In Portland, Oregon, the Paths to Homeownership Are Multiplying, Dwell, Michael Andersen

Thompson’s business is alive and thriving; every one of its recent projects has turned a profit, he says, and financing hasn’t been too hard. Thompson’s secret: the argument he lost seven years ago. Despite his efforts in 2015, new homes of the size he once built are now illegal in most of the city. But in exchange, almost any residential lot is now allowed to have up to four modest homes on it.

Welcome to Portland, America’s new test tube for rediscovering the “missing middle” of the housing market.

This article about Portland’s zoning reforms is excellent. It portrays these reforms basically as what they are: not radical social engineering, but loosening of government regulation to unleash opportunity and entrepreneurship. It’s worth noting that large developers don’t actually like these reforms, because they open up competition. Suddenly a small developer, or even an ordinary homeowner, can get into the game. “Don’t call it a revolution, though,” Andersen rightly notes. “Call it a comeback.”

This drives home that point:

One hundred years ago, duplexes, triplexes, quads, townhouses and backyard homes—“middle housing,” they’ve recently been called—were legal almost everywhere. And they were fairly popular. In those days before the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, one path to homeownership was to build a small duplex, rent out one side, and live in the other. Thanks to countless ad hoc arrangements like that, millions were built, often scattered through the low-density neighborhoods of the day.

Read the whole thing. It’s great, and it sketches out in detail how these reforms help ordinary people, both small builders and less affluent people and families.

How many restaurants closed from the pandemic? Here’s our best estimate, Washington Post, Tim Carman, June 21, 2022

Restaurants and other small businesses have no doubt struggled during the pandemic, but it turns out the dire predictions—40, 50, 60, 70 percent of restaurants going under—were wildly exaggerated, or simply wrong:

Such a collapse could have meant the loss of hundreds of thousands of restaurants. But no such extinction event, as one advocate described the pandemic’s potential impact, occurred. The number of closed establishments to date is a fraction of those early dire predictions, which were based largely on fears or a small-business survey with acknowledged flaws or just educated guesses.

Being on Twitter and seeing talk about restaurants from people with some connection to the industry, I’ve seen this exaggeration. I remember when Sushi Taro, one of D.C.’s most famous Michelin Star restaurants (until this year, when it lost its star), announced in 2020 that it would pivot to a small, takeout-only location for good. I immediately guessed that that wouldn’t happen, and it didn’t; they’re back to their normal operations and have been for some months now.

A lot of the talk about “supporting restaurants,” tipping 30 percent for a poor experience, complaints about customers “lingering” rather than hurrying out to maximize table turnover—there’s something a tad elitist and off-putting about it.

But anyway, the article is a dive into the survey methods that produced these exaggerated numbers, and attempts to come up with a more modest and accurate estimate, which is nonetheless still pretty rough. Restaurants are a very, very tough business.

What tiny towns in rural America can teach the cities about adaptation, All Things Considered, Patrick Wood; Alejandra Márquez Janse; Patrick Jarenwattananon, June 21, 2022

Jon and Zach’s project has picked up on a trend: there aren’t many new buildings in the smallest towns. Instead, the old ones find a new purpose.

Well hello!

Jon and Zach are a gay couple—maybe not who you’d expect to enthusiastically document old buildings in rural America. But they themselves note that the project has made them rethink some conceptions about politics and rural America.

Jon is quoted as saying:

“So many of the images that are propagated from rural parts of the country focus on decay or on destruction or abandonment, and we’re very interested in the ways that buildings, in particular, continue to serve and continue to be adapted in ways that meet the needs of communities.”

This is a point I try to make with my “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” series. A lot of the buildings I feature are pretty ordinary, and their various lives over decades are unremarkable, but over time form real fabric and history out of very plain things. We’re seeing an age-old human and urban process of reuse and adaptation, just in a very modern style of land use and architecture.

The pictures are wonderful; scroll to the one of the beer and burger signs, in different states, which happen to use exactly the same piece of artwork for the illustration. If there are two, in different states, there are probably more. Gosh, tracking down that burger-and-beer illustration could be a whole story.

‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death, The Guardian, Sam Knight, March 17, 2017

I don’t remember how I came across this piece, and I have no particular interest in the British monarchy, but it’s a deep, long piece of the sort I love to sit down and enjoy in a nice span of free time. A little bit:

The last time a British monarch died, 65 years ago, the demise of George VI was conveyed in a code word, “Hyde Park Corner”, to Buckingham Palace, to prevent switchboard operators from finding out. For Elizabeth II, the plan for what happens next is known as “London Bridge.” The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say “London Bridge is down” on secure lines. From the Foreign Office’s Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed location in the capital, the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has served as a symbolic figurehead – a face familiar in dreams and the untidy drawings of a billion schoolchildren – since the dawn of the atomic age.

Read the whole thing.

Related Reading:

New and Old #48

New and Old #49

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