By any measure, Oak Park is a very progressive place. On most progressive litmus tests we clock left to far left, especially on race and “culture war” issues.
Here in our own little bubble, we live our progressive values un-accosted. There’s no battle to be fought, we’ve mostly “won.” This breeds a sort of complacency, the notion that our own house is in order, that it’s all those other folks who need to change, elsewhere.
But small “c” conservatism is just that: the idea that things, just as they are, are pretty good, and we don’t really need to change much.
My own internal title for this column is “Bikes, Bricks, and Boulevards.” I focus on transit, walkability, housing policy, and how these collide with that ineffable “character” of Oak Park.
In my column I beat the drum for change. I’d like to see a lot more bikes and bike lanes in Oak Park. I’d love to see more transit options in general. We need more, and more varied, housing and I believe Oak Park’s character is stuck in a nostalgia-tinted haze that ignores our present reality.
The resistance to change I’ve experienced is extreme. People object to bike paint, to speed humps, to the little white posts on curbs. Letters to the editor warn of the horrors that will follow if a few dozen on-street parking spots are removed for a bike lane. The single-family home, we are told, is what holds Oak Park’s character together, and any threat to it is a threat to everything.
We Oak Parkers want to keep living just the way we do right now. Things are just fine. We don’t want to lose free parking, we don’t want to be slowed down in traffic. We don’t want to share the roads. We don’t want more people living in our neighborhoods. This is small “c” conservatism, and not just from big “C” Conservatives.
If you are progressive in Oak Park, even if you like bike lanes, you’ve got about a 50/50 shot of living in a historic district. Historic preservation is huge here. Mass historic preservation is also extremely conservative — on just about every measure. People believe they are preserving the architecture, or fighting for sustainability, or protecting equity. I don’t doubt they believe it. But when you preserve half the land area of a town, you have decided that nothing can change there, ever. That’s a conservative policy, whatever anyone believes about it.
People like myself can explain the social, cultural, economic, and sustainability benefits of reforming transit or housing policies until we are blue in the face, but we always run up against the crushing conservatism of Oak Park. The same old arguments pop up again and again in defense of the status quo.
I get it. Change is hard. Oak Park is an extremely nice place to live, and nobody wants to see that change. I’d just like more people to be able to experience Oak Park and its benefits, and experience it like it was designed to be experienced: on foot, not in a car, walking through diverse neighborhoods packed with unique businesses and even more unique people.
That’s not change. It’s more bikes, more bricks, better boulevards. It’s the Oak Park we have today, just more of what we’ve always been.