New and Old #149
Friday roundup and commentary
Racially motivated zoning was explicitly outlawed in 1919—private racial covenants, in 1954. Since then, discrimination has persisted, but in less explicit ways. To legally maintain homogeneous cities, the federal government pushed for the adoption of economic zoning measures that effectively supported segregation, even if they did not actually refer to race. Municipalities rezoned primarily Black neighborhoods to be commercial or industrial districts, for instance, lowering property values and ensuring only low-income families would buy homes there. At the same time, single-family zoning and minimum square footage requirements artificially increased the value of homes in primarily white neighborhoods. Such practices intentionally trapped low-income households (who were usually people of color) in areas of the city with lower property values. Although these kinds of tactics are less blatant today, all current zoning legislation owes its existence to a racially biased model of land-use planning.
At the very least, it is impossible to completely disentangle racially neutral zoning from explicitly racist forms of land-use regulation. That is the unfortunate reality that confronts you when you look at the history.
This is a very factual and level-headed essay on this topic. Very much worth a read, especially if you’re skeptical.
Dollar General Overcharges ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Customers, Lawsuit Alleges, The American Prospect, Ramenda Cyrus, January 19, 2024
Dann told the Prospect that his firm has collected “thousands of pages” of public records that show the violations. Part of the case has to do with “weights and measures standards,” which are designed to prevent stores from undercutting their customers by ensuring that products sold are the proper size and weight claimed on the packaging. As Dann told the Prospect, Dollar General regularly fails state and federal weights and measures tests, at an average of 20 percent.
This sounds like pretty old-school late 1800s-early 1900s stuff—stuff that most Americans think of as being a thing of the past. It’s like James Cagney’s 1936 noir crime film, Great Guy, about a plucky weight-and-measures inspector taking on corruption.
Read the whole thing. Opposing this kind of corporate malfeasance—that’s a kind of progressivism I think a lot of people can get behind.
The Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile, The New Yorker, Alexandra Lange, April 19, 2018
What [Susan] Kare lacked in computer experience she made up for in visual knowledge. “Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple,” she told an interviewer, in 2000. The command icon, still right there to the left of your space bar, was based on a Swedish campground sign meaning “interesting feature,” pulled from a book of historical symbols. Kare looked to cross-stitch, to mosaics, to hobo signs for inspiration when she got stuck. “Some icons, like the piece of paper, are no problem; but others defy the visual, like ‘Undo.’ ” At one point, there was to be an icon of a copy machine for making a copy of a file, and users would drag and drop a file onto it to copy it, but it was difficult to render a copier at that scale. Kare also tried a cat in a mirror, for copycat. Neither made the cut.
This is such a fun piece about the woman who came up with and drew the Mac images for all of the commands, putting into catchy and intuitive images what you once had to do via command prompt.
The Audi Effect, Straphanger, Taras Grescoe
Drivers of electric cars, hybrids, and Volvos I class with the herbivores—if they kill you, it will likely be an accident, the way a brontosaurus might have crushed Purgatorius, or other proto-primate, underfoot while browsing among the reeds.
There are three makes of car that I class with the tyrannosaurs: Mercedes, BMW, and, above all, Audi. Particularly when the car in question has a black paint job. Then, I consider myself to be in the presence of active malevolence.
A little overwrought, maybe, but apparently, there’s research finding that drivers of expensive cars are basically worse and more dangerous drivers:
In addition to a whole bunch of other nastiness, owners of soi-disant luxury cars were found to be three times less likely than drivers of “lower status” cars to give pedestrians the right of way, and four times more likely to cut off other drivers.
Correlation not causation, will it replicate, etc. But I’d believe it.
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Even assuming all the intentionality in the world into the historical record, the fact today is that the resulting zoning ans (glad you mentioned it) building codes reduce the commercial value of properties TODAY. THAT ought to be the focus of reform efforts. The historical analysis is unlikely to shame a single NIMBY and may only distract attention to assessing blame.