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As you know if you’ve been reading me for awhile, one of the things I come back to once in awhile is the question of communication, rhetoric, framing. I’m interested in how we talk about what we advocate for, and how other people hear us. I’m also interested in identifying the exact substantive disagreements at play, both between people in the broad housing/urbanism movement, and between that movement and the median American.

And I’m also interested in the role that really articulating what we believe plays in convincing people. In other words, how many disagreements are down to words, and how many are really down to actual bedrock disagreement?

What I’m sort of doing is applying the idea of ecumenism to urbanism. Ecumenism typically refers to discussions between religious bodies to explore and identify areas of agreement and disagreement. And its results can be very interesting. Bear with me a bit before I get into the urbanism stuff.

Now when I say ecumenism, I’m not talking about a certain slick, intellectually dishonest variety of ecumenism which, I would say, seeks to conceal disagreement by stretching the meaning of words, and settling on statements which can be interpreted in multiple ways.

You can see this at work with some of the Communion hymns used by multiple denominations: hymns that go “look beyond the bread you eat” or “Precious Body, Precious Blood, here in bread and wine”—statements which split the difference on Eucharistic theology and are amenable to a number of different and contradictory theologies. Perhaps they are not unorthodox, per se, but they are, and are intended to be, un-specific. This kind of ecumenism is an effort to identify a lowest-common-denominator which does not actually say anything.

But then there is an ecumenism which does the opposite—which probes the ways in which our divergent customs and language and modes of expression and implied or assumed meanings can conceal agreement.

A fascinating example of this is discussions between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox on one side, and Oriental Orthodox on the other side. This ecumenical effort has yielded—not without some skepticism on both sides—an understanding that the core doctrinal disagreement, over the nature of Christ (one or two natures) was in fact fundamentally linguistic and not substantive.

Here is a pretty solid Catholic source: “Pope Saint John Paul II signed accords with the Coptic Orthodox and the Syriac Orthodox (both miaphysite) recognizing that their Christology is currently sound and orthodox – fully in accord with Roman Catholic Christology. The Catholic Church recognizes that the debate was essentially linguistic and political.”

In other words, the divergence in how each body described, and perhaps even understood, the actual fundamental bedrock doctrine created an appearance of the doctrine itself being different. And this was not apparent to either side until both sides interrogated their framings with each other.

They literally did not know they agreed with each other.

Another interesting example is a post-Vatican II 1960s Catholic-Lutheran document on the Eucharist. It ends with this seemingly groundbreaking statement:

On the two major issues which we have discussed at length, however, the progress has been immense. Despite all remaining differences in the ways we speak and think of the eucharistic sacrifice and our Lord’s presence in his supper, we are no longer able to regard ourselves as divided in the one holy catholic and apostolic faith on these two points. We therefore prayerfully ask our fellow Lutherans and Catholics to examine their consciences and root out many ways of thinking, speaking and acting, both individually and as churches, which have obscured their unity in Christ on these as on many other matters.

Elements of this document are a tad simplistic and perhaps even tendentious. For example, on the question of Eucharistic adoration, typically rejected by Lutherans, the Catholics rhetorically walked back the importance of adoration:

Roman Catholics have traditionally reserved the consecrated host for communicating the sick, which, according to the Instruction of May 25, 1967, is the “primary and original purpose” of reservation. The adoration of Christ present in the reserved sacrament is of later origin and is a secondary end. The same Instruction repeats the insistence of the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy that any adoration of the reserved sacrament be harmonized with and in some way derived from the liturgy, “since the liturgy by its very nature surpasses” any nonliturgical eucharistic devotion.

Eucharistic adoration certainly is an optional devotional practice, and not the Sacrament itself. But it is also a little bit more than that, in actual Catholic practice. You can see the very fine line ecumenical dialogue has to walk. It is almost as if the Catholics here said, “Put aside the manner in which Catholicism is popularly practiced, and just look at what the core doctrine says. It says no more than that Eucharistic adoration is acceptable, and that, almost by definition, adoration is merely a sort of extension of the Supper (on which we agree in many respects with the Lutherans).”

This difference of emphasis seems, well, different from “Everyone must kneel at the Corpus Christi procession.” But…is it? It’s fascinating to me how hard it actually is to distill the absolute underlying idea, and nothing else, from its usual rhetorical framings or implementation or trappings or cultural accretions.

Now I’m done with the religious stuff. The point of this exercise is that in many cases, we literally don’t know if we actually disagree or not, because the same fundamental ideas can be framed or expressed in quite divergent ways—which in turn can be based on divergent tacit understandings.

The only way to know what our intellectual subfloor looks like is to ruthlessly strip the rhetorical carpeting—under which we may discover layers and layers of linoleum. Only then, all of that pulled up, will we know if we are truly standing on the same thing.

Now I want to change pace a tiny bit and wonder what substantive statements you could craft that could act as a sort of “urbanist formulary”: the broadest possible statements which could capture the broadest possible affirmation, without that affirmation being tendentious (“So not like the Anglican Formularies, har har”). How big a tent can we build without tearing the fabric?

Here’s an example. Have you ever seen an urbanist or housing advocate say something like, “Housing is like immigration: just like we shouldn’t have national borders, we shouldn’t have neighborhood ‘borders’ in the form of NIMBYism”? Or have you seen a housing advocate say, “Anybody should be able to live anywhere they want”?

I’ve seen this view articulated: the idea that welcoming new immigrants and welcoming new neighbors are two instances of the same thing. I don’t care for this argument. One, because neither I nor most of the people I try to speak to believe in open borders. And two, because I don’t see these things as inherently being related.

But when I say “I’ve seen this view articulated”….what is this view? Is it a statement of a fundamental idea? Or is it a framing of some underlying idea informed by the language and attitudes of American progressivism, to an extent that the underlying idea is actually being obscured? Potentially, even to those making the argument? Is “both local and national borders are illegitimate” really precisely what the people who say this are intending to say? Is their bedrock claim actually about borders and immigration, or is it about something distinct?

I personally prefer to formulate the idea that neighborhoods should be “open” this way: “Good” neighborhoods are mostly neighborhoods with good access to jobs, which is to say, opportunity. The “right” to live in a “good neighborhood” is really the right to work, and everybody must have the right to work.

Am I saying something substantially different here from “borders are illegitimate and everyone has the right to live anywhere they want”? Some people would think so. I don’t think so. This is what I mean by urbanist ecumenism.

It is very difficult to determine if these are both ways of expressing the same idea, if one is more bedrock or “pure” than other other, or if they are simply different ideas. That is why this exercise is important. We’re not just trying to strip the rhetorical carpet; we’re trying to discern what actually is the carpet, and what is the subfloor. And it is hard!

With this in mind, I’m going to give you a few urbanist priorities and a few different possible ways of stating them. I’m curious how they read to you, and whether you agree that they are all attempts at stating the same underlying principle—or whether what I’ve identified as the underlying principles even are the final layer.

Neighborhoods should be open to newcomers

• Neighborhood borders are like national borders; both should be as open as possible

• Neighborhoods in which there is high demand to live are neighborhoods with access to economic opportunity; economic opportunity is the right to work; and people have a right to work. Therefore, there is no way to argue that neighborhoods should be “closed” without denying people the right to work

• Access to economic opportunity is so closely tied to the right to work that it must effectively be considered a prerequisite of exercising that right, and therefore places with economic opportunity should be “open”

• Communities/localities have an obligation to keep housing production at pace with the job market

• The housing and market and the job market cannot be arbitrarily severed by overly restrictive zoning/housing policy

Note that even these statements rely on an idea that some people would argue with: that a “nice” neighborhood is basically a “high-opportunity” neighborhood. This is a phrase housing folks use to point out the link between housing and jobs. So you would also have to come to an agreement on the idea that “high opportunity” is a legitimate way to describe “nice” places, and only then even reach the level of discussing what that reality means for the legitimacy of NIMBYism in such places.

People should rely less on cars

• Driving is inherently immoral

• Driving is kind of bad and should intentionally be discouraged or made more difficult

• We need to make it easier for people to walk, bike, or take transit, and because of the geometry of cars and the space they take up relative to the people inside, this may entail as a side effect making it more difficult to drive in some places

• Driving should be a choice—the problem isn’t that people choose to drive, but that the broad transportation system renders it impossible to choose not to drive

Dense, walkable, mixed-use development is good and should be permitted and encouraged

• Cities are climate policy

• Everyone should be able to access everything they need on a regular basis within a 15-minute walk or transit ride

• What we today call “dense, walkable, mixed-use development” is a modern attempt to understand historic urban places, and to restore, given modern conditions, that mode of building human settlements

• Traditional urbanism is essentially what people build except when impeded by codes mandating something else; we don’t need to engineer, but merely “re-legalize” traditional urbanism

All sorts of communities should be open to newcomers of all sorts of backgrounds

• Progressive localities need to build housing so women can access abortion rights and LGBT people can enjoy full civil rights

• Red states need to build housing so families can homeschool, access non-woke education, and enjoy pro-family governance

• No community of any sort anywhere should be effectively closed

Multifamily housing and a variety of housing sizes, types, and options should be encouraged in more places, including in single-family zones

• Housing is racial equity

• More housing options are especially important for minorities, the poor, single women, and LGBT people

• Housing options within communities should exist for people and families at every stage of life, from child to student to single to young couple to family with children to retired

• A community, almost by definition, should be a place in which one single person, in every stage of their life, can find an appropriate and affordable housing option

• A “family-friendly neighborhood” is a neighborhood that can be afforded by an average family. The same for every category of person/people. Whatever housing types meet that definition in a particular place should be built

Urban freeways should be removed

• “There is ‘racism physically built into’ United States highways”, and removing them would be a form of racial reparations

• Urban freeways displaced vulnerable communities and it would be appropriate to undo that damage to communities and to the urban fabric

• Midcentury planners imposed a destructive, revolutionary project on American cities, and we owe it to our communities and our heritage to correct their mistake

• Urban freeways are a sort of conceptual oxymoron, because by definition cities are not merely, or primarily, conduits for passing traffic

Here is a final issue which is difficult to distill into a single statement, which is ripe for this process of explication: the question of “beauty in architecture.”

In the online discourse around new buildings, you will see some people saying things like “New buildings should be beautiful,” and you’ll see other people—mostly very enthusiastic pro-housing folks—treating that desire with skepticism or snark. I think the people who care about beauty think that the people resisting it are saying “Build ugly buildings!”

I think what they’re actually saying is something more like “beauty is a complicated concept that can descend into being some kind of signifier of reactionary politics like the rightwing “statue accounts” on Twitter, or as a fig leaf for plain old NIMBYism, so I’m not going to touch those arguments.”

This reflects a cautiousness about signaling and how other people will take a neutral but potentially charged statement—this is a cautiousness everyone who spends time on the internet or in messaging will pick up and have to exercise. It also might be an awareness of the way in which adding yet another priority to new projects will just slow them down. In other words, it is still not a commentary on the value or definition of beauty in architecture itself.

But that cautiousness, to the people who care deeply about beauty, reads as an endorsement of ugliness. Perhaps you begin to feel like these modernists really do want to foist ugly architecture on us. Perhaps that sharpens your skepticism of the YIMBY movement—and perhaps that makes those YIMBYs more likely to view you as a questionable, reactionary partner.

Furthermore, if your concern about beauty is tied up with a certain conservatism or respect for tradition, perhaps you feel that the “housing people” are concealing a metaphysical attack on beauty and tradition and normalcy under their housing advocacy, which makes you think that maybe new construction does need to be opposed. And now you sound as if you’re taking people’s homes hostages: “Cornices or the people don’t get housing!” And that kind of obstruction more or less has to be opposed by a movement whose goal is to get housing built.

And all of that, with no discernment or interrogation whatsoever over what either side actually believes or where—if at all—its disagreements lie!

I’ll close this all out here. But I’ll be thinking about this a lot, and I hope it’s useful for you in thinking about these and all issues.

Related Reading:

Urbanist Ecumenism

Me Or Your Own Eyes

Look What You Made Me Think

“I Like My Opinions, Why Would I Want New Ones?”

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Yaaas In My Backyard, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki Apr 26, 2024

This is a really interesting piece. It answers the question of why it seems so many of the folks involved in housing advocacy are LGBT. I’ve noticed this, and I’m sure anyone who knows a lot of people working on these issues has noticed it.

Some people don’t like it, of course. As I wrote here: “I had an old editor who was like this: he observed that housing was an important issue with LGBT folks, and he tweeted something like ‘Conservatives should be suspicious of urbanism/housing when they see all the freaks who are behind it.’”

His error, aside from being a jerk, was in not trying to think through why certain people would naturally care about certain causes.

Puzycki (who is gay himself) writes, a little tongue-in-cheek:

Naturally, I wondered why so many legislators are gay for housing. Is it a reflection of good taste? Or is there something inherent in homosexuality that predisposes these gays to favor more housing, beyond a desire to decorate more homes?

Is that what the Gay Agenda was all about?

Perhaps there’s more to it. On the one hand, YIMBYism is a nonpartisan movement that cuts across all demographics, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that views of housing reflect proportionally the same way in the LGBTQ+ community as they do in the broader culture. But on the other hand, it is interesting that America’s only three gay governors are also all YIMBYs.

