Linkage

This is spectacularly dysfunctional.

It’s not just historic flats from Britain’s postwar housebuilding boom that are being sold. Brand new council houses are also going under the hammer, almost as fast as they are being built. Design blog Dezeen revealed this month that seven of Norwich’s newest council homes are already in the process of being sold off, fewer than five years after they were completed. Other authorities have also been forced to sell their new council homes, such as Hackney in east London, which has already lost some of the social housing it built in Stoke Newington in 2018.

Despite right to buy being so destructive to public finances that it has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, Labour has announced it will keep Thatcher’s policy if it wins the next general election. This U-turn, backtracking on the party’s previous two manifestos, which promised to suspend sell-offs, has bitterly disappointed many local politicians who are desperate for change.

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It’s hardly surprising most councils are not building many homes at all, given they are obliged to sell them at a discount almost as soon as the paint is dry. Would you spend hundreds of thousands of pounds building a new house to rent out if your tenants could force you to flog it to them for less than it cost to construct, just three years later? According to research from UCL, right to buy “remains the major disincentive to local authorities building more social rent homes” as the majority of councils rightly fear the policy will impact any new housing developments they undertake.

Instead, many authorities have launched schemes to cling on to as much of their remaining stock as possible. Some offer grants to incentivise council tenants to buy on the open market instead of via right to buy. Wandsworth, in south-west London, for instance, will chip in up to £120,000 towards helping their tenants purchase a home “within the UK or anywhere else in the world”, provided it is not a council property.

In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.

"Company shall immediately disassemble all products that are created or assembled out of, comprised of, or that contain any Service Parts not purchased from Samsung,” a section of the agreement reads. “And shall immediately notify Samsung in writing of the details and circumstances of any unauthorized use or misappropriation of any Service Part for any purpose other than pursuant to this Agreement. Samsung may terminate this Agreement if these terms are violated."

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The contract shows the incredible level of control that Samsung has over “independent” repair shops, which need to sign this agreement to get repair parts from Samsung. Signing this contract does not even make a repair shop an “authorized” repair center, which is a distinction that requires shop owners to jump through even more hoops.

Owners of Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing device are begging the company to open-source the gadgets to save some the landfill. Spotify hasn't responded to pleas to salvage the hardware, which was originally intended to connect to car dashboards and auxiliary outlets to enable drivers to listen to and navigate Spotify.

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Car Thing came out to limited subscribers in October 2021 before releasing to the general public in February 2022.

In its Q2 2022 earnings report released in July, Spotify revealed that it stopped making Car Things. In a chat with TechCrunch, it cited "several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues." A Spotify rep also told the publication that the devices would continue to “perform as intended,” but that was apparently a temporary situation.

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Spotify's announcement has sent some Car Thing owners to online forums to share their disappointment with Spotify and beg the company to open-source the device instead of dooming it for recycling centers at best. As of this writing, there are over 50 posts on the Spotify Community forums showing concern about the discontinuation, with many demanding a refund and/or calling for open-sourcing. There are similar discussions happening elsewhere online, like on Reddit, where users have used phrases like "entirely unnacceptable" to describe the news.

A Spotify Community member going by AaronMickDee, for example, said:

"I'd rather not just dispose of the device. I think there is a community that would love the idea of having a device we can customize and use for other uses other than a song playback device.

"Would Spotify be willing to maybe unlock the system and allow users to write/flash 3rd party firmware to the device?"

A Spotify spokesperson declined to answer Ars' questions about why Car Thing isn't being open-sourced and concerns around e-waste and wasted money.

According to new survey of U.S. drivers, the average American is spending 20 percent of her monthly income on auto loans, fuel, insurance, maintenance, which is around twice or at the absolute upper limit of what financial experts recommend they spend on transportation costs, depending on who you ask. (Federal statistics estimate that the average U.S. household spent 15 percent of its income on transportation in 2022, but that includes those who are lucky enough to live in communities where they can rely on other, cheaper modes.) 

Ten percent of surveyed drivers, meanwhile, estimated they spent 30 percent of their take-home pay on car payments alone, while more than 12 percent "found themselves living paycheck to paycheck due to the financial strain of their cars," the report authors wrote. Close to 17 percent of the survey respondents say they'd gotten a second job specifically to afford their vehicle.

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The Marketwatch study did not analyze how respondents' local transportation systems influenced their likelihood to take on onerous automobile costs, but a larger March 2020 survey from Data for Progress found that 80 percent of all Americans feel they have "no choice but to drive as much as they do." 

Climate and housing are vitally connected, and acknowledging this turns a pair of calamities into one huge opportunity.

That’s the message from the national Task Force for Housing and Climate, a cross-partisan group of former politicians and policy experts that launched in September and released their final report on March 5. The non-governmental task force convened fifteen heavy hitters from across the country, including former Conservative cabinet minister Lisa Raitt and Edmonton’s progressive former mayor Don Iveson as co-chairs, as well as economist and former governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney and former Toronto chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat. The group has created a road map for 5.8 million “affordable, low-carbon and resilient” homes to be built by 2030.

