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Category Archives: Rational Urbanism

Setting Your Watch

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I’m almost embarrassed for the host of the Capitol Watch podcast from the Hartford Courant. I mean, I wish Springfield and Masslive had anything even remotely similar with a focus on the city and urban issues. It is still the case that, even with the multi-million dollar headquarters and broadcasting center of New England Public Radio being located on Main Street in the heart of downtown Springfield, I haven’t heard of a single program devoted to the city in general, or the downtown in particular (Call me!). We will muddle on with “Idiots Discuss the News”, mornings on Rock 102.

Getting back to Capitol Watch; I listened for the first time yesterday. The presentation had that “This American Life” ennui with much higher production value than anything I’ve ever done at KTKK, WHYN, or on my own short-lived RationalUrbanism podcast. There was one teensy weensy little problem: the premise of this episode was based on a (common) misunderstanding regarding ranking data. 

The data being investigated related to the fact that the “Hartford Metropolitan Region” ranks #8 in the nation for % of Millennials with college degrees, and some follow up rankings involving measurements like job opportunities and salaries also being assessed by METRO AREA in which Hartford scored well. The question put to random passers by at a community market was clearly asking if Hartford, as in The City of Hartford full stop, “…is really one of the best places for Millennials to settle down?” What ensued was a ridiculous Hartford slam fest. Kudos I guess to the producers for not editing out all of the negativity, although that is almost all there was. 

As an aside, I’ve seen this same confusion in local Springfield media with rankings; Springfield was ranked number one for college campus quality of life. The survey included Smith, Amherst, Mt Holyoke; but it was interpreted as referring to Springfield College, A.I.C., and WNEU: The response was skeptical. I’ve written about it before.

Getting back to the podcast: The first respondent complained, again, assuming the question was about Hartford proper, that you could get more house for the money in the suburbs(!?): I’m not an expert on Hartford home prices but that seems unlikely to be true, although it seemed that what he was really trying to say is that suburban homes come with more land and are therefore, by default, superior. That the contrast which was being made was, according to the surveys in question, not germane because both Hartford and suburban Hartford are part of metro Hartford, never came up.

The second respondent, while admitting to “not having been a Millennial for a while”(sic) responded that many places have much more to offer than Hartford, taxes are too high in Connecticut, and Millennials would be better off going just about anywhere else. That response seemed to lump the city and its surrounding communities into one whole, and so may have actually been on point.

Respondent number three was a Hartford native and complained that, knowing “what’s really going on” he opined that “it is completely false” that Hartford is a good place for Millennials to settle down. The reasons: crime, poverty, gentrification, segregation: “Charging Manhattan and SoHo prices but ya’ll don’t have Manhattan and SoHo attractions.” He was just “bein’ real”. As he went on he seemed to make a different point. While, perhaps, accepting the idea that upwardly mobile Millennials might find Hartford, “greater” or “proper”, a reasonable place to live, for the not so well off Millennials who already lived there the arrival of the gentrifiers wouldn’t be helpful.

After going 0 for 3 with his “man on the street” interviews the host went “meta” and played some archival interviews which were perhaps more directly related to the question, which were then fiollowed by yet another conversation at the community market which was also both more on point and actually positive in its take. A final interview brought the tally of man on the street interviewees to 2 in favor, 3 against the idea of Hartford being a good place for Millennials to settle down with, honestly, perhaps something one might be able to piece together as “a meaningful idea” on the topic in and among the agglomeration of words.

I am going to presume quite a bit and reinterpret all 5 of the extemporaneous responses:

#1: Yes, suburban Hartford is awesome ’cause lawns. Cities are icky.

#2: Other places have lower taxes and better “culture”…museums, symphony orchestras, probably not his idea of “culture” I’m guessing though.

#3: Being Black and poor in Hartford isn’t any fun (unlike other places?). Rich White folks moving in makes it more expensive. Doesn’t care about amenities, and there aren’t enough of them.

#4: Smaller metros (sic) give people opportunities to be big fish in small ponds. Hartford has a lot going for it. It’s a good place to make a difference.

#5: Buy low, sell high. Greater Hartford is low, so buy, buy, buy!

Overall I understand the temptation to ask “Everyman” what he thinks, and a convincing argument can be made that most people make even enormous decisions in life without putting together a single coherent or more internally cohesive idea than any of the ideas expressed by these interviewees. For many people life works like this:

My brain sees: “Then a crisis happens” in all these formulae where others see miracles!

And yet I still want to disentangle the rest of the math.

Is the City of Hartford one of the best places for Millennials to settle down? I think it likely is, at the very least, better than average. Hartford gets more negative press than Springfield which means its real estate market is likely depressed (Everyman #5), that not only gives one a good chance of buying low, but the generally negative attitudes projected onto Hartford limits the pool of competition for good jobs. There are walkable neighborhoods, some healthy local agricultural concerns, both insurance and state government to provide stability, and improving regional public transit. The regional water system is robust. It is a hub of high culture. Unlike a Springfield, or Rochester, or Scranton, or Youngstown, it sits at the political center of a state which is unlikely to lose sight of its significance. Ask most people in Boston about Springfield and their thoughts turn to Abe Lincoln I’m sure!(Yes, wrong Springfield. Exactly.)

That said, I don’t think Hartford is as well prepared to exceed expectations as my hometown for precisely that final reason: too often Connecticut’s capital has been the subject of well meaning experiments which have eviscerated its neighborhoods and desiccated its downtown and these have served to leave it only more impoverished, segregated, and isolated. Springfield’s school system has been much healthier and more stable, the crime rate much lower, its White flight,not nearly as thorough, its industrial base both broader and deeper, its proximity to significant agriculture even greater, its share of owner occupied housing much higher, its park and library systems much larger.

If Hartford were to become a breakout superstar as cities go it would only be good news for Springfield. Neither of these ersatz Twin Cities have done the other any favors in the way a Worcester has been able to use Boston’s rise to re-energize itself, but we are stuck with each other, or at least near each other, mostly doing a good job of pretending the other doesn’t exist.

If you listened to the entire podcast you heard them discussing tourist slogans for the city and the state. hARTford or The H(arts)ford are the way to go: The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Stage, Mark Twain, and all the rest. The Simpsons used up our best idea already:

What puts the spring in Springfield?

Come find out!

Dare not Speak its Name

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Unless they’ve had some contact with their art in one of my colleague’s classes, most of my students have never heard of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya. They’ve heard of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso (who they think is French), and perhaps one or two others, but almost never Velázquez and Goya. 

After explaining that Velázquez does not play for AAA Pawtucket, and that this Goya has nothing to do with that aisle at the grocery store that their mom skips quickly past I go on to show them Las Meninas, and some of the Black Paintings. In what has become a favorite, fun, and utterly predictable ritual, I anticipate their response to me telling them that Las Meninas is considered by many to be the single greatest painting in the history of art and I assert; after asking them what they think IS “the greatest painting in the history of art”; that they’ve never actually seen the Mona Lisa.

Almost inevitably two or three hands shoot up: “I have. I’ve been to the Louvre.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I tell them, “you’ve never really seen it either.”

I go on to explain that they’ve been so propagandized to see it as the quintessential work of art that they never really look at it. “Do you know what ‘sfumato’ is? What makes La Gioconda (what its called in Spain) better than this (I toss up a portrait by El Greco) to you?” The classroom usually breaks out, mildly, into chaos, as students actually begin to think about what they are seeing. 

I go on to explain that I understand why other people view Las Meninas as such a significant work of art, I appreciate its genius, but, I tell them, it isn’t even in my top 10 pieces by Velázquez! What I ask from them is that they understand those reasons as well, but that they are under no pressure to pretend to substitute anyone else’s preferences for their own.

The key point is that, while we may believe our aesthetic judgements to be our own, any thoughtful introspection will reveal that they are anything but that. Whether from urges to accept or reject our societal indoctrination, what we view as most beautiful has more to do with our programming than whatever it is our authentic self, whatever that may be, might perceive.

So when Richard Florida writes that beautiful cities have a distinct advantage over ugly ones when it comes to attracting jobs and residents, it’s important to keep in mind that what qualifies as, or is even allowed to be, beauty, has been pre-filtered. 


I guarantee that most of my students (I’ve asked them) view any freshly paved stroad as more beautiful than this streetscape (unless you say it’s in Manhattan!):

 

The same Richard Florida article tries to slip past the reader that sunshine and a lack of rain are considered “beautiful” as well. I’ve written on how that constitutes an irrational, and probably temporary, shift in preferences. I will never be convinced that Phoenix has better weather than Seattle, or that Houston is meteorologically preferable to Boston. 


So to say that beautiful places are more popular than ugly ones is not only tautological, it begs the question. What places like Springfield need to determine is how to win the propaganda war, as New York has since the 70’s for example, and convince people not that Springfield has beautiful qualities, but that the qualities that Springfield has are beautiful. I’ve seen it too many times; to do the former is merely to get people to grudgingly admit that the otherwise abhorrent, disgusting, value-less community of Springfield has this or that speck of aesthetic quality, like an aged, deformed serial killer with a nice haircut; to achieve the latter is to create the receptivity which will allow for the entire community to be appreciated for all its qualities.

The way to do this is to not be afraid to shock people, and be viewed as a philistine, by expressing your own appreciation for the beauty of your unappreciated community. I’ve had people tell me, when I tell them how beautiful I find Springfield, that I must not be well travelled. I will always then actively engage them in a comparison of experiences: How many countries, continents, or even American states have they visited? Have they lived in a European capital? Have they been to Africa? Studied in Europe? Can they compare the art, the architecture, the churches, the neighborhoods and parks of Springfield to those same features of any other place…I mean apart from Epcot and the strip in Las Vegas? 

I thought not.

They don’t admit to changing their minds. But they have been humiliated. Some may disagree with that tactic, and if places like Springfield were on the verge of being considered acceptable, I would disagree as well, but the absolute freedom with which so many cast about their utter contempt, as though it were an unassailable and established fact that Springfield was irredeemably contemptible, has to be met with just as assertive a response. Love your place, but love it out loud. 

