On Journalism

 A generation past, old journalists taught young journalists that there are always two sides to any issue, and showing both was necessary for 'objective' journalism. Which has been perverted into ensuring that relevant political factions get equal airtime (without regard to objectivity or relation to reality). 

America would be better off with a more British adversarial partisan journalism which isn't objective and doesn't falsely claim to be. Adopting the regulatory standards from broadcast television news, where limited spectrum resulted in a limited number of stations practically inviting regulated monopolies, is almost accidental. It was purely a legacy of big semi-monopoly corporates borrowing a model from others in a related industry as they were bought out by private owners in a class private equity / corporate empire play.

Prior to the web, publishing meant actually manufacturing physical objects, using capital machinery, which was capital intensive, while providing content meant managing a lot of human capital, in an enterprise with enormous economies of scale. Quasi-monopolies were almost natural.  But there was absolutely no reason 'print' journalism needs to follow that model today.

It's not by accident that the web keeps seeing new publishing platforms emerge--news groups, websites, blogs, microblogs, social media, short-form video. Technological improvement is part of the game, but so is that the fact that private capital keeps trying to achieve return on investment by using network effects to scale to ubiquity and then extract monopoly rents. (We also see billionaires buying platforms to silence critics and acquire vanity assets: see Twitter and the Washington Post). Hence, BlueSky--not just a clone of Twitter, but a competitor designed to be invulnerable to being bought out. 

There are also the issues of censorship and content theft. Archive of Our Own (AO3) exists because LiveJournal purged sketchy content to make it more attractive to advertisers and hence investors. SubStack exists because blog traffic was being compromised by AI summaries of its best content. 

Again, there is no need for print journalism to make any effort to be objective, as there can be an infinite array of journalism providers on the web. In which environment, journalism can be as radical as it likes--infinite speciation to fill infinite infinitesimal niches, optimized through evolutionary selection. 

Rather than being objective, journalism should be informative. It should tell you something you didn't know before, even if it's only in a Jane-Austin-whose-daughter-has-married-whose-son sort of way. Good journalism will always be investigative, providing not just the facts, but the context necessary to understand implications of the facts. Really Good journalism is transformative - when new facts are used to demonstrate the limits of what someone previously thought they knew and create a new understanding that synthesizing both old and new understanding. Bad journalism is merely confirmatory - it affirms what you already knew is correct. Really Bad journalism is enabling delusion - reinforcing what you already know to be correct, even when that understanding is wrong. 

Present diatribes against 'fake news' and 'woke culture' exists in direct response to the threat that exposure to Really Good Journalism presents to Really Bad Journalism using a 'purity culture' technique to quarantine information by labeling it or its source as 'bad' or 'shameful' or 'sinful'. (If you are seeing a parallel to people getting 'cancelled' it's not by accident - extremists at both ends of the political spectrum use exclusion and denial an boycott as a threat. 

There is a delusion among major new outlets that they can avoid this by being objective, but that is a pursuit of false ideal and a financial dead-end. Nothing can ever be 'objective' enough to satisfy the zealots who are the partisan drill sergeants--their job is to find something wrong in order to find something they can use as a basis for discipline and punishment. 

That most journalism is supported by advertisement is both tonic and poison. A tonic, because money doesn't have an ideology. And poison, because almost no one who buys advertising wants to be associated with a fringe position that might alienate potential buyers or induce a boycott. 

Together, this suggests we'll see two forms of journalism: the apolitical (or at least unaligned) journalism about 'Topics' and facts about those topics, and the ever-more unhinged 'Narrative' journalism focused on emphasizing some facts and deprecating others in order to privilege a preferred political narrative. In neither form of journalism is 'objectivity' relevant. For Narrative journalism, it's fundamentally contrary to its purpose. And for 'Topics' journalism, no one is going to care about objectivity -- the watch you trust is the one that tells the time best. And perhaps this already exists today, and the real frission we are seeing is the interstice between the two. And as a human writing about things, your only real question is if you are writing something that is informative, investigative, transformative-- or confirmatory and enabling.

