New and Old #262
Erstwhile downtowns, a neat policy experiment, against optimization, and a retro-gaming hobbyist labor of love
When America’s downtowns ruled the world, Pencilling Out, Zak Yudhishthu, March 27, 2026
This is bouncing off a book that I need to read, by the way.
The concept of “downtown” that you’re familiar with — large-scale stores, high-rise offices, very little residential housing — is a unique product of early 20th-century America, a very particular time and place in urban development. During this time, downtowns were glorious, frenzied, and altogether incredible places. American cities featured a typology of “downtown” that was distinctive on the world stage: central, hyper-dense clusters of high-rise office buildings and department stores, combined with very few full-time residents.
It’s a long piece and worth your time if any of this is interesting to you. But this is an interesting point, further down:
Since many downtown interests assumed that increased car access would primarily increase traffic towards downtowns — instead of decentralizing activity — they also turned their attention towards parking facilities. Many drivers had been parking their cars on the street, which only exacerbated congestion and sparked debates about how to restrict and regulate on-street parking. Through the 1930s and 1940s, the private supply of off-street parking had also grown steadily.
You never really know where a discrete moment or policy will go, and the place it ends up may not be discernible except, in a way, looking back in time and imposing a kind of story on the process that really wasn’t there.
Anyway, this is a nice longer read.
How a city used land leasing to buy off the NIMBYs, Urban Proxima, Jeff Fong, March 19, 2026
This is very good, and the opening lays out a canny and, I think, correct view:
A hundred years of bad land use policy has suppressed housing production in our metropolitan cores. A core problem with fixing this failing system is that it’s not failing everyone. Incumbent homeowners prefer the status quo, which is why they use local political systems to block new development.
This characterization is mostly accurate, but it’s also slightly reductive because it implies that the only way to overcome NIMBY sentiment is to directly overpower it. While that’s certainly one tack, there’s more we can do. We can make the fight for housing abundance easier to win not just by renegotiating the political rules of the game, but also by reconfiguring the underlying political economy that creates so much hostility to new housing in the first place. More plainly, we don’t have to beat all the NIMBYs; we can get some to join us. And because I love a good case study, we’ll be taking a look at the example of Falls Church, Virginia.
This was particularly interesting to me because Falls Church is not very far from me. I’ve even met the small city’s mayor, who is known for being very good on housing. The actual policy described here is a little wonky, and you should read it instead of me trying to summarize it. But the point is that it created a situation in which development seemed as if it would benefit people, and more people supported it.
At the most fundamental level, NIMBYs are NIMBYs because they prefer the status quo. Individually, that could have to do with banal issues like the aesthetics of their neighborhood or unpriced street parking. It could also include resource concerns like the availability of free street parking or school crowding. More darkly, racial and class animus might also be at play.
So, our problem is twofold: NIMBYs don’t believe change benefits them personally and local government overweights the preferences of the typical NIMBY. While there’s been a lot of work done on the latter part of that problem, the Falls Church land leasing story is a great example of the progress we can still make on the former.
This is a little bit of what was a play with Andrew Burleson’s guest piece for me a couple of weeks ago. Contra the idea that NIMBYs must simply be overpowered, Burleson argued that building better places, with more of a public and civic sense, might blunt the tendency to resist every little change. Fong argues here something similar. It’s very good and combines ideas and policy. Read the whole thing.
The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla’s Newsletter, kyla scanlon, March 26, 2026
One example of an individual optimization tool that really works is Ozempic. Some people need to be on it for medical reasons1 and others are self-admittedly doing it for aesthetics. To be clear, Ozempic is a wonderful technology that solves a very real problem for individuals but it leaves the collective problem like the food system and healthcare access2 untouched.
It also marks a shift. The internal body has a thing we can really control, with time and resources. What we have is the Ozempic optimization of everything - Ozempicization, if you will. We have a suite of magic shots now in the form of peptides and everything else that address effort and discomfort and complexity. Everything can be optimized. Everything can be controlled.
This is a subtle point here, and difficult to make clearly. It’s something like the argument urbanists make against self-driving cars. It isn’t The problem is important to our cause, so we don’t want it solved, or we only want it solved in a way that’s narrowly politically palatable to us. It’s more like, Solving the problem in this way might be narrowly good, but it sets the stage for leaving other, bigger problems unsolved, or even to get worse.
It’s a little bit like the old arguments against irradiated beef, back when e. coli and fast food were big in the discourse. If the beef was dangerous because it was handled poorly (by overworked slaughterhouse and meatpacking workers), for example, irradiating it might in fact make it safer for consumers, but at the cost of making it easier to overwork the workers.
Scanlon connects quite a lot of things in this essay with this overall observation, and I’m not sure they all connect, but it’s an interesting lens to think about a lot of seemingly disparate things going on these days.
Mega Man II – Full SNES 16-Bit Conversion Announced, RetroRGB, Bob, March 25, 2026
I love the hobbyist labors of love that you see with these old games, and old pieces of culture in general. I’m not sure how copyright technically affects this. I don’t care. It’s awesome to see a long afterlife for beloved cultural artifacts, long after the original developer has moved on.
The developer Infidelity has just announced he’s working on a complete 16-bit overhaul of Mega Man II, based on his NES to SNES conversion. This will be an aesthetic upgrade that will still play exactly like the original NES version (and his current conversion), just with the reduced slowdown and sprite flicker these SNES conversions allow. The project is just beginning and he’s looking for an artist to help with the graphics, so this might end up being an awesome collaboration.
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