New and Old #264
The YIMBY theory of power, pinning down the house, Virginia tourism marketing, and a cool feat with a retro computer
A YIMBY Theory of Power, The Nation, Ned Resnikoff, April 28, 2025
Opponents on the left have long accused YIMBYs of refusing to engage with questions of power. YIMBYism has been, according to one critic, “a promise that we didn’t need to redistribute anything [because we] could just make more property.”
This is YIMBY policy analyst Ned Resnikoff arguing that YIMBYism does, in fact, have a “theory of power,” and that it is, as the subhead puts it, “more sophisticated and has more explanatory power than the one held by many critics of the ‘abundance agenda.’”
Good read.
What Is a “House?” The Language and Uses of Housing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Houston, 1837–1880: Thesis, What Are Streets For, Jon Boyd, December 2, 2025
This paper starts with detailed analysis of the use of house in mid-nineteenth-century newspapers published in Houston. Commonly house was used synonymously with the present-day use of building. This study also considers house compounded or qualified, as in courthouse, warehouse, and dwelling house, for just a few examples. Since the period studied here runs from 1837–1880, it is sensible to call this time Victorian, as well as using this as a noun for the people living at that time. This stipulation avoids many awkward expressions. Victorians, thus understood, sometimes distinguished buildings by use and compounded these words for uses with house to refer to a kind of building. Yet Victorians used house freely as part of a dispositional flexibility that was also a reflection of buildings which were themselves often poorly distinguished in design and form.
This is great, and the insight that the buildings themselves, of many uses, were not that distinguishable by type, is really important. Give this a read.
This County Is No Longer Considered Part of Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia Magazine, Michele Kettner, March 19, 2026
This is interesting:
As the saying goes, parting is such sweet sorrow. By the start of 2027, Fauquier County will no longer be part of Northern Virginia, according to the Virginia Tourism Corporation.
The tourism group is creating a new region called the Virginia Piedmont, which will include Fauquier. The change also moves Culpeper and Rappahannock out of the NoVA tourism region.
The Virginia Piedmont region will consist of 11 different counties and cities, including Albemarle County, City of Charlottesville, Culpeper County, Fluvanna County, Greene County, Louisa County, Madison County, Nelson County, Orange County, and Rappahannock County.
What’s interesting about it is that more and more of the state is becoming “Northern Virginia,” as the D.C. suburban area sprawls outward. Winchester and Front Royal, and even Richmond, are in some ways the fringes of the D.C. metro area now. But I suppose that’s precisely why the tourism folks are trying to distinguish the more rural outer areas as their own place. There’s an interesting push and push there.
With everything set up, Scott fires up the program, and his virtual lunar lander starts to slowly descend. As the spacecraft approached the surface of the moon, Manley talked about how slow the system is, saying that it sometimes had a lag of about two seconds. Nevertheless, he also said that the AGC “ran on a 2-second cycle, where it would compute some values at that rate and it would be able to land on the moon like that.”
I love this sort of thing.
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