New and Old #271
Local pro-housing policy, being older and busier, a listening bar, and planned obsolescence
How Atlanta is trying a new model for below-market-rate housing, Urban Proxima, Jeff Fong, June 3, 2026
This is a good a piece about a local housing policy idea from Atlanta:
Atlanta, like most American cities, has long deployed the standard menu of housing subsidies. These include Inclusionary Zoning, LIHTC-financed projects, and demand-side policies like down payment assistance. These methods have, however, reached their limits. So, in 2023, the city established the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation (AUDC) to go beyond what’s possible with the legacy policy toolkit.
It has abilities and resources that make it theoretically to get projects done that the private market alone, or the market plus the typical subsidies, would not find profitable or worthwhile. Unfortunately:
As far as I can tell, no AUDC projects have yet broken ground. Given the organization was established in July of 2023, we should have gotten at least a few shovels in the ground by now. The main bottleneck seems to be in the developer selection (the AUDC’s model involves them selecting a private development partner to execute on the actual construction). Based on publicly available information, it’s unclear what the hold up is.
Fong notes there is one project, finally, in the works. Maybe this is just glacial-pace government, or maybe there’s a problem with the organization? I guess we don’t know yet.
However, it’s great to see local attempts to break through on the housing problem, and Fong makes a point that I think is really important. I’d put it this way: “local control” is often just a byword for NIMBYism, but it’s important for cities and municipalities to use their local powers for the pro-housing cause. And they can. This is a good sort of laterally related counterpoint to the preemption vs. local control debate:
The last thing of note is simply that Atlanta did this on its own. It’s in vogue at the moment to talk about state capacity in a general sense (thanks Ezra), but we should also be interested in local state capacity as well. In our story today, local leaders took the initiative to try something new, something they could undertake leveraging local resources. Given where we find ourselves in history, I’m not betting on an especially helpful federal government, so it’s important for municipal leaders to secure prosperity for their cities in any way they can, with whatever tools they have at hand.
Read the whole thing.
Unease, inconvenience & creativity, Street Haunting, Anandi Mishra, June 2, 2026
At some levels, I find myself stuck in the period between 2005-18. I listen to music from that era, rewatch Hindi, American, French movies from then. On Google photos I find myself palming back over and over to the phase of 2014-18 which I believe was my most poorly paid, but also most creatively abundant phase. I feel that with life moving on, years feeling less endless than before, I’m losing my grip on my own share of creativity.
I read books, but don’t writing enough about them. I watch movies but don’t critique them nearly enough. I visit places that I’ve wanted to but feel something amiss, like a connection with my own self. Like most of us, I wander solemnly alone in the alleys of this AI-addled internet, sometimes with a completely blank mind. Whatsapp chats don’t buzz, SMSes don’t ping, iMessages with once besties just don’t arrive. Insta DMs are free of any curious stories or spicy gossip. No one calls to check in. No one messages “out of nowhere” to wonder “how are you? it’s been long”. I’ve officially forgotten how to use air quotes in life, in text.
Huh. I kind of feel this. Some of it is technology, some of it is getting older, some of it is being busier. It reminds me of how when we visited Manhattan, I felt young again. But I think what I meant was, there were things you could easily do at all hours of the day. Somehow we think of growing up as giving up some of that serendipity. There’s a lot here and this all intersects with how we think about cities and urban life too.
A Japanese-Inspired Record Bar Opens Near Petworth, Washingtonian, Jessica Sidman, May 29, 2026
“Authentic listening bars [in Japan], you’re really not speaking that much. You’re enjoying a cocktail, and you’re just in the moment of the music. And people, they take it serious,” says owner Loyd Griggs, an Army National Guard veteran and former government contractor who also previously owned a cafe/bar in his native Chicago. He didn’t want something quite so strict at his own vinyl bar, but he does want to keep the focus on the music: “We’d rather you not be on your phone. There’s no TVs… The sound system is the centerpiece of the bar itself.”
Griggs sourced his vintage JBL 4435 speakers from a collector in New Jersey. “I was able to convince him to sell them to me. It took a while,” he says. The collector wanted to make sure they’d be appreciated by a true audiophile, and Griggs assured him he’d keep the speakers safe behind the bar where no one would touch them.
Neat little story about the collector! On some level this sounds like a bit of a fad sort of thing, but it’s a cool idea. I like this, about bringing your own records:
The bar is open Thursdays through Sundays, and each day is dedicated to a different genre of music, with albums played from start to finish. To start, Thursdays will be devoted to jazz, soul, and blues. Fridays will feature old-school R&B and a bit of hip-hop. Saturdays are for pop, alternative, and light rock. And Sundays are a catch-all with whatever’s by request. Griggs is also encouraging people to bring in their own records during select times: “If you want to hear it on a very good quality sound system, you can bring it in, and we’re happy to play it.”
And it’s also first-come first-serve, which is nice; none of this silly angling for reservations, or the “speakeasy” thing where they don’t disclose the address, or whatever. Just a place you can go. That’s underrated.
Also, sort of on the subject, in Japan last year we went to a little coffee shop, which served alcohol at night, with jazz records playing on vintage stereo equipment. It was a little ramshackle old building in a residential area, one of these micro-businesses you see in Japan, but it was wonderful.
Is planned obsolescence a thing where you work?, r/AskEngineers, Reddit
Lots of good answers in this thread on how exactly design, price, consumer demand, and expected lifespan interact.
Most comments at least partly blame consumers for generally going for low price, which makes it difficult to compete on quality:
Nobody tries to make things break sooner, but because of other priorities coming ahead of lifespan, lifespan suffers.
This ultimately comes to consumer choice. If you’re out buying a new washing machine for your clothes, and there’s a $500 option and a $2000 option, you’re far, far more likely to go with the 500, even if the 2000 will last 10 times as long. People are cost-averse more than anything. And when you buy the 500, it’s going to have plastic gears instead of metal gears. It’s going to have lower quality electronic components. It’s going to have a motor that will burn out after a few years. Unfortunately the companies have kind of been forced into making products lower quality to meet the lower price demands of consumers.
A counter comment, which I can confirm: I have a cheap television I found free in 2017, and it still works. The only issue is if you leave it plugged in on standby, it will not turn on. You have to unplug at the end of use, then plug it in and press power two or three times for it to come on. That’s probably a capacitor issue, or some other small component which could be replaced. No other issues with it!
Those two things are one in the same. Either way, the company is still cutting the life of a product short to profit off of the consumer. Minimizing cost tends to go hand in hand with using parts that will fail sooner. Warranty periods are also often quite short in the U.S. (I know Europe tends to be better, but I don’t know how much exactly). Right now a brand new 4K Samsung TV only has a one year warranty.
I had LG TVs that were built using some shitty capacitors, after a few years they had to be replaced. If it wasn’t for the capacitors, the TVs would last much longer. In fact, both got repaired (one with a replacement power supply board, the other with just replacement capacitors soldered on) and continued to work for years. A part that as cheap as a capacitor was the only reason the TVs wouldn’t last until the became technologically obsolete.
If any of this is interesting to you, check out the whole thread.
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