Post COVID the service suffered really bad in late 2021/22. Went for the outdoor dining a few times last year, and things like not getting the coffee I ordered until the meal was already over or 1 of 4 entrees coming out 15 minutes later made it feel bad. The food also didn't seem as tight, but that may have been nostalgia. My partner & I decided it was basic enough new american food, often an hour wait, and the bad service killed it to the 'no longer consider' list.

Downtown could still use a better basic new american take your parents to brunch place.

They've run a few places, hopefuly they can nail the post-COVID price/service/staff thing down at their next place.

Sad to see this; I always enjoyed their food and the vibe was nice. Their brunch is great.

Thirded

"Trickle-down housing" is a term invented solely to attack the YIMBY case and conflates two unrelated things: "supply-side economics"--which is itself misnamed, because it is actually sending money to meet the demand-side of rich people, which was derided by its opponents as "trickle down"; as in, the money eventually trickles down to everyone else-and "filtering", which is the general observation that older housing becomes less valuable and thus more affordable, all else being equal.

Filtering is now derided by YIMBY opponents as "trickle-down housing", because the YIMBY point is that new "luxury" (a marketing term with no descriptive value other than "market-rate") housing will make older housing more affordable than it would be if that new luxury housing was not built. But on the scale of a city, this only can happen if the density of the new development is greater than before.

In the context of this original article, California did a great job in destroying cities with Proposition 13 which allowed homeowners and their inheritors to become incredibly rich and pay no taxes for massively increased land values, freeing them up to fight anything they didn't like forever with no negative consequences, while renters got screwed. They had to be screwed, not just because of a lack of rent control, but also because any new building of any sort has to pay fair taxes.

In fact the "fair taxes" aren't fair, because buildings reset to market rate taxation, because they are newly built or because they are substantially modified, have to pay for all the undertaxed old buildings. This fact doesn't directly account for high overall housing costs- zoning, punitive "impact fees" on new development, and other policies do that- but it does mean that any new unsubsidized development has to charge high rents to pencil out.

So the "greedy landlords"--and they are greedy, it's capitalism-- are subsidizing the righteous homeowners who stood against overdevelopment. Well, at least the ones who own newer buildings do.

It is now too late and California is hemorrhaging population thanks to their intransigence, so California has passed YIMBY laws to fix the problem over their objections. Reality has shown one of the premises of this article--the idea that developers want to build in low income neighborhoods because land is cheap--to be false. Quite the opposite: developers have filed builders remedy complaints in Huntington Beach, Santa Monica, and other relatively wealthy towns. This is what YIMBYs thought would happen, because we understand that land is a residual and paying more, for more expensive land, one time, is only a small part of a development that can command higher rents.

All the other stuff about governments needing to "build affordable housing" or evil corporate landlords charging high rents is a smokescreen. These corporate landlords do not want more housing to be built and they say so in their corporate disclosures! It is a material risk to their bottom lines. Avalon Bay, Kushner, etc do not want competition. As for government needing to build affordable housing, who pays for that? The response is usually, "the rich". And how are they to be taxed exactly? The city can only tax them if they live here. And where are they going to live? Either they live in new "luxury" apartments, or they live in existing mansions, or they buy a crappy old house and demolish it, often demolishing multifamily housing for one big house, which is what they're definitely going to do if you make building new "luxury" buildings impossible.

Yeah it’s a bit removed from the pedestrian plaza

I have strong factual disagreements with much of what you wrote, but I think the bottom line is that you cannot reasonably expect people from other racial groups to support programs that discriminate against them based on their skin color. If you ever want to work toward wealth equality for all Americans, regardless of skin color, let me know.

I’ve never had a bad experience. To each their own.

I always deemed it a peculiar location for a restaurant. Before Latham house that space was essentially a bodega for the occupants of the building and there was a waterfall in the lobby.

Bro porta is trash wtf

I didnt like the food at dull boy. Was pretty salty

What is YIMBYism? I've never heard that term before? "Yes in my back yard"?

I'm never happy to see a place close, but also never that surprised. Running a restaurant is exhausting, and if you're not absolutely killing it it can be hard to justify the amount of time and effort needed.

Not really huge inroads tbh.

Smart like who? Reactionaries are always reactionaries.

Dunno if covid fucked em, but they had great food before then. Took my dad there for his birthday a couple times and we both really enjoyed it.

Seconded.

Welp, as long as you're sure, I guess I have no choice but to accept the terrible way we've been doing things thus far.

Sigh. The constant negativity is just so dull. It's so easy to say why something won't work - anyone can find a bunch of reason why something won't work. If we put half as much energy into figuring out solutions, maybe we wouln't be in this mess. We certainly can't progress as a society with that attitude!

Oh give me a break. It would be fairly easy (in the context of the US anyway) to address some very recent past wrongs that account for a significant portion of the existing wealth inequities across racial lines. I’m talking about the GI Bill and other post-WWII policies that helped build the white middle class - at the exclusion of Black Americans (including Black war veterans…I mean, just vile behavior). Similar legislation is possible. What’s lacking is the will power because, you guessed it, this is still a very white supremacist society and a Black underclass is needed for its survival. So keep that we are the world BS to yourself. We aren’t buying it.

I'm glad theyre closing. Their menu made no sense and the food was terrible

I may be in the minority here, but I never really understood the hype about Latham House, everything was just so basic and bland on the few times I gave them a try. There are already plenty of restaurants in downtown that have similar menus with better execution, surprised they lasted as long as they did.

Past wrongs are past and difficult if not impossible to address. Inequality of wealth is a current wrong that could be addressed by redistribution today, in a manner that helps every poor person, but the main barrier to that solution is racial chauvinism like yours that privileges certain poor people over others based on the color of their skin and creates endless conflict that keeps the oligarchy in charge.

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We don’t live in a new society. We live in the same old prejudice society where white people own the majority of wealth as a direct result of past wrongs. The only way forward is to address those wrongs, not just play nice at an individual level.

Not that close to grove but I ate at Franklin Social last night and it was pretty good