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A Guy Who Took Some Econ Classes in College Tells You What He Thinks about MMT

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(For those of you about to experience TLDNR mode, the short version of this is: Giving money to rich people probably doesn’t cause bread prices to go through the roof cause rich people can only eat so much bread, but giving money to the poor just might “cuz those folks be hungry.” Enjoy the rest of your day.)

Most people prepare for the apocalypse they want. As for those people who aren’t preparing for any apocalypse; exactly. I include myself in this. I could do some fancy word salad b.s. and obfuscate here, but rather than do that I will be completely honest and admit that I’m about to do that thing which most annoys me about people who claim to want to investigate some concept or idea: start with a conclusion and figure out the means of argumentation most able to get me there.

I want a return to the city, the traditional northern industrial city, but without too too much coal smoke in the air and only enough horse dung on the streets to be, you know, homey. The apocalypse I hope will get us there will be a spiking of energy costs, EROEI and all, which obligates humanity, even in its wealthiest iterations, to focus most of that energy on basics like food, shelter, water, and clothing; like the Good Ol’ Days! I see Springfield, with probably the best and highest quality public water supply in the United States, located on New England’s longest navigable river, in a very productive agricultural valley, not too low in elevation or too close to the coast, blessed with a number of hydropower resources, and with an abundance of walkable communities in its orbit, as well suited to rise to the top of the shrinking garbage heap that will be the industrial world in decline.

The likelihood of that happening as I’ve sketched it is pretty low. I’m ready for the future to be pretty much like the present, only more so as well by the way. I don’t need a crash. If all my worries of economic and social discontinuity turn out to be post millennial hogwash, I am GOLDEN: I’m fully vested in a defined benefit pension, I’m eligible for Social Security benefits (working a second job in the private sector for so long wasn’t so stupid maybe), I have no debt apart from a rapidly declining ridiculously low mortgage, and no need for a car once I retire. 

I don’t need a collapse but I’d be lying if I said that a little part of me didn’t want to see one. I’ve got my townhouse/apartment house/trendy urban co-work space in good shape and I’m zoned for anything from multi family and commercial to light industrial…because the zombies are sticklers about zoning from what I’ve heard.

All of this is preface to the real topic of today’s post: an Econ minor (from 35 years ago) tackles MMT. Keep in mind both real geniuses and morons can do an “interesting” job of simplifying things. All of the experts I’ve listened to and read on the right wing conservative side of the argument criticize Modern Monetary Theory as nothing but money printing. And of course, in a way it is. But they go on to argue that the government can’t just print prosperity because the money itself has no value and printing more just inflates the cost of what goods and services already exist in the market.

Only one of these critics has ever honestly addressed, at least of all the critics I’ve read, the underlying skepticism that the left might have with this critique: The government always manages to do just that when it is to fund shit I’m totally against! Endless illegal immoral wars of aggression (7 of those right now)? Bailing out the richest and least productive elements of our economic system because their insatiable appetite to devour the rest of the economy has made them “too big to fail”? We have managed to create trillions upon trillions to do those things, but making sure grandma has soup and paying for Billy to get an Associates Degree?

 Well, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Oh, how drôle, how very, very drôle you are, Maggie.

The left side of the argument is that demand creates its own supply. If more people can go down to the grocer’s and buy cheese, more dairy farmers will produce cheese, eventually engaging in capital investments to increase production even more and so the end result is only minimally inflationary.

What have we seen with what is, let’s be honest, the MMT experiment we’ve been running since at least 2008, if not well before, with QE and the continued explosion (pun intended) of the military-intelligence budget? Asset prices have blown through the roof with traditional stock valuation tools like “price to earnings ratios” losing almost all meaning. Is the reason stock markets in the U.S. are at or near record highs because so much money has been thrown into the top of the system that it has created a hyperinflation there? Yes, probably. Remember, part of that is super low interest rates for corporate clients who use debt to buy back stock and raise prices. That’s what has also pushed mounds of cash into dubious (on many levels) tech or tech-ish stocks from WeWork and Tesla to Uber and Netflix. If you can’t see that this is just the dot.com bubble/crash part deux then you are being willfully ignorant.

