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.

The main reason why our places are less beautiful than they used to be, as I see it, is much less satisfying an answer than any of our common suspects present on their own. It’s an underlying ethos that courses through modern building practices. It’s not greed. It’s a systemic laziness, lack of thoughtfulness (or, lack of creativity), and perhaps no small degree of fatalism.

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

Transforming yesterday’s thrift shops into attractive, hyper-efficient, omnichannel retailers required time and experienced retail managers. Before he came to Goodwill, Adams was director of sales operations for the Richfield, Minnesota-based Best Buy Co. Inc., where he oversaw retail at the company's big-box and mobile-specialty stores. As he walks through the St. Paul flagship store, he speaks fluent retail.

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:

[Goodwill stores] serve as low-cost inventory for flippers who monetize their more valuable finds online. If there were no Goodwill, many sellers who fuel the online apps would find themselves struggling to purchase inventory.

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.

Imagine being able to take a train to Great Falls. That was once reality, Greater Greater Washington, Gregg Otten, October 2, 2018

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.

The last surviving motor court on the Lincoln Highway is still welcoming overnight guests, Roadtrippers, Alexandra Charitan, July 24, 2020

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:

New and Old #70

New and Old #71

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