Fútbol Goes Parabolic

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(Click on the link)

Some things just don’t make any sense. Until they do.

In the world’s most popular team sport the English Premier League was already statistically Europe’s strongest league when it suddenly was infused with more TV money than any other league could have hoped for. It was clear that the next decade would be dominated by clubs from just one league. And it was; by Spain’s La Liga. Never had any league ever earned as many as 20 “UEFA Coefficient Points” in a season, La Liga did so for years in a row. One year not one Spanish team was knocked out of Europe except by another Spanish side!

Spain’s domination was so complete that at one point Spanish teams had won 19 out of a possible 20 trophies winnable in international club competition. Head to head against the Premier League Spanish teams had won something like 47 out of 50 knockout ties. English and Spanish teams had met in finals 9 times in 15 years with La Liga going 9-0 and outscoring their EPL rivals 25-7. 

All of this made no sense. The Premier League was better run, had more cash to splash on the best players, distributed their cash more fairly among the clubs, and the individual clubs were better run and were resting on firmer financial and even cultural ground. La Liga was, and is, always in chaos, doesn’t manage itself or its image well, and always has teams on the verge of bankruptcy. So how was Athletic Bilbao crushing Manchester United? Why was Sevilla, who sold its best player to Liverpool, beating Liverpool?

In retrospect, the answer was simple: too much money spent on players, not enough time on coaching. If a team had a weakness they’d spend huge cash on the best player available at that position; rinse and repeat. When that didn’t work teams fired coaches and hired new ones starting the whole process from scratch, all the while assuming pure talent would overcome all obstacles. Essentially the entire league became Galáctico era Real Madrid. Long on sizzle, short on steak. Bad news in a team sport.

Fast forward to two weeks ago and…everything turned around. La Liga has still outperformed all of the other leagues in Europe, but the EPL has risen to the top with all 4 teams in both major finals being English, while thrashing a number of Spanish clubs along the way.

And what does all of this have to do with Rational Urbanism?

Peak Oil.

Climate Change. 

The Stock Market. 

American Empire. 

Suburban Sprawl. 

Pensions.

The National Debt.

The Housing Bubble.

Where these things stand, how they are playing out, how they are perceived, just doesn’t make any sense to me. I have no idea what all the mechanisms are which are at play of course, they are much more complex than a little team sport. As a fan of La Liga I enjoyed the insanity of its total domination of world football all the while knowing it wouldn’t last. As a fan of living a fairly boring life the opposite is true of what seems to be the obvious reversals facing us due to the systems and issues listed above. Things that can’t go on forever, don’t. At one point, just two weeks ago it seemed as though an insane status quo in European football which had lasted for over a decade would continue, and then over just 48 hours, it all changed.

Our understanding of “all of the above” could be transformed in almost as little time. As Emerson expressed it, I have to be true to me, to who I am, and to what I believe. I can’t pretend to believe things I don’t believe, or to trust in things I do not trust. I foresee turbulent times ahead. How far ahead?
(Click on the link)

¡Viva el Betis, ‘manque’ pierda!

Death Warmed Over

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Two weeks ago I woke up without my voice. I missed two days of work and spent the weekend convalescing. After pushing through a full week at school I was presented with one of the most glorious days of this heretofore wet and chilly spring; It was the Saturday of Springfield’s birthday celebration (#383) and World’s Largest Pancake Breakfast.

Feeling as though I had finally put my upper respiratory infection completely behind me, Elizabeth and I set out to do it all. We brought our own real maple syrup to slather on to the pancakes, we wandered up and down Main Street shaking hands with our favorite local politicians, meeting local celebrities, listening to music, people watching, and finally selecting a nice spot along the 1/3 mile long breakfast table to enjoy our pancakes, bacon, orange juice, and hot coffee. Good times. 

Liz signed us up for the “Cat in the Hat” license plate while I had the longest conversation I’ve ever had with a Picknelly; Paul in this case. I introduced myself. Thankfully, he doesn’t read my blog. Truth is he’s done a nice job with the plaza in front of Monarch Place, and he was part of the consortium that stole the T-birds from Portland and “saved hockey” in Springfield. I told him we’d get the vanity license plate if he promised to invest another $10 million or so in downtown. That’s fair, don’t you think?

After that we took the Art Deco downtown tour with my wife’s favorite person, and yes I think that includes me, Bob McCarroll. We wandered from the Quadrangle to the Apremont Triangle, from the triangle to Main Street, to State Street, and back to the museums. Along the way I learned a lot…and pitched my ideas for a Frederick Douglas-John Brown memorial, and a Muhammad Ali statue in Stearns Square. (Frederick Douglas and John Brown met while the latter lived and worked here, and Muhammad Ali spent years living just a few blocks from where I sit writing this blogpost)

After that it was on to the Gardening the Community plant sale. On the way we passed by a Pioneer Valley Planning Commission event/ demonstration of a “complete street”. Our friend Alex and his bike crew were at a nearby park demonstrating, well, demonstrating just how freaking talented these kids are on their bikes. It also demonstrated how easy it would be to just declare a park “a bike park” and let the kids go to town. And I think that’s a good idea. But that won’t stop these kids from riding maniacally on the streets as well; they want to show off, shock, and be seen.



