New and Old #269
Zoning and culture, zoning and culture again, drinks and culture, and American textiles
Why I care about zoning, Fried Kielbasa, March 30, 2026
This is an interesting way to put this point, about the way these seemingly arcane, technocratic rules really affect culture and daily habits and the feel of a place:
If your neighborhood doesn’t have a small coffee shop nearby, you won’t buy coffee that often. I understand, of course, that you in particular may continue to go out of your way for coffee, but in aggregate, this will be a much less coffee drinking area.
I’m talking about the texture of your life — whether you enjoy going to your grocery store, whether there’s anywhere for you to sit outside your home, or what you decide to do on an afternoon when the weather’s nice and you’re done with work. The rhythm of a neighborhood is the result of what’s within reach. People take the path of least resistance — you do what’s easy, you skip what’s hard, and over time that becomes your life.
This isn’t just how the world naturally works — these are deliberate political decisions being made on your behalf, often without your input.
He goes on to mention the dearth of, and high cost of, daycare, and the problem of aging people forced to drive to get around, as also downstream, at least in part, from zoning. And they are.
This is one of the most important points of all:
If you wanted to run a small business out of your home — in most parts of the US, that’s illegal. Sometimes it’s legal to run the business, but it’s illegal for customers to visit you at that business. This prevents a lot of the wonderful tiny businesses that exist, for example, in Japan where people have a cafe that they run out of the first floor of their home. You don’t allow entrepreneurship, where somebody can for a summer try out running a cookie shop out of their home and then they can graduate to something bigger. The barrier to entry is much higher when you need to rent a space just to start a tiny business — think of how many cookie shops we’ve missed out on!
And as noted above, this is another reason I’m skeptical of the idea that “culture” is some metaphysical woo-woo thing that just exists, like God, outside of incentives or influences or economics. A great deal of culture is shaped by what is allowed, and what is allowed shapes what seems feasible. This is why I say urbanism is one of the most fundamental issue sets there is; at bottom it is about how to live with one another and how to be fully human.
Why Albuquerque’s NIMBYs Fear Neighborhood Life, ABQ Urbanist, Jordon, March 26, 2026
This is related to the piece above, fittingly.
In a recent Albuquerque Journal op-ed, Dinelli praised the conservative bloc of councilors who voted to gut or reject some of the city’s modest pro-housing and pro-livability reforms. He described neighborhood-scale retail as a likely “magnet for crime,” cast duplexes and casitas as threats to neighborhood stability, and portrayed people advocating for more homes as radicals bent on destroying Albuquerque’s neighborhoods.
It was a revealing piece not because it offered a serious diagnosis of the city’s housing problems, but because it so clearly expressed the old fear at the heart of Albuquerque’s anti-housing politics: the fear that neighborhoods might have to change to allow other people in. Like many members of Albuquerque’s anti-housing coalition, Dinelli is a supply skeptic. He acknowledges that housing costs are a problem, but refuses to accept the basic implication: if a city has made it difficult to build enough homes, then it will become more expensive to live there.
Of course, a lot of this is just either crankery or political self-interest (a lot of local politicians feel pressured to back NIMBYs, not even necessarily because they’re a majority, but because they’re louder and more organized).
But it also fits with my point above that, basically, we very easily confuse liking what we know for knowing what we like. These urbanist priorities feel radical to a lot of people simply because, in a sense, they are; we’re not used to urban living, and we’re not used to the freedoms of more dynamic neighborhoods and lower barriers to entrepreneurship.
It’s easy to look at places where that works, and think well, they can do it because they’re different. They’re Europeans. They’re Japanese. They’re not like us. That’s why rediscovering America’s own urban heritage, including the striking urbanity of many American small towns, is so important to me.
There’s a lot more in the piece; read the whole thing.
Does Anyone Really Know What Tiki Is?, Punch, Chloe Frechette, April 24, 2019
This phenomenon of things being named and categorized looking back, imposing a storyline or structure on them that really isn’t there, is fascinating:
When the first-ever Pearl Diver Punch emerged from a discreet bar at Los Angeles’ Don the Beachcomber in the 1930s it signaled a dramatic shift. The drink, festooned with a geranium leaf and edible flowers and served in a bespoke glass, was the antithesis of the spartan three-ingredients formulas—Manhattan, Martini, Old-Fashioned—that had defined the bar world’s status quo for the last half-century. It belonged to an entirely new category of cocktail.
