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The Future Is Not Now

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Definitions in the world of urbanism are amorphous at best. The word “city” itself is a very good example. We make judgements based on the population, economic output, crime, and numerous other things relative to the boundaries of a given city. These are the numerators, if you will. But these cities range in geographic size from areas of 10 square miles to almost 1,000. They can be as isolated from the next closest city as hundreds of miles, or they may border one or more other cities. In this sense we look at data which has been painstakingly compiled to give us as exact and precise a representation as can be achieved which we then use to compare to other communities whose “denominators” could not be more different making their use in comparison arithmetically pointless.

 I spent a few hours clicking through the Brookings Institute’s metro data and the newest census estimates for 2017 and that led me to wander through Wikipedia’s entries for various communities. I could see patterns developing within and between cities and metropolitan areas. Occasionally a data point would jump out at me: “Columbus has a population which is growing incredibly fast…for Ohio. Wait. It covers 200 square miles? Has it been annexing surrounding communities? It has. To gain access to Columbus’ water and sewer systems you must agree to be incorporated into the municipality.” If you just look at the raw data you’d think it was really bucking a trend; not so much.

The census data was sobering. After years of reading, granted from a self selected coterie of websites, that the trend toward suburbanization was over and that Millennials and Baby Boomers (Hey, that’s me!) were moving back to the cities the “we don’t have a dog in this fight” census numbers were showing a post 2007 crisis move back to even more suburbanization. I can hear the cheerleaders making excuses already: 

“Sure, suburban growth is outpacing urban growth again BUT, it’s no longer outgrowing it at as rapidly growing a rate as it was before!” 

“It’s not fair. Government regulators, bankers, and the developers all have their thumbs on the scale and so we can’t really see what people’s actual preferences are!”

My favorite one is that home values in urban areas are outpacing those in non urban ones. I have no doubt the numbers are correct, but it’s pretty easy to see how ridiculously hyperinflated values in a handful of enormous markets along with an epochal low in home values in urban areas generally makes this data meaningless for places like Springfield. From the very beginning of this blog I’ve made clear that this isn’t about just some generalized “urban living”, it’s about the places which have been struggling for survival for half a century. 

When the larger cities of Boston and New York started to pull out of their tailspin in the 1980’s I was among many who hoped that they were enormous canaries in the coal mine for smaller cities like Springfield. The change in Springfield’s skyline which took place in the 80’s, along with the construction of thousands of units of yuppie housing in the downtown were indicators that the private sector thought that the rebound was imminent. What is apparent in hindsight is that the back to the city movement, however organic in nature, was short circuited by centralization and mergers in the corporate sector. Looking at the four modernist Springfield scaled “skyscrapers” that dominate the horizon, three of which were built by financial entities headquartered in the city, not one of them is the headquarters of a bank or other financial institution today; in fact the City of Springfield does not have anything apart from a credit union headquartered here. Not a single bank headquarters where once there were at least half a dozen. 

The Dow of cities then, is a lot like the actual Dow Jones Average: it tells us a lot about a tiny sliver of the economy but it hides much more than it reveals.

Returning to the Brookings metro data for the northeast, it reveals some interesting things. As the narrative of the report suggests, those metro areas closest to Boston and New York City are starting to see spill over from the over-heated real estate markets of those two giant regions. Regions containing state capitals also have an employment base equivalent to a corporate headquarters or two which can provide stability. A city like Providence has proximity to Boston and a small state bureaucracy on its side, Syracuse has neither. That may very well explain a great deal more about their relative prosperity than the opening of a new coffee shop.

It’s fun to read and listen to enthusiasts who want to claim that this or that decision has made all the difference in creating, or not, prosperity in their urban neighborhoods when much larger processes are at work. A link from one of the aforementioned articles described a shortage of cities. I have no doubt that Manhattan would make do with a few square miles more of Manhattan, and San Francisco could double in size tomorrow fourth dimension-ally and it would not be nearly enough to slake the thirst for living in that city, but there are dozens of architecturally stunning, fine grained, walkable cities, with good bones and tremendous potential just rotting in the rain; because there is no demand for them. I’ve been told a dozen times that my townhouse would be worth a million dollars if it were in Boston. But it’s not in Boston. And that makes all the difference.

If there were really some general passion for urbanity it wouldn’t just be manifesting itself amidst all the usual suspects and expanding more or less only at their peripheries and in a few boutique neighborhoods in rapidly (once again) expanding areas in the Sun Belt and out west. I do believe that the future will be about walkable urbanism and local food production: traditional cities and productive farm land. But the future is not now. Given current realities, people want to live in McMansions in homogenous suburban communities, they want to live in hot climates without snow or even rain, and they want to commute 27 miles to work in an SUV on an 8 lane expressway. And they are going to continue to do so until they can’t. 