On the Pentagon side, the cost to produce a crappy F-35 going through the roof doesn’t have a direct impact on the family’s monthly budget, but the people who brought you the (I’m not taking the time to look up how much it was) dollar toilet seat have only gotten better at getting less for more as the government has showered them and their defense contractors with money.

The sad thing is that these examples do not bode well for “MMT for the people” being non-inflationary. Of course, demand can create a certain amount of supply, but that is constrained in the short and medium term by actual productive capacity. We have deindustrialized huge swaths of the American landscape. If we can’t produce what we create the demand to consume then prices will need to rise to capture those products from other bidders, including from abroad. The dollar’s reserve currency status, waning but still impactful, can help us to outbid others in the short run, but in the long run we can only consume what has been produced and creating more dollars to chase limited goods must create inflation which erodes the power of the new money to do what it was intended to do.

Making MMT for the people work will require a judicious and cautious attitude that I’m not sure we possess.

I’m skeptical of “renewables” doing anything more than perpetuating the fantasy that we can continue to grow the economy on a finite planet. Wind, solar, hydro, and biomass will each play a role in what I see as our declining total energy future, and making intelligent and strategic investments in them is wise, but conservation should be focus number one and, getting back to my preferred apocalypse, the key to our future is living in ways that require less energy! Walking to work, to school, to shop, or at worst using public transit, eliminates the need for huge amounts of transportation fuels and the embodied energy…the enormous amounts of embodied energy especially in electric cars. Hyper-insulating homes and offices, and only building super-insulated buildings in the future is much more intelligent than producing billions of solar PV panels which will begin to deteriorate shortly after installation and which will need to be fully replaced in 20-30 years. Even in New England we could heat our water with the sun 80% of the time…why are we using fossil fuels to do it?

In transportation we should restrict federal dollars to transportation infrastructure which improves energy efficiency. The physics would dictate that we prioritize walking, biking, water and rail over everything else. Subsidizing air and automobile travel is out in any of its iterations. Make drivers like me pay for every nickel of asphalt. Yes, I’ll say it; make energy hogs squeal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard (just this week!) how it’s unfair to make people who drive more (“A hardship in itself!” oh, yeah, self imposed) pay more to drive. 

If it doesn’t hurt enough to change people’s behaviors then it won’t change people’s behaviors. Why does a dog lick his balls…in the suburbs? Because he can.

In education we have to be much more selective in terms of what we subsidize. The huge increases in college costs have come as a direct result of government getting involved incompletely and randomly in the payment process, but not sufficiently limiting costs. When so many “customers” have their price sensitivity diminished by third party intervention, by grants or loans, then costs will skyrocket, it’s as simple as that. Jim Kunstler is right when he says higher education has become a racket. Throwing money at community colleges and state schools with strong oversight makes sense, but there is a much more complicated mess on the private side, especially of the for profit Sally Struthers “of course, we all do” variety.

Health care is a no brainier. Single payer yesterday. 40-60% of our premiums go to paying people to try to keep us from getting care! or at least to make sure our health insurer doesn’t pay for it. Compare that to 4-6% of Medicare costs going to paperwork. We pay the most in the industrialized world and we are, what? # 27 in terms of outcomes? Ridiculous. I’d much rather the tens of thousands of dollars my employer and I give to CIGNA go to the government and that they deal with the hospitals. I’ve lived in Spain, a relatively poor European country with what they consider “m’eh” health care; I liked it, and I was never at risk for going broke because of it. Just like public education, if you want to opt out, go ahead, but yes your tax $ are going to pay for everyone else.

What we will get, I’m afraid, is helicopter money creating hyperinflation. I’m a socialist. A real socialist. Everyone forgets, it seems to me, that there are two parts to even the most simplistic of definitions expressing what that means. Yes, to each according to need. But also, from each according to ability. Giving things away is not socialist. If you want “what you need” you must “do what you can”. Just paying people to consume is a bad idea. Teaching a man to fish is much more expensive in the short run than just giving him a fish, but teaching people that you’ll just give them fish even if they don’t do anything to earn it IS a recipe for social disaster. 

It’s no simple task to create a social safety net while at the same time protecting individual freedoms. There are trade-offs. My apocalyptic view sees a future where all hands will be needed at the pump and those who will not work, shall not eat; the earth and its limited resources will require husbandry, not exploitation, and that will require that we all give a little more as we take a whole lot less of what we don’t actually need: a third set of dishes, bagel slicers, salad shooters, vacations to Disney.

What a surprise. I want MMT to pay for the prep work for my preferred apocalypse. I had a feeling that might happen. Everyone else wants that to, of course. There are so many other things to discuss here: the so-called efficiency of the market versus the “waste” that is social spending. Efficiency! The planned obsolescence of an iPhone a year, and even producing iPhones when people are starving; empty homes and homeless people…markets! (Oh, wait, markets “distorted by the gubmint”) My take on this is game theory. There’s some kind of discontinuity coming. Depending on who wins the war of perception the government will lurch stupidly to the right, or stupidly to the left, with the former being stupid in its direction and the latter stupid in its execution. 

Strong communities are made up of strong individuals. Focus on food, water, clothing, shelter, and surrounding yourself with people who share your values be they family or friends. I have zero confidence in my ability to predict what will happen, but I am going to be ready for what I think might happen and I’ll take it from there. Good luck to you in doing the same.

Bombo-Apocalypse

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As I was preparing to proctor this year’s PSAT with a colleague she shared a story with me about being among the first students to take the MCAS exam over two decades ago. It brought to mind the fact that I was not only already teaching at that point, but my daughters were attending school and I was on the parent advisory committee at their school when it happened. The local newspaper came out with a series of articles on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System of examinations the primary theme of which was “Urban Schools Suck”.

Because I was motivated to believe that my decision, as a parent and an educator, to send my own children to an urban public school was not tantamount to abuse and neglect I did hours of research and number crunching and demonstrated that the MCAS exams did little more than rank schools by which had the most kids on free and reduced lunch.

At the same time I was barraged by friends with comments about the dangers of living downtown. A few specific events which were ubiquitous on local TV and print media started me down the path which two decades later became Rational Urbanism. The first was the arrest of Louis Lent, a man who confessed to being responsible for numerous child abductions and murders. He abducted more than one child while each was riding a bicycle alone on suburban and rural roadways, but was caught when trying to abduct a girl on her way to school in downtown Pittsfield. The second was the terrible story of a young teacher, whose sister was a student in one of my classes, who was abducted and murdered while working her second job as a retail clerk at a small shop in a suburban strip mall.

What I saw, because I was looking for it and wanted to find it, was a pattern of stranger danger possibly being greater in suburban and rural locations. It was years later that papers began to be published in peer reviewed academic journals which supported the hypothesis which I had formulated to support my decision to raise my family in an urban environment.

To be clear, on both issues I got the right answer not because my reasoning was better but because I was motivated to use my reasoning to find what turned out to be an answer which was correct. These experiences along with being the host of a talk radio show every weekend gave me some insight into reasoning at a time when I dearly wanted to avoid being outed as “wrong” on whatever subject in a very public medium. I began to distinguish in a very conscious way the difference between what I wanted to be true and what the evidence seemed to point to as true. All the time. I got to know myself much better, for good or for ill, but I also had to let go of some ideas which I had dearly wanted to be true.

At the top of the list are things like coming to grips with death being the end. Full stop. Or that the right will prevail. Or that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Or that I’m a likable person outside of a high school classroom.

The stark realities I work very hard to obligate myself to live with make me very sensitive to the inability of others to do what I try to do regarding my preferred beliefs. The past few weeks have provided me with even more grist for that mill. Here in the northeast we had a traditional Nor’easter which, apparently, underwent “bombogenesis” and became a “superstorm”. Thousands and thousands were without power in this region for days. Schools were cancelled.

Our lights never even flickered and Luna was upset to find all of the schools open and unharmed. As usual. I can’t recall a single power outage here; tornadoes, remnants of hurricanes, blizzards, and now bombogenesis; never been without utilities once in their wake for even a split second.

A few weeks ago in California power was cut off, on purpose, to hundreds of thousands of customers for days in order to avoid a repeat of last year’s fire storms which destroyed entire rural communities. From what I could see in the press urban neighborhoods in Oakland and San Francisco, like mine here in downtown Springfield with underground utilities, had experienced business as usual.

