"The whole thing boils down to class warfare... People all over the world are wondering why they did that to 5Pointz. My answer is, why not?"

"Do we really think some landlord is going to give a damn about the culture of the working class? This was an art form invented by the children of the working class, not children with last names like Trump or Rockefeller."

"There are hardly any spots left in the city for graffiti writers... It’s going to mean that everybody’s going to be fighting for space. And you know what happens if they don’t have space to express themselves."

Does your city allow you to build a little house in your backyard — an "accessory dwelling unit"?

Madison, Wisconsin does. Here we see a couple that has a house, and they're building a tiny house behind it, on the footprint of what had been a detached garage, 12 x 18. Then, they bring in tenants and make income for a while, and ultimately, as they age and no longer can or want to manage the big house, they move into the tiny house.

"We thought we might live in it when we're too old to live in the larger house... It's a way for us to stay in the neighborhood and live here."

"I've always liked the idea of living smaller and more beautifully... This idea is pretty neat."

So what do you think? Is this a great way to increase density in the city, build up the tax base, free people to make income from their property, provide appropriate housing for younger and older people, and boost the tiny house movement? Or is this a bad intrusion onto existing neighborhoods, pitting homeowners against each other?

I look out on our backyard and see 4 detached garages impinging on our view. Would we be worse off if those were converted into little houses? Put the cars in the driveways or on the street, and install little old couples or singles into those spaces. Or maybe Meade and I should build our perfect little dream house in our backyard, then sell the big house to new owners who will loom over us until we move on to the ultimate truly tiny house.

"We are supposed to be the vandals, but this is the biggest rag and disrespect in the history of graffiti."

The work of 1,500 artists, whited out overnight.

A monument to prolific writing and the aversion to travel.

And I thought I was prolific and averse to travel. Check out this profile of Peter Ackroyd. Excerpt:

Ackroyd writes nearly all day, nearly every day. Each morning he takes a taxi from his London home, in tony Knightsbridge, to the office he maintains in Bloomsbury, where he typically divides his workday between three books. He begins by writing and doing research for a history book, turns to a biography sometime in the afternoon and finishes the day reclining on a bed in a room adjacent to his book-lined office, writing a novel, in longhand....

In the past decade alone, he has published some two dozen books. These include four novels; a prose retelling of “The Canterbury Tales“; a magisterial “biography” of the Thames River; “London Under,” about the world beneath London’s streets; “The English Ghost,” about the national obsession with specters and spirits; a cultural history of Venice; a beautifully written series of history books for children; biographies of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, J. M. W. Turner, Edgar Allan Poe and the Victorian literary oddball Wilkie Collins; and a handful of other books....

Ackroyd is a provincial and proud of it, with a hermetic lifestyle that supports his writing regimen. He hates to leave London, professing a strong dislike for the countryside (“It’s too noisy, too dangerous, I don’t trust their food”) and no interest in traveling to other cities (“I don’t understand their histories”). 

He's written multiple, massive histories of England, especially London, so he's vastly interested in history, but he's all about depth of understanding in his particular place. 

Ackroyd says that when he walks London’s streets, he will sometimes lapse into a time-travel reverie, toggling backward to envision, with crystal clarity, how a street, an intersection, looked two or three centuries before.

Those of you who argue for travel because it's broadens your mind, makes history "come alive," and foments complex understanding, please contemplate Ackroyd.

"The city does not allow meals to be served to members of the public in someone’s home."

Illegal "supper clubs" in NYC.

Basically, these are dinner parties where guests pay. Something about exchanging money makes the private zone public, right? Like with prostitution.

"Speaking of urban agony... if folks on the right were truly Macchiavellian, they’d be joining the critics of stop-and-frisk."

"The big Blue enclaves are where the crime and racial strife mostly are; letting those get worse would probably benefit folks on the right. Luckily for the hipsters, righties are too principled for that sort of 'heightening the contradictions' thing."

"China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years..."

"The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers...."

Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides....

Instead of creating wealth, urbanization could result in a permanent underclass in big Chinese cities and the destruction of a rural culture and religion....

“For old people like us, there’s nothing to do anymore,” said He Shifang, 45, a farmer from the city of Ankang in Shaanxi Province who was relocated from her family’s farm in the mountains. “Up in the mountains we worked all the time. We had pigs and chickens. Here we just sit around and people play mah-jongg.”

Lou Reed gets a liver transplant.

