New and Old #167

Friday roundup and commentary

How Urban Renewal Ruined Everything, The Discourse Lounge, Darrell Owens, May 17, 2024

This is a really interesting piece positing that a lot of NIMBYism and the general inability to build stuff quickly goes back to the failure of urban renewal. While he notes its particular impact on African Americans, Owens also notes that nobody really looks kindly on urban renewal today:

Urban renewal did convince most Americans that the government was incapable of delivering public projects. It had successfully frightened minorities that the government would usurp their lands and target them. It had convinced the white middle class that government programs were mostly tax-wasting, destructive projects and fueled the tax revolt of the 1970s.

However, one of the takeaways about urban renewal is mistaken:

Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not federal officials, and they chose targets like minority neighborhoods. Rather than recognizing that representation in government gave way to the destruction of neighborhoods, a myth has emerged that there weren’t enough meetings. These urban renewal projects were deliberated on for years or enshrined in local master plans decades prior— always without the explicit participation or solicitation of poor communities.

By not being honest about just how destructive urban renewal was, we end up locking ourselves into a slow, build-nothing status quo:

We live in a fantasy world where all government projects and development done efficiently come at the material cost of communities, rather than the truth which is that urban renewal was meant to destroy, not improve neighborhoods.

Read the whole thing.

When the Housing Shortage is a Windfall, Southern Urbanism, Zoe Tishaev, May 28, 2024

Generating equity through rising home values is nothing new. Real estate is one of the top assets for creating generational wealth. But just how much homeowners are making off of the housing shortage may surprise you.

This raises two points: one is that, per Charles Marohn’s new book, housing can’t really be both a necessity and a financial instrument. And two, even though homeowners may see their home values skyrocket, there’s increasingly not that much they can actually do with that value.

It’s kind of astounding, though, when you do imagine that increase in home equity as cash:

From 2021 to 2022, the average homeowner in Durham earned $54,062 simply due to the rising costs of homes. That amounts to $148 stacked on the coffee table, every day, from doing nothing.

Some housing folks dispute this “homevoter hypothesis,” i.e. the idea that NIMBYism is motivated by the financial interests of homeowners. I’m sure it isn’t the whole explanation—a lot of it is really just a general aversion to change, and some of it is racism or classism—but it’s hard to imagine money has nothing to do with it.

Classic Hometown Restaurants We Love, Arlington Magazine, David Hagedorn, May 9, 2024

This article is a delightful look at the people behind a bunch of longtime Northern Virginia restaurants, and it doubles as a list of places to try if you’re in the area!

Even in the middle of the day, the parking lot of this eatery near the Air Force Memorial is full—mostly with rideshare cars whose Ethiopian drivers are hanging out inside drinking coffee, shooting the breeze and nibbling on confections such as chornake (deep-fried dough) and doughnut-like bonbolinos.

Dama has two parts: a 60-seat restaurant and a 30-seat bakery and café with a display case full of treats by co-owner and pastry chef Almaz Dama, including mousse cake, fruit tarts, cream puffs and napoleons, many of which are vegan.

I’ve been here before. It’s excellent, and there’s no good reason not to see places like this as embodying the local community spirit that some people claim is absent in Northern Virginia. (There are bad reasons not to see them that way, though.)

Or a classic Greek-owned diner:

Given the restaurant’s pedigree and the fact that its chef is Greek, it’s no surprise the menu also features Greek specialties such as moussaka, gyros, souvlaki, stuffed grape leaves, spanakopita and baklava. “We go through gallons of avgolemono soup every day,” Kapetanakis says.  

The diner’s location in the Salona Village shopping center makes it a popular gathering spot for IT workers and defense contractors, as well as Pentagon and CIA employees. Politicos spotted at its homey tables include Terry McAuliffe, Patrick Leahy and Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

I love living here.

Making architecture easy, Works in Progress, Samuel Hughes, September 7, 2023

This is a really good piece on the whole question of “beauty in architecture,” and it sidesteps “beauty” per se in order to discuss the actual question of preferences and the likeability of building styles:

To some people, this framing feels strange. These people have the impression that we used to make fewer ugly buildings and dysfunctional places. They don’t accept the idea that technological modernity somehow morally requires us to build in an austere ‘modernist’ style. But they also find it bizarre to be dogmatically in favour of the use of old architectural styles rather than new ones. People in this group feel that the debate has gone wrong somewhere. They are ideologically homeless: they are obviously not ‘modernists’, but they are also uneasy with the ‘traditionalist’ label. I count myself in this category, and I think quite a few other people fall into it too…

there are important reasons why we should favour some architectural styles over others – reasons that are special to architecture, and that set it apart from music, literature, painting or film. Architecture is a public art, a vernacular art, and a background art: it is created by a huge range of people, and experienced involuntarily by an even wider one. This means that we need architectural styles that are as accessible as possible, to the full range of people who live with what we build, and to the full range of builders who create it. Some ‘traditional’ styles might well be useful in achieving this, but it is not their being traditional that matters: any style with broad and deep appeal will do just as well.

I will probably be coming back to this question in a separate piece myself. This one is very long, detailed, and illustrated. Read the whole thing.

---

Related Reading:

New and Old #22

New and Old #23

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!