The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2023
Favorite and most-read pieces of the year
So here we are, another Christmas and holiday season during which I’ve continued this newsletter. Each year grows more than the last, though the progress is slow, incremental, sometimes imperceptible. Like the kind of growth in our built environment that we should be allowing, you know.
Here I’m going to share, as I do to conclude every year, the top 10 pieces of the year. I’m going to give you the top 10 by pageviews, then I’ll add a few most-liked pieces, and a few of my own favorites that didn’t crack the top 10.
Thank you for reading, sharing, signing up, subscribing for money—it all helps, and it all matters. I think I have a developing sense of what exactly I’m doing here: part magazine-of-one, with all of the experience that working in magazines gave me about the different elements involved, and how the whole is more than the sum of its parts—editing, writing, headlines, art, and promotion. But also, I’m communicating ideas from the housing and urbanist movements to a regular and often apolitical audience. As I’ve begun to think about this as a sort of role, I think I’ve gotten better at it. You’re the judge, though.
This set of pieces includes a few of the other issues I write about here, in addition to the core urbanism/land use/housing/built environment topics. Which is very nice to see.
Here’s to another year!
#1: The Shape of Metal, January 19
This piece went viral, believe it or not, via a bunch of conservative aggregator sites which really liked the point about the decay of manufacturing knowhow. (Viral as in more pageviews than anything has ever gotten at this newsletter, and more than most of the web magazine articles I’ve ever published.) But it’s not an industrial policy article. It actually began as an article about pastina!
This was the heart of my argument:
Think of how hard it is to remember where exactly you were in a task after getting interrupted for a few minutes. That’s a tiny taste of what it’s like to try to revive a mothballed industry….
I think you can sum it all up this way: manufacturing is not like coding. So much is digital now that it feels like you can just conjure things into being. Any idea for an app or a program that you can come up with, and that current computing power can support, can be written out of nothing but lines of code. (And all of the physical infrastructure that underlies our digital infrastructure.)
I didn’t expect this to be my number one for the year, or of all time, but it was fun to think about and write, and it’s an important meta-issue behind a little popular news item.
#2: The Fairfax Teardown, April 6
This was a fun (but not completely fun) on-the-road piece. I drove around some exclusive Fairfax County neighborhoods and took pictures of all the massive houses. And of the old ranch homes in between them. E.g.:
I was documenting this phenomenon where older neighborhoods, where nothing but single-family detached houses are allowed, express the pressure of urban growth via larger houses rather than more density. There’s an economic story here, a zoning story, and an architecture story. These neighborhoods are changing in a visually drastic way, because change can’t be stopped, it can only be channeled in certain ways.
There’s more construction noise on one of these streets than in most urban neighborhoods. It’s interesting. But it’s a kind of change that we just sort of gloss over.
#3: If By “War On Cars” You Mean...
In another piece which pairs with this, I note: nobody thinks twice about the fact that we ban pedestrians on the Interstate Highways. Why is banning cars in the densest core urban neighborhoods so controversial? I suggest that the whole question of “banning cars” is and should be about which mode of transportation is appropriate to the setting—in other words, a practical question rather than the abstract ideological question that so many make it out to be.
Here, relatedly, I break down the conservative talking point that there’s a “war on cars.” In addition to some other more specific points, I simply note how permissive the general culture is towards motorists, and that all of the concern over cars has barely made a dent in this:
Think about how many close calls you have on the road. That guy is eating his burger, that woman is on her phone, these guys are yelling at their kid in the backseat. Or maybe you are. Think about how many times you sort of zone out staring at the lane markers, or miss a traffic light change, or come to a sudden stop because you didn’t look right again when a pedestrian had the green and you had a right on red.
Eating, drinking, chatting, listening to loud music, and generally fooling around in the car is basically entirely accepted. You can point to the crackdown on drunk driving, and to a much lesser extent phone use, but those are the only counterexamples. Distracted driving, in the sense of being tired, or carrying on an argument, or reaching for the radio dial or the water bottle or the snack or the lip gloss in the glove box? Utterly normal. There is no social norm that says it’s kind of bad and irresponsible to drive in an impaired state, unless you’re actually drunk.
There is no shame or discredit in any of this whatsoever; the culture has nothing to say about it. We disapprove more of raising your voice in the library than piloting two tons of steel at 50 miles per hour in a pre-coffee mental haze.
And this is something that should resonate with conservatives, and with people who like cars—and appreciate their power and potential danger. My father taught me to always treat a gun like it’s loaded, and always keep my eyes on the road. They’re not that different. I don’t hate cars. I respect them. Driving is a grave responsibility.
#4: America’s Urban Heritage: Culpeper, Virginia Edition
I’m really proud that this piece made it into the top 10. I’ve written a lot about the fundamental urbanity of small towns, and this idea that “town” and “city” are simply different points in the same pattern of urban growth, which is really to say, human settlement.
