New and Old #125
Friday roundup and commentary
The Death of the Neighborhood Grocery Store, Southern Urbanism Quarterly, Dave Olverson, July 13, 2023
Planners and urbanists love to come up with technical terms. For example, growing up in Hawaii, I lived in a house with a small cottage on the property. We called it our “ohana” unit. Many years and one planning degree later, I now recognize that as an accessory dwelling unit (ADU). I can’t imagine a more technocratic shift, from ohana, meaning family in the Hawaiian language, to the robotic and jargony idea of a “dwelling unit.”
Likewise, there has been renewed discussion of accessory commercial units (ACUs) recently. A hundred years ago, these were simply referred to as neighborhood groceries.
This is a good point. Language matters—and language that sounds contrived, stripped of any sort of human sentiment, raises suspicion. But on the other hand, language like this is an attempt to understand and reverse-engineer via policy what we once permitted to develop naturally. And that’s a lot better than nothing.
But anyway, this piece is about small grocery stores. Olverson writes that the effective nationwide ban on small neighborhood grocery stores
means that in most residential neighborhoods, people don’t have a choice. They are forced to drive to get their groceries. What’s more, thanks to zoning codes, residents have been stripped of any avenue to come up with solutions to the problems facing their neighborhood. They have no agency over whether or not a large supermarket chooses to locate in their area.
What if, instead of being at the mercy of the workings of a giant corporation, headquartered hundreds or thousands of miles away, residents were allowed to open a produce stand? More broadly, what if residents were allowed to respond to the needs of their community? Wouldn’t that be a more equitable landscape?
Good stuff. Read the whole thing.
Let Fairfax County grow, Greater Greater Washington, Luca Gattoni-Celli, August 7, 2023
There’s a lot here, and you should read the whole thing. First of all, I know Luca, and he’s neither a developer nor an activist. He’s an utterly normal person with a family who realized that the housing situation in the D.C. metro area is insane. Let me put it this way: he’s no more an ideologue than I am. Looking for housing here will do that to you.
Now a little bit from the piece:
Fairfax’s residential density is low, as shown in a map of 2020 census tracts. For reference, Alexandria’s quiet, desirable Del Ray neighborhood has about 10,600 residents per square mile west of its main street and about 8,800 to the east. Only a small fraction of Fairfax’s land matches Del Ray’s density, illustrating the county’s enormous capacity to grow.
In other words, there’s a heck of a lot of room to grow before you reach truly urban densities of the sort that would change the kind of place Fairfax County is.
He also makes the point that sprawl intensifies traffic and commute times, because so many people from further out pour onto the highways; much of the new exurban housing lacks close access to transit.
Whatever style or language the YIMBY message takes, its underlying claim is basically true: people need somewhere to live, and our land use regime seems to be based on the opposite.
Lobby Life, Slate, Henry Grabar, July 28, 2023
Superficially, the hotel lobby contains the ingredients of a third place—it’s free, it’s temperate, you can stay as long as you want. But its true nature is the polar opposite. The hotel lobby is a transitory place. A useful place. It’s a place where you’re more likely to meet a stranger than a friend.
In a way, if it’s there, it doesn’t matter what it is. Maybe. This is a fun piece that is, despite this critique, cautiously appreciative of the quasi-public space that a hotel lobby is. I like them too.
As a kid, I remember a couple of day trips to Manhattan when we stopped by a fancy hotel that had a cat lounging around the lobby. I got to pet the cat for a few minutes while my parents chatted with the doorman. Of course, that was a nicer space than your typical chain hotel lobby, but it’s one of those things that’s sort of a blank canvas.
The death of ownership, Business Insider, Nathan Proctor May 18, 2023
Andy Harding has been running his small electronics-repair shop, Salem Techsperts, in Salem, Massachusetts, for the past eight years. He does steady business fixing phones for college students and nurses from the nearby hospital. But soon after the release of the iPhone 13 in September 2021, Harding noticed a minor change to Apple's software that he thought might shut down his small shop for good.
Proctor is a major right-to-repair advocate. I think this is one of the most important political movements out there. But it’s not really political. Like housing, it’s sort of a pre-political idea that’s forced to subsist within a political movement. The folks worried about being forced to own nothing and be happy should be upset at Apple, not people building apartments.
Once again, read the whole thing.
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Language does, indeed, matter, and "accessory dwelling unit" is a name that only a technocrat could love. Calling it an "ohana" unit is a good start, but I also like the name used in, I believe, Southern California (and maybe the southwest in general?), which is "casita". Who could dislike a casita? So much better than other term, "mother-in-law" unit, too. And if you don't think terminology is important, look at the progress made when advocates stopped calling for "gay marriage" and instead asked for "marriage equality".