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Yes and No

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I asked myself last week, if I had never seen a single newspaper article, magazine photo essay, or television news report on climate change would I, at some gut level, be aware of any particular changes in weather patterns here in southern New England. The answer was no. I recall the snowless period from the late 80’s into the early 90’s, before I was aware of global warming, and I thought about how different things seemed to be for a while; but then that flipped and we started to get enormous amounts of snow winter after winter. Whether in my imagination or not, I seem to remember more 100 degree days as a child and we almost never see that now.

My connections to nature have in my adulthood been, at times, limited, and in my youth they were not analytical. In the early 2000’s I did volunteer work planting trees all over the city, which is very connected to and limited by the dates when the ground freezes or thaws, and when trees leaf out, but that only lasted for a handful of years; not enough to create a baseline from which the norm could shift. Now my wife and I garden as we have for the last 9 years or so; in all honesty we are still so much on our own learning curve regarding planting times and harvesting that detecting anything larger or broader isn’t likely.

With all this, of course, we have read books and essays on the topic, we’ve seen news reports, and watched documentary films and we are concerned. With that in mind we do what most people do with a belief system: we remember the “hits” and forget the “misses” with regard to cold and heat, rain and sun, gorgeous days and natural disasters. When we talk about our many frugalities, mostly in the ways they save us money, we sometimes talk about the way they reduce energy use or our carbon footprint, again remembering our hits; “We don’t have a second car!” And overlooking our misses: “We do have a first one.”

I’ve been reading Giles Slade’s American Exodus and rereading John Michael Greer’s Dark Age America, and both paint a picture of climate migration in the future which stands in stark contrast to what we are actually seeing in terms of the behaviors of the well-to-do and the middle class. Their predictions do, however, correspond to what we see in one particular arena: the movement northward of increasing numbers of families from Central America and Mexico. What jumps out at me about that contrast is that one generalized prediction about climate mobility is that it will be the poor who are and will be stuck in place as climate disruption makes life increasingly difficult in certain locations as the wealthy, with great ease, abandon the less livable places for those with brighter prospects.

As it relates to Springfield, a city in a region on the border between those areas expected to see negligible or even net positive economic impacts from climate change, our middle class and wealthy populations are moving, if in small numbers, towards areas predicted to experience the greatest climate disruptions: Texas, Arizona, Florida and other low lying southeast coastal states, while we experience in-migration of people from Puerto Rico whom many would classify as climate refugees. 

In April the Census Bureau is scheduled to announce its metropolitan and micropolitan population estimates for July 1st, 2018; the first of those estimates broken down by metro region since Hurricane Maria. In the state by state estimates Massachusetts showed the greatest population increase of any northeastern state, which was explained by most as being the result of Boston’s red hot economic growth. That is probably the cause of most of Massachusetts’ significant growth, but Hampden County was second only to the Bronx for María refugees in the United States outside Florida, and Springfield took in as many as 3x the number of school age students as any other district in the commonwealth.

The poor and refugees obviously have fewer resources than the well off, but they also may live in much less isolation from the natural world than I do. It’s fairly easy not just to adjust to, but also to ignore the impacts of weather on day to day life when you have a car, a pool, an air conditioned school, a climate controlled home. Some people I greatly respect, Andrés Duany for example, believe that within just a few years the impacts of climate change will be so obvious as to be undeniable. Others, the aforementioned John Michael Greer is one, believe that denial will actually increase as the effects become more ubiquitous. I wouldn’t claim to know, but I wonder if our wealth and technology continue to give us greater opportunity to avoid reality if this pattern of “getting while the getting is good” won’t persist on the part of the poor while the comfortable continue to ignore what is happening to their surroundings.


I find it interesting to watch. Things stay the same until they don’t I guess, and people will respond to a crisis when the crisis is upon them, but not before. I’m not implying I’d be any different. I don’t want to be in Florida or Texas, I don’t want to move to a city on the coast even. My house is 70 miles inland and 100′ above sea level, but if it were 7 miles and 10′ I wouldn’t be running for the hills either, I know that. What I wonder is if I’ll live long enough to see that moment when I ask myself the same question with which I started this essay, but the answer will be the opposite, and what will that look like, and how will we respond?

Hey Sofia

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One of the problems with passenger rail is that for many people what they see in their mind’s eye when it is referenced is a steam locomotive from a movie out of the Old West; a technology of a time before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease, before the light bulb, and before the automobile. For many the only acceptable new investment in rail has to be in much more advanced systems involving mag-lev, or some other “bullet train” technology. 

I’ve ridden on Spain’s Talgo, a diesel train that can go over 150 mph, and so I know that none of that is required to travel much faster than one can legally and safely travel in a car, and without the hassles involved in air travel. Improving passenger service on existing lines to go faster along most of the routes between cities requires a certain, fairly humble, level of investment. Creating an entirely new system on a continental scale at speeds in excess of 200 mph would require hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars.