Today we call it tiki, but it wasn’t always so. “Back in the day, during the Golden Age of what we now call tiki drinks, they were never called that,” explains Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the genre’s leading historiographer. (It was only after the drinks had faded from mainstream phenomenon to cultural artifact that the name emerged, borrowing from the central motif of the genre: tiki totems.) During their midcentury heyday, what we now refer to as tiki drinks were known interchangeably as exotic cocktails, tropical cocktails, Polynesian drinks or, in Don the Beachcomber’s parlance, “rhum rhapsodies.”
It was, in part, the very drama of these eye-catching drinks—the Shark’s Tooth, Missionary’s Downfall, the Zombie—that allowed the specifics of the genre to evade codification for so long. The formulas themselves, with their complex blends of rums and unusual modifiers like falernum and orgeat, were ruled by a certain behind-the-scenes rigorousness. But from the outside, the imprecise notion that “you know it when you see it” has long dictated the limits (or lack thereof) of tiki. “When you start calling something a tiki drink, now you have to define that,” says Berry, “but nobody did define that right when the drinks were being created.”
Berry is quoted further: “To try and retroactively apply constrictions to the genre proves challenging because, as Berry puts it, ‘you’re creating parameters that never were for a category that never was.’”
But it kind of can be defined:
“It all comes down to the punch formula,” says Berry, referencing the classic Planter’s Punch, a West Indies staple since the colonial era, the components of which are immortalized in a well-trod-out rhyme: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak. Tiki takes this baseline recipe and fractures each requisite component into multiples of each. It is, as Berry concludes, “a Caribbean drink squared, or cubed.”
Of course, you don’t think of Tiki as Caribbean, because of the whole caricatured Hawaiian/Polynesian theme, but that just shows how marketing can create real culture that ends up having a life of its own. That’s really cool. Read the whole thing.
America Stopped Making Its Own Textiles. One Mill Never Did., PureSource, Guy Barnett, April 25, 2026
I love this:
Most of the mill towns still exist—Paterson NJ, Cohoes NY, Agusta GA, Manchester NH, and on, and on. But what they were—the role they played—has largely slipped from memory. Industrial giants like Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, once the largest textile mill in the world, have faded along with the system they helped build. The rivers still run. In many cases, the buildings still stand. But the industry that once defined them is gone.
Well… almost gone.
In Thomaston, Georgia, there is still a mill producing sheets and towels on American soil—one that traces its roots back to that same era. Thomaston Mills has been making fabric since 1899, and today—along with its direct-to-consumer brand American Blossom Linens—it is the oldest continuously operating sheet mill in the United States. At a time when the industry has largely moved overseas, an operation like this seems almost out of place today.
So how did this happen? How did a textile mill founded in 1899 survive—while most of the American textile industry disappeared?
Isn’t it strange how a thing can come to seem “out of place” simply by continuing to exist? I find these last stragglers from generally defunct or obsolete concepts fascinating. (I’ve written more than one piece headlined “The Last…”)
He blames unfair trading practices, which is really not the only factor, but it’s impossible to think that it isn’t one:
We’ve seen this pattern again and again—when domestic regulations and perverse foreign incentives drive manufacturing overseas, American factories shut down. Entire industries are hollowed out. In textiles alone, more than a million American jobs were lost.
And he argues that we may have seen a cheap-foreign-goods interlude, and that preferences will swing back the other way:
Today, Thomaston Mills is still producing sheets and towels domestically more than a century after it began. It’s tempting to see it as a lone holdout—a monument from a bygone era standing against the shifting tides of global manufacturing. But we shouldn’t think of it that way. Rather, it has become a beacon helping to guide a new generation of companies (like American Giant, Buck Mason, Harvest & Mill, LA RELAXED, and Imogene + Willie) that are recommitting to domestic production and rebuilding capabilities that were once taken for granted. This is only the beginning.
We’ll find out!
Related Reading:
Excellent! 💯