Category: Places

Now, I’ve always disliked dress codes. I try to avoid going to bars that have dress codes, even if I meet them, just because I think they’re stupid. But this defies stupidity. And it makes southerners look bad– I don’t know how many times I’ve had to deal with “oh, you’re from Virginia, do you have plumbing?” jokes. Come on people, grow the hell up and stop acting like yokels, and maybe we’ll get some respect from the rest of the country.

Three hundred sixty five days ago, Sunday night, I went to a party. There were beer cans on the train on the way over. The station smelled like beer. The neighborhood smelled like beer. Needless to say, I woke up Monday morning in Southie.

Eurotrash recalls her Irish upbringing in London: “Usually I told people I was Canadian. No-one hates a Canadian. ”

Indeed.

You know, let’s skip turning Haiti into a nation-building exercise. We’ve got our hands full, we helped Aristide out once or twice before, and of course they don’t have any oil. So on the whole, you know, we should probably just leave it to fester until it becomes a real emergency.

Northern Virginia has never looked so appealing.

JFleck, whom I admire greatly, defends the Mars plan. I mean, yeah, this is after all the 21st century, and such. But really my question is not “why Mars” but “why now?” and “why this, over feeding the hungry, curing cancer, or stopping AIDS?” (Well, I guess those would require politically inconvenient science like common sense economics and nutrition, genetic research, and promoting the use of condoms, all of which our current administration opposes.)

Yes, I want space travel to work. I want to strip-mine the moon as much as the next guy. But come on, we haven’t got the cash right now because we’ve given it all to people making over $350k/year already, and if we give it to NASA we’d basically be giving it to a dysfunctional, wasteful organization. They need a completely new philosophy. And while we’re at it can we just give them, say, 1% of the military budget?

I feel like this is Saddam again: yes, Saddam is a bad, bad man who should be stopped, but you’re doing it badly and for all the wrong reasons! If you want to give a boost to basic research, double the direct research budgets and give money to schools.

Asking NASA to fly to Mars on any budget, even one double or triple what Bush wants to spend on it, is asking for another shuttle disaster and ten or fifteen more dead heroes to mourn, which I suppose will take the public’s mind off the fact that they’re being screwed out of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Federico sent me an old article about sprawl, from the Atlantic. I’m not entirely sure how to respond to it. The article is a few years out of date, and the beginning of it has some major logical flaws (ignore the parts about how the old building methods were best– they often sucked, and there’s a good reason that many old buildings have not survived).

On the other hand, I basically agree with a lot of what the author has to say: a community is more than a group of houses, it needs human scale and mixed use and so forth. And I agree with his overriding, mostly taste-based assertion, “Sprawl bad,” despite the fact that it totally fails to take into account the fact that lots of people like having big houses on big lawns, like the separation and privacy that subdivisions create, and dammit they like their cars.

Anyway, it all comes back to me with the family farm. All that new-urbanism kind of development takes more than just a developer. It takes a broad-based commitment on the part of public leaders, and a willingness on the part of individuals to take risks that are not entirely known or predictable.

When it comes to one family, and one farm, being developed, it’s not going to be a “real community,” whatever that means. It’s going to be a twisty-roaded subdivision. We’re not going to come close to any of the ideals of new urbanism or intentional communities, we’re talking what does grandma do with 200 acres and a zoning law that insists on a minimum lot size of 20 acres. In that case you get 10 lots, 20 acres each, which is too small to farm and too big for a neighborhood. You get big houses on the big lots and it’s a bedroom community.

So, given that you can’t farm 200 acres, what can you do with it? I’m not trying to change the world here, I’m trying to figure out what combination of individual action and community policy could create something other than sprawl. It’s easy enough to say “I want new urbanism” but how do you get there in the medium-sized chunks of most peri-urban development these days?

The single most important issue for me in local politics is housing. A lot of people are in favor of rent control, but I really feel that’s a recipe for disinvestment and disaster. We don’t need to squeeze the landlords, we need more apartments, more condos, more homes. The area has a serious lack of low to moderate priced housing: you can go to the suburbs and get a large house for a 350 and up, or you can live in the city in a condo for 350 and up, but there’s not much under a quarter million.

Some people are opposed to adding apartments, because they think apartment dwellers aren’t invested in their communities. That’s just wrong. The Fenway-area development of new aparment and retail buildings needs to go forward, over the objections of the anti-growth crowd. Yes, it needs to include parking for residents, blah blah blah, but we really need a very large number of units, and scaling it back is not a good idea.

Robert Reich had a good idea about how to make it easier to increase the supply of housing: increase maximum heights, speed up approvals, unify licensing. Designated affordable units in each new development is good, but it’s not enough: we need to increase the actual supply. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that designated affordable units drive up the price of the other units: you end up with one ‘affordable’ and ten very expensive units and nothing in the middle, which is hard on Average Joe, poor guy. I imagine that a dramatically increased supply of housing would make most of those problems go away.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that all this expensive housing is going to hurt the economy, and not just because it’s a bubble. I find that when I think about buying a house, I look at my finances and think of ways to avoid spending any money at all. Like, college-studenty ways of doing things, like spending no money ever, and washing clothes in the sink to avoid spending a buck fifty on laundry. And that can’t be good for the economy.

Is there any real research to indicate that secondhand smoke is bad? Now there is: Helena Montana had a dramatic drop in heart attacks after banning smoking in bars. Then they dropped the ban, and the heart rate rose again.

The People’s Republik bar, in Cambridge MA, has a chalkboard out front. On the day the Cambridge smoking ban took effect, it read “You can’t smoke in here, but some of us can still stink up the bar.”

So, Alabama has a reputation as a place where cops are thugs. Recent news about the criminal justice system there doesn’t do much to dispel that. Also covered in TalkLeft and the (mainstream newspaper) Mobile Register.

My brother recently returned from a trip to Bogota and Medellin, only to find that there had been a shooting in Adams Morgan, his DC neighborhood.

The distinction between less-structured “crews” and more-formal gangs is covered in another Washington Post article on the recent surge of gang-related violence.