In the early 2000’s Jim Kunstler made this point in his own inimitable way: Yes, we have a passenger rail system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of and we have to get to work improving it, but we have to forget about high speed rail, it ain’t gonna happen, we’ve missed the window when our nation’s finances could accommodate it.

Comparing California High Speed Rail and the Northern New England Intercity Rail Initiative makes the case perfectly. Around 2008 voters in California approved a ballot to move forward on a plan to connect all of the state’s major cities with a brand new ultra modern high speed rail system. 


It would cost $40, ummm $64, errr $77 billion dollars, connect to 24 mostly brand new stations, travel at a speed of 220 miles per hour, and incorporate all of the state’s population centers on brand new rights of way.

The Northern New England Intercity Rail Initiative seeks to improve access along mostly already existing rail corridors by making incremental improvements which will allow the Diesel engine locomotives already traveling on those routes to reach maximum speed more often.

It piggy backs on 4 already completed improvements:

*CT Rail Hartford Line service and line improvements

*The opening of Springfield’s Union Station

*Massachusetts acquisition of and improvements to the north/south corridor stretching from the Connecticut line to the south, north to the Vermont border.

*The new Montreal Central Station Customs and Immigration Facility

And two projects in varying stages planning:

*The “Vermonter” extension to Montreal

*The expansion of Boston’s South Station.

Massachusetts is already committed to a pilot project adding two round trips per day from Springfield to Greenfield for the next two years starting in June, and has begun a two year study of creating commuter service between Springfield and Boston. Both of these initiatives inch closer to full implementation of the NNEIRI.


These improvements would better connect Montreal, Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and Burlington and would provide an alternative “inland route” for service between Boston and New York City. The cost for a complete build out, which includes hundreds of millions already spent on the aforementioned improvements, comes to about $1 billion.

77:1

It’s not an apples to apples comparison. Actually, that’s the point. The economic capacity and populations aren’t so different, though Los Angeles is a primary focus of the “High Speed” plan, whereas New York City is tangential to the New England program. With that as a given the size and significance of the other cities in each are comparable though not identical, but almost everything else is strikingly distinct.

*500 miles from north to south compared to just over 300.

*Brand new rights of way versus, at most, some new “double tracking”.

*New stations and completely new service to dozens of cities versus possibly reopening one station closed less than 10 years ago.

*Building from scratch the newest and best technology or tweaking current rail-lines and rolling stock to maximize speeds.

*220 mph Max speeds along the entire system or occasionally hitting 120 when circumstances allow.

The most significant difference at this point seems to be the fact that one of these plans is well on its way to full implementation a decade or more ahead of schedule and without anyone ever really “deciding” to do so; the plan was presented but all of the separate pieces that I outlined above have been or are being done for other much less grandiose reasons: The Hartford Line exists to bring the Connecticut capital closer economically to New York; the state of Vermont sees a rail link to Montreal as vital for Burlington; and Massachusetts wants to spread Boston’s prosperity westward to relieve housing and employment pressures around the economic engine of the Bay State. 

On the other side of the country the California HSR program is being hotly debated even as only the middle section appears to be getting built. People debate whether or not Governor Newsom has given up on the plan, whether or not $3.5 billion in funding will need to be returned to Washington, and whether of not the new intermodal transportation facility in San Francisco can be salvaged. 

Fuggedaboutit? I have no opinion on what California should do going forward, I think I’d need to know a lot more than I do about the state and its state of affairs. On this side of the continent we’re happy to be on the verge of rubbing the nose of those snotty Bulgarians in the grandeur of our transportation excellence. Next up, Romania!

We ride on the INSIDE of our planes.

But you are in that chair

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Distinguishing between the objective and the subjective is beyond the capacity of most people it seems. I’m not talking about the rabbit hole of philosophical discussions, whatever their value, in which we end up at cogito ergo sum and everything else must be doubted, but rather distinguishing between what we want to be true and what is true. 

I finally read a piece at CityLab this week which actually corresponded to my lived experience and yet does not bode well for many of my hopes and dreams. It spoke of the continuing trend of not just suburbanization, but the increasing relative economic strength of suburbs to urban areas. I don’t want this to be the case. There was part of me that so wanted the narrative of young people and retirees moving back to the city in more than just the metros which constitute “the usual suspects” to be the new reality, but it never connected with what I actually witness in the news feeds of my former students, or what I see in the neighborhood that surrounds me.

People prefer big houses on big lots with big SUVs surrounded by anything but another house like their house or any nearby place to engage with strangers. They like the 7 mile drive to get milk and the 37 minute commute to work and only an enforceable economic reality will change those behaviors. 

