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Category Archives: Rational Urbanism

Rusting Last, Realizing Slowly

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I’ve asked why it is if bureaucracy and government interference are the causes of bad urbanism that the places most known for those things have the best urbanism: The Northeast, The Pacific Northwest, and Europe. To be clear, I don’t think that laissez faire capitalism is necessarily the primary cause of the woeful state of the American landscape, and it’s fairly clear that the Eisenhower interstate highway program, and federal subsidization and support for suburban single family home development are and were clearly part of the problem. But it’s also true that many of the worst cases of auto-centered development are in places with a reputation for being the most conservative and the most Republican: Arizona, the Deep South, Texas…

This question has re-emerged for me because I am stunned at how clear it is that Springfield is thoroughly experiencing two wholly contradictory processes at the same time: Urban rebirth; and Rust Belt auto-centered self destruction.
All over the country places like Omaha, and Oklahoma City seem to have already gone through the process of auto-centered self destruction and are ready to begin the inverse project of becoming people centered walkable environments. In Springfield the process of going car centered was so slow that it continues at the same rate today even as what I’m sure will be an equally slow, and contradictory process of restoring walkability begins to take shape.

Here in Springfield it’s amazing to watch the same people (!) who say all the right things about walkability and urban revitalization at one moment, in the blink of an eye not only allow, but advocate for car centered development to take place in startlingly close proximity.

My own South End neighborhood provides a perfect example. The powers that be understand that success from the MGM development will only come if people leave the MGM property and walk down Main Street and State Street to the performance venues, the museums, the restaurants, and the shops located blocks and blocks away from the resort complex. At the same time, however, they press for and celebrate demolition of historic pedestrian scaled buildings to be torn down to make way for auto oriented development at the center, on the periphery, and throughout of the neighborhood.

A local car dealer is buying up and tearing down building after building after building EVEN ALONG MAIN STREET in the South End for car storage and it’s being celebrated as ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT; another developer wants to raze these buildings at the edge of the highway in order to put in place some kind of Taco Johns style project to replace that which they perceive as “old and blighted”:

and the city is pushing to expedite it!

And the saga of the Shean Block continues with even people at the forefront of making the downtown walkable shaking their heads as if unable to confront the cosmic stupidity of placing a surface parking lot at the core of the new, billion dollar initiative to create a walkable downtown despite the region’s largest ever parking garage being less than a block away. (More on this soon)

All of this at the same time that government sponsored organizations and local non profits work together with the city to bring together the precious gems of downtown into a more cohesive unit with park improvements, way finding programs, public transit initiatives, bike infrastructure plans, and too many other things to mention all focused on creating a people centered downtown. 

They’re giving a few blocks a blood transfusion as they attach auto oriented leaches to every extremity…and at the heart.
My hypothesis then is that in Springfield we have just been slower, not less willing, to annihilate that which was best in our built environment than much of the rest of the United States, and as we slowly allow the influence of the urban Renaissance to impact our decision making here it will continue to move forward in concert, somehow, with our continuing self destruction. 

A Seriously Modest Proposal

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Climate change is genocide. Sure, I’m in. If the foreseeable consequences of our behaviors in the more developed world are going to lead to the deaths of millions of people with entire human societies especially in the developing world suffering first and suffering the most then those of us who fail to alter our behaviors bear responsibility thereof.

Michael Klare has expressed this idea in an article at Salon and in interviews. He claims that those of us who are doing what we can to reduce our use of fossil fuels are more or less without blame, but that it is an obligation, once people are made aware of the global consequences, to make those changes. I am on board with this is as well, but there is a little something that sticks in the craw about this related to professor Klare.

He is called a Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, but the primary locus of his teaching is on the campus at Hampshire College. My daughter graduated from Smith College, one of the five college consortium, and took at least one course on the campus at Hampshire College. I’ve been to a lecture at the National Yiddish Bookcenter, I’ve visited the Eric Carle Museum, and I’ve been to a wedding on the campus of the college. It has its charms. Wikipedia tells the story of the creation of the campus thusly:

It was a product of its time. An industrialized and mechanized society was being confronted by a counter culture which responded with a back-to-the-land ethos. The campus embodied separation from a wider society which was going in directions and growing in ways that these idealist sought to change.

