New and Old #193

Friday roundup and commentary

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Yaaas In My Backyard, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki Apr 26, 2024

This is a really interesting piece. It answers the question of why it seems so many of the folks involved in housing advocacy are LGBT. I’ve noticed this, and I’m sure anyone who knows a lot of people working on these issues has noticed it.

Some people don’t like it, of course. As I wrote here: “I had an old editor who was like this: he observed that housing was an important issue with LGBT folks, and he tweeted something like ‘Conservatives should be suspicious of urbanism/housing when they see all the freaks who are behind it.’”

His error, aside from being a jerk, was in not trying to think through why certain people would naturally care about certain causes.

Puzycki (who is gay himself) writes, a little tongue-in-cheek:

Naturally, I wondered why so many legislators are gay for housing. Is it a reflection of good taste? Or is there something inherent in homosexuality that predisposes these gays to favor more housing, beyond a desire to decorate more homes?

Is that what the Gay Agenda was all about?

Perhaps there’s more to it. On the one hand, YIMBYism is a nonpartisan movement that cuts across all demographics, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find that views of housing reflect proportionally the same way in the LGBTQ+ community as they do in the broader culture. But on the other hand, it is interesting that America’s only three gay governors are also all YIMBYs.

And adds:

Of course, much of the gay underworld has come out of the closet, so to speak, and gay bars have become such regular fixtures of the urban nightlife scene that drag queens compete with bachelorette-party bridezillas for the title of biggest diva. But the city has long been a safe space, a place that gays and other “sexual deviants” could find and call home. In this sense, gays are natural urbanists.

This is a tension you see with people much kinder than my old colleague: they wonder whether cities are inherently progressive places, and whether that means, as people with conservative sensibilities, that cities will never be friendly to their interests or their politics. I remember an article where the author said something like “The question is whether conservatives can or should be urbanists, when cities are always going to be Democratic.”

I’m not winking at going anti-LGBT to gain credibility with the right. Rather, I understand how the prevalence of LGBT folks and progressives generally (a lot of overlap there) in housing/urbanism can make it look like a lefty issue. You know, like nuclear non-proliferation or GMOs or something like that.

Conservatives who say “Urbanism is a universal concern that simply happens to have predominantly left-leaning advocates” face skepticism from other conservatives as well as from progressives who may in fact see urbanism as one dimension of their progressive worldview, and not a neatly severable element of it. I’ve had both of these sorts of critics argue with me, many times.

All that said, this is probably the answer to the initial question:

If a connection exists at all, I think it might be more visceral, more intuitive—this sense of longing for home, and the difficulty (or impossibility) of finding one in the America of living memory. Perhaps, now that gays have been fully welcomed into the fold of American constitutional and political life, we can see how lousy housing policies have made finding and securing a home so lousy for so many others.

For the gay community, finding home has historically meant moving to the city and discovering “family,” in a way not unlike how immigrants from certain countries will cluster in specific neighborhoods in their new cities and towns. In US cities, these clusters became some of America’s most infamous and vibrant gayborhoods.

You should be able to empathize with that feeling, with that longing. I remember seeing someone on social media saying about LGBT urbanists, on the matter of education policy: you’ll never have kids, what’s it to you? Well, we can disagree over education policy. And some of them will have kids. But everyone was a kid. The notion that you need to have skin in the game in the form of your own children to care about a policy that affects children is incredibly misanthropic and lacking in empathy, though it pretends to be the opposite.

Pasta al Limone Recipe, Serious Eats, Daniel Gritzer, February 23, 2023

I’m including this not for the recipe (I’m sure it’s good, I actually haven’t made it) but for this neat bit about the taxonomy of Italian pasta sauces:

There’s a taxonomy of pasta sauces that exists in my mind. Trace the branches to the top, and you arrive at what I think of as the mother pasta sauces. From those, almost all the other sauces are derived, at least in a technical sense if not necessarily a historical one. One important branch is the family of tomato sauces, to which a basic marinara, briny puttanesca, and spicy arrabbiata all belong. Then there are the oil-based sauces, the most basic of which is aglio e olio; add clams and white wine to it, and you basically have alle vongole. Next in line are butter sauces, which can be as simple as the famous fettuccine Alfredo. That sauce, in its original form, is nothing more than butter emulsified with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Add lemon zest and juice to Alfredo sauce, and you have this dish, spaghetti al limone—spaghetti with lemon.

This is interesting to me because my wife and I have been reading this old Italian regional cookbook from the 1970s, and we keep noticing how many extremely similar dishes there are—basically minor variants of each other—that are presented as unique, distinct, local specialties. It’s so funny to think that, say, spicy tomato sauce becomes a totally different thing when you add olives, or capers, or octopus, or parsley, or whatever. Or that a standard fish stew made with some local fish or herb suddenly becomes the defining dish of this one particular place.

I’m not really making fun of Italian culinary pride. It’s more that I personally find cooking intelligible because I view dishes in that taxonomy/family-tree kind of way: a series of proteins, sauces, starches, breadings, toppings, etc., that can be modularly swapped out to make variants.

