New and Old #89
Friday roundup and commentary
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This is actually a promotional page for the book of the same title, with a long-ish description. Cary, North Carolina, and the whole Triangle metro area, is an example of this, which one reader pointed me to after I recently wrote about Cary.
This is interesting:
Located in over twenty-five major metro areas throughout the United States, numerous boomburbs have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled in size between census reports. Some are now more populated than traditional big cities.
And so is this:
Typically large and sprawling, boomburbs are “accidental cities,” but not because they lack planning. Many are made up of master-planned communities that have grown into one another. Few anticipated becoming big cities and unintentionally arrived at their status.
These places have the economic growth that many places can only dream of. But they lack the ability or will to focus that growth into an overall coherent pattern. I wonder how much it might have changed YIMBY-NIMBY debates over the last 20 or 30 years had some of these suburban boomtowns instead grown into lovely new urban environments.
The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake, The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas, December 20, 2022
This article generated some controversy online, in part because some people took it to be arguing against people owning homes—despite the first paragraph telegraphing that the argument is much more nuanced than that:
I don’t know if you should buy a house. Nor am I inclined to give you personal financial advice. But I do think you should be wary of the mythos that accompanies the American institution of homeownership, and of a political environment that touts its advantages while ignoring its many drawbacks.
Demsas argues that the benefits and costs of homeownership are borne unequally, meaning that it is not as simple as tallying them up and weighing them. She also points out that housing as an investment is inherently opposed to housing being widely available and affordable. This is obviously true, it is just something that homeowners can very easily forget.
What I get out of this article is the observation that the system of homeownership in America is a sort of odd way to achieve the ultimate result of people being housed. It’s a little bit like how circuitously our health insurance system does (or doesn’t) get us the result of a healthy population.
Many Americans are convinced homeownership is the best way to achieve a middle class that has some real assets, and that in that sense it is an engine of opportunity and security. Maybe it is. But give this a read.
What it’s like to live full time on a 400-square-foot sailboat, Washington Post, Dan Parsons, December 15, 2022
The confines of a sailboat have a way of showing you how little you actually need to be content. Seats and bunks overlay lockers where food and tools are kept; many sailors tuck away canned goods and bottles of wine beneath the cabin floor. Balancing what you take to sea requires a lot of editing, since there is no room for the extraneous items that tend to sit unused in closets and basements on land.
Interesting. It’s a little bit like “back to the land,” but, you know, at sea.
When we spoke, Dahlke and Corrado were stuck in Spain, awaiting favorable winds to Portugal. Being at the mercy of the elements can be frustrating, but relinquishing some control is part of the allure of sailing.
I can tell you life on a tiny wind-powered boat is absolutely not for me. But I’ve written about this sort of thing before—simplicity, contentment—and I admire people who can walk the walk.
Happy Birthday, Jesus, The American Conservative, Addison Del Mastro, December 21, 2016
Yes, this is an old article by me—my very first Christmas article! It’s a summary/analysis of an old piece of science fiction from the 1950s by the kinda-socialist writer Frederik Pohl. In this story of his, he takes midcentury American consumerism and extrapolates it into the future, resulting in such absurdities as people doing Christmas shopping in September.
Huh.
Read the whole thing, if I may say so myself. Merry Christmas!
Related Reading:
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I thought Josh Barro's piece responding to Jerusalem Demsas' one was useful:
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/we-need-a-better-homeownership-society
They're both good pieces that I agree with solidly on substance, but I quibble with the frame that each of them take. They're right that the US absolutely puts a heavy thumb on the "pro ownership" side of the scales, and I've never found a sound articulation of why that's justified. They're also both right that even if we accept that there should be *some* bias that way, it's pretty clear that what we're actually doing is bad for most people (renters, aspiring owners, middle-class owners) and exists explicitly to provide unmerited benefit to the fortunate.
And I think both of them agree to some extent that all of this special treatment (as part of broader economic manipulation) has given general impressions that are wildly out of whack with reality and has caused people to have deep emotional connection to policies that aren't doing what they think they are.
Jerusalem's piece probably does understate the degree to which the normie homeowner's motives aren't primarily about the finances, though I think she's right that you can't disentangle them from it. Josh, on the other hand, undersells the degree to which given the thumb on the scales that does exist, there needs to be some attempt to rebuild the system rather than just stopping to push. Both of them have reasons for choosing their framings, so I don't think they're wrong per se, just only addressing part of the issue.