But looking at the campus through the lens of not just climate change and resource scarcity, two topics the understanding of which Michael Klare can rightly be called an unparalleled expert, but of what he calls genocide, one can’t help but see as car-centric, fossil fuel dependent, and isolated a campus as there is in the United States:


The fact is this campus embodies everything that is wrong with the way which America has organized itself since World War II given the combination of an abundance of fossil fuel energy and land which existed: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Look at the massive parking lagoons; yes, surrounded by grass, rolling hills, and trees. If Hampshire College students wish to engage with the wider world they use buses and cars, and their teachers, including Dr Klare, surely arrive in the same manner or else why the enormous parking areas?

Imagine professor Klare recommending this game changing strategy: Hampshire College begins a 10 year effort to relocate the campus to an underutilized section of nearby Holyoke, Massachusetts. It returns the current property to agricultural use and/or it becomes a center for the study of permaculture focusing on sustainable and carbon reducing food production.

New students at the college are not allowed to own cars, or at least are not allowed to use them to come and go for classes. While the current campus is provided with bus service by the PVTA, it doesn’t have the connectivity to the system which downtown Holyoke already enjoys. Furthermore, Holyoke sits on a rail connection, a form of transport which is much more energy efficient that cars or buses, which students and families can use to come and go during holidays and breaks. Beyond even that, on a daily basis the most efficient car or bus trip is the one that’s never made because walking and biking are realistic and practical options.

Repurposing the enormous stock of underutilized structures and space in a city like Holyoke, in combination with a student body, faculty, and staff which finds itself enabled to engage not just in life on campus, but also life off campus without the need for fossil fuel energy, will also have the benefit of re-energizing Holyoke and drawing thousands and thousands more people to live with a smaller carbon footprint. 

If our current way of life is genocidal, as Michael Klare claims, then certainly he should insist that the institution he represents embody the change that such an awareness requires.

MegaProject versus the North End

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We’re running, quite by accident, a nearly perfect test of the philosophy that the small project focused on marginally increasing value in a relatively undervalued neighborhood is better than a mega project designed to transform a place. It would appear to be a totally unfair fight between a project in the North End which repairs sidewalks, improves lighting, plants trees, and re-paves the street, and a nearly billion dollar hotel, entertainment, retail, and housing project in the South End.

The South End would appear to have all the advantages: It is connected to the downtown, it has retained a healthy core of businesses from its Italian heritage, and it connects to a number of healthy, and relatively wealthy, historic neighborhoods. The North End is separated from the downtown by a Le Corbusier inspired urban removal district and a massive highway interchange, whatever the North End’s previous ethnic heritage (French Canadian? Polish?) it is such a distant memory that I can’t recall what it is, nor do I see any remnants thereof, and the one huge employer in the neighborhood((Baystate Medical Center) is so monolithic and self contained that there is no tradition of leaving the campus to purchase even lunch from one of the many Caribbean restaurants along Main Street.

The North End does have a much more visible and lively public park than the South End, and both connect at about the same distance to at least somewhat comparable larger parks in Forest Park from the South End and Van Horn Park in the North End. Both are poor even by Springfield standards, both have a majority of Hispanic residents with the North End being less heterogeneous. The North End also carries with it a heavier burden of being perceived as dangerous. From my own childhood the North End and what used to be called “Winchester Square” were understood to be two nearly “no-go” zones for the White middle class. 

On its face the North End experiment has every disadvantage: no connection to the amenities of the downtown, ethnic isolation, physical isolation, endemic poverty, and is getting a relatively small investment. On the other hand there is very little to lose here. Property values are already low, there are some incredibly well maintained and well restored historic buildings, but there are also vacant and blighted buildings as well. At least one major employer in the neighborhood is moving operations to a different part of the city(PVTA), whether they will continue to own and maintain their property or retain it for some use I do not know. Near the southern terminus of the neighborhood there is already some investment going on, but there are also a half a dozen or more vacant lots along Main Street which haven’t been turned into parking lots.

