Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.
In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east. Indeed, as one historian noted,
“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]
In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.
Above is a photograph of two houses in Nashville, Tennessee. They are narrow buildings, connected by a one-story hallway in the middle, and they share a driveway. Do they look a little strange? To me, they do—handsome but strange.
They show how a Tennessee law led to creative designs.
Taxes and regulations often have unintended consequences. In this post, I will share three examples of distinctive housing that came about in an effort to work around government fiats.
Nashville’s Connected Houses
Let’s start with Nashville’s connected houses. The reason is simple. Nashville has been growing, with population increasing at about double the U.S. rate during the past decade. [1] This puts pressure on housing supply, and subdividing a lot to build two houses is attractive.
Until 2014, however, zoning laws required builders who wanted to build two homes on a single lot to connect the houses—to make them legally duplexes or condominiums. So, as having two homes on one lot became financially attractive, we got homes like those above. Continue reading “How Taxes and Regulations Shaped Architecture”
We may be on the verge of a widespread switch in the auto industry from gasoline-powered cars to electric ones.
While wondering if such a massive switch will occur, I began to look into what happened to the early electric vehicles. First developed in the 1880s, electric cars were popular for several decades. An electric car won a celebrated race in Chicago in 1895, [1] and in a 1904 brochure, 21 of the 88 automobile models listed were electric. [2]
The disappearance of the electric vehicle illustrates capitalism’s “creative destruction,” a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter to explain how new products and services sweep away the old. (We would use the term “disruptive technology” today. ) Overall, the advent of the “horseless carriage” caused creative destruction, as it demolished entire industries— horse breeding, horse feed, carriages, saddles and, of course, buggy whips.
But why was the electric car swept up in that destruction? The usual answer is that the technology was inferior. Batteries were too heavy, too weak, and had to be constantly recharged. True, but I don’t think technology was the main reason. Continue reading “What Happened to the Electric Vehicles of 1904?”
The invasion of Ukraine may give us some insight into the causes of war, with the help of experts.
I recently shared Jeremy Black’s view of why wars happen.[1] High on his list are two explanations: humans are inherently warlike and we idolize war heroes. But after I wrote about Black, I was urged (by Mark Brady) to read a more classic treatment by Geoffrey Blainey, a prominent Australian historian. He wrote The Causes of War in 1973 and updated it in 1988.[2]
Blainey was not interested in fundamental psychological causes but, rather, in finding specific patterns of how wars get started and how they stop. His book, he said, was based on a study of all international wars since 1700.
Blainey’s most important claim is that war starts when “two nations disagree on their relative strength.”[3] The leaders of each nation weigh their chances of winning or obtaining a goal (which might be maintaining independence). The decision to go to war is based on at least seven factors, he says. Continue reading “Why Do We Have Wars? Part II”
If you are like me, you think of peace as both the ideal and the natural state of humanity. Wars interrupt this peace. They are aberrations that usually occur because “bad” people—aggressive government leaders—try to expand their territory, and other governments respond with force.
Jeremy Black, an emeritus history professor at the University of Exeter, has written a book that undermines this view, at the same time challenging many claims of military historians.
Let me caution that I do not urge most of my readers to go out and buy his book, A Short History of War. Black summarizes as many conflicts as he can fit into a 258-page book, and for those of us unfamiliar with military history it is what journalists call “listy.” What makes the book valuable is that Black helps us think broadly and objectively about war and violence (closely related but not synonymous terms). Yet because most of the book consists of examples, gleaning his message takes some efforts of interpretation.
