Everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.
Why my 2026 resolution is to go to more boring meetings.
When I walked into the city council meeting, I felt a rush of anxiety. The NIMBYs had come out in full force. They sat together, wearing red, ready to make a show of opposition. While I wasn’t alone, it felt that way—one voice speaking in favor of housing, facing down a wall of resistance.
It’s not that there are significantly more people opposed to new housing. In fact, most people say they support building more homes, especially if it means housing will be more affordable. The real imbalance isn’t opinion; it’s participation. What NIMBYs lack in numbers, they make up for in engagement.
American attitudes toward housing are often shaped by experience. Older Americans, many of whom bought homes before the 2008 financial crisis, faced far fewer barriers to ownership. They have both a financial and an emotional incentive to keep housing stock the same. While we most often talk about the financial incentive homeowners have to resist new housing, I think the emotional one is perhaps even more operative. Change is scary, and it’s hard for people to imagine how their neighborhood changing could possibly be a good thing; emotionally, it’s easier to show up and say no to any kind of change, especially if you can’t see exactly how it will benefit you.
Americans under 40, on the other hand, came of age amid housing scarcity. Our world was shaped by a bottleneck in housing supply after 2008, runaway rents and home prices, and delayed independence driven by cost. These experiences prime us to see density not as a threat, but as a basic condition of affordability. As a result, younger Americans tend to be far more open to multifamily housing, mixed-use development, and new neighbors.
But openness doesn’t translate into power on its own. NIMBYs are really very good at attending public meetings. Whether it’s because older, wealthier emptynesters have fewer evening obligations, or because meetings are often held during working hours, the result is the same: city council chambers, planning commissions, and neighborhood associations are routinely dominated by people opposed to housing and density. The rest of us are at home, probably getting a child ready for bed - or working an evening shift.
Whether NIMBYs know it or not, they are using community organizing tactics developed not by those opposed to urbanism, but America’s most famous urbanist - Jane Jacobs. Tactics like showing up at meetings in large numbers, slowing down processes, and the language of protecting neighborhood character were used by Jacobs to stop urban renewal programs from gutting Greenwich Village . Jacobs believed that cities work because they are dense, mixed, and constantly changing. Her fight was not against growth or housing, but against top-down, car-centered megaprojects that erased neighborhoods in the name of efficiency.
Today’s NIMBYs borrow Jacobs’ tactics and use them for the opposite purpose. Where Jacobs fought against the flattening of cities into single-purpose corridors and superblocks, modern NIMBYism often exists to preserve exactly that kind of monoculture: single-family zoning, car dependence, parking mandates, and artificially scarce housing. Jacobs organized to protect the life of the city; NIMBYs organize to freeze communities in an imagined suburban ideal.
These tactics are effective. In Nashville, a comprehensive zoning reform called NEST was effectively killed after overwhelmingly older crowds showed up to meetings and screamed at the sponsor of the legislation. There are plenty of people who might otherwise build or support affordable housing who simply don’t wade into the work, because they know they can’t stomach the harassment and bullying that often comes with it. All over the country, NIMBYs combine Jacobs’ organizing strategies with pure vitriol to put an end to anything they see as a threat to their emotional or financial control over a neighborhood.
I think it’s past time for YIMBYs to reclaim Jacobs’ tactics (but not the vitriol that NIMBYs bring with them). Too often, elected officials, public servants, and even private developers walk away from community meetings with the sense that there is overwhelming opposition to sensible increases in density, multifamily housing, and mixed-use development. That impression persists not because it’s true, but because it’s loud.
And so I have a 2026 New Year’s Resolution that honestly doesn’t sound like much fun, but that seems important to me: go to more boring meetings. Go to more council meeting, committees and commissions, neighborhood association meetings. I want to let showing up be my first step in reclaiming Jacobs’s tactics to urbanist ends.
Everyone wants a revolution; no one wants to go to boring meetings.
There’s an aphorism I love, though no one is sure who said it. Was it Shane Claiborne? Dorothy Day? Was it a hippie talking about the failure of a commune? Fannie Lou Hamer? Who knows; the internet suggests all these authors and more. But its message rings true:
Everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.
We all want to be part of dramatic, world-changing movements. We want to be the hero in the story, the main character who can one day look back on history and say we did the right thing. But social change, lived out, is depressingly mundane. You can have an a commune with amazing ideals or organize a protest with a brilliant cause, but if no one is willing to do the practical responsibilities of sustaining human community - like the dishes - the whole thing falls apart. (No surprise that men get to be the heroes of history, and women do the dishes - but that’s for another time.)
