How the Iconic Dingbat Took Over Los Angeles, Planetizen, Diana Ionescu, September 28, 2021

The dingbat is a medium-sized apartment building closely associated with Los Angeles architecture. It has a highly visible carport for its ground level, and is essentially a form of “missing middle” housing: one that represents a middle between detached houses and large apartment buildings in both density and size. With parking taken care of, and the size quite modest, are buildings like this a way of scaling up density in low-rise communities with serious housing pressure?

A flood of unknown products is making online shopping impossible, The Washington Post, Heather Kelly, October 4, 2021

Referring to online shopping from Facebook ads to Walmart to Amazon, Kelly writes, “Between the reputable products and the counterfeits is a sea of mysterious companies selling goods of unknown origin and quality.” This is all too familiar to me, and probably to anyone who does a lot of online shopping. All you have to do to see it is to type in a couple of ordinary product search terms on Amazon and look at the dozens of pages of janky results.

Kelly suggests that this wild west of online shopping outsources a lot of work onto the customer. It’s more than just buyer beware; it’s virtually impossible to know what you’re going to get, and even the reviews are often useless. Most of these products are not technically illegal, but many are inferior clones of a more recognizable product.

This strikes me as one of those things that eventually transforms from an individual annoyance to a collective problem. And I bet it’s only going to get worse.

Evicting Our Future, Law & Liberty, Michael Hendrix, September 1, 2021

While this piece argues against the CDC eviction moratorium, it states bluntly, “Ultimately, America cannot solve its evictions challenges without fixing its housing crisis….We cannot solve for evictions without solving for supply in housing.” In other words, the moratorium was at best a stopgap measure which did not get to the roots of the problem. Lots of folks still don’t recognize that there is a problem, namely the housing crisis that is getting harder and harder to ignore.

This, it seems to me, is a hallmark of political dysfunction: the inability to name the real problem and act. If even the pandemic hasn’t forced us to do that, I’m not sure what will.

Hendrix also points out, “Small and minority property owners, who make up a majority of landlords in America, suffer the greatest burdens from foregone rent.” Landlords, like developers, are more complicated than the negative stereotypes about them. This is also a good sentence: “The Supreme Court has long looked askance at bureaucrats suddenly discovering enormous powers under long-existing statutes.” Sorry, one more: “It turns out that having 450 separate state, county, and local entities administer the disbursal of rental aid was a recipe for inconsistency and incompetency.” Yep.

Downtown D.C. Restaurants Are Still Hurting While Neighborhood Eateries Bounce Back, DCist, Ally Schweitzer, October 4, 2021

Restaurant owners are hopeful, but data show that in Washington, D.C.—and probably most cities, though they aren’t mentioned here—that downtowns will recover foot traffic, but the still greatly diminished office worker population means these restaurants have not gotten back to their pre-pandemic business levels.

For thoughts on how cities should react to a temporary or potentially long-term reduction in office workers and commuters, check out this brief Strong Towns web symposium on that question from December 2020, to which I contributed.

Related Reading:

New and Old #13

New and Old #14

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