And adds:

Of course, much of the gay underworld has come out of the closet, so to speak, and gay bars have become such regular fixtures of the urban nightlife scene that drag queens compete with bachelorette-party bridezillas for the title of biggest diva. But the city has long been a safe space, a place that gays and other “sexual deviants” could find and call home. In this sense, gays are natural urbanists.

This is a tension you see with people much kinder than my old colleague: they wonder whether cities are inherently progressive places, and whether that means, as people with conservative sensibilities, that cities will never be friendly to their interests or their politics. I remember an article where the author said something like “The question is whether conservatives can or should be urbanists, when cities are always going to be Democratic.”

I’m not winking at going anti-LGBT to gain credibility with the right. Rather, I understand how the prevalence of LGBT folks and progressives generally (a lot of overlap there) in housing/urbanism can make it look like a lefty issue. You know, like nuclear non-proliferation or GMOs or something like that.

Conservatives who say “Urbanism is a universal concern that simply happens to have predominantly left-leaning advocates” face skepticism from other conservatives as well as from progressives who may in fact see urbanism as one dimension of their progressive worldview, and not a neatly severable element of it. I’ve had both of these sorts of critics argue with me, many times.

All that said, this is probably the answer to the initial question:

If a connection exists at all, I think it might be more visceral, more intuitive—this sense of longing for home, and the difficulty (or impossibility) of finding one in the America of living memory. Perhaps, now that gays have been fully welcomed into the fold of American constitutional and political life, we can see how lousy housing policies have made finding and securing a home so lousy for so many others.

For the gay community, finding home has historically meant moving to the city and discovering “family,” in a way not unlike how immigrants from certain countries will cluster in specific neighborhoods in their new cities and towns. In US cities, these clusters became some of America’s most infamous and vibrant gayborhoods.

You should be able to empathize with that feeling, with that longing. I remember seeing someone on social media saying about LGBT urbanists, on the matter of education policy: you’ll never have kids, what’s it to you? Well, we can disagree over education policy. And some of them will have kids. But everyone was a kid. The notion that you need to have skin in the game in the form of your own children to care about a policy that affects children is incredibly misanthropic and lacking in empathy, though it pretends to be the opposite.

Pasta al Limone Recipe, Serious Eats, Daniel Gritzer, February 23, 2023

I’m including this not for the recipe (I’m sure it’s good, I actually haven’t made it) but for this neat bit about the taxonomy of Italian pasta sauces:

There’s a taxonomy of pasta sauces that exists in my mind. Trace the branches to the top, and you arrive at what I think of as the mother pasta sauces. From those, almost all the other sauces are derived, at least in a technical sense if not necessarily a historical one. One important branch is the family of tomato sauces, to which a basic marinara, briny puttanesca, and spicy arrabbiata all belong. Then there are the oil-based sauces, the most basic of which is aglio e olio; add clams and white wine to it, and you basically have alle vongole. Next in line are butter sauces, which can be as simple as the famous fettuccine Alfredo. That sauce, in its original form, is nothing more than butter emulsified with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Add lemon zest and juice to Alfredo sauce, and you have this dish, spaghetti al limone—spaghetti with lemon.

This is interesting to me because my wife and I have been reading this old Italian regional cookbook from the 1970s, and we keep noticing how many extremely similar dishes there are—basically minor variants of each other—that are presented as unique, distinct, local specialties. It’s so funny to think that, say, spicy tomato sauce becomes a totally different thing when you add olives, or capers, or octopus, or parsley, or whatever. Or that a standard fish stew made with some local fish or herb suddenly becomes the defining dish of this one particular place.

I’m not really making fun of Italian culinary pride. It’s more that I personally find cooking intelligible because I view dishes in that taxonomy/family-tree kind of way: a series of proteins, sauces, starches, breadings, toppings, etc., that can be modularly swapped out to make variants.

For example, I have my family of chicken-cutlet dishes. Cutlets/egg wash/Italian breadcrumbs = chicken cutlets. Cutlets/egg wash/panko = shortcut tonkatsu. Cutlets/flour/mushrooms/marsala = chicken marsala. Cutlets/flour/chicken broth/lemon = shortcut chicken Française (it’s supposed to be egg-washed after the flour, but I find that too messy/time-consuming.)

Then you can, say, take your chicken cutlet recipe and add a topping and bake the cutlets, or flatten a chicken breast, add a topping, and roll it up for a fancy presentation. I do an “Italian” rolled chicken breast—mozzarella, ham, parsley, and garlic inside—and I do an American autumn-time rolled chicken breast—wild rice, stuffing, and roasted sweet potatoes inside. You can do this with smaller pieces of meat for what’s called “involtini.” Etc., etc.

It seems confusing to imagine each of these things as having nothing to do with one another, so I liked this article for specifically imagining the world of Italian sauces as being “related.”

Grilling Man at the End of History, Mere Orthodoxy, Stephen G. Adubato, March 19, 2024

Though my friend group consisted of mostly studious classmates and our sense of fun was fairly tame, my parents didn’t know how to handle my newfound “rebelliousness.” Who knows what could happen to us as we walked down to the convenience store? We could get hit by a car, shot, kidnapped. In our sheltered, upper-middle class suburb.

This is something I think about quite a bit: does being safe make you feel unsafe? Or as I put it in a headline once, “If you live in a castle, does everything feel like a siege?” Is there something about suburbia that actually generates this sense of paranoia?

As the author goes on to note, suburban kids these days don’t take too many risks, and that has downstream effects.

Is it any surprise that suburbia has given rise to infantilized adults in their thirties who, often are afraid to fly from the nest (whether physically or emotionally), are hopped up on anti-depressants, and opt for “partners” instead of committing to a spouse, and end up raising dogs rather than human children?

I’m not sure I quite buy this, because I doubt the extent to which these things are cultural versus economic. But it’s quite interesting, because generally you’ll see conservatives blame cities (or campuses) for the state of young people these days. Of course, most of us grew up outside of cities and absorbed a lot of our outlook before college. So perhaps this is on to something.

Also this:

As proponents of anti-suburbanism like Adrian Crook, Rollie Williams, James Howard Kunstler, and the anonymous YouTuber known as Not Just Bikes point out, commuting a long distance daily from one’s home to work place—aside from being tiring—normalizes the feeling of uprootedness from a particular locale. It contributes to the notion that one’s dwelling ought to be a private space separated from where one works, plays, goes to school, and goes shopping.

This notion of “rootedness” tends be a right-wing idea these days, though it has something in common with “small is beautiful” leftism. In any case, the idea that commutes screw up our idea of “home” and “place” seems plausible. It seems to me the burden of proof is on the people who think this is normal to prove its normalcy, not on those of us who recognize it as an aberration in respect to how humans have traditionally built and settled places to prove that humans were right all along until the middle of the 20th century.

There’s a lot in this long essay, some of it probably distasteful to progressives. But it’s a genuine right-wing argument against suburbia, and for that reason, read the whole thing.

15-minute Heritage, city neighborhoods and place identity, Policies for Places, John Tibbitt, May 31, 2023

On that idea of localism, here’s something interesting. Tibbitt overviews the idea of the “15-minute city,” centered around everyday amenities and services being in close proximity to, or mixed within, residential areas. In other words, as I’ve explained it before, a sort of technocratic reverse-engineering of traditional urban development.

But he then introduces a corollary idea, or an expansion, that I’ve not heard talked about much before, and which I really like.

There are other factors which can enhance neighborhood identity. One such which is attracting attention relates to the promotion of a shared awareness of local heritage. Inspired by the 15-minute neighborhood approach, there are now some interesting innovative projects aiming to develop what has been dubbed ‘15-minute heritage’.

At the core of the idea is to encourage people to explore the heritage which is on their doorsteps as they go about their daily business. Civic buildings, open spaces and local landmarks ranging from historical ruins to relics of local industry may all lie within a 15-minute walk from home. At the same time as digital technology allows access to museums and heritage sites around the world, increasing awareness of local heritage can foster a richer understanding of place identity and local cultural influences.

And:

Many of the heritage assets I have mentioned above are often taken for granted by local people who pass them by every day. But there are accounts of how, during COVID lockdown, when many people found themselves confined to living local, many took to exploring their local areas much more closely only to discovered numerus historical references they were previously unaware of. Writers describe how the discovery of these references prompted them to read and research to understand more about the events or people identified and understand more about how local heritage makes and shapes their communities.

This reminds me, oddly enough, of the reaction to Pokémon GO when it first came out in 2016. The game’s central mechanic, other than catching Pokémon, is “spinning” stations that give out items. The stations are located in physical places in the game’s map, which is overlaid over a real map. And each station is some kind of landmark—a sign, a statue, a building, a mural, etc. Some are more interesting than others. But it was cool to realize all the little details in your everyday environment that you might have never noticed before.

You can get a little too excited over this stuff, and its potential to really make people feel more tied to a place. But it’s not nothing. Read the whole thing.

Related Reading:

New and Old #74

New and Old #75

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Back in April, my wife and I visited New York City to see a friend of hers and her husband who were spending a weekend there. It was our first time in the city for about eight years.

I’d never really liked New York City—by which I always meant Manhattan—growing up. My father commuted to Manhattan every day, and we would daytrip in on the weekends fairly often. This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so New York was probably about as clean and low-crime as it ever was or will be. We never had any safety issues. We saw homelessness, though not of the aggressive or intoxicated variety—once I gave a homeless man a quarter, and he said I made his day.

But despite never having any issues or close encounters, I always found the city too loud, too dirty—too much. I remember the drives home more than the days out, when we’d pull off I-78, then U.S. 22, and get on a quiet country road heading home to our multi-acre lot.

Looking back, I probably took the city for granted. I had no understanding that it was something unique in America. I remember my mother, who grew up in Manhattan, would always seem so excited and lively when we first stepped out into the street (from a parking garage—I think we drove into Manhattan and parked for the day every time we visited). I could never understand that. I certainly never felt it.

Part of this, in addition to not really understanding what a “big city” was, was experiencing it through the lens of the prevailing suburban attitude. I experienced my parents’ sensible advice, about not pointing at people or yelling “Mommy why is that man doing that?” and whatnot, as evidence that cities were places where you could never let your hair down. I think, even at that age, I felt that the difficulty of arriving to the city by car meant that it was somehow walled off for me, not for me—the car, in my imagination, being like the air I breathed. And since I had little understanding that millions of people lived in cities, these annoyances seemed arbitrary, and directed at us. This, I think, is how so many suburbanites develop a vaguely conspiratorial view of cities.

I understood, if that’s the right word, that your house and your land was your refuge, and that you ventured out into the city and braved its discomforts once in awhile for the amenities the city had. Museums, shows, food tours, fine restaurants, quirky neighborhoods, the highest forms of things like Italian and Jewish delis. I don’t think it ever even occurred to me that cities have these things mostly because cities have a lot of people. Cities were just sort of there, for other people, their existence inducing a kind of suspicion.

In other words, I never really saw the city for what it actually was—a large, densely populated human settlement full of all of the things people do. I really wonder how many people never think of it this way at all.

All of this is to introduce the fact that, visiting Manhattan for the first time since I was in college, I wasn’t sure what I’d think of it. In the intervening years, I’ve “become an urbanist”—I like cities, but more importantly, I appreciate them. I think crime and disorder and nuisance behavior are real problems that some urbanists take too lightly, but I don’t define cities only by their problems.

But would the Big Apple still be too much?

Nope. I loved it. And for the first time, I felt like I was seeing it. You hear so much on talk radio, in the pages of the New York Post, from folks in suburban Jersey griping about the crime and the homelessness and the illegal immigrants getting credit cards and the subway pushers and the pot smoke and the bike lanes and the (since canceled or delayed) congestion pricing and the incompetent mayor (though nearly everyone seems to agree on that last point—no matter who it is).

The tenor of all this commentary is that this is all a sort of tribute exacted by the city against the responsible people who trek in every day to work. Whatever merits there are to these complaints, there is rarely any apparent understanding that some things are the way they are for the people who actually live in the city—nearly three-quarters of whom, in Manhattan, do not own a car.

What struck me about my visit in general was how little the on-the-ground experience I had resembled the gripes you hear; how much you would have to add to the raw experience to end up making those complaints.

New York City still feels like what it looks like. The sense of aliveness, activity, bustle is palpable. It’s one of the only places I’ve ever been where there’s so much foot traffic the sidewalks get congested. The view of the city at night, which I remember, at the ground level, from some late drives home, is still captivating, an expanse of angles and lines and lights in all colors as grand as the skies and the plains.

A few images capture the essence of this country, and this must be one of them. I don’t know how an American can’t look at this view and not have their heart swell with pride:

There are so many restaurants, so many stores, the little corner slice shops and delis and bakeries from so many different national cuisines, the street food carts selling gyros and halal platters and roasted nuts, the bagel shops with 30-foot-long counters full of smoked fish and prepared foods. The variety juxtaposed with the specialization. It feels like a European city—multiple European cities. There’s a sense of enterprise and commerce, at a granular scale that is missing in most American places.

