Category Archives: Year in Review

most popular words in home listings in 2022

I am a big fan of walkable urban communities, and I want to believe my fellow Americans would learn to love them if they just had more options to experience them. But an analysis of home listing keywords shows that what is selling is still big floor space, big yards, and garages.

Spaciousness defines home descriptions in 2022: Keywords addressing the need for more “room,” “space,” and an “open floor plan” were among the most used, aimed at ticking the boxes of space-deprived buyers. This universal need for space was also reflected in the frequent use of space-related adjectives, like “open” or “great.”

Curb appeal matters, but parking space matters more: “Garage” was the most-mentioned amenity in listing descriptions across the country.

Homes that promise a “patio/porch” or a “yard” might experience a boost in interest with these outdoor amenities still riding high off their post-pandemic popularity.

point2homes.com

Due to the tyranny of geometry, you can’t have lots of private space, lots of parking, and the density that allows walkability all at the same time. If we want to reduce car use, we will have to find ways to make shared public spaces as good or better than the private spaces people are saying they want, and we will have to find ways for people to get from point A to point B that are faster, cheaper, and more pleasant than the private car infrastructure they are saying they want. I would say safer, but almost anything is safer than cars and having non-deadly transportation options does not seem to be a selling point in our real estate market. The people have spoken.

To create space inside houses in the city, you can either go vertical or you can take it away from other land uses. Some people like high rise living, but the public by and large does not seem to want this. The next option to create space inside houses and for private outdoor space is to take it away from public outdoor space. This is what we tend to do in denser neighborhoods like the one I live in – some people are able to have small yards and some people live in exclusive gated communities with their own private parks. Public open space is extremely limited, in extremely high demand, and to a certain extent a victim of its own success (for example, because trash cans quickly become overwhelmed on the weekend leading to litter, bags of dog waste, and odors). So in this case, people who value large, nice smelling open spaces don’t stick around. The final option to create more space, both indoor and outdoor, public and private, is to take it away from driveways, garages, parking lots, roads, and street parking. People resist this because cars are still the most convenient way to get around, if you happen to have convenient parking. Public transportation, where it exists, is slow, infrequent, and gross. Biking and other forms of personal mobility, even where they have dedicated infrastructure, are not remotely safe. We know how to improve these things, but there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem where the public does not support spending more money or taking more space for them because they are so pathetic now. You could break this cycle by just fixing it using known technical solutions, but at a high political and financial risk. You could create pilot programs in certain neighborhoods where public support exists, but then you run into the gentrification trap because it is likely to be higher-income neighborhoods where that support exists. Or you can thrust it into lower-income neighborhoods where there is more likely to be public opposition, and that is also politically and financially risky. So we might need leadership with the courage to take some risk, and this is in particularly short supply.

538 – best charts of 2022

There is nothing in 538’s best charts of 2002 that truly bowled me over. I mean, there are some graphics and maps that are effective at telling a story about their underlying data. There just aren’t any types of charts or applications of old types of charts that were a big surprise to me and that I thought I would want to copy if I could. Just purely for personal interest in the subject matter, the one I found most interesting was the map showing how college football conferences are losing all geographic meaning. I find myself slowly being less interested in college football with each passing year, and this is one reason why. My team’s losing campaign, loss to the NFL or “transfer portal” of many of their best players, blowout of the junior varsity squad in the mid-December bowl game they were lucky to even be selected for, and lackluster recruiting class are other reasons.

Top Urban Planning Books of 2022

Planetizen has a list of top urban planning (and related fields) books from 2022, or to be more accurate, fall 2021 through fall 2022. Lots of fields are related to urban planning, like engineering, architecture, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, ecology, economics, and public health to name just a handful.

First, they have an interesting list that they call “The Canon”:

  • To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Reform by Ebenezer Howard
  • The Death and the [sic] Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs [yes, they got the title wrong – ouch!]
  • Design With Nature by Ian McHarg
  • The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
  • The Urban General Plan, by T.J. Kent, Jr.
  • Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practices, edited by Gary Hack et al.

