Finding opportunity in urban flight, Regions, Connor O’Brien, April 25, 2022

The social and economic shocks of the last two years have either fundamentally upended the economic trajectory of dense urban centers across the developed world or been a mere blip on an inevitable march toward continued urbanization, depending on whom you ask.

The potential and durability of remote work are likely the most important questions in this genre.

I’ve written before about these questions, and while I’m not terribly sure which way it will go, they’re very interesting and important questions. A lot of urbanists see empty office districts and permanent remote work as a big problem for cities; I’m not so sure, and neither is O’Brien. He writes (his emphasis:

The rise of remote work will provide urbanists and YIMBYs an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the urban political landscape in our favor, aligning urban leaders’ interests with our goal of more vibrant, livable, affordable, and accessible cities. Rather than lament the rise of remote work, we should embrace it.

It’s a great, somewhat idiosyncratic piece. I’m not going to say more, except give it a read!

A Real Estate Nightmare on Foxhall Road, Washingtonian, Marisa M. Kashino, April 13, 2022

They [two houses the article is about] were built in 2018 by a fledgling real-estate venture called Prefab Partners. Steve Salis—the high-profile restaurateur behind DC mainstays such as Ted’s Bulletin and Kramers and cofounder of the &Pizza chain—launched Prefab with the general contractor who built many of his restaurants. The company promised a revolutionary new method of residential construction, using prefabricated panels manufactured by robots, that would practically eliminate human error.

It’s unclear to me how true it is that new construction is of lower quality than old construction, but in this case, it was; the houses basically fell apart. Get a load of this:

“To date, no home in the country has been built this well. There are no mistakes,” said Salis [the builder], standing in front of the unfinished houses in a marketing video. “Every nail is in the correct place, every substrate is level, every window is perfectly sealed, and every part of the home’s infrastructure is built to perfection.”

When you hear that kind of salesmanship, run the other way. I guess that’s one lesson here. The other lesson is that being an early adopter comes with a lot of risks.

It would be easy for some people to take some pleasure in the humiliation of the rich, insidery couples who got burned on these houses. But that would be missing the point. This is basically a story of fraud. And it’s a reminder that sometimes “disrupting” an industry simply means throwing out accumulated, hard-won wisdom. There’s a lot of architectural and legal stuff down in the piece, which is all very interesting.

But I’ll leave it with this:

“There was water leaking from all the light fixtures. . . . I tried to put pots and pans wherever I could to collect the water. I remember thinking, Oh my God, this is crazy,” says Puri. “Maybe two weeks later, the exact same thing happened in our house.”

Ever seen “A Plumbing We Will Go?” Who knew The Three Stooges was a documentary?

A Suburban Poverty Boomtown: Lehigh Acres, Florida, Strong Towns, Daniel Herriges, August 17, 2016

The growth of this phenomenon [suburban poverty] across our country—more poor Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities—is one of the big, important demographic stories of the last couple decades. Understanding suburban poverty is of vital importance to regional planning and policy.

After noting the well-known poverty in older, post-industrial suburbs or inner-ring suburbs, Herriges introduces a different kind of place:

In the boom-and-bust Sunbelt states, there is a totally different sort of poor suburb: vast suburban and exurban communities that have boomed in population in response to the spillover demand for affordable housing from more prosperous cities nearby. These places were never rich. They didn't gradually decline. They grew up—explosively fast in many cases, fueled by the pre-Great-Recession glut of subprime mortgages—as poor suburbs, and they will likely die as poor suburbs.

Once again, read the whole, heavily illustrated piece. But one line resonates with me. Herriges captures a disconcerting feeling I’ve felt in far smaller and less remote housing developments: “It’s very hard to convey the sheer scale of this place, the seeming endlessness of it. Photos don’t do it justice.”

Hank Dietle’s Tavern finds new identity after devastating fire, Bethesda Magazine, David Hagedorn, March 21, 2022

Segraves says there were two separate worlds at Dietle’s before the fire: people who went for the music, and the roadhouse people who wanted to drink and play pool and not be bothered by noisy bands. The new Dietle’s is more of the former and less of the latter, but a question remains: When an iconic bar burns and returns, can its soul convey?

I know nothing about Hank Dietle’s Tavern except that, before it burned, it was one of the oldest structures—possibly the oldest—still standing on Rockville Pike, the stretch of Maryland 355 that runs through Rockville. (And I only know that because I drove and walked most of the Pike for this pair of pieces.)

I’ve come across similar thoughts on the disappearance of somewhat rough bars popular with white working-class folks on Richmond Highway, the stretch of U.S. 1 south of Washington, D.C. (One of them was even called Hillbilly Heaven!)

This piece brings to mind something I wrote about an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant and event hall that closed last year: “I almost feel like I’m observing the last living individual of an endangered species when I walk into a place like this. It exists, but it’s no longer possible for it to continue existing.”

When these places have some kind of break in continuity—a fire, new ownership, etc.—they almost never come out with their old-fashioned character unselfconsciously intact. It can be sad, I guess, but it’s also life.

Related Reading:

New and Old #30

New and Old #31

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