New and Old #286

Climate change and conservatism, building places we love, everything is housing, and a neat Japanese restaurant custom

On the edge of retreat, Washington Post, Chris Mooney, Zoeann Murphy and Simon Ducroquet, November 28, 2022

A century ago, about 250 people lived on Hog Island, a seven-mile expanse off the Virginia coast. They raised livestock and gathered oysters. They lived in a town called Broadwater, worked at the lighthouse and Coast Guard station, and danced at night in a social hall called the Red Onion.

But that was back when there was still soil beneath their feet.

This is an article about the effects of climate change on this Virginia island and its way of life. it notes that sea levels had been rising before, and that erosion of barrier islands is not a new phenomenon.

I find articles like this much more relatable in terms of making climate change real than “alarmist” or technocratic writing. I made this point in a book review some years ago, of a book which dealt with a similar issue on Virginia’s disappearing Tangier Island:

Shorn of its environmentalist subtext, read as an ethnographic work and a poignant recognition that everything changes, even the ground under our feet, Chesapeake Requiem works. But that subtext—one that should frankly hit conservatives hard—is that climate change isn’t a threat to “the planet” in some amorphous sense, nor is it a “global” problem. It is a threat to thousands of very local cultures and ways of life all around the world.

The fact that Tangier and its irreplaceable patrimony is sinking should alarm those who champion localism, rural and forgotten places, and the fantastic regional diversity of America. The fact that climate change is almost certainly the culprit should prompt skeptics in those ranks to rethink that question.

In some ways this is a lot like the rhetorical divide in urbanism between—obviously simplifying—“Return to traditional cities!” and “We invented 15-minute cities, look how smart and original we are!” It turns out that issues which have gotten coded as “left” in American politics can have consequences which should concern genuine conservatives too.

People Love Downtown Cape, so Why Doesn’t More of Cape Look Like Downtown?, Cape Connected, Genevieve Isles, August 14, 2023

It took me a minute to figure out which city this was about; I initially thought it was Cape Cod. Then when I saw it was Cape Girardeau, I thought maybe that was in Quebec. It turns out it’s a city in Missouri!

Isles writes:

In public spaces, all sorts of different backgrounds, age groups, political views and ways of life meld together in a way we don’t really see on social media due to divisive algorithms. Dense, walk-able spaces open to the public help people get out of their bubbles and see perspectives they otherwise never would have.

These spaces exist in droves in downtowns all over the world. And what I find particularly interesting is how, as I walk west from the Mississippi, the downtown space becomes more and more spread out. In a way, it’s like time suddenly accelerates forward. To understand what I mean, you need to understand how Cape grew.

This is an interesting way to put it—that the “rings” of development around downtowns are also a way to date the period the stuff was built, almost like rings on a tree. Isles makes the point, frustratingly familiar to urbanists, that people mostly really like the old downtowns, but also seem to have no conception of how we might have something like that anywhere else, or that it would even be possible. I’ve wondered about this seeming contradiction for years.¹

I don’t know the answer, but Isles presents modern urbanist ideas as copying the things we like about the old historic downtowns in more places. That’s exactly how I think about it.

A Cape Girardeau with denser, mixed-use neighborhoods gives us the benefits of less traffic, lower housing costs, less pollution, and a more closely-connected community.

I fully believe that this is something we can see in our lifetimes.

Mixed-use zoning doesn’t have to be restricted to just one place in the city. The good thing is that if someone wants to live in a single-family home - that would still be feasible.

But there are so many people who would want to open up a cafe, bookstore, barber shop and so many other communal spaces we need to mix around and exchange ideas as a civilized society. Other important communal spaces like schools, parks and public libraries shouldn’t be as separated from people who live here and should be within walking and biking distance.

I imagine a lot of people have never thought about this much at all, and I hope this way of presenting it changes some people’s minds or inspires them.

The Monocrisis, Some Unpleasant Arithmetic, Maia Mindel, July 5, 2023

There’s a bit too much of an emphasis on racism as the cause of the housing crisis here—it’s true that a lot of zoning has its origins in racism or other forms of prejudice (looking down on poor people or immigrants, which of course often overlapped). But there’s also a lack of any real reason at all for some of these regulations, at this point. Lots of towns simply copied zoning ordinances because it was the thing to do, and those initial motives may have been invidious. But those legacy codes have more or less continued on without necessarily being affirmatively or explicitly considered on the merits. That, of course, is changing.

The overall argument here is that the housing crisis is implicated in all sorts of problems in the United States, beyond anything we think about as having explicitly to do with housing. A chronic housing crunch isn’t just an inconvenience, nor does it even just affect the “undesirables” against whom much of zoning was devised. Housing is fundamental, and screwing it up screws up the entire economy in a lot of ways.

This is why I called the housing crisis the “housing famine.” A housing crunch is as fundamental a distortion of economic and personal life as acute shortages of food are. And like many famines in history, the housing famine is caused by bad politics and policy.

Bottle keep, Wikipedia

Bottle keep (ボトルキープ, botorukīpu; a wasei-eigo term), or bottle-keep, is a service which is provided at some Japanese drinking establishments where a patron can purchase a bottle of liquor and have the unfinished portion stored until a later visit.

I came across this idea reading some old newspaper reviews of a Japanese restaurant we used to go to in the late 1990s. It was a tiny but very nice little place owned by a Japanese couple. A couple of the reviews mentioned that customers who went often would keep bottles of alcoholic drinks at the restaurant for their next visit.

I had never heard of this and wondered if it was even correct—sometimes newspaper articles make mistakes—but apparently it’s a Japanese custom. The earlier Japanese restaurants in the United States probably resembled those in Japan more closely than today; there are a lot more of them now and most are Korean- or Chinese-owned. They’re often quite good, but probably wouldn’t offer a somewhat unusual service like this.

That’s quite a random bit of trivia, but reading old newspaper articles is a really great way to see what things were like, or how they were talked about, in the recent but largely pre-internet past.

---

Related Reading:

New and Old #258

New and Old #259

---

1. I don’t think racism/classism anywhere near fully explains it, because lots of the old Main Streets/downtowns are quite expensive and desirable, and very clearly not places where “those people” live. If prejudice explained all of anti-urbanism, I don’t see how you could have a contingent of people who love classic towns and Main Streets but also seem mystified by urbanist ideas.