New and Old #278
Re-legalizing corner stores, saving Japan's old homes, "Abundance" outside the big cities, and lines as places
We Made the Corner Store Illegal. Here’s the Bill to Fix It., On the Lege, Samuel Hooper, August 11, 2026
Walk through the oldest parts of almost any American city and you can still see the evidence — the odd storefront embedded in a block of houses, usually grandfathered in decades ago, and often the most beloved building on the street. Or if not an active storefront, unusually large shop windows looking into what is now the living room of a single family house or ground floor apartment.
Then zoning happened.
Yep.
The results are all around us. Commercial rent in purpose-built retail centers (often an identikit strip mall with a laughably pastoral-sounding name) prices out the entrepreneur who needs 400 square feet instead of 4,000. Errands that could be a five-minute walk become car trips, creating traffic. People intuitively know that something has been lost in the process — perhaps the neighbor who knows your name, the shop that anchors a block, the tangible evidence that a regular person can build a small commercial concern from scratch.
Also yep.
And this:
Neighborhood retail never required a grand theory to justify its existence, and it shouldn’t require one to bring back. A person who owns a house on a residential street, and wants to sell coffee or cut hair or repair bicycles from a corner of it, is proposing to make an ordinary, productive, and harmless use of her own property. The burden of proof rests with those who would forbid it. For a century we have gotten that burden exactly backwards.
This is the Japanese approach to residential zoning, which allows by right small, low-intensity commercial uses. There are zones with higher intensities of commerce or industry, but there is no residential-only zoning.
This is also very important and works with but goes beyond zoning:
A right that exists only by forbearance is not one a lender will underwrite or an insurer will price. If we want the corner store back, the law has to say so — clearly, uniformly, and in terms a bank can rely on.
This is moving towards an actual attempt at a model bill which would re-legalize low-intensity commerce in residential areas:
So here is my draft: the Commerce and Opportunity through Restoring Neighborhood Enterprise and Retail (CORNER) Act — model state legislation that would allow at least one accessory commercial unit, by right, on every lot with a lawful residential use.
This is good stuff. Read the whole thing.
Of course there’s a bureaucracy/red-tape angle here:
Some of the parts are over 200 years old. When the 800-square-foot house was put together in 2024, there was no county permit process for old Japanese buildings. Ms. Koike, 61, a former organic tea entrepreneur, and Mr. Oliver, 80, a former planning director for Wallowa County, had to surmount those municipal and logistical challenges, like the way wooden beams can warp during long sea voyages. It took an international collaboration between Toda Komuten, an Aichi architecture firm; Kominka Collective, a Japan-based preservation group; and Devco Engineering, an Oregon structural-engineering company.
As with a lot of historic preservation quandaries in America, you have objective historical interest, changing consumer preferences, changes in population and economic fortune, and higher standards of safety or engineering, all interacting to make it difficult to wave a wand and preserve an actual, physical building which is not quite like an artifact in a museum:
Kominka are old minka, traditional private Japanese residences occupied by commoners. Most were erected before post-World War II building codes were implemented, and all share a common design: a post-and-beam system to define the space, with sliding doors, tatami floors and paper screens serving as minimalist, multipurpose and flexible elements. But they’re not treasured the way they once were. Japan’s rapidly aging and shrinking population has left it with at least 9 million uninhabited homes, or akiya, particularly in rural areas. Kominka can be seen as dark, cold and isolated, especially by younger Japanese. They’re also difficult to maintain under Japan’s rigid earthquake-resistance standards.
As a result, many have little value and end up abandoned or demolished. Japanese preservation groups estimate that tens of thousands of traditional houses disappear each year, which has sparked efforts to save them. Meanwhile, the crashing value of the yen has made old houses very cheap — they can be had for less than $50,000 — and YouTubers chronicling their renovations have gone viral. A fully rebuilt, redesigned kominka will cost about the same as a custom-designed, timber-frame home.
Very interesting read.
What Abundance Has to Say About Mississippi, The Rebuild, Gary Winslett, June 11, 2026
One of the better criticisms of the Abundance Agenda is that while it has much to say about the problems of places like California and Massachusetts, it has a lot less to say about the problems facing other places, struggling rural areas in particular. I don’t blame Klein and Thompson for writing their book the way they did; a book can’t be about everything. Still, there’s something to this critique and it needs an answer.
This caught my attention, and is a very worthwhile piece. I am sympathetic to this argument and why it would create some skepticism about the “abundance agenda,” but I also think it is ultimately wrong. This piece works through it very nicely. First he dismisses the people who really do think we owe nothing to America’s struggling rural places:
I grew up in neighboring Alabama and have been to Mississippi many times. The depth of the rural poverty you can see in parts of the state is astonishing and sad. This is why I’ve never liked the glib response that these places should be left to rot. These are people with names who live in places with names. They are not fungible widgets and if you want to help them, you need to help the places they live in. And it goes without saying that these are communities that were systematically prevented from building wealth for generations, so ‘do nothing’ isn’t a neutral, technocratic response, but rather willful indifference to the legacies of injustice.
And then he introduces how some of the ideas of abundance could be applied to the conditions in such places:
Much of the abundance agenda’s standard policy toolkit was designed for places where supply is artificially constrained relative to demand. Much of Mississippi’s problem is the reverse: supply constraints aren’t the binding problem because demand has nearly collapsed. You need a different set of intellectual tools for this kind of situation.
And argues:
People who want to help the rural areas often end up implicitly endorsing a kind of nostalgic economic vision: bring back manufacturing, protect agricultural communities, slow down the transitions. But that’s the same mistakes Mississippi’s leaders kept making. Instead, we should identify what a place can actually make or do that the market will pay for into the future. Mississippi, it turns out, has more to offer on that front than almost anyone realizes.
This suggests that even if many of the advocates of abundance are narrowly focused on the problems of high-growth metro areas, the ideas themselves are separable from their origin and initial priorities. And I take this to mean that the ideas are valid. They don’t fail to apply to, say, Mississippi; they simply must be applied.
He continues to both critique and apply the abundance agenda, as well as identify a Mississippi which might help propel the state forward economically. This is very good. Read the whole thing.
Are lines the new third space?, The Up and Up, Rachel Janfaza, June 4, 2026
This is interesting:
In the hour and a half we sat there, we saw plenty of people we know — a friend from college, work, from growing up. Both walking by us on the street and on the outdoor patio. It seemed like every table around us (most filled with twenty-something-year-olds) was having the same experience. The attraction wasn’t just the wine or the food, it was the feeling that something was happening.
I went back to earlier this week (on a weekday) to check out the scene. Even at 5:29 pm on a Tuesday, it was packed. And not just normal NYC crowds. It was exceptionally popping….
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m calling our current ‘line culture.’ The phenomenon where everything good has a line: your favorite drinks spot, fro-yo place, coffee shop.
That’s really interesting; waiting in line as a kind of social activity, rather than an inflation-driven or consumeristic thing. I suppose it can be both, and it probably is. Food for thought.
Related Reading: