Tag: the atlantic

• Land, development, democracy

  Traffic congestion and a lack of affordable housing are two clearly defined problems facing most, if not all, major cities. We know they exist. We call them crises. And yet, we can’t seem to implement effective solutions, even though we know what they are. Why is that? In her new book, On The Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, Jerusalem Demsas makes the argument that it is a failure of local democracy. There is a disconnect between what we say we want to happen and what we are actually doing. This resonates with me. In my mind, it’s looking upstream at what is bottlenecking us from making the decisions that will produce better outcomes for our cities. So after reading this conversation with her about the new book, I decided to buy a copy.

  As always, I’ll let you know what I think.

  2024.09.09

• Do rich people love quiet?

  Now that phones work on the subway (here in Toronto), I sometimes find myself having to take calls while in transit. And one of the things it has made me realize is that the subway is a very noisy place. It’s not a suitable place for calls.

  But interestingly enough, I only really realized this once I started taking calls and once I wanted it to be quiet. Before that, it was just the sounds of the subway and it was perfectly fine from an auditory perspective. And that’s maybe the thing about noise in the city: it’s relative, and it depends on your expectations.

  Here’s an excerpt from a recent article in the Atlantic by Xochitl Gonzalez that refers to urban silence as “the sound of gentrification”:

  Attempts to regulate the sounds of the city (car horns, ice-cream-truck jingles) continued throughout the 20th century, but they took a turn for the personal in the ’90s. The city [of New York] started going after boom boxes, car stereos, and nightclubs. These were certainly noisy, but were they nuisances? Not to the people who enjoyed them.

  And here’s another quote that directly speaks to its relativeness:

  In the years that followed, many of New York’s nightclubs migrated to Brooklyn, which remains loud and proud. An analysis of 2019 data ranked it as the loudest borough in New York. It earned this distinction by racking up the most noise complaints to 311—the city complaint hotline. Which raises the question: Was it the noisiest borough? Or was it just home to the densest mix of loud people and people who wanted to control those loud people?

  Urban noise is obviously an important consideration. If you have to get up for work at 5 AM and someone or something is keeping you up, that is going to be supremely annoying. But if you’re looking for something fun to do, then a noisy Brooklyn nightclub could be the cacophony of sounds that you’re after.

  When I first heard about the issue that we spoke about in yesterday’s post, my mind immediately went to noise. I thought, “That must be it. Well-caffeinated coffee drinkers are disrupting the rest of the neighborhood!” I have no idea if that’s actually a problem in this particular case, but it’s often a thing.

  According to Xochitl Gonzalez, rich people love quiet. Do you agree?

  2024.06.16

• Our cities are full

  One of the most common objections to new housing is that the place is already too crowded and potentially even full. But Jerusalem Demsas’ recently article in The Atlantic about how much people seem to hate other people is a good reminder that the topic of overpopulation can be a complicated one.

  Because what are we really saying when we say a place is too crowded or full? Is it just that this particular neighborhood is full, or are we talking about entire cities being full?

  Moreover, who determines when a place is full? Berkeley, California is, for example, a hell of a lot less dense than a city like Paris. So if a place like Berkeley can be considered full by some people, what does that mean for Paris? Presumably it’s entirely unliveable.

  Or could it be that the entire world is simply full and we should be looking at more drastic measures to curb population growth (in the places that are actually reaching replacement-level fertility rates)?

  It’s all very complicated. Thankfully Demsas offers up some possible solutions in her article:

  We have, of course, discovered an elusive technology to allow more people to live on less land: It’s called an apartment building. And if people would like fewer neighbors competing for parking spaces, then they should rest assured that buses, trains, protected bike lanes, and maintained sidewalks are effective, cutting-edge inventions available to all.

  The rest of the article is just as good.

  2022.05.24

• Marchetti’s Constant and why commuting actually has positive utility

  @OceanJangda shared a great article with me today about “the psychological benefits of commuting to work.” It is excellent, it cites a lot of psychological research, and I would encourage all of you to give it a read. While it is never fun getting on a packed subway in the morning, the argument is that there are psychological and other positive benefits to commuting. It turns out, we need breaks in our day.

  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

  But here’s the strange part. Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed. The sack of Troy blurs with Telemachus’s math homework. And employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. “No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,” a Microsoft report warned last fall. After-hours chats were up 69 percent among users of the company’s messaging platform, and workers were less engaged and more exhausted.

  It also turns out that there’s kind of a magic commute number. In the mid 1990s, Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti remarked that, all throughout history, humans have tended to cap their commute times at about 60 minutes per day. So a half hour each way. This was the case in ancient cities and it appears to be the case today (ignoring COVID).