Boring meetings are the same way. We can want to see dramatic zoning reform, affordable housing projects, mixed use development, multifamily housing, protected bike lanes, efficient transit, and safer safer streets, and we can talk about it until we’re blue in the face. We can make convincing Substack posts and connect with likeminded people about all these subjects and more; we can have guerilla bench building projects and make excellent memes -- but until we’re in the room where decisions are being made, well, we’re just dreaming of a revolution but not doing the dishes.
This is why my resolution for 2026 is to go to more boring meetings. Council meetings, committees and commissions, neighborhood associations: these spaces are rarely exciting, but they are where decisions are made. And when they are exciting, they are often full of weeping and gnashing of teeth (and frankly, stress me out). And more than boring or stressful, these meetings can be infuriating and circuitous; cities do things like studies that demonstrate the same things we know already (like high speed limits kill people, and lower speed limits save lives), and then routinely ignore their own studies.
But I want to show up and let anyone and everyone know: yes, I live here and I’m from here. Yes, I am a homeowner. No, I am not a developer. And yes, I do want more development - multifamily housing, low-income housing, mixed-use development, bus stops, bike lanes, and more - in my backyard. And I want to show up in my clergy collar, as a visible faith leader to make it clear that there is a moral imperative to build communities that work for everyone.
I can name dozens of people who are far better at attending these meetings and have been for a long time. I’ve been wanting a revolution but not doing the dishes. I’m not saying anything new here, but just laying out where I feel called for 2026, and hoping that others out there will join me.
Community meetings, commission meetings, and council meetings are almost always one of two things: well-attended, contentious, and stressful - or poorly attended and painfully boring. But either way, these are the places where our cities are shaped. Showing up consistently to speak in favor of housing, density, transit, bike lanes—the whole urbanist sandwich—is not a distraction from change. It’s how change actually happens.
Going to Boring Meetings as a Mom
You might be surprised to know that Jesus Urbanist has not become a world famous publication, or made me insanely wealthy. Instead, I spend most days with my toddler and writing during his naps or before he wakes up in the morning.
And this means that he’s also with me when I go to boring meetings. And so he’ll go to boring meetings with me.
This fact will make me unpopular with any number of people, because hating children for, um, existing is increasingly the norm. Other adults, especially those who don’t currently have young children, tend to view anything and everything a child does as a reason to judge that specific child, that child’s parents (but, let’s be real - their mothers specifically), or children and mothers as a whole. The current social sentiment is that children should be neither seen nor heard in public.
What this inevitably means is that mothers shouldn’t been seen or heard in public spaces. As daycare becomes less and less affordable (often due to NIMBY regulations and NIMBY arguments), more mothers have limited childcare or work around their children’s schedules. Some families make the precarious financial decision that one parent should stay home with a child, and that parent is almost always the mother. Finding a babysitter can be an ordeal, especially if it’s during the day or just for a bit of time here and there.
Women belong in every room where decisions are being made, and that includes mothers. And if we want moms to have any chance at being included in our decision making processes, this means that we need to become more tolerant of children in public.
This doesn’t mean I’ll let my toddler run free in a Metro Council meeting - but it might mean that someone will hear him exist in public (imagine the horror). Honestly, I feel nervous even writing that I’m figuring out how to bring my toddler to more boring meetings, so strong is the public’s ire for children (and mothers). I have already taken him, virtually and in person, to meetings with councilmembers and with our local Department of Transportation, and it has often left me feeling... embarrassed? Worried of how people will judge me, because I brought a child into a public space? But if you’re a stay at home mom who wants to be involved in public life, what other option is there?
My son is a lovely, normal kid. Sometimes he makes noise, and he loves seeing other people. And I try to teach him how to act in public, but learning that and controlling one’s body takes time. And he gets to exist in public, right alongside me.
As he grows older, I hope he’ll also dream of a revolution and know how to do the dishes, too.
It isn’t uncommon for children to be doing homework or relaxing in committee rooms during our meetings. Sometimes they’ll even pop onto the floor to talk to their mom. I hope your toddler shows, too.
Thank you for this, your message is so important. And thank YOU for doing the dishes! I've found that another important benefit of attending those civic meetings and speaking positively about change, is that we actually start changing the conversation right there and then. There are other people who want to be positive, but they need to hear someone else. That can really start a major shift AT THE MEETING. A key is to be positive, no negative labels, talk about the future you want, rather than arguing about what you don't want.