West Coast Road Trip Reflection, Too Big for Japan, & More

Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Aug. 2 - Aug. 9.

Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. This weekly post mostly covers news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events. My posting schedule got delayed a bit by my travel. I hope to get back to the regular Monday-Friday rhythm soon.

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West Coast Road Trip Reflection

I just did a road trip up the West Coast to visit closed and closing colleges in the region, similar to the one I did last summer in this Inside Higher Ed article. I visited 15 closed, closing, or struggling campuses across three metros: Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.

It was my first time in the Pacific Northwest states, and I was quite taken by the region. This is my Thomas Friedman-esque, ask-the-cab-driver perception of these places. Yes, so don’t take it too seriously.

From this very specific angle, Seattle almost looks like Japan. Photo by me.

The Bay Area is in the Wrong State

I had already been to San Francisco before, but not in tandem with the other Pacific Northwest states. The thing that stuck out to me is that the Bay Area seems like it is in the wrong state. The people, culture, and feel up there simply mix better with the vibe of the Pacific Northwest rather than that of Southern California.

The weather and general scenery are more aligned—those cooler days, greyer skies. But I thought the cultures of the area matched better, too. There is a broader progressive sensibility and aesthetic that gels these areas together more closely than what I’m used to in Southern California, especially Orange County.

So I decided to draw a new state map to fix the mix-up. On my new map, Southern California gets to stay California. But the Bay Area and the rest of Northern California will now be part of Oregon and Washington, a new state called Jefferson. I also had to cleave off the rural Western part to make a new state called Cascadia to keep the Union at 50.

I am obviously joking but this imagined state of Jefferson aligns more culturally than the current iteration.

Portland is Actually Weird

This was my first time in Portland, and I did like the city enough. It did live up to the strange vibe that is promised on Portlandia. One issue is that I could not tell if the downtown was in a death spiral or if that was just normal Portland. There were rows of storefronts or other retail spaces empty, even decades-old stores had recently shuttered. The streets were often devoid of heavy foot traffic aside from the rather large homeless populations and encampments.

We stayed in Old Town Chinatown, which I know has had a long reputation of being a rougher area. Even a dead university I was researching in the neighborhood blamed the degradation of the neighborhood for the reason they had to close. “The increase in crime, drug use, and people living unsheltered in Portland and, especially, in Old Town, due to the pandemic led to a steep decline in enrollment and gutted the college building’s value,” stated an official announcement from the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine reported in Inside Higher Ed.

In this photo is a shuttered bookstore that had operated for 83 years along with a man having some kind of psychosis. Many such cases in the downtown. Photo by me.

I will say that the parts outside of the downtown were more what I was expecting after watching Portlandia. In these places, there were quirky little shops, restaurants, and other subcultures that were sometimes lampooned on the show. The dream of the ‘90s was still alive and well here. Hipsters live! The best meal we had on the trip was at Portland Fish Market & Fish And Chips Window. I will definitely be returning one day.

Seattle is a Great American City

During the entire trip, I was most impressed with Seattle. It felt like a real city in the same class as DC or Chicago (not quite to the NYC level). We stayed in the downtown in Chinatown (again), but this time the city felt lively, even if the homeless crisis was quite apparent there, too. Because there were so many people around, it didn’t feel as eerily quiet like Portland did with semi-abandoned streets.

The Sounders played right there. It was a lot of fun to be around all the fans! There were plenty of buses and light rail trips servicing the stadium.

We also likely got lucky on the timing of the visit. During our visit, there was a Sounders game (Seattle comes out for their soccer, too!), a Mariners game, a Seattle Storm game against Cameron Brink and LA Sparks (the WNBA is popular now!), and the Blue Angels airshow. The city was hopping during all of this. So maybe we just got lucky, but there was an energy in downtown Seattle then.

The city’s metro system, Link light rail, also went out into the suburbs. We stayed a night in Everett, which even had a stop on the line. While we mostly drove, I could see how someone could reasonably live car-lite, if not car-free, in Seattle. Someone on the Transit Subreddit even just posted, “Crazy how much Seattle's light rail system feels like a true metro.” I’m sure there are things to complain about in urbanist circles, but I was impressed on my visit.

