I will admit to being something of a very amateur architecture aficionado; I love great looking buildings, even though I’m in no position to afford one for our family. I follow people like Coby — “Working on creating better, more beautiful places to live in. Developer, Writer, Urbanist, Professor, Optimist. Check out my writing below!” — Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, Architectolder, who specializes in photography and who is a strong conservative, and Architecture & Tradition, along with other similar accounts on Twitter.

And these are great people, people who appreciate nice architecture and art, but most of them — not Architectolder! — have a bit of a blind spot. They praise urban living, and show many examples of really great urban housing, but, as in Coby’s tweet shown to the upper right, they don’t seem to appreciate the fact that most Americans cannot afford the places they’ve shown.

I once remarked how the houses in one of the Philly “Main Line” suburbs were great, but not only couldn’t I afford one of them, I couldn’t even afford one of their driveways!

Sure, I prefer the small farm on which we live, I prefer that I don’t have to walk the dogs every day, but can simply open the door and let them out to play on our 7.92 acres of property, and I prefer the fact that there are few other people out here, only one of whom I could actually call a neighbor. And yeah, I would certainly like to be able to walk five blocks to the Votre supermarché at 12 Avenue Baquis in Nice to pick up freshly baked croissants for breakfast, but not being able to do that is a small price to pay for having our own land.

But one thing about living in very poor Estill County, I can see what is around me. We bought our property very cheaply, just $75,000 in 2014: decent land, a livable if nevertheless fixer-upper house, which yes, we have been fixing up, and are still fixing up. I previously noted how we bought a second house, a two bedroom, one bath single family home, not for ourselves, but to rent to my wife’s sister. I didn’t mention the price, but it was just $70,000, and it, too, was a fixer-upper. You can see photos of my nephew and me remodeling the junked bathroom. These were cheap, eastern Kentucky houses, the last one bought just before Bidenflation struck interest rates.

This is what some of the urbanists just don’t understand. They see some real gems in the cities, but don’t seem to understand that most people can’t afford those really nice places. We have previously noted some of the urban houses and streets in which people have to live in Philadelphia because that’s all they can reasonably afford. When my good friend Alicia posts images of her favorite residential architectural style — much of the photos are from Europe — she’s posting images of places she might like to live, but places most working-class Americans couldn’t afford, nor residences which Americans could build for any affordable prices.

While Alicia hasn’t mentioned it at all in anything of hers I’ve seen, that courtyard living she champions looks to me like a version of the gated community, to keep out the poorer people and the bad guys and the riff-raff. But perhaps that’s what the urbanists really want, for themselves and their friends; the denizens of Strawberry Mansion and the Philadelphia Badlands can stay outside. A “pharmacy on your block, a farmer’s market that comes to the plaza out your front door, and a courtyard in your backyard” sure would sound nice to people, but in a lot of neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love, what the residents would see more useful are streets not run by criminals and gangs, and sidewalks not slept on by junkies.