New and Old #246
Fear of sidewalks, urban disorder, video rental lives, and a Catholic sort-of case for Mormonism
According to the letter from Robert Gonzales, Sidewalk Section Chief, of the 73 residents who responded, just 12 supported the sidewalks.
“In the remaining 61 comments, residents heavily opposed the installations,” Gonzales wrote, “expressing concerns about loss of available parking, lack of need, financial loss due to tree and landscaping removals, loss of environmental beauty and the ‘natural feel’ of the community, stranger danger, increased crime, littering, and, most of all, the worsening of stormwater flooding and erosion.”
Gonzales added that the county’s budget doesn’t have enough money to install the sidewalks anyway. “Our decision is clear,” he concluded. “None of the proposed sidewalks will be installed.”
This is one of those reasons why I say that America doesn’t really understand urbanism at all. The idea that sidewalks would bring strangers, and crime, into communities is hard to understand as anything other than one or more of 1) ignorant, 2) racist, 3) outdated correlation/causation pattern-matching.
I suspect that it is largely the third: folks who feel a sense of discomfort over anything that feels like “the city,” based on the lived or cultural memory of the urban crime wave in the 20th century. There’s also an element of “I don’t walk anywhere, who does that?”, in the same genre as the old “I don’t know anybody who voted for Nixon!”
This reminds me of a lawsuit some residents of Alexandria, Virginia brought against the city, over a zoning liberalization the city approved. They cited several harms that might arise from more density, and one of them was foot traffic. Foot traffic.
People fearing sidewalks, or living in a city and complaining that allowing more density will cause more foot traffic is a perfect encapsulation of how so many people simply don’t understand what cities are.
Our Cities are a Billboard for the Democratic Party, Everyone is Welcome, Stan Oklobdzija, September 19, 2025
Well, on the other side of Dan Reed’s piece, I’ll offer this one:
Crime is judged by the modern mind. Who is to say whether a city is more dangerous than another except to compare statistics? There were 573 murders in Chicago last year, but there were also 2.6 million people living there. So when you think of one number in the context of another, there are relatively few given how many more human beings live within the boundaries of that city.
Disorder is judged by the ape mind. Dallas feels relatively safe because you experience it through a car window and a parking lot. Sure, you are far likelier to catch a disgruntled bullet in a Dallas bar than a Manhattan sidewalk, but the overwhelming crush of humanity in the latter presents a multitude of threats your ape brain must scan for.
Unsheltered homelessness is a massive threat to our political project because it makes the ape mind scream.
Oklobdzija is basically saying that politics and urban governance have to make some concessions to the way people are. Many progressives lean more towards a view that we should resist “who we are”—that we can choose to be better than to conflate the desperation of homelessness with the threat of crime, etc.
I guess my question is, what if “we”—i.e. a politically decisive share of the population—are not now and are never going to do that? Progressives don’t want to throw the most desperate people under the bus as a kind of political sacrifice; conservatives don’t want progressive demands of perfection to hold up improving things within the political reality that obtains now.
I find this struggle between worldviews compelling and am sympathetic to both views. But personally, I think it’s pretty easy to say, “Nobody should be homeless and living on the street, and everyone involved would be better off if they didn’t have to be living on the street.”
The Last Video Rental Store Is Your Public Library, 404, Claire Woodcock, December 3, 2025
But it’s not just that discs from different regions aren’t designed to play on devices not formatted for that specific region. Generally, it’s also just that most films don’t get a physical release anymore. In cases where films from streaming platforms do get slated for a physical release, it can take years. A notable example of this is the Apple+ film CODA, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. The film only received a U.S. physical release this month. Hudson says films getting a physical release is becoming the exception, not the rule.
“It’s frustrating because I understand the streaming services, they’re trying to drive people to their services and they want some money for that, but there are still a lot of people that just can’t afford all of those services,” Hudson told 404 Media.
This is a piece about public libraries as the last holdout of places where you can rent physical media. It’s mostly about movies, but music and even video games can be found in many libraries. It’s kind of old-fashioned and (relatively) low tech, and it’s increasingly difficult to amass a physical media collection. But it’s in demand. Partly, maybe, as a kind of throwback/retro thing, but largely because streaming has turned out to be a poor 1:1 replacement for owned and/or widely available physical media collections.
This is an important issue for culture and preservation as well as the more immediate question of consumer demand. Give it a read.
Mormonism Obsessed with Christ, First Things, Stephen H. Webb, February 2012
Once in awhile, First Things does, or did, publish stuff that went a bit outside of their expected rather hardline Catholic editorial line. This is one of those pieces. It’s basically a “steelman” argument for Mormonism as at least belonging within Christianity, if not (obviously) being doctrinally correct from a mainstream Catholic (or Protestant) view.
It’s a rather moving piece, and it argues that Mormonism, in its unusual belief that God is of the same species as humanity and that Christ is not exactly God, is not off-the-wall heretical but rather holds to an almost aching hope as far as the question of being united with God one day. It also proposes viewing the Book of Mormon as a series of stories about Jesus, which makes it a sort of devotional book, but not as actual scripture. As a Catholic who has never heard much about Mormonism, I found this very interesting.
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