New and Old #45
Friday roundup and commentary
The Fascinating Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Streetcar Suburbs, Governing, Emma Newcombe, January 27, 2022
But suburbs were not always so closely tied to the automobile. In fact, from about 1890-1930, they were shaped by a completely different form of transportation: the streetcar. The rise and fall of the streetcar suburb is a story of how government dollars (or a lack thereof) can drastically shape urban planning and housing development.
Read the whole, interesting piece. Streetcar suburbs are a sort of missing link between old urban cores and modern suburbs. They got a lot of things right, and to this day many former streetcar suburbs are well-loved places that mix gentle density with some privacy, green space, and proximity to transit, retail, and activities.
These were basically the greenfield (i.e. built on previously undeveloped land) subdivisions of the day, but by continuing many of the design elements of urban neighborhoods, they balanced their urban lineage and suburban character well.
The article also goes into the complex decline of the streetcar, which was not nearly as simple and one-dimensional as Roger Rabbit made so many people think.
New, but Far From Perfect, New York Times, Ronda Kaysen, March 8, 2015
Do they make them like they used to? It depends. For every old building that feels like it’s falling apart, there’s one with walls that could survive a bomb blast. It really comes down to the individual building. Likewise, new doesn’t always mean better. This piece from a mid-2010s building boom in New York City is a warning about rapid, shoddy construction. Everything from the paint and finishes to the structural aspects like plumbing, wiring, and concrete can and do go wrong, sometimes within just a few years.
But there’s a factor other than rapid construction here. One interesting factor here is that many of these buildings were begun before the Great Recession, after which they changed hands and were completed by a different developer. That broke the flow of the projects—and perhaps the fact that many of these buildings sat for years in an unfinished state also contributed to some of the problems.
The Railroad That Wasn’t Built, Goodspeed Histories, Marfy Goodspeed, August 31, 2019
This is a long and detailed account of a proposed rail line in the vicinity of my New Jersey hometown, back in the 1800s. The details may or may not interest you, but check it out anyway. It’s a fascinating website full of pieces about New Jersey history.
What I always notice about stories like this is the ease with which new rail lines could be built in those days, or even electric streetcar lines into the 20th century. Projects that take many years and billions of dollars today were often just proposed, debated, and built in short order. There are reasons for this, some good of course (like property rights and environmental concerns). But there’s something real to the feeling that it’s just very hard to get anything done today.
I studied environmental policy in grad school, and one of the first issues I became interested in was the intersection of consumerism and recycling/waste management (or in plain English, people buy too much junk, where does it all go?). So this article caught my attention. Tons of basically disposable consumer devices using lithium batteries, many difficult to repair or recycle, are ending up in the regular recycling stream, thrown in with cans, bottles, and other ordinary recyclables.
But these things aren’t just not recyclable—the batteries explode when put through shredders or run over by trucks, and have been responsible for a raft of fires at recycling plants. This is the kind of issue that suggests the need for some kind of regulation, since it clearly transcends individual responsibility. But what exactly the right set of regulations is, I don’t know.
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