[t]here is a deeper, more substantial challenge that an encounter with agrarians would pose for New Urbanists: namely, to come to terms with the radical economic and cultural changes implied in a thoroughgoing return to traditional neighborhood design. Agrarians, we think, are more cognizant of what they are asking people to surrender - indeed that they are asking them to surrender something. Contrary to popular belief, it is not possible to have it all: to pay less for our food than it is worth and to preserve small-scale agriculture at the same time. Agrarians have called us to confront this choice and others like it. They have argued that what we would surrender to preserve local communities is comparatively unimportant. But they have not evaded the implications of their work: that Americans should pay more for the food they buy, and grow some for themselves; that people should be less "mobile"; that smart people should spend their intelligence on small, unglamorous problems in small, unglamorous places; that we should be slow to adopt technological innovations; that people should house their aging parents rather than commit them to the care of institutions.

Zoning is often accepted by planners in a rather Churchillian fashion - acknowledged to be the worst land use planning tool out there, except for all the others. And, the older your building stock, the worse zoning gets - the existing assortment of buildings falls further and further behind current sensibilities of how to use land. One commonly recognized manifestation of this is in older residential neighborhoods where not a single house on the block could be rebuilt under current zoning if destroyed in a fire. (This was the case when the ICC lost Stevens House a few years ago. The emotional response was to rebuild it back, exactly as it was - but this would have violated the existing zoning in a dozen or more ways. We eventually sold the lot, for over $400,000, and it currently sits empty.)