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If all this sounds wildly optimistic, somewhere between wartime effort and fever dream on the scale of probabilities, well, so is the fight against climate change. One could take heart from the fact that, last fall, housing minister Fraser told the CBC “this is a wartime effort we need to adopt.” There’s also the fact that the debate over housing policy hasn’t suffered the same partisan warping that afflicts climate policy. Nobody in Canada is arguing the housing crisis is a hoax or wildly overblown; instead, every party is now competing to prove it has the best, most aggressive solution.

Ah, private equity; is there any bad situation you can't make much, much worse?

In the midst of an affordable housing crunch and with yearslong Section 8 voucher waitlists, manufactured homes tend to be a more affordable option compared with traditional site-built houses, particularly for seniors and low-income households. A factory-built home can be a steppingstone for families pursuing homeownership or the last stop before falling into homelessness. But advocates say manufactured housing is quickly becoming unaffordable as private equity firms buy up parks and raise rents. In some cases, it’s unclear who owns the lots, making it easier for maintenance problems to go unaddressed.

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A household that lives in a manufactured home may own the structure but rent the land on which it sits. For many, “mobile” may be a misnomer.

“It's difficult, expensive or outright impossible to move these homes and so residents are forced to tolerate escalating rents, arbitrary fees, lack of transparency in billing and failure to invest in the maintenance of park properties, all which contribute to their housing insecurity,” said Esther Sullivan, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, at the Senate committee hearing.

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“It's really frustrating as someone who has spent time in social services for so long to not be able to help people, particularly when they're in your city and you should have some jurisdiction over situations like these, where the living conditions are compromising the residents’ health, safety and well-being. We should be able to do something and hold those people accountable,” said Warren City Council President Angela Rogensues, who spearheaded the nuisance complaint.

Rogensues told state lawmakers last month that many parks are in “tremendous disrepair.” She reported seeing residents dealing with rat infestation, trees growing through trailers, trip hazards and trailers filled with garbage in 2022. Rogensues said she reached out to city and state departments and was told they didn’t have jurisdiction over mobile home parks. The city cannot test to regulate the water once it enters the park, she said, meaning the owner is responsible for the water quality. 

“Renters of mobile homes and even owners of mobile homes do not fall into a category I can regulate or enforce,” she told lawmakers.

But social values were very much on the mind of Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born designer who created the first enclosed mall in the United States, Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, in 1956. Gruen wanted to give patrons a version of the lively and intensely social shopping districts he remembered from the Vienna where he grew up. It wouldn’t just be a collection of stores — it would include schools, post offices, medical centers and museums. A modern mall, especially in a cold-climate place like Minnesota, would be a sort of urban market town, a Main Street under glass.

In the years before his death in 1980, Gruen realized and regretted the failure of his creations to meet his original vision. They may have been pedestrian-friendly in their way, but they were nevertheless islands in a sea of parking. And the idea of a shopping mall as a key element in modern social life was rarely mentioned. 

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When you look at what has happened to many of the dead malls of the last century, you find a whole variety of retrofits. Some of them have simply been torn down, of course, but others have been repurposed to contain housing, hotels, museums, gyms, churches, senior centers, libraries and a whole variety of other features. Many of these are public enterprises, successors to the strictly private mall operations that have dominated shopping-center history.

In perhaps the most startling transformation, Gruen’s Southdale Center in Minnesota, the first of the fully enclosed malls of the 1950s, is being re-created as a multipurpose development that includes luxury hotel rooms and apartment complexes, a fitness center in place of a defunct J.C. Penney store, medical clinics and day care for children, and a variety of other public and private properties.

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Ironic as it may seem, malls such as Southdale are moving closer to being the entity that Victor Gruen envisioned — places where different segments of the community can gather and find their basic needs as well as their consumer desires met, and also satisfy their desire for sociability.

Lately, a moral panic has been brewing. People in the media, government, and across the internet are declaring that children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis and that smartphones and social media are to blame. But is this even true?

I talked to danah boyd, the top researcher on kids and social media use, about some of the problems that young people today are facing, why quick fixes like banning social media apps are never the answer, and what we can actually do to help younger generations.

I have to admit that it’s breaking my heart to watch a new generation of anxious parents think that they can address the struggles their kids are facing by eliminating technology from kids’ lives. I’ve been banging my head against this wall for almost 20 years, not because I love technology but because I care so deeply about vulnerable youth. And about their mental health. And boy oh boy do I loathe moral panics. I realize they’re politically productive, but they cause so much harm and distraction.

I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. (I wish I could believe many things that are empirically not true. Like that there is no climate crisis.) Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is ecological. As a researcher, I know that young people’s relationship with tech is so much more complicated than pundits wish to suggest. I also know that the hardest part of being a parent is helping a child develop a range of social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can be independent. And I know that excluding them from public life or telling them that they should be blocked from what adults values because their brains aren’t formed yet is a type of coddling that is outright destructive. And it backfires every time.

I’m also sick to my stomach listening to people talk about a “gender contagion” as if every aspect of how we present ourselves in this world isn’t socially constructed. (Never forget that pink was once the ultimate sign of masculinity.) Young people are trying to understand their place in this world. Of course they’re exploring. And I want my children to live in a world where exploration is celebrated rather than admonished. The mental health toll of forcing everyone to assimilate to binaries is brutal. I paid that price; I don’t want my kids to as well.

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Please please please center young people rather than tech. They need our help. Technology mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. It’s what makes the struggles young people are facing visible. But it is not the media effects causal force that people are pretending it is.