Anyway, here are a few from the new list that caught my eye:

I have reached middle age as defined by having a reading list of more books than I can read in my remaining lifespan (a long list for what I hope will still be a long life). So I am not sure how many of these I will get too. But knowing they are out there is useful in case I need to brush up on a particular topic at some point.

sexiest man alive vs. (hu)man of the year

People magazine still does their sexiest man alive bit, and the 2022 sexiest man alive is… Chris Evans. Who I never heard of. He appears to be your typical early middle age Caucasian actor/model type. So good for him. Meanwhile Volodymyr Zelensky is Time magazine’s person of the year. He appears to be your typical early middle age Caucasian actor/model/leader of the resistance type.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution horizon scan

This journal does an annual “horizon scan” of of emerging topics and issues. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • “bio-batteries” – “DNA-enabled biobattery technology uses a set of enzymes coupled to DNA to degrade organic compounds, releasing electrons and generating electricity…Such batteries could theoretically supply power densities in orders of magnitude greater than widely used lithium-ion batteries”. There are also new processes for extracting lithium more sustainably from waste materials. So there is some hope that the resource and waste limitations to scaling up renewable energy can be solved. Thermophotovoltaic cells are a third energy storage technology mentioned.
  • more practical methods of converting human urine to fertilizer – This might not sound like a big deal, but our coastal waters are being choked by nutrients both from treated wastewater and from farm runoff, while the nutrients in the farm runoff are derived from fossil fuels in the case of nitrogen or a mined from finite geological resources in the case of phosphate. Reprocessing urine into fertilizer is almost a no-brainer. And the technology has been known for awhile. The problem has been waste taboos which seem to be extremely ingrained in our psyches. I really want this one to be overcome, but as a wastewater industry insider I have become more cynical about this one over time. Genetic engineering of crops to help them take up nitrogen directly from the atmosphere (which peas and beans can do naturally, but most crops can’t) is also mentioned.
  • A particular pathogen that infects amphibians may be spreading to new areas.
  • European countries are considering new policy/legal frameworks for biodiversity reporting and conservation. This might sound boring, but we have gotten there with conventional pollution and we are getting there with greenhouse gases and renewable energy, while land use and conversation have mostly been left out to date.
  • Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to try to accelerate drug, chemical, and pesticide research.
  • trash reefs – New ecosystems may actually develop and adapt around ocean garbage patches.

word of the year 2022

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2022 is gaslighting. I appreciate this, because despite considering myself a literate person, I have not been able to figure out what people mean when they use this word. And I am not alone apparently. But basically, it is just lying, or intentionally misleading someone, or what we used to call propaganda. I concluded from the article that people say it to sound smart, but they don’t really know what it means, and it can mean a variety of different things. So now I feel less dumb when I hear smart people say this word.

Runners up were “oligarch”, “omicron”, and “codify”.

LGBT is now LGBTQIA. The Q can stand for either “queer” or “questioning”. The I is “intersex” – I don’t know what this means. And A can stand for “asexual”, “aromantic”, and “agender”. When I first read that I read “aromatic”. Well, people of any gender or sexual preference can be aromatic, sometimes more or less pleasingly so.

Sentient is an interesting word. To me, it is the ability to feel. It comes up in the context of artificial intelligence, but also applies to animals and babies, among other entities. Plants? I don’t know, they have the ability to sense light, moisture, salt, and nutrients among other things. Is that sentience? Sentience and self-awareness are not the same, which is interesting.

Loamy – farmers and soil scientists are aware of this word, if other people are just discovering it good for you.

Raid? It’s a poison you spray out of can to kill bugs, which aren’t sentient so you don’t have to feel bad.

Consort? This is a gray area between “spouse” and “hooker” as far as I know.

top 25 “most censored” posts of 2022

Project Censored has posted its annual list of most censored news stories. Well, sort of. These popped up in my RSS feed and are posted publicly on their website, but there don’t seem to be any links to them on the landing page. So, by all means support them by donating or buying their book if you feel guilty, or if these links are no longer active by the time you click on them.