 

Twitter & BlueSky

One of the reasons this blog is comparatively nearly devoid of content for 2021-2024 was caused by devoting a lot of my attention to Twitter. I find X.com a far inferior platform, but for those curious about past tweets. 

Active on BlueSky as well, but from a 'writing is thinking' perspective, I've found that the 300-character batches is a non-always-helpful limitation. 

Chunking utterances into 300 characters supports brevity and clarity in communication, as each utterance must stand on its own, but impairs composition when trying to articulate thoughts and aggregate related ideas. 

Accordingly, most threads run stream-of-consciousness, and folks who can be articulate in that matter are rare, a lot of what is posted is dreck*. So useful as a 'public conversation', with people responding to one another, but less useful in generating comprehensive things for people to respond to. 

(Being articulate on the fly is a pretty good indicator of expertise. Means someone has articulated something before and done so enough times that articulating that understanding no longer imposes a substantial cognitive burden). 

Hence, more content in 2025/2026.

An American-style 'union station' is a worst-case outcome

 An American-stye 'union station' is a worst-case outcome - a traditional terminal head station for multiple non-connecting railroad companies. Yet even after our commuter roads fell into public ownership, we kept the same operating paradigm, rather than exploring through-running. I anticipate part of which is a matter of station architecture--not design for thru-running, it's difficult to implement. But I suspect a greater part is institutional, that "The Purpose of Commuter Rail is Bringing Commuters to the CBD" and that was as much thought as went into it. 

City planners don't design roads

City planners don't design roads. Traffic engineers do, and they explicitly follow geometric design manuals produced by a clubbish non-profit named AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials), whose rules are then adopted by FHWA, which then makes them a requirement for local DOTs, who then make them a requirement for cities and counties. And even in cases when places are not required to use the AASHTO standards (non-federally funded roads), traffic engineer (mis)-apply the standards because they don't have anything better. 

This is despite the fact that most roads mileage is not, in fact, Federally funded. The vast majority of roads, by functional class, are local roads in subdivisions, the design of which is governed by local subdivision ordinances, which are the province of standards set by local engineers. The total thought that goes into them consists of two concerns: 1) "They should be wide enough for two cars to pass, even with people parked on both sides", and 2) "They should be good enough to last a long time without the city needing to rebuild them". Fire marshal concerns about fire access - routes to get to houses from a fire station being too long or circuitous -- also influence design. City planning only gets involved when a city has had issues with too curb cuts onto highways, or traffic lights too close together. It's fair to blame city planners for every land use problem, but city planners have remarkably little to do with roads. 

NIMBY Defined

 A NIMBY is someone who understands that the financial benefit of development to someone else outweighs any price they would be willing to pay to prevent that development and so attempt to achieve the same ends more cheaply by making nebulous claims of public harms. This inevitably entails claims of 'It could happen everywhere!', until it alarms enough people to gather sufficient political support to cause sufficient public clamor at a public meeting to intimidate council members. (This essential NIMBY tactic is my chief dispute with Missing Middle advocates. Upzoning everywhere threatens a lot of people with change).

A second standard NIMBY talking point is "Skyscrapers!" and "Manhattanization! and "East Coast!". Anyone who has actually traveled around the East coast can tell you that the pre-war urban core is dwarfed in scale by the surrounding suburbs, and that average density metropolitan density is quite low. But it's designed to cause fear, and it's almost always coupled with cries of "Crime! Renters!" like it's still 1980.

When the boomers are gone what will the appetite for cars look like?

 The 'appetite' for cars is going to decline. The boomers love affair with cars is based on a golden age when cars were cheap, gas was cheap, and roads were uncongested. The experience has been worse for each subsequent generation, such that Gen Z doesn't even like to drive and can't be bothered to get licenses. But we can't do away with cars -- dependence on them is baked into our built environment. 

