The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #177
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This is basically my “if you build it, they won’t care” idea: the fear of change is real, but it’s also mostly forward-looking, in the sense that once the feared thing is done, it rarely turns into resentment looking back in time. It just dissipates. The new thing becomes old, and life goes on. There’s a real psychological truth to that, and the ability to understand that about yourself is difficult but worthwhile.
Those of us who say stuff like this are accused of a couple of things: either being shills for real-estate or developer interests, or wanting to impose our own preferences on everyone else. The fact is, while lots of urbanists and housing advocates do love what they’re advocating for, some of us also have real trepidation about it. But not doing anything exacts its own costs. A lot to think about here. The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives, The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, August 5, 2024
I’m going to use this one more time: Because it captures what’s wrong with so much conservative policy commentary: it isn’t really policy commentary at all, but a fixation on culture and ideology, which allows you to sound like you’re really into some issue without actually doing anything at all. But more of the article:
It’s a really strange, scary thing to imagine that if these trends continue, there will be entire regions of the country that are “for” settling down and starting a family, and entire regions which are just for young white-collar professionals and childless power couples. That cannot happen. That is not a country or a society. This is a really important bit:
In other words, without a minimum critical mass of children and families in a community, parents really do come to seem like just another special interest angling for this or that favor, or worse, not represented at all. That really is a problem, and any person should be able to see that. Just like bashing childless women doesn’t equate to pro-family policy, caring about the interests of the family doesn’t imply looking down on non-parents. This is a really, really key related point:
The same can be said of urbanism. A lot of young people have never had the family modeled for them, except (hopefully) in their own childhoods. A lot of Americans in general have never had urban living modeled for them. So much of what we understand to be our preferences are really our own restricted horizons. Read the whole thing, which also includes some substantive critiques of urban progressive policy. What Kalamazoo (Yes, Kalamazoo) Reveals About the Nation’s Housing Crisis, New York Times, Conor Dougherty, August 22, 2024
One of the arguments against YIMBY is something like this: the handful of really high-demand cities with acute housing shortages are never realistically going to be able to build enough homes to drive down prices. (Look how expensive Hong Kong is, for example.) Demand will always outstrip supply—maybe demand will even grow. Why ruin the character of these actual, existing places for a goal that can’t in actuality be met? Aside from questioning whether making room for thousands or tens of thousands more people is “ruining” a place, the counterargument to this is that the acute housing crisis is no longer the province of a handful of high-demand cities. It may be true that in a small handful of localities, demand will always outstrip supply, but this was never true in the vast majority of places. But somehow, some form of this problem now is.
One more bit: this is what happens when people actually take the advice of “why don’t you just move?”
We’ve reached a point where the housing market is determining the rest of the economy rather than the other way around. Read the whole thing. When Did the Great Stagnation Actually Begin?, Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen, August 27, 2024 There are a few hypotheses here as to why in the early 1970s lots of things sort of started to slow down economically. The last one given, which Cowen sort of dismisses, is the one that has always felt really true to me:
If there’s a word that seems to distill American life today, it’s stuckness. The initiative and good luck needed to do anything—get married, start a family, buy a home, build a home—is so high that these utterly normal things are increasingly difficult. That sense of stuckness—nothing is really ever going to change or improve, is it?—is how Americans used to think of the psychology of other countries, like those laboring under communism. This is why urbanism is so conceptually important to me: it’s literally unsticking our everyday landscape, restoring a sense that things can happen which I really think would have all sorts of positive effects throughout American society. Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
Older messages
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Who Is My Neighbor?
Monday, August 26, 2024
Long thoughts on characterization and fact in regional housing arguments ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Tripping
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Related thoughts on travel and cities ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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