famous for advocating that our current built environment is not Goldilocks, and that the scales are tipped heavily towards s

The Congress of the New Urbanism is famous for advocating that our current built environment is not Goldilocks, and that the scales are tipped heavily towards sprawl and away from good urbanism. So it’s weird to see it publish the viewpoint it essentially formed to oppose (urban agglomerations are social problems to be solved by decentralizing and spreading out). It has a slightly different view of the nature of that social problem, but is overall aligned with the original postwar purveyors of sprawl. More to the point, it doesn’t make any argument that the current level of growth is the Goldilocks zone. A YIMBY may read all this and agree that there’s such a thing as too much, while still thinking of the optimum as much higher than the status quo.