The North End (aka Memorial Square)

Le Corbusier-ville and the viaduct:

Main Street in the North End:



If we see over the next 5-10 years further movement toward rehabilitating the vacant and blighted structures, and some infill development occupies the now vacant plots along Main Street then I think the city will have seen adequate return in terms of maintaining the infrastructure of this stretch of Main Street and its environs.
The South End is a much trickier proposition. Keep in mind that the South End got the new sidewalks, lighting, and amenities nearly 8 years ago, but a tornado ripped through it just a few weeks after the project’s completion and a number of highly productive commercial and residential buildings were destroyed. Apart from the MGM project I can only think of one building which was completely destroyed having been replaced; many severely damaged structures were repaired, but there are still a handful of vacant lots along Main Street which had contained significant buildings before June 1, 2011.

The South End:


MGM and Main Street in the South End:

One consequence of the combination of the damage from the tornado and the volatility created by the enormous MGM project is that a very high percentage of store fronts from Central Street to State Street remain vacant. It has been reported that landlords have raised rents in anticipation of an MGM boom, and it is clear that potential retailers and entrepreneurs have no desire to get out ahead of the curve. In this we can glimpse a very large potential downside to the project; instead of breathing life into the district, it could suck all the life out of it. The tens of thousands of square feet of retail contained within the project could soak up all the demand created by the project and then some, the developer’s desire to give the core of the development a local flavor could remove that same flavor from the surrounding streets. 

On the other hand the potential upside is enormous. If the resort complex as a whole transforms the perception of the city and the massive investment in policing the Main Street corridor 24/7 induces people into engaging with the center city as a whole the benefits could be immeasurable. A 15-20 minute “walk shed” with museums, entertainment venues, restaurants, hotels, historic architecture, a major transportation hub, and a variety of residential options is not combination to be found just anywhere in North America.

Only time will tell. I hope that both projects will prove successful of course, and as with most “experiments” in the social sciences double blinding is really impossible so we’ll never truly know if the city might have been better off with one particular strategy or with no strategy at all.

The Public Realm

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Kunstler describes the street as embodying the public realm in America because we lack “the thousand year old cathedral plazas” of Europe. It may be overwhelmingly true for most of the United States, even absolutely so if the thousand year qualifier is added and one assumes no active precolombian places of worship, but here in Puritan Massachusetts we have nearly 400 year old church plazas:


There is no longer an absolute consensus among all residents that what is now called Court Square (though the church site predates any courthouse by some time) is our public meeting space and living room, but, together with the contiguous City Hall steps, it is the most often used location for demonstrations, celebrations, manifestations, and festivals. 


Would the people of the city and perhaps the region know intuitively that it should be the rallying point for any significant democratic or populist show of force? Of that I would not be so sure. I have seen gatherings at the state office building and at the federal courthouses old and new.  I suppose it is a measure of people’s perception of subsidiarity which causes them to select one or another location. 

Be that as it may, we have a well defined, attractive public space which is flexible enough to give individuals in numbers ranging from 10-10,000 a location to join together as a citizenry. Maintaining that tradition and even re-establishing it with those to whom the concept is foreign would be an excellent way to repay our ancestors for gifting us such a lovely location to hear and be heard.

¡PVTA!

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The first thing I’d do if I were in charge of the PVTA would be to go for a name change. In the lower valley a high percentage of bus users are Hispanic and, how do I explain this? Imagine if some Mexican city had a huge population of north-of-the-border retirees and its bus service had the initials CVNT. Maybe change the name? Just sayin’.

A bigger picture issue, though, has to do with one measure of urban western Massachusetts and one particular barometer of our success; where the people who are the most successful among us choose to live. This week the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority named a new administrator. She lives in Hamden, Massachusetts. Nice town. No bus service. The head of our regional transit system lives in a place where she couldn’t use it even if she wanted to. 

I’m used to it. As I’ve listed before the leader of our most significant housing initiative in the city lives in the suburbs of another state, our best real estate developer does that too, none of the heads of our most important cultural organizations live here, and the presidents and CEO’s of all our major institutions live elsewhere. I don’t mean this as a scold this time, just an observation. 

How many of those people are at least connected enough to Springfield that they COULD take the PVTA to work if they needed to? It’s a pretty large network:

When they all do, maybe we’ll have made some genuine progress. 