Links I’m Reading This Week

Education

• Columbia the brand is suing Columbia the university over trademark. It does seem strange since Columbia changed its name from King’s College to Columbia in 1784 while the clothing brand was founded in 1938. Seems absurd. Columbia U needs a win, so I hope they get this one.

• UNLV got caught by the College Football Subreddit for using AI when the school was bidding farewell to its old stadium. Eagle-eyed fans spotted hallucinated “facts” about games that never happened. Bad form.

• The University of Pittsburgh is housing students in a dumpy Hampton Inn for $5K a semester. This is what I mean about the tradeoffs of building those mega student housing projects. At least they are actually nice for the high costs.

• Old hospital and shuttered college campus to become private student housing in Eugene, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado, respectively.

• Virginia Commonwealth University has a dorm project rejected by the city due to architectural concerns. The university will have to start the application process over now. This is the exact kind of bureaucratic hoops that take loads of resources to overcome

• The College of Charleston is also facing pushback from a proposed dorm on a “historic burial site”. I was, admittedly, squeamish when first reading this, thinking the school would be knocking down a cemetery. But when I did a bit more digging, it turns out the site was already forgotten and plowed over with a parking lot. Now, I am firmly on the college’s side (I will keep monitoring this one).

  

  Photo via a Count on 2 report.

• The University of Utah sells its downtown Salt Lake City dorms. Apparently, students didn’t like living away from campus and the facilities weren’t great, just look how ugly they are!

Photo via The Salt Lake Tribune.

Urbanism

• HOAs in California lose the ability to endlessly fine residents. Good! It is wild how much governance localities offload to HOAs (this might be a future article).

• OKC’s plan to build the tallest building in the country moves forward. I am excited to continue watching this story from my home city!

• Another Dot-Com bubble coming for AI? So many fake bots are driving everything online. Dead internet theory seems less a theory and more a reality now.

• After decades of being a cheap destination to move to, Arizona is cost of living is now above the national average. Everywhere is doomed to become California eventually if they keep following what we did here.

• Interesting chart from the Transit Subreddit showing the ridership recovery rates since pre-pandemic. Only one system is more than before (Philly), but I think this says more about the rise of digital work. Any surprises? I was surprised OCTA (my local system) was the 4th highest.

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:

Last week I wrote about the YIMBY-Strong Towns divide, well, so did

Laura Foote

and

Jeff Fong

. They argue that the movement needs state support to fully work.

Strong Towns Need Strong States

Local playing fields are tilted one way — against solving the housing shortage. Pro-housing coalitions are winning numerous local battles for more inclusive zoning and permitting policies, but no amount of local pro-housing activism is going to change the incentives in Beverly Hills. Or most places that end in “hills.” Economic integration, where people who work in a community can live in a community as well, is not everybody’s goal.

A City That Works

has a fun article by Noah Wright comparing Chicago to Austin in terms of recent housing construction. I am here for the memes and side-by-side photos.

What Does Better Growth look like?

Austin built the housing to accommodate this growth, too: every year since 2010, the Austin Metropolitan Area has built more new housing than the Chicago Metropolitan Area, despite having less than 1/4 the population. In recent years this has been downright humiliating: from 2020-2024 the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) permitted about 80,000 new units of housing

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Closing Time… Trump Trucks Big in Japan?

President Trump announced that US truck imports to Japan would be hyuge. I am sorry to say to Detroit, but there is little demand for American trucks in Japan.

The problem with US-made trucks is that they are one of our most protected products. The US government is always trying to uplift the automotive sector, but especially the truck sector. We have what is called the chicken tax, an import tax on all light trucks. This means that, despite demand for smaller Japanese trucks, they are too expensive to bring into the country.

The protection undercuts competition from the American automotive manufacturers. Because of this, innovation in the sector has been slow and standardization in terms of size has been slowly creeping in. We are mostly left with bulbous trucks that are basically vans with truckbeds (I will have a future article on this).

Given the lagging innovation and massive size, there is little demand from foreign markets. In a lot of places, our trucks would not even fit on the streets. There might be certain circumstances where someone abroad would want an American truck, but it will be more novelty than trend due to the physical constraints. The Japanese simply aren’t interested in what we are selling.

It would be absolutely miserable to drive a giant American truck in Tokyo.