New and Old #79
Friday roundup and commentary
Kaufmans Department Store, Abandoned America, Matthew Christopher, September 23, 2022
Matthew Christopher, who writes Abandoned America, is great. This post, on an old passenger ship, is a good example. The one here, on an old department store anchoring an early pedestrian mall in Baltimore, is full of Baltimore history and spooky photos.
Read the whole thing!
Why many homes and buildings in this Florida city still stand, even after Ian, Washington Post, Allyson Chiu, October 1, 2022
Many of the homes and buildings were reconstructed to modernized building codes that were improved again in 2007, Schortz said. And in the aftermath of Ian, the buildings left still standing seemed to have at least one thing in common, he said: “Everything with a 2007 code and beyond pretty much was fine.”
It’s frequently said that we don’t build them like we used to, but in this case it’s a good thing! Much the same is true of earthquake-resistant buildings on the West Coast.
How does this actually work? This paragraph is instructive:
Buildings constructed using modern codes have a slew of structural advantages that can help them better withstand extreme weather, including major storms. For instance, updated codes often have stricter requirements around “structural load continuity,” which involves ensuring that a roof is well-connected to walls and the walls are well-connected to the structure’s foundation, Rajkovich said. Even a small failure in the “building envelope,” or the walls, roof, foundation, doors and windows, can lead to catastrophe.
I featured a long investigative piece on this neat little controversy last year, and it’s interesting that it’s still in the news.
“Some business stories become a little dance as the reporter tries to let you decide for yourself if a company is a big scam,” McQuade writes, and of course a tiny little deli in the middle of South Jersey sprawl was a big scam. One detail involved stock trades with the same interested party on both sides.
Maybe You Could YIMBY a Little Bit Less, Freddie deBoer, June 8, 2021
YIMBYs are a group of people who are almost always right on the big picture, sometimes wrong in the particular, and very often immensely annoying.
Sure, I guess, sometimes. This is an oft-repeated trope, sometimes validated by the tone of online debate, but it bears no resemblance to anything I see on the ground with pro-housing folks. In real life, if anybody is annoying, or worse, it is almost always the NIMBYs, particularly in the setting of public meetings, which frequently get very…lively for weeknight evening affairs.
DeBoer argues, however, and probably correctly, that in politics perception is reality. YIMBYs do need to convince ordinary skeptics, and the tone of some YIMBYs online probably runs counter to that. Nonetheless, most ordinary people, uninvolved in this stuff for the most part, are not part of those debates anyway.
I guess I find DeBoer kinda-sorta correct, but also drawing far too much from a subset of a subset. (First online YIMBYs, then annoying ones.) The YIMBYs I know in person are some of the kindest and, politically, most reasonable people I know.
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Ha, YIMBYs are annoying? Some NIMBY on Nextdoor by me went to the planning board HQ with cardboard boxes to sarcastically "help" the resigning commissioners clean out their offices, got on TV news, and was so proud of it that he posted it to Nextdoor twice!