A Carbon Tax Rebate for Country Folk

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NPR and I started to part ways after September 11, 2001 due to our differing views on the wars which followed. I started seeking out news more in line with my own views and found Democracy Now! and some independent podcasts (though I’m not sure the word existed)tended to come from a perspective I could tolerate. Of late, however, I have been experimenting a bit more with our local organization NEPR, having seen their commitment to not only locate in my neighborhood but to engage with it as well.

So it was that I was listening to a reporter discuss possible significant policy initiatives coming out of the State House in Boston when I heard of a bill to create a sort of carbon tax here in the Bay State. Great, I thought, Massachusetts is already one of the most efficient users of energy in the country, pushing us further in that direction seems an important and logical response to current and impending circumstances…but wait…at the tale end of the report one comment (or was it a quote?) from the reporter changed my view of the potential legislation:

–Rural users will receive rebates for the tax because of the necessity they have of driving greater distances.





Imagine this in some other sphere: 

An initiative to discourage smoking increasing taxes on cigarette buyers…unless you smoke more than 2 cartons a week…then you get a rebate, after all, that would really be expensive!

A crime bill with longer sentences for violent offenders…except murderers and rapists I mean, c’mon, some of those guys get really stiff sentences now!

I am not “anti-rural”. A great deal of what I think could make western Massachusetts a resilient region has to do with the balance between urban and rural. Rural western Mass has water resources and elevation which work well for hydro power generation, high quality land for agricultural production, and a storehouse of memory regarding traditional production methods. Subsidizing rural living, however, for people who not only play no role in those more effective rural endeavors, but who really engage, or should engage, with the urban economy harms both city and country: the city thrives on population density and intensity making neighborhoods more vibrant and efficient; rural areas need low land values to create a greater margin for success in areas of raw materials and agricultural production. The further the suburban is subsidized to spread into the rural landscape the less viable both the rural and urban economies become.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to live in rural areas if they’re really living suburban lives, but the point of a carbon tax is to start to make the real costs of energy use visible to the end consumer: If someone chooses to live a certain way then they should pay for its actual costs. As it is cities subsidize suburbs and poorer areas the richer ones all over this country. Not coincidentally our bicameral legislature and the electoral college give rural voters more power in our republic than urban ones. 

Rural communities, and even some farther flung suburbs, are really struggling to pay for the services people expect. That’s because it’s ridiculous to expect the same level of services in a far flung sprawling community that can exist in a denser urban area. We city dwellers require fewer miles of pipe, less asphalt, fewer firehouses, and less energy per capita than our suburban and rural neighbors to achieve the same ends. Public transit works more efficiently here, schools require fewer buses…or none at all…the list goes on and on.  

I use energy, and I’m willing to pay for its costs whether obvious or as manifest in so called “externalities”. Legislation which implies that somehow urban energy use is filthy but rural energy use is green perpetuates the falsehood that living John Denver style in the Rocky Mountains is more environmentally friendly than living in Manhattan. It isn’t. If you love nature engage with it as a steward or leave it the f&@$ alone. Living on 10 acres of land so your kids can ride ATV’s and snowmobiles, commuting 30 miles to work everyday, and taking your SUV to stock up on Chex Mix at Costco are not endeavors worthy of state subsidy.

Chuck or Mike?

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During a week when I thought that Richard Florida’s new book would give me some insight into the urban condition, it turns out to be a book on food that sent my mind to thinking. My wife had been trying to get me to read “In Defense of Food” for months and this week I finally acquiesced. She had read so much of it to me aloud, had paraphrased other parts, and had talked to me about so much of the rest that it felt very familiar to me as I began to read it. One connection I hadn’t expected however, was with urbanism and infrastructure.
As I paused for a bit after a handful of chapters I realized that what I was reading was The Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme and The Curbside Chat by Chuck Marohn but with a topic shift from infrastructure to food. 

They both explain how the most basic elements of our civilization, having been formulated over millennia by trial and error have been seized upon in the twentieth century using, yes, the scientific method and data, but without any humility as to the limits of our broader systemic understanding. The alterations to tradition which the people of the United States and, to a lesser degree, other parts of the Western world have been subjected have not only led to seriously negative consequences, but have created enormous constituencies lobbying for the maintenance of a flawed system.  

