New and Old #205

Friday roundup and commentary

Your Neighborhood Does Not Belong To You, Flaneurbanist, Billy Cooney, February 17, 2025

The language used here—destroy, overtake, tower over—is used to paint development as oppressive. This is not only hyperbolic. This view is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of a city. Any city’s natural inclination is to grow and change. What people fail to realize is that the place they currently occupy is merely the current rendition in a long history of change. Not recognizing this is to be woefully ignorant of history.

This is exactly what I’ve repeated many times, against NIMBYs who see themselves as guardians of their little local place. In reality, in my view, trying to freeze a place at a moment in time does not enhance but diminishes what it is.

This is a good statement of the whole worldview of urbanists/YIMBYs/whatever you want to call people who believe that natural, organic change is an inherent and necessary element of human settlements:

The people opposing change in Cobb County today are exactly the people who transformed the Cobb County that former residents wanted to preserve. They moved into Cobb County by the droves, desecrating Cobb County’s paradise, or so the NIMBYs of the past would have us believe. And then they tried to put up the drawbridge behind them. It was okay for them to transform Cobb County in their image, but god forbid someone comes along after them with the same idea. Refusing to recognize one’s own contribution to changing a city and the rights of others to act in the same way is arguing in bad faith.

We don’t come into this world ready-made, and neither do our neighborhoods. They are made from scratch, transforming natural spaces into human ones, and they continually evolve thereafter. Just like the fields that were built upon to found towns, the town itself gives way to the city. The places we’ve come to love today could have only come about by this process of change.

And this bit hints, as I often do, at the almost metaphysical aspect of development, and why NIMBYism is not just often bad land-use policy, but a kind of foundational error about reality:

If our neighborhood is so sacred, so worth fighting for, then the woods at large can’t be. The woods were destroyed to create this sacred place. But NIMBYs exist in a world where nothing is sacred but the present. What was destroyed for them—whether it's an historic home or a forest—doesn’t matter. What could be created from more change—an apartment complex for new neighbors, a community center, or a daycare—doesn’t matter, either. To NIMBYs, nothing exists before or after them.

Read the whole thing.

No, You and a Couple of Friends Shouldn’t Buy a Dead College, College Towns, Ryan M. Allen, February 24, 2025

This is a really good and interesting piece, because it methodically, and in plain language, explains why defunct college campuses are so cheap, and why those prices are probably “right” given the cost involved in doing something with them. Knowledge over up-the-wrong-tree “common sense” is always good.

Well, I am here to squash that dream. I study these dead and dying colleges, having visited 30 of them so far. I am here to show and tell you why you and your friends shouldn’t get together to buy one of these closed college campuses.

I’ve never had this fantasy, but I can imagine the allure of it. Just like “let’s build a cabin out in the woods” or something. But as with all such projects, the costs are usually hidden and sometimes surprising or unforeseeable.

Not just the kind of obvious deferred maintenance on aging buildings, but stuff like this:

On my own campus of Soka University of America, we have an entire crew of people making sure things look nice. They do a great job! But it’s hard work. We even have a secret nursery on campus to grow and cycle out various plants.

Colleges that are dead or dying cut back on much of the landscaping, keeping the bare minimum to comply with local ordinances. It shows when visiting these places. They might not be fully overrun, but shuttered campuses are shabbier and bushier than their fully-functioning counterparts.

I.e.: “Which of your friends would be willing to mow 120 acres under a hot summer sun?”

And zoning issues which limit what can be done with campuses, such as limits on commercial uses or a requirement of some educational mission:

Further, the “institution” label for universities is often tied to an educational function. This label is attached to the land itself, not necessarily the university. If a university closes, whoever buys the land should also have a relevant educational mission. This is why it is easier for other colleges or schools to purchase closed colleges.

Spiritedness and self-reliance, Archedelia, Matthew B. Crawford, January 9, 2024

I’m not a fan of the writing of Matthew Crawford that I’m aware of: a book he wrote in praise of driving, which I found far too accommodating of motorists’ vices and far too dismissive of the problems with car dependency, pedestrian safety issues, etc.

However, there were some parts even of that book that I liked: the bits on zoning and doing your own mechanic work and the immense knowledge of old-time parts counter workers at a dealership. Crawford is a proponent of what I like to call mechanical literacy, or understanding how things work and working on them. This post is actually from his much older book on this general topic, Shop Class as Soulcraft.

Writing about the conundrum of replacing an aging car the dealership has no interest in, or possibly screwing up your own work, he writes:

The idea of opportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate.

It’s kind of a shame to me that someone with such an incisive sense of these things also dismisses concerns I find extremely important. But nobody’s perfect, and on this subject Crawford is very good. If this interests you, read the whole thing.

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For the fourth item today, I’m linking to two Reddit threads (this and this) about the extreme difficulty of retro (‘80s and ‘90s/8- and 16-bit) video games. There are some interesting suppositions or explanations for this. And some interesting comments in general.

For example: “It’s difficult to judge some of these old games. Can I really call it a great game if I never see past the 3rd level without modern cheats that weren’t even present on the cart?”

Or: “There’s absolutely no reason to have to keep playing the same levels you’ve mastered over and over again just to get one more chance to try the next level. That is just an old way they used to make short games longer. If you save state before every level this lets all your gameplay focus on actually improving at the level you’re struggling on. Then you can beat even difficult games in a relatively short amount of time without save states once you learn all levels using save states.”

bit about Lion King and rental period

These are interesting design-related observations:

Nobody really was used to making games that were intended to be home console exclusives and not arcade games first, with a console port a secondary thought. Either they still kept it difficult to steal imaginary quarters or just not a lot of experience in refining gameplay etc.

(I.e., arcade games were specifically designed to eat quarters, and despite the economic model for console games being different, the design philosophy in the early days of home gaming had not adjusted yet.)

Or maybe the difficulty was an accident of the playtesting procedures of the day:

Aside from trying to squeeze as many gameplay hours out of an otherwise short game, the difficulty level in TMNT and other older games was often high because the developers (who were often small teams or even a single guy) used their own playtesting during development to calibrate the difficulty level. They didn't have separate teams or focus groups for that kind of thing. Playing the game for several hours a day for months straight, they became very good at the game, and the difficulty ended up being calibrated to their own skill level.

And there’s this conspiratorial but possibly correct explanation: “I’ve always given credence to the theory that games were made more difficult to ensure they couldn’t be beaten over a weekend, as video game rentals began to cut into sales.”

One more: “Take Castlevania 1 for example, it is rough the first time playing through. But, once you stick it out and know how to beat the levels and bosses, you can beat the entire game in 15/20 minutes.”

That idea, that these games are 20-30 minute affairs in theory but hours, hours, and hours of endlessly looping the first two or three levels in practice, is interesting. I wrote once about how much work the developer put into these old games, especially for the arcades, knowing full well that very few players would ever see half of that work. That’s dedication, I guess.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #98

New and Old #99

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