We say that places like this are “magical,” as though there is no explanation for why they are this way. The explanation is density. Proximity. People. That’s the magic. Or rather, there’s nothing magical, nothing inherent in the unique character of a specific place, that gives it this kind of delight and variety. It isn’t in the air or the water or fate or chance. It’s the people. Maybe density is not a guarantee—New York City is culturally and economically diverse, and you probably need different kinds of people—but this kind of thing isn’t possible without the people.

There is not, in other words, any such thing as an immutable “neighborhood character,” some Platonic form in the ether, of which the actual, on-the-ground place is merely a sort of shadow. Our places are what we build them to be.

What really struck me was that I had new thoughts and ideas running through my head as we strolled around. A sense of possibility and aliveness. A reminder that the world is big. I remember a friend of mine saying back in 2020 that the pandemic turned her into an old lady. She was talking specifically about going to bed early, but there’s a general truth in that.

Here in the city, I wanted to stay out another hour or two, get a late night snack or a second dinner, just to exist longer in a place so full of human interest. I looked at how much walking I did, amazed at getting that much physical activity just getting around.

I call that “feeling young again.” But I am young! It’s just, perhaps, that so much of what we think of as being due to age or stage of life is down to our surroundings, and whether they work with or against our desire to get out and do things. It’s hard to tell the difference between tiredness and boredom. Between quieting down and moving to the suburbs, or the suburbs quieting you down.

I wonder if it wouldn’t do a lot of people a lot of good to get out of their routines and comfort zones and experience this kind of thing. And I wonder how much of what we call the “loneliness crisis” is really just that when a critical mass of people live physically spread out, there just isn’t enough external stimulation close enough at hand for people to have good everyday mental and physical health and fitness.

That’s one thing I took away from New York: just how full of everything it is, and how, with more maturity and a better understanding of what cities are, I was able to experience that old too much feeling as so full. I was seeing the same thing, but I was experiencing it differently.

Just like I used to not really see what I was looking at, many of the people who grumble about cities are not seeing what they’re looking at. They’re not seeing what’s actually in front of them.

Walking around the city, we saw some Hispanic immigrant women, with their children by their side, selling chilled cut fruit in little cups. April was maybe a little early in the year for a cool treat, but it was sunny out, and I can imagine dropping a few bucks on some fruit that’s ready to eat. I’m sure it’s at least as safe as the kebab trucks. I can also see disliking seemingly unregulated street commerce, and wondering if these people are licensed to do business.

What I have trouble understanding is the chain of thought that goes something like, “Here are immigrant women selling fruit. Joe Biden let them in through his open border, and the New York government is giving them credit cards and free hotel rooms and letting them work illegally while their fraudulent asylum claims go through the system.”

I don’t mean that I can’t imagine opposing illegal immigration. What I mean is that I can’t imagine getting so worked up over a Hispanic woman selling fruit on the street that you file that experience away in your mind as having observed with your eyes Joe Biden’s anti-American open border policies. That seems to me like it requires something in addition to having direct thoughts about what you’re looking at.

Similarly, say a cyclist almost hits you while you’re walking. What I can’t imagine is connecting this to the push for bike lanes and congestion pricing, which you connect to progressives who hate cars, which in turn means they hate American life. And so a random messy human encounter becomes some kind of attack. A random clumsy cyclist becomes a foot soldier in the war against drivers, against responsible people who schlep to work, against you.

We saw policemen sort of being around, observing, sitting in their cars in Times Square, amid a handful of beggars and buskers and homeless people, as well as lots of tourists. There was a black man with an amplifier doing some sort of racial-harmony routine that was hard to pin down politically, with a small crowd around him. I don’t know if anything they were doing was technically a minor crime, or if it was all allowed.

I can see being a real tough-on-crime guy and wondering why those cops are standing around if this guy isn’t allowed to use amplified sound. I can’t see connecting the cops in their cars to the police standing down because left-wing prosecutors won’t have their backs. I can’t imagine looking at a black guy doing a street show and someone playing an instrument for a buck and some homeless folks sitting by the curb, and thinking all of that is an abstraction, and the real thing is the left-wing forces behind them fighting a war against normalcy and respectability and America and using these random people on the street as their battering ram.

If I sound crazy, that’s because you’ve never heard right-leaning New Jersey suburbanites talk about New York City.

But I can guarantee you there are plenty of people whose general idea of the city goes something like this. To those folks—and I hope some of them see this piece—I only say, turn off that filter, that overlay, and consciously train yourself to observe and take in only what you are actually seeing. And if you do that, I find it very hard to believe that you can arrive at the narrative about big cities, or at least about this city, that so many people believe or claim to believe.

Nothing I observed suggested that New York is free of crime or noise or nuisance or dirt. But nothing suggested that it resembles itself at the peak of the crime wave, or as the talk radio guys and New York Post editors describe it. There are families, children, elderly people, visitors, businessmen. Everybody seemed to be casually going about life. There is utterly no indication that the average New Yorker or visitor understands themselves to be living in some kind of precarious, deteriorating situation.

The typical response to this observation is something like, “Well, they’ll learn the hard way.” But why is the actual experience of the vast majority of these people less real than what might potentially happen to a tiny fraction of them? What is more plausible? That millions of New Yorkers and commuters are complacent and naïve? Or that this city isn’t really going to hell?

It is true, as far as crime goes, that sensational crimes can produce sensational reactions. The punches in the face, the subway pushers, the lunatics who turn subway cars into powder kegs waiting to blow. These are like the school shooters of urban crime. Statistically they are rare, but they are scary, and random, and take up mental space. It only takes a little bit of that to create a sense of fear far out of proportion to the likelihood of it actually happening.

And once people are in a pose of fear, suspicion can easily follow, and assurances that the problem is not as bad as it might subjectively look or feel can begin to sound like denials or even soft endorsements. It is important not to break social trust, and to the extent that some left-leaning urbanists are soft on these matters, I think they are wrong.

But again—none of this has to run through your head as you actually walk around the streets of New York. Sometimes philosophizing is important. But sometimes, there’s so much in front of you that the only reasonable thing to do is pause your mind and open your eyes.

Related Reading:

When I Say “City,” You Say...

Who Is My Neighbor?

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Giants walked among us:

You probably won’t be surprised that this was a supermarket. It is, however, quite a large one, especially for the year it was built. It’s an 80,000 square foot store, and it opened in 1963.

So what was it?

Here’s the top of a neat blog post that goes into its history:

As you can tell from the windows just to the right of the logo, which are still present today, this is the same building, with a minor facade update and, unfortunately, the removal of that cool arch.

This opened as a Giant Open Air Market, a Virginia supermarket chain that served, more or less, as the Wegmans (or other regional massive food emporium) of its day. It was based in Norfolk and had roughly two dozen supermarket locations. The one pictured and featured in the blog was the flagship store (Wikipedia cites a no-longer-available article and says the store was 150,000 square feet; it even had a second floor, which perhaps accounts for the discrepancy).

In any case, it is huge compared to the typical supermarket of the day, and it’s even quite large by today’s standards. It also featured all sorts of then-uncommon products and features. There was a “cheese cave” section, barbecue, pizza, and other prepared foods, and imported delicacies.

The Wikipedia article says:

As a 24-hour store (only closed on Christmas Day) the “front door” was an “air curtain” with no real doors. A blower pushed air down as customers entered and a steel grate below captured the air and recycled it. The grate was always full of loose coins that were cleaned out once a year and donated to charity. The location was also known for massive decorations, such as was a 20-foot fall “waterfall” of ice in the seafood department. The stores had large bakeries that produced fresh bakery 24 hours a day. Other accommodations for shoppers were a large portico to have their groceries loaded into their cars out of the rain, and a 24-hour laundromat.

Scroll through that blog post for photos. They’re wild, considering when this was, and not in a major city, either (though the military sites around the Hampton Roads area provided a stable middle-class customer base).

There are fun comments. For example, this: “It was magical to a little kid. The pizza is still the best that I have ever had. And you could go to the meat dept., pick out a steak, and then take it over to the restaurant and they would cook it for you over a fired grill.” And this: “I remember the merchandise being covered up and roped off at midnight on Saturday for the Sunday Blue Laws when you couldn’t purchase anything but food.”

A commenter on a Reddit thread about the store says, “That place was great! I remember the upstairs area and balcony. It was like Wegmans is today. Great BBQ too.”

Some interesting comments from a Facebook thread about the supermarket chain:

“I remember Giant before the sliding doors were used on a daily basis. It used to be no doors, just walk inside. Then came the natural gas shortage and then the doors were used.”

“Me and my mom having a steak at 1 in the morning back in 1972.”

“They catered my wedding.”

“I ordered my wedding cake from Giant.”

“On cold days they would serve heated Dr Pepper in a paper cup at the Wards Corner [the location of the flagship] store as soon as you came in.”

“Saw my first round pizza at 16; as my mom, Antonia Antinelli, always used a cookie sheet.”

This comment reveals that the store had a fairly large merchandise section, which was rare for supermarkets at the time. Depending on exactly how big it was, it might have even qualified as a sort of proto-supercenter:

The best store I’ve ever known. Watched the store grow as they diversified and brought a lot of new lines in, i.e.; hardware, clothing etc. Always had something new! Great selection and can’t forget the good food.”

Also: “My brother would get pizza, I would get a sub and parents would pick out their steak and cost a dollar or 2 to cook and serve with sides and rolls. Then my brother and I would check records out.”

They also apparently had a small video arcade. There are always tantalizing comments like this one: “I worked there. I also remember it before it was the real store. It was a market that was truly open air meaning it had no walls.”

As far as I can tell, it’s a little less interesting than that: what became Giant Open Air Markets first began as a produce stand in a market area. This Virginian-Pilot article from 1995 includes this history:

Whatever its difficulties in recent years, the neighborhood at the southern end of the Campostella bridge [in Norfolk] has had a rich retailing heritage. The late Wendell P. Rosso began selling fruit there in 1939 and broadened the business during the 1940s to meats and produce. His partnership with the late Vincent J. Mastracco Sr. eventually became Giant Open Air Markets, a predecessor of the Farm Fresh supermarket chain. The Rosso-Mastracco fruit and produce stand evolved into a grocery store with a restaurant and a bakery. By 1958, they had moved their store to a new building on the other side of Campostella Road.

Or this one: “A gallon of ice cream was $1. They also had exotic foods like chocolate covered ants. Had my first crab cake there. Segregated bathrooms. I snuck into the colored men’s room and was disappointed. It was the same. You can tell that I’m old as the hills.” This is probably accurate, sadly.

Other locations, like this surviving structure, were not as large; it’s about 40,000 square feet, including what may be a later addition. That would be more in line with a regular supermarket, though still above the average for the period.

Giant Open Air merged with another chain, Farm Fresh, in the 1980s and the name disappeared, as did, apparently, this bountiful, cutting-edge style of grocery retailing, at least until Wegmans got down here. If you’re on the East Coast in or north of North Carolina and you don’t have a Wegmans, you probably don’t have anything like this.

It’s always a strange thing to read about something that sounds too grand or too modern to have existed so long ago. It’s sort of the same feeling as discovering that my little hometown used to have a genuine department store on Main Street. It’s like finding a fossil in a strata where it isn’t supposed to be, and realizing that your conception of history is all wrong. What happened? What happened to the world that made these things?

The answer is probably just boring and unsatisfying: just business. The energy crisis. The difficulty of sustaining such a multifaceted business. The shift in which locations were the most desirable, as new suburbs opened up further away from the old population centers.

The locations of Giant Open Air stores remind me a lot of the locations of old Kmarts. They opened in what were at the time prime, central locations, but which ended up being leapfrogged by newer, larger stores in newer suburbs over the decades. A new wave of stores was opening, basically, just as they were reaching the point where they looked and felt worse for wear.

Take a look at the aerial image of this Giant Open Air store in the year it opened, 1963. It’s the building in the middle at the left:

Here’s the same image today. Not too long after opening, the Interstate and a spaghetti-bowl interchange went in. Suddenly the grand supermarket was claustrophobically bounded by high-speed roadways, and must have been just a bit harder to pull into, both physically and psychologically.

Here’s the location of that surviving building I linked above. Same deal. You can see how these were prime spots that today don’t look as prime. It’s right in the middle of that triangle:

Beyond that, in some ways, this was a demonstration store, almost like the retail equivalent of a concept car. It must have taken an immense amount of work and expense to maintain. More than that, the sheer amount of labor. It was also at least somewhat skilled labor, to the extent that lots of people were doing in-store pizza baking, grilling, etc. (I bet insurance companies and fire marshals wouldn’t love open-flame grills inside supermarkets, too.) There’s something very modern but also old-fashioned about it all. Like one branch of modernity that we didn’t end up taking, that ended up dying out.

One of the really interesting things you realize reading about retail history is that before the modern supercenter emerged, and before Wegmans became the go-to massive supermarket in eight states, there were all sorts of very large stores loaded with features, amenities, large selections, and unusual products.

In fact, a lot of these stores were larger than their modern descendants-of-sorts. (Look up Schwegmann’s, no relation to Wegmans, another pioneering large-format supermarket.) Given how obscure a lot of them are now and how almost none survived to today, I’m not sure modern ones are “descended” from them at all. It’s almost like we invented this sort of retail concept twice, and the second time it stuck. I wrote about that here.

