Arlington County spending over $700 an hour in lawsuit against residents over Missing Middle: report, Fox 5 Washington DC, Tisha Lewis, January 17, 2024

This is what happens when after years of supposedly “rushed” deliberation and public input, you finally get a modest and watered-down zoning reform enacted:

Arlington County is reportedly doling out over $700 per hour in legal fees as it combats residents suing the county over the contentious issue of the “missing middle.”

The battle centers on allowing mixed-use housing in neighborhoods with single-family homes. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include ten Arlington homeowners who say they would suffer substantial harm from the construction of multi-family buildings. On January 11, a judge ruled the residents have a right to sue the county. 

This happens a lot. It happens in California. It happened in Minneapolis, where a big plan for medium-term densification got held up under environmental lawsuits. It sometimes happens when a zoning board’s discretion is overruled by a court as capricious “spot zoning,” which is technically legally distinct from the power to rezone or grant variances, in a way that I do not understand.

Even after going through all of the bloated processes, a locality and the beneficiaries of the new rules still can’t know it’s permanent. This is really nutty, broken stuff.

Skydome, DC area’s only rotating restaurant, reopens, WTOP, Jeff Clabaugh, February 16, 2023

From a Yelp review: “Supposedly this place was recently renovated but quite frankly still feels like a time warp to the 80s/90s.”

I’ve passed this place, in Arlington not far from the river across from D.C., many times. It’s cool looking, and I’ve always kind of wanted to go. But the reviews are poor, as they usually are for novelty restaurants, and the Washington Monument view is good enough.

The dining room seats up to 100 and can also be reserved for private or semi-private events.

Skydome is open for dinner only, Tuesdays through Saturdays from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The restaurant slowly rotates 360-degrees about nine times per day.

It’s still in business about a year later, but I don’t know. I’ll look at it from the ground level.

United Methodism and Apostolic Succession, Mitchell Lewis, April 21, 2013

This is one of those random things I came across and found interesting. Protestants who care about apostolic succession (the Catholic/Orthodox/sometimes-Anglican doctrine that only bishops in a chain of succession that can be traced back to the original 12 apostles can ordain new bishops or priests)?

Sort of! Apparently the United Methodists don’t quite have “bishops” as those other churches understand it:

Wesley was following a precedent that presbyters could consecrate bishops in extraordinary circumstances. There were occasions when properly ordained bishops were not available. In other words, there were gaps in apostolic succession at the episcopal level. When the Western Roman Empire began to come apart due to external invasions and internal weakness, churches in Africa found themselves isolated from the rest of the church and at a loss for episcopal leadership. In this instance, a group of presbyters got together and ordained a bishop on their own. The Catholic Church eventually accepted this irregular arrangement because of the emergency situation.

But they can, if the genealogy at the end of the blog post is accurate, still trace an unbroken chain through American Methodism to Anglicanism to English Catholicism and back to the early church and the apostles.

I’m not sure how thoroughly interrogated that chain of succession is from a historical standpoint. Apparently, most Catholic bishops can’t definitively trace their “lineages” further back than the Renaissance period, probably due to non-existent records and not to non-existent ordinations. But it’s a pretty neat idea to me.

An Ode to Italy’s Absurdly Beautiful Modern Ruins, New York Times Magazine, Merrell Hambleton, June 28, 2018

Modern ruins, these are. This is what I thought of Sicily, and I’m not sure any of this would change that, but modern ruins are always of interest to me. Check out the piece.

Related Reading:

New and Old #12

New and Old #13

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