With all of that as a backdrop I hear two genial, sober, and responsible men discuss in a public forum the idea of finding community and creating a resilient life in what they describe as a sick culture (I agree). To give them their due, they do discuss “staying put” as a possibility; creating a checklist of your various forms of capital, and seeing if what you have corresponds to what you desire. All very useful. All very much designed to accommodate the individual, or the family, in its focus to help people discover what it is that brings them the most happiness.

But I’ve read what these guys have written for years, I’ve even met one of them. I remember the look of panic that came across Chris Martenson’s face when I told him that I not only lived in Springfield, (“Oh, there are some nice neighborhoods there.”) but in the urban core of Springfield (“…………………………….”).

I get it, he sees hordes of marauding “those people” eating my liver without Fava beans or Chianti. And maybe that will happen. If so I hope I’m dead before even the antipasto is served.

But right on cue, when these two begin to discuss what to do if moving is part of what needs to be done in order for you, whoever you are, to find your bliss, the examples are 100% anti urban. People are looking to get away from places where there is no “security and safety”; no mention of how safe and secure you might feel if your access to the grid is cut off. “I need access to natural beauty. I really am sick and tired of living in a concrete jungle and urban grime. I’ve got to figure some way to have access to natural beauty, for instance.”

What I realize is that these are the same guys who made up reasons to not live in walkable places 30 years ago. They moved their families to the suburbs, they lived empty lives devoid of community, by their own admission(!), and now their solution is to recreate suburbia but as an intentional community! Keep in mind these guys are free marketers, with a belief that what we are seeing now as “horrible consequences” is because of a perversion of the market. But what they are recommending as a solution is abandoning the “free market” that establishes a community and creating a command and control community.

At the same time their claim, in the end, is that community is the most important thing…but they don’t want to be the “tax donkeys” who pay for it! Tax donkeys. They’re the victims. The White suburbanites who abandoned the productive places to live an auto-oriented life (in two ways, car centered and self centered) and suck society’s productivity out to pay for their unproductive lifestyle now want to move on and recreate it elsewhere because the bill is coming due. All in the name of community!

And this idea that beauty is to be found only in nature! Fuck you! Like humans aren’t part of nature, like we haven’t arranged places by thoughtfully combining our artistic sensibilities with elements of natural beauty to create the most amazing places on earth. Sorry, I have seen streetscapes and manmade parks that are more beautiful than any wild landscape. If you disagree, bully for you, but I’d sit and wonder at the beauty and complexity of any number of manmade spaces far longer than I would at any forest or mountain range, and my senses are no less developed than yours, no less attuned to the idea of the aesthetic. Take your biophilia and shove it up your ass.

Some people might want to run away from where they live and start over. Awesome. But not every manmade landscape is a grimy concrete jungle. Just because you, or your parents, left a beautiful manmade place to live in a horrible, soulless post war industrially manufactured suburban subdivision doesn’t mean that every city is ugly and valueless. And it may well be that people have created and lived in cities for thousands of years because there is a survival value in them as well. Hmm, there’s something to contemplate. Maybe running away “to nature”, even as a survival strategy, isn’t such a good idea.

I’ve been through a half a dozen natural disasters right here in this very urban, very poor neighborhood, and in every instance we’ve been the rescuers, not the rescuees, we’ve always been the lifeboats, never the Titanic. There could always be a twist ending I suppose, but ask yourself, is that really what is most likely, or is that just what you want to have happen?

Chicfieldyoke

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So here’s the comment that got this brain train rollin’:

September 16, 2019 at 5:35 pm



Steve,


I’ve been reading the blog for about a year now; I found it somehow, not totally sure, but I am glad I did. I just moved (begrudgingly) to Windsor CT as my girlfriend works in Hartford and I in Springfield still. Previously I was on Mattoon for a year, before that in East Forest Park, and originally in Sixteen Acres when I first moved to Springfield just over 4 years ago for graduate school. Springfield became my home and I loved it, especially my time on Mattoon.

