New and Old #172

Friday roundup and commentary

Where’s the nightlife in Montgomery County?, Weston Henry, Greater Greater Washington, July 16, 2024

Eleven years ago, Montgomery County formed the Nighttime Economy Task Force to address a demographic crisis: young people were not moving to the county due to its weak nightlife options….

And yet, here we are eleven years later, with no dance clubs, few late-night spots, and little evidence to suggest that the perception of the county as a social desert for singles has changed. The reason is simple. The five-member board of license commissioners won’t allow it. The Board of License Commissioners is solely responsible for creating the county’s alcohol rules and regulations, and have created a series of regulations seemingly designed with the sole intention of preventing any venue catering to young, single, or recently transplanted people to open in the county.

This makes me think of the tension between the older folks who live in places like this, and the younger people, many of whom have moved from elsewhere, who just want more. It also makes me think of how when those older folks were young, they no doubt wanted places to hang out, meet up, etc. It’s easy to project your current life back in time—to forget that you were born, as I like to put it.

I’ve heard people say, Oh, you talk about “walkability” and “community,” you just really want to walk to the bar. Or whatever. An attitude that treats amenities as unearned privileges and not obvious pieces of places worth loving and living in.

The article is quite interesting and thorough and gets into regulations and demographic statistics, but it’s the fact that a lot of legacy homeowners probably think adding more nightlife is obviously a bad thing that interests me.

Evolution of the Corner Store, Strong Towns, Davina van Buren, July 10, 2018

“I can’t tell you how hard it is to work 45–50 hours a week and then not have somewhere close by that’s open during the week to pick up fruit and vegetables,” she says. “Bessemer Curb Market was open six days a week with regular grocery store hours. You could get off work and still grab something on your way home to cook a fresh, healthy meal.”

Europe? New York City? Nope—Greensboro, North Carolina. Not a small place—300,000 today. But not a metropolis. And still the idea of buying a little something fresh for the night’s dinner existed. Granted, you probably weren’t walking there, but small businesses give you that kind of flexibility. A big supermarket can easily be too packed at rush hour to drop by for a single item.

I like this “flip the script” bit:

At the other end of the spectrum is a return to the old way of life, and somewhat surprisingly, young people are leading the charge. People often joke about millennials being lazy, but I have observed the opposite, particularly during my time living in rural Colorado and small town North Carolina. Millennials have done something truly remarkable: out of necessity, they’ve made minimalism and self-sufficiency cool. You’ll find them homebrewing craft beers, making cheese from the goats they do yoga with, and pressing cold juices from produce they grew on their urban mini-farms. In recent years, farmers markets have experienced a resurgence, and although the average age of the American farmer is 58 years old, I hope that younger generations will continue to demonstrate that farming is not only an honorable profession, it can also be a profitable one, especially with the rising interest in agritourism and conscious consumerism.

This is a really interesting piece. Read the whole thing.

The Intellectual Obesity Crisis, The Prism, Gurwinder, May 17, 2022

We evolved to crave sugar because it was a scarce source of energy. But when we learned to produce it on an industrial scale, suddenly our love for sweet things became a liability. The same is now true of data. In an age of information overabundance, our curiosity, which once focused us, now distracts us. And it’s led to an epidemic of intellectual obesity that’s clogging our minds with malignant junk.

Interesting. Feels true.

We now live in an attention economy, where people are trying to draw our interest by any means possible. Since low-quality information is just as effective at satisfying our information-cravings as high-quality information, the most efficient way to get attention in the digital age is by mass-producing low-quality “junk info”— a kind of fast food for thought. Like fast food, junk info is cheap to produce and satisfying to consume, but high in additives and low in nutrition. It's also potentially addictive and, if consumed excessively, highly dangerous.

Also feels true.

At the end of your life, when you're weighing your regrets, you probably won’t say “Man, I wish I’d spent more time browsing the web.” On the contrary, you'll have no recollection of that tweet by a stranger telling you they prefer pasta to pizza, or that gif that amused you for five seconds, or that Times piece that made you mad for a whole minute. And when you notice the myriad holes that all this junk has left in your memory, then it’ll finally be clear that you weren’t consuming it as much as it was consuming you.

Damn.

Luxury Beliefs applied to urbanism, Urbanism Speakeasy, Andy Boenau, July 11, 2024

Interesting:

Car-oriented infrastructure can be a luxury belief. 

The wealthy will always have mobility options. They can opt for large estates and however many vehicles they want, or they can opt to live comfortably in walkable, transit-rich environments.

Many other examples. Check out the piece.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #32

New and Old #33

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