The Hotel-Spirit, Slate, Henry Grabar, July 17, 2022

This piece made the social rounds big time, and it’s great. Here’s the key argument:

America once provided a solution to all of these problems—a flexible, variable-term accommodation that welcomed prosperous vacationers, footloose young people, the elderly, and the destitute. I speak, of course, of the hotel. Hotels remain a $168 billion industry in America for business travel and vacation, with seven hotel nights booked each year for every American. They employ more than 2 million people, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association. But most people, like the marooned ski bums of Aspen, don’t consider hotels to be on the continuum of housing.

They should. Hotels—grand ones, modest ones, inns, motels, and single-room occupancies—once filled a crucial niche in the American housing ecosystem. And now they should again.

This is also very important, because it’s a reminder that these things changed for reasons, whether good or bad:

To some extent, hotel life collapsed because we didn’t need it anymore. Cars and planes opened up a much wider territory for vacationing. Two-earner households with demanding jobs couldn’t swing a full summer at the beach (nor, perhaps, with a house in the suburbs, did they feel they needed one). New development models, such as timeshares and condos and retirement communities, scooped up high-end clientele. A booming midcentury economy made it hard to retain the ample staffing necessary to “keep” a grand hotel. Federally subsidized suburbanization reduced the urban housing crunch, and white flight and Sun Belt migration left many older cities feeling like they had, all of a sudden, too many hotels—often in declining, redlined neighborhoods.

The bigger point here for me is that so much of what urbanists and housing advocates talk about today is not innovative or newfangled but very much a return to an earlier era of American life. The weird interlude in between is the thing that’s radical and out of character. Once that clicks all of this looks different.

This is a long, detailed piece; read the whole thing.

‘Towns just turned to dust’: how factory hog farms help hollow out rural communities, Charlie Hope-D’Anieri with photographs by Danny Wilcox Frazier, The Guardian, May 5, 2022

Analyzing census data from 1982 to 2017, alongside data from the US Department of Agriculture and other sources, the report found that Iowa counties with the most hogs have experienced higher levof depopulation, heavier job losses and have seen more retail businesses close, including grocery stores, than other rural counties.

I don’t know if this is true, and I’m sure the opposite side has their own reports. But I’m willing to bet it’s true. It might seem like it fits into partisan anti-business attitudes, but it really fits in with a kind of rural environmentalism and a sense of caring for the land. In other words, not national and abstract, but local and concrete.

There’s a lot here, and it’s wistful and alarming at the same time. Give it a read.

What Does Economic Development Mean in Small Town Western Massachusetts?, Strong Towns, Christian Bergland, September 18, 2018

Very much worth the full read, but here’s a lot of it:

In the context of Strong Towns and its advocacy for a traditional development pattern, Blandford and towns like it represent something of a challenge. A transition to the traditional development pattern as Strong Towns readers likely recognize it—compact, walkable, mixed-use streets—is not easy to envision in a town where density never happened in the first place and where sprawl, such as it is, dates to when the region was made up of farmland. Compounding this, two of the main potential drivers being examined by the town—a highway exit and high-speed internet connectivity—would both require infrastructure investment that might inspire some wariness.

At the same time, the alternative would seem to be that we should simply let all of these towns die, something that is particularly difficult in a region where most town charters predate the American Revolution. I would hope that this piece gets Strong Town readers thinking about how they might tackle increasing revenues for a town like this, allowing it to continue be strong as we move deeper into the 21st century.

I also find this really interesting, in terms of when Interstates do and don’t enhance a place’s economy:

While the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) goes through Blandford, the town sits dead center in the highway’s longest stretch without an exit, meaning that Blandford residents are unable to take any advantage of its presence. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation is currently assessing the viability of a turnpike exit in Blandford, something that would halve the time it takes to get to Springfield and make Blandford a much more attractive option to commuters working there.

And also this:

Beyond its relatively remote location, Blandford lacks something crucial for 2018 homeowners, particularly young ones: high speed internet. While Verizon has expanded DSL access to many rural Western Massachusetts towns over the last decade, calling this access “high-speed” is often laughable at this point, with extremely slow or nonexistent service common, seemingly due to forcing 2018 demand on 2008 technology. Let’s put it this way: if I want to stream Game of Thrones, I’m using my cellular connection.

There are a lot of places that are really not all that remote, but which have totally different problems than places I’m familiar with.

The story behind stuffed ham, southern Maryland’s hyper-local delicacy in St. Mary’s County, WAMU Dish City, Patrick Fort; Ruth Tam; Shweta Watwe; Ann Marie Awad, June 16, 2022

Local historians trace the dish’s roots to the county’s Black residents, who were enslaved on the region’s tobacco plantations. There, enslaved Black people used vegetables to flavor less desirable cuts of meat that plantation owners didn’t eat. During holidays, jowls were taken from plantation smokehouses and distributed to enslaved people. Some enslaved Black people were allowed to grow small gardens. They stuffed these smoked jowls with vegetables like kale, cabbage, watercress, and turnip tops before they were wrapped in a rag and boiled until tender.

As plantation owners became aware of this dish, the same stuffing techniques and ingredients were applied to the owner’s more desirable cuts of meat like whole smoked hams.

The article notes that it’s become a cherished local food. It sounds really good, and I think I have to try it; I sometimes think about how amazing it is that only a couple of hours in the car can get me from the D.C. suburbs to a place like this, or to Pennsylvania Amish Country. It’s a big, big country.

Also:

Up until the mid-20th century, St. Mary’s County residents were closely tied to the region’s agriculture and waterways. Residents both worked, and ate, off the land. But, in 1942, the U.S. Navy built a naval air station along the Patuxent River and the area’s residents, economy, and built environment began to reflect that.

St. Mary’s County isn’t on the Eastern Shore, but it’s on the Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore has a similar history of developing much late than the mainland. These are probably some of the last places in America where so much local culture persists.

Related Reading:

New and Old #54

New and Old #55

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