The Mullet House, Happy Birthday Excel, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Sept. 27 - Oct. 3
Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. These posts mostly cover news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.
What is a Mullet House?
Over on the Wild Homes subreddit (a lesser-known cousin of ZillowGoneWild), there was an interesting post on a new home redevelopment: the Mullet House!
What is a Mullet House? It’s basically the preservation of the historical entryway and frontal structures, along with core visual features. But the back of the unit has additions where modern architects go nuts with their glass and open concepts.
The mullet house preserves the beauty and history, while allowing for modern function and sensibilities. I know there are versions of this in construction, often keeping a historic facade, but I like the flashy name here.
There is a divide within the urbanist world over this kind of historical preservation. Most urbanists are united in that modern suburbia is terrible (all the parking, ugly strip malls, and sprawl housing). But we are often split when it comes to how to grapple with historical structures.
Historical preservation is often weaponized by NIMBYs to obstruct new construction and pretty much anything. The infamous historic parking lot is a familiar meme in urbanist circles, but it’s very real!
Yet, there are also some of us who believe that the older models of building were more beautiful and had overall better design aesthetics. In a place like Southern California, it doesn’t matter because so much stuff is just new post-war crap. But these battles are more real on the East Coast.
Digging into the historical preservation issue is probably worth a future article. For now, I am thinking the Mullet House could be a compromise between the various urbanist factions.
Can this become a trend? We will see! Now, does anyone have $3 million to buy this place in Raleigh, North Carolina? Probably not.
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
The hottest new field for Stanford grads: military tech. So much for that high-minded saving the world stuff!
University of Chicago sells off one of its research institutes for $200 million. The university seems to be in pretty rough financial shape.
With the attacks on H-1B visas in the US, there is a lot of talk about other countries recruiting this talent, but a real question is do they even have the capacity? Chinese youth, with high unemployment rates, are already questioning the new K visa the gov has unveiled to attract foreign talent.
Crime in the college town of Columbia, Missouri, is getting so concerning that university presidents are trying to figure out a course forward. A student of a local college was sadly murdered recently.
Spain is not only one of the world’s top tourist destinations but also for study abroad. The popularity is bringing in global student housing giants from across the world to invest there.
Yale Divinity School opens a student housing unit that is the largest residential building to ever complete the so-called Living Building Challenge. The building itself will house 49 apartments that will produce more energy than used, mainly through solar panels, among other innovations.
The University of Colorado at Boulder is planning to build more dormitories on its property. The neighbors in their single-family homes, you guessed it, are “concerned.” The funniest part to me is the neighborhood is literally called University Heights. College town NIMBYs are just always too on the nose.
Residents of Amherst, Mass, are calling for UMass-Amherst to house more students on campus. I agree! Let the university build more housing, just don’t protest when they do.
Urbanism-ish
As companies turn to AI more and more, they are finding that there is so much wrong, errors, and fakes that it’s actually hurting productivity.
LA is very much behind schedule for the infrastructure needed to host the World Cup next year and the Olympics in 2028. One possible savior? Watertaxies. I don’t hate it!
Let’s build watertaxis across Southern California’s coast! The city of Houston has removed signal priority for its streetcar lines, which means the public transit will just get stuck in traffic with all the other cars. When we do this, it makes the investment pointless.
President Trump has frozen funding for NYC metro area rail projects, blaming the federal government shutdown. This will only further delay and inflate costs and efforts that are already delayed and inflated. Good job by us.
Meanwhile, India is planning to build rail connections to Bhutan, its Himalayan neighbor. China opens its newest high-speed rail route, the Shenyang–Baihe line. Japan is mapping out the world’s fastest train. It seems our global peers are just moving further and further ahead as we continue to take steps backwards.
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to stay connected to the growing Substack community. Here are a few I am reading this week:
Josh Barro at Very Serious writes about how annoying overregulations inflate the cost of living in New York City:
Last week, the New York City Council passed, by a vote of 47 to 1, a bill that would require installation of all gas-powered appliances to be completed by a master plumber, or a journeyman plumber working under their direct supervision — even where a new appliance is being installed in the same location as an old appliance with no change to the gas line. These installations are simple and routine enough that building superintendents typically handle them now. In the rest of the country, if you buy your new gas appliance from a big box retailer, the person who delivers it will also install it — here’s the Home Depot explaining how their non-plumber technician will install your gas range for you.
It is this kind of thing that makes Democratic governance of big cities such a mess. These are self-inflicted wounds on the very ethos of government. This kind of overreach happens in cities across the country, too.
Speaking of rebuilding trust, Jay Akridge, Trey Malone, and John Anderson have a piece on Finding Equilibrium: Two Economists on Higher Ed's Future discussing how to rebuild it for our universities. Waning perceptions of higher education is certainly something I have been thinking a lot about, and should probably write something on it myself. In the meantime, these guys lay out some of the issues:
University teaching and research with the many publics they serve through engagement/extension is a powerful one. Research and teaching programs informed by stakeholder engagement are more likely to be viewed as relevant by stakeholders. Engagement and extension relationships help ensure research findings and educational programs are available to those who can benefit from them. Such relationships are self-reinforcing and trust-building as value is created for stakeholders and society more broadly.
Closing Time… Happy Bday Excel
The software Excel was released 40 years ago this week. Happy birthday, Excel! I think the software is perhaps one of the most underrated pieces of software ever produced. It does a kind of thankless job, yet the ability it gives users has done more to improve efficiency than pretty much any other piece of software ever produced.
I’ve always loved this old Excel commercial showing just how much it helped improve efficiency in the office:
Dare I suggest that Excel improved efficiency to a greater degree than the Internet? Maybe! I mean, we cannot goof off using Excel. It’s all business. Well, perhaps someone can find a way to do it, but it’s mostly just spreadsheets and analysis.
Due to the simple nature and critical ability of Excel, LindyMan calls it, “Possibly the only lindy software program ever made.” He argues that it is just an older form of business using “the ledger, the grid, the table.” Indeed, a data table dating back to ancient Mesopotamia was uncovered a few years ago. It really does look suspiciously like an Excel spreadsheet.
So here’s to you, that timeless spreadsheet tool, the number cruncher, a real graph generator, happy 40th birthday, Excel!
Thanks for flagging our post Ryan...much appreciated!