A pandemic, a motel without power and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future, The Washington Post, Greg Jaffe, September 10, 2020

This sobering story paints a Dickensian picture of American poverty, following families who live in run-down motels outside Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida. It’s a tough read; the best gloss you can probably put on the attitudes of people who are unmoved by this kind of thing is that perhaps they really don’t believe it is true. But it is. The vignette of long-term guests essentially running an abandoned motel by themselves—involving gas generators, because the power has been shut off—truly feels like dystopian fiction. This piece highlights so many things wrong with how we do things. You’ll just have to read it. I read it when it came out over a year ago, and am featuring it here because I haven’t forgotten it.

How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing, ProPublica, Alec MacGillis, June 29, 2020

I first read this around the same time as the first one, and it made a similar impression on me. It’s a fantastic piece of investigative longform journalism. This bit stands out, but so much does. Again, read the whole thing.

This correlation [between the closing of grocery stores and proliferation of dollar stores] is not a coincidence, according to a 2018 research brief by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for small businesses. The stores undercut traditional grocery stores by having few employees, often only three per store, and paying them little. “While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress,” the brief reported. “They’re a cause of it.”

Housing First; Cars Last, Planetizen, Todd Litman, January 7, 2021

Every time somebody purchases a vehicle they expect somebody else—businesses and local governments—to provide thousands of dollars worth of parking for its use, a matching grant for driving.

I’ll admit, when I first saw the term “car storage” on urbanist Twitter years ago, I scratched my head until I realized with a little annoyance, “Oh, they mean parking!” The first time I heard parking critiqued like this, it sounded radical. Now, it seems quite commonsense to me, especially in cities where space is at such a premium.

Litman suggests that this is not anti-suburban, but rather that:

Parking regulations are generally applied without consideration to context; the same requirements are imposed in multimodal neighborhoods with land value areas as in sprawled, automobile-dependent areas. In other words, conventional parking policies impose suburban values in urban environments where they are inappropriate.

If your reaction to this is like mine years ago, why don’t you read the whole thing too?

This could be the skinniest new apartment building in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Inga Saffron, January 31, 2019

You may shudder at the thought of living in one of the tiny apartments in this unique building in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, overlooking the infamous Vine Street Expressway that tore a hole through the city’s urban fabric decades ago. Zoned for a tall building but considered too small to build on and used as a pair of parking spaces, this little strip of land was left over from the Expressway, which wasn’t quite as wide as had been originally planned.

Certainly a tiny apartment like this isn’t for everyone, but it wouldn’t get built if it weren’t for someone. And the fact that it’s possible is a sort of test case for all sorts of infill in urban areas on odd lots. Often, in fact, the barriers are more regulatory than architectural. This is the kind of locally tailored work that can really make neighborhoods better. In turn, we should make it easier for small developers to do it.

Related Reading:

New and Old #17

New and Old #18

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of nearly 200 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share