New and Old #163
Friday roundup and commentary
It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Problem. I’m 33., New York Times, Jeanna Smialek, March 2, 2024
I am no simple crowd follower. What I am is 32, about to be 33 in a few weeks.
And there are so many of us.
If demographics are destiny, the demographic born in 1990 and 1991 was destined to compete for housing, jobs and other resources. Those two birth years, the people set to turn 33 and 34 in 2024, make up the peak of America’s population.
As the biggest part of the biggest generation, this hyper-specific age group — call us what you will, but I like “peak millennials” — has moved through the economy like a person squeezing into a too-small sweater. At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake. My cohort has an outsized amount of economic power, but that has sometimes made life harder for us.
And:
That economic influence extends well beyond day-to-day consumption. When peak millennials went to college in 2009, the enrollment spike was so significant that community colleges that had once prided themselves on welcoming all students started to turn away applicants.
When that group began to graduate and moved for jobs, the population of metro areas like New York City, San Antonio and San Francisco jumped to new highs, leading to a fierce contest for a limited supply of apartments in some places — the Bay Area in particular.
That re-urbanization boom came “when those millennials were coming of age, getting their first jobs, looking for housing, looking for roommates,” said Igor Popov, chief economist at Apartment List.
You know what this makes me wonder? How much of the phenomenon where “Millennial” turned into a byword for “immature” or “faddish/trendy” or whatever was a sort of accident? A conflation of a culture-war grievance with the inherent dislike a lot of people have for fads? There must have been a similar feeling at the time when the Baby Boom generation were all doing the same things. Why is there so little historical memory of any of that? What I mean is, neon signs must have been viewed with the same derision as those coffee shops with some faux-rustic sign that says “Est. 2019” under the name.
Millennials snapped up houses in 2020 and in 2021 as the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to near-zero. That was partly about the pandemic: People wanted space amid lockdowns. But it also reflected that a big group of people were finally far enough along in their economic lives to buy property.
So maybe we’re two years from a huge childcare crisis!
Read the whole thing. It’s not a framing I’ve really ever seen articulated in detail: that a lot of the weird economic moments we’re having are tracking the major life stages of this very large cohort of (now) 30-somethings as they age. Interesting stuff.
On a spring Tuesday morning, a few dozen senior citizens who range between 65 to nearly 100 years old and live in the historic Wah Luck House leave their neighborhood, D.C.’s Chinatown, to go grocery shopping.
It’s an orchestrated event that happens once a month: A senior support center located in their apartment complex, called the Wah Luck Adult Day Care Center, charters buses for the group. The seniors leave their home in the morning, taking foldable shopping carts with them. Once on the bus, they’ll be driven 30 minutes west to the Great Wall Supermarket in Falls Church, Virginia.
Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown is kind of infamously bereft not only of a single Chinese grocery store or supermarket, but to a great extent even of Chinese restaurants. The region’s “Chinatown” is more or less in and around Rockville, Maryland, and there’s a smaller population of Chinese people and businesses in Fairfax County.
Chan and his neighbors at the Wah Luck House have witnessed great change over the years, both in his building and in neighborhood — including the shuttering of many Chinese businesses. A decade ago, Chan says the last full service Chinese grocery store closed, leaving his community without affordable, familiar food.
And:
Another Wah Luck resident shopping, Sui K. Foo, was glad to be shopping for groceries. His cart was filled with Asian greens. If he had it his way, he’d go grocery shopping five times a week. Because the adult day care center can only take them once a month, Foo has friends drive him to the store when he needs more food. Great Wall Supermarket is accessible by public transportation, but it’s more than an hour long by bus, which can be grueling commute for seniors.
Supermarkets are one of the most basic amenities—necessities, really. The article is also about the effort to try to bring a Chinese supermarket back to Chinatown, but it’s difficult. Ultimately, nothing the city does can guarantee that a private business will find it worthwhile to set up shop. But there are, of course, things that can be done to make that proposition more amenable. That would be nice.
Clicking Our Way Down Main Street, Discourse Magazine, James Lileks, April 3, 2023
It won’t happen everywhere. Most of these main streets are gone for good. Google Street View is useful for reminding us how many main streets slipped into slumber, how many places rich with simple human history are just waiting for someone to bring life back to the brick mausoleums. Waiting for someone to open the old movie theater and splash a story on the empty wall….
Alas. At least we can tour the remnants of the American Main Street, and pay our respects. Google Street View’s account of these places is a visual eulogy, necessary evidence of the changes wrought on the nation. At some point these empty places will fall, or burn and collapse, but of course the same is true of the stars the Webb telescope sees. There’s always a day when the shopkeeper closes up and clicks off the neon, and the sign never lights again.
File this under “things I wish I wrote.” I did actually write, years ago, about the historical/archival use of Google Street View. It’s an incredible resource for the work I do. This is a really great piece, with some architectural history too. Read the whole thing.
Walking all 28 miles of L.A.’s longest street in a day tested our limits, Los Angeles Times, Pedro Moura and Brian van der Brug, May 6, 2024
This one is last, because it’s paywalled and I couldn’t find a gift link anyone had shared. But it sure looks like a fun piece, and it’s also the sort of thing I’ve occasionally done, though never so long!
Related Reading:
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WRT the Chinese grocery store - we are so conditioned by our environment that we think private, for profit entities are the only ones who can solve any problem.
The lack of a grocery (or general) store is a problem in many locales throughout the world, and a tried and true approach is a cooperative. The community agrees to fund the inventory and then hires management to keep it running or has rotating volunteer staffing.
In DC’s case, they could propose a tax break or grants for non-profit cooperatives to help deal with the cost of the lease.
"so we're maybe two years from a childcare crisis."
As a father of a 2 year old and 1 year old, it feels like we already have one. We got on the list for daycare around 25 weeks of pregnancy. Our second child only got in because they were a sibling. There already aren't enough slots for kids, and we're already paying tens of thousands of dollars per year