What do I mean by an enforceable economic reality? I mean a circumstance where every option to push off the payment of the actual cost of their lifestyle is gone and the inability to pay in the here and now for the true cost of said lifestyle results in its revocation. Read this essay I found on ZeroHedge this week and let it soak in. Yes, instead of basing their lifestyle on their real economic circumstances what many people do is choose a lifestyle and then figure out a way, using creative financing, to live that life. 

But they are doing it. And have been doing it. Successfully. Sometimes for decades and decades.

That means that, as long as people can push out their day of reckoning to its conceptual horizon and beyond, they are the ones living in reality and I’m the one trapped in a fantasy. They’ve been on their luxury vacations, lived in their McMansions, and driven their Escalades; and some of them have died more or less of old age doing so. As I have written many times, I enjoy my, as it turns out, fantasy world of frugality and savings; buying things with cash, vacationing with money I’ve saved, installing insulation and low flow toilets to live more cheaply, growing food in my garden to eat a bit more humbly; but it’s fanciful to to think that I will ever be joined in this endeavor by the society at large unless they are obligated to do so.

The lifestyle I enjoy; urban, walkable, active, a bit loud and heterogeneous, is not what most people want, and they’re not coming to it unless they are brought to it kicking and screaming and, truth be told, I don’t want that. I don’t want that because I know that it will also mean that the aspects of fantastical reality which I enjoy today will also be gone: The overly generous compensation which I receive for my public sector employment; the ridiculous pension I’ve been promised (given average life expectancy which may be part of this ersatz reality) for decades of non-productivity; and perhaps ultimately, cheap, and abundant energy available for use at my whim.

In a corollary to the idea that “markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”, today’s reality can remain in effect for longer than I might remain alive. Even if I do manage to outlive today’s reality I know that its end will entail the exhaustion of most of the best resources, resources that won’t be there to infill and build to full efficiency the urban corridor in which I live. The end product will be lesser than if it had been done under today’s fantasmagorical reality, but that is how it will be done if it is ever done.

In my deluded state it appears that the migration of people on the local, regional, and continental scale is toward places and lifestyles which are destined for catastrophe. That behavior is irrational, and insane; like not having the money to do things but doing them anyway. I have to accept that the lifestyle I enjoy is for most people for whatever reason, the thing which above all else must be avoided; and so it will be avoided.

In truth that seems to leave me in a sort of stasis. To the degree this reality holds my neighborhood will continue to struggle, taking what crumbs it can recover from the festival of hypertrophic growth of the society at large to stave off decline as it has for nearly 100 years. Conversely the collapse of the current paradigm will see its material deconstructed and repurposed as best it can to increase the carrying capacity of this place which may function in an altered reality where decisions have consequences.

Our Marsupials

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This post is an extended response to my friend’s post at Granola Shotgun.

We have two areas of the city which fit the description of Marsupial Urbanism. Baystate Medical is an enormous regional healthcare provider and its main campus and the repurposed industrial buildings which make up its satellite campus both sit a block away from Springfield’s North End. Mass Mutual Life Insurance and American International College sit on the State Street corridor which also is the heart of the largest Black neighborhood in Massachusetts west of Boston; Mason Square.

Main Street in the North End recently got a facelift from brand new sidewalks and signage, to bike lanes and park improvements. I had a long conversation with an owner of a local retail establishment and he says business is up a full 20%. He says that the improvements make the street look safer and that he sees lots of new people coming in. Three national retailers have moved in with new construction on previously vacant lots in the last year as well; They insisted on having off street parking but at least the buildings are built to the sidewalk with their actual entrances on the Main Street frontage. A handful of apartment building were restored on the strip as well, all of them to historic preservation standards. There is one remaining shell of an apartment building along the route. It’s an attractive building, here’s hoping it gets some TLC soon as well.

Some images from Google maps of the new retailers, some improved façades, and a before and after of an older apartment building:

Before:

After:


Mason Square has seen the city build an elementary school, a Head Start, and a fire station as well as engaging in a battle with a local non-profit to restore the neighborhood library. One of the city’s best developer is just starting a re-do of an apartment complex in the old Indian Motocycle building as well as the conversion of the old firehouse into apartments. A.I.C. took an old parking lot and built a brand new facility across State Street from its main campus and the city and A.I.C. together have done a great job of encouraging façade improvements along this stretch of State Street as has Mass Mutual. 

On the down side, one other private developer completely restored a beautiful mixed use brick building and opened a barbecue place on the ground floor, they tried to get A.I.C. to encourage students to eat there by including it in the meal packages provided but the college didn’t want to encourage the students to venture off campus and it closed. Along with that the Indian Motocycle developer is taking down two fantastically functional buildings just outside its footprint to make the parking more accessible. These two:

None of these improvements seem to involve any idea of gentrifying either neighborhood, for good or for ill. Depending on your level of skepticism it’s clear they’re both about some combination of making their respective areas better places for the current residents to live OR to make them less disagreeable to people driving through on their way to the major institutions on their periphery. Even if it is more about the latter than the former they do seem to be working out for everyone involved.