The PVPC complete streets thing looked so much like the photographs I’ve seen of the legendary Better Block endeavor in Memphis which transformed a stretch of mostly vacant retail frontage on a traffic sewer of a street into a vibrant little neighborhood, and got the city of Memphis to invest in some small improvements to the infrastructure. Problem here is, this neighborhood is already vibrant, all the storefronts are already full, the city put in new sidewalks and decorative lighting years ago, and the neighborhood park is in tip-top shape and has all the amenities. Investments the city made decades ago have, slowly but surely, stabilized blocks that seemed destined for decline.

After doing some back yard work to prepare for our GTC plants we decided to top off the day with “lupper” (it was 3 o’clock) at Red Rose. Our meals were fabulous. I decided to forgo the traditional Red Rose lambrusco given my recent illness and the decidedly uphill return leg of our journey. On that walk home I felt totally invigorated and said so to Elizabeth. I was finally, really getting better. 

Or so I thought. 

This, dear reader, brings us to the actual underlying message of today’s essay: What I believed was invigoration was my body pumping enough adrenalin into my system to get me home. I had been working, playing, and venturing about with pneumonia for over a week. I collapsed when I got home, failed to publish a blogpost for the first time in years, and went on to miss an entire week of work. I had turned a corner; and got hit smack dab in the middle of the forehead with a 2″x4″. Systems can do that. Everything looks fine. All that paranoid concern was just that. It’s all back to normal. And then, not so much.

Gary, Indiana

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The algorithms that select videos for me on YouTube demonstrated their accuracy last week by placing a documentary on Gary, Indiana at the front of my cue. It wasn’t the most recent nor the highest quality footage I’ve ever seen, but it was produced by a filmmaker whose perspective I recognize in myself. 

Gary, Indiana is one of the cities I see in the data sets I seek out in articles from CityLab or Planetizen; it is not a community I know anything about on a personal level, or even second hand. According to the documentary, Gary reached its peak of population of near 180,000 people in the mid 70’s just as Springfield did. Where Springfield saw a decline in population of some 12% and then stabilized, Gary’s population has collapsed by almost 60% and continues to fall. I was amazed to hear that still standing in Gary was the very first building ever built there. Wow! I was less impressed when I learned that the structure in question was built in 1907; Gary went from 0 to 180,000 people in less than a century based on one company, U.S. Steel, placing an enormous mill there. 

The footage documenting the decline was familiar: beautiful churches left in ruins; grand old movie theaters rotting and festering; abandoned industrial buildings; vacant homes; and empty lots. The scale of the city was familiar as well, but the depth and breadth of the devastation was not. It was not just “a church” whose charred remains were still standing, but “the” church in the center of town. The Palace theater was not just empty and decaying, it was open to the elements and was unrecognizable. The all-encompassing squalor was beyond anything I had seen.

The rapidity of the collapse still has my head spinning. In some cases only a few decades separated elaboration from eradication. The contrast to the fractal rejuvenation that can be seen here was telling. No plans, big or small, seem to have been fully elaborated: A solitary convention center connects to nothing via a pedestrian bridge to nowhere; an enormous 70’s vintage hotel sits completely empty; signs with the names of architects and politicians sit in front of vacant lots with no sign of development taking place behind them.

The real lesson was yet to arrive. As well meaning native sons and daughters of Gary were interviewed I felt a knot develop in my stomach. If only this or that had been done differently, if only the focus had been put on this pipe dream instead of that one. The film was made after the death of Gary native Michael Jackson’s death, but before the most recent, if unsurprising, accusations of pedophilia, so it was not just cringe-inducing, but sad to see arguments forming around the makeup of a Michael Jackson centered tourist megaplex knowing it amounted to debating how many moon-walkers could dance on the head of a pin.

With a nod to Chuck Marohn, no one else gives a damn about Gary, Indiana. 

And no one else gives a damn about Springfield, Massachusetts.

These well meaning interviewees couldn’t help but see Gary through their own hopelessly maternal perspective; “Of course your friends would love to buy Tupperware, and Amway products from you, or have a convention in your convention center, or relocate their headquarters to your industrial park, honey.” 

Pity purchases are the kiss of death. It’s cruel. Every time, and there have been many, I have purchased something from a shop because I wanted to wish them well not because I really wanted what I was buying, that place has gone out of business almost immediately. The same holds for the broader community, if we aren’t well set up to succeed on our merits no amount of charity will save us.