Anyway, I’ve noticed you accurately refer to this part of New England in regional terms. That is, New Haven-Hartford-Springfield make up a densely populated region rather than 3 separate cities and their own suburbs. I’m curious, then, as to your thoughts on annexation, what it would mean to each independent city, and to the region as a whole. It seems to me that if Hartford incorporated West Hartford, East Hartford, and possibly some other bordering towns (Bloomfield, Windsor, Newington, Glastonbury, Wethersfield) it would reach more than 300,000 people within its city lines, with considerably more corporations considered to be headquartered in Hartford (i.e. Cigna, Colt Firearms, Pratt & Whitney) and therefore offering massive tax dollars to the region. It would also now contribute enormous tax dollars of the high earners (who benefit from being next to Hartford proper) in West Hartford, Glastonbury, etc. to Hartford’s base, while also consolidating the amount of town costs (each has their own fire dept & chief, police, etc.).




I mean, for Hartford to annex this handful of towns would probably put its geographic size close to that of Atlanta (134 sq miles, ~500,000 population). To put it further, Hartford County is about 750 sq miles with close to a million people in it. By comparison Allegheny is about the same geographic size and 1.2 million citizens, with Pittsburgh as its county seat. The narratives on Pittsburgh and Atlanta are much different than Hartford-Springfield-New Haven, I think mostly due to the nature of the cities land base. Because they are larger, they have more residential areas and neighborhoods, which stabilizes the perceived “crime” rate, and their city services are condensed coherently with opportunity to create public projects with the regions interests in mind. Perhaps that’s another reason they get more attention from journalists and we don’t. We are completely misrepresented as a region.


My point is this: doesn’t it seem that this region, with cities technically using a small amount of space in comparison to the region, is structured so that the cities are destined to fail? With each suburb competing against the city, pulling tax dollars (both corporate and income) away from the traditional areas of business, the city proper is left with nothing, and is then blamed for its problems. Hartford is tiny, only about 18 sq miles. Springfield is a bit bigger (33 sq miles) with about 30K more residents. New Haven is in the middle, about 20 sq miles and about as dense as Hartford.


Why are we not talking about regional cooperation? It seems your calls for regional prosperity are on point, but how can we ever get there if our cities are not major metro areas that benefit from occupying larger space? Nowhere else in the country does this issues really exist (and I recognize that New England towns have their own identity and would likely resist this process).


It seems, from a macro perspective, that merging our regional cities with its suburbs, is the first step to a rational urbanist agenda.






The claims made in this comment are not just accurate, but incredibly insightful from the city side of the discussion. I agree with every word. With so many of the topics that bubble to the surface at Rational Urbanism the fact is that perception is the reality that must be dealt with, and annexation does change the way data is tossed around and the judgements which are made from it about Springfield and about so many other places like it. It puts me in mind of the end of an interview I did on the Strong Towns podcast about my Death Race 2016 feature. At the close of the interview Chuck asked me what I would have the media do differently, and I, haltingly and choppily, gave a response; why was my response so unsatisfactory I wondered afterword? 

Because it wasn’t the media I was interested in at all, it was the public which was consuming it whose interpretation I wanted to change.

To confront the question of going metropolitan: actually doing it wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell, at least in Springfield, if it were to be attempted overtly with any of our suburban neighbors. Hartford is similarly looked down upon, I think, by the communities surrounding it, and so it is equally a non-starter. Massachusetts already has created the next best thing with a sort of de facto annexation by using what is mostly state income tax revenue to subsidize half of Springfield’s budget. 

As I have commented here repeatedly, I find that 100% justifiable as the incomes taxed are nearly all EARNED in Springfield. As I wrote in this essay, the argument that the community where the income earner lives is more productive than the place the earner works is like ascribing the value of a farm to the farmhouse and not the fields that surround it. 

There is no doubt that annexation can drive a narrative of a growing, thriving city: look at Columbus, Ohio. In a state of dying cities it is considered perhaps the sole survivor. The fact that most of the growth narrative has been perpetuated by forcing surrounding communities who need access to its water district to join (or die) isn’t mentioned when the lists of America’s Growing Cities are released…and positivity begets positivity; my guess is that some real growth and an actual increase in prosperity has taken place because a good story is the best medicine for what ails most cities. 