If you ran the 20th century again, who knows what the retail patterns would end up being. We’d probably always have invented supermarkets, because the idea of concentrating all the different categories of food (baker, butcher, grocer, etc.) along with some basic sort of food-adjacent merchandise (baking and kitchen equipment, home decor, drugs and vitamins) seems pretty obvious.

I don’t know that we’d have invented these “concept” emporiums, though. That took some particular planning, logistics, and imagination. Perhaps giants only roam once.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #4

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #16

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #17

Why *Does* It Feel Like Things Are Always Getting Worse?

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A couple of years ago, sitting in a Panera somewhere in Maryland or Virginia, I heard one of those songs that sounds like it was crafted for twenty-something sittings in a Panera somewhere in Maryland or Virginia. Or anywhere, I guess. “Like Strangers Do,” a familiar-sounding tune, voice, everything. One of those pop songs you feel like you’ve heard before. One little bit stood out to me:

I miss the way that you looked in your sundress

The way that you looked when you undressed

The sound of your first steps across the room

We’re far from the era when Ed Sullivan demanded that Mick Jagger replace “Let’s Spend the Night Together” with “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.”

It captures that feeling of being single, actually—freedom mixed with expectation.

If I think about it, one thing among many that I love about marriage and homeownership is that they close off some of that. And as I imagine fatherhood, I think about how that would be the final closing of the gate, as it were.

In a certain sense—not in a coercive, political sense—I understand that parenthood is something that must be forced on someone like me: someone who tasted that utterly autonomous, freewheeling, unattached, responsibility-free young adulthood, that amorphous period where 22 and 25 and 30 and 33 all feel like one long wonderful moment of owning and controlling yourself entirely. I’m happy—grateful, even—that marriage and then parenthood put that to an end. The choices that forecloses other choices are probably the ones that really matter.

I am thinking about the weird, ideological pronatalism of the far right. And I’m thinking about the context of childlessness, and what might explain it.

I think, once in a while, which is maybe more than I should, of an odd article in The American Conservative that made the rounds a few years ago, by a young liberal woman who had briefly dated a far-right member of the Proud Boys. And I remember this bit, in between the bit about the wannabe-fascist asking if he could measure her skull:

I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to be an autistic mother. To have autistic children, at whatever level of functioning they may be. I’ve worked with the lower-functioning kids you hear about. I think about how it would feel to watch my child experience pain. About giving myself fully to another. Like my mother did for me. The intensity of her feelings scares me sometimes. It’s easier to sit alone with my weed and the heroes & villains in my head than face the hard stuff.

I’ll be damned if something like that isn’t going on, maybe semi-consciously, in the heads of a lot of people my age. We look at the way we grew up—maybe it was dysfunctional, maybe it was highly functional, maybe we don’t want to replicate it, maybe we don’t think it can be replicated—and in any case just wonder, how the hell did they do it? Literally, how do two parents work full time and maintain the home and property and put dinner on the table and raise kids and make their lunches and get them to school and pay for all the supplies and toys and doctor visits and get the cats to the vet and remember to re-register the cars…

When described, normal family life for most people in most of the country sounds literally impossible.

Add to that that even the idea of being a child, of being around children, of holding a baby, feels like a distant abstraction, after a decade of college dorm life and gentrified neighborhood life. It would be possible to live in a hip neighborhood in a major city and almost forget that children exist. It is possible to forget, in a sense, that we were ever born.

There are certain perks of not having kids. One of them is getting to pretend that you’re better than all the parents. It’s a sobering thing to me to realize that good parenting can look like abuse. I don’t mean child abuse; I mean relationship abuse. At a museum in D.C., I saw a mother who had put her sons on either side of her, both of them upset over what was probably a brother brawl that got out of hand. “We keep our hands to ourselves,” she said firmly, scolding her child at the same time as she gently wiped away his tears.

Making someone cry and then comforting them; classic abuser behavior! Not only do I think that; I like to think that. I loathe, on some level, the idea of giving up the privilege of judging people. Or think of a parent’s go-to explanation for discipline: I’m not punishing you; you’re punishing yourself. I promised you I’d punish you if you did (whatever). I’m not responsible for my actions; you are. Next time don’t make me do this to you. Classic abuser psychology!

In other words, stripped of context and familiarity and experience, parenting looks odd, and kind of mean. Like something a breezy, fun person doesn’t want to do or have done to them. Who wants to be the kind of person that other people look at and say, “Gee, look at that guy making his kids cry at the museum.” I do that; I imagine breaking up a discipline session and saying “Hey, knock this off”—to the parent!

I’m not sure I’d even be able to dish out discipline. Hell, I’m not sure I’ve ever truly accepted that I ever deserved discipline as a kid myself. I know it, of course, as an intellectual matter—oh, do I know it. But I still keenly remember the feeling that I was an impeccably behaved little angel being set upon for no particular reason. I don’t like the idea of doing that to my own child or of having to definitively give up that fiction.

Maybe we just don’t want to be viscerally reminded that we once wore diapers. That we once threw meaningless temper tantrums. That we once knew nothing about anything and had to be tirelessly raised up to be who we are now. Perhaps it is easier to imagine, as our lives so often seem to suggest, that we have always been exactly who we are today, completely autonomous and self-made. In other words, perhaps on some level, my generation understands that having children will injure our pride and puncture our self-understanding.

Maybe this all sounds ignorant; maybe, frankly, it sounds like moronic navel-gazing, or a brain rotted by online discourse. It kind of sounds like that to me, too. But I realize that I have virtually no first-hand experience of kids or taking care of them—except for my own childhood, which feels increasingly distant, like a story I read about somewhere.

I wonder if one reason for the exploding popularity of pets, and the notion of “pet parents,” is that pets don’t truly require discipline. Sure, you spray the cat, yell “no” at the dog. You train them, you refuse treats or put them in the crate. But they don’t really have to be raised up—they don’t truly understand right or wrong. We imagine that our cat is feeling guilty or our dog is giving us sad puppy eyes, but we know we’re anthropomorphizing. A pet owner never really has to inflict real emotional pain on a pet for its own good, in a way that it cannot understand but which it needs nonetheless. I have to imagine that something like this is an underrated reason for deferring or refusing children.

There’s nothing natural or intuitive about parenting to me; it’s an abstraction. The template, the neutral state, for my life and that of most of my peers is college and post-college, years and years of breezy autonomous living, bounded by almost nothing but money and work hours. I probably belong to the first generation for whom holding a baby is more of an abstraction than jetting off to Europe. A baby might as well be a Martian.

When things become optional, they become choices, and choices can be hard. They can subtly alter psychology. Pope Francis remarked, several years ago, that the easy availability of divorce changed the nature of marriage itself. Suddenly there was always an exit ramp, whether or not you ever personally considered taking it. Once it’s there, how can it not at least occur to you to take it? For people in abusive or miserable marriages, that exit ramp is good and necessary. For everyone else, what does it do to you to know that you can always walk away? I think it’s pretty obvious that reliable contraception and a culture that doesn’t explicitly encourage childbearing has done something similar to the idea of starting a family.

Individual autonomy is a good thing. It is not, necessarily, the highest good. For all of its benefits, and for all of the ways in which we should not roll back the clock, complete personal freedom of choice makes doing everything harder, because you don’t particularly have to do anything. It is curious that many people can readily discern this phenomenon, which social scientists call the “paradox of choice,” when it comes to 30 varieties of toothpaste or peanut butter or potato chips, but not when it comes to the deepest and most serious personal decisions we will ever make.

There is something exceedingly difficult about having to reverse-engineer or philosophically justify something that was once just unselfconsciously understood. Getting married and starting a family have succumbed to this.

Amid all of this, it is impossible to know just how freely chosen intentional childlessness really is. It is obviously shaped by a kind of passivity, doing what everyone is doing—as was, in a different era, its opposite. It is shaped by economic challenges, chiefly the cost of housing and childcare, followed, perhaps, by education issues.

We marvel at the ease with which people seemed to start families in the past, as though they were a race of superhumans. They were homeowners and parents at 25; well into our 30s, we scarcely feel like we’ve grown up, yet we can hardly remember our own childhoods.

It takes only one break in the chain for the whole thing to be compromised. Ronald Reagan famously declared that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction.” The fact is, almost everything may only be one generation away from extinction. Look, for example, at how only one or two generations of smaller families and higher ages of marriage and childbirth have made large families far more impractical—fewer grandparents; older parents for in-family childcare; fewer cultural resources; a tacit social norm that large families are a little bit odd. It would not matter if family life had been the same for thousands of years or a few generations; one break is all it takes to make it seem impossibly distant to us.

My problem with a lot of the right-wing pronatalism is that it assumes things like cities are bad for families because people in cities don’t have a lot of kids or women who want 10 cats instead of a child are the problem or whatever. These are facile ideas that fail to discern any of what is going on. Too much of the supposedly pro-family lobby cares more about scorning non-parents than conveying the joy of family life. They make the same error that ideologues of all stripes make: simplifying complex questions and turning the practical into the ideological. They speak as if preferences and behaviors simply exist in the ether, disconnected from the contexts and incentives in which they take shape.

A baby might be an abstraction to a young, highly educated, coastal professional like me. It seems like it might be an abstraction to a lot of pronatalists, too.

Related Reading:

Kids And The City

Wood, Quartz, and Kids

Born This (Urbanist) Way

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The last official release for the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, was Wario’s Woods, which hit the North American market on December 10, 1994. This was not only years after the release of the NES’s successor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but precisely a week after the Japanese release of the Sony PlayStation, which hit Japanese stores on December 3, 1994. Wario’s Woods was released before the PlayStation in Japan, but it’s quite remarkable that an official NES game came out two video-game console generations later. (A Europe-only NES Lion King video game even came out in 1995!)

The “last” of a thing is often only notable looking backwards; Wario’s Woods was a puzzle game. It wasn’t an adventure game, RPG, or platformer, the genres that made up most of the period’s hit games. There was no intentional go-out-with-a-bang final release to see off the NES. It was not, at that time, beloved, just obsolete. There were probably many stores by that time which barely even carried NES titles anymore. Wario’s Woods was essentially a perfunctory release to eke out a last bit of revenue. Essentially, an accidental last. Even the question of “the last NES game” only became interesting later.

Which brings us to New Town, North Dakota.

The U.S. federal government located and platted the town in 1950. It was a designated replacement for several small settlements that were to be flooded for a dam project.

Other than being two-thirds Native American, New Town is not particularly notable. It is not large, or unique, or likely to be interesting in any obvious way to a passerby. It’s a typical American West small town, with a Main Street that accommodates cars more than a classic eastern small town, and a wavy street grid that took some design cues from the quasi-grids of suburban developments which were exploding in popularity in the postwar years.

The only thing that is truly notable about New Town, North Dakota is that it is, possibly, the very last place that could be considered a traditional town that was ever unselfconsciously built in the United States.

This question—when was the last time America unselfconsciously built a traditional town—may not be precisely answerable. You need to pin down your definitions, and your parameters.

“Unselfconsciously” rules out the “New Towns”—a movement name, not a place name—of the 1960s, which included Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; and Irvine, California. It also rules out the 1980s New Urbanist developments like Seaside, Florida or Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which very consciously sought to imitate the then-lost art of traditional urban development.

Perhaps those exclusions don’t make sense, but I think they limit the question in an interesting way. You could phrase the question differently: at which exact point can you say that the obvious break with the past in building and placemaking that happened in the 20th century actually happened?

You also have to define what, precisely, a “traditional” town is. This is not a cut-and-dry question. It’s a little bit like asking whether, or why, the archaeopteryx is “really” a bird. It’s a question of a critical mass of old or new features. Those might include: attached structures on Main Street (or throughout town); multistory or mixed-use structures on Main Street (or throughout town); a grid rather than a hierarchical road system; at least some apparent or intended walkability; elements that suggest predominant car use, like buildings set back behind parking lots; and other things that we typically understand as old-fashioned or modern planning features.

Of course, many towns were not “built” all at once (though some rail towns went up so quickly that you could describe them as having been built at a specific time), and there are places from the early 20th century which once resembled classic towns and, over time, came to resemble suburban commercial strips. It’s possible, in other words, that “the last town ever built” no longer exists in recognizable form, making the question functionally impossible to answer, or requiring the addendum “that still exists more or less as first constructed.”

The question would also exclude some obviously suburban places that were built in a similar manner to old towns—traditional plats sold to developers, with minimal rules as to what had to go there. Some folks suggested Coral Gables, Florida as an example of this. And again, some places that arose in this manner will today appear far more typically suburban than they might have in their initial iteration.

One more question here would be this: by today’s definitions, does an early development like Levittown “count” as a “town” rather than a “suburb”? Levittown’s basic form remains quite unchanged from the earliest aerial imagery I could easily find, which is from the 1960s (and it wouldn’t have changed much from its construction to that point).

Levittown’s street network is sort of recognizable as an altered grid, rather than a completely modern hierarchical road structure. It retains the placement of schools and churches within neighborhoods. It did, however, have separation of commerce from residential, though many small towns effectively also had that before zoning or planning ideas demanded it.

Levittown had a fully modern big-box store and a couple of strip plazas, but its largest shopping center resembled an actual urban street. That shopping center still had both a front and a back parking lot, suggesting that while walkability appears possible, it was not for the most part intended.