  What this mean is that as new technologies became available — such as the automobile — we were able to further decentralize and still only consume about 60 minutes of our day. Apparently the average one-way commute time in America is indeed about 27 minutes. Some people, of course, have much longer commutes, but this is the average. Currently mine is about 12-15 minutes with a coffee stop. Yes, it’s luxurious.

  This 60-minute rule of thumb has become known as Marchetti’s Constant. And there are a number of possible explanations for why this has remained the case. Again, the obvious one is that it helps us detach from work, which is why so many of us have felt burnt out while working from home. We haven’t been shutting off and we need to.

  For more on this, click here.

  2021.07.14

• A child of catastrophe

  

  It used to be the case that cities had a habit of catching fire and burning down. Toronto had the Great Fires of 1849 and 1904. Chicago had the Great Fire of 1871. And the same can be said about many other cities. In fact, you probably weren’t considered a real city until you had some sort of “Great Fire.” But as Derek Thompson points out in this recent Atlantic article about urban comebacks, disasters have a way of forcing positive change:

  The 21st-century city is the child of catastrophe. The comforts and infrastructure we take for granted were born of age-old afflictions: fire, flood, pestilence. Our tall buildings, our subways, our subterranean conduits, our systems for bringing water in and taking it away, our building codes and public-health regulations—all were forged in the aftermath of urban disasters by civic leaders and citizen visionaries.

  As Charles Dickens famously described, British cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution were grim and pestilential. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds—they didn’t suffer from individual epidemics so much as from overlapping, never-ending waves of disease: influenza, typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis.

  It’s somewhat unfortunate, but oftentimes we need something to break before any action is taken. There’s a bias toward the status quo. Otherwise, it becomes a question of, “what did we do last time? Well that worked just fine. Let’s do it again.” But hopefully all of this makes you at least a little optimistic about the future. Because history has taught us that when faced with adversity, we don’t typically turn our back on our cities. Rather we turn around and make them better.

  Photo by Tomek Baginski on Unsplash

  2020.09.11

• Why we work out

  This recent article by Amanda Mull makes an interesting argument about “Why Americans Really Go to the Gym.” In it she argues that gyms aren’t just about being healthy and looking beautiful. Part of the satisfaction of working out in a collective space is that, among other things, you get to be around people with similar values and you get to prove to others that you are someone with enough self-discipline to stay consistently active. In her words, “proving something to others is often a big part of proving it to yourself, and that’s difficult to do when no one else can see you.” Depending on how you interpret this, it might lead you to believe that we’re all looking for a bit of validation from others. But I think the other way to look at it is that spaces such as gyms and offices aren’t just empty vessels where we come to do our necessary work. They are also social environments that serve some potentially important psychological functions.

  The other thing Mull’s article touches on is the evolution of physical activity:

  In the past 70 years, physical activity in America has transformed from a necessity of daily life into an often-expensive leisure activity, retrofitted into the foundation of people’s identities. As a concept, fitness was a response to the flourishing, sidewalk-free postwar American suburbs and what the fitness pioneer Bonnie Prudden dubbed “the tyranny of the wheel”: Americans went from strollers to school buses to cars, stripping out much of the on-foot transportation that had long characterized life in cities or on farms. “In the ’50s and ’60s, the body became a problem, and exercise developed—it had to develop—because people realized that we were all going to die of heart attacks,” Shelly McKenzie, the author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, told me.

  In short: we had no choice but to create a fitness industry because we systematically removed physical activity from our daily lives. You could argue — as the above excerpt does — that this was largely because of suburbanization and changes in mobility. But I don’t think that’s everything. We also changed the kind of work that a lot of us do and created technologies that allow us to do more without, frankly, moving all that much. Today, doing good work and being productive is often characterized by sitting still for extended periods of time and subsisting on empty calories so that you don’t have to lose focus for very long. Indeed, working out our bodies, and consequently our minds, has become somewhat of a luxury.

  2020.09.08

• A catalyst for Westside development — but not yet

  A new 280 acre park is currently under construction in an old quarry on the westside of Atlanta. It’s called Westside Park. When it opens this spring (that’s at least the target), it will be by far the largest park in the city. But already there are concerns that this investment in new public space could be triggering “rapid gentrification” in the surrounding area.

  So earlier this month, the mayor’s office issued an executive order that put in place a 6-month moratorium on all new construction permits in the communities surrounding the park. The order read like this: “…refuse to accept new applications for rezonings, building permits for new construction, land disturbance permits, special use permits, special administrative permits, subdivisions, replattings, and lot consolidations for non-public projects.”

