On Fire Departments, Thesis Driven, Brad Hargreaves, March 29, 2024

For all the good they do, fire departments have increasingly emerged as a primary force preventing cities from embracing walkability, safer streets, transit, and affordable housing.

I can imagine some folks saying, “Gee whiz, now you urbanists hate the fire department? What else do you hate, mom and apple pie?” But this is a long-documented phenomenon, largely coming down to the fire department’s huge trucks which demand wide streets. The other element of it is building codes and the typical requirement for larger buildings to have more than one stairwell. Lots of housing advocates want to scrap this element of the code, and point to Europe, whose fire death statistics are not worse. But fire departments demand it for the sake of fire safety/access.

On the street aspect:

Narrower lanes—particularly on urban streets—have been repeatedly shown to lead to reduced speeds and safer roads. On wider streets, drivers feel comfortable going much faster regardless of the posted speed limit. Narrower lanes keep drivers alert and discourage distracted driving, saving the lives of car occupants and pedestrians alike.

This is a little bit like the phenomenon of public health officials during the pandemic focusing on saving lives, rather than weighing trade-offs. That’s their job. The fire department’s job is to do fire fighting, not to weigh the number of lives lost in fires not responded to due to narrow streets versus traffic deaths due to speeding on wide streets. It’s difficult and maybe not good to get people with narrow expertise and mandates to try and make much broader, potentially tendentious calculations.

But here it seems pretty cut and dry that the objections of the fire departments on these two matters are doing more harm than good. The piece is full of data and really makes this case. Read the whole thing.

The high-stakes art of naming new apartment buildings, Washington Post, Rachel Kurzius, September 26, 2023

Real estate company Bozzuto had a specific mission in mind when it hired branding agency Grafik a few years back: Its new apartment building in Alexandria, Va. had a “rich and masculine feeling,” recalls Hal Swetnam, Grafik’s chief creative strategist, and Bozzuto needed a name to evoke that vibe.

Swetnam’s team got to work, asking the client questions such as “What kind of music would you expect to hear in the lobby?” The brainstorm took a few weeks, which is typical. Among the possibilities Swetnam and his colleagues tossed around: the Stewart, the Algonquin, the Bronwyn.

“We joked one day that this would be where Frasier Crane would live,” he says. Boom. They had it: the Frasier….

In real estate, names are serious business. Developers pay marketing and branding firms anywhere from $5,000 for just a name alone, to more than $50,000 for a complete branding package to sell a new building or community. At best, a good name differentiates a property from other offerings and generates excitement about what it might feel like to live there. At worst, a name can immediately date a new development or offend the surrounding neighborhood and potential residents.

Wow. One thing I’ll never get used to, having worked my whole life either in small nonprofits or self-employed, is the sheer amount of money burned by big companies. Weeks of brainstorming to come up with a name that almost certainly has the most marginal advantage in driving leases over a name any layman, or certainly anyone with industry experience, could come up with on the spot? Besides, I’ll gladly take a rent cut to live in a building called The Junkyard. But I guess that’s point, so maybe it does work.

Nonetheless, the pseudoscience of apartment building names is a fun topic. It can also be touchy. Some people might think this Black professor is being too sensitive, but I don’t think so. I noticed a “Plantation” development in North Carolina last time we were down there, and this was basically my first thought:

When she was buying a house two years ago in Savannah, “there were several homes that I really liked in gated communities that were named ‘plantation’ — I wouldn’t even visit them,” she says in an interview. “As a Black person, I cannot live in a community called plantation. … Using that name to describe a community could very well be intentional to keep some people out.”

There’s more here on the naming and marketing process, and it’s a fun read.

Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores, Gizmodo, Maxwell Zeff, April 3, 2024

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Some took this to mean every shopping order was literally being tallied up in real time. The article is poorly worded on this point, but it doesn’t claim that, and that isn’t what happened. The people in India were used for training and correcting the automated process. Nonetheless, this sort of thing makes you wonder what’s so bad about having a small self-checkout bank and a few registers in a supermarket. You wonder whether all this gee-whiz stuff even saves money in the long run.

But beyond that, I think the norm of walking into a store and actually paying for what you buy is an important one. Not just the substance of it, as were—which “Just Walk Out” preserves, because you’re not stealing—but also the form. The tendency of digital technology to pull the texture and process out of daily life—to shortcut actually doing things—is one of which I think we should be metaphysically or spiritually wary.

The Tyranny and the Comfort of Government Cheese, Taste, Bobbi Dempsey, August 21, 2018

Faced with literally tons of cheese to dispose of, the government decided to unload it on the poor. Congress passed the Agriculture and Food Act of 1981, which allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop programs to give a bunch of these dairy products to families struggling to get by. That year, President Reagan announced the Special Dairy Distribution Program, which would oversee the distribution of roughly 30 million pounds of cheese to people struggling to make ends meet.

Before I read this article, I had no idea “government cheese” was actual cheese: I thought it was just a term of derision for welfare in general. I didn’t grow up poor, after all.

What actually is it? Basically what we call “American cheese”?

Some government materials kept matters opaque, referring to it as “pasteurized process American cheese,” but it’s unclear what, if any, difference there is between that and plain old regular “processed cheese” or the even more mysterious “cheese food” that you see in the grocery store dairy section. Sometimes the cheese was hard and dry—tough to cut, with a tendency to crumble when you tried. Other times, oddly, it was soft and adorned with a glistening sheen that was far less appetizing than anything with the word “sheen” has a right to be.

Although, given those quality control issues, it sounds more like something made by the Soviets.

But the psychology of poverty is definitely not intuitive to someone who hasn’t experienced it—and I haven’t, but I don’t think people who have are making it up—and I take this to heart:

While I personally don’t have strong feelings about the taste one way or the other, I must give the cheese a sort of begrudging respect—an attitude I seem to share with Kendrick Lamar and the Wahlbergs, who famously still use the cheese at their burger chain, Wahlburgers. The cheese provided a sense of autonomy and power over a tiny part of our daily survival, its versatility giving us the freedom of choices within our limited menu. It might seem like a simple thing, but in a life defined by lack of control over your own existence, it’s a luxury you don’t take for granted.

Related Reading:

New and Old #2

New and Old #3

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