Alex Pemberton

Let
America
Cook
Again

ADU Bingo:
✅️ Unconventional financing
✅️ Built on Boomer parents' land
✅️ Leveraged their equity
✅️ Unlocked financial/lifestyle benefits unavailable to those without access to all of the above

ADUs are popular with planners and politicians due to their shared mandate to funnel benefits to homeowners.

English speakers need to return to our vorgestern/übermorgen origins.

The day before yesterday?
The day after tomorrow?

Grow up.

My grandfather-in-law, Jürgen Messer von Santiago, is a builder. Insanely talented. We were in his homeland recently and I asked him what it would cost to build walkable, mixed-use concentration camps today.

I'll never forget his answer:

"We can't do it. It can't happen here."

Heute in den USA (links). Vor 100 Jahren in Deutschland (rechts).

We all have our diversions from fascism-induced despair. Let me have mine.

You also definitely had an attic apartment as a separate unit at some point, I'd guess 1960s/70s.

Found a classified: NICE ROOMY UNFURNISHED APARTMENT. Private entrance. Reasonable.

1938. Confirmed.

These would have a lock-off door in the room off that second front door, like a suite hotel, then two or three rooms straight back on both sides. Easy to make it two apartments or one house.

Nvm found it. Fascinating. This is not one of the floor plans I've studied, which had their heyday pre-WWI, but it appears the two front doors are original. AssessPro says 1929 construction and it was being advertised for duplex use in 1940, which suggests it was designed to do so.

Spencer what's your address I can tell you in two minutes or less

1813 would have been SFH. Not that it couldn't have potentially been converted at some point, but it wasn't designed to do it easily.

Those with L-shaped porches, perhaps except the two at top, were a builder-standard type built all over. There are 268 extant examples in Lockeland Springs-East End. I've matched so many, I can tell them from the Sanborn outlines. All had two doors, floor plans designed to divide. Nice row in EE:

Never mind, looked closer. 1813. Sad, all the other houses on that block are "flexplexes" designed to convert into duplex use, ubiquitous along streetcar lines in pre-war Nashville. So close.

Do you know which house number? And do you have more photos of the house?

And fascism aside, that is the only other construction industry firm in the collective portfolios of this venture's funders—mostly minor AI, crypto, app VCs.

I'm interested in the technical aspects you see here, because it doesn't seem anyone in the construction space saw enough to put money on it.

Only one other American builder/developer is funded by New Founding and they—to their credit, with more candor and courage than Bobby—are explicit Christian nationalists building little Ruby Ridges in Appalachia.

Man, this fucking broke me.

Last name... checks out.

They are saying there will never be a more grotesque decadent-Berlin-expat humblebrag. They are saying it can't be topped.

Lüften is social engineering to normalize German landlords shifting the blame for painting over black mold to steal security deposits. It relies on Calvinist shame and a Good German sense of order that rejects the great innovations of Americanism.

Resist.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Not X, but Y?

Wow. AI slop.

Every day, MoCo wakes up and looks in the mirror and asks itself a simple question: How can we MoCo harder than we did yesterday?

The Real Reason Cities Are Losing Young Families - Aaron Renn & Bobby Fijan | #78

His housing-for-families schtick has always been a plexiglass Trojan House for this nonsense, divorced from all available data, and all the urbanists who treated him seriously have not covered themselves in glory. Too few have challenged his nonsense and fewer still have called out its purpose.

Tune in to hear Bobby "The Floorplan Fascist" Fijan chat with New Founding, a Christian nationalist project funder building a (Ruby) RidgeRunner compound in Tennessee.

No novel Fair Housing Act interpretations, but queue up more of their episodes for Holocaust revisionism, anti-DEI slop, and more!

Thank you, friend. I needed this after watching Eden (2024) in its entirety.

When they find me, they will know my dog has scavenged my body to bones. Years later, a major director will read this story and make a movie about my life, inexplicably casting Sydney Sweeney as my dog, and it will puzzle some man in his mid-30s so much he will create a Letterboxd and post a review.

I will become one of those dudes who writes and posts Letterboxd reviews no one reads. My friends/acquaintances will look on with varying degrees of sympathy, embarrassment, and disdain until one day someone realizes I have been dead for several weeks because I stopped posting Letterboxd reviews.

A ★½ review of Eden (2024) Eden wants to split the difference. It attempts to balance an auteur vibe with a blockbuster budget and a Hollywood cast with faithful adherence to its period-piece source material. Instead, it split ...

I watched Eden (2024) on the Netflix platform. While there are reasons to watch it, not exclusively Ana de Armas-related, the German accents are very bad. The German accents are so bad, I spent the film so puzzled by the premise of the production I created a Letterboxd to work it out.

My review:

Wobbled

Only in America! (because every other developed country has windows that block sound, rendering this method of protest ineffective)