Economist Tyler Cowen suggests the YIMBY movement would be more successful if it championed aesthetic beauty alongside housing density. A key opposition point is the fear that new developments will be uglier than what they replace. Promising prettier neighborhoods could be the key to overcoming local resistance.

Building products like insulation and roofing are often manufactured domestically because safety and building codes vary significantly country-to-country. This makes it more practical to produce goods closer to the end market where they will be used, rather than exporting a standardized global product.

While spolia was used to create grand new projects, the practice faced significant public backlash. Ordinary citizens were furious as their local buildings were dismantled for parts, leaving their neighborhoods looking ramshackle. This reveals a core tension between macro-level reuse initiatives and local community impact.

Traditional lime mortar wicks water out of bricks and flexes as thick masonry walls expand and contract. Modern cement mortar sets faster and is stronger, but its rigidity and impermeability prevent natural movement and water dissipation. Consequently, building movement causes severe cracking across wall faces, while trapped moisture freezes, expands, and hollows out historic bricks behind rigid mortar shells.

As skyscrapers adopted steel skeletons—exemplified by the later wing of Chicago's Monadnock Building—brick ceased being the primary load-bearing element. Instead of carrying structural weight, bricklayers were relegated to enclosing steel frames for fireproofing or applying exterior brick as decorative veneer. Once relegated to a decorative material, brick was freed from structural requirements, allowing modern architects to treat it as an aesthetic statement rather than a foundation.

After the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, the city urgently needed to rebuild. Although local glacial clay was full of stones and limestone that produced pitted, soot-absorbing bricks mocked nationally as the country's ugliest, brickmaking machinery enabled manufacturers to press 36,000 bricks per hour. Driven by intense post-disaster urgency, Chicago rebuilt itself using whatever clay lay right beneath its feet, regardless of aesthetic flaws.

After World War II, rising labor costs prompted builders to replace small structural bricks with concrete blocks, which cover seven times the volume much faster. As demand collapsed, the 1970 Clean Air Act mandated strict emissions controls. Because Chicago common brick manufacturers still fired bricks using primitive scove kilns rather than enclosed ovens, they could not afford the necessary upgrades, ending domestic common brick production by 1981.

Chicago's Monadnock Building, the world's tallest pure masonry skyscraper, reached 16 stories without steel by building load-bearing walls six feet thick at the base. To achieve its smooth, unornamented curves without chiseling on site, manufacturers crafted hundreds of specialized brick molds and meticulously regulated kiln temperatures to maintain uniform color, illustrating the immense material precision required to build skyscrapers exclusively out of brick.

Allentown's "form-based" zoning code regulates buildings' physical form and aesthetics rather than their internal use. This modern approach allows greater flexibility, making it possible to integrate light manufacturing into neighborhoods without disrupting their character.