In anticipation of the Purple Line’s scheduled opening in 2027, Montgomery County officials are looking at places to build sidewalks near the light rail line. But plans to build sidewalks near the future Takoma-Langley station, on University Boulevard in Takoma Park, have been shelved in part because neighbors say they’re afraid of “stranger danger.”

Staff at the Montgomery County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) identified eight residential streets within a half-mile of the station that were missing sidewalks, then sent information about the proposal to over 150 nearby households. Fewer than half replied, but those who did were mostly against it. According to the letter from Robert Gonzales, Sidewalk Section Chief, of the 73 residents who responded, just 12 supported the sidewalks.

“In the remaining 61 comments, residents heavily opposed the installations,” Gonzales wrote, “expressing concerns about loss of available parking, lack of need, financial loss due to tree and landscaping removals, loss of environmental beauty and the ‘natural feel’ of the community, stranger danger, increased crime, littering, and, most of all, the worsening of stormwater flooding and erosion.”

Gonzales added that the county’s budget doesn’t have enough money to install the sidewalks anyway. “Our decision is clear,” he concluded. “None of the proposed sidewalks will be installed.”

“Stranger danger” is a concept dating to the 1960s, when high-profile cases of children being abducted or murdered began appearing in the news. If you grew up in the 1990s like me, you probably remember pictures of missing kids on milk cartons or round-the-clock news coverage about child kidnappings.

It’s largely unfounded, as children are most likely to get abducted by someone they know. But “stranger danger” was still an effective tool to scapegoat minority groups, like gay people, as threats to children. It became an excuse for “tough on crime” policies like mass incarceration. Sometimes it even backfired, leading children who are actually in danger to reject an unfamiliar adult trying to help. Today, child safety advocates strongly discourage teaching kids about “stranger danger.”

What does that have to do with sidewalks? I don’t know. But it seems any opposition, regardless of the reason, is enough not to build a sidewalk.

It’s generally MCDOT policy to get resident approval for the smallest of transportation projects. As with many things, the people who want sidewalks are less likely to speak up than people who are motivated by opposition, and people who don’t want sidewalks in front of their house can be pretty loud. Thus, the agency tends to defer to them.

In a now-deleted Bluesky post, an agency staffer said they asked residents in Bethesda’s Kenwood neighborhood, where thousands of people go to see cherry blossoms each spring, about building sidewalks. MCDOT decided not to after 50 households–a majority of those who replied, but just 20% of the whole neighborhood–were opposed.

Even in neighborhoods where there’s vocal support for pedestrian improvements, MCDOT is slow to act. The agency rejected a Rockville neighborhood’s request for a stop sign near Wood Middle School after a driver hit one child, and only relented after another child was killed by a school bus. Here in East Silver Spring, my neighbors and I are pushing for stop signs at two intersections where drivers hit me and my dog and an 11-year-old boy this year. Bethesda Today recently covered that effort and was told by Michael Paylor, who’s in charge of traffic engineering and operations at MCDOT, that “sometimes it’s the best interest of the county to do nothing.”

Montgomery County boasts that it’s one of the first places in the United States to adopt Vision Zero, pledging to end all traffic fatalities by 2030. But between January and October 2025, 358 pedestrians were involved in a crash, 12 of whom died. That’s basically the same as four years ago. Giving people more safe places to walk by building more sidewalks, especially near a transit station that many people will walk to, would go a long way in reversing this trend. If this county were serious about safety, it wouldn’t use “stranger danger” as a reason not to build sidewalks.

The Department of Transportation is overseen by County Executive Marc Elrich, who is term-limited and is instead running for County Council. Next year’s Democratic primary on June 23, 2026 will likely decide his successor, who will be responsible for the agency. We’ll be endorsing in the executive and county council races, and asking the candidates if they support building more sidewalks–or making more excuses.

Top image: A sidewalk. Image by the author.

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I’ve been meaning to write about this interesting essay by Michael Green, about how the poverty line could be pegged at $140,000 per year, if we’re talking about what he calls “the cost of participation” in contemporary American life.

Some of the claims in the essay are hyperbolic, and it was largely derided by the green eyeshade battalions of the dismal science, but it nevertheless struck a nerve for good reasons. For example:

Critics will immediately argue that I’m cherry-picking expensive cities. They will say $136,500 is a number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not “Real America.”

So let’s look at “Real America.”

