This is why I hate driving through North Virginia. Maryland’s highways are somehow not as aggressively modern.
Neighborhood forests and skyscraper trees
Matthew Yglesias wants D.C. to repel the century-old Height of Buildings Act so we could have proper skyscrapers in the district. I couldn’t disagree more: the city’s decentralized downtown — a consequence of not being allowed to build anything taller that 40m (130 feet) is a remarkable feature that more American cities should adopt.
The are many reasons why building more high-rises are not a good idea, from enrionmental to urbanistic to Talebian arguments against concentration. Now, having just spent a couple of days in Midtown Manhattan I can see their appeal as a backdrop to city life: dramatic skyline, bustling streets, smell of rotten garbage in the air. But DMV is not Manhattan in geography, population size or culture. To picture restriction-less DC, look at Rosslyn — a skyscraper-laden area just across the Potomac. It is… not great to walk in. The tall parts of downtown Bethesda are marginally more walkable but irreparably ugly and dead at night, much as downtown DC would be if it were filled by office buildings. But who even uses office buildings any more? The whole thing makes no sense.
Disclosure time: I, in fact, live in downtown DC, right in the triangle Yglesias proposes to be the center of a high-rise building boom. He himself also lives in DC — outside of the triangle. And that may as well be the root cause of the difference in our opinions.
But I think there’s more to it than that. He comments that, because of the HoB Act, companies have offices in Dupont and NoMa, like mixed use is a bad thing. What he proposes would further centralize commercial activity into a narrow area, which goes against the mixed use that YIMBYs are usually for. If you like mixed use, you should be anti-skyscraper and pro mid-rise, just the kind of buildings DC is making more of. The District is generally is pro-building — maybe even too pro-bulding — and has the kind of zoning other American cities could do well to copy. But just read this whopper of a paragraph:
Basically, the inability to fit everyone into the central business district meant that there was always artificially high demand for office space in secondary centers. There are offices out in the commercial corridors of Upper Northwest and in Georgetown and DuPont Circle. And during the course of my time here, the city has built out a series of essentially new greenfield neighborhoods — NoMa, Union Market, Navy Yard, the Ballpark, the Wharf — and each of these has an office component alongside residential. The developers of these large-scale projects liked being able to include offices in the project, because it spread out risk, diversified revenue sources, and made the ground floor retail leases more valuable since you could ensure a lunchtime customer base.
Still, that always struck me as missing the forest for the trees, making individual projects easier to finance and market at the expense of making commutes worse and reducing the agglomeration power of the city.
What is the forest and what are the trees in this analogy? Because I’d say it’s Yglesias who is missing the forest (of many neighborhoods in the goldilocks zone of mixed use) for the trees (skyscrapers).
And this, I presume, is because the whole article started with the wrong premise: is there anything that the federal government could do directly that’s anti-NIMBY, pro-local, and within its powers. Yes, it turns out there is. But that does not by itself make it a good idea.
Unbelievable: I’ve passed by this building dozens and dozens of times, never knowing that behind these stone castle walls lies…
A beer garden
And I only learned this because I randomly opened a hotel room desk drawer. Nestled inside was the Spring 2024 issue of “Preservation” magazine featuring an article about Heurich House. I wonder if they have any events planned for the month of October.
The FBI arrested a DC council member yesterday for taking bribes. The same council member who made the news in 2018 for saying that “the Rothschilds controled the climate”. Here is a good heuristic: if someone sees corruption, manipulation and conspiracies everywhere, odds are that they are themselves corrupt, manipulative and conspiratorial. Pure projection.
Attulus fasciger is a species of spider from the family Salticidae native to northern and western Asia. However, it has also been introduced to North America. The spider is brownish-black coloured, has 8 eyes, and is 3–4 millimetres (0.12–0.16 in) in size.
Shot with an iPhone 14 Pro Max. I should remember to take more close-ups!
My last post mentioned the new World War I memorial in DC, due to be unveiled next month. I only found out about it yesterday, thanks to this brilliant interview that Russ Roberts had with the memorial’s creator, Sabin Howard. Highly recommended!
The Washington Post is having a crisis of identity — it recently laid off most of its local columnists but apparently still wants to focus on local news:
Sir William and co. are floating an idea called “Local+,” a new offering for readers who want to pay extra for premium local content, sources tell me.
At the same time, their coverage of 12 best ice cream shops in Washington starts with one in Alexandria, Virgina. So, the “+” in “Local+” may not mean what I think it should mean.
One of the first things European visitors to the US will notice is how many squirrels there are running around — almost as many as rats!
Well, there is a whole family of albino squirrels living at the National Mall, behind the National Gallery of Art. Albino rats I haven’t seen outside of a lab.
Notes on election day
It is the first Tuesday in June and DCPS schools are closed for primary elections.
- Weekday elections are disruptive and if the ones in November have to be maintained out of respect for history why double the misery during the primaries? At the very least move them to after the school is out anyway.
- It is the first time non-citizens can vote in local DC elections and the uproar is in line with my expectations.
- As a non-citizen myself I did in fact register to vote. Alas, not registering myself as a Democrat means I won’t make an iota of difference in voting out of office the ding-dongs who thought giving non-citizens a vote was a good idea.
- If the ding-dongs wanted true democracy in this deep blue city-state, why not go for open primaries?
- This is the only overtly political post I will make until November.
Why build such an eminently sittable window then forbid sitting on it? I’d throw a few cushions and pillows on it, not a crumpled up paper and a sad plaque.