If you were to take as a “word bank” terms like: engineers, planners, infrastructure, suburbanization, automobiles in the statements of Chuck Marohn and use them as replacements for scientists, nutritionists, diet, industrialization in the writings of Michael Pollan and vice versa you could see how either could quickly present “In Defense of Traditional Development” or “The Table-side Chat”:

It does seem to me a symptom of our present confusion about __________ that people would feel the need to consult ___________________ about so basic a question in our everyday lives as humans. I mean, what other animal needs professional help in deciding___________?

For most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice. To guide us instead we had Culture.

What drove such relentless change in the American _______________? One force is the _____________ billion dollar a year _____________ industry. 

Another is the _____________ that, depending on your point of view is either steadily advancing or is changing its mind a lot because it is a flawed science.
The underpinnings of the ____________ crisis lie in a ________________the American ___________ — that does not _________________. 

We often forget that the American ____________________ is an experiment, one that has never been tried anywhere before. 

Across cultures, over thousands of years, people have traditionally ___________________. It is only in the last two generations that we have ___________________.

We need to end our _____________ in the ________________ of _____________, along with the multitude of direct and indirect subsidies that make it all possible. 

Further, we need to intentionally return to our traditional ________________, one based on __________________. When we do this, we will inevitably rediscover our traditional values.

There is a tremendous problem we’ve identified, it has dramatic consequences that we are largely unaware of as a culture. 

Everything we’ve been told about the links between _______________ and _________________ get blown away in the gust of the most recent study.

The story of how the most basic questions about _____________________ reveals a great deal of the institutional imperatives of the ______________ industry, _______________ and journalism, three parties who stand to gain much from widespread confusion regarding __________________.

My aim is to help us reclaim____________________.

We find ourselves increasingly in the grip of a ______________Industrial Complex comprised of _______________ and _____________. Together, with some crucial help from the government, they have constructed and ideology of ____________________ that has convinced us of certain pernicious things.

America is ________________. Lots of people are being hurt by it, some very badly.

Now ask yourself how this existed in the first place. How did we _______________such an amazing _____________ before the_______________? 

Today we have largely relegated this art to _____________and isolated parts of the _________________.

That will require a completely different approach to ______________along with a completely different understanding of _________________. 

If such an approach to ____________ doesn’t strike you as a bit strange! that is because ___________thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible.

Even after adjusting for age, many of the so-called diseases of civilization were far less common a century ago-and they remain rare in places where people don’t ________the way we do.

Here, then, is a simple crucial fact about ________________, yet, curiously, it is a fact that ____________cannot see, probably because it developed in tandem with the _______________ of our _____________ . _______________ prefers to tinker with __________________.

We redirected our county’s extensive resources into a _______________unseen at any point in human history. 

We abandoned thousands of years of history, knowledge and tradition in _______________ in order to try this new — and completely untested — approach.

So, Chuck or Mike? Whether it’s what we eat, or how we live, it seems that both of these men have arrived at similar conclusions: We’ve more than tinkered with a system that took thousands of years to develop, and in our hubris we’ve made some significant mistakes which are having grave consequences for us as individuals and as a society.

All Thinking No Doing Makes Stevie a Dull Boy

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Whenever the topic of social capital comes up I’ll say to my wife that Duncan Crary, a Troy, New York cheerleader, would know more people in the neighborhood after living here for 9 days than I would after 9 years; it’s just the nature of who he is and who I’m not. I was able to put a corollary to my Duncan Crary hypothesis to the test through a recent visit from Johnny Sanphillippo. We had never met but we had gotten to know one another through our work for Strong Towns. 

Johnny and I share a common interest in places which are under-appreciated, under-utilized, and, perhaps, misunderstood. We couldn’t be much different in our methodology, however, when it comes to how we go about our study. Johnny visits new places all the time, scouring the landscape in search of a combination of data, better understanding, and stunning visual representations of what he perceives. I live in my particular model of an under-appreciated, under-utilized, and misunderstood place and try to come to a better understanding mostly by sitting on my couch and thinking.