This image is actually taken from the shopping center’s front parking lot, which is effectively a street! The Levittown builders transposed an urban commercial block, complete with its street, into a commercial parcel along a main suburban road. This is a very early iteration of the strip-plaza form. But to me, it still counts as definitively not a Main Street.

What looks like the “street” here is a parking lot with a traffic lane running through the middle, and what looks like a street-facing block of businesses is the strip plaza. Off to the left is the actual road. Note that the parking is diagonal, just like on an urban street that has been expanded to accommodate cars. In other words, at the time Levittown was built, there was not a definitive suburban/car-oriented design language, as it were.

If Levittown is, or is nearly, the “first” “true” “suburb,” then the “last” “true” “town” must be from around the same time, with just enough in its mix of new and old features to classify it as a town and not a suburban development.

Levittown was constructed by a single master builder between 1947 and 1951, and New Town was platted in 1950 and sold and mostly built by 1953. New Town, being founded by the federal government, may have simply gone for the simplest known way to build a town, rather than experiment with the suburban planning ideas of the time. In other words, because the government was involved, the town may have ended up more old-fashioned than a settlement being built in the 1950s otherwise would have.

I showed you Levittown’s almost-Main Street. Here is New Town’s barely-Main Street. It’s in the middle of this aerial:

And on the ground:

Like Levittown’s shopping center, New Town’s Main Street has ample parking off the main roadway. Unlike Levittown, however, there’s a true downtown commercial district rather than several separated shopping centers. And unlike Levittown, the parking lot lanes here run the full length of the commercial strip, making them not quite parking lots but…parking streets. Like Levittown, the commercial structures here are mostly one-story and don’t appear to have any walk-up apartments or other sundry uses mixed in with commerce. Unlike Levittown, there are attached but separate structures here.

In other words, this is essentially the very last iteration of Main Street before the idea of “a commercial area surrounded by residential areas” was simply no longer something recognizable as a Main Street at all.

Here, from Google Maps, is the entirely of New Town:

Churches and schools are mixed in with the neighborhoods. It does not look like New Town included multifamily structures initially—with a lot of land and few people, that may have been simply because they were unnecessary and not because planning orthodoxy proscribed them. (The duplexes and apartment buildings towards the top right of the satellite view were built in the 2010s; oddly, the duplexes appear outside city limits, but connect to the town’s streets.)

I can’t say that this is definitely “the last town in America.” But it looks very much as one would expect such a place to look, and it comes from the time you would expect to see a last appearance of such a form.

The old way of building towns more or less faded away without much fanfare. Whatever understanding there was at the time that we were embarking on a revolutionary and untested manner of building human settlements never became a mainstream impression. Even the New Towns of the 1960s were experimental, and did not resemble traditional small towns or urban neighborhoods, even though they attempted to embody many of their features.

It was probably not until the New Urbanists, or even later, that any real number of Americans began to think in terms of the question “Why did we stop building actual towns and cities?” Due to urban renewal, even many of our old cities lost their history and their classic urban character.

It is remarkable, almost mystifying, how quickly we forgot a thing we had done for all of our history. But perhaps it’s also remarkable how briefly the new suburban orthodoxy reigned as the standard, default option. Between New Town and the first New Urbanist project of Seaside were only 30 years.

That, perhaps, is the point of identifying that “last” town: it suggests that, on a certain timescale, we hardly ever abandoned traditional urbanism at all.

Social card image credit Flickr/Andrew Filer, CC BY-SA 2.0

Related Reading:

Into The Sunset

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From Everywhere To Last

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The discount runs until the end of Sunday the 22nd, and each of this coming week’s pieces are longer and more fleshed out than what I typically publish. It’s a fun thing to publish these longer pieces, and I’m very thankful to you that I have a large enough audience to publish them here instead of trying to freelance them to a magazine.

“The Deleted Scenes” originally, in my mind, referred to the idea that this newsletter would be expanded or leftover bits of my other writing, a kind of “here’s the stuff that got cut or that didn’t fit or that is interesting and adjacent to a recent piece but doesn’t quite make a piece on its own.”

I do a lot of that, but what I do here has evolved to the point where sometimes I run those magazine-type pieces here, and often ideas I end up writing up into feature pieces begin here as conversational pieces that help me flesh out an idea with you. It’s a fun process, and it makes writing something we all do together, in a way. So thank you!

And now I’m going to give you a rundown of the pieces coming this week.

Monday is my first stab at a question I’ve been thinking about for awhile: which settlement in the United States could you plausibly describe as the last traditional urban place ever built here? In other words, not a New Urbanist project or a modern “town square” development or something, but the last time in the 20th century that the traditional town-planning pattern was enacted before the status quo shifted to suburban, car-oriented design principles. My answer may not be the answer, but it is probably one of them. I’m going to keep thinking about this.

Tuesday is a piece adjacent to housing and economics and my generation’s complicated attitudes about family formation and having kids. This is one that I started over two years ago and never quite finished until now. What I do in this piece is try to put into words what I sense in general from people my age. And I think what can appear to be hostility to or dislike of children is in a lot of ways just a kind of emotional path dependency; most of us do whatever feels like the default or easiest thing, and that used to be getting married, buying a home, and starting a family. That chain has been broken, and even for those people who want those things, achieving them takes an affirmative effort that it didn’t used to. I think this applies to American attitudes about cities and urbanism, too: most of us have never truly lived in a city, and, as I wrote recently, it is very easy to mistake liking what you know for knowing what you like.

For this week’s “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”, I look at the history of a regional supermarket chain from the midcentury years in southeastern Virginia. It’s striking how “modern” a lot of retail concepts back then were, and how long it took for similar concepts to become mainstream again. (You see some of this in a piece I wrote about the history of “supercenters.”) If you like quirky retail history, you’ll like this one.

For Thursday, I’m writing about my first visit to New York City since 2015, how I had sort of forgotten what a genuine big city feels like, and how I liked it a lot more than I remember liking it back when I was younger and had no particular interest in cities and urbanism. What I really took away from this visit was that the things people say about cities, and the experience of being there in the middle of a city, are wildly divergent. Yes, there are problems in cities, not the least of which is crime. But cities are incredible, quirky, diverse, energetic places full of all sorts of things. There’s a real value in putting down your thoughts and ideas and narratives, and just experiencing being in the middle of it all.

Friday’s New and Old roundup is a typical roundup of four pieces, but the pieces themselves are especially noteworthy in my view, and I’ve written longer engagements with them as well. Enjoy a little reading around the web.

Enjoy the whole week, and have a wonderful Advent and Christmas and holiday season. Thank you for reading!

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Images of Christmas

Construction In A Small Town

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Spoiler in the sub-head: “It turns out that if you make it easy for local developers to build starter homes, they will build a lot of them.”

In cities across the country, duplexes, townhouses, and homes on smaller lots have nearly gone extinct. That is, except for in Nashville: Over the past 15 years, the city has built tens of thousands of townhouses and small-lot homes in neighborhoods close to the city’s downtown core. The Nashville starter home renaissance — the largest infill homeownership building boom in per capita terms in the country — has helped to keep the Music City relatively affordable, even as nearly 100,000 new residents came knocking.

To better understand how Nashville bucked the trend, I spoke with Charlie Gardner, a research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the co-author with Alex Pemberton of a new report on the obscure Tennessee law that enabled the building boom.

Gray just started this newsletter recently. He’s great. Give this a read and sign up!

The Double Life of Nat King Cole, Commentary, Terry Teachout, June 2021

This nice piece traces Cole’s career, and concludes with what seems like a diminishment, but then turns out to be the opposite:

What he could never have done was become a Sinatra-like cultural colossus, for he lacked Sinatra’s larger-than-life personality. Instead, he was content to be nothing more—or less—than a first-rate popular singer, and the reissue in 1991 of an 18-CD boxed set of the King Cole Trio’s recordings for Capitol triggered a revival of interest in his earlier work as a jazz pianist. Fortunately, it is not necessary to choose between the two Nat Coles: They were two different sides of a great popular artist, one who gave fully of himself in both capacities. In Will Friedwald’s well-chosen words, “he could do almost anything that any other artist could do, but no one else could do what he did.”

Of course, most people today probably know Cole only from his Christmas songs which still get plenty of airtime around the holidays. But he was far more talented, and a much bigger name at one time, than those songs would suggest. Read the whole thing.

The Beach Boys: Little Saint Nick, Lyrics, Weakly, December 25, 2009

I like reading these semi-serious critiques of silly Christmas songs, of which “Little Saint Nick” is definitely one.

Even if i actually am mishearing things, the only alternative i can come up with is “But she’s like a toboggan with a four speed stick”, which makes nearly as little sense, since as far as i can find toboggans are not normally outfitted for manual transmissions, let alone transmissions of any kind, as would be necessary for such a simile to work.

In comparison with that line, the second line is amazingly clear: “She’s candy apple red with a ski for a wheel”. Well, the color makes sense (and fits traditional descriptions of Santa’s sleigh), but “with a ski for a wheel” is, well, lacking. First of all, cars have four wheels, not one—so does this sled have one ski, or three wheels plus one ski (that is, one wheel having been replaced by a ski)? Maybe it’s a unicycle that’s been retrofitted with a ski for winter maneuverability. Oh, and a transmission.

The point, I guess, is that nobody is supposed to bother trying to analyze lyrics like this, and so the mere act of doing it is almost comedic in and of itself. If it’s your thing, enjoy. (Also, here’s a fun one on Michael Bublé’s…interesting choice to cover “Santa Baby.”)

The last item today is a neat bit of tech history I found on a Reddit thread, linking to a YouTube video: “Alien Resurrection found to have cheat code that allows playing burned backup games.”

Somehow, this PlayStation video game had a code error that allowed you to play an (illegally) burned disc in your PlayStation if you put the Alien game in first, removed it, and booted your burned game. How? Don’t quite understand. It’s a little spooky when computers act almost like living creatures, in these quirky ways that are tough to trace or pin down.

There are also some really interesting comments from folks who used to mess around with Game Sharks, Action Replays, and copied discs. Not an endorsement of piracy, I guess, but cool all the same.

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New and Old #72

New and Old #73

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As I noted in that earlier piece, it was really cool to see much of this vague network of pro-housing people all together in one room. Most of us probably knew who most of the others were, but definitely some of that is just social media mutual following. So getting those folks in a room is worth something in and of itself.

As part of the launch, there was also a panel discussion, and here I want to relay some of the interesting points that were made.

One, which I’ve touched on before, is the framing of what we usually think of as “nice” or “desirable” or “expensive” or “exclusive” places as fundamentally not any of those things. Fundamentally, such places are productive. This is an important distinction. It defines the housing shortage in these places as a hoarding or walling off of opportunity, rather than as a protection of a fundamental character. In other words, the thing being excluded isn’t “desirability,” which impliedly should be afforded or earned, but opportunity, which is everybody’s right.

I noticed that the introduction to the panel, by Brian Hanlon, the president of California YIMBY, had a careful mix of words and implied arguments and audiences. He nodded towards making cities desirable and safe for families, promoting carbon-free transportation, fostering racial and economic fairness and opportunity. In other words, you’re covering people who come at housing advocacy and urbanism more generally from a pro-family perspective, an environmentalist perspective, a social justice perspective, and a libertarian-ish economic opportunity perspective. (Not that these are mutually exclusive.)

The point that MAP is underscoring is that we are facing a fundamentally artificial, self-imposed scarcity. Hanlon said that anti-growth sentiment, or NIMBYism, arose as a political force in coastal cities and college towns, but now threatens all metro areas. That’s even a little bit of an anti-elitist point.

So I found the political messaging element here interesting, from these framings to the notion of the housing crisis as being about scarcity versus abundance. Maybe this message can really break through political polarization. There was even a mention of popular discontent. It was almost like the premise was that this election was a protest against the status quo, which is also the opposite of what we housing folks want.

The panel had a former state legislator from Arizona, whose name unfortunately I didn’t catch. He talked about his time in the statehouse, where he tried to go big on a housing and zoning reform bill. He called himself a conservative, but said a lot of conservatives have no real answer to the housing crisis.

What was interesting about his remarks was the view inside the legislative process. The League of Arizona Cities and Towns, he said, didn’t like his housing bill—those organizations being un-aligned with the pro-housing movement is ironic—and they sent an alert out to all the mayors. This ended up scaring some legislators who had been for the bill, and the bill didn’t end up having the votes (short story).

He then explained that later on, a number of core elements from that bill passed as individual bills. But the big “omnibus” bill he sponsored originally caught a lot of attention and catalyzed a movement. For a new concept, he said, “it may be better to have a sacrificial year or two” in the form of a big bill that won’t pass, to build knowledge and momentum so that elements of it can pass later. This is stuff I never would think about, not being involved in politics directly.

The next panelist was Katie Cristol, a former Arlington County Board member. She was on the board during the time the county’s Missing Middle zoning reform was passed unanimously. That passage followed eight years of development. By the final outreaches and hearings, she said, the YIMBY advocates actually outnumbered the NIMBYs. Arlington, she noted, is majority under 40 and majority renter, but you’d never know that from being on the council.

She talked about race and environmentalism, and how getting the NAACP and the Sierra Club on board with the zoning reform was key to getting it passed. She also noted that missing middle is a fundamentally conservative reform: it permits multifamily units in single-family zones, but only if they can fit within the basic form of a detached house.

