The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2024
What you liked the most
Wow, another year! Looking through the archive and the stats to assemble this top 10 list is always fun—only at the end of the year do I look back on the whole thing. I write so much that I can’t even remember, from the headlines alone, what a lot of these pieces were about (what was the difference again between “At The Peake” and “At The Top” or “Old Way, New Way” and “The Old Way Is The New Way”?). But there are always a few pieces that I really enjoy writing, and that do very well. Sometimes they’re even the same ones.
I describe this newsletter as “mostly urbanism” or “urbanism and other related (and sometimes unrelated) topics” and other things like this. It’s true. I’m proud of the breadth of topics that I see I’ve touched on in a year—homeownership and home maintenance, consumer issues, thoughts on family, food, and home, photo essays/light reviews of various businesses I find interesting, illustrated visits to small towns and places I grew up around, pieces inspired by social media or “discourse” arguments, pieces throwing out an idea and refining it along with you in the comments. Pieces that put forward strong opinions and pieces where I try to play devil’s advocate or even offer a little self-doubt. Yet, I think anyway, it all kind of coheres.
But I wouldn’t be doing this for another year if I didn’t have an audience, and so it’s thanks to you. I don’t want to conflate engagement (clicks! likes! social media shares!) with value. I can tell you that some of the people reading this newsletter work in academic departments, or in planning, or in other positions where, hopefully, little bits and pieces of what I publish filter out into the professional world when it comes to urbanism, planning, land use, transportation, etc. Doing my little part in this field is a big reason why I write this newsletter.
But I also enjoy having a “regular” audience. I think, for one, that you need regular people’s agreement when you’re advocating for something. But I also enjoy writing pieces that are just, as one reader and social-media acquaintance put it, “something to read.” Not weighty, not self-important, maybe not even important. Just something that’s fun and interesting and won’t make you say “Did he really have to stick that in?” or “Oh, so he’s one of those guys!” You all have your own examples of that.
And so here you go: the top 10 pieces, by traffic/pageviews, of 2024 at my newsletter (in order of highest to lowest traffic). Without further ado:
The “Vibecession” Was (And Is) Real, But It’s Not About The Economy
This was one of the handful of what I thought were true magazine-quality pieces that I published here instead. It was my hypothesis as to what exactly the “vibecession” we were talking about earlier this year was about. Obviously plain old inflation was part of it. But given the fairly strong economic numbers overall, I felt there had to be some other factor. And while partisanship was no doubt one of them (“the president is a Dem so the economy must be bad!”), I don’t think that was all of it.
This is what I think was, and is, going on:
You know what will really throw your “vibes” off? More than a million of your fellow citizens dying in less than four years….
Some people were scandalized by the pandemic because they thought they watched a free country temporarily descend into coercive nanny-state groupthink; because they saw mass protest endorsed, and rioting and arson excused, even as they were barred from churches and hospital rooms and funeral halls. These grievances are not illegitimate.
But some other Americans were scandalized by something else: by watching half the country shrug at a rapidly rising death toll; watching people show more fury over being asked to wear a mask or to tip a service worker at 20 percent than over watching hundreds of thousands of preventable and unnecessary deaths….
Think of all the parents and grandparents who died. People who left behind—or who had hoped for—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Think of how many lives are more bare and empty now. The stress, the grief, the long-term illnesses? The millions of still-living people touched by—no longer touched by—the one million dead? What does that do to work ethic? To hopefulness about the future? The desire to go out and spend money and have fun?….
Almost every single routine was disrupted, in every single household and business and institution. Almost every continuity with pre-pandemic life was broken. Resuming is never quite the same as never pausing. Stopping a thing changes it forever….
We live, in a certain sense, in a subtly but entirely different society, where very few of the familiar routines, and very little of the embodied knowledge, we had in 2019 is still fully intact today.
That bit about continuity, and not quite being able to pick something up the same as when you put it down—I think about that a lot.
This one was a lot of fun, and yes, I was doing a little bit of the “written stand-up routine” thing here that I like to do once in awhile:
The restaurant scene is sort of like D.C., but worse. Lots of places that may or may not be good restaurants, but which all have a gimmick. There’s the Southern-style biscuit joint Biscuit Bitch, where they say “bitch” and “bitches” a lot, including to you when you pick up your order. I’m sure it’s the best Southern-style biscuit joint at Pike Place Market.
