Zillow’s Satellite View Shows the Ghosts of Neighborhoods Erased By America’s Highways, The Drive, Peter Holderith, March 5, 2021

Beginning in the 1950s, to make room for America's new expressways, a whole lot of buildings—houses, businesses, communities, entire blocks of cities—had to be knocked down. Long erased from view, those neighborhoods are slipping further and further towards the void. But there's an unlikely savior preserving their memory: the real estate site Zillow.

Also: “All of this data is current. The parcels still exist as far as the county is concerned, so that's what sites like Zillow show—the remnants of neighborhoods that used to be.”

And, of course:

The eminent domain that allowed their [highways’] creation and the quality-of-life issues that they spawned have also had a devastating effect on innumerable urban neighborhoods—again, often working-class neighborhoods populated by minorities.

Read the whole thing for an explanation of where this old data comes from, and for some unsettling images of what we destroyed to run expressways through urban cores.

Fix These Mansions!, Washingtonian, Courtney Vinopal, February 9, 2018

The other day, in Washington, D.C., I came across this, in an embassy-heavy neighborhood off Dupont Circle:

I wondered, of course, if this was the Russian embassy! But I looked up the address, and apparently it’s the old Pakistani embassy, which is in a newer building now. It’s for sale, as are a number of other vacated embassies around the city. I suppose I had the idea that embassies were never abandoned except for war or diplomatic issues. This piece is a neat window into the little world of former-embassy real estate.

The First Music Streaming Service, The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia, April 4, 2022

I write about Techmoan, a British old-tech YouTuber, a lot. This article might as well be a Techmoan episode, and that’s very much a compliment. It’s about a fascinating piece of dead-end audio streaming technology that used phone lines and disk jockeys. I don’t want to repeat too much, so read the whole thing. (And for something similar, here’s a piece on a weird hybrid between the record and the audio tape.)

Sorry, collectibles are terrible investments, Full Stack Economics, Alan Cole, April 14, 2022

Collectibles have a fundamental flaw: they don’t generate cashflow. In fact, after maintenance, storage, deterioration, and transaction costs, their cashflow is usually negative. That means that in the long run, they'll consistently under-perform conventional assets like stocks and bonds.

I read this article with interest, because I once spent several hundred dollars on a bunch of sealed video games, enough to fill up a U-Haul box. I selected them based on my knowledge of video game genres, developers, and consoles, and what sort of games tended to become valuable over time. I guessed correctly on most of them, made some very handsome money on a few, and overall made money on the whole little experiment.

That said, this was an experiment, not an investment strategy! Read the whole thing, but here’s one more insightful point:

There’s a place for zero cash flow assets, and always will be. Some share of the economy will always be devoted to Picasso paintings, 1977 Kenner Star Wars figurines, or obscure 19th-century stamps. But that’s a limited pool of money and attention, and its value is bounded. If a new collectible becomes popular, it erodes the mindshare and the market share of at least some incumbents.

And a note on Beanie Babies (my emphasis):

This may sound confusing⁠—perhaps almost deliberately so. Deep Fuchsia is your golden ticket, and Fuchsia is worthless. It’s like the company functionally counterfeits its own product. But this blurred line between the rare items and the common ones is what drove a lot of people to hear about⁠—and buy⁠—the common items.

Related Reading:

New and Old #28

New and Old #29

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