New and Old #78
Friday roundup and commentary
Whatever Happened to the Starter Home?, New York Times, Emily Badger, September 25, 2022
What we now call “tiny homes” were once just…homes.
Take a look, for example, at these detached single-family homes in Cambridge, Maryland, a post-industrial city on the Eastern Shore:
They are about 600 square feet each! Would I want to live in one of these? Well, not really. Would I choose it over not having a home? Absolutely. That’s the choice that we’ve taken away from many people, and it’s creeped up the class ladder from a “poor people’s issue” to an issue that affects everyone but the very rich.
The disappearance of such affordable homes is central to the American housing crisis. The nation has a deepening shortage of housing. But, more specifically, there isn’t enough of this housing: small, no-frills homes that would give a family new to the country or a young couple with student debt a foothold to build equity.
The affordable end of the market has been squeezed from every side. Land costs have risen steeply in booming parts of the country. Construction materials and government fees have become more expensive. And communities nationwide are far more prescriptive today than decades ago about what housing should look like and how big it must be. Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today.
It’s a masterful deep dive into how a crucial segment of American housing has almost gone extinct. Read the whole thing.
How Waffle House Helps Us Respond To Hurricanes, FiveThirtyEight, Maryn McKenna, September 29, 2022
This is actually a 2016 article written during Hurricane Matthew, and in the editor’s note they write: “we thought we should revisit what happens when the famously resilient restaurant shuts its doors for a storm — and why even the federal government pays attention when it does.”
I remember in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey and New York, there was a lot of talk about Home Depot helping with rebuilding logistics. And I also remember that a random Chinese buffet just across the state line, in Pennsylvania, was one of the only places you could go eat for a few days. It was cool, and kind of eerie, to drive past dark houses and businesses, downed trees, and other reminders of natural disaster—and then walk into this packed restaurant and eat unlimited sushi and lo mein.
But in New Jersey, all of this is pretty unusual, whereas in hurricane country, Waffle House is famous for braving the weather and, when it doesn’t, serving as a kind of barometer of just how serious things are.
The group [a FEMA team!] was inspired first to rank Waffle Houses in the same way: green for fully operational, yellow for a limited menu and red for closed. “Which is pretty bad, because Waffle House is always open,” Lopez added. And, second, to use those observations as a proxy for how much a disaster disrupts a community. Fugate has since been quoted as saying: “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”
The concept of restaurant operations as an indicator of storm impact percolated slowly into emergency-management culture — the magazine Environment Health Safety Today wrote about it in July 2011 — and broke out into the open around the time of Hurricane Irene in August 2011 (when, according to The Wall Street Journal, 22 Waffle Houses lost power but only one stayed closed longer than a day).
Read the whole thing. It’s very cool.
The American Camry, National Review, Wells King and Dan Vaughn Jr., September 29, 2022
The authors start here by arguing that Tesla—cast as an all-American company all the time—is too cozy with China, due not only to the large Chinese market but also to Chinese industrial policy. And then they argue that Ronald Reagan actually implemented very good industrial policy to draw Japanese auto investment to the United States. Reagan’s trade policy on cars, motorcycles, and maybe most famously microchips is often derided as protectionism, but I think you can distinguish protectionism from legitimate industrial policy.
After Reagan’s quota on Japanese cars, they write:
Detroit turned around, and the Japanese firms invested tens of billions of dollars in a massive new manufacturing base in the South that created hundreds of thousands of American jobs — the single, exceptional example of significant foreign manufacturing capacity relocating to America instead of the other way around. Anyone hoping for more of the same today should take note.
After four decades of aggressive public support from its Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) — direct subsidies, tax breaks, cheap loans, and information-sharing — Japan had built an automotive juggernaut by the 1970s. Economics textbooks predicted that such policies would yield sclerosis and cronyism, but in this case, the results were the world’s most efficient production processes and its highest-quality cars. Japan’s top automaker, Toyota, had perfected its management of material to the point where its inventory costs were only a tenth of General Motors’. American automotive engineers awarded many more product-quality honors to Japanese automakers than to American ones. Over the decade, the Japanese industry raised its productivity by 4.3 percent annually — three times the American rate of progress.
Some argue that Japanese industrial policy did not, in fact, birth the Japanese auto industry, and argue a counterfactual that in a freer market, Japan would have been even more competitive. That strikes me as being in the same category as the argument that without zoning, we would still have paved the country with suburban sprawl. It treats a theoretical scenario as more real than the one that actually happened.
Trade policy happens to be one of my interests, and I know how easily policies that favor an industry in some way can be, and often are, little more than political favors. But industrial policy was a plank in both major party platforms up to the 1980s, and the increase in global trade hasn’t made those concerns go away.
The Internet is Made of Demons, Damage Magazine, Sam Kriss, April 21, 2022
I wrote a longer piece in The Bulwark sort of bouncing off this piece, thinking about social media as a vice akin to smoking or gambling. This is one of those things that you can’t take too seriously or literally, but it definitely made me think. (Especially the part where I realized I had thought about the internet as “a consciousness drilling itself into your brain” before I had ever seen it compared to demonic possession.)
There’s a reason I saved this one for Halloween month.
But all that aside, this is the real core of the essay for me:
Back when I spent half my days on social media, I did much the same thing. I would probably have also celebrated a murder, if the victim had once tweeted something I didn’t like. Now, looking back on those days is like trying to remember the previous night through a terrible hangover. Oh god—what have I done? Why did I keep saying things I didn’t actually believe? Why did I keep behaving in ways that were clearly cruel and wrong? And how did I manage to convince myself that all of this was somehow in the service of the good? I was drunk on something. I wasn’t entirely in control.
Let me be a broken record and say that driving does something similar to our psychology. Like the anonymity of the internet, the privacy of the automobile cabin, and the visual and physical separation from other motorists, lowers the cost of anger. It makes it easier for us to be bad.
I’ve already mentioned demonic possession, so let me mention something lighter to do with my faith. In Catholicism, we have a concept known as “the near occasion of sin”—i.e., something we know will tempt us. It is considered a sin even to expose yourself to a near occasion of sin, because the flesh is weak. Tempting ourselves is not virtuous. Bad situations—dangerous situations—are not opportunities to build character.
That feels like something that needs to go in a longer essay, and this is just the link roundup. So until next time!
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