Can This Car-Free Neighborhood Clone Itself? - Bloomberg | Japan needs more sperm donors - The Economist | Opinion | Why Do We Build Houses in the Same Way That We Did 125 Years Ago? | Opinion | Nature Is Profoundly Broken. Do We Love Anyone Beyond Ourselves Enough to Listen?

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Can This Car-Free Neighborhood Clone Itself? - Bloomberg

In downtown Mesa, Arizona, the 27-acre patch of land known as Site 17 has sat empty for decades, a redevelopment mystery that has yet to be unraveled. The local Mesa Tribune compared it to Nevada’s Area 51, noting that “developers have hovered, coming close to landing — then, as mysteriously as UFOs, vanished.” Past plans have included turning the city-owned dirt lot, once home to 63 single-family homes, into a health-care facility and resort/water park.

But in October, the city took a big step towards solving this real estate riddle, by selecting a proposal to build a housing project from the startup Culdesac, famous for its car-free neighborhood taking shape in nearby Tempe. Over the coming weeks, the city and Culdesac will negotiate a memorandum of understanding, which is expected to be presented to the council for a final vote early in 2024. Mesa officials are banking on the Site 17 project to help catalyze a downtown revival.

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Japan needs more sperm donors - The Economist

AFTER THEY married in 2015, Shimuzu Nao and Ayaka dreamed of having children. But this was not straightforward. The couple are both biologically female; Nao, as the former is known, is a transgender man. While exploring possible workarounds, including adoption, they came across a man on social media who was willing to provide them with sperm. They proceeded to meet up with him several times at an internet café in Tokyo. Each time, he handed them a plastic syringe containing his semen, which Ayaka injected into herself. After the seventh meeting, she became pregnant. “Having children has been one of the most enriching experiences for us,” says Nao, now a father of two.

Assisted reproduction is popular in Japan. About 8% of babies were conceived through in vitro fertilisation in 2021, compared with 2% in America. But sperm and egg banks are unregulated in the country, and there are few of them. Laws pertaining to IVF only cover straight married couples (gay marriage is illegal in Japan). That is prompting hundreds, including single women and gay couples, every year to seek donors and surrogate mothers in other countries, including America, where such practices are legal. Others have, like the Shimizus, resorted to the less costly option of seeking sperm donors online in Japan. But this underground practice comes with certain risks, and there is a growing demand for regulation.

While egg donations are almost unheard of in Japan, artificial insemination using donor sperm (AID) has long been available in a few hospitals and more widely in the shadows. In 1948 Keio University Hospital in Tokyo started performing the technique, using sperm from medical students. Some 20,000 Japanese children are estimated to have since been born through AID. They are often not informed of their origins and have no right to get information about their biological fathers. But calls to facilitate disclosure grew during the 2010s, leading to a fall in sperm donors.

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Opinion | Why Do We Build Houses in the Same Way That We Did 125 Years Ago? -

A crane raising a Fading West housing module for placement in a development in Colorado.Credit...

In 1969, the federal government announced that it would hand out millions of dollars in subsidies to companies willing to try something new: build houses in factories.

Then as now, America was in the throes of a housing crisis. There weren’t enough places to live. Mass production provided Americans with abundant and cheap food, clothing, cars and other staples of material life. But houses were still hammered together by hand, on site. The federal initiative, Operation Breakthrough, aimed to drive up the production of housing — and to drive down the cost — by dragging the building industry into the 20th century.

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Opinion | Nature Is Profoundly Broken. Do We Love Anyone Beyond Ourselves Enough to Listen? -

Humans are a remarkably ambitious species. We came to the edge of lands we could safely chart and built ships that would carry us to the unknown. When travel by water and land no longer suited us, we took to the skies. After journeying among the clouds could not sate our spirit, we turned our hearts to the stars.

But whatever it is about us that makes it so easy for us to dream, to build, to act, makes it hard for us to comprehend the consequences of those acts. We edit and shift our perception to put things in the best light.

It was not simply a desire to discover that took us to the sea and the air. It was also greed, an unsatiable thirst to own and conquer. That thirst, the conquest of the continents we found, the comforts we built for ourselves there, left their mark on the people and on nature itself. Just as the oppressed are finding their voice, the effects of climate change have grown louder over the last few decades. But 2023 felt like a shout.

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