America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing?, Vox, Rachel M. Cohen, April 10, 2024

There are two kinds of properties discussed here—indoor malls and strip plazas—and two kinds of projects—using the land to build new structures, and actually converting existing commercial structures to housing. Both have been done, but far more commonly the use of old commercial lots to build brand new buildings. Here’s an example from New York:

[Amy] Casciani ached for her town, which not only was dealing with the eyesore of the abandoned mall but also lacked enough vacant land to develop desperately needed affordable housing. Her nonprofit development group, PathStone, embarked on a complex but meaningful project: They retrofitted the Sears department store into 73 rental apartments and built a new four-story multifamily building with 84 rental units on the adjacent parking lot.

Here’s that entire property, with the new housing appended onto the top right of the mall and apparently reusing part of the structure. Judging from how empty the parking is, a lot of more of this land could be redeveloped, in addition to the further reuse of the existing structure.

Here’s an example from California. The tall building is new apartments, replacing a corner gas station. The rest of what you see in the middle and on the right is the old strip of stores reskinned. They’re still stores. So in exchange for a gas station and some parking, the strip mall becomes local walkable retail for the new apartments.

Read the piece for the policy background on this, which, Cohen reports, is mostly a problem of zoning (not surprising). The actual conversion work isn’t much of a barrier itself, although it’s certainly trickier than clearing a lot and building entirely from scratch. It seems to me using at least some of what’s already there is likely to yield more incremental and smaller-scale infill development, which is a good thing.

Behind the Scenes at an All-You-Can-Eat Indian Restaurant, Serious Eats, Elazar Sontag, October 30, 2019

The first dinner guest of the night fills up a plastic to-go carton from the buffet before explaining he doesn’t have enough money to pay. Raja lets him leave with as much food as he wants. He says it’s good for bringing in new business, but I notice Raja gives as much food to his returning customers as he does to people eating at Marhaba for the first time. During the month of Ramadan, Raja says he makes sure everyone breaking the fast at the restaurant eats for free. Even if they're Christian...and not breaking the fast.

To charge such low prices, I’ve learned, these restaurants rely on customers having a range of appetites: While I’m inhaling a third or fourth plate of food, my companion is full after eating their complimentary soup and a bowl of lentils. The big eaters are balanced out by the little eaters. But at Marhaba, even the little eaters leave laden with rice pudding, biryani, and tandoori chicken. Every time I try to get a better understanding of how Raja makes ends meet, he tells me it's all thanks to God’s good will. By 7 p.m., I’m starting to believe him.

This is a delightful piece, one of those things I wish I’d written. There’s a whole bit on the workflow leading up to lunch, and how the huge batches of items for the buffet are made. This is the kind of restaurant from my childhood that stands out in my memory—scrappy independent places where you might meet or even be served by the owner, and eventually become a known regular customer. The pandemic was probably very tough for these kinds of operators.

The piece also underscores that buffet-centric restaurants need volume—one reason so many of them disappeared after COVID or went to weekend-only. The office-worker crowd has obviously shrunk, and the economics of the buffet break down at much higher volumes than do the economics of regular made-to-order restaurants.

Read the whole thing.

Outside this Philly church Sunday, activists partied to stop cars from parking in bike lanes, Philadelphia Inquirer, Rosa Cartagena, April 14, 2024

Philly Bike Action’s concern isn’t directly with Tenth Presbyterian, but with its parking permits. The city grants the church six blocks of parking for its congregants on Sundays, which allow cars to park in current bike lanes. The organization says the situation is unsafe for cyclists who use Spruce and Pine Streets as critical thoroughfares for biking crosstown, so they’ve gathered volunteers to prevent congregants from parking and keep the bike lanes open during church service. This week was their second event, and they plan to continue weekly until the issue is addressed.

This is an interesting tension between church parking and bike lanes, which apparently the city has essentially double-booked.

Philadelphia grants parking permits to houses of worship that sometimes interfere with bike lanes across the city. PBA has identified seven places where Sunday parking impedes cycling and implores organizations to stop applying for and using the permits. Last year, PBA convinced the Philadelphia Ethical Society, St. Peter’s Church, and Old St. Joseph’s Church not to seek renewals.

Their efforts have increased as there have been greater calls to curb traffic fatalities in the city. In 2023, 126 people died in car accidents, including 10 cyclists, according to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. Since 2020, at least 24 cyclists have been killed in Philadelphia after colliding with cars or buses.

This seems like the sort of story that could easily be transmogrified into “left-wing urbanists hate churches!” It is so easy to fail to discern that this is what reliance on the car does to urban places: that urbanism is positive-sum and motoring is zero-sum. On the matter of churches and parking, read this piece I wrote awhile ago, which links to a fascinating newspaper article by a pastor in the 1940s.

Remembering When America Banned Sliced Bread, Atlas Obscura, Diana Hubbell, September 7, 2022

In trying to track down a story my priest told at his sermon the other week—an almost certainly, it turns out, apocryphal story about New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—I somehow came upon this story about the United States banning sliced bread amid the rationing of World War II:

The backlash to the ban on sliced bread was immediate. “I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household,” wrote an indignant Sue Forrester from Fairfield, Connecticut, in a letter to the editor of The New York Times. “My husband and four children are all in a rush before, during and after breakfast. Without ready-sliced bread I must do the slicing for toast—two pieces for each—that’s ten. For their lunches I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward, I make my own toast. Twenty-two slices of bread to be cut in a hurry.”

(It sure is easy skipping breakfast most days!)

I guess this is why this article came up in my search:

On January 24, less than a week after the ban, the whole thing began to unravel. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia made a public announcement that bakeries that already had bread-slicing machines could carry on using them. Needless to say, this caused a rift between those bakers with slicing machines and those without. One baker by the name of Fink, who also happened to be a member of the New York City Bakers Advisory Committee, publicly advocated for the ban, then was fined $1,000 (more than $14,000 today) for sneakily violating it.

Nothing unsurprising there, huh?

It’s a fun piece on a pretty random bit of trivia from a time almost nobody now remembers.

Related Reading:

New and Old #6

New and Old #7

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