His wife Laurie Anderson said: "It’s as serious as it gets. He was dying. You don’t get it for fun."

She described the operation as “a big surgery which went very well”, adding: “You send out two planes – one for the donor, one for the recipient – at the same time. You bring the donor in live, you take him off life support. It’s a technological feat. I was completely awestruck. I find certain things about technology truly, deeply inspiring.”

The linked article, in the UK Telegraph, brings up this old quote of Reeds':

"I take drugs just because, in the 20th century, in a technological age living in the city, there are certain drugs you have to take just to keep yourself normal like a caveman, just to bring yourself up or down. But to attain equilibrium you need to take certain drugs. They don’t get you high even, they just get you normal."

That made me think of the old Velvet Underground song "Train Round the Bend":

I'm sick of the trees
Take me to the city...
Hey, I am just a city boy
And really not the country kind
Oh, I need the city streets and the neon light
To see the train comin' round the bend...

Yes, I've heard about that light you see coming.

The anti-car message conveyed by those curbside rows of bike-share kiosks falls flat...

... when the gas-powered vehicles they impede are ambulances and fire trucks.

City workers swooped in Monday night and yanked out part of a bike-share rack blocking the front of a West Village co-op — just hours after The Post called the Department of Transportation over complaints that an ambulance crew had trouble getting to a 92-year-old resident in distress.

So... your tax money is used to install these things and then yank them out again. You might say: Just site them properly in the first place. But every time an old lady is "in distress" the right place for bike-share racks becomes the wrong place, The Post calls the Department of Transportation, and — once again — city workers must swoop in and yank out. 

"Crunchy Cons took a pretty hard line against suburban living..."

Rod Dreher, reconsiders suburbia. 

"Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots" is the name of a book he wrote, back in 2006. As the italics indicate, the quote above refers to what he said in his book, not what the people he labeled "crunchy" did — at least not directly.

In his new article, Dreher describes himself "someone who used to live in big cities, and who now lives in a small town [and therefore] more understanding of why someone with a family would choose to live in the suburbs." The same old reasons people move to the suburbs affected him and his family, so now he sees the point.

While I still believe there are serious objections to the way our suburbs are designed, and ways to design them to be more aesthetically pleasing and human-scaled, I appreciate very much Keith Miller’s critique, and how he urges us to think about whether we are not simply baptizing and moralizing aesthetic preferences. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that the material order in some real sense reflects, or should reflect, the sacred order. Aesthetics are rarely completely divorced from metaphysics or morals. On a more practical level, though, I think we ought to all give more grace to each other. Not everybody who moves to the suburbs wants to build a gargantuan McMansion and live the full-consumerist lifestyle. Not everyone who chooses to live in the city is driven by morally pure motives; they could be refusing one kind of consumerist narcissism for the sake of embracing a more attractive version of same.

What aesthetic preferences have you tricked up as moral imperatives?

A New Jersey problem that makes it utterly different from Wisconsin.

"A 1947 [New Jersey] law, passed to curb the organized crime that flourished in the years after Prohibition, allowed one liquor license for every 1,000 residents per town..."

Flemington had just three—two belonging to establishments in strip malls and one for a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall.

Having a decent bar, it turns out, is helpful to reviving small downtowns, development experts say. So, in February, the developers came up with a novel but expensive solution, buying the Italian restaurant that owned a license and eventually transferring it to the downtown hotel. The price: about $1 million for the permit alone.

In Wisconsin, from what I've seen — and I've driven around a lot — even the smallest place you could possibly call a "downtown" has multiple bars — bars on any commercial block.

(Link via Instapundit.)

"It is a crime that officially does not exist, because it’s not on the books."

Said the Rev. Eugene Rivers of the Youth Violence Reduction Task Force.

Purchase of the day.

From the March 6, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

City Journal (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $5.75)

... and 93 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Thanks to all who periodically use the portal for your myriad shopping needs - offering stimulating support to our hard-nosed soft-hearted cutting-edge urbane blogger who holds herself and her blog to the highest intellectual, journalistic, and literary standards, aiming to produce intelligent and absorbing reading for her intelligent and discerning readers.

"The city’s going after families who have pigs as companions."

"Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s daughter has a pig in Gracie Mansion and no one mentions it’s illegal."

The powerful think the rules don't apply to them. But that's not an argument in favor of pigs in the city. No pigs in the city!

"And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where... the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for 'hipsters welcome.'"

