THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FINISHED STATE.

I've previously engaged Strong Towns on some of their more rigid criticisms of the Suburban Experiment, noting, for instance, "The Suburban Environment is Emergent" and betting on emergence, for instance with "In the same way that the American High built environment emerged piecemeal, whatever comes next is also likely to take shape piecemeal, although some experiments might be more successful than others."

That might be what Strong Towns and American Conservative contributor Addison Del Mastro is seeing in Wheaton, Maryland, where a mid-sized big-box store (sorry for the awkward phrasing) that is no longer useful to the discounter that built it is none-the-less useful as a resale shop.  "The giant thrift store that occupies it, which imitates the layout and product range of a discount department store, is basically a perfect fit. It allows people in this crowded, deeply settled area to donate a lot of stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill. And it provides cheap and often pretty good merchandise to the area’s less affluent residents."  That might be a St. Vincent de Paul or Goodwill or the Salvation Amry, or it could be a Ross, which have an outlet in what I think was the Barnes and Noble store that was before that the K-Mart in DeKalb selling new stuff in an environment that sure looks like Railroad Salvage or a resale shop.

The neighborhood appears to be trending downscale (must not have been discovered by Beltway rent-seekers yet?) and the surrounding stroad network is not conducive to walking.  But shoppers who walk in now have food options, even though there's not the expected set of outbuildings with franchised bun-'n-run operations.

It’s quite common in this area of Maryland to see food trucks or carts set up in parking lots—the space is freed up, either due to retail vacancies or to higher-than-planned pedestrian traffic—often selling Latino foods or snacks. In the overbuilt parking lot of the giant thrift store, there were not one, not two, but three food trucks, at least on the day I visited. (I was there too early for lunch and they still appeared to be setting up.)

Sometimes those food truck operators move up to opening a permanent eatery, or perhaps they would, if the corona tyrants would lift the uncertainty surrounding in-person dining.  Perhaps some of those eateries will emerge in the repurposed four-unit apartments that became common in the peak years of the American High.

For something similar, take a look at this row of repurposed multifamily houses, now various offices and businesses, in the relatively poor and heavily immigrant community of Langley Park, about 20 minutes away. Langley Park suffers even more intensely from the dynamic of heavy pedestrian traffic in a working-class and largely car-less community originally designed for the motoring middle class.

This isn’t aesthetically pleasing. In fact, it’s the kind of environment that, growing up in quiet, affluent, white suburbia, you instinctively learn to avoid. In some cases, though, there’s nothing malign going on; there’s just no particular reason to go to these places. (I frequented a thrift store and international supermarket along here in grad school, but lots of people didn’t, and most of them didn’t have offensive reasons not to.) This isn’t to glorify it either; this community does have an elevated rate of poverty, dangerous highways, lots of traffic, and a very old housing stock.

But while I might once have just seen run-down buildings through my windshield and kept on driving, now I see people doing what they can with what they have. It’s not perfect. They don’t think it’s perfect. But it’s better than abandonment and blight. Many hold the impression that the working-class immigrants who often own and patronize these businesses are to blame for the physical decay. But they’re simply buying or renting what’s available, often from commercial landlords who are speculating on the land.

That's the funny thing about older housing stock. When it gets old enough, it gets listed, and it takes a Papal Bull and an Act of Congress to make changes to it, but before it gets that old, it might be viewed as "blighted."  It's more accurate to think of "doing they can with what they have" as a manifestation of resiliency.  It's probably easier to turn a one-story big-box into a thrift store than it is to convert a multi-story urban department store into some sort of community "incubator" or put apartments up where lingerie and toys once were, both attempts at improving central Milwaukee; and converting the first-floor apartments in those four-units into retail space extends the commercial life of those properties.

Sometimes, emergence simply happens.  Would you believe that the Cold Spring Shops headquarters are in a planned use development with conditions including "no permanent outdoor clotheslines," "no outdoor storage buildings," and "no flagpole taller than sixteen feet."  (Thus, no multiple hoist Naval flagpole outside, although I was tempted ...)  But the developer is out of business, having sold off the unimproved lots piecemeal, and the builder, who did a very good job, is also out of business, and the new construction looks different from what the developer and builder were offering, and there are more than a few outdoor storage buildings popping up.  So far, though, nobody basing a taco or ice cream truck in the driveway.

We’ve come to have a low tolerance for chaos and disorder. We expect things to be neat, organized, clean, frictionless. This expectation is ironic, because we glorify our country’s rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial history, yet we often look down on people who embody it today, and on the commercial landscapes that result.

Back in 2019, I attended Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns book talk, fittingly in the nearby DC suburb of Greenbelt, Maryland. He may not have used the word “chaos,” but he argued that affluent suburbanites were basically wrong in their expectation that we were rich enough to buy our way out of that rough and tumble, the need to be constantly productive, and the certain messiness that comes with it. In reality, it’s more like we’re living on accumulated capital that we’re no longer producing.

Indeed, dear reader, there is no production that doesn't bring messiness with it.