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The Boutique and the Carnival

by Christian Huebner 

There are few cities in America today as different as Portland, Oregon and Houston, Texas. The differences teach us something about what we need to consider as we plan cities of the 21st century.

Portland, one might say, is a boutique. It’s a gorgeous town. It’s young, it’s artsy, it’s green. Its gutters brim with rain, its restaurants overflow with microbrewed beers, and its streets teem with backpacker chic. Portland has the world’s coolest bookstore (Powell’s City of Books), the nation’s best-named sports arena (the Rose Garden), and perhaps the universe’s only hotel/bar/restaurant/community-hot-tub housed in a retired elementary school (McMenamin’s; you have to see it to believe it). 

All of this culture is compressed, compacted and maintained by some of the country’s most extensive zoning laws. Portland’s decades-old “green belt” ordinance makes it nigh well impossible for the city to expand a foot beyond its current boundary with the surrounding farmland and countryside. At the same time, building codes within the city make it very difficult to develop anything big that isn’t there already. The boutique has a watchful security guard.

Houston is not a boutique. Houston is a carnival. It is a sprawling hodge-podge of concrete, cars, big boxes, suburbs, old-money estates, new urban lofts, blue-collar neighborhoods, local holes-in-the-wall and McWalbucksnerabee’s chains, scattered over the Gulf coastal plain. Houston boasts the nation’s tallest suburban building (Williams Tower: 64 stories), the hemisphere’s most complicated traffic intersection (off of Beltway 8), and the world’s highest count of free chips and salsa distributed per capita (I’m almost sure).

The carnival exists because it’s easy to stroll up to the fairground and pitch a tent.  Houston has the least restrictive zoning laws in the country – in fact, it has no zoning laws at all. The only limits on development are privately made neighborhood covenants and the space to break ground.

My sense is that most people under 35, and maybe a good percentage of those older, too, find the Portland boutique model more immediately attractive. And so, as the younger generation moves up into the leadership class, the boutique rather than the carnival will be the guiding light of civic leadership.

I take a somewhat different view. I’m instinctively drawn to the boutique, but I also believe we should be wary about forsaking or denigrating the carnival.

Why? Because everything has a price. That goes for selecting models of cities, as much as models of cars, houses and Extra Value Meals. Either kind of city, boutique or carnival, involves trade-offs, giving up some goods for the sake of others.

Sometimes the trade-offs between a place like Portland and a place like Houston are obvious. Go out for lunch, fill up a tank of gas, or pay a rent check and you’ll quickly see one: the price of tamped-down expansion and development is a higher cost of living. Portland is expensive; Houston is just about the cheapest city in the country. Boutiques charge a high price of admission, while carnivals are easy come, easy go.

On the other hand, a free-for-all on the fair ground makes it mighty difficult to cultivate any particular vibe, particularly the hip, urban, boutique vibe. You can find pockets of it, of course, where enough like-minded people decide to circle their wagons and partition off a little slice for themselves and their particular ways. But you won’t be able to guarantee a consistent vision of beauty on the larger scale. Too many diverse tastes.

That brings us to another important trade-off, perhaps the most important one. The boutique and the carnival will attract – or allow – different kinds of people. Put simply, carnivals welcome all comers; boutiques cater to a restricted clientele.

Spend a few days on the ground in Portland and Houston, and this becomes plain.  Portland feels like a city of 20 and 30-something hipsters, yuppies and dinks. Of these, most appear to come from the white, upper middle class, even if they might be scraping by on less – in a hip sort of way – for a season. Babies are a rare sight: people have dogs instead.

Houston, in contrast, is young, old, and in-between; rich, poor and all degrees of middle class; full of children and also full of hipsters, yuppies and dinks; Anglo, Hispanic, Black, Vietnamese and Indian. There’s a good deal of socio-economic sorting across town, but everyone still shares the same city, and at least rubs shoulders.

Intentionally or not, one of the expenses of boutiques is the loss of diversity. One can debate how significant this is, and whether it is a price worth paying. 

There is a similar give-and-take, for instance, within the Church. On the whole, I tend to think of the Church as more carnival than boutique – for its messiness and squalor as much as for its diversity and freedom. But there is an undeniable tendency for the boutique, too. We see this especially in the yearning for beauty in worship: in reverent liturgy, in sacred architecture, art and music. Nor are these impulses incompatible: beautiful worship should train us to see grace in the messy world outside.

In the end, no model of city, be it boutique or carnival, will be the New Jerusalem.  That should come as no surprise if, as was once proposed, we have here no abiding city.  That said, in the necessary work of doing the best we can, we should remember the virtues of rough and shoddy tents just as much as pristine store windows.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)