This issue of coalition-building, trying to get this group on board and that group on board and hoping your outreach to one doesn’t make the other suspicious, etc. etc.—that whole process, I guess, can look kind of cynical from the outside. But that’s what policymaking is. That’s what democracy is. I think, as the Arizona politician said, conservatives often lack answers to these difficult problems because on some level they’re skeptical of the whole process of making public policy.

Unfortunately, despite the caution with which Arlington went about the Missing Middle reform, a judge struck it down—the same judge overseeing almost the same case in Alexandria, which passed a similar reform. Cristol noted that Charlottesville passed a similar ordinance, and theirs also got held up in litigation. What happened to basically letting localities exercise land-use powers? It’s so odd to me that localities can put pretty much any restrictions they want in the code, but any attempt to reform these old codes suddenly raises questions about the extent of their powers. Cristol said she thought, with multiple cities’ similar reforms tied up in the courts, that the Virginia Supreme Court would need to rule somehow on this question.

Cristol had some other interesting thoughts on all of this.

She said back when the work on Missing Middle started, there was a prevailing notion of “protecting the neighborhoods”—which more or less assumed people and multifamily residences were a nuisance. That people living in multifamily buildings don’t count as members of neighborhoods. This, she said, was an idea from the ‘70s, with debates over the Metro corridor running through part of Arlington.

The fact that this idea from half a century ago still prevailed showed how much we just haven’t touched these issues in ages. That, the judge, an older man, striking down a modest reform in a majority-young, majority-renter county, the general attitude that nothing should ever change—Cristol called it “intergenerational despondency.” We’re “trying to bend the curve” on housing costs, where maybe today’s kids can buy a home in these communities in their 20s and 30s like so many of today’s NIMBYs did in their youth.

The next panelist, Emily Hamilton, an economist who focuses on housing, spoke a bit about inclusionary zoning, a policy that requires developers to include a certain percentage of “affordable,” i.e. income-restricted, units in new buildings, and often gives them a “density bonus,” where they can build more market-rate units if they go above the required percentage of affordable units.

Hamilton noted two problems with this. One is that it likely reduced the total amount of housing production, though she said this depended on the locality. And two, IZ relies on “an underlying base of exclusionary zoning.” In other words, a “density bonus” has no value unless the status quo is that you can’t build. Interesting. This sort of technocratic, situation deregulation to engineer some specific desired purpose is not really letting the market work, and it isn’t the “abundance” approach.

I bet this point would get some disagreement, and perhaps you could argue IZ is the least-bad option among what’s possible right now. But I found Hamilton’s critique interesting.

She also made another interesting point: zoning reforms often just reveal other code or finance issues. One way around this is the increasingly popular reforms to permit ADUs: “accessory dwelling units” or what many people know as an in-law suite. These are small projects that a homeowner themselves can do. They’re not disruptive, and so easy to permit and regulate. And they don’t raise issues with financing the way larger projects can.

But there are ways localities can actually incentivize them rather than just permit them on paper. For example, not requiring a public hearing; not requiring off-street parking; not requiring owner occupancy. A line in the code is the difference between one of these projects feeling achievable to an average homeowner or not. Altogether, Hamilton said, ADU advocacy blunts NIMBYism because homeowners can see themselves wanting the right to build an accessory unit and basically monetize their land (without selling or taking out a home equity loan).

The last panelist, Anika Singh Lemar, spoke mostly after I had gotten up, and I didn’t get to take as many notes. But in response to Katie Cristol talking about getting the NAACP on board, Lemar noted that the earliest organized to open up zoning were tied to fair housing and civil rights concerns. In her own state of Connecticut, the NAACP protested downzonings in, I believe, the 1970s. The Mount Laurel decision in New Jersey in 1975, which requires municipalities to provide affordable housing, is from the same era. In other words, the politics of this stuff has changed, and there was a moment when more muscular reforms were enacted or considered than today. Interesting.

It’s all interesting. Thanks for following along!

Related Reading:

Book Talk

Book Talk II

Book Talk III

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Because that building on the right, and that sign, used to be this:

And this was the last High’s ice cream shop in Virginia.

High’s was and is an ice cream company and convenience store chain.

Like many companies with a decades-long history, the High’s of today is not exactly the High’s of yesteryear. From the company’s website:

In 1928, the High’s brand was born—our ice-cream store chain grew rapidly throughout the Mid-Atlantic States. At one time there were more than 500 locations, making High’s the largest ice-cream store chain in the world!

In 2012, Carroll Independent Fuel Company acquired High’s and began to build off of the strong heritage that everyone knows and loves. Today, we are a chain of 60 convenience stores run by our team of 500 talented individuals.

High’s began as an ice cream parlor chain, in Richmond, Virginia, where the ice cream plant was also located. The chain’s Virginia locations were sold to the 7-11 parent company in 1987, and either closed or converted to 7-11 stores. That’s where there’s a branch in the company: because that final store in Portsmouth closed not in 1987 or closely thereafter, but in 2010.

Actually, according to a 2006 article in the Virginian-Pilot, the simple history above, relayed from Wikipedia, is not accurate. And I’d take a Virginia reporter’s history over Wikipedia’s:

When one owner died, the chain split into seven companies using the High’s name. One still operates as High’s Dairy Stores in Maryland, but they are much more convenience than ice cream businesses.

The Norfolk-based operation had an ice-cream manufacturing plant on 38th Street. In 1966, the company reported more than 100 outlets in Virginia alone.

There were more than 30 High’s stores in Hampton Roads in 1989, when Richmond-based C.F. Sauer Co., acquired the chain. There also were some independently owned High’s franchises in the area.

Of those many versions of High’s, this is the story of the final Virginia location:

By 1997, the owner of most of the area’s remaining High’s Ice Cream stores filed for bankruptcy.

The familiar green and white signs disappeared, along with flavors such as bubble gum and black walnut.

Seven years ago, Valerie Royall noticed her favorite High’s store on Portsmouth Boulevard seemed to be running out of ice cream. She operated an ice cream shop in Virginia Beach and decided to rescue the Hodges Manor store.

Royall closed her Beach location and took over the store at 5735 Portsmouth Boulevard.

Here’s a photo of the Virginia Beach location from the 1980s. That may well be the one that the Portsmouth store’s owner sold.

The store was purposely left vintage, but—as with the last Howard Johnson’s a couple of years ago in Lake George, New York, it was no longer possible to operate the business the old way, because the chain infrastructure had disappeared.

The floors are the original green and cream checkered linoleum. Faded photos of hot fudge and strawberry sundaes that probably go back to when the store opened four decades ago hang on the walls. Collectors have offered to buy them, but Royall isn’t interested.

“I love it being old,” she said. “I try to keep it that way.”

Some things had to change. The High’s ice cream plant in Norfolk is gone, she said, so the store now sells 42 flavors of Hershey’s Ice Cream, made by a Pennsylvania dairy company that goes back to 1894.

According to Wikipedia, High’s sold the rights to produce its ice cream in 1989, but still makes its own too. It’s available at the modern incarnation of the High’s stores, which are typical convenience stores in every way except for their ice cream counter.

I hope someone bought that neon sign and whatever papers and fixtures were still in the Portsmouth store by the end. Company histories are an interesting thing; it almost becomes a philosophical judgment whether a company “still exists” or is “the same.”

If you zoom out a little, a store is a store and ice cream is ice cream. But a side of history never hurts.

Related Reading:

Hook, Line, and Sinker

A Pancake Amid Stacks

Dunkin Into History

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Pretty much every hotel we stayed at had a huge, impressive, pretty good quality all-you-can-eat buffet. They were mostly at breakfast, but the food ranged from some basic Western breakfast dishes to Chinese breakfast foods to all sorts of savory dishes that you’d expect more for lunch or dinner. Noodles, stir-fries, soups, fried rice, vegetables in brown sauce. One even had sushi!

If you’ve been reading me awhile, you know I’m a big fan of buffets. So it was really awesome to have unlimited Chinese food every morning while we were out traveling. I felt like a kid, finishing off the leftover beef and broccoli the next morning after we had Chinese takeout. Sometimes the simplest and most random things are the most delightful.

I want to show you a bunch of these spreads/plates. Now this was obviously not the finest food, but it was plenty good—as good as many restaurants, and some of it better than what you’d get at an American buffet restaurant.

There weren’t just cooked dishes, either. There were hot and cold dishes; made-to-order noodle soups, including one where a chef was cutting fresh noodles off a block of dough; flat-top griddles to sizzle eggs and bacon, and put a crisp on the bottom of dumplings. This was impressive and fairly labor-intensive stuff. Waking up early with your time completely flipped—China is a full 12 hours off Eastern Standard Time—it was really nice to have a buffet to start these travel days.

In no particular order, this is how you will very likely start a morning staying at a nice hotel in China:

Why is this a common thing in nicer Chinese hotels and not in U.S. hotels? The internet tells me one reason could be that food quality out in the Chinese restaurant world is uneven, and so especially for people traveling for business, the hotel buffet is both a convenience and a kind of guarantee of quality and food safety. Other than that, the reason may just be that it’s done there. For whatever reason, the idea of overpriced hotel restaurants as a source of profit isn’t as much of a business practice in China. Probably, running essentially a free restaurant is cheaper in China than in the U.S., too.

Of course, there are free breakfasts, usually buffet-style, in American hotel chains, but typically they disappear as you climb the price ladder. Some of the hotel buffets in Europe, in my experience, have pretty nice spreads, but they’re not always free, and don’t have the same variety.

If anyone has any insight into how the hotel industry makes these decisions, leave a comment!

Our last buffet of the trip, a dinner, was on one of our last evenings in my wife’s home city. We didn’t stay, but it was also a hotel. And it was such a cool place that I’m going to do a little illustrated follow-up just about that building/hotel/buffet dinner. Stay tuned!

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Buffet Chronicles: Back to the Beginning

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The first was a launch event for something called Metropolitan Abundance Project, a project of California YIMBY, which is considered the first YIMBY housing advocacy organization. (Those folks held the colloquium I wrote about here, on the question of “new cities”). But I don’t particular know most of them the way I know a number of the folks involved in this stuff in the D.C. area. Obviously, there’s a whole east coast and Midwest and Southeast, but the D.C. region has a really highly developed housing advocacy coalition, so it and California are probably where most of us reside or work.

“Abundance” is one of those words that has an element of focus-group testing, but also an element of real ingenuity. It’s a way of getting past, or out of, accusations of being “left” or “right.” It’s a way of hinting at deregulation without deregulation being the end in itself. What do housing advocates actually want? Not just raw housing units. We want human settlements that are not artificially held back. I can imagine that “abundance” was almost coined by someone asking, “What’s the throughline in what we want in a more abstract sense?”

There is a little bit of an element of “trust the experts” (economists, developers, etc.) to this—which I touched on here—but one of the key insights is that when you regulate with a lighter and smarter touch, you often lower the barriers to entry. And that’s the opposite of “rule by experts.”

It was very cool having these two worlds in one room—a few dozen of the probably few hundred people in the country with some public visibility most involved in housing, zoning, and urbanist issues. On the one hand, you can say, this is such a small world, how much can it matter if you all fit in a conference space in a D.C. office building?

But below this group of people—with some sort of national or regional profile, who work in public-facing roles doing policy or advocacy or communication or public service—there are many, many more people out there doing the same work. People on town and city councils and zoning and planning boards, in traffic engineering departments and state DOTs, opening businesses or renovating historic structures on Main Streets, building small-scale multifamily buildings in mid-sized cities. The places with the worst housing crunches have the largest national saliency, but these things matter everywhere, and there are people doing this work everywhere.

Nonetheless, lots of regular people out there don’t know what we’re on about. Nolan Gray, one of the big names in housing advocacy, joked how easy it is to forget that the particulars of this stuff are still very niche. He said something along the lines of, “I’ll say to people ‘I worked with Donald Shoup,’ and they’ll stare blankly and I’ll say, ‘You know, Shoup! The parking guy!” Most of us laughed knowingly. (Shoup wrote the first book that really treated parking as a key urban issue.)

That’s the challenge. But over time, we’re meeting it. I remarked to one person that housing seems like one of the more successful stories of an advocacy movement gaining mainstream recognition and support, and he asked me why I thought that might be. My answer is that housing was a universal cause waiting for really good promoters/marketers/communicators. We have that now, and once that happened, it really raised the saliency of housing.

I’ve said before that housing advocacy, per se, shouldn’t even exist—it’s really weird that something so universal has to subsist within a movement. Our goal—perhaps like all advocacy movements—shouldn’t be to “win” per se, but to become unnecessary and redundant.

What I’m trying to say here is, we’re important, and we’re not important. Our success would in a lot of ways mean our irrelevance, and I hope we’re all good with that.

At the next event—another Metro ride and a short walk through a few residential streets—I had a really important, interesting, heartfelt conversation.

But first, I had an interesting chat with an older fellow who wasn’t against development, but was skeptical of developers. He said that he’d like to see local people invited to be part of ongoing development in the places they live. Not just asked to say yes or no. That’s interesting. A lot of folks will write that off as NIMBYism trying to sound reasonable. But I don’t think it is.