Johnny said he was looking forward to seeing Springfield through my eyes, but of course, I would be much better served by seeing it through his. I know that there is quite a bit I have a hard time seeing clearly, there are so many places here in my hometown which I still see as they were when I was a kid or as I want to see them or as others have convinced me they are. It would have been really eye opening, I think, had Johnny never heard of me, never read my blog, and yet had visited Springfield and written a piece on the state of my city. 

What he has written is masterful and does a magnificent job of describing my Springfield Strategy: “Live beyond your means within your means”, or perhaps (if you’ll pardon my English) “Live well by living wrong”. Beyond that, knowing what he likes to see I took him to two places, Gasoline Alley, and the Indian Orchard Mills, which I knew would give him glimpses of what he wanted to see.

But I have a confession to make (To you dear reader, not to Johnny, he already knows, I know): These are not really my places. Another friend, who has lived here less time than I’ve been blogging, had to remind me of the existence of Gasoline Alley. I had been there, and to the Indian Orchard Mills perhaps a handful of times in my life (they’ve been around for decades) before Johnny came to town, and seeing them with him made my greatest deficiencies both painfully obvious and horribly clear. I observe, but so does he. And then he barges in, takes pictures, asks questions, asks more questions, laughs and comments, sits and talks, stands and walks, says goodbye…and he’s off to the next place to do it all over again! 

To my credit I was inspired enough by Johnny to start up a conversation with a man who, as it turns out, had just finished running a workshop at his hydroponic farm on a part of the property which didn’t used to be part of the Alley, but was instead a retailer of used building materials; a place I did visit many times while refurbishing my house. I introduced him to Johnny and…the next thing I know we’re getting a personalized tour of his operation. Magic. Turns out he’ll be selling his produce every week at a farmers market just 10 minutes from my house. Good to know for weeks when our CSA or our backyard isn’t fulfilling our produce needs.

The whole experience made me vow to open up a bit more, to widen both my circle of interests, and my ways of knowing. Standing back and watching has its esoteric and antiseptic merits there can be no doubt, but to be “comprometido”, to engage more directly in the struggle can lead to even greater rewards. Partly due to being inspired, and partly as an offshoot of the reaching out I had done to prepare logistically to show Johnny around I had been reminded of an event in my old neighborhood; at the place where my wife and I held our wedding reception. There I saw Jack Wysocki, the hydroponics guy, for the second time in a week, I talked with a candidate for city council and he complimented me on a piece on my blog, and I walked down some streets that I hadn’t walked for decades. Streets that reminded me of what I love most about my city; Vietnamese old ladies watching kids play in the streets, two girls speaking Spanish haphazardly walking a dog while clearly gossiping about something, the back door to a pizza shop,open to let out hot air, revealing the chatter of the cooks. I crossed mid block, like I used to, and went into the Bing theater. 

The Bing, where I watched the world end more times than I can remember, once or twice in “sensurround”, and where my own life started fresh again with Elizabeth. I owe it to her to explore a little bit more some of the other parts of the city; the places Johnny Sanphillippo and I didn’t even get to like the North End, and places outside the city like Holyoke…or Chicopee. I’m not even sure I know how to get to Chicopee. We’ve never explored West Springfield or Westfield. This summer we hope to go back to Europe again, but maybe in the interim we should get to know where we live just a little bit better.


Thanks, Johnny!

When Dysfunction and Dysfunction Meet

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I get what I have to admit is a guilty pleasure in reading about the drama involved in placing affordable housing in suburban communities. Growing up one of my best friends lived in the town of Ludlow. Being from Springfield I would joke about Lud-where? His response was usually Lud-why? As a coach of a Springfield girls soccer team our greatest test was almost always against the combination Portuguese-Suburban might of some Ludlow squad.

Ludlow is embroiled now in a conflict with the largest non profit affordable housing coalition in the region due to their purchase of land and their plans to build almost 50 units of apartments on an undeveloped plot in the town. I enjoy reading what I find to be the obviously disingenuous arguments of the townsfolk and the politicians regarding their “concerns” over the “location” of the development:

 It’s too close to an elementary school. 
(What would poor people want with schools?)
It’s too close to an intersection.
(Roads meet in a perpendicular fashion nearby, can’t have the poor near that!)