I try to make things better here because, well, I want to be here, and what’s the other option? What will save Springfield or Gary, or seal their fate, will be forces beyond my control, and beyond the control of any professor at Indiana University Northwest. It’s been a while since I’ve said it, so it bears repeating: All of the trends, demographic, economic, social, and cultural, have been working against places like Springfield (and Gary) for decades now. If Springfield were in the Sun Belt, or had a major research University, or was 30 miles from New York or Boston, it would be more likely to be thriving today. It’s not, it doesn’t, and it isn’t.

Making good decisions where we have the power to make them is what we need to do and where we need to place our focus. I don’t share the phobia regarding mega projects that some people have; as I have explained before nearly all of our local mega projects have proved to be successful. That doesn’t mean that anyone should expect any one or even any handful of developments will transform the city; only the reversal of the aforementioned trends or Springfield being subsumed in the New York-Boston Mega Region would force such a change. 

What is interesting is how Springfield has slowly crept up to the middle tier of mid sized cities in the United States in terms of population growth, economic growth, and other relevant data points. We aren’t on anyone’s top 20 list, we’re not the up and coming-est, but it feels like things are headed in a positive direction. The middle is nice. The “rocking chair”. I’ll settle for staying off the radar.

A Boom in Busts

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All of a sudden I find myself as actively engaged as I ever have been in some activities which promise to make positive change in the city. I was participating with a relatively small group of stakeholders in a conversation about place making at the Apremont Triangle and I realized I was enmeshed in a grand loop of circular urbanism where the people leading the meeting were from the same organization which indoctrinated me in the first place; Project for Public Spaces.

As the dialog continued I could tell that I was expressing ideas that the PPS people were hoping we might arrive at as conclusions and, rather than feign being an idiot savant I explained that I had been reading and studying the ideas of their founders since, I think, before those founders formally created the organization. The PPS website now boasts that they have worked with over 3,000 communities in 40 years. At a time when they had only worked on a few dozen projects in perhaps two dozen cities they had already worked in Springfield 3 times.

As I have written before, many ideas that urbanists, new urbanists, bloggers, and Strong Towns aficionados express as though they were revelations freshly carved into tablets on Mt Sinai have been contemplated and expressed for decades and too often, those of us who have been actively engaged in trying to revitalize a community have learned, cause and effect are reversed and these concepts are much less powerful than they are imagined to be: Meds Beds, and Eds, innovative downtown residential spaces, beautifying the pedestrian experience, the list goes on. Sometimes success or failure aren’t deserved, forces beyond anyone’s control determine winners and losers.

Ann B Davis was never going to be a supermodel, and Kate Upton could do almost everything wrong and still end up on the cover of Sports Illustrated. 

Looking through the online information and the Springfield Central literature I have in my urbanist library it confirmed that William H Whyte was my first mentor in all things downtown. All of his diagrams and explanations of human behavior were the things which prepared me for understanding The Geography of Nowhere more than a decade later, and from there I’ve taken to studying the New Urbanism among other things, and I’ve also found myself taking interesting detours down pathways involving the environment, economics, education, public safety, and many other things. 

Of all the rabbit holes I’ve fallen down perhaps the most persistently recurring involves economic discontinuity. I was working at a news radio station in Salt Lake City on Black Monday in 1987. As a 23 year old who was studying economics at BYU at the time I found the conversations of the following days and weeks supremely interesting and was intrigued by the contradictory analyses coming from everyone everywhere depending on their politics and, in Utah, their perspective on the End Times. I’ve been a sucker for collapse theory ever since.

Jim Kunstler’s work in particular has focused a whole lot more on economic collapse than on urbanism in the last decade or so, I’m sure he would say for good reason. In public and in private a lot of the idea mongers I’ve gotten to know through his work are very much on board with the idea of another Wall Street collapse coming soon which, to a man, they conclude will be at the very least a match for the big one in 1929:

“Get out now.”

“Better two months early than two days late!”

“Once it starts, it’ll be too late to get out.”

“The exit door will get smaller and smaller.”

I have no idea. I was uncomfortable enough with what seemed an over-valued stock market 4 years ago when the Dow went above 18,000 and  I “liquidated our exposure”; I got out half a decade early! Perhaps everyone is better off that I became a Spanish teacher and not an economist.

With that as a caveat: These ideas surrounding limited opportunities for exit and entry got me to thinking about what I see in the manmade environment which surrounds me. That market is mostly “long” suburban sprawl auto-oriented development, and “short” walkable urbanism, particularly of the Rust Belt variety. At the same time, and for that reason, the supply of the former is enormous and highly elastic, whereas the latter is not only small but also very inelastic.

Next time you venture out, notice how few places are adapted to human use without an automobile. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say how little land area is designed that way. Even in the most walkable place we are dependent on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine it’s true, but notice how much of the territory we’ve developed, ostensibly for human use, is inaccessible, purposeless, or dysfunctional without an automobile. I see a dozen houses on my short commute to work which have more than 5 cars in the driveway at all times. One or two have over 10. It’s so important that every person have constant access to an automobile that they need well over $100,000 of investment sitting in the driveway and they must spend nearly that every year in insurance, maintenance, and fuel. 

