New and Old #52
Friday roundup and commentary
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This did the rounds among urbanists, and it’s excellent. Read the whole thing for a view—like, in a somewhat different area, my piece about a thrift store zoning dispute in Montgomery County—of how these development fights play out on the ground. And frankly, of how shortsighted and provincial a lot of people sound, in neighborhoods that are evolving with or without their approval.
This, towards the beginning, says a lot:
“I understand that there’s a lot of emotion behind this, and a lot of folks that think that townhouses will be damaging to your neighborhood,” Carrier [planning board chair] said. “I think you will decide — if this goes forward, five years from now — you’ll decide it’s OK.”
Basically, that’s it. Many people oppose change reflexively in cases like this, but in most cases the substance of the change is just fine. I think about my hometown’s prime landmark, the historic Union Hotel. For over a decade, the town fought over redevelopment while the hotel fell apart. “Five floors? That’s too tall, could you do 4?” “100 parking spaces? We need at least 120!” “200 apartments? How about 180?” Etc. So much of it just isn’t worth arguing about. There’s a real opportunity cost to freezing places like this.
The broader takeaway for me is not that all NIMBYish sentiment is necessarily wrong, or illogical. The general attitude of preferring the status quo to an uncertain future is a natural enough sentiment. The problem is when that sentiment becomes a veto. You simply can’t elevate the opinion of incumbent homeowners over everyone else, or else nothing would ever get built. Nothing we love now in America would have gotten built. It’s something like the tragedy of the commons, where everyone acts in their narrow self-interest, and you end up with a serious collective problem that ultimately hurts everybody.
Why Are Farmers Battling for the Right to Fix Their Own Tractors?, Governing, Jesse Hirsch, March 13, 2022
This is an interesting piece written off of news that the FTC is looking at cracking down on extremely restrictive proprietary rules regarding tractor repair. This is something of a niche issue, but the movement known as “right to repair” is also active in putting pressure on automobile and electronics (largely cell phone) manufacturers.
My understanding is that it’s something of a progressive movement. But it cuts across political lines in that it combines consumer advocacy, distrust of concentrated corporate power, and self-sufficiency. (There’s a lot of the spirit of Ralph Nader here, who was really not against capitalism per se, but in favor of free markets over corporate market power.) If you’ve never heard of right-to-repair, it’s a really fascinating movement to follow.
The Grim Reaper of Small Towns, Strong Towns, Seairra Sheppard, April 5, 2022
This piece about how the Interstate highways killed small towns across America reminded me of my driving down U.S. 11 in Virginia, the old U.S. Highway bypassed by I-81. A lot of what was along here was car-oriented stuff like gas stations and motels, but there are also a lot of sleepy old towns that no longer get much traffic. And that’s in the Shenandoah Valley, where tourism brings lots of people down. There are countless far more distressed and even desolate stretches of pre-Interstate road and highway. The legacy of the Interstates is complicated, and this puts it well:
There were a wide array of benefits to this web of roads in the time of their construction, but this advancement came at a detrimental cost to many people and they suffered greatly for it.
The best $0 I ever spent: Watching someone else shop, Vox, Adam Chandler, March 27, 2022
Over the next several months, I would get an unearned peek at a consumer life that fascinated me and made me feel connected to a stranger many, many brightly lit aisles away. In ways both unexpected and unlikely, these digital scraps would teach me about how people are getting by in a time of unmatched physical and social separation.
This is a fun, light piece about the sort of bits and pieces of modern commerce that I find really interesting. It’s a story that couldn’t even have been written 25 years ago. It also raises the question of how much our shopping habits actually say about us.
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