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Double Down

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Just admitting that certain evidence supports an idea contrary to our hopes, our dreams, and our previously held beliefs can be the hardest thing to do. In theory I try to be much more skeptical of evidence which supports my views than that which contradicts it but that can be very hard at times. 

The one thing that helps me persist is seeing how sad it is when others insist that evidence which contradicts a particular claim actually supports it. In politics it has been the conclusion of the special counsel investigation and its apparent recommendation of no indictments in the Trump campaign-Russian “meddling” issue. Yes, for all I know Trump was the spotter for Khrushchev on the Grassy Knoll, but nothing we’ve seen or heard in the characterization of the report supports a belief in collusion. Period. Maybe just admitting that it doesn’t support your prior belief, or perhaps even openly questioning your own understanding of what has been alleged, would be a good idea. Especially if what you thought was an absolute, undeniable, obvious truth ends up, after two years of investigation by a capable investigator, not being conclusive enough to even recommend an indictment of anyone. Ham sandwiches everywhere, breathe a sigh of relief! 

I listen to a podcast called the Scathing Atheist. It’s funny. They have been open in their belief of the Russia-gate narrative. I was wondering how they’d handle what we’ve learned so far of the Mueller investigation; how they responded wasn’t just denial that what we know so far of the Mueller investigation doesn’t support their belief, in the very opening moment of the podcast there was an allusion to a hypothetical “uncle” that you’ll have to interact with now on this topic who is the type of moron who won’t be swayed by evidence! Engage in psychological projection much?

In urbanism this presents as the insistence that Millenials will save our struggling cities. “They don’t want cars, and houses with yards, they want to live in cool, gritty places and transform places like Springfield into San Francisco, or New York, or Boston!” No they don’t. They want to live in San Francisco, New York, or Boston, or move to the South and West; and if they aren’t superduperstars who can make enough cash to live like they wanted in those places then they’re either going to move back home and live where they can afford to live until economic circumstances allow them to buy the suburban home with the two car garage, or they’re going to move to the pre-designated quasi-hip location for the quasi-succesful, quasi-urbanist: Northampton, West Hartford, or whatever it is where you live; the place with a kinda walkable downtown with enough brown people to make you feel, you know, not racist, but not so many that you feel like “they” might actually run the place.

The only thing that changes the outcome is that bit about “the suburban home and the two car garage” not ever being affordable. This is absolutely NOT what I want to be true. This is the opposite of what I have always wanted to be the case, but you can read here, and here, and here, and here, about empirical evidence which indicates that it IS the case. The only blip in the data is from the period from 2008 through maybe 2010 when what appeared to be the new reality was causing fewer people to move to the South and West and more people to opt for urban lifestyles even in less prosperous cities. Once the options appeared to be available again, people began to take them again.

As far as education goes, I have a story from back when I was on Facebook more often. At least once a month I’d see a post lamenting the decline of the Pledge of Allegiance in America’s public schools; a horrible loss pointing to the decline of educational standards and academic achievement in our country. Except, I teach in one of the most liberal, secular regions of the United States and I’ve never taught in a school that didn’t have the students recite the pledge, and data doesn’t support the hypothesis that educational attainment is down.

In my Dear John Michael Greer post I tried to encourage JMG to perhaps rethink his views, and perhaps take back some of his ridiculous statements, regarding public education. He, nicely, doubled down on his willful ignorance by asserting that the people he talks to say the system doesn’t work. But I’ve read what he’s said, and it’s incorrect. Students are taught civics, they are taught about the three branches of government, checks and balances, and the Bill of Rights. Obsessively. Do children internalize those ideas and grasp their significance? Did you? At 15? Cool. You’re probably fooling yourself, but cool. It’s amazing how facts and data are great, super-important…until they contradict your previously held belief and then “a guy told me” becomes the solid foundation for real understanding! 

“Back in my day we did experiments in cold fusion in Kindergarten, and we watched YouTube on our abacuses, and debated holograms of Stephen Douglas we made out of used toothpicks in our Social Studies-Woodshop classes!”

No you didn’t. You sang along with Paul Simon: “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all!” 

It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. If all you learned in high school was crap, it was your fault. If all a child learns now is crap the same holds true. There was no Golden Age when all the youth sought learning earnestly and were met by nothing but dedicated professionals who all were completely dedicated to their craft. There have always been good students and bad students, good teachers and bad teachers, areas in which education excelled and ways in which it was flawed. Making claims that this or that is no longer taught makes you look ridiculous to anyone who knows that they are.

Dear John Michael Greer

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(Once a month John Michael Greer’s blog Ecosophia hosts an “open post” where he encourages readers to ask him questions about any of the topics he tends to write about. I always want to participate, but my Wednesday afternoons are particularly busy and so, by the time the weekend rolls around I assume he has moved on to other things. Since all of the topics I’d like to engage him on relate to my favorite themes on RationalUrbanism I thought one way to deal with this would be to write my post to JMG as an essay on my blog!)

I’m a long time reader and I have especially enjoyed your books Dark Age America, and Decline and Fall. While at the same time I do not want to read too much into something you’ve explained in recent interviews as a desire to be better connected in terms of public transportation and a need to have better access to medical care, it is true that all of the people I regularly listen to or read whose views align with mine regarding societal decline, economic discontinuity, and climate disruption have ended up in or, in the case of Jim Kunstler, very close to New England.

As a New Englander myself I must admit that I am not here primarily because I view its prospects as superior in terms of coping with catabolic collapse, but rather because I feel an emotional attachment to the region, but is it coincidence that you, JHK, Chris Martenson, and KMO are all so close by? 

