My County’s Award-Winning Smart Growth Plan is a Disaster. Here’s Why, Strong Towns, Daniel Herriges, April 6, 2022

After writing that Sarasota County, Florida is a poster child for America’s overbuilt and unproductive suburban development pattern, Herriges raises a plan that has gotten the county a lot of positive attention. But:

Unfortunately, the Sarasota 2050 plan has not remotely changed our growth trajectory or resulted in a better pattern of development. It’s a dismal failure.

The reason for this failure is simple but important to grasp. It’s that the best plan in the world can’t solve something that’s not a planning problem. What we have here is a problem of power: who has it, and who doesn’t.

The plan is supposed to create New Urbanist-style “villages,” but, as you might expect, the actual, on-the-ground results bear little resemblance to that ideal. I often talk about the spread-out nature of suburbia, so this paragraph stuck out to me:

The prevailing thing you experience when you drive through Lakewood Ranch is distance. Incredible, alienating distance, with long stretches of nothing at all flanking the major roads in between entrances to gated communities and business parks. It’s a landscape of supersized roads, supersized parking, giant medians, noise walls, and retention ponds. It’s impossible to even imagine walking anywhere as a means of transportation in Lakewood Ranch. The distances are so great that the idea is ludicrous.

Read the whole thing. But if you don’t, read this extremely important paragraph:

There is absolutely no way to do a small project within the 2050 framework. It’s only suitable for massive communities built over time frames measured in decades. You will spend several years and a million dollars in attorneys' fees just on planning and approval, and executing your Transfer of Development Rights. The players who can pull this off are, exclusively, about four large development companies with immense political power, and a similarly tiny insider’s club of large landowners—mostly former cattle-ranching or citrus-growing families whose land is now worth far more in speculative suburban development value than it ever would be as working agricultural land.

The dining shed—soon to be banned in NYC—awakened a sense of what’s possible with the city street, The Counter, Aaron Timms, March 24, 2022

It’s funny how Americans travel to Europe and gush about the sidewalk cafes, yet many of the same people see trying to create that here as inconvenient or suspicious. I’m not sure what explains that—maybe, for some people, the association of outdoor dining with taking COVID too seriously? Maybe the idea that that sort of leisure is just for vacation? It reminds me of James Howard Kunstler’s remark that what Americans really like about Disneyland is that it has no cars.

I like this bit, which speaks to how ordinary and seemingly meaningless things can take on the weight of custom and identity:

In a cityscape historically dominated by glass, steel, brick, and tile, corrugated fiberglass and plywood suddenly became an indelible part of New York’s visual grammar, as recognizably “of this place” as the tenement facade, the fire escape, or the mountain of uncollected trash.

Timms writes, “The shed’s reimagining of public space represents one of the pandemic’s more surprising legacies.” Maybe that’s part of it too—the perception that these pandemic-era stopgaps are turning into first steps in a revolution. Well, making streets calmer, safer, and livelier—inherently at odds with making them convenient for motorists—should not be revolutionary at all, in my opinion.

In Praise of Small Menus, Grub Street, Rachel Sugar, June 1, 2021

The first New York City restaurant I fell in love with served only one thing. I had not known this was a possibility. I had never encountered a restaurant that did not require me to make any decisions at all.

I remember watching Gordon Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares years ago, and one of his frequent critiques of restaurants was that their menus were too big. A sprawling menu means more ingredients to stock (and go bad), more recipes to remember (or execute poorly), etc. Diners often like the variety and sense of choice. A small menu means trusting the restaurant, in a way.

But there’s also a COVID economic factor here, in the seeming trend towards smaller menus:

From the restaurant side, the reasoning is simply a reflection of new industry realities: Smaller menus reduce food costs, which are rising, and require less labor, which remains at a premium. “Offering one menu means so much less wasted food and energy,” explained Cohen. From the consumer side, the rise of the small menu is an unequivocal win.

It’s interesting how restaurants combine tough commercial imperatives—a need to generate profits while facing notoriously thin margins—with real skill, craft, and artistry. As I try to remember to say every time I write about restaurants, it’s a very, very tough business.

Zortrax 3D Printers Used To Modernize Iconic MiG-29 Fighter Jets, 3DPrint.com, TE Halterman, August 10, 2015

This is a really interesting article about upgrading and modernizing the old Soviet-era MiG fighter jets. I came across this in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I had not known, actually, that there were any former Soviet/Eastern Bloc weapons still in use in NATO. I guess I assumed they switched to Western weapons systems, but obviously doing that all at once would have been incredibly expensive, especially given the economic tumult of the transition to capitalism.

The immediate takeaway from this piece is that for something as expensive and complicated as a fighter jet, repairing or upgrading is still cheaper than replacing.

Related Reading:

New and Old #36

New and Old #37

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