Trump’s Ballroom Defenders Have Adopted the “Abundance” Argument

It has become far too difficult to build anything in America. Prominent Democrats have become vocal this year in calling out their party’s lawyerly obsession with process, which combined with a not in my backyard (NIMBY) mentality, has prevented a place such as California from building a high-speed rail project that its voters approved by referendum in 2008.

The Abundance books are about how society at large suffers from NIMBYism. (For those just tuning in, NIMBY means “not in my back yard.”) But nobody I know is trying to build a high-speed rail from the White House driveway to the South Lawn. Nor does anybody hold title to a backyard situated inside the White House complex—not even Trump, because it isn’t his house. You and I own that house. That gives us a legitimate right to elevate preservation above all other concerns—never mind what the current tenant desires—unless there’s some very compelling reason not to. Preserving buildings like the White House and the Capitol helps us preserve the principles they stand for.

The public’s collective right to preserve the people’s house is protected in two ways. The first is that, before Trump, presidents instinctively respected it and made only minor alterations or, if they made large changes, these were almost entirely invisible to the public. A good example of the latter is President Harry Truman gutting the interior because the floors were rotting. And as my colleague Matt Ford pointed out, Truman commissioned an extensive study of the mansion’s needs before anyone swung a sledgehammer, and throughout the renovation process he went out of his way “to avoid unflattering views.” 

The second protection is a pair of executive orders and a statute. The executive orders, one by President William Howard Taft and one by President Woodrow Wilson, require that the federal government solicit “comment and advice” from the Washington, D.C., Commission on Fine Arts before it builds anything inside the District of Columbia. The statute is a 1924 law creating the National Capital Park Commission, later renamed the National Capital Planning Commission, which reviews all federal building plans inside Greater Washington, D.C., excepting the Capitol, which has its own architect.