New and Old #178
Friday roundup and commentary
The Simple Life in the City, Logan’s Substack, Logan, August 30, 2024
A lot of people are yearning for more of the simple life. And for some reason, in the American mind, simplicity is overwhelmingly equated with rural / agrarian. I really wholeheartedly relate to this desire for simplicity. I love Emily’s [other writer he’s responding to] phrasing of not wanting to be “pulled in every direction both metaphorically and geographically…” But that’s precisely why I choose to live in the city.
This is really, really great. It fills out, as I try to do too, this empty space in the American imagination of everyday urban living as an actual thing regular people can do. Not scary, not ideological, not boutique, just…life.
This captures so much of what irks me about suburbia, and more so once I realized the language to describe it:
In a human-scale neighborhood where errands can be accomplished on foot, a full day of errands can feel like a day at home, because the whole neighborhood is home. There’s no frazzled hopping in and out of the car to five different destinations, it’s just a peaceful stroll with a few stops along the way. The world is at your doorstep, instead of every interaction with the outside world being mediated through the automobile. That friction of “really, getting in the car again?” never sat right with me in the suburbs.
There’s more. Read the whole thing.
Northern Virginia is now included in the National Zoning Atlas, a decentralized effort to catalog zoning restrictions across the tens of thousands of jurisdictions that regulate land use.
The atlas reveals one factor behind the region’s high housing costs: 71% of our developable land is restricted to exclusively detached single family houses rather than more affordable types of homes.
So there you go—a precise number on it based on real data. Almost three quarters of the land on which we can build is locked up for nothing but single-family homes. It doesn’t feel like that if you drive around and see big new buildings going up all over the place. But that perception is not accurate. We could cut the single-family only land by a lot, and still build a lot more multifamily housing and still have pretty significant single-family only zones!
Read the whole thing.
Chicago is making plans to potentially open a store of its own. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office commissioned a feasibility study, delivered earlier this month, looking into the idea of establishing a city-run grocery store, which would make Chicago the first major U.S. city to do so. The report, by HR&A Advisors, found that the city could establish a three-store network that would fill its food deserts for $26.7 million in upfront investment.
There are some small towns and cities here and there that have done this, actually, but it’s a rare thing, and it seems like it might be a way to fill in the market gap where chains don’t find it worthwhile to operate—basically, analogous to public housing while the vast majority of housing is private. Whether governments can do this well, and who will actually operate the stores (will they be privately managed via a contract or actually run by the government?) are other questions.
This is not some kind of welfare or “communism”—it’s remedying what looks like a real market failure, because of the dynamics of the industry and of lower-income neighborhoods:
Smaller grocers, especially nonprofits or community-run stores, face daunting hurdles in the marketplace. Grocery already has a thin profit margin, often under 1%, so operating in a neighborhood without the high incomes needed to afford expensive purchases, and without the purchasing power of a large national chain, becomes an uphill battle.
Interesting read. It would be very cool to see this done at scale in a major city.
The Cultivated Wilderness, Virginia’s Newsletter, Virginia Postrel, August 1, 2024
As I drove through less-populated regions of the west, I was struck by how obvious it was how many people work transforming physical stuff. It’s partly what you see—farms and agricultural processing centers, oil wells and light manufacturing sites—but mostly what you don’t. Even hospitals are scarce. And you certainly don’t see the “For Your Consideration” billboards that dot my usual environs.
Flagstaff has plenty of brainiacs—and, according to an overheard restaurant conversation that appeared to follow a science department job interview, “it leans into nerd culture”—but even they need physical tools, notably telescopes. Albuquerque has the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History—a reminder of the region’s importance as a center for aerospace and defense work (and its history of uranium mines).
What an interesting road-trip, slice-of-life bit of winding commentary. Fun read.
Related Reading:
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Riffing on Logan's Substack, which was a great recommendation. . . .
English adopted two Latin roots and we have not yet sorted them out well enough to fulfill the purposes of urbanists: civis and urb. In addition, some "urbanist" problems are based on scale, while others are not. We need separate categories for scaled urban problems and non-scaled urban problems. Walkability can exist at almost any scale. Access to grand opera is unique to great cities.
I just moved back to Northern Virginia from Philadelphia, and my rent has gone up $900. I know that Nova is a coveted area and West Philly very much isn't, but the price disparity is nevertheless shocking