The model above allocates $23,267 per year for housing. That breaks down to $1,938 per month. This is the number that serious economists use to tell you that you’re doing fine.

In my last piece, Are You An American?, I analyzed a modest “starter home” which turned out to be in Caldwell, New Jersey—the kind of place a Teamster could afford in 1955. I went to Zillow to see what it costs to live in that same town if you don’t have a down payment and are forced to rent.

There are exactly seven 2-bedroom+ units available in the entire town. The cheapest one rents for $2,715 per month.

That’s a $777 monthly gap between the model and reality. That’s $9,300 a year in post-tax money. To cover that gap, you need to earn an additional $12,000 to $13,000 in gross salary.

So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative. I’m using optimistic, national-average housing assumptions. If we plug in the actual cost of living in the zip codes where the jobs are—where rent is $2,700, not $1,900—the threshold pushes past $160,000.

The market isn’t just expensive; it’s broken. Seven units available in a town of thousands? That isn’t a market. That’s a shortage masquerading as an auction.

And that $2,715 rent check buys you zero equity. In the 1950s, the monthly housing cost was a forced savings account that built generational wealth. Today, it’s a subscription fee for a roof. You are paying a premium to stand still.

Green emphasizes that for couples with young children, childcare costs are a devastating addition to household budget. For many people in their 20s and 30s, this means “choosing” to be childless, because it feels fundamentally unaffordable. This of course helps explain why the birth rate has been cratering for decades — it’s now quite literally half of what it was when I was born at the peak of the baby boom. And the birth rate in the US is still a lot higher than in much of the developed world, The worst situation, not surprisingly, is in countries that still have strongly patriarchal traditional cultures, i.e., women are expected to do all childcare and other domestic labor, but where women also now have a certain degree of economic and social freedom. In places like South Korea, the consequence of that combination is a total fertility rate of less than one — a completely unprecedented situation in all of recorded history, and no doubt in the entire history of the species, or otherwise we wouldn’t be here to blog about it.

The Times had a piece today (gift link) that used Green’s essay as a jumping off point. The basic economic problems here are well known: the cost of housing, of childcare, of health care, and of higher education. These things are all central to any concept of a middle class lifestyle. Of course another big factor in all this are changing standards of what’s considered an acceptable version of such a lifestyle:

Mr. Thurston, from Philadelphia, said he wanted children. But right now, he and his partner must climb three floors to their rental apartment. Their car is a two-door “death trap.”

His salary, about $90,000, would need to cover student loans and child care. He also wants to live in a good school district and pay for extras, like music lessons and sports leagues.

“I know you don’t need those things,” he said, “but as a parent, my job is to set my child up for success.”

Even for those who own a home, the thought of children can be daunting. Stephen Vincent, 30, and his partner, Brittany Robenault, a lab technician, first went to community college to save money. Then, he said, they “ate beans and rice” for several years to save for a down payment.

Now an analyst for a chemical company with a household income of about $150,000, he likes his lifestyle in Hamburg, Pa., and wants to keep it.

“We live in the richest country in the history of human civilization, so why can’t I eat out twice a week and have kids?” he said.

To the skeptics who say these trade-offs are simply lifestyle choices, there was a rejoinder: Hey, you try it.

“It’s very easy from a place of wealth and privilege to say, ‘You should be happy with something more modest,’” Mr. Thurston said.

But, he said, “it would kind of suck to live that way.”

Alicia Wrigley is grappling with the trade-offs. Ms. Wrigley and her husband, Richard Gailey, both musicians and teachers, own a two-bedroom bungalow in Salt Lake City and feel lucky to have it — they say they could not afford it now. But juggling in-home music lessons with their 2-year-old’s needs can feel like a squeeze. They want another child, but wonder how it would all work.

“I know it’s possible,” she said, looking through the window at her next-door neighbor’s house, which is exactly the same size.

That neighbor raised six children there in the 1970s. One way mothers then would cope, Ms. Wrigley said, was to “turn their kids out all day, and they’d just run around the neighborhood.”

She said she would not do that today, not least because someone might report her.

“The world,” she said, “is fundamentally different now.”

This is reminds me obliquely of a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s study of life in a mining town in northern England in the mid-1930s. Orwell is interviewing a family of eight living in a four-room house (I would guess this would probably be in the neighborhood of 800 square feet or so), and he asks them when they became aware of the housing crisis. “When we were told of it,” is the reply.