Going from 35 square miles to well over 200 square miles is a significant part of the real story, but you have to know to look for it. Read the Wikipedia entry on the demographics of Columbus and you’ll only find that the population of the city has skyrocketed at a time when so many other Ohio cities have declined. I talked to people who’ve lived in Columbus who had no idea about the whole annexation thing, they just know that the narrative is “onward and upward!”

As often happens with issues like this, I want to flip the argument, at least a little bit. I’m a true believer in the Strong Towns case for suburbia being screwed in the long run. I want nothing to do with them. Right now we have the most functional places filled disproportionately with the least functional people. To clarify, I would agree with ALL of the arguments that in the case of race, their disfunction is due to a society which has disproportionately created their disfunction, but for this argument that is neither here nor there: the places best suited for human habitation in the region are those which were created before World War II, those are mostly in our urban cores of Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, West Springfield, and Westfield, and those are disproportionately filled with the poor; or in other words those people who have been less successful in our economic system.

These functional places filled mostly with less functional people, by this definition, are surrounded by much, much larger swaths of territory built in an experimental form which has been conclusively demonstrated to be so unproductive as to be unsustainable without siphoning off productivity from productive areas (i.e. The Strong Towns argument). These places are destined to fail. Whether or not they will bring down the productive places around them is the operative question and I think the looser and more fragile the bonds which connect them, the better. 

It may happen long after I am laid to rest, but someday the productive places will again be filled with the productive people, and nearly all of the productive non agricultural work will once again occur in those places. A few, a very few currently “unproductive” places at the near periphery of the productive cores will be reworked to join those cores, but the rest will be let loose to become either productive farmland, or to be a sort of banlieue with little in the way of city services.

So if I could I’d jettison a fair chunk of East Forest Park and 16 Acres, I’d encourage Indian Orchard to hook up with the center of Ludlow, and I’d annex what was left of Springfield with Holyoke, Chicopee,the center of West Springfield, and the part South Hadley just across from Holyoke. It would put the population of my New Springfield at around 250,000. It would unify all of the walkable places, it would have the hydropower of the Holyoke dam and the Cobble Mountain Reservoir…along with its water supply, and it would be easily connected by existing rail and bus public transit.

It would unify all of the places that no one wants now anyway; all of the shit-holes. “It” would be the only place with any value in our manmade landscape. It would be this region’s lifeboat. The real question is whether to fill it with life preservers or harpoons.

Ethnography

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The first story I ever read by Jorge Luis Borges was El etnógrafo. (English version) It’s the story of a man named Fred Murdock and his discovery of the secret of life. If you’re at all familiar with Borges you’ll not be surprised to learn that the story ends in a way which leaves the reader reinterpreting the meaning of the story over and over. The last line explains that, after becoming the only White man to possess the secret after spending years living with a tribe of native Americans and deciding not to publish it, he gets married, gets divorced, and is a librarian at Yale University.

Get it? The secret isn’t what you think it is, or doesn’t do what you think it should. His romantic life fails, his professional life is unremarkable. If knowing THE SECRET doesn’t even help you with those things, or doesn’t cause you to drop out completely and be completely satisfied without them, to what realm of life does the secret pertain? What is its function?

Exactly.

In what I think was Chuck Marohn’s first interview related to the publication of the new Strong Towns book he interviews none other than James Howard Kunstler. The connection is that JHK’s The Long Emergency was a seminal work in the formulation and the direction of what became the Strong Towns movement. In the interview Chuck prefaces a comment by stating that the American landscape gets less and less coherent as one travels west. In a later interview Chuck specifies Boston as a city which in its development pattern adheres to Strong Towns concepts.

Chuck would be the first to say that the east-west continuum idea is at most a heuristic. Boston ran highways through its core neighborhoods, Boston has built mega-projects, torn down buildings for surface parking, and neglected many of its public amenities even for generations. But there’s still enough there there to be a model for most of what Strong Towns is trying to elaborate. That said, as I have expressed many times including in my most popular post ever, Springfield is not Boston.

And yet. As the week has gone on and in interview after interview Chuck describes the rational responses to the predicaments we face on the American landscape I see how, in case after case, Springfield is already there. How can that be in a Strong Towns universe where Springfield’s claim to fame is its disregard for its citizens relative to the juxtaposition of one amazing City Beautiful Carnegie library, and its parking lot? There’s more to a town than one parking lot and the one, really the only thoroughfare in the city which turns into an out and out stroad.

