New and Old #185
Friday roundup and commentary
A Requiem for The River Arts District, On Housing, Aaron Lubeck, October 4, 2024
I was in the mountains on September 27th, 2024, immediately after Hurricane Helene hit. Few areas were hit harder than River Arts. Much of the district was under 25’ of water, with the lowest terraces completely wiped out. Despite what was described as a 500-year flood, it appears that the historic row buildings—which anchor the district—survived, but with significant water damage. I pray that they are salvageable, as they are the DNA from which any hope of restoration will flow.
One of the reasons River Arts is worth studying is the third-fiddle role the district played in Asheville. It’s lesser known than the city’s two main attractions: the grand Biltmore Estate, marked with wineries and baron-worthy architecture, and the lively downtown, filled with James Beard Award-winning restaurants and world-class breweries. The River Arts District represented an organic alternative localism—undercapitalized, scrappy, and alive—all things I persistently advocate for under the broad-brush brand of incrementalism.
What does that mean?
Incrementalism is also where 100% of a city’s placemaking happens.
The places that matter—the places that people identify with and think of as their own, the places where people do first dates and fall in love—they’re almost exclusively incremental. You don’t take a date to a corporate Chili’s; you take them to Katie Button’s Curate.
Incrementalism is largely synonymous with localism. Wall Street has never built a James Beard Award winning-restaurant. And they never will. They can’t because, at Wall Street’s scale of financialization, risk aversion is the name of the game, pushing all development into an unambitious, predictable, mushy, mediocre middle.
The antithesis to this financialized mediocrity is localism. The one and only cure for run-away machine-like corporatism is a fierce and unbending commitment to localism.
Good stuff. Maybe some exceptions—I’m sure there are first dates at chain restaurants. But it’s broadly true that most places we really like were not created; they evolved. There’s a sense of fullness, a sense of mental engagement, in these places which simply can’t be reverse-engineered. You just have to let it happen. And like planting a tree, the best time to start is right now.
Read the whole thing.
The Lost Art of Waiting, The Free Press, Christine Rosen September 14, 2024
The Free Press is one of those publications, like The Federalist used to be, that publishes a lot of hacky political stuff but also some genuinely interesting pieces. This is one of those pieces:
Waiting isn’t what it used to be. These days, we expect to be able to avoid the dullness of it—and not just when we are spending a day at a theme park. Nearly every moment of interstitial time can be filled with entertainment or communication. We turn to our smartphones to check email, text a friend, or play Candy Crush. It feels good to remove oneself mentally from the reality of waiting; our new and boundless capacity to escape tedium can feel like a micro-revolution. But the problem with revolutions is that they sometimes devour their children.
The point is this:
As life gets faster, we have become more impatient about everything, including the interactions of daily life. Not long ago, New York Times technology reporter Nick Bilton wrote a screed against what he called “time-wasting forms of communication.” For Bilton, who uses X to stay in touch with his mother, this includes most of the things that used to be called pleasantries.
This feels intuitively true for me. The cost of convenience is that it takes from you your ability to go without it. I feel like there must be a saying or a fable or something that captures this. It’s kind of like King Midas turning his daughter into gold and starving to death because his food turned to gold upon touching it.
To be a conservative is to be able to say, “This thing I want may be bad for me, and I may not know exactly how, but perhaps I should build up the character to resist it.” To be able to discern and resist a part of yourself—the part we call fallenness or original sin or human nature. A progressive believes that human nature is treatable; a conservative understands that human nature is a chronic condition.
Also read the whole thing.
Why the U.S. is covered in strip malls, CNBC, Shawn Baldwin, October 8, 2024
The U.S. has more than 68,000 strip malls from coast to coast, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.
Convenience, hybrid work and the increase in millennials moving to fast-growing suburbs are driving more shoppers toward the shopping centers.
“Lines are shorter because of smaller stores, parking is easier, they’re usually on your way home from dropping your kid off at school or on your way home from work,” said real estate attorney Jessica Vara of Hunton Andrews Kurth.
Interesting. This tracks with something someone said to me about Walmart being convenient: actually it isn’t that convenient, because putting everything under one roof, accessed by one huge parking lot, means you can no longer just pop in for a minute, grab your stuff, and get going again. Retail at that scale and concentration incentivizes bigger and longer shopping trips. Convenience is in the eye of the beholder.
Strip malls—the little ones closer to the road with large collections of smaller stores—do have a certain convenience. Really, a classic strip mall is basically just an urban commercial street with its upper residential floors shaved off, and set back from the street a little bit to fit a reasonably sized parking lot. That’s a different creature from the big mall or “power center” shopping center anchored by a bunch of big chain store.
The Ramyun Zip opened a couple weeks ago and is building up a collection that will include more than 120 ramen flavors filling an entire wall of the restaurant. Bowls start at $5.50.
Owner Chris Kim says instant ramen shops like this have taken off in South Korean, especially since the pandemic. When many restaurants shut down, “Hangang ramen” spots popped up across the Hangang parks that line Seoul’s Han River so that people could make themselves a hot bowl to enjoy al fresco.
Centreville, the town this is in, has a large Korean community, so it’s not surprising it located there. There are lots of other Korean restaurants in Centreville (including some great Korean BBQ), but this particular concept is, I believe, a first. It’s always really cool to see a restaurant with a specialty focus like this, or like this Indian all-you-can-eat thali restaurant I wrote about.
I don’t know whether this will stick or turn out to be a passing fad (self-serve frozen yogurt, sushi burritos, mochi donuts come to mind—still around but not “the new thing”). But I do know I have to try it!
Related Reading:
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"And like planting a tree, the best time to start is right now."
Correction: The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. Right now is the SECOND best time.
[winking face emoji]
I can't come up with a teaching fable on the loss of patience. I can only shamelessly adapt Oscar Wilde's epigram.
"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Those in a hurry know the length of everything but figuring out the value takes too damn long.