“Housing reform must not be allowed to make house famines,” Benjamin Schneider, Urben Field Notes, December 14, 2022

Looking at a 1919 book on housing policy by Edith Elmer Wood, Schneider writes:

Wood’s analysis begins in a surprising place, with the progressive laws governing the construction of tenement housing in big cities. Wood unequivocally supported these minimum housing standards, but nonetheless had concerns about how they would impact the availability of housing for low-income people. As cities reduced the supply of low-quality, low-cost housing, the federal government desperately needed to step in and provide housing for the poor, Wood argued. Absent such a government program, the continued ratcheting up of minimum housing standards could ultimately “leave a considerable number of people homeless,” she writes.

That’s a pretty fascinating and invisible reason for high housing costs: cheap stuff—arguably or potentially dangerous stuff—isn’t allowed to be built, and what is considered too beneath an American standard of living rises over time, creating a high floor for the poorest Americans.

The analogy here is something like this: “Every American deserves to eat lobster and caviar every night, so we’ll ban all that other junk.” The result, of course, is that anyone who cannot afford lobster and caviar will starve.

Now Schneider goes on to say that Wood is not making a libertarian argument that the poor have a “right” to live in dangerous buildings at great personal risk. Rather, her point was that government needed to build or fund affordable housing to help fill in the gap left by ever-increasing minimum standards.

It’s a really interesting thesis, and there’s more here. Read the whole thing.

Wednesday Walk: Big Box Party, Willoughby Hills, Heath Racela, January 25, 2023

You’ve probably gotten the impression from reading this newsletter that I am fascinated with how big box stores, malls, and Main Streets continue to evolve.

To that end, I’m sharing an interesting article from Kelly Hayes for Fox: big box home center Lowe’s will soon be offering in-store birthday parties. (Hat tip to Andrew Wagner for tweeting this article out).

According to Lowe’s, the party packs start at $349…The price is actually quite reasonable for what’s included. As somebody who has tried to save money on my kids’ birthdays by hosting them at our house, I know how quickly a bouncy house rental, an Elmo costume, and some refreshments can add up!

Heath writes a great, idiosyncratic newsletter, and this bit made my ears perk up. It isn’t “urbanism,” is it? But it’s part of this big question of what comes next for these single-use, underutilized spaces we’ve massively overbuilt in this country. Good stuff.

Why Sherlock Holmes Can Finally Smile, Roy Schwartz, IGN, January 10, 2023

However, in an interesting and odd turn of events, Sherlock’s creator’s estate continued to claim ownership of the character even after he began to enter the public domain – specifically, over any version in which he was… well, nice. Now that, as of January 1, 2023, Sherlock is fully in the public domain, let’s look back at The Curious Case of the Illicit Smile…

Copyright/IP stuff can get nutty, and this is a fun diversion of a story. Give it a read.

Tivoli Henry Kloss Model One teardown & repair, Khron’s Cave, September 3, 2019

I found this neat blog post because I found this radio (that’s what the Tivoli Henry Kloss Model One is) in a thrift store. It’s a solid, heavy, elegant radio, but I plugged it in and got nothing but awful noise. So I looked up the problem, and this blog post came up.

It’s fun and heavily illustrated post on the good and bad of this radio. The overall blog is heavy on electronics teardowns and such. Check it out, if it interests you. (And check out the piece I wrote about blogs, which are really a neat information-sharing format.)

Related Reading:

New and Old #41

New and Old #42

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