Start with housing. Chuck describes a healthy income to home value ratio of 1-2 or perhaps 1-3. If you look at the median family income in the metro, and the average home price in Springfield that’s about where we are. For my wife and me it’s a little more like 1-1 or even 1.5-1.

Maintenance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard commentators at Strong Towns claim that the problem with building maintenance and road maintenance is that there is no ribbon cutting, there is no “photo-op”, it isn’t glamorous or glitzy. Here it is. I can link to dozens of articles and news reports on roof repairs in public buildings, new windows in schools, sidewalk repairs, and new boilers, and insulation…

I have to add here: Patrick Sullivan. In my mind absolutely the most important man in the history of Springfield after William Pynchon. From the moment he took over the parks department, and was given increasingly more and more responsibility as it became clear that he could take the resources he was given and get done what he needed to get done, the legacy that his “Greatest Generation” predecessors was willing to watch decay and rot was nurtured and preserved. Patrick saw the “good bones” with which the city was endowed and was unwilling to let them grow brittle. How he has done it I have no idea. How Springfield has kept him? I can’t understand.

Back to the Strong Towns message: Where to focus these reinvestments? Which neighborhoods get the sidewalks, the libraries, the parks, the schools? I’d call it the Kevin Garnett strategy, but with Chuck being from Minnesota that seems cruel; in a way you take your biggest weakness and make it your greatest strength. Of course, it’s not exactly that as in case after case after case, as Chuck describes it, the poorest neighborhoods in struggling cities have the best bones and give cities the best return on investment. With the caveat that there was no way the city could rebuild and renovate every school in every neighborhood in a school system with more students than any other in all of New England outside Boston itself in 10, 20, or even 30 years, it is remarkable how many schools have been built, rebuilt, renovated, or repurposed in the last 35 years: All four high schools; dozens of elementary schools, magnet schools, Chestnut Middle, and Forest Park Middle School.

That last one makes an interesting case study. There was a push to cast that old shell of a building aside and build new inside King Phillips Stockade, a place about as isolated from anywhere a student might live as humanly possible. FPMS, or FPJH as it was when I attended, remains where it was, all new, all up to date, but still the anchor of the neighborhood and a middle school a tremendous number of children can walk to not only safely, but surrounded by some of the most beautiful streets in the city.

Look at all of the mini downtowns of all of the neighborhoods that were the poorest, most run down, and least regarded when I was a young man: Mason Square, the South End, the North End, and Six Corners. Which one doesn’t have new sidewalks, new parks, new schools? Which one doesn’t have decorative street lights, a more pedestrian friendly core, and a strip of well maintained local shops?

Back to Borges. So we’re done then. Fix one library parking lot deal and we’re all set? Not at all. The Strong Towns message isn’t what you think it is. It doesn’t do what you want it to do. It’s still the single most important message out there to tackle all of the most pressing issues of the 21st century from environmental degradation to the opioid crisis and all points in between. But, as Fred Murdock explains to his professor, the secret is not nearly as valuable as the roads that lead to it. How literally true in this case.

Being strong, perhaps by accident, has allowed Springfield to survive when many others really haven’t. Springfield, like the thousands of cities that came before is an experiment. Whether or not it is an experiment that will earn the right to continue for another century or two, or a millennia, will be determined by forces larger and more complex than anything I could hope to ever comprehend; but focusing on people and their struggles, and finding ways to confront those struggles as nimbly and as adroitly as possible will improve the odds.

Success is survival. Success, by the way, is still having people who have problems that need to be confronted. That’s as good as it gets. If you don’t have problems to confront that means you’re already dead and buried!

We were lucky enough here to be nearly frozen in time when the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world produced what we’ve come to see as normal in our post war automobile oriented development pattern. We have less cancer. Yup. That is a good thing. Yup. But we still have cancer. And other things can kill you apart from cancer you know. And all of the cancer that’s grown up all around us at the regional and national level doesn’t help us. Being a slightly healthier organism surrounded by a dying ecosystem does not signify inevitable success. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king…of a bunch of blind people…which can make getting on with this experiment in civilization that much harder.