Smoke Gets in my Eyes

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Almost 15 years ago I found myself at a city council meeting of some sort and spoke in favor of a plan to turn a vacant building into a boutique hotel, but against the idea of tearing down some adjacent buildings to provide parking and “provide a better view”. The proposal was being made by one of the city’s most prominent residents and business owners. I thanked him for his commitment to the city but went on to state emphatically that his proposal demonstrated his utter cluelessness regarding what it was that might attract people to a boutique hotel in an urban environment. He was not accustomed to having anyone gainsay anything he said, it was clear from the look on his face. 

I doubled down on my invective. While I knew that it would be impossible to convince this businessman of the ridiculousness of surrounding an historic downtown hotel with a moat of parking I knew that I might shake a city council member or two into looking into the idea if my vituperative verbosity was sufficiently vivid. Within a few weeks the local businessman was dead; I’m fairly sure my verbal tirade was only partly to blame. (Make sure to read the next to last paragraph of the New York Times obit)

I remembered at the time a similar speech I had given at a Historical Commission meeting in which the head of the Museums Association was seeking support for razing an apartment building adjoining his property; people in the building would hang out laundry to dry on the rear fire escape! Who could possibly enjoy Monet, Millet, or any 19th century French masterpieces after seeing that! I observed that the Louvre had been captivating visitors for years with its ample adjacent free parking. The Prado as well. Who doesn’t associate fine art with a Home Depot style parking lagoon?!

I digress.

One of the buildings in question related to the development of the Court Square Hotel was a building I later learned was called the Shean Block. With the death of the developer the property and the plan to demolish the rest of the block died as well and it wasn’t until I was in attendance as a member of the board of the Springfield Preservation Trust that I found out that the same Shean Block was now at risk as part of a plan to build a new parking garage for the nearby sports arena the Mass Mutual Center. The idea was to demolish two buildings at or near the corner of State and Main streets and build a parking garage to replace the aging structure located on the north side of the arena. But hey, the Main Street frontage might have some retail on the first floor and maybe even Windows on the second floor to make it look less like…A PARKING GARAGE ON THE CORNER OF STATE AND MAIN!

After my let’s call it “passionate” response I was told how badly this downtown “needed parking”. 

Even the historic preservationists were like: “Yup, parking. I’d let a pair of oxen have their way with my mother for parking…so…parking.” Luckily a lack of funds made the acquisition of the buildings and the construction of a new garage impossible so, somehow, the original garage was “brought back from the brink” by a few hundred thousand dollars of bonds. (Future plans to replace the garage now center on a surface lot nearby; putting a garage there with ground floor retail or office space and redeveloping the old garage site would actually constitute an improvement to each site and so, if it were to ever happen, it would not be the worst thing to have ever happened.)

I was unaware at the time that, with the idea of the Main Street garage for the Mass Mutual Center falling by the wayside, the new preferred developer of the Court Square building included the son of the now deceased former developer and he had the same view  of surface parking as his father. Apparently, in the years before I was appointed to the Historical Commission these new developers had requested the support of that body for their bid to obtain historic preservation tax credits. The commission did so.

While very little progress was being made on actually redeveloping the property apparently plans were being drawn up which once again included the demolition of the Shean Block. At this point MGM’s plans for Springfield were just being presented and, given the process which was laid out, it seemed a long shot that it would ever come to fruition. As it did, MGM had planned to locate its market rate housing within the footprint of the casino and so the local plan for Court Square was not at all connected. 

Around this time I was appointed to the Historical Commission and was in attendance at a meeting where a representative of the local developer was going through the formality of requesting that we once again write a letter of support for their historic tax credits for the Court Square proposal. As I had been aware of the earlier plans which involved the demolition of nearby historically significant structures I decided to ask the representative if the current plans included the acquisition and demolition of those buildings. To everyone’s surprise he not only responded in the affirmative, but he acknowledged in response to the query of yet another commissioner that this fact was not revealed in the formal application for historic tax credits.

The representative didn’t realize it at the time but this was a:
 “Did you order the Code Red?”
“You’re goddam right I did!”
moment.

Part of getting tax credits, apparently, for historic preservation, is that your plan for preserving some historic stuff not involve destroying other historic stuff. Weird. Who knew?

We voted NOT to support the tax credits.

All hell broke loose. Commissioners got unpleasant phone calls from powerful people. The mayor wrote us a letter for being bad boys and girls and engaging in conjecture; like the conjecture that what a developer told us in an open meeting about his plans was accurate:

 The city attorney visited us and instructed us on how we were not allowed to connect a vote on one development to another totally unrelated development. Yup. Being told by the developer that “Development A” is connected to “Development B” in a public hearing does not justify connecting them even when the whole point was that not revealing that connection impacted directly on the commission’s one and only mandate: to preserve the city’s historic resources. 

