New and Old #176
Friday roundup and commentary
Here are some reasons why I don’t think the word “urbanism” communicates very well on behalf of our cause:
Many people don’t know what urbanism means
I suppose my most important problem with the word is that very few people outside the inner circle of self-identified urbanists understand what we are talking about when we talk about urbanism, good or bad. Allow me to share an anecdote….
Every word of this is worth reading. Benfield worries in the intro if urbanists will take offense at his questioning of the term, but I don’t think so. And I think he’s right that most regular people don’t know what the hell “urbanism” means. We have to be careful that we don’t end up doing for urbanism what J.D. Vance has done for starting a family, as I put it here: “concealing something normal and human behind a bizarre ideological edifice.” Now I don’t think most of us do that, but communicating ideas clearly is really, really important.
He goes on to note that the boutique use of “urbanism” to mean something like “modern advocacy for traditional urban patterns” is not even a recognized dictionary definition of the word. And he notes—a point I emphasize all the time—that urbanism can exist outside of what most people would consider “cities”:
“Urbanism” can even be a little deceptive in that it is not necessarily about cities, exactly, not in the way that most people think of them; the word also applies to places such as small towns and suburbs at a considerable distance from something ordinary folks would describe as a city.
My own thought: I think you could say that self-identified urbanists are a little bit like foodies: we (I think I’m both) talk about food and architecture in detailed, specific—you know, nerdy—ways. But a lot of people sense and feel these things without a precise language, and we can sound like elitists or obsessives (or nerds). The key is to figure out how to communicate these “boutique” concerns about things that really affect all of us every day.
Read the whole thing. It’s excellent.
The Vicious Cycle of American Housing, Liberal Currents, Kevin Erdmann, April 10, 2024
A polity can find itself in a vicious cycle where bad public policy leads to bad outcomes. Instead of retracting that policy, additional policies are layered atop it, each with their own unintended consequences, which, in turn, attract more layers of new policies.
This is common with issues like immigration, drugs, and sex. In those arenas, one sign of ineffective policy is the rise of black markets. You might say that the increasingly common tent encampments in our major cities are our housing black markets.
Interesting. No doubt that a lot of public policy is basically messing with a mess and making more of a mess.
There’s a lot here and it’s a little bit technical. But I want to point to Erdmann’s really great term for “superstar cities”: “closed access cities.” Sometimes the right words help you perceive what’s going on. That’s precisely it. The Supreme Court, when it found zoning constitutional, “opened up a century where city-building as it had necessarily occurred in the past could be outlawed as a nuisance.” That’s it. It all changes when you understand that this is what happened and what we’re trying to undo.
What does this situation mean? For people without a ton of money, this:
For families with lower incomes, housing is less of a luxury and more of a necessity. At some point, there are no more bedrooms to give up. No longer commute to bear. It becomes a stark choice between paying more, choosing to be regionally displaced, or becoming homeless.
This also clarifies and articulates some things:
In the past, successful cities didn’t become such outliers in average incomes. They mostly grew larger. Every new engineer that moved to Detroit in the early twentieth century was joined by teachers, police officers, waitresses, clerks, etc. The average Detroit income was only moderately higher than other cities. Mostly, it grew.
Today, the cities with high incomes are the slowest-growing cities in the country. Their rates of net domestic migration are the worst in the country. An anthropologist looking at only their population and migration trends would assume there had been a famine or a natural disaster. It is their outmigration that is unusual.
There’s also this important point:
Where housing is in shortest supply, tent cities are accumulating in our parks and on our street corners. Of course, the residents that end up homeless aren’t middle managers and engineers. They are the most vulnerable residents. Where homes are ample, mentally ill residents mostly have a home to sleep in. The rate of homelessness across the US is correlated with low housing vacancies and high rents. It isn’t correlated with mental illness or drug use.
I think part of the resistance to this is the sense that people who end up homeless must have deserved it. Perhaps, on some level, people even think the unfair situation is the one where people who “deserve” to end up homeless are kept off the street by cheap housing—that by getting rid of bottom-rung housing we’re making the outcome in reality match what it’s “supposed” to be. Maybe I overestimate how heartless people are. I’d like to think so.
I can’t tell you if everything in here is correct, per se. But it’s really well written and it recasts a lot of these housing issues in a way that makes you look at them new.
The last days of California’s oldest Chinese restaurant: From anonymity to history, Los Angeles Times, Jessica Garrison, August 1, 2024
One day in 2022, Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a law professor at UC Davis, stopped in for lunch. Chin is an expert in immigration law, specifically the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that made it incredibly difficult for Chinese people to immigrate to the U.S. And he knew something the Fongs didn’t, something that would complicate the family’s efforts to wind the business down: If the sign behind the counter was accurate, if the Chicago Cafe truly had been operating since 1903, that would make it a treasure of historic significance.
In January, UC Davis announced the results of Chin’s research: Of the tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants serving food in America, the Fongs’ unsung little diner is the oldest one continuously operating in California, and probably in the U.S. The Fongs suddenly found themselves in possession of an important piece of American history, which had been sitting in plain sight in a farm town 20 miles northwest of Sacramento.
A story hiding in plain sight. That’s what so much “history” is: accidents of discovery that could just as easily have gone unknown. These sorts of “lasts” are one of my favorite things to document and learn about. These questions of how far back you can trace a thing, and whether we can ever really conclusively know the answer.
There’s also the question of immigration and, yes, racism. And also the weird fact that restaurants are in a lot of ways instruments for immigration and immigrant families as much as they are sort of businesses enterprises in their own right:
For a time, restaurants had their own exception to the Chinese Exclusion Act — which some coined “the lo mein loophole” — that allowed business owners to go to China on merchant visas to bring back employees. In the years after 1915, when a federal court added restaurants to the list of businesses allowed such visas, the number of Chinese restaurants in America exploded.
Really interesting, complicated piece. Read the whole thing.
The case of the angry history postdoc, Noahpinion, Noah Smith, May 28, 2024
A lot of what’s in here has to do with intra-progressive social media spats, but this is the bit that stands out, along with the basic argument that we’re “producing” more highly educated people trained in specific academic fields than we have an economy that can absorb in jobs having anything to do with what they studied and paid for:
Why is no one hiring historians? There are four basic reasons. The first and most important — which almost no one ever talks about, because it’s supposed to be so obvious — is that the U.S. university system is largely done expanding. The 20th century saw a massive build-out of universities, which required hiring a massive number of tenure-track professors. Then it stopped. And because tenure is for life, the departments at the existing universities are clogged with a ton of old profs who will never leave until they age out. New hires must therefore slow to a trickle, since as long as the number of profs is roughly constant, they can only be hired to replace people who retire or die.
Tell me if this sounds like anything else.
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**"The Death and Life of Great American Cities"** written by **Jane Jacobs** was a highly influential work. Did the movement it inspired have a name, and what happened to that momentum? I know that part of the momentums on off into the historical preservation movement.
The Benfield article speaks to a lot of my concerns with how progressives approach social policy. You hear a lot of "80% of people say they want [X progressive policy], but they don't vote for it." I think it's because so often the pitch is hidden under layers and layers of jargon. My town's business development organization did it a really smart way. They know people here want more urbanism, but they sent around a survey that kept it very simple: "What kind of new restaurant would you most like to see open here?" "What kind of new retail store would you most like to see open here?" "What kind of food or grocery store would you most like to see open here?" Get that info, attract someone who will build it, and the people will come.