Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of January 24, 2022
The newsletter will be going on hiatus, I just don’t have the time to work in this anymore. If you’d still like me to send you random links n such, either text me or reply to this email and I’ll try to think of you went reading articles and send you impromptu rants instead!
The Lead
Inject this shit straight into my veins.
Across the country—but particularly along the coasts—barriers to construction mean that housing production has plummeted, such that we now face a national demand-supply gap of 6.8 million homes. To break even over the next 10 years, the National Association of Realtors found, we would need to build at least 700,000 new homes each year.
In the meantime, we’re stuck with a lot of old housing that, to put it bluntly, just kind of sucks. A stately Victorian manor in the Berkshires is one thing. But if you live in a Boston triple-decker, a kit-built San Jose bungalow, or a Chicago greystone, your home is the cheap housing of generations past. These structures were built to last a half century—at most, with diligent maintenance—at which point the developers understood they would require substantial rehabilitation. Generally speaking, however, the maintenance hasn’t been diligent, the rehabilitation isn’t forthcoming, and any form of redevelopment is illegal thanks to overzealous zoning.
New housing: it’s good!
The fact is that those much-lamented cookie-cutter five-over-one apartment buildings cropping up across the U.S. solve the problems of old housing and then some. Modern building codes require sprinkler systems and elevators, and they disallow lead paint. New buildings rarely burn down, rarely poison their residents, and nearly always include at least one or two units designed to accommodate people in wheelchairs.
And despite what old-home snobs may believe, new housing is also just plain nice to live in—in many ways an objective improvement on what came before…
Modern homes and apartment buildings are not only far better insulated—they also feature modern HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) technologies, such that homes can be warmed and cooled without using nearly as much energy as their older counterparts. Given that heating and cooling account for nearly half of all household energy use in the U.S., the savings from new housing could have serious implications for climate change. That little space heater struggling to keep your drafty old apartment warm—to say nothing of your window AC unit—isn’t just unsightly. It’s also a climate failure.
In smaller ways, too, new construction is nicer. Bathrooms and closets are larger, as are kitchens, which are no longer walled off from the rest of the home. Modern windows let you bathe a unit in natural light, without temperature or noise concerns. Smaller unit sizes—think studios and one-bedrooms—better reflect shrinking households. And in-unit laundry is more common now, as are balconies—amenities that have only grown in value amid recurring COVID-related shutdowns.
Honestly though, I could probably quote the whole article. Well worth reading. [The Atlantic]
Good journalism/Cool shit
Your Bubble is Not the Culture
Great from Yair. But even with this, I’m not sure he’s talking so much about critics as much as leftist Twitter (not the same). Once again, Twitter is not the entire populace (needs repeating).
But just because something makes waves on Twitter doesn’t mean it actually matters to most people. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those users, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” In other words, nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults. This is not a remotely good representation of public opinion, let alone newsworthiness, and treating it as such will inevitably result in wrong conclusions…
Put another way, it’s true that Hamilton and Harry Potter and Parks and Recreation are “cringe.” But they’re only cringe in a narrow and unrepresentative corner of the culture that is disproportionately inhabited by critics, not in the rest of the culture those critics are meant to be covering.
To end on a positive note, the joys of Roger Ebert:
One of many things that made the late Roger Ebert great was that he retained the ability to watch something as a conventional moviegoer and rate it accordingly, even if as a critic, he’d seen 100 similar films and had a different reaction from that perspective. He knew that most people who go to the movies are not looking for the next great work of cinema, but rather something with which to enjoyably pass an afternoon with their families. So he would do fancy film events where he’d discuss the technicalities of cinematography in the work of Martin Scorsese, and then turn around and give four stars to Iron Man. [The Atlantic]
We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in Our Hospitals. It’s Greed.
Sign me the hell up for more about how greedy hospitals and doctors are (sorry Mikey boy). [New York Times]
Hate reading
Calling Omicron ‘Mild’ Is Wishful Thinking (ed. note: it isn’t though?)
You can’t go the entire article talking about how it’s milder and then say it isn’t! That’s not how this works!
Y’all are so obsessed and concerned that the public can’t understand facts that you have to obfuscate everything in these measures that don’t help at all! You can say it’s less severe but it’ll still do more damage because it’s more transmissible! That’s a lesson that’s easy to understand! But don’t tell me that it’s not milder. And of course, sure there could be more variants. But are you just going to sit at home by yourself forever (in the case of this author, honestly, yes probably). [The Atlantic]