Malcolm Gladwell once described entrepreneurs as possessing three defining traits: imagination, conscientiousness, and disagreeableness. The first two are easy to admire. Imagination fuels innovation; conscientiousness delivers it. But it is the third — disagreeableness — that quietly determines whether anything transformative ever happens at all.
Psychologists define “disagreeable” people not as combative or contrary, but as those who do not require the approval of their peers to act on conviction. They do what they believe is right, even when others insist it cannot be done. It is this trait that allowed Malcolm McLean, the father of modern container shipping, to reimagine global trade in the face of ridicule. It is also the trait that every reformer in community building must eventually embrace.
Because in the realm of housing and development, to believe that our built environment should serve people first — not investors, not expedience, not habit — is to be profoundly disagreeable.
Malcolm McLean
The Quiet Tyranny of Approval
Society frowns on disagreeableness. We are social creatures, programmed to seek approval, harmony, and belonging. Yet progress depends on those willing to risk exclusion for the sake of truth. The same holds for how we build and create.
For decades, our development systems have rewarded compliance and punished conscience. The zoning code tells us how things “must” be done. The lending standards dictate what can be financed. The real estate market measures success in absorption rates, not in human well-being. Within this machine, to challenge the premise — to ask WHY we are building this way — is to invite skepticism, or worse, silence.
To be a community builder in this context requires a kind of moral stubbornness. It means standing before a system optimized for commodities and insisting that we are, in fact, building for communities.
“Society frowns on disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.”
Commodity
Commodity Thinking
The fundamental illness of the modern housing market is not technical; it is philosophical. We have mistaken the built environment — the physical habitat of human life — for a financial product.
Houses, blocks, and neighborhoods are treated as commodities to be bought, sold, and traded, detached from the lives they shape. Land becomes a ledger entry. Housing becomes an asset class. Communities become data points in a portfolio.
The consequences are everywhere: developments designed for short-term yield rather than long-term belonging; neighborhoods engineered for turnover rather than continuity; and cities that grow larger, wealthier, and lonelier at the same time.
When the primary question is “What will it sell for?” rather than “What will it sustain?”, we are no longer building civilization — we are manufacturing inventory.
The Nature of Community
Community, by contrast, cannot be commodified. It emerges from relationships, proximity, and shared experience — qualities that can be designed for but never bought outright. When a neighborhood is planned as a network of interdependence — small blocks, walkable streets, mixed housing, local commerce — it creates conditions for belonging. Its parts cooperate rather than compete. Its value grows through connection, not consumption.
This is the heart of The Great Housing Reversal: to move from a mindset of extraction to one of cultivation. The developer becomes not an extractor of land value but a steward of place. The city becomes not a container for transactions but a living system that nurtures growth in balance.
To think this way, however, is to be “disagreeable” — to refuse the default equation that equates worth with sale price.
Monopoly
The Monopoly Board Fallacy
Too often, the business of real estate has been reduced to a game of Monopoly — a contest of acquisition and liquidation, where the physical world serves as a backdrop for financial performance. Houses become tokens. Land becomes territory. The goal is to accumulate, not to connect.
This worldview treats the built environment as inert, something to be processed and moved rather than lived in and cared for. But a community is not a board game; it is a living organism. Every building, street, and square contributes to the larger metabolism of daily life. When any piece is designed without regard to that whole, it weakens the entire system.
In truth, the only responsible form of development is one that contributes more to community than it extracts from it. That is the ethical baseline. Anything less — however profitable — is parasitic.
““You must have the strength and the resolve and the courage
to pursue that idea even when the rest of the world thinks you are insane.””
Disagreeableness as a Civic Virtue
To reclaim community as the purpose of development, we must rehabilitate disagreeableness as a civic virtue. It is the courage to ask forbidden questions — to say, what if this isn’t progress?
Disagreeableness in this context is not hostility; it is integrity. It is the refusal to conform to a worldview that measures value only in square footage and resale price. It is the discipline to design for social connection even when the spreadsheet argues otherwise. It is, as Gladwell suggested, the willingness to pursue an idea “even when the rest of the world thinks you are insane.”
Every major transformation in housing — from Jane Jacobs’s defense of neighborhood life to Andrés Duany’s first sketches of New Urbanism — began with this kind of dissent. The first rule of community building is to disagree with the assumption that “this is just how it’s done.”
Community as Craft, Not Commodity
When development becomes an art again — a practice of proportion, empathy, and stewardship — it reclaims its moral center. The builder becomes an artisan of belonging.
This does not mean rejecting the market; it means reordering it. Financial success should flow from community success, not the other way around. A great neighborhood will always create durable economic value because it nourishes human value first.
The act of planning or building then becomes an act of moral imagination — of seeing in every sidewalk and courtyard the potential for shared life. The disagreeable builder is not fighting against profit; they are fighting for meaning.
The Strength to Persist
The reversal we seek will not come through compliance. It will come through conviction — through the collective disagreeableness of planners, architects, investors, and citizens who insist that community, not commodity, is the true measure of success.
Malcolm McLean changed global shipping not by accepting convention, but by challenging its premise. The same courage is required of us now — to question the entire operating system of how we build, finance, and inhabit our cities.
““The reasonable man adapts himself to the world:
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.””