I’ve articulated something like that before, with regard to my hometown, and the strangeness of living in a beautiful, historic place that you also want to never change. In some ways, love of place and cautious acceptance of change go together. We probably should devolve the scale and concentration of development, so that ordinary people can be and feel like participants in the places they live.

And then I had that really important conversation. I’m going to just say this was with a key person in D.C.-region housing/urbanism/transit advocacy, because this wasn’t an interview or anything. But we discussed history, historic preservation, and the idea of love of place. Of how she, and a lot of urbanists who get accused of wanting to tear down the past or whatever, really genuinely love and care about the places we live in.

I observed that to this day I still hear conservatives bring up something Barack Obama said many years ago: something about “fundamentally transforming” America. What the conservatives say is this: that was evidence that Obama didn’t like or love America, because why would you “fundamentally transform” something you love?

Maybe some people mean it that way. In my experience, this is just sort of how progressives talk about change and their preferred policies. But we got to talking about communication and trust and respect, and how we don’t always convey the complexities of what we feel regarding these debates over neighborhood change.

She said it was wild to her how many people assume she just wants to tear down the past, when something like the bulldozing of a historic building—which sometimes happens and sometimes has to happen—genuinely saddens her. She used a word—reverence—for how a lot of us urbanists feel about the history of the places we live in, work in, and advocate in. We want to see new growth in these places precisely because they’re places we love and care about. Because walling something off, declaring it “finished” or “full,” is, in a sense, killing it.

I can guarantee you what we both said is what we really believe. And I take that to mean that a lot of what gets said in these debates is oversimplification, or carefully curated rhetoric. That happens when your work involves communications. But our work also involves communicating: actually getting regular people to hear us. And those are not always the same thing.

These are the kinds of conversations you can have at a small gathering in a rented upstairs room at a neighborhood bar. These conversations in subtle, maybe non-measurable ways matter. Conversations like this can change how people think and talk, and the more in-person mixing you have like this, the more—hopefully—good ideas form. Often, I’ll chat about something I’m working on or thinking about at one of these meetups, and it’s like fun, social, laid-back feedback.

Another fellow who comes to many of these D.C.-area urbanist events told me his “urbanism origin story,” and we discussed a whole bunch of ideas and insights. Suburbia relies on the car but protects its residents from exposure to motor traffic, while cities are less reliant on cars but more exposed to them. Cities can feel so quiet and peaceful without the roar of traffic. Lots of people who walk around thinking they dislike “cities” either think it’s still the crime wave, or actually dislike the same things about contemporary American cities than urbanists do, and don’t even realize it.

But his “origin story” was very simple: he took an elective course in college on urban communities and sustainability, and found the lecture on zoning interesting. So he looked up the zoning code for his small Midwest city of 65,000 people, and it struck him that the urban forms he’d associated with capitalism or free enterprise or greedy builders—the strip malls and box stores and giant parking lots and subdivisions and “stroads”—were prescribed by the code. That understanding—that our governments have effectively mandated a pattern so few of us actually like—was what made him an urbanist.

I try to avoid the pose of “we’re right and everyone who disagrees with us just doesn’t know it yet,” but the other error is to assume that whatever anyone believes or feels right now is their immutable preference. We can very easily mistake liking what we know for knowing what we like. We can resist things up until we wonder how we ever lived without them. That isn’t arrogance; it’s humility. It’s the humility of knowing that if you’ve ever changed your mind, you may not know with absolute certainty what you like or want. That, again, is why scale is important and genuine participation in the project of building our places is important.

There was a panel at the launch event, during which I took a lot of notes, and I’ll be writing that up soon. Stay tuned!

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That certainly means opportunity for people in countries that are poorer and have fewer opportunities. Probably/hopefully. But it raises the question of how you identify and train up the managers and CEOs of 20, 30, 40 years in the future, if the jobs those people would be doing now are no longer available as entry points?

The idea of having your career within one company, climbing its internal ladder, is pretty much gone, and has been for awhile. In our previous home, one of our neighbors, a retired elderly lady, had a clock on her wall that she’d gotten as a gift from her company for 40 years of service. Imagine someone 25 now getting that at retirement! Now even climbing the ladder in general is difficult, because first jobs that also open up career paths seem to be in short supply.

Jobs that usually go nowhere and don’t pay terribly well are still available. Based on the number of hiring signs, anybody could probably find a retail, restaurant, or service job. Those jobs might funnel people through careers in hospitality, but not at a rate you’d want to bet on.

It’s interesting to me that in some ways this mirrors what has happened in housing.

Read more

The spirit exclaims incredulity: “I seek!”

Scrooge backtracks slightly: “Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family.”

To 21st century readers, it might seem like an archaic inside joke; but to Victorian England, the references were obvious.

In the years prior to the publication of A Christmas Carol, one member of Parliament had introduced strict Sabbatarian bills that foolishly, Dickens thought, sought to make “man truly moral through the ministry of constables, and sincerely religious under the influence of penalties.”

That quote is from a scathing essay Dickens wrote, directed at Sir Andrew Agnew, who repeatedly sponsored the legislation in the late 1830s….

Scrooge’s accusation of the ghost was actually a disguised dig at a local politician, and lost to obscurity over ensuing generations. The spirit’s answer, however, remains timely and applicable.

“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they never lived.”

I remember reading an analysis of A Christmas Carol where the writer took this aside to mean that the story was fundamentally a Christian one, because Scrooge apparently understood the spirits to be sent from or representing the Christian God, in whose name those blue laws were passed. That seems like over-interpreting to me. But this scene is a funny little bit of inside knowledge that probably goes over the heads of most readers today. Myself included, before I found this article!

The Struggle to Contain, and Eat, the Invasive Deer Taking over Hawaii, Modern Farmer, Dan Nosowitz, May 24, 2021

The most important invasive species for a few islands, especially Maui and Molokai, is the axis deer. On Molokai, an island of only around 7,000 people, there are somewhere around 70,000 axis deer. On Maui, there are around 50,000.

The axis deer are a fascinating and multi-dimensional inhabitant. They are simultaneously invasive and part of traditional culture; they destroy food supplies and are an extremely important source of food themselves; they are protected by law and despised by some parts of law enforcement; they are wildly destructive to Hawaii and also, during the worst of COVID-19, were a beacon of hope.

How it started:

“Introducing grazing animals here was considered a good thing,” says Jeff Bagshaw of the communications and outreach team for Hawaii’s Department of Forestry; he focuses on deer in Maui. Hawaii was a base to explore the Pacific and a halfway point to Asia, but some of the early sailors found it tough to restock their ships without land mammals to hunt. A few different peculiarities of the Hawaiian islands made it a great home for the axis deer. As grazers, they prefer to eat grass, but they will browse for just about anything. And Hawaiian plants, without any native mammals that might eat their leaves or shoots, never bothered to evolve thorns, spines or toxins to discourage herbivores. There’s even a variety of native Hawaiian raspberry, called the akala, that doesn’t have any thorns.

The deer found no predators in Hawaii, either; none of the wolves, big cats, terrestrial snakes or alligators that prey on them in Asia. But because they had so many predators in Asia, the deer evolved to give birth much more often than other deer species, in the hopes of outpacing the rate at which they get eaten. In Hawaii, they have no predators, but they still give birth year-round.

The dream of those early sailors was realized, but far too well….

It’s an interesting story of, as all these invasive species stories are, unintended consequences. There’s also a fascinating legal issue that resulted in an unintended consequence:

Not only is the Department of Forestry not allowed to completely eradicate axis deer from Hawaii, it is theoretically required to ensure that the population is stable and secure. Of course, that’s not a problem it’s really worrying about; the deer is so overpopulated that the idea of saving the deer is laughable. But it would have to, if it came to that.

And then this bit of regulatory standards having unintended consequences:

“The process of harvesting a wild animal has crazy amounts of overhead that go into it,” says Muise. It is legal to give hunted meat to anyone you want, in the United States, but to sell it, it has to be inspected. Unlike some states, Hawaii has no state meat inspection service, so Maui Nui has to go straight to the USDA. On every single hunt, a USDA inspector must accompany Maui Nui’s hunters and examine every single wild axis deer for health before giving a thumbs up to the hunter to take a shot. And that hunter can only take that one shot; the USDA regulations for humane commercial hunting strictly require that the animal be rendered unconscious immediately, with a single shot to the skull. This process is slow and liable to spook the deer, so it has to be done at night, when the deer are more calm, which requires all kinds of equipment. Maui Nui’s hunters use military-grade infrared binoculars and, as of recently, a drone, to locate deer in the dark.

Give this a read.

Our homes don’t need formal spaces, Curbed, Kate Wagner, July 11, 2018

It’s important for us as homebuyers, -builders, and renters to be able to discern a need versus a want (or as my mother says, an “I cannot” versus an “I don’t want to”) when looking for a potential home. “Entertaining space,” as it is marketed by builders, realtors, media, and popular culture, is, more often than not, a want that has been rationalized and internalized, and thus feels like a need. But now that science proves that nobody uses their formal living and dining spaces, it’s time for us to sit down and have a struggle session with “space for entertaining.”

Wagner is writing a tad tongue-in-cheek, but she means it. It’s an interesting phenomenon—those formal dining rooms with a nice table that gets stacked with stuff, that end up being ground-level giant open closets most of the time. “Oh, don’t go in there, we don’t use that room.” That was fairly normal for me growing up (though we did use our own dining room fairly often, and many regular nights for dinner too).

Is it true that something that gets used once or twice a year isn’t needed? Maybe. Maybe spare capacity is kind of needed, though. On the other hand, of course, two generations ago lots of us did without it, and lots of us still do without it. Not only do you survive, but some of the friction and inconvenience can turn out to be a kind of social glue.

Here’s more of her primary point, which is classic anti-consumerism, anti-keeping-up-with-the-Joneses stuff:

The irregular massing and enormous windows of two-story foyers and great rooms, as well as formal dining rooms (often nested in a separate mass or articulated with wall-to-wall windows) facing the street, are such common McMansion features that yours truly has, over the past three years, immortalized them with a series of pejorative terms (Lawyer Foyer! Dining Turret!). If these rooms were designed for their actual practical purposes (entertaining) instead of being architectural megaphones for their owners’ money, they wouldn’t be cavernous spaces where it takes 50 steps to walk from the refrigerator to the oven, where the windows are so large that the heating/cooling bill is hundreds of dollars with an added bonus of being able to get a sunburn inside, and where the mere clinking of plates (much less a conversation) mercilessly reverberates through 3,000 square feet of pure echo.

The ironic inefficiency of hyper-exaggerated high-end entertaining spaces belies a truth: These spaces aren’t really designed for entertaining. They’re designed for impressing others. And not just impressing others: After all, it’s general politeness to compliment a host on their home no matter how impressive it is. The real goal, deeply embedded in these oversized, over-elaborate houses, is not for guests to say, “Oh wow, this is nice,” but to make them think, “Oh wow, this is nicer than what I have and now I feel jealous and insecure.”

I used to very much take this view of what I would have considered conspicuous consumption. Now that I’m a little older and have my own home and my own responsibilities, I understand that pinning down precisely what counts as overconsumption or wasteful consumerism is tricky.

Back when I first started taking stuff home from the dump in high school, my dad said, “nobody throws something out without a reason.” When a lot of the stuff I brought home was worth money or worked great, we rethought that. But the opposite may be true: nobody buys something without a reason. If a fancy house makes you envious, that’s your moral problem, not the owners’ consumption problem. Etc., etc.

What do you think?

The Pirate Preservationists, Reason, Jesse Walker, September 10, 2023

The fearful mood intensifies whenever politics enters the picture. When books by Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and other long-dead authors were reedited to reflect what are said to be “contemporary sensitivities,” many e-books were automatically updated even for readers who had bought them long before. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, several streaming services, unable to stop the abusive policing that set off the unrest, decided instead to edit or eliminate TV episodes where characters appeared in blackface. (This wasn’t an anti-racist gesture so much as a cargo-cult copy of an anti-racist gesture—an elaborate imitation built without figuring out the functions of the component parts—and so it mostly affected shows that had presented blackface with obvious disapproval.) Several songs with words that might offend listeners have gone missing from Spotify or (as with Lizzo’s “Grrrls,” which originally included the term spaz) were replaced with new versions.

This is not actually the main point of the piece. It’s really this: “There’s something to be said for the bootleggers and pirates. Whether or not they mean to do it, they're salvaging pieces of our heritage.”

More:

As a profit-generating enterprise, they are either dead or, at best, in suspended animation. But they’re still there. When HBO pruned its library, the pirates became accidental preservationists.

This wasn’t the first time that happened, and it will not be the last. Cultural artifacts have long been preserved by people acting either outside the law entirely or in a legal gray zone:

• F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu is a critically acclaimed horror classic. It is also an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. After Stoker’s widow sued to stop it from being distributed, the German courts ordered that every print of the picture be destroyed. It survived only because a collector illegally kept a copy, which eventually made its way to the archives of the Cinémathèque Française.

This is also true of stuff like video games on legacy platforms, where the actual software and hardware are effectively impossible for a regular person to use. The only way to preserve them meaningfully is for the ROMs to be emulated. There’s a little bit about video games here, and also this, with some hope:

One unexpected effect of this migration to the internet was to blur the boundary between a blog and a music label.