(Lots o’ brick, not many front yards…my house is in the center of the first photograph)


Springfield, Massachusetts and Providence have differences to be sure, but as major New England metro centers they do have quite a lot in common as well. As I’ve listened to your most recent interviews and read your blog posts since your move to East Providence I’ve been interested in learning about your vision of the place; I would love to hear and read more! Some relatively minor things which are different here from what you’ve described in Rhode Island are the construction and design of the houses as well as the condition of things like libraries and schools. In my neighborhood nearly every house is made of brick, there are few front yards, and the libraries and the schools are mostly in better condition than they have been for decades and decades.

(Some local libraries and schools…I took this first picture to capture the mural, there are many, many books in this library as well…really!)


Also, your take on the state of public education does not resemble in any way my experience. Reaching young people in the age of the “smart phone” is not easy, but the Social Studies teachers in my public high school are not good, they are spectacular. Children receive a very nuanced view of history and are offered an opportunity to really understand the nature of the Constitution, for example, why it was constructed the way it was and in whose interests. They debate empire and its impact on our society from multiple perspectives. As a Spanish teacher I can tell you that we read Allende, Borges, García Márquez, García Lorca, and Cervantes and we, again for example, discuss how similar the current urban/rural divide in the United States is to what Spain was experiencing in the 19th and early 20th centuries in its debates over tradition versus progress, and how we see still more similarities with the Yellow Vest movement and Brexit. We read San Manuel Bueno, mártir by Unamuno and discuss its connection to the aforementioned debate, its roots in Gnosticism, and its similarities the philosophy of Leo Strauss, and to the movie The Matrix.

My daughters took a course dedicated to epistemology their first year in their (Category 5, “failing” under No Child Left Behind) urban public high school and went on to learn things far surpassing anything I learned in high school a generation earlier. There is much in our society which distracts children and sends the message that education isn’t important, but to claim that schools no longer offer challenging curriculum does not hold true, at least in this part of New England. 

Springfield invests a great deal in vocational training as well. The reconstructed Putnam Vocational High School is the most popular (students here choose high schools based on interest)choice in the city right now. I recommend Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error or, better yet, volunteer at your neighborhood school. I’d be interested to hear what you think about what you experience!

Busophilia

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A few weeks ago we were able to get out and do some work in the garden for the first time this season. We’re moving some beds from one area to another and exchanging them with a pathway leading to the back gate. You can see a lot by looking, and last year I saw an entire stretch of raised beds now shaded by growing fruit trees as an equivalent area baked uselessly in the sun. Three new sunny raised beds and one shaded pathway coming up. When we finished we noted how once again a little work in the garden had improved our attitudes and raised our spirits. 

As I mentioned last week we do own a car; but only the one. I do take that vehicle to work most days and leave Elizabeth to get done everything she needs to get done from her employment to shopping on foot in our neighborhood. Last week that wasn’t going to be possible, she had a number of very specific tasks which couldn’t be successfully completed here in the downtown but which needed to be done while I was at school. What she did notice was that a PVTA bus did pass within a few yards of each of the destinations on her list. After spending a few dollars on a day pass she was off on the first of four legs of her trip: getting LuLu to school after her dentist appointment. It required a change at Union Station but Lu used the pity garnered from a visit to the dentist to get a treat at Dunkin’.

I kept getting reports of her progress via text message and I could spy on the buses she was on most of the day; six in all on 4 different routes with three stopovers at Union Station with the longest wait being 10 minutes and the shortest…running after the bus as it was pulling out and having an alert and sympathetic driver stop for her. She ended up getting dropped off about 10 feet from our front door a little after 5 with good news about our taxes from our new accountant.

After settling in and checking in with Luna we sat down in front of the wood stove and debriefed. I noticed something. The same elation, the same raised spirits and heightened emotions that are so obvious to me when I come home and Liz has been working in the garden were present here as she recounted as many of the odd and mysterious occurrences of the day as she could remember; the show never ends when you are in the public realm around here. 

Most people, including myself, probably would have concluded about the positive impacts of work in the garden that they rested on some sort of biophilia inherited from our ancient ancestors who hunted and gathered in the wild lands; me too. But having worked, just a little bit, on a farm fairly recently I can tell you that the differences in scale between gardening and farming do make a difference as far as pure enjoyment is concerned.

Certainly the pleasure derived from the hustle and bustle of taking the bus can’t be attributed to biophilia as it is usually defined: the love of the natural world. To what do we ascribe it then? Novelty? Not really. Just last year Liz had to use the bus so often she often had a monthly pass, and the energy with which she would communicate her experiences was the same. When I worked downtown and went to school at a college on the PVTA route I looked forward to riding the bus, and don’t get me started on the Metro in Madrid.

If we look at biophilia more expansively perhaps, not just the love of nature but “to seek connections with other forms of life” then perhaps this is at the root of our enjoyment. There is little in our world as isolating as the automobile, we see other cars and even people as obstacles to our liberty and freedom of movement; thence road rage. When we travel together it can create a very different sensation. And yes, all of this is to romanticize public transit. I know that there are people who would almost rather die than take a city bus, or a train, but I don’t share that feeling. Have I never missed a bus and been forced to wait what seemed like an eternity for the next? No, but I have also sat by the side of an interstate highway with a broken down car and waited what seemed like an eternity for not just the tow truck, but also all of the complications that come from both needing a car repair and NOT being near public transportation.

My retirement plan has very close to its heart buses and trains from the PVTA stop 10 feet from my front door, to Amtrak, CT Rail and, hopefully soon, the MBTA. With monthly passes and senior fares I think I can go a long way, get a lot of walking in, and see a lot of sights for a whole lot less than it costs to own a car. They say Hell is other people. I find that Hell is other people mostly when I’m in a car.

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, and north to the Vermont border.

*The new Montreal Central Station Customs and Immigration Facility

And two projects in varying stages of 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 or 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.