The Case for More Backyard Bodegas and Sidewalk Salons, Governing, Scott Beyer, March 9, 2022

ACUs, or accessory commercial units, are essentially small extensions attached to residential structures for the purpose of running a small business.

ACUs are common enough in developing nations that they don’t need a technical legal name. In Mexico, for example, ACUs are just a fact of life on nearly every block — with everything from auto repair shops to taco stands emanating from people’s homes.

This brings to mind a piece I wrote last year on the informal reuse of underutilized parking lots:

There’s a tendency to view this kind of informal reuse of once-pristine suburban landscapes as sort of akin to “downcycling,” a term that denotes the reuse of something in an inferior manner to its original use. It codes as decline, poverty, disinvestment. It suggests crime. Or maybe just a little unchosen and occasionally fraught human interaction, like busking or begging. Or unlicensed food carts.

We’ve come to have a low tolerance for chaos and disorder. We expect things to be neat, organized, clean, frictionless. This expectation is ironic, because we glorify our country’s rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial history, yet we often look down on people who embody it today, and on the commercial landscapes that result.

Personally, I think you might want to limit the sort of businesses permitted—maybe no auto garages, for example—but the idea is fine by me. “New York City is beloved for its corner stores, just as Portland is for its in-house pubs,” Beyer observes. “But most of America makes it illegal to replicate that.” People resist a lot of new things, and then get used to them.

How a small Texas city rewrote the rules of development, Curbed, Patrick Sisson, December 2, 2019

There’s a lot of wonky detail in here, but the basic story is that the small city of Bastrop, Texas, 20 minutes from Austin, adopted a new land-use plan that requires gridded streets, as well as other “old-fashioned” urban characteristics.

This is something you see, for some reason, very rarely: an existing 19th-century town that requires new development to connect and interface with the existing street system. Why is that? I don’t know. Perhaps the Curbed piece is overselling what Bastrop did. But it’s a very interesting story.

The Week Wrap, Gideon’s Substack, Noah Millman, April 25, 2022

Noah Millman, a columnist at The Week, writes on the demise of that publication’s opinion columnist section. The Week is moving over to more of a news, rather than commentary, strategy. Millman has some interesting thoughts on what working for or with a publication can do for you versus writing (and reading) completely on your own. I also contributed occasionally to The Week; check out my author archive there. I’ll miss them.

The final item in today’s roundup is not an article, but a Reddit thread exploring the question of how the taste of beer, and brewing methods, have changed over the centuries. It’s fascinating, and it’s fun sometimes to have a complete diversion from the sort of topics I usually feature here. Check it out.

Related Reading:

New and Old #32

New and Old #33

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