How many careers revolve around the car as we know it?

Even if everything becomes EV and BEH, there will still be engines and cars to be maintained, and those vehicles will likely last longer, requiring their own maintenance specialists for body and brakes, rather than for the powertrain. 

If your city grows faster than its historic average it ceases to be able to meet its affordable housing needs through market-based filtering

If your city grows faster than its historic average it ceases to be able to meet its affordable housing needs through market-based filtering. High-income newcomers outcompete anyone lower on the income scale for rents, forcing everyone else down a rung on the ladder, and the bottom rung falls into homelessness. Then the stock of low-income housing decreases, as the competition for homes on the higher-income rungs makes it worthwhile to fix-up depreciated homes in good locations, and then in not-so-good locations. 

Before Euclid and Modern Suburbia.

 

Is there a good descriptor of how pre-Euclid and pre-modern suburbia raw development, that led to our great cities, actually worked?

People build kind of whatever they wanted. In Manhattan, the Astor's (richest people in America) abandoned their mansion on the edge of town and moved away because of the encroach of working-class high-rises destroyed the neighborhood character. You had a legal right to build anything, and the only way your neighbor could do anything about it was by suing you for nuisance. And blocking someone's view or sunlight was not considered a nuisance.

But, I don't think Strong Towns is quite getting this quite correct when they broadly blame "regulations" and "financing" for how and why development is different today relative to some supposed historic "incremental" methodology.

Strong Towns is absolutely right in blaming regulations and financing for how and why development today is different. Euclid meant you could buy a house and know that no one was ever going to build a (smelly) glue factory next door. So, housing became a far safer investment. And that meant banks were willing to loan more money to more people. So, there was more demand for owner-occupied housing. SZEA and SCPEA made zoning more prevalent. But that wasn't enough. 

The GI bill made any returning veteran eligible for a subsidized mortgage. Prior to the GI Bill (Federally subsidized mortgages), a mortgage was 50% down and lasted 5 years. Afterwards, it was 5% down and lasted 30 years. By one estimate, half the adult male population had been in the military at that point. So huge numbers of people could afford to buy houses, setting off a massive surge in homebuilding, which made it into a real industry, and people started to apply the mass production methods used for war for housing production. (Levitt-town is famous for a reason). Streetcar suburbs had done something similar, but nothing like at the same scale--there hadn't been the finance to support the demand to support the scale to support the specialization.

Of course it is almost certainly some kind of change in "regulations" and/or how the government operates but I think this would be worth pinning down. If we want to go back to some supposed golden age we need to actually understand that golden age.

SZEA and SCPEA were enabling legislation - it made zoning less liable to legal challenge (Supremacy clause). And the GI bill provided the financing. But the government operations don't stop there. The whole paradigm of modern suburbia relies on government planned and funded freeways. How we did it was a bit tricky. Federal government can't legally own roads, so they passed legislation saying that any State with a DOT was eligible for a 90% construction subsidy for highways and also added a fuel tax. Lots of freeways were build, and combined with expanding auto-ownership, moving to a semi-rural suburban idyll with big yards and lots parking became available to many. (And for most boomers, that era is the Golden Age of their childhood). However, it came to a crashing end in 1973 with the Arab Oil Embargo, and the formation of OPEC. 

Canonically, when I think Chicago or New York, I think (maybe imagining) paper streets as far as the eye can read on maps read across miles of undeveloped land, or whatever the original townsite was. I know Jason Barr has some blog posts at building the skyline about the mapping and surveying of Manhattan, but it's light on the when, where and how of the actual infrastructure construction timing and its relation to the when, where, and how of the related building construction.

The Wikipedia Article on the 1811 Commissioners Plan is a good place to start. But It's critical to realize how minimal city infrastructure was until the Victorian era. The Croton aqueduct (1842) bringing fresh clean water to Manhattan was major civic achievement.  You don't have paved roads, water mains, piped gas, or even sewers for quite a long time. A road was where it was illegal to build, and it was dirt or mud with a ditch in the middle for stormwater for when it rained. Water came from the well in the back yard, probably with a latrine nearby, which probably emptied into the local creek. London itself doesn't get sewers until 1865. 