The irony, and perhaps even the paradox for me is that my community will suffer as long as the economy at large keeps moving forward at pace, or will prosper only relative to decline overall. Such is the fate of a natural born contrarian. I may not like it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to pretend that it isn’t true.

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Some interesting visuals from the Brookings’ data (Dark Blue is best, Dark Red worst, gray is middling):

Metro Springfield is a slightly more prosperous than average metro, and metro areas, as opposed to smaller, or “micro” regions are generally much more prosperous making this area fairly well to do:

The metro does incredible well in terms of inclusion, being considered number TWO in the country by Brookings’ measurements from 2006-2016:

Growth here is slow, but better than most metros the region:

In terms of population Springfield (at the top) chugs along at a snail’s pace, but unlike similar places like Rochester or Syracuse (highlighted), it does continue to grow:

And these estimates are as of July 1, 2017. Given that Hamden County has taken in more María refugees than any county outside Florida:

I assume that the trend will not only continue, but may quicken slightly.

The 9th (or 10th) Commandment

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I was the Community Liaison for the Armoury-Quadrangle Civic Association and we were engaged in an effort to beautify the neighborhood. I spent a lot of hours picking up trash in parks and on sidewalks and our executive board leveraged some services from the park department and the Business Improvement District to hang baskets of flowers and some newly designed banners. As we presented the idea for the banners to the group one person, that I can’t remember ever seeing before, objected strenuously; How could we justify wasting money in this way when children in the Springfield Public Schools were in need of things like books?! 

Leaving aside the fact that I was a parent representative on the School Centered Decision Making Team at the nearby elementary school and that the children there were not any more in need of books than any other children, the pot of money from which the banners and flowers were to come would not flow to “books for neighborhood kids” if we chose not to use it, but rather it would flow to some other neighborhood, perhaps in some other community, for their neighborhood beautification efforts. The commonwealth spends hundreds of millions on public education. I’m sure every school could use more funding, but I highly doubt the tiny fraction of public funding that accrues to neighborhood beautification in any way impacts school funding.

(At least two of the banners still flying)

Apart from just the “do-gooder-ishness” of the visitor’s commentary there is also a touch of the bias which shows itself, as Noam Chomsky describes it, as requiring a much higher level of morality for the poor than for the affluent: Rich neighborhoods can have hanging baskets of flowers and banners, but for poor neighborhoods it shows a wanton disregard for probity to squander funds on such trivialities! I would take it a step further; the rich can have their own private flower gardens in their own fenced in yards and hang ridiculous banners from their front porches representing whatever their banal obsessions might be, the poor have only the public space and often spend a great deal more time in it. Why not some flowers to beautify their walk to the dollar store and some banners to inform them that they do live in a place with people who have an identity and care about the public realm?

And here we scratch the surface another debate NOT raging at Strong Towns: the foolishness of spending money to attract tourists to older urban neighborhoods. “Stop wasting money on creating amenities for visitors and focus on your residents!” Except, I can’t think of an amenity for a visitor which couldn’t also enhance the life of a resident. When I worked at the Sheraton downtown, an amenity for visitors if ever there was one, that hotel gave me a job that I could walk to with hours that allowed me to go to school in the daytime and work on the evenings and weekends.

Yes, the newer fancy pedestrian enhancements here are designed for visitors to MGM, but my neighbors and I get to use them as well. More shows at Symphony Hall and the civic center will give visitors more entertainment options to choose from…and residents too! Is the problem that the poor shouldn’t go to shows or concerts, or is it a bad thing that people who aren’t poor might decide to move to the neighborhood because there is so much going on? Gentrification! Gentrification! To quote a headline from from the American Conservative (in an article republished at Strong Towns): Rust Belt Cities Need Investment, Not Gentrification Worries.

Halle-frickin-lujah. Can I get an “amen”?!

I’ll take it a step further. I often attend the symphony. I absolutely love it. Ditto the American Hockey League Springfield Thunderbirds. At both venues I guarantee that suburbanites make up the overwhelming majority of attendees. “Boo! Boo! You’re catering to the outsider, the person who just comes into the city to have their little ‘experience’ and then they run home to their white (emphasis on the white) picket fence!” 