Countless companies specialize in finding forgotten music, often released by regional or local labels that went out of business long ago, and repackaging it for modern listeners. Countless crate-diggers do essentially the same thing, but they post their finds on blogs, on YouTube channels, in Internet Archive collections, or as SoundCloud mixes. As streaming gradually displaced CDs, some reissue labels started posting playlists as well as publishing physical releases. This is not just true in the sense that, say, the Chicago-based Numero Group posts albums on Spotify. The same record label posts playlists on Spotify, the way any user can, which gives it a legal way to include songs it doesn’t have the right to reissue itself.

This is a really interesting article. Read the whole thing.

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In other words, you would treat their opinion (on such a matter) not just as likely to be useless to you, but as reliably the opposite of what yours should be.

I’m thinking about this because I see this phenomenon in politics. Some people think of this habit as trolling, “owning the libs,” etc. But I think it’s more than that. What it really amounts to is outsourcing your thinking to the people you disagree with or dislike. And I would ask: why should their opinion on a matter be all you need to know? Why would you let people you don’t like determine your views for you?

Now I know what some people who, probably inadvertently, do this would say: it’s not that I’m outsourcing my views to people I disagree with. It’s that I’m assuming it’s a good rule of thumb that if those people are for something, it’s probably bad, and if they’re against something, it’s probably good. Obviously this is not operable once you get to “Hitler was a vegetarian” territory. But is it completely wrong?

Yeah, generally I think it is. At best, it’s akin to a stereotype or generalization. At worst it ends up being circular reasoning, and it cuts off critical thinking. If you find that someone you generally disagree with makes an interesting point, you should wonder “Maybe this person is right about this thing” or “Maybe people’s views on things are idiosyncratic and don’t always line up the way I would expect,” rather than “That idea sounds good, but I know it must actually be bad because of who’s saying it.”

I’m leaving this general, so that you can think of your own examples. But here’s a hint: for a long time I’ve been meaning to write a piece probably titled “‘I Agree With Urbanists, But I Don’t Trust Them,’” about this question of how to deal with good ideas being held by people you might generally be skeptical of.

A lot of our opinions are not derived from abstract reasoning or critical thinking or consistent principles, though that’s what we’re taught in college. Most of us outsource our views on things we don’t care about very deeply. On some level, we have to, because we all have lives to live. (Of course, you can also choose to have no opinion, which in some ways is more thoughtful than outsourcing it.)

Anyway, I’m curious if you can give an example of this phenomenon, especially one where maybe you’ve changed your mind or thought differently about an issue. Leave comment!

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But here you go:

This is a standard “model” building for the previous tenant, but it’s a newer one, so it’s quite possible you’ve never seen it before; I’ve never seen it in person myself, but I’d recognize the previous iteration of the brand’s model building.

Hint: it has nothing at all in common with AutoZone, and it’s kind of funny that AutoZone did nothing to alter the exterior of the building. I always love one recognizable brand-centric building becoming home to a new business. Especially a chain that has its own visual styles.

Anyway, this was a Pier 1 Imports home store! Here’s an example of this building type:

And here’s the probably more recognizable look:

The last Pier 1 stores closed in October 2020. Those articles screenshotted above, here and here, are interesting write-ups of what happened to the company. This bit is especially interesting:

The biggest problem Pier 1 faces is its inability to find a sweet spot. In its heyday, Pier 1 offered aesthetically interesting items that were slightly cheaper than top design brands but more expensive than the average discount furniture warehouse. Today, the market for this type of product no longer exists. There’s a growing array of inexpensive items that have a more sophisticated look and feel. Similarly, there’s thriving demand for high priced designer-quality products.

“It’s very hard to be that mid-tier player,” said Sokolyanska.

This seems like the same thing that happened to Bed Bath & Beyond and to other category-killer stores. A Pier 1 seems a tad big for an AutoZone, but you’ll see more of this as these mid-sized stores go vacant and the spaces are less of a fit for the chains that are still out there. It looks to me like the erosion of the middle-tier stores goes along with a decrease in the number of mid-sized stores. That’s interesting.

Every time a chain with it’s own style of building closes up, those buildings suddenly enter the architectural public domain. Many will be demolished or renovated so they no longer have the old brand motif. But many will just keep on going, becoming part of the color and variety of the American roadside landscape.

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First, I want to show you these (sorry, very blurry) photos I took last Black Friday, in 2023. This is the exit to go to the Leesburg Premium Outlets, a modern outlet center typical of the segment today, managed by the real-estate company Simon. (Simon says…)

What you’re seeing here is not just the exit all backed up. There are cars parked all over the grass off the exit ramp. Meaning the very large parking lot for the outlets themselves was very much full. Here’s the satellite view of the property, with the exit ramp at the top left:

So it’s interesting; while lots of parking lots no longer fill up even on holidays—see this project from Strong Towns—these big modern outlet centers more than fill up easily. They capture the same sort of excitement that the older, quainter, outlet centers of the 1980s and ‘90s used to capture.

And those older centers have been closing or becoming semi-abandoned in recent years. I list a bunch in the article, and go on to make the more abstract point that you’re seeing different iterations or “generations” of the concept over time, and you can see this for other types of businesses too:

There are certain businesses where you can distinctly observe the “generations,” as we refer to iterations of electronic hardware. You can see it with supermarkets, ranging from early ~10,000 square foot neighborhood grocery stores to later midcentury 20,000-30,000 square foot supermarkets to modern giant supermarkets with gourmet offerings and massive prepared food sections. You can see it with all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets: There are a few old-school establishments out there, with a single steam table and Jello and chocolate pudding in big trays for dessert, but no grill or sushi. Then there are the newer ones with maybe four tables and a small sushi bar and hibachi station.

But the latest buffets tend to have as many as eight steam tables and very large “sushi bars” (consisting mostly of combinations and permutations of crabstick and avocado). You can also see certain “concepts” simply disappear. The salad bar/steakhouse format—the Sizzlers and Ponderosas—are nearly gone; the more upmarket but fundamentally similar Brazilian steakhouse chains like Fogo de Chão are growing (from one location in 1997 to 65 by 2024). As an overall retail segment develops, the previous iterations tend to fall by the wayside.

It’s always interesting—almost spooky—to observe a live business from a previous generation that’s still there, but isn’t being opened anymore in that form, and won’t exist anymore once it closes. It’s almost like seeing the last member of a species, already effectively extinct even in life.

The other thing the piece is about is whether this shift is about corporate profits or consumer preferences. And I think you probably have to say it’s some mix of both, as are most of these things. Simon says, but so does the consumer. For example, one of the ways modern outlet shopping is more predictable and scalable is that there are now outlet versions of most of these stores, rather than actual factory or outlet stores selling the “real” merchandise but outdated or with small defects or what have you. There’s less of a random treasure-hunt element and more of a transactional, here are discount-grade branded items in a place called an outlet center, and it’s a fun place to spend half a day element. And while that’s a convenient business model, it’s also probably inevitable; there aren’t enough of the real returns/overstocks/factory seconds/etc. to stock the same basic Premium Outlets everywhere with the same basic merchandise and shopping experience.

The quaint, village-style shopping centers that have survived are not the old, smaller versions of the modern outlets. They’re ones that are unique in some way and have their own draw. A prime example is Peddler’s Village, which is built a lot like Liberty Village was, but is full of independent, local stores:

One example of something very much like a first-generation outlet mall is instructive. Peddler’s Village, a quaint, walkable, outdoor shopping complex with historic-looking buildings and an on-site flagship restaurant and inn, has been a major commercial attraction in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for decades and remains so today. It’s basically at the same scale as Liberty Village, but it’s filled mostly with independent, locally owned shops, and the mix of businesses leans heavily in the direction of tasting rooms, specialty foods and decor/knickknack/houseware-type places. In other words, one-off shops you can’t find everywhere or replace with online shopping—places that reward physically visiting and browsing.

Right across from Peddler’s Village was an actual first-generation outlet center, Penn’s Purchase Factory Stores. Built in the 1990s, the property was deteriorating and mostly vacant by the mid-2010s. Part of the Penn’s Purchase property, on one side of the road, has been revived with a handful of tenants, similar to the mix in Peddler’s Village. But the larger piece of Penn’s Purchase on the other side of the road still sits mostly empty and falling apart.

While this piece started as a sort of nostalgia-tinged lament for the older iteration of outlet shopping, as I wrote it, it became more of a history with less lament, because this is probably just the way outlet shopping had to evolve given it’s popularity.

There’s more in the piece. Give it a read!

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There are also lots of things that have less, or nothing, to do with inflation, but which fit into that “things are getting worse” narrative that can start to form in your head. I have two little recent examples.

One, we’re looking for a new ceiling fan with lights, and we’re finding something odd; most of the cheap ones have a supposed wattage limit of 6.5 watts on the light fixtures. Not 65; 6.5. In other words, you can put some small 60-watt equivalent LEDs in there, but not, say, a 100-watt equivalent. (Or maybe you can and it would be fine; one fellow on Reddit thinks the fixtures are the same as before and the limit is just to get you to save energy. I’m not sure I’d risk an electrical fire to find out.)

Why? Why has all our material progress resulted in ceiling fans with cheap little light sockets that can’t accept a 10-watt bulb? What was the point of making lighting so cheap and abundant if the fixtures are designed downward to not be able to use most of the lightbulbs?

The other thing is another why? moment. Just a gripe, but the kind of thing that adds up. I was using the Yelp app the other day and I wanted to copy down something from a review. And I found that when you’re in the app, you can’t copy and paste text. Why? Why does the app on an amazing little computer in your pocket do less than the website on a desktop or laptop? Another one: why doesn’t Amazon let you keyword search reviews on their mobile site? (Or if they do, they really make it hard to find.)

Another example I like to use is restaurants increasingly separating fries from burgers and making them a separate order. The big question is something like, if we’re in such a strong economy and everything is so good, why does it feel like we’re always being squeezed a little more?

Some of this sort of thing is inflation in the sense of companies cutting corners, I guess. Some of it has nothing to do with the economy per se. But there are a lot of these little frustrations, and enough of them, amid a strong but recovering economy, will create a mental narrative that may not be strictly speaking accurate. But it is definitely understandable.

Is this mental perception real, or are people just wrong? Are there better examples of ways in which the standard of living has deteriorated even while the economy is doing pretty well? Leave a comment!

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One person commented: “I think we have to Do Something about the media and their constant voyeuristic ‘crime reporting.’”

Another replied: “Yikes. How dare the press make factual reporting available to the public? If we let that happen, how will we keep controlling the narrative that everything is fine????”

The exchange continued:

Over-reporting individual crimes (as opposed to broader statistics with proper context) makes people feel like crime (both crime in general and specific crimes) is far more frequent than it actually is.

And that has major negative social consequences, like how the over-reporting of incredibly rare stranger kidnappings resulted in the rise of the “helicopter parent”

And:

But is it “over-reporting” simply to record what happened and publish it in a newspaper? That’s just “reporting”. Almost all of the subway crime reports I read are very by-the-book acts of journalism. Not reporting those crimes feels like an attempt to sweep the problem under the rug.

Then:

If you report on a rare event so often that it distorts people’s sense of how often it happens, you are effectively lying to them about how common that event is.

And so on. In other words, there are two ideas of truth or accuracy or fact in tension here, because of how we process or extrapolate discrete facts into probabilities or risks.

I want to pull a bit from a political newsletter here, from Jonathan V. Last at the The Bulwark. This isn’t about the topic in that piece (he was writing about J.D. Vance amplifying the claim that immigrants were eating cats, which was not true), but about this idea of “fake but accurate,” or “fake but true”:

Two of the formative controversies of my journalism career were fights over Rigoberta Menchú and George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service.

You probably remember the Bush-TexANG story, in which fake documents were planted supposedly showing that Bush served dishonorably. 60 Minutes got suckered by these fakes. It was kind of a big deal.

I covered this story at the time and I was pretty hung up on the fact that the documents were forgeries. Many people on the left argued that even if the docs weren’t legitimate, the story was “fake, but true,” because Bush was a terrible person who must have served dishonorably.

The story of Rigoberta Menchú is slightly more obscure. A Guatemalan human rights activist, Menchú published a testimony of her life in 1983. The book was called I, Rigoberta Menchú and it was widely acclaimed as witness of the terrible treatment of indigenous peoples. In 1992, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the strength of her activism, which was derived largely from the platform her influential book created for her.

In 1998 an anthropologist named David Stoll published a book documenting several major discrepancies between Menchú’s account of her life and other evidence.

Over the course of a few years, this controversy blew back and forth. There was a movement to revoke Menchú’s Nobel prize. (It failed.) I didn’t cover this story at the time—I only followed it. But the fight broke down along the same basic lines: Some people (like me) thought it was important (and wrong) that Menchú had lied about key details of her life. On the other hand, Menchú’s ideological allies maintained that even if the specific details of her story never took place, there had been terrible human rights abuses in Guatemala. So her story was “fake, but true.”

You’ve probably seen or heard some variety of this argument: My facts may have been wrong, but the general thing I claimed was basically true.

What interests me about this crime reporting thing is that there’s something almost opposite going on: not fake but true, but real but false.

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