The building construction (multiple stories, half lot coverage) ran long before any kind of public infrastructure. Much the same in smaller towns. The house my dad grew up in dumped its sewerage directly into a local creek, via a cast iron pipe from the toilet, and had an old on-site well. You tended to see public infrastructure investment when property-specific system collapsed. Culinary water typically at the forefront - once the local watershed is polluted, there is no way to fix it. Sewers are an easy sell to voters - less smell. For paving, roads were paved using a system that looks very much like a Public Improvement District, levying a tax on houses fronting onto them. We owe a certain amount of paving to streetcar companies, for whom the franchise agreement allowing them to build a railway in the public right of way required them to pave it as part of the deal, and since they were already doing a lot of grading, earthwork, and water management to their own project, it wasn't a big deal. 

Highway paving was erratic and ad-hoc. The AAA maps don't refer to thinks as 'auto trails' without reason, and a journey from LA to Long Beach was an all-day excursion and mostly off-road. There was nominally a national highway system from 1926, but without attached funding it was a bit conceptual, and mostly a matter of signage, connecting bits of roads. 

Suburbia relies on highways. Suburban development relies on being able to link local suburban roads to the broader public network. Without public highways, travel to a new subdivision would be along a rutted rural dirt road, and thereby much less comfortable and far slower. Which meant such a location was less attractive, and so less rentable, and so not worth developing.

But really it was the scale of suburban development that mattered--building a subdivision meant an efficiency of scale that supported the develop of local infrastructure networks. By splitting the cost of a water main and sewer main over 30 houses with a sort of minimum spanning tree, you could afford to connect everyone to a local creek or sewer main. 

But part of what makes suburbia work is that it is a process - it's not just the one suburb, but the assumption that future suburbs will emerge. And that makes it worthwhile to make public infrastructure improvements in things like substations and public schools that would not otherwise be reasonable for a single suburb. 

We used to build plenty and it might be related to how we built differently. How, exactly?

Well, no. For a brief period, we built plenty. But that period was pretty brief, only a few decades. It seems like it went on for a long time because we repeated the same cycle in new places (The interstate didn't reach everywhere at once, and viability of continued interstate widening has varied based on terrain, climate, and public opposition).

It's really critical to understand what Strong Towns is about, and the name should be a clue--they are about towns. A town is a place where, after the initial settlement boom, the increase in local population is largely dependent on local natural increase. Which tends to be gradual, and so new housing development tended to be incremental. A space previously used for an orchard or garden or poultry yard would become a new house.

The style of structure built was also different. Financing was limited (five years with 50 percent down) so everyone tended to build a small house and add to it over time, adding and enclosing porches to all sides. "Barnacling" as Strong Towns calls it.

Prior to mortgages, a starter home in the twenties might consist of a of a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room (where the children would sleep). A larger house might have a front parlor, dining room, kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms. Laundry was done out of doors, porches were the 'mud rooms', and play took place wherever. The panoply of rooms that characterizes our houses today didn't exist.

After the GI bill, rather than incremental additions, you could afford to be like a rich person and build it all at once. And if a garage was attached and integrated into the house, that counted as part of the house, and that could be financed as well.

Prior to the GI Bill, households were also different. You lived with family until you got married, and once you had your own house, you had lodgers--siblings and cousins and extended family who provided domestic labor. And if you had any kind of money, you had live-in servants for whom you provided bed and board. A household was not a matter of relation--it was an economic unit. (You can still see this in early zoning codes, which forbid unrelated persons living together, excepting domestic servants). You took in boarders or lodgers inverse to your number of kids, and your youngest kid probably never moved out and stayed to care for you in your dotage. Or, if your daughter got married, you might move in with her to her new house.