And Culpeper, Virginia is one of the finest examples of small-town urbanity I’ve ever seen. You read about its history, and nothing tells you, “This is a town, not a city.” Culpeper also saw the same deterioration in the 1960-1980 period that most of urban America saw. The “quaint small town” is really an idea that arose after that, as Americans rediscovered some of their old cities and didn’t quite know or remember what they were or why they ever existed.
Plus, George Washington surveyed the town back in 1749. I’m just going to keep on banging this drum:
The notion sometimes comes up that American urbanism is a European import; that dense urbanism is in some way alien to the American character. But the fact is that American urbanism remained fundamentally in continuity both with European urbanism and with its own past, up to the postwar era….
a place like Culpeper is fundamentally, ontologically, a city. Not in a comparative or analogous way, but literally. And it would have been understood as such by its residents for most of its history.
You can take a block of Brooklyn, or Old Town Alexandria, or Colonial Philadelphia—or Culpeper, or Flemington, or Staunton, or Frederick—urban settlements with wildly differing histories and population counts—and their land use is essentially the same. The classification of the city as a beast of its own, and the subsuming of the small town into the suburbs, is a profound, ahistorical error.
#5: The ‘Starter Car’ Is Headed To The Economic Scrapyard
I think urbanists should want better cars. Cars aren’t going anywhere in America, but the composition of the nation’s private fleet has trended larger, heavier, and more expensive over the years. And in the last few years, a raft of small, cheap cars have been discontinued.
I compared this “embiggening,” you might call it, to the disappearance of the starter home:
The problem isn’t that we have more and better options now—that the ladder has gotten taller. The problem is that the ladder hasn’t gotten taller—as the top rungs have multiplied, the bottom rungs have been sawed off. Those who cannot reach the new, higher bottom are left with no good options.
This is what has happened to housing over the last century, with tiny homes, accessory units, small-lot homes, various kinds of multifamily structures, residential hotels, and SROs squeezed out by zoning in most localities, on most private land.
And I concluded with a broader point that I think about a lot:
It’s almost like we forget who we were. We want to rewrite our history. We were always rich. We were collectively born, as I put it in the piece, with a silver Mercedes in the garage. We now view as trappings of poverty what we once viewed as engines of opportunity. We lose tolerance for discomfort, for gradual and incremental improvement, for making do, for being hardscrabble and resourceful.
And, in turn, we make life artificially and needlessly harder for those who are still willing to exercise those virtues, or who have not become affluent enough to dispense with them.
#6: When I Say “City,” You Say...
This might just be my favorite of the year. I worked on this for quite awhile, in bits and pieces, until I felt it was just right. There’s a lot here: it’s my attempt to understand, for real, where the almost irrational hostility to “the city” comes from.
Many of the fathers I knew growing up commuted the roughly two hours each way into Manhattan. They were not living out in central Jersey because they drove until they qualified; the express point was to exit the gravitational pull of the city, and only enter it on your own terms.
As far as I can tell, from my own vantage point, the discrete occurrences that led to this situation—that is, the crime wave; the urban problems that seemed natural to this generation in its childhood; possibly actual experiences of crime or at least nuisance or a sense of danger—blurred and hardened over time into something like an anti-urban ideology and a general suspicion of “the city.” The word “city” itself became a sort of pejorative.
Let me give you an analogy. Sometimes when I encounter something puzzling and frustrating, I’ll say, this feels like math, flashing back to nights trying to finish homework. When some Baby Boomers encounter even the better elements of urbanity, they will often think, in the same tone, something like this feels like the city.
I urge you to read the whole thing!
This was a piece I wrote in a bit of frustration at my local supermarket, so I’m a little surprised it did so well. It must have been relatable. Have you noticed this? Stores went over to self-checkout, cut staff, and then saw more shoplifting. Instead of putting people back in the stores, they close entrances, make self-checkout more difficult to use, etc. The store that sparked this piece is in a very nice area, and there are many nearby stores that haven’t done this stuff. So I don’t think it’s inevitable.
I wrote this following a talk I gave at a Prince William County library. PWC is an outer county in the D.C. metro area, facing all of the intensifying traffic and development pressure of the more distant localities where there’s still room to sprawl out. But I argue, as you might expect, that we shouldn’t do that—and that, in fact, it’s low densities which cause traffic, because traffic is generated by distance.
“People cause traffic” is almost like saying “Cooking causes the fire alarm to go off.” Only if you cook badly! People cause traffic only if you force them to rely on cars. And the further we put new construction and new housing away from the urban core, the more we separate and isolate everything, the more people will end up causing traffic.
This is not something that 99 percent of exurbanites have ever heard or thought about. I don’t think people out here think much about the regional dimension of the housing crisis, either.
That feeling, that question—why are they putting these big apartment buildings here in the middle of nowhere?—that’s the little crack where the conspiracy theorists stick the crowbar and start prying….
A lot of older folks in these semi-rural communities look at these 5-over-1 apartment buildings sprouting up the same way we’d look at an alien ship landing in a cornfield. It’s completely foreign to their understanding of how people want to live. They are often unaware that this is a symptom of a housing crunch in other places closer to the city.