The chairman of the commission was pressured to write a letter of support for the project, which he did, and the commission was asked to reconsider its position. I was not present at the meeting but those who were voted in favor. A number of commissioners did mention in remarks, which are in the official minutes, that they felt that the process involved undue political and personal pressure.

For the next few weeks and months I made it my job to forward all of the official information about these goings on to the people in the state bureaucracy who dealt with the approval of historic tax credits. At every opportunity I button-holed everyone even remotely connected to the project and told them that razing the Shean Block in connection to any development at Court Square just might blow up the entire project. 

About this time MGM had changed its project slightly, placing the hotel where the market rate housing was, and relocating its housing to, potentially, the Court Square building.

The people at MGM liked me. I made clear in my remarks at Historical Commission meetings that the MGM development was not an historic preservation program with an economic development component, but rather an economic development with a commitment to contemplate historic preservation as a component; MGM could choose to do nothing in the way of preservation and still get approval to move forward and, in my opinion, they would. 

I spoke to people at MGM about the tax credit issue and the manner in which it had been handled to no avail. I made contact with Jeff Speck. I knew that he had worked for a time with MGM on the Springfield project and had given them advice about making it connect to the city. Putting a surface parking lot, which had once again become the plan, between MGM and the rest of the downtown would clearly not improve the “connectedness” of the project. Mr. Speck responded by contacting MGM and writing this letter:

To put this in perspective, Jeff Speck is arguably the world’s foremost expert on walkability and MGM does billions of dollars worth of urban development. Jeff Speck put that relationship at risk to take a stand on an issue in an obscure third tier city just because I asked him to do so. I can’t think of a better example of personal and professional integrity.

When this journey started I was the only one on my side. Everyone else knew that every problem related to downtown development was a parking problem and that any investment in more parking would make the city a better place and anyone saying anything different was literally crazy. Now everyone but the developer understands that parking lots and parking garages have no place on Main Street; the current plan was revealed just last week and, according to everyone involved, there are no plans for placing parking on Main Street.

Can I get a Hallelujah?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so naive as to think that the Shean Block is completely safe; it wouldn’t be the first time that a Springfield building which proved stubborn in the face of demolition or taking was, oh my goodness, destroyed by a suspicious conflagration of some sort! Powerful people are accustomed to getting their own way after all, and Jesus does love them more than he loves the rest of us, so why wouldn’t an act of God occur in order to enable our betters to give us a little bit more of what’s good for us?

That said, I take pleasure in knowing that our zizagueo has managed to preserve one good building in one place at least for a time this once. Sometimes the good guys win.

Wait a second, do you smell smoke?

Outliers

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As I am feeling a bit under the weather I worry that attempting my usual long form essay would result in an even less coherent result than usual, and so I offer this:

Almost two years ago I wrote this post on Michael Klare, and Hampshire College. Now it looks as though Hampshire is an institution at serious risk of disappearing. I stand by my analysis and even by my “modest proposal”; imagine a university becoming the embodiment of the behavior it claims to expect of itself and others!

More information is making it into the local press regarding declining enrollments in rural school districts. People are demanding that the state help out with the transportation line item in particular as, even with today’s super low fuel prices and high property values, districts are having a hard time making ends meet. When Springfield essentially gave up on creating racial balance in the schools the city went back to a neighborhood school model and instantly saved millions in transportation costs. When I was in high school all but one of the city’s high schools were downtown and so, rather than use yellow buses to transport us, we all took the Springfield Street Railway buses to and from school. Today most of the high schools sit on the State Street corridor and so the renamed “PVTA” is still used to get students to school and adults to work.

Ware is having a tough go of it. I wrote this piece referencing the town just over two years ago. Today a persistent dirty water situation is being discussed, the community is the only one in Hampshire County being singled out for pyrrhottite problems with home foundations, cost overruns on school projects despite declining enrollments, and what people inside and outside the community would agree is a serious image problem.

These are outliers; the funky liberal arts college, the rural school district, and the small formerly industrial town. They are having a hard time holding it together and delivering on the basics, remaining solvent, keeping buildings in adequate repair, providing clean drinking water; and these are the good times, low unemployment, stable property values, stocks at or near all time highs. What happens when the gyre starts to widen? 

It’s going to be interesting. I recently read an academic paper wherein it was predicted that the population would grow roughly 10% in this region due to internal migration from issues connected to climate change. Maybe, but just reading a handful of articles every week one gets the impression that with the fading of the “baby boom echo” this region is looking at its population numbers falling off a cliff…except for those communities with a large Hispanic population. I have no doubt that Springfield’s Puerto Rican population will be comfortable decamping to smaller local cities and inner ring suburbs, but will they move to the hinterlands and if they did, would they be welcome?

Nyack. So Nyack!

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Consider this a thought experiment based on science fiction or dystopic fantasy if you will. Imagine that places must be functional without the vast majority of their populations having access to cars. Which places survive, and which don’t? 