Peak Oil voices are surfacing again, as well as people who see them as a collective Chicken Little. The argument rests on whether the shale oil miracle has been an indication that human ingenuity, engineering, and technology will overcome what only appear to be obstacles to progress, or whether the whole thing is more accurately viewed as a sleight of hand made possible by super low interest rates and investors desperate for profit. I fall into the latter category, I must admit, but I know that could be more the result of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning than any deep understanding; I am not a petroleum geologist.

I am curious to see if these concepts will run together; so few places which have any functionality beyond the automobile, a squeeze in petroleum, and a crash on Wall Street. People will persist across most of the territory we’ve developed (Yes, Johnny), but the less automobile access needed to produce each widget, or facilitate each transaction the better. It would be interesting to witness a transition of places which have only managed to persist because (despite being out of fashion) they have allowed the most resource poor to survive within them, becoming a lifeboat for the more prosperous because even they find themselves in need of being less profligate with the resources they control.

It’s not inevitable. It may never happen. But one can easily imagine realistic scenarios in which it could happen. I would say this: the door to investment in such a future is wide open, but even a small shift would make clear just how limited this resource happens to be. The door could close very quickly. I’m staying put, I know that, but I am curious to see what future awaits.

The Spoke in Your Own Eye

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My bike gave me my first sense of autonomy as a kid. Looking back on a childhood spent without a phone and without GoogleMaps I have to suppose that I used primitive technology like paper maps or my own memory to get from my house to a friend’s house. The useful world got a little bit bigger, and the things I had access to expanded quite a bit.

I explored some very different neighborhoods as well. If I left my street and went south I was in the poshest community in the region: Longmeadow. Occasionally I would ride on those winding streets of Colony Hills and see how different things were from what I would experience if I left my home and travelled north. To my north was the South End and Six Corners. They were, even then, among the poorest of neighborhoods in the city. 

In a few years I was riding my 10 speed enough that I started dreaming of becoming a cyclist; I mean, I would ride for an hour, sometimes even two hours a day. I was getting really good, or so I thought.

One day I was in the South End and heading towards Johnny Appleseed Park in the Six Corners neighborhood when some kids on their bikes; crappy, multicolored, rusting, one speed contraptions, spied me, the curly haired White kid on the brightly colored 10 speed bike. They voiced their displeasure at my intrusion onto Locust Street. I was a little scared. I decided to outrun them with my superior skills and equipment; I was surrounded by all of them before I even made it to Mill Street. 

One kid grabbed my handlebars, the rest formed a wall around me. I was asked what I was doing in that part of the city? I told them I was just riding around. I can’t remember what else was said. I didn’t try to hide that I was sufficiently intimidated, which is to say, scared shitless, and I rode off to the south. 

I spent an hour or two on my bike each day, if I didn’t have church, or baseball practice, or if we weren’t doing something as a family. These kids spent all day every day on their bikes. They lived for their bikes.

Those kids still exist in Springfield. In a day and age when society is screaming for adolescents to get off their phones and go outside, dozens of mostly Black and Hispanic young men are doing just that and, in the process they have become inconceivably talented riders. The people who have taken the time to actually ask these kids why they spend so much time riding have discovered that, contrary to popular myth, they do it to get away from drug and gang culture, not to participate in it. 

They are exploring the world outside the world of screens, and, in many cases, away from spaces and places tempting them to head down darker pathways.

As one would expect to happen with adolescents, they push boundaries. Anyone who has walked the sidewalks or driven the streets of the city of Springfield in recent months knows that some of the young men among these dozens of kids on bikes engage in extremely reckless acts. They ride wheelies down the middle of two lane, and multi lane one way streets and attempt to get as close as possible to on-coming cars, they weave in and out of traffic and parked cars, they make pretty obvious attempts to startle motorists and pedestrians. I’ve seen them intentionally ride on the wrong side of the street to place themselves in the path of cars backing out of driveways. I’ve seen them scare pedestrians by suddenly changing direction and cutting across their path.

These young men want attention. Yes, they break the rules that govern vehicular traffic, as do many motorists, but mostly they are putting themselves in grave danger. It is critically important to understand that this predictably reckless behavior engaged in by adolescent boys should not and must not be conflated with violent and criminal acts engaged in by adults riding motorized dirt bikes and ATV’s on some of the same streets. Unfortunately, some recent incidents involving the latter group has caused the mayor of the City of Springfield to release a statement in which he does just that. 

Engaging in vandalism and even sexual assault using dirt bikes and ATV’s as both weapons and the means of escape is inexcusable and must be dealt with, but criminalizing “bike riding while brown” will not make our city a safer place. I disagree with people who claim that there aren’t any places for these kids to go, right now, today, and ride freely and safely; few cities in the world have the abundance of park land and wild land that Springfield contains. 

The questions we need to answer are why these young men don’t ride in Forest Park, in Blunt Park, or Van Horn, or along the paths which exist, or used to exist, in any one of a dozen dingles and undeveloped areas of the city? Are they made to feel unwelcome? Are they unaware that they exist? Are these children in need of recognition and acknowledgement that they won’t get hidden away in a park? As any parent or teacher knows, a child who craves attention will settle for negative attention if affirmative attention isn’t forthcoming.