It’s too close to a brook.
(How do we keep the poor kids and the wetlands separate?)
My favorite quote…about keeping AFFORDABLE HOUSING from a NON PROFIT organization OUT of the town is this one, which I will leave for you, dear reader, to decipher:


Once I get control of my schadenfreude, however, I’m filled with even darker thoughts. Right now, in general at least in this region we have a situation where dysfunctional people live in functional places, and functional people live in dysfunctional places; and so there is a sort of tenuous equity. In my neighborhood (median household income around $14,000) people can’t afford cars, but people don’t need cars to do most of what they need to do (Walkscore 87, Transit score 59) and housing is cheap because no one (including the poor) wants to live near the poor. In the further flung car-centric suburbs incomes are much higher, but the cost of living soars because there’s a premium to be paid to be isolated from poor people and because every adult needs at least one car.

I have no doubt that we will be forced by circumstances economic, energetic, infrastructural, and financial to re-densify and that, like most civilizations throughout most of time, land will be valued for its proximity to markets, its fecundity, or its strategic location in connecting the other two. While there is plenty of room, for example, for the poor who are already here in my neighborhood to remain here even while the neighborhood gentrifies, it may be difficult for the poor who have hitched their futures to suburbia to move back to walkable neighborhoods, and the design of their relatively recently and poorly built shacks (let’s be honest…even today’s McMansions are mostly particle board and plastic) will not allow for significant agricultural production.

When the relatively poorer functional people in a declining empire can no longer afford to live in their individual Tivolis in the suburbs they will move into the most functional places available: the traditional centers of our towns, cities, and neighborhoods; functional people in functional places. The least capable people with the fewest resources, the poor, the elderly, the troubled, will be left where they are; dysfunctional people in dysfunctional places. 

Advocates for affordable housing in places like Ludlow will make the argument, true of today’s seeming reality, that the working poor play important roles in communities like Ludlow and that, having need of these people it is only right that Ludlow provide places for them to live. And I agree. In the long term however these developments will be seen to have been, at best, an enormous waste of resources, and, at worst, an isolated and isolating dystopia for a whole lot of people whose lives are much too fragile for such an existence. 

(I am aware that in many other regions these “dysfunctions” have already met or are meeting, making watching them come together here that much more tragic)

Worth Defending*

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The MGM resort casino was the focus of a news feature on Connecticut Public Radio last week. As one would expect from a CPB production it was generally fair, thoughtful, and well produced; it also took very few risks and generally trod the pathways one would expect. 

There were two glaringly contradictory “fear pairs”, each brought up multiple times but without ever acknowledging their mutual exclusivity. My favorite goes back to the original anti-casino campaign in the city and it goes like this: NO ONE is going to come to a resort casino in downtown Springfield…and the traffic is going to be horrific! Coming in a close second to that is: “All the jobs created by the casino are going to be crap…and Connecticut is going to fight tooth and nail to keep those crappy jobs in Connecticut where they belong!” I understand the skepticism regarding casinos, but there has to be some nuance to the critique.

On a much more important note, especially with the release of Richard Florida’s new book which he says takes an honest look at some of the flaws in his original “creative class” hypothesis, there was the introduction to the piece which showed some marked incredulity at the idea of anyone voluntarily attempting to enjoy themselves in Springfield. Florida’s work tends to be data driven, but I hope he casts an eye on the culture we’ve created which doesn’t allow for love of place unless that place is at some cultural extreme. 

Rather than try to detail how that works in this essay I’d rather take you on a thought experiment. Be patient, this is going to take a few bullet points, but it is precisely that fact which makes the case.