The Hudson River Valley is astounding in this regard. Only the enormous wealth of New York City and the huge demand for suburban style housing could have created the mass of ridiculousness that is so much of Westchester County. There aren’t just random houses here and there, but thousands of them built on hills and cliffs and ridges where no one had any right to expect a house to be built, on roads which, devoid of said houses, would appear to be nothing but trails beaten through the wilderness by thrill seeking lunatics; no one could walk 20 feet on them safely in the age of the automobile; if there were room for a sidewalk it would have two more houses on it instead!

Contrast that with the town centers of not just Westchester, but so many of the areas just outside New York City, all so walkable, all replete with mixed use buildings followed one upon another, block after block of place where a person could still live a “Leave it to Beaver” life without any difficulty whatsoever. When New York City declines, as it inevitably must, will these “preserved in amber” districts be at the core of a new localism, or will their almost universally despoiled outlands not have any capacity to provide the nearby connection to agriculture that such a future entails?

Comparing once again Nyack and Kingston it is clear that the former is much more affluent than the latter today, but Nyack’s affluence has much more to do with its propinquity to NYC than anything else whereas Kingston seems a bit too far away to owe more than a tiny portion of its success the City. On the other hand Kingston sits in a fairly undeveloped region and has a great deal of current and potential agricultural land in proximity. So, for Nyack, what helped preserve it in the short run may kill it in the long run, and what was a challenge for Kingston may be at the heart of its survival in the future.

Springfield owes a great deal of its infrastructural soundness to its being politically connected to Boston. The city itself couldn’t afford to maintain the schools, the parks, and the libraries as it does without state largesse. On the other hand, so far Springfield has proven too distant from both New York and Boston to be directly invigorated by them economically like Hoboken, or Providence, or Worcester. Could the same “Kingston Logic” apply here? What makes us too distant to be lifted by them may keep us at the necessary distance to avoid being dragged down with them when they inevitably crash.

If ever there has been a time when being left out of the growth which accompanies prosperity would be a blessing, then this last 75 years has most certainly been it. And it would be hard to argue that this hasn’t been a time when Springfield has been mostly left behind by our fellow Americans.

Walking in not Memphis

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When we found out that we had about half the time we had been planning on for a long weekend getaway my wife and I felt compelled to switch our plans from Montreal to someplace a bit closer, so we found a cool hotel in the Hudson Valley and we started to make plans based on that. I’ve always had a thing for the late colonial period, stage coaches, and taverns and so Liz found a restaurant in a place we’d be passing through just around dinner time on Friday which brought together all of those interests and would provide a place for us to grab a bite to eat. 

As we were arriving we had a little trouble getting our bearings and so we had to drive around the block once. We weren’t very focused on exactly what we were seeing mind you, but it was clear that this part of Kingston, New York had some interesting places to explore. After dinner we decided to walk around a bit. It was amazing. I mean, it was a Friday night and most everything was closed but, it was amazing. There was building after building after building with great programming at the ground floor, interesting window dressing, and even a few people wandering here and there to visit the restaurants which were open, to pop in to visit a friend who lived in an apartment above one of the shops, or to listen to some live music. There was one angry homeless guy yelling indecipherable things which added “local color”, and it was all knitted together by colonnades on street after street.

The streets themselves were narrow and the colonnades together with on street parking made them feel even narrower. The shops, cafes, and restaurants extended around…oh, my god, around almost an entire block and every side street seemed to have either historic well designed houses, or perpetuated the excellent mixed use habit of the main streets. I hadn’t seen a better or more three dimensional example of good walkable urbanism outside of Manhattan ever in the United States. (I apologize for using photos from Google instead of taking them myself, but we were having such fun just wandering about I didn’t want to alter the mood by stopping to pull out my phone)

From an urbanist perspective my weekend would have been complete, but the next morning we ended up in Nyack, New York, just looking for a bite to eat and some panty hose. We found panty hose and even a garlic press at a real local pharmacy. We ended up walking around the place for hours. The views of the Hudson were lovely, but the center of the town itself was yet another example of really good walkable urbanism combined with beautiful residential architecture, although you could see that a little bit more damage had been done here and there than in the Stockade neighborhood in Kingston during the post war period before the community started to take advantage of the incredible bones it had inherited.

As I read my friend Johnny Sanphillipo’s essays on his experiences in Memphis some comparisons began in my head. He was invited to visit Memphis from San Francisco by people who are hoping for some insight on how to revitalize the inner core of Memphis. The two are major league cities in the South and West, the former growing in population but struggling economically, and socially, the latter having come through a period of decline but now seen as, arguably, one of the most vibrant and certainly one of the most prosperous cities in the world. Memphis, Johnny remarks, has a real chance to create a vibrant urban space even if only a tiny percentage of people in the region are looking for such places because there is nothing, according to him, to compete in that regard anywhere near Memphis.

Contrast that with Springfield’s challenge in the Northeast. So much high quality urbanism not just to choose from, but for others to use as yardsticks against which to be found wanting in a region with negative domestic migration patterns; you can do it right, just not quite right enough and certainly not well enough to attract the sort of people who can choose to live anywhere, like artists for example.

I wasn’t asked to visit these places, they neither needed nor wanted any advice from me, and they are certainly not the sort of places that anyone would confuse with major league cities like Memphis or San Francisco: Understand the spirit of what I am about to say. I realize that my hometown could disappear from off the face of the earth and most people without a direct connection to it wouldn’t ever notice. The same is true of Nyack and Kingston, two very different places which have managed to create enjoyable, livable communities for very different reasons; but if two such otherwise unremarked upon places just two hours from my home can be so remarkable it makes it that much more evident that success in this endeavor to make Springfield livable will have to be done with the people we have and the resources we can bring to bear ourselves. 

To become so exceptional that we will be sought after by anyone else is a pipe dream.

Watch Your Gimbals

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In his book The Long Emergency as well as in many of his “Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles” James Howard Kunstler has made reference to the fact that Americans will engage in heroic efforts to salvage what he describes as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. In JHK’s conversation with K-MO on the latter’s C-Realm Podcast last week I was surprised not to hear that particular prediction, perhaps one of the few Kunstler has got spot-on, highlighted as an answer to the host’s query regarding the apparent delay of the Peak Oil Apocalypse.

Three local news and opinion items in particular jumped out at me this week displaying how, just in this one provincial community, these efforts might take shape. Rural communities in Western Massachusetts are dying. They survived and thrived during the initial stages of the deindustrialization and financialization of the regional economy by transitioning from centers of agriculture and small scale manufacturing into bedroom communities for the urban employment centers which remained nearby. The people who lived or still live in those locations are aging beyond the stage of life in which one has school age children and therefore school populations have collapsed. Economies of scale which existed at a certain level of population have disappeared and demand for exurban housing has weakened just enough that systems are wobbling.

Ideas are evolving into strategies, and strategies into legislation at the state level with proposals for increased funding for rural school districts, cash payments to remote workers willing to relocate, changes in infrastructure to promote demand for housing in rural areas, and incentives for creating jobs in sparsely populated areas all being actively discussed. From the outside it seems clear that the people promoting these initiatives are hoping to find a kind of Goldilocks Zone in which the policies attract just enough people to maintain a stable population with just the right amount of school age children to provide educational services with exactly the infrastructure that worked over the last 40 years while at the same time replacing lost businesses with precisely the sort of businesses that will provide a perfect level of employment; but not so much that their “rural character” is endangered. This is an Apollo 13 scenario.

Incidentally, I add the demand that all of this change not change anything the current residents don’t want changed ( i.e. everything but their home values, level of service, and the demographic make-up of their community) based on news items like this one in which the existence of a Dollar General isn’t permitted because it doesn’t conform to the vision these people have for their community, or this little item requesting that rural residents be exempted from any mileage taxes given that they would be disproportionately, and in their minds unfairly, burdened by such a tax; why should people who use the roads most have to pay so much in user fees after all?

I want more of what makes my city a city in my city. The only person I’ve heard complain about the increased traffic from MGM is a lawyer with a nearby office who wants to be able to get to his suburban home without the inconvenience that, I kid you not, occasionally having to sit through a light might bring. Everyone else wants the proposed new hotels to open, the contractually obligatory market rate housing to be built, the proposed new retail and restaurants to begin construction, and for infill development to begin; these things give us all more of what we came here for. 

You can criticize suburbanites for wanting their communities preserved in amber, but the “Hill People”; they want everyone and everything else to change in order to keep everything they love about living wild and free in the wilderness exactly as it is, but all the while demanding that everyone else pay to see to it that they not suffer any diminution of access to the aspects of civilization that they enjoy. I don’t hate the hinterlands, I actually love them for exactly what they are, if only the people who lived there felt the same way.

Orthodoxies Part I

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I was called an icon this week. After I expressed my hopes that the person nice enough to express such a thought was not an iconoclast it set me to thinking about orthodoxies. At 17 the orthodoxies which ruled my life, whether I knew it or not, were Mormonism and God belief, laissez faire Capitalism, American Exceptionalism, and an ignorant acceptance of what I would now call auto-oriented development. That there were, and are, other orthodoxies so deeply ingrained within my psyche that I am not even aware of how absolutely they control the bounds of my thought I have no doubt, but the aforementioned are the ones of which I became aware and have cast off.