Or The Pink Door, which has no sign or obvious entrance aside from a pink door in a wall, and which has a dress code but doesn’t tell you what it is, and which makes a point of refusing to serve ketchup with French fries, which for some reason it serves despite being an Italian restaurant. (I see a pink door, and I want to paint it black.)….
If every big city were like Seattle, I’d sound like the Boomers.
But Seattle did remind me of Europe in one respect: there wasn’t enough air conditioning.
Some folks thought I was too negative on a city I didn’t have much experience with, but 1) downtown is something like a city’s living room and foyer combined, and if it isn’t pleasant and hospitable to visitors, that’s a problem. And 2), I wasn’t making fun of Seattle so much as expressing my disappointment at what seemed to me like squandered potential.
I’ll also say something that’s more important than all that: my friend and fellow urbanist Substacker Luca Gattoni-Celli has seen the same thing I have, too: pieces that obviously embrace and like cities and urbanism, but which take the crime and disorder stuff seriously, do very well and get a lot of mostly positive engagement. Make of that what you will.
That Damned Elusive Parking Spot
This was actually a follow-up to a piece called “The Urbanism We Already Have,” and both of them are appreciations of small, quirky businesses that come with certain annoyances. The cool independent coffee shop and roastery with one bathroom that always seems occupied when you need to go; the little breakfast joint on Main Street with a tricky rear parking lot.
I got into this theme of urbanism as “eating your vegetables,” as cultivating in yourself the ability to resist immediate gratification in order get something more valuable:
To be an urbanist is to be able to deny yourself in the immediate term—to cultivate what we once called self-mastery—in order to get something on the other side much more valuable than a big men’s room or a half-empty parking lot.
And I think it’s curious that urbanism is coded as left, when it sort of fits the virtues that many people—including conservatives themselves—associate with conservatism:
It’s interesting that with all the discourse about young people being “soft” or “entitled” or what have you, there’s hardly any cultural perception that the expectation of driving everywhere in a climate-controlled vehicle and parking immediately for free right in front of the place you’re going makes it harder for us to put up with the momentary discomforts that might come with a much richer built and commercial environment. Or, for that matter, with the inevitable failure of the car-oriented ideal to actually live up to its promise.
As you can see from this and many other pieces I’ve written, I almost think urbanism is a worldview as much as a set of land-use policies. And I think it’s a lot about self-awareness and gratitude and cultivating patience and forbearance.
This was a long, somewhat meandering attempt to understand why there’s a parent/non-parent divide in urbanism. Here’s one element that I think is noteworthy. Part of it is messaging, but part of it is the tricky question of how you’re supposed to care about other people and the world writ large once you have a tiny human being in your care:
One big element of this is the SUV question: families who feel they need a large car, both for safety in the event of a crash, and for room for their kids/carseats, their friends, stuff, etc. You see a lot of SUV-bashing among urbanists and pedestrian advocates: not surprisingly, because these cars are fuel inefficient, more likely to kill a pedestrian if they strike one, and have obviously triggered a car-size arms race in which people feel they need to buy an SUV for their own safety in the event of a crash.
This is one of those areas where our dependence on the car leads us to an awful zero-sum view of life and safety. The “safest” car for the occupant will almost always, by definition, be the most dangerous car for anyone else in a collision. You can see how parents might perceive a childless young person prattling on about oversized cars as effectively saying “Yeah, maybe your children should die.” That’s not what anybody thinks. But again, if being a parent makes it harder to embrace urbanist ideas, so much the worse for urbanist ideas. That’s where a conservative urbanist starts.
Which eventually led me to this insight:
I think you could boil all of this down to one observation: for some people—and not at all most, but probably some urbanists—the family is a special interest. Not only is the family not supreme in the landscape of policy considerations, but not even necessarily first among equals. Getting married and having children is no worthier a choice than putting ketchup on your hamburger. For people who believe that family life is hallowed, that children are a miracle and a gift from God—which is to say, lots of American Christians and right-leaners, people like Jonathan Last—the idea that their concerns are seen as akin to those of any other special interest lobby is almost offensive. At least, it can inspire a distrust.
