New and Old #147
Friday roundup and commentary
“With so much reform happening, it’s all too easy to overlook the city that passed Virginia’s most ambitious housing policy: Charlottesville.”
Charlottesville is a great example of the American small city, and it has UVA to keep it economically vibrant, sadly unlike a lot of other small cities in Virginia (Petersburg and Roanoke come to mind). But with that vitality comes, of course, high housing prices. The city is doing something about that, including for the poorest residents at risk of being pushed out. The framing here is one of equity and social justice, but remember these aren’t platitudes:
How to translate the values of equity and racial justice into a zoning code (a planning tool some experts describe as “an American form of apartheid”) was a much trickier question. In a city that destroyed the homes of 600 Black families less than 60 years ago, residents realized that reducing displacement had to be a top priority.
Urban renewal and highway building that demolished often poor and black neighborhoods were real injustices, and zoning that doesn’t allow the housing supply to grow in tandem with the broader economy inflicts real harm.
UVA, for some reason, was against the reform, which isn’t good, but it passed unanimously. Read the piece, but the removal of the minimum-parking mandate might be the most important element of the reformed code.
Do You Know How Tomatoes Taste?, Ambrook Research, Ethan Freedman, January 12, 2024
File this under spooky tale of lost knowledge amid unprecedented affluence. Almost. The article isn’t saying we’ve forgotten what a tomato tastes like, exactly, but that we basically have to figure out how to select for better-tasting tomatoes. The problem is that durability in shipping is basically inverse to good flavor—those perfectly round, mealy tomatoes are picked green and ripened with gas, while the flavorful, vine-ripened heirloom varieties are too fragile to ship long distances and too ripe to hold very long.
It’s an interesting article about breeding a variety in between.
There’s some interesting stuff here (Japanese attitudes about entrepreneurship) and less interesting (crypto) but this bit stuck out to me:
As those of you who have been present in the United States for the last 20 years know, the United States is a different country in 2023 than it was when I left in 2004. Even though I’m someone who followed much of the news about this on the internet, a lot of it is hitting me quite hard in the face all at once. There are some things that creep up over time that are not that noticed, but really obvious if you only experience living in America once every 20-year increments.
One of those things is, portion sizes are so much larger than they were when I was growing up, to a degree where there are many restaurants that attempt to serve me things that are . . . the act of attempting to serve that would put me off the notion of eating because it does not seem to be designed to be an amount of food edible by a normal person, with my anchor for what normal people ate in the late 1990s. This is not just me saying this, by the way. You can look at pictures of McDonald’s portion sizes over time and track them as they go up into the red.
There are a lot of little things that Japan does right. I call it the will to have nice things. In the United States, many places lack the will to have nice things and suffer the consequences of that. These are just a million little paper-cut annoyances, like the delivery company deciding to deliver my bed to the middle of the front yard because they couldn’t get into the house. We are a rich and powerful nation that puts up with such obviously suboptimal things like that. I’m hitting a lot of them all at once, and it is causing a degree of culture shock — reverse culture shock, rather.
Chris Arnade had a piece sort of along these lines which I featured in last week’s roundup. Why does it seem like American life is so full of these sorts of frustrations?
Grimy Margin and Losing Sides, The Lamp, Jude Russo, January 19, 2024
The magic of cities—and I mean magic in a purely neutral sense, since magic is often very frightening stuff indeed—grows in proportion to their decay. In Washington, the old Franciscan seminary—an enchanted Art Nouveau building whose buttresses are decorated with monumental sculptures of great Franciscan theologians and scientists—has been left to molder by its most recent owner, Howard University’s School of Divinity. The abandoned storefront across from my parish church in Baltimore had, for some time, a large princess tree growing from its second story, its bole coming straight out from a hole in the brick and then making a right angle which rested, elbow-like, on the cornice of the first story. This is the stuff of dreams.
I’ve always found a certain grandeur in things forgotten and falling apart. Of course, the people living in such places probably don’t feel that way. But this is a far healthier attitude than writing it all off. Conservatives are better at this kind of prose. It’s a nice read.
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