A lot of exurban sprawl is driven by denser, older, inner communities not building anything and essentially outsourcing “their” housing demand to outer communities. Sometimes, development skeptics in these outer communities feel a sense of solidarity with NIMBYs in the inner communities: “We all just like our communities the way they are and are trying to preserve them.” I suggest, instead, that the inner communities—near the city, with transit—in refusing to permit the organic process of increasing urbanization, are forcing that growth onto the outer communities, which have far more of a right to remain the way they are right now.
I thought this one might do well, and it did. I also thought it might be a little controversial, and it was. I asked: if I’m a happy suburbanite with a car, and I’m not an environmentalist or anything, why should I care about walkability? Is urbanism actually offering me anything, or is it asking me to reduce my convenience and quality of life for the sake of an ideal or principle? I don’t mean me, I mean the very large number of people who would basically ask this.
I got a lot of very good answers, some of which I’d not thought about before, and I’ll be doing a piece rounding up and working through some of the best ones. But I believe this is the kind of thing urbanists should be thinking about.
Here, I put on my conservative hat and argued that progressive urbanists need to take crime more seriously, even minor crime. I don’t mean that you throw people in jail for minor infractions—the question of penalties, to me, is a separate one from acknowledging that the infraction is a problem, and having more than excuses or equivocations.
This is probably the core argument:
The problem is that disorder isn’t just aesthetic. It isn’t just graffiti. It’s also locked or “out of order” bathrooms, everyday products behind glass, store entrances closed off, parks the domain of the homeless. It’s a breakdown, a deterioration, in the ability of people to exist unselfconsciously in the city. At some point, instead of finding the values of the majority defective, you have to make some concessions to their preferences.
Much of this inconvenience and occasional sense of risk is bearable, or maybe even largely invisible, if you’re street-smart, or if you’re single and/or childless. But once you add kids, it gets so much worse. The danger and inconvenience is heightened. There’s a very real parent/non-parent divide in urbanism and cities. A kid can’t just hold it when the CVS or Starbucks bathroom is locked up; a kid can’t be trusted not to point at or say something to the strange fellow on the subway who may or may not react.
And this:
If the idea that the city must be friendly to the broad middle class, and to children, and to people who aren’t street-smart, is met with pushback or hectoring by urban progressives, then the city itself will be met with pushback from the broad middle class. As, in much of America for a long time, it has been.
Middle-class Americans aren’t a special interest. Families with kids are not a special interest. They’re in many ways the median American. They’re not the last word, but they have to be the starting point. If normal Americans feel like progressives are concealing an ideology behind their advocacy for the city, they’ll recognize it, and they’ll say no.
A lot of people like cities, or would like to like cities, but they feel they can’t, or that they don’t trust progressives to govern them well (which is hardly a baseless idea). You just are not going to mainstream urbanism if visiting or living in a city is understood as requiring a tolerance of disorder and petty crime. I’m especially interested in how having kids intensifies this, and how there’s a weird reinforcing feedback loop here, which intensifies the (also questionable) idea that suburbs are “good for families.”
Anyway, more on tough issues next year, and see you then!
I’d like to also more briefly share four pieces that were in the top 10 by number of likes, but which didn’t make it into the top 10 for pageviews. I think they’re also all very good!
This is my second pass at trying to understand and critique the idea that a lot of people have about prices: that they’re not really economic signals based on supply and demand, but rather statements about the inherent value of a thing. My example is people who think building more housing in order to push down housing prices is an example of “entitlement.” How is using the mechanisms of free enterprise “entitlement”? Only if you think prices are revealed truths, and that altering them is illegitimate.
In Italy, back in October, I kept seeing all these tiny trucks—some with just three wheels! Many of them were used commercially, like the one I featured in this piece. Inside the truck was a bunch of fish, and the driver stopped in the street, opened up the side of the truck, and started selling fresh fish! I think a lot about this question of scale—see the “Starter Car” piece above—and this was a very fun way to illustrate how small scale provides opportunity, especially for people without a lot of money.
I usually avoid news cycles, but when that country guy released a song celebrating small towns for their vigilantism, I thought it was a good time to once again make my argument that “small town” is an artificial category, replacing the history and built form of the place with a set of cultural ideas. Just like the word “city” carries with it a whole bunch of associations that have nothing to do with land use, so does “small town.” My contention is that this is mostly noise.
Sometimes I describe the rise of the suburbs and the mass adoption of the automobile as a revolution. There’s a lot of pre-revolutionary wisdom that we lost, and “urbanism” is largely an effort to relearn it. This piece is about a pastor’s letter about a parking regulation proposed for churches, in Dallas in 1949. It’s really fascinating how much clarity it possessed, and yet how rarely the average person today will have heard its arguments.
And five of my own favorites that didn’t make either list:
Don’t Trad On Me
Cities Aren’t Loud, Cars Are Loud
Stress Cracks
You Dropped This, King Farm
I’m From Walmart, New Jersey
Related Reading:
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2021
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2022
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