From the second paragraph of a NYT style article titled "Creating Hipsturbia" about NY suburb such as Hastings-on-Hudson. That bird business called to mind this segment from the TV show "Portlandia":



Anyway, the article is interesting and amusingly written, even if you don't worry about how suburbs can adapt to the tastes of "the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city."

"Hipsturbia" is a good portmanteau word (if "good" includes making people who are trying to feel good about something feel bad).

To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives... and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.

How are they supposed to ward off nagging senses with the NYT dogging them like this? Don't these people know they are never ever ever supposed to leave the city — not for fresh air, not for adequate housing at a remotely decent price, not for good enough public schools, not for anything? If you leave you will be punished. You may try to get something that reminds you of the Real Life that can only be had in Brooklyn, but you will be pleasuring yourself with antlers.

"With Gov. Scott Walker hinting that he may move to end the city's longtime residency rule for public employees..."

"... Mayor Tom Barrett went on the offensive Friday, saying he's certain property values would drop if the requirement goes away."

"People in [the southwest and northwest sides] of the city are concerned about their property values," Barrett said. "They should remember when their property values go down that it was Governor Walker who did that to them if he proposes this. I'm still hoping he doesn't propose this."

Isn't that the wrong reason for requiring residency? You want to use people — deny them free choice — in order to bolster the real estate market? I can see not wanting the city to hollow out as people escape to the suburbs. You don't want Milwaukee to turn into Detroit, but what about the real people who work for the city? If they want to live too far out in the suburbs, their only option is to give up their jobs?

Note the big effect on who teaches the schoolchildren of Milwaukee. And then one of the reasons you might not want to live in Milwaukee is that you don't think the schools are good enough. A vicious circle there, no?

From the comments at the link:

I am considering moving out of Milwaukee. I own a $200,000 house and my taxes are almost as much as my mortgage. How can you even consider making someone pay almost $7K year for a $200k house and I can't even send my kids to the public schools. Don't even get me started on crime.... clean up the city and you won't have to hold employees hostage!

On the other side, also from the comments:

If you draw a city paycheck, the city has every right to require you to contribute to the local tax base by living there. If that's simply too much to bear, there are other places to work. No one is forcing anyone to work for the city of Milwaukee.

"See? You can be messy on the inside, and no one knows."

Step inside a 400-square-foot apartment space, transformed by elaborate built-ins:



The quote I've used for the post title appears about midway and marks the spot where my mood began to shift from delight to despair. What do we think of this man, who is promoting what seems to be a simplified, de-cluttered way of life, but who is, himself, in a business, promoting expensive merchandise, the machinery of compression. Do we want to be compressed thusly? It's one thing to live like this on board a cruise ship, but permanently? For a certain type of person — perhaps this man, or the man he pretends to be — it's a fine, joyful existence. Would he ever really have a dinner party for 10 in this space, as we see enacted at the end? It's not a real party, because it's an on-camera demonstration of the space. Watch closely and notice how the women are responding. There is something they do not love, and it is visible even in this crisply edited production. I felt empathy with these women and resistance to the man's sales pitch. And I remembered the gutted space shown at the beginning of the video, and thought that I could be happy, living in SoHo, in that 400-square-foot space as it looks right then. Just do the kitchen and the bathroom, nice and modern and constrained into a modest space, and let me put in some normal furniture — a good-sized table near the window for my work and eating space (that can be cleared off if anyone needs to come over for dinner) and I'll order a sleeper sofa from Design Within Reach. Spare me all those insane, ever-encroaching built-ins, and those crazy pop-up extra beds for guests. Guests to the city can get a hotel room or sleep on the floor or I'll add sleeper chair. By the end of the video, I felt paranoid that the government had a plan to shift us into smaller and smaller pods with evil corporations getting rich fitting them out with soul crushing storage bins. Mayor Bloomberg! Who fixed your ducts? Huh? Fixed your ducts, all right. I told you before - they fixed themselves. Oh, yeah? Then where did this come from, eh? Out of your nostril? Eh? Nostrils, eh? Central Services. They don't take kindly to sabotage. Sabotage, huh? Jesus, this place is in a terrible state. Just a minute! You're not gonna leave it like this, are you? Why not? All you gotta do is blow your nose and it's fixed, innit?

"Jeffrey has his own life, and he has chosen that life, but he knows that our hearts and home are always open to him."

"He knows that, he’s well aware of that."