My father worked nights at “Tapley Street”, a regional distribution center for the United States Postal Service. If you asked him what he did he would say that he “got the Wall Street Journal out”. Dow Jones and Company printed the WSJ and Barron’s and such in Chicopee and from there it was distributed throughout the Northeast…including Wall Street. When I started to show interest in economics he would occasionally take a copy of whichever publication was being shipped out that night and bring it home. I watched the PBS series “Free to Choose” and got a copy of the book with Milton Friedman holding a pencil on the cover. I took an Economics course at Classical High School which did its best to cover major themes in economic thought in a semester and I was off to Brigham Young University as an “Econ major” to take my first class under James Kearl, returning advisor to then President Ronald Reagan. 

(An old BYU Econ textbook “A History of Economic Theory and Method” which is still in my collection…Marx included:)

Not a whole lot there but Free Market Orthodoxy.

One of my first “13 Stake Firesides”, I think that’s what they were called, a filling up of the Marriott Center by perfectly groomed BYU students to listen to some speaker or other, was offered by former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and focused on the evils of feeding the poor unless a church did it. It seemed weird at the time. I was in a giant room with 20,000 religious youth and the primary message was not one I could have imagined in the mouth of Jesus. I started to notice the messages apart from the theoretical models which had so captured my desire to be rational. I began to notice the paranoic level of anti Communist and anti Socialist rhetoric I was hearing every day despite the fact that no one was making any counter argument. It was responding to “Hey, honey, how was your day?” with “I am not fucking my secretary!”

The level of fear was obvious in that they never explained why anyone might think these crazy evil terrible stupid ideas could convince anyone. I became obsessed with studying “the other”. Nothing too radical, John Kenneth Galbraith is one I recall, and attending a meeting with a representative of the Nicaraguan Sandinista movement…OK, the 4 of us who were there, apart from the Sandinista representative and the watchers from BYU, must have seemed pretty radical: “Sure if greatly diminished infant mortality and increased literacy are good things!” I began to curve away from Laffer.

Being Mormon was what made me different. How many Mayflower descendants living in Massachusetts were LDS in 1970 or 1980? It gave me a small social network to thrive in, as opposed to my high school with 2,000 kids, and gave me a ready made excuse for being a social failure; I was too good, no smoking, no drinking and all the rest. Mormonism was tailor made to exist in American suburbs, but New England didn’t supply the type of growth that Mormonism needs to expand as it did in the rest of the United States; Mormon transplants establish themselves in numbers large enough to create a ward and locals are drawn not so much to the dogma as to the social cohesion and support. Here proselytizing looked much more like the way in which the LDS church works in the Third World: Pick off the losers, loners, and weirdos until it gives you a foothold and then try to establish type 1 wards. Ergo, my ward growing up, I would discover, wasn’t very orthodox. Beggars can’t be choosers and all. I heard very little about politics, just getting all these newbies on the same page with respect to Mormon theology was all that we could handle. 

I couldn’t wait to attend BYU, visit the temple, and go on “my mission”, in that order. All three would erode my trust in ol’ Joe Smith and my God belief. 

BYU had what was called “the old campus” which to me actually looked like a college campus. At the other extreme, literally and figuratively, was the newer Big Box Campus with all the parking lagoons and mediocre architecture that implies highlighted, at the time, by the N. Eldon Tanner building or “the box the temple came in”:

I soon learned that criticizing anything about BYU was indistinguishable from criticizing “the brethren” and therefore was as heretical as a fully caffeinated Coca Cola or a cup of Earl Grey. 
Next, the temple ceremony which I had been told for years would answer all my questions only made me wonder what the hell kind of cult I had been a member of my whole life. We were symbolically slaughtering ourselves to represent what we would suffer if we revealed that as part of the ceremony we were symbolically slaughtering ourselves, snakes really didn’t have legs ’cause they pissed off Elohim, and I was going to wear protective underwear with special emblematic stitching. 


 People were giving me knowing looks and saying cryptic things about what an eye opener the temple is, and how it really makes sense of things; Sure, I thought,like an LDS LSD. I was scheduled to enter the Missionary Training Center the next day: Geronimo!

In Spain I was bombarded by sensations. I might suggest what had the most lasting effect on my life was not necessarily the Spanish way of life, but how my fellow Mormon-Americans responded to it. So many things in cities like Jaén and San Fernando reminded me of home, most of my mates, from the west of the U.S. saw nothing reminiscent of home and very little of value. That irked me. The platitudes these same people would pronounce about loving Spain and its people were contradicted by their constant criticisms of everything Spanish. Theologically, though, they started me on the path which led, finally, to my atheism. 

One night, in a small apartment in Jaén two missionaries in particular started in on mocking the belief in the story of the Virgin of Fatima; Three kids go into the woods and see the Virgin Mary. Mary gives them messages to transmit to the world.

How stupid! Kids. In the woods. Getting messages from celestial beings. How can anyone believe that crap?! I pointed out, leaving aside the veracity of the claim, that the only difference from that story and the one we were carrying from door to door was the ratio of children to celestial beings:


They were not amused. 
It took me 17 more years to leave the church, but I had started down the highway to hell.