Imagine a friend tells you about a little neighborhood in New York City, or maybe Boston or San Francisco:

It has an art museum with works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, and Daniel Chester French in its American collection and Tiepolo, Titian, Picasso, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, and more in its European collection there’s also a smattering of O’Keefe and Calder “downstairs” and some incredible surprises in the always changing watercolor and print galleries: 


Across a little plaza there’s a classic little Victorian museum with a huge collection of armor and weapons from Asia along with a large room filled with American landscapes and other pieces from the XIX century:

Nearby there’s a brand new children’s museum dedicated to the work of Dr Seuss and an interactive sculpture garden inspired by his work in the aforementioned plaza:


Before you wander off check out the quirky little science museum:

And one of Augustus Saint Gaudens most famous original works:

On the other side of this cluster of museums is an industrial history museum with a handful of classic cars, including some of the oldest American cars ever produced and a huge collection of classic motorcycles:

On the way up to the nearby National Park there’s a brand new starchitectural wonder designed by Moshe Safde:


Inside the park there’s a museum with an enormous collection of firearms:


The park provides a beautiful view of the valley below:

If you head the other direction from the plaza where the museums are clustered there’s an amazing historic district with a church designed by H.H. Richardson and some really impressively restored French Second Empire row houses:

Walk a block  and there are some streets with some cool buildings and every thing from grab and go food to some really nice sit down restaurants: There’s German, Indian, Cajun, Italian, Barbecue, Lebanese, Puerto Rican, and Chinese to name a few:


If you go north there’s a newly refurbished train station from the golden age of the American railroad:

If you go south there’s another Richardson building in the region’s oldest park:

The church in that park is neoclassical, the governmental complex is among the finest City Beautiful monuments in the United States (as is the library you passed on the way to the National Park):

If you look north you’ll see two hotels, in case you want to stay the night, but walking south you’ll start walking past the new MGM complex: movie theaters, retail shops, a wiz bang bowling alley, a food court, some restaurants on the Main Street, an open air plaza for entertainment and a spot for farmer’s markets and craft fairs in nice weather, and ice skating in the winter. They’ll be taking over management of the performance venues I forgot to mention. There are symphony and theatrical productions during the season as well as AHL hockey, MGM promises to bring pop music concerts as well as events like cirque de soleil:

Once you get beyond MGM there’s a little Italian neighborhood with multiple delis, cafes, restaurants, and even a little florist shop and a bakery. That’s where I spend most of my time:


Yes, this isn’t in some superstar city, this is my neighborhood. I don’t mean to imply for a second that it’s nothing but sweetness and light here but I want to highlight how ridiculous it is that a news outlet, or anyone else, would show any incredulity regarding the potential viability of the place as a tourist destination. The only explanation is that even an enterprise like public radio which prides itself on broad based objectivity is infested with the American invective for small (American) cities.

There has always been a cultural pull toward the biggest cities and the greatest capitals of culture of course, that I understand, but even George Bailey had people try to argue him out of leaving Bedford Falls, today it seems everyone, even family, would not only be telling him to leave but would be packing up to leave with him. With so many of our communities having been hollowed out to the point that a young person’s dying thought of his or her hometown might be “the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Wal-Mart” it makes sense that everyone would yearn to be someplace authentic, but then why do so many of our most genuine places receive more opprobrium than affection?

For me the answer rests somewhere in the culture which can only see black and white: There is one champion and all the rest must be losers. It’s an almost Manichaean worldview where small cities are somehow both the opposite of nature and the opposite of real cities. In this area people claim Boston (somehow) as a relevant cultural marker, but skip on any allegiance to the closer municipalities which in fact provide the economic base on which they exist. In Spain people take pride in their community of origin no matter how humble; to not is like hating your own mother or father. In the United States to love your hometown and to stay there is only indicative of a lack of ambition; you must leave the tribe and your family to show independence.

I’ve always had the opposite view: Any idiot can move to trendy place. The iconoclast sees the uniqueness of the place where he or she is and revels in it. My fellow Massachusetts natives Emerson and Thoreau each expressed this same idea if in somewhat different ways. I have been to 3 continents, 10 nations, 46 states, and countless cities. I’ve lived in Europe and the Mountain West as well as Massachusetts, I’ve travelled with students a dozen times and seen hundreds of historic places; my hometown has no need to be embarrassed by what it has to offer, it has a significance, a value, an attraction all its own as do so many cities its size, and treating with disdain the idea that people might want to experience it for the sake of enjoyment, enrichment, and even enlightenment from time to time is ridiculous.