  The objective is to avoid displacement. And since new development means change, this is a way to stop change. (Don’t you just hate when things go and change?) The problem, of course, is that a moratorium on new housing doesn’t stop change and it does nothing to address the desire to live next to this new amenity. It only stymies the supply of new housing to meet this demand. (It’s also incongruent with the park investment being marketed as a “catalyst for new development.”)

  In fact, Joe Cortright (of City Observatory) and Jenny Schuetz (of the Brookings Institution) have both argued — either directly or indirectly — that the above move could actually increase displacement in the surrounding area; because the moratorium on new housing could simply redirect demand toward the existing housing stock. The order does seem to suggest that you can still renovate an existing property.

  I wonder if any studies have been done on the externalities associated with temporary housing supply moratoriums. If so, I would be interested in reading them.

  2020.02.28

• Thoughts on the coronavirus

  This is an excellent article by James Hamblin about the coronavirus. He believes, along with many epidemiologists, that the disease (COVID-19) is unlikely to be contained, and may become endemic:

  The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

  But here’s the irony. It is unlikely to be containable because, comparatively speaking, the disease isn’t as fatal as other coronaviruses. In James’ words: The virus is deadly, but not too deadly.

  As of right now, the fatality rate is believed to be less than 2%. SARS and MERS, on the other hand, were highly fatal to humans. H5N1 (avian flu), which emerged in the 90s, had/has a fatality rate of about 60%.

  One of the problems with COVID-19 is that, for many people, the symptoms are mild or even non-existent. And that is precisely why it has been so difficult to pin down. If it affected everyone equally and as severely, then it would be far more containable.

  But I am the furthest thing from an epidemiologist, so you should probably just go and read James’ article over in The Atlantic.

  John Hopkins University also has this live map showing total confirmed, total deaths, and total recovered. At the time of this post, the fatality rate looks to be about 3.4%. But if you believe that many people are asymptomatic, the denominator is probably understated.

  Naturally, we are all taking precautions, doing what we can to make our communities safe, and trying to quash this virus. And that is what we should be doing. At the same time, I found James’ article helpful at putting things into perspective.

  2020.02.27

• The childless city debate

  There’s an interesting debate happening online right now. A recent article by Derek Thompson (of the Atlantic) made the claim that today’s urban renaissance is great for young college graduates, but not so good for kids.

  Here’s a quick synopsis:

  Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell.

  Raising a family in the city [New York City] is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

  Michael Lewyn (of the Touro Law Center) responded to this argument with a post titled “the myth of the childless city.” While it is true that the US fertility rate is at an all-time low, the numbers — at least some of them — suggest that cities aren’t all that childless:

  Furthermore, not all urban cores are doing poorly in retaining children. Washington, D.C. had just under 32,000 children under 5 in 2010, and has over 45,000 today. In Philadelphia, the number of children under 5 increased from just over 101,000 in 2010 to 104,152 in 2018. Even in San Francisco (which, according to The Atlantic article, “has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”), the number of under-5 children increased from 35,203 in 2010 to 39,722 in 2018.

  What I would be curious to see is a more granular look at where children are being raised within specific cities, and how that may, or may not, be changing over time. City boundaries can be broad.

  2019.07.26

• Software developers are half of the homebuyers in San Francisco

  A couple of months ago I wrote about the relationship between IPOs and home prices. It was in response to the current wave of tech companies — most of which are headquartered in San Francisco — that have gone public or are expected to go public this year (2019). What impact will this have on the city’s housing market?

  I cited this academic study on the topic, which already discovered a “positive and significant association between local house price changes and firms going public.” But today I stumbled upon another interesting study by a San Francisco real estate agent, name Deniz Kahramaner, who happens to also be a Stanford-trained data scientist.

  What Kahramaner wanted to figure out was, who tends to buy residential real estate in San Francisco?

  So he started with title data and then scraped the internet to try and match up individual buyer names with specific companies and industries. Since not everyone has some sort of public profile and because real estate is sometimes held within a company, he was only able to traceback about 55% of home purchases in San Francisco last year.

  Still, the data looks pretty clear. About half of the homes bought in 2018 were by individuals whose employment has roots in “software.” The next biggest buyer segment was “finance.”

  

  The other interesting thing about this data set is that it shows where people have been buying (at least last year). Historically, the north end of the city has been the wealthiest, but the above data shows things moving in a southeasterly direction. Though, it remains to be seen what all of this will look like when the dust settles after this current crop of tech IPOs.

  Chart: The Atlantic

  2019.06.09