For example, I have my family of chicken-cutlet dishes. Cutlets/egg wash/Italian breadcrumbs = chicken cutlets. Cutlets/egg wash/panko = shortcut tonkatsu. Cutlets/flour/mushrooms/marsala = chicken marsala. Cutlets/flour/chicken broth/lemon = shortcut chicken Française (it’s supposed to be egg-washed after the flour, but I find that too messy/time-consuming.)

Then you can, say, take your chicken cutlet recipe and add a topping and bake the cutlets, or flatten a chicken breast, add a topping, and roll it up for a fancy presentation. I do an “Italian” rolled chicken breast—mozzarella, ham, parsley, and garlic inside—and I do an American autumn-time rolled chicken breast—wild rice, stuffing, and roasted sweet potatoes inside. You can do this with smaller pieces of meat for what’s called “involtini.” Etc., etc.

It seems confusing to imagine each of these things as having nothing to do with one another, so I liked this article for specifically imagining the world of Italian sauces as being “related.”

Grilling Man at the End of History, Mere Orthodoxy, Stephen G. Adubato, March 19, 2024

Though my friend group consisted of mostly studious classmates and our sense of fun was fairly tame, my parents didn’t know how to handle my newfound “rebelliousness.” Who knows what could happen to us as we walked down to the convenience store? We could get hit by a car, shot, kidnapped. In our sheltered, upper-middle class suburb.

This is something I think about quite a bit: does being safe make you feel unsafe? Or as I put it in a headline once, “If you live in a castle, does everything feel like a siege?” Is there something about suburbia that actually generates this sense of paranoia?

As the author goes on to note, suburban kids these days don’t take too many risks, and that has downstream effects.

Is it any surprise that suburbia has given rise to infantilized adults in their thirties who, often are afraid to fly from the nest (whether physically or emotionally), are hopped up on anti-depressants, and opt for “partners” instead of committing to a spouse, and end up raising dogs rather than human children?

I’m not sure I quite buy this, because I doubt the extent to which these things are cultural versus economic. But it’s quite interesting, because generally you’ll see conservatives blame cities (or campuses) for the state of young people these days. Of course, most of us grew up outside of cities and absorbed a lot of our outlook before college. So perhaps this is on to something.

Also this:

As proponents of anti-suburbanism like Adrian Crook, Rollie Williams, James Howard Kunstler, and the anonymous YouTuber known as Not Just Bikes point out, commuting a long distance daily from one’s home to work place—aside from being tiring—normalizes the feeling of uprootedness from a particular locale. It contributes to the notion that one’s dwelling ought to be a private space separated from where one works, plays, goes to school, and goes shopping.

This notion of “rootedness” tends be a right-wing idea these days, though it has something in common with “small is beautiful” leftism. In any case, the idea that commutes screw up our idea of “home” and “place” seems plausible. It seems to me the burden of proof is on the people who think this is normal to prove its normalcy, not on those of us who recognize it as an aberration in respect to how humans have traditionally built and settled places to prove that humans were right all along until the middle of the 20th century.

There’s a lot in this long essay, some of it probably distasteful to progressives. But it’s a genuine right-wing argument against suburbia, and for that reason, read the whole thing.

15-minute Heritage, city neighborhoods and place identity, Policies for Places, John Tibbitt, May 31, 2023

On that idea of localism, here’s something interesting. Tibbitt overviews the idea of the “15-minute city,” centered around everyday amenities and services being in close proximity to, or mixed within, residential areas. In other words, as I’ve explained it before, a sort of technocratic reverse-engineering of traditional urban development.

But he then introduces a corollary idea, or an expansion, that I’ve not heard talked about much before, and which I really like.

There are other factors which can enhance neighborhood identity. One such which is attracting attention relates to the promotion of a shared awareness of local heritage. Inspired by the 15-minute neighborhood approach, there are now some interesting innovative projects aiming to develop what has been dubbed ‘15-minute heritage’.

At the core of the idea is to encourage people to explore the heritage which is on their doorsteps as they go about their daily business. Civic buildings, open spaces and local landmarks ranging from historical ruins to relics of local industry may all lie within a 15-minute walk from home. At the same time as digital technology allows access to museums and heritage sites around the world, increasing awareness of local heritage can foster a richer understanding of place identity and local cultural influences.

And:

Many of the heritage assets I have mentioned above are often taken for granted by local people who pass them by every day. But there are accounts of how, during COVID lockdown, when many people found themselves confined to living local, many took to exploring their local areas much more closely only to discovered numerus historical references they were previously unaware of. Writers describe how the discovery of these references prompted them to read and research to understand more about the events or people identified and understand more about how local heritage makes and shapes their communities.

This reminds me, oddly enough, of the reaction to Pokémon GO when it first came out in 2016. The game’s central mechanic, other than catching Pokémon, is “spinning” stations that give out items. The stations are located in physical places in the game’s map, which is overlaid over a real map. And each station is some kind of landmark—a sign, a statue, a building, a mural, etc. Some are more interesting than others. But it was cool to realize all the little details in your everyday environment that you might have never noticed before.

You can get a little too excited over this stuff, and its potential to really make people feel more tied to a place. But it’s not nothing. Read the whole thing.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #74

New and Old #75

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