Here’s what I know, making these young Black and Hispanic young men feel even more alienated by criminalizing the one activity which brings them the most joy will not make Springfield a better place for those of us who live here. Yes, for those who merely come here to earn a salary and for whom the streets of Springfield are just traffic sewers through which they must pass to get home to their suburban paradise, they won’t care what the consequences are of clearing their pathway home. But for those of us who live here with these kids, and whose children attend school with these young men, there is much more to the story than just clearing the streets. These young people are a part and will continue to be a part of our community. Whether or not they see themselves as cared for, respected, and recognized will have real consequences for all of us for decades to come; in the long run that is much more significant than the inconvenience of having to slow down in our cars from time to time because a child is behaving childishly.

I’m not ignorant of the fact that the behaviors I’ve outlined aren’t just a danger to the kids on bikes, they endanger all of us because a startled driver or pedestrian can make sudden, yet catastrophic, decisions. Fear itself is an enormous problem because it drives so much of the anger surrounding the issue; if one of these kids is hurt, even unintentionally, by a motorist it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the group were to respond aggressively toward the driver. I’ve felt this fear as a child has whizzed past my car with one wheel high in the air and one hand flailing toward my rear view mirror. I was scared for him, but I was also scared that I might be blamed for some horrible outcome. 

There is no simple “solution”. Any intervention which will “eradicate” the problem will do more harm than is being done right now by the bad behavior. Mitigation is a better and more achievable goal.

Let me sketch this out. Cops chasing and, even on occasion, successfully catching one or two kids riding bikes recklessly will not put an end to the behavior. Getting cops to chase them will become an end unto itself for these kids, most of the time only the weakest and least experienced of the riders will be the ones who are caught and, eventually, either a police officer or a kid on a bike will make a really bad decision which will lead to the kid on the bike being either seriously injured or killed, and that will escalate the problem well beyond where it is today. 

If we put this into perspective, just a little, before we move forward it would be helpful. I’ve lost count of the number of pedestrians and motorists killed, that is KILLED, just this month in the Springfield area. Killed, each of them, by motorists. As reckless and foolish as these behaviors engaged in by these kids on bikes are, I haven’t heard of a single serious injury, let alone one death, directly related to them. 

It’s a problem. It’s a serious problem. But it’s not a crisis. The ADULTS need to come together and formulate a strategy controlling the only thing we can control: ourselves. It isn’t about, it can’t be about, retribution; it has to be about changing what we can change to alter, improve, and diminish the bad behavior. We need to communicate with the kids themselves, but we need to understand that it is in the nature of youth to rebel. We will never get to 100% compliance. We need to investigate and study what we can do on our part and then we will be left with whatever outliers remain in terms of behaviors and individuals and move forward from there.

Kids will be kids. When I hear adults bemoaning the state of childhood today it usually involves how sedentary and unadventurous today’s children are. These kids are “going out to play”; change the vernacular and the racial make up of the kids and they are re-enacting episodes from Stand by Me, The Goonies, It, Stranger Things, and countless other works of fiction where we idealize and even celebrate the excesses of youth. If you squint just a little you might see that these kids aren’t that different from me and you when we were young. Contemplate the excesses of your youth. And would you say that you had more or less to deal with than these young men? 

I can still see the rusty fence that runs along the berm between my parents’ house and the Temple Beth-El parking lot placed there because some neighborhood miscreant stole one too many hood ornaments off the cars there. I wonder if they ever caught that kid? Or if that shoe box is still in the basement?

Retail

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Just after the financial collapse of 2008 many of the same people who had warned of the residential real estate bubble bursting started to warn of a bust in commercial real estate. Long before the Amazon Effect or Cyber Monday it was being pointed out that the United States had, in particular, orders of magnitude more retail square footage per person than the rest of the industrialized world. 

Perhaps prior to the 2000’s people had begun discussing “the dead mall”, but it was usually in the context of an older, worn out shopping center being made obsolete by a newer, fresher model. Now we see the mall as having diminishing significance overall in people’s day to day lives, and even big box retail is taking a hit.

In my mind I had seen this trend having an impact on the malls, the big box retailers, and on many, many, many strip malls; but not on Main Streets. After all, Main Street retail was either of the elite, boutique type to have survived during the height of the mall era or, conversely, it was already “mostly dead” with the only thing left to do being to “search the pockets for loose change”.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Northampton, which I would have placed among the unassailable elites in Main Street retailing is losing storefront after storefront. A family member told me that in Mt Kisco, New York; a town surrounded by lots of money and with a great Main Street, city leaders have had to form a task force to address what they view as an alarming number of empty storefronts. Here in Springfield MGM seems to have given up on trying to get another retailer into its billion dollar resort complex and is turning half its vacant space into another bar: 

All the while (as I previously mentioned) another promised retail development on Main Street has been shrunk down to a single drug store transforming this:

Into this:

In my neighborhood what keeps the storefronts alive are the Italian markets, local restaurants, take out places, and the bodegas. Apart from that we still have a florist, one coffee shop which isn’t part of a chain, a package store, a local pharmacy, a CBD retailer hoping to sell legal weed soon, a thrift shop, a bank, a dry cleaner, an African Market, a phone store, a physical therapist, a chiropractor, and 6 empty storefronts. 