It raises this fascinating meta-question of whether parenthood makes you selfish, and whether or not it has to, and what that might mean.
There’ a lot more here; go back and give it a read.
I love writing these quasi-review, quasi-photo-essay pieces about businesses. Rural King is a neat chain store, located in rural or far exurban areas, that sells all sorts of things farmers and people with a lot of land need: tractors, power tools, livestock products, live chickens, work clothes, canning products, guns and hunting equipment—everything.
I don’t mean to create the impression that rural folks are there for me to learn about them, or some condescending nonsense, but this is part of why I wanted to write this piece:
Part of the animating spirit of this newsletter has always been my sense of belonging to and having pride in Northern Virginia and the D.C. area, especially its diverse, culturally interesting suburbs. I’ve felt pretty much since I moved down here that this supposedly soulless landscape is very much a “real place.”
But I also think about the possibility that I might live in a bubble. I wonder how long it would take me to realize anything had happened, if the world beyond the 20-mile radius around my home disappeared?
And then I go on an illustrated tour of the store:
Start by grabbing some free coffee and popcorn! It probably costs them peanuts, so to speak, but it makes such a difference in the customer experience to get a little “extra,” to feel like you’re being invited to browse and linger and enjoy your visit.
As a former Kmart, the store is larger than you’d expect—at least, I’m always surprised how big old Kmarts were. There are so many different things for sale, many of which I can’t identify. But here’s one I can: the Lodge cast iron department, with a wider selection than I’ve ever seen in a store, including cute little dishes for roasting corn on the cob!
It’s a funny thing, how nice people are, how slow the pace is, the little free perks that welcome you, alongside the guns and country-Jesus t-shirts that some folks would call “Christian nationalism.” I guess I can see how you can find it odd, but I just remind myself that odd is in the eye of the beholder, and I enjoy where I am.
This is one of those long pieces that sat in my drafts for the better part of a year. It started as a lookback at a few blog posts from Powerline, a conservative blog written by a couple of lawyers who did a critical series in the 2010s on Barack Obama’s housing policies. It ended up being a really long piece on a lot of fundamental themes in housing, and it’s one of my favorite pieces—one of a handful that I think of as being part of a sort of core “series” or “storyline” on one of my core themes.
It’s also, I think, my best articulation of the idea that “forcing affluent localities to build affordable housing” shouldn’t be understood as social engineering or an attempt at leveling (“nice suburb you got there…it’d be a shame if poor people happened to it” is what a lot of right-leaning suburbanites think housing advocacy is), but rather as opening up opportunity. Proximity to jobs is not a handout; it’s a prerequisite for exercising a work ethic.
“We’re being forced to pay to house other localities’ poor people” is not a statement of fact; it’s a characterization. So here’s another characterization. Those people are your people. In two senses: one is the point above, that artificially high housing prices that act as a class filter have in fact pushed “their” poor people outside of their boundaries.
But secondly, every community needs various working-class and manual-labor jobs: janitors, maids, security guards, construction workers, landscapers, roofers, nannies, house cleaners, the people who pick up and drop off laundry and deliver packages and groceries. And then the better paying but not glamorous jobs like teacher, fire fighter, entry-level cops, garbage pick-up, and lots of other jobs.
And in many instances, the richer a place is, the more of these services it will demand. In Long Island and the New York City suburbs, where most houses are on small lots, the mix of jobs will be different than out in central Jersey, where many people live on large lots, anywhere from one to five acres.
But affluent neighborhoods will be calling contractors and handymen and hiring nannies and having their laundry picked up and delivered back and in general availing themselves of labor-intensive services more than less affluent neighborhoods.
These communities want to enjoy the benefits of low-cost labor, but they want to export the costs. They are effectively importing jobs and exporting people; demanding that other localities house their workers, because they want to hire them but not live near them.
This piece also features what I think might be my best final line in any piece ever:
If someone is good enough to deliver your packages or mow your grass or tar your roof or clean your house or be a nanny to your kids, then they’re damn well good enough to be your neighbor.
This one was a follow-up of my review of Carlos Moreno’s The 15-Minute City. That’s the definitive statement of what the 15-minute city idea is supposed to be about and…I found the book turgid, intellectually unclear, and loaded with jargon. I also found that my review got a lot of positive reactions. I think there’s a real hunger for people in the advocacy world who can speak plainly; not as a sop to the rubes but because plainspokenness is a kind of humility, which is a virtue.
I wrote this:
I feel at times—maybe I’m putting on my own tinfoil hat here—that some elite types almost purposely try to speak and write in a manner that will make ordinary people suspicious, just to mess with them. The broader point here is that urbanism and good planning require trust. And that trust is broken not just by the YouTube and podcast and Twitter cynics who make money pretending cities are prisons, but the elites who open the door through which those guys drive a truck.
And this is my takeaway on the whole 15-minute city discourse:
Nonetheless, at times, I get the sense that there’s something like a tragedy in the old Greek sense happening here: the elites can’t help but inflate a very simple idea with words words words, and in turn they disguise—conceal—the underlying idea and turn regular people against them. The desire to elevate yourself can make you sound ridiculous. And the intuition to embrace normalcy and straightforwardness can make you go crazy. To the extent that there is anything nefarious about the 15-minute city, it is in appearance and words; at worst—though bad and odd enough—it is a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
If You Build It, They Won’t Care
This is one of those pieces inspired by a social media post that ended up helping me distill something a lot of us in housing and urbanism have observed: people line up against things, and then when those things are built, they’re just there and people mostly forget all the controversy.
It reminds me of the furor that always erupts when a social media app or website changes the layout or icons or menus, or when a brand changes its logo. You’d think from the reactions that it’s a big deal, but within a few days, not only do you get used to the change, you often don’t even remember what it looked like previously. It feels like it was always the way it is now.
This is the human brain at work. Have you ever moved to a new place and thought about how you’ll miss some particular thing—the old kitchen sink, or the layout of a bathroom, or something—and find that pretty soon the new one “feels” just as natural to you? Have you ever “seen” old memories that happened in your old place taking place in the new one? Probably. I know I have. It’s strange having trouble visualizing memories in our old condo in those surroundings; If I recall something that happened in the kitchen or the bedroom or whatever room, I see it as those current rooms, not the ones we were in at the time.
Have you ever had a job or a relationship you thought you wanted to hold on to, and then realized not long after it ended that it’s a good thing you got out? Some device or gift you were sure you didn’t want, and then once you had it couldn’t imagine not having it?
This is why I say so much of urbanism is psychological; I find this constant theme of needing to discern and resist a lot of our habits and impulses, this theme of living together in proximity as something valuable and good for us but difficult to choose.
This one is about being humbled by having changed my mind about cities and urbanism, and that I’m not telling people what’s really good for them, but trying to invite other people to consider that their minds might be changed too.
A lot of people who are sort of bike advocates are very angry. They’re angry—I now understand—because cycling is needlessly dangerous. Almost all of them have had close calls with motorists, who often are themselves angry. Many of them have had friends injured or killed by motorists. Couple that with the internet and the style of social media, and they can come across as bitter and snarky, in addition to sounding “activisty.”
A lot of people will never stop and wonder what real, material reasons they have for feeling or sounding that way. All they will do is pattern-match and say “These bike people sound kind of socialist or lefty, so whatever they want must be wrong.” And that’s it.
Until a few years ago, that was my reaction, more or less. I never knew a single person who biked for transportation purposes. It would never have occurred to me that it was possible to bike somewhere for the purpose of running an errand. None of it felt like a real thing from my vantage point. If you express that on social media you might get piled on for being clueless, which will only confirm your impressions about these people.
And also, being aware of how your possibilities inform your preferences:
Ask people if they prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream, or if they prefer Democrats or Republicans, or cats or dogs, and those answers will reflect preferences, because everyone knows what both of those options are and can choose which one they like. But asking Americans if they prefer suburbia over dense, urban, walkable places is like asking them if they prefer cats or unicorns. You can’t poll people about things that effectively don’t exist and which they effectively can’t choose.
How have our modern, advanced societies gotten to a point where we have to relitigate and ideologize and justify philosophically the absolute most basic things that society rests on? That God or evolution seemingly designed us to do?
I’m talking about both living in cities and having kids. Enjoy.
And here are a few of my favorites that didn’t end up in the top 10:
“I Like My Opinions, Why Would I Want New Ones?”
Related Reading:
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2023
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2022
The Deleted Scenes Top 10 of 2021
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