Anyway, as usual I would classify some of these as “important but under-reported” rather than intentionally censored, but you can be the judge. Here are a couple that caught my eye:

5 of Bill Gates’s Favorite Books

I guess this qualifies as my first “best of” post for 2022. It’s a bit weak though. Bill Gates, instead of picking his five favorite books that came out during the year, picked five books that he recommended to somebody during the year. He picked Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as the “best introduction to grownup sci-fi”, which I take to mean sci-fi books for people who don’t have enough imagine to consider reading sci-fi, but might enjoy it if they try. This is not one of my favorite sci-fi books. About all I remember is a swimming pool supposedly somewhere in the Poconos, and the audiobook reader inexplicably giving a key character supposedly from the Poconos and southern accent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an okay book, but even if I were restricting myself to Heinlein I might pick something else, like Starship Troopers, which some “serious” people have at least heard of (and to be fair, Billy G. mentions in his post). How about Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, which depicts a plausible near-future and is extremely entertaining and mind-blowing.

The only other book I’ll mention is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, which might be interesting. Still, this list don’t impress me much. I’m thinking old Billy Gates just didn’t do a lot of reading this year. Can’t he pay people to give him the Cliff’s Notes? (Considering he has more money than any particular gods, couldn’t he track down Cliff himself? Well, I looked this up and Cliff was Clifton K. Hillegass, and he died in 2001.)

VMT, traffic, and density

This post provides evidence that increasing density (households per acre) does indeed reduce vehicle miles traveled per household. The thing is that what people experience is not vehicle miles per household, it is “traffic” and the inconvenience of parking. So even if driving per person or household decreases, the inconvenience of daily life will still increase until you get to a point where cars are unnecessary for most daily work, school, shopping, and leisure trips. I picture a curve where convenience decreases with density up to a certain point, and then increases again. People who have experienced only the decreasing side of the curve have trouble understanding what it would be like to get over the hump and up the other side. And this plays right into the hands of the highway-oil-auto industrial complex.

the 30-year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union

A big milestone of 2021 was the 30-year anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991. I was born in 1975, so I was 16 when this occurred. I didn’t have a good understanding of it at the time, and I am not sure the average person has a good understanding of it today. As I read about it now, Russia, somewhat oddly, essentially declared independence from itself (aka, the Russian empire, aka the Soviet Union), and Mikhail Gorbachev found himself in charge of a political entity that no longer existed. I have vague memories of Boris Yeltsin and tanks in the streets of Moscow. I have no memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This suggests to me my parents and teachers did not spend much time talking to me about current events, or talking to each other about current events within ear shot. Maybe I can do a bit better with my children, while trying not to make the world seem too depressing.

Is the cold war over? Not really. There are many, many ways its legacy affects us today. The most obvious ones are all the nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia have pointed at each other, nuclear proliferation around the world, and the tensions at the Russia-Ukraine border. Less obvious but crucially important is the extreme free market propaganda that constrains possibilities for the U.S. and economic and political systems around the world to this day. First, I think globalization had a lot to do with cold war propaganda. The U.S. invested heavily in industrializing and trading with Japan and South Korea after World War II at least in part to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. At first, the exports the U.S. was buying were a tiny trickle compared to the economy. The policies were so successful though, that those economies grew to rival and out-compete U.S. industry. The propaganda suited U.S. multinational corporations just fine because it provided access to cheap labor and lax environmental regulations abroad, while keeping the U.S. market wide open. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore copied the model with spectacular success, and then China copied it on a massive scale, and the system the U.S. had created swallowed it (the tail wagged the dog, the pig swallowed the python? I struggled to come up with the right animal-based metaphor here). Certainly, this economic growth lifted a lot of people out of poverty in Asia. It is somewhat ironic though that the biggest beneficiary turned out to be a (nominally, at least) Communist empire.

Back to those U.S. corporations and the propaganda that suits them. To this day, they are able to use that Cold War anti-tax, anti-regulation propaganda to scare the public into voting against “socialist” policies that would benefit the vast majority of citizens and even the economy as a whole, but would trim the profits of a tiny minority running mega-corporations. Commie red policies like having health care, education, and child care systems that are not failures and that would allow the U.S. to stop falling toward the bottom and eventually getting shit out of its peer group of advanced nations (I think I got that metaphor about right!) The mega-corporations can then invest a small fraction of their profits to ensure election of politicians who will continue to spew the propaganda and in some cases even actively work to undermine voting itself. This is a cycle that is going to be very hard to break, if it can be broken.