Ok. Except, those are the suburbanites who care, at least a little bit, about the city. At least in my experience. Maybe they also hit up a restaurant or a bar in the city when they go to a concert or a game. Maybe they play a little pool at Smith’s Billiards too, or they have dinner at a friend’s house nearby. There is a difference between ignoring your residents’ needs and enhancing your city for visitors. I suppose it’s possible to do both at once, but I have actual experience in an urban neighborhood where, from my perspective, every enhancement for visitors has enhanced the area for residents.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the lifestyle I have chosen is that, were I to magically inherit tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars I would not want to leave my home, but most of my neighbors, if they were to come into a thousand would use it to leave. The irony is that money is not an obstacle to so many of the rich experiences I have here. Just yesterday my wife and I went to the annual flower show at the museums. We choose to be members in order to support the museums in what they do, but any Springfield resident can go to any of the museums for no charge as often as they choose. 

It really is a metaphor for the experience here; so much is accessible here for so little, but the people who perhaps need it most access it the least. Nothing helps one to appreciate what one possesses like seeing someone else experience and appreciate it. I’ve always thought that the only really valuable outcome for the emphasis we’ve placed on getting outsiders to value the assets we have here is that in so doing the people who live here might actually look up and realize the exact same thing for themselves.

This Is Part Two

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You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in my recent essays. I’ve never had much patience for dogma. To me, flip-flopping, or in other words changing strategies when the old ones aren’t working, just makes sense. I’ve spent much of the last 40 years not just thinking about, but working towards improving what has become “my neighborhood”. I’ve planted trees, painted benches, picked up trash, participated in workshops, written letters, prepared reports, met with department heads, and today I serve on two city boards.

I know that my writing and the writings of others I’ve encouraged people to read about place making and building for people have influenced thought and made a difference in designs that were eventually executed, but I’ve also seen that local developers are the ones who hold the real power when it comes to small to medium sized developments. The problem with that is that the money over the last half a century has been made mostly in horizontal development, or what is commonly called “sprawl”, and the people who have become “successful local developers” see absolutely nothing wrong with what has become standard auto oriented design. For that reason, when called upon to do anything, even in a traditional downtown and despite the urging of planners and economic development officials, they demand excessive surface parking and pedestrian killing setbacks.

It is for that reason that the barrage of writing, especially at Strongtowns, of the one size fits all mentality that anything done at scale must be bad when my actual lived experience in this one medium sized rust belt (typologically if not geographically) city is that there are precisely two forms of economic development that preserve a walkable environment: historic rehabilitation, and mega-projects. Everything else turns Main Street into a stroad. Would that it were not so, but I have documented that fact here. Your community is much more enlightened and you have local developers building combination retail/commercial/residential structures built to the sidewalk with little to no surface parking? Bully for you, but I’m trying to preserve MY community under the terms of today’s power reality and I have a feeling that the same thing is true of a number of places.

You know what? The enormous MGM resort casino does pose a risk to what’s left of the fine grained urbanism of the downtown and the South End of Springfield, but that risk is really just that the decay and decline will proceed at an even faster pace than it has in the preceding 5 decades. On the other hand, how many orthodox incrementalists really would cast aside not only a project which in and of itself contained movie theaters, retail shops, and recreational activities long sought after in the core city, but which has also led to tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure maintenance both below ground and above including the complete restoration or rebuilding of three downtown parks?

And the repair of miles of downtown sidewalks including the addition, for the first time ever, of bicycle infrastructure?

And led to the further enhancement of yet another historic plaza and the rehabilitation of the grounds of a National Historic Site?

Of course, if you live in an already thriving urban oasis I can understand why you wouldn’t want all this in your back yard; turns out you’re a NIMBY after all! But if you live in any one of dozens of moldering traditional formerly industrial cities I bet you’d gladly embrace the whole idea; in private at least, all the while chiding the cheerleaders of the project as sell-outs! Honestly, Utica wouldn’t want this? Rochester wouldn’t take this deal if it were offered? Syracuse?

“All things in moderation”. Including moderation I’d say. Sometimes a little excess is what’s needed. In the long term the realities of energy, the environment, and demographics will determine if Springfield declines, thrives, or even survives. In the long term we’re all dead as well. 8 months from now my wife and I will be able to walk to a movie theater on a sidewalk that’s no longer crumbling into dust, or take LuLu ice skating on a brand new outdoor rink. A year from now the plaza connecting the Quadrangle museums to Main Street will be reopened for the first time in years with a new design that won’t promote public urination. Will this be the spark that ignites the fire of a long dormant city or will it be just another flash in the pan? I can’t say that I don’t care, but if the last 40 years have taught me anything it is that there are no guarantees. 
Sometimes you just have to say: “What the hell!”