🎭 Went to the theater for the first time in years to watch Babbitt, a well-executed dumbing down of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about middle-aged and middle-class conformity. The play took the lazy approach of taking pot shots at MAGA; a more biting satire would have aimed at the upper middle class conformists in the audience.

I’ve updated my now page. The update includes where I am right now, which is Savannah, Georgia, where I am attending a medical conference. But you can’t escape DC: I was sitting at the bar having lunch when a couple couldn’t help overhearing where I lived as I was chatting with the bartender. “Hey, we’re from DC too”. Small world! Where in DC? “Oh, we live downtown, we’re both lobbyists.”

Of course they were. One for a private healthcare equity firm, the other for medium-sized pharmaceutical. We did not delve deeper.

This morning on Axios DC:

Metro fixed its fare evasion problem on trains, and now they are focusing on the 70% of bus riders who don’t pay. That eye-popping rate is up from 17% pre-pandemic.

Yowza. There is more at WaPo. Kids and I take the metro bus to school from time to time and I can confirm that:

1. School children in general don’t use their free ride cards. It improves the flow of people and drivers don’t seem to care.
2. More than half of the adults just waltz in as well. That too improves the flow of traffic, and drivers don’t seem to care about that either.

A head-scratcher, that.

From Axios, PowerPoint’s comeback:

Gen Zers and millennials are using the software to prepare whimsical presentations on niche topics, dating history or vacation destinations for their friends and family.

Tight Five Pub, a sports bar in D.C., hosts PowerPoint parties where locals gather to present silly, heartwarming and informative slideshows on esoteric interests.

I haven’t been pessimistic about kids these days, until now.

DC and its suburbs have some of the worst drivers in the country (see r/MarylandDrivers), and this post from Dave Winer reminds me why: no sense of personal car space. The demographics of people trying to kiss my bumper are similar to what Dave encountered, too: middle-aged women and elderly men.

“With everyone who does that in the District of Columbia, they’re singling me out?”

Here are a few unrelated articles that crossed my inbox this morning:

• “Studios start at $1,927”
• "$1,134: The amount I paid for my round-trip cross-country Amtrak ride"
• “A six-bedroom apartment costs about $50,000, and the maximum income for a family of four is $160,000."

This is why I hate driving through North Virginia. Maryland’s highways are somehow not as aggressively modern.

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…

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.