Some busy blocks:

The empty ones:

That’s all more or less to the south. To the north, directly across from MGM there is almost nothing. There is a day care center and a post office. One jeweler is vacating its space further up the street to be closer to MGM, a barber shop displaced by MGM moved across the street, and there are eight vacant storefronts. Some have been empty since before MGM was even thought of, but they stay vacant now because the property owners clearly believe that there is a chance to make that one big deal which will set them up for life, as opposed to doing the moderately hard work of creating or leasing to a successful enterprise themselves.

The jeweler moving in from up the street:

In all these buildings right across from MGM; a barber shop, the post office, and lots of empty storefronts:

Red Rose has shown that proximity to MGM can be a great thing, thousands of people are willing to leave the MGM footprint and spend their money elsewhere; strange though, those same people insist on getting something in return, they seem unwilling to just slip the cash through the mail slot of any empty shop. Given that what properties have changed hands have gone for a higher prices I could see higher property taxes creating enough pain to get the speculators to sell. It may be a two edged sword, however. What damage will it do to the ma and pa shops just down the street who do their best just to survive? 

It wouldn’t be the first time that unrealistic expectations managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Not on the List

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The interplay of data and personal experience are what I use to understand what’s happening to my community. What I glean from my own experience of course tends to be too narrow to wholly depend on, and most of the data I can find is often too broad to be sure just how accurate it is with respect to urban neighborhoods in Springfield.

I pay close attention as I skip from one news aggregator to another so as to find studies which might include meaningful information. When the data is grouped state by state I can be fairly certain it will be useless as Boston and its environs weigh so heavily and possess a reality which is so distinct from Western Massachusetts. Often metro data is only released for the nation’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas, a category into which Springfield does not fall, though it does fall in the top 100. If the data is for the 100 largest cities or for cities over 200,000, then I am also out of luck.

As I have mentioned before, a frustrating element of that is that what defines a city or even a metro area in the United States varies so much, especially from region to region. Birmingham, Alabama, for example, is “a city” with over 200,000 people and is a top 50 metro but its city population of 25% more than Springfield is stretched out over 500% of the land area with roughly the same calculation holding for the metro. It’s no one’s fault of course; cities and metro areas haven’t come to define themselves for the purposes of distorting data or hiding information but it the result is the same.

Even in the same tiny state two apparently very similar cities such as Springfield and Worcester are actually very different. Worcester has 15% more people on 15% more land, but Worcester is not contiguous to a single community which is also a city; Worcester contains one tiny island of urban density in what is otherwise a thoroughly suburban and rural location. Springfield, on the other hand, is merely the most populous of a set of 5 long established cities. 

Look at these screenshots taken at the same scale of each region:


Add to that the fact that Worcester is both in reality, and according to the Census Bureau, part of the enormous, and enormously successful Boston Metropolitan Area, whereas Springfield sits very much in isolation from Boston and, in reality, much more closely connected economically and culturally to Connecticut whether we or they like it or not.

Still, finding analysis which includes Springfield is important to understanding what might be happening and what might be changing in the city. 

By the same token I know that even my own lived experience and my interpretation of that experience can be skewed. It took a colleague whose wife was a social worker in the neighborhood where most of my friends lived while I was growing up to make clear to me just how different it was from 40 years ago. The slow pace of that change made it invisible to me despite visiting my parents week after week during all those decades. I hadn’t noticed how different the reality was from what I thought I was seeing all those years. I remember how different the lived experience of a young Black woman working at a phone store was from my own while living in the same neighborhood for the same number of years, and how she felt as though violence was all around her, meanwhile I had seen and experienced none.

With all of this as a much overwrought prologue I was eager to peruse a publication of the Manhattan Institute on America’s Stagnating Metropolitan Areas in order to take the data I would find and synthesize it with my own experience. There was a problem, or perhaps a dearth of them: Springfield was not listed among them. There were the usual suspects: Syracuse, Rochester, Pittsfield, even New Haven and Albany, but Springfield was not on the list. This was, this is, fairly remarkable. 

The focus of the report would normally put a bullseye on Springfield, but, according to this report, the city no longer qualified.

What this implies, of course, is that by dint of whatever larger forces are at work Springfield has managed to work its way into the middle category of mid sized cities which, while certainly not among the red hot, are no longer stagnating; a sort of “extra medium”. I don’t rule out that the exclusion of Springfield from the list is mostly an anomaly, but even for it to be possible to be left off anomalously is a step up for a region so long dogged by negativity, pessimism, and decline.

John Michael Greer writes about the British often struggling to find a general who could take overwhelming numerical, technical, and weapons related superiority and use it to achieve the “not impossible task” of gaining a military victