The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #75
Why Building Better Places Isn’t About Money, Coby Lefkowitz, March 10, 2022 Coby Lefkowitz is an urbanist in the New Urbanist mold, someone who cares about beautiful buildings in both ways: that buildings should be beautiful, and that we should actually build them. Some housing advocates are skeptical of people who talk about beauty or aesthetics, because those concerns are often raised in bad faith, to simply stop development. That’s absolutely not what this article is about.
This mindset is, obviously, not challenged by zoning and other land-use regulations that make it unnecessarily hard to do anything interesting or original. It’s also made worse by things like setback mandates and minimum parking requirements. All things being equal, auto infrastructure does not improve the beauty of a place. Read the whole thing. Why Goodwill Is the Now and Future King of Thrift, Bloomberg Opinion, Adam Minter, August 25, 2022
Minter is probably the best—really, one of the only—people writing about the secondhand industry with real knowledge and insight. He’s written before, and particularly in his most recent book, about the serious business acumen of the thrift industry. It’s a really interesting story, and a really interesting beat. This is especially interesting:
In other words, there’s a whole chain or set of levels in the secondhand industry, from discount to high-end, and Goodwill is a major driver of the whole industry. Neat stuff. This is a great piece on the history of the rail line that used to run all the way from the edge of Washington, D.C. out to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Many of the communities that exist in Northern Virginia and Maryland’s D.C. suburbs began as rail towns or streetcar suburbs. The particulars are interesting, as is the whole period of suburbs before cars, which seems largely forgotten or ignored in discussions of this stuff. Summer of 2020 would have been an ideal time to stay in a detached cottage and take a road trip. It’s interesting how an obsolete and nearly vanished style of accommodation would be desirable because of an event happening so many decades later. When I drove down Route 11 in Virginia later that same year, I passed a handful of very old tourist cabins, as they’re often called. They were essentially detached, freestanding motel rooms, and over time motels switched almost entirely to connected rooms; they used land and materials more efficiently. But like every ordinary thing that becomes endangered, these tiny little cottages from 1940 are now relics of a different era in our national life. I find “the last” of anything to be utterly fascinating. If I’m ever in the area, I might just spend the night. Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You’re a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber. |
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