. . . commenter Felix D’s question about this passage led me to look it up, and it’s somewhat different than I recalled, but the gist is the same:

Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first
became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it',
meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took
almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was
a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it,
and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one
of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a
couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue
when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people. And
when his wife was sick with the illness that killed her, she still had
to make that two hundred yards' journey to the lavatory. This, he said,
was the kind of thing people would put up with 'till they were told
about it'.

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[Not needing to drive shouldn’t be a luxury.]

Nearly all Americans drive, but it’s by necessity, not necessarily by choice.

Today, cars are an inescapable fact of life in most of the country. Almost 70% of U.S. workers drove alone to work in 2022, compared to 2.9% who biked or walked and 3.1% who took public transportation.

This reality doesn’t necessarily reflect Americans’ preferences, however. Many people in the U.S. want to live in walkable areas, but only a small fraction of the nation’s developed land fits this description. Around 90% of all housing in the nation’s largest metro areas is located in car-centric suburbs. The low supply of real estate in walkable neighborhoods drives prices upward, making it unaffordable for most people.

Culdesac Tempe is a 17-acre car-free residential development that could be a model for walkable neighborhoods in America.

Link: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/11/this-car-free-neighborhood-was-designed-to-revolutionize-american-cities/

Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post fired longtime columnist Karen Attiah over the weekend. Per Attiah:

 The Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.

Here’s the only reference Attiah made to St. Charlie of the Internet:

Here again we see the right wing definition of defamation in full force, which consists of quoting a person word for word without further comment.

Attiah did have some comments regarding white on white violence, but it’s long past time that we overcome the, if I may coin a phrase, “political correctness” that makes it impossible to discuss the pathologies of the white community without getting cancelled. Where are the fathers? Oh right: filling their houses with high-powered weapons, which they teach their soon to be completely mentally unbalanced by the most toxic swamps of the internet sons to use from a tender age.

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Dropping some political science on Brett Kavanaugh [free link]:

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh says good judges are like good referees.

“Am I calling it the same way for labor and management, for the business and the environmental interests, for the Republican and the Democrat?” he asked at a judicial conference over the summer. “If you can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘I would do the exact same thing if the parties were flipped,’ then you’re not being a good judge, just like you wouldn’t be a good referee if you were favoring one team over the other.”

A look at the court’s record in emergency rulings does not appear to reflect Justice Kavanaugh’s goal.

This is apparent in the overall numbers, with the Trump administration prevailing much more often than its predecessor had — 84 percent of the time, compared with 53 percent for the Biden administration. That is perhaps unsurprising, given that the court is dominated by six Republican appointees.

Drilling down to individual justices’ votes rounds out the group portrait.

In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48-percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump.

In all seriousness, however unsurprising this data will be to knowledgeable observers of the court who aren’t paid or pro bono liars, it’s still good to see stories like this when pieties about the nonpartisan legitimacy of the Supreme Court remain a staple of mainstream coverage. More widespread recognition of what the Court is does not solve the problem, but it’s a prerequisite for addressing it when it’s politically viable.

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Susan Collins sucks. And yet it does not look like Democrats have any plan to defeat her except relying on Janet Mills to run–who is a mere 77 years old, making her the perfect candidate for the Democratic Gerontocracy. A bit young perhaps. After all, she’s only 5 years older than Collins. And Mills may well not run. There are cases where this might make sense–Ohio with Sherrod Brown is an obvious example. No one could win in Ohio right now and Brown might not be able to either. But while Maine voters are obviously dupes for Collins’ bullshit, Democrats can quite clearly win a statewide race there. And yet the Democratic establishment hope is someone nearly the average age of death for American.

There is however a grassroots candidate, Graham Platner, who is a 40 year old veteran. I know nothing about him from a policy perspective, but boy goddamn howdy do Democrats need to take this to heart:

“We need to stop using the exact same playbook that keeps losing over and over and over again,” said Mr. Platner, a political unknown who serves as the local harbor master in the tiny town of Sullivan. “Running establishment candidates who are chosen or supported by the powers that be in D.C. — in Maine specifically — has been a total failure, certainly in attempts to unseat Susan Collins. It is time for us to try something new.”

I mean, if Mills ran, maybe that would be better, I don’t know, but a 77 year old is not exactly the clear message of change–a sentiment which has little to do with policy–that clearly defines the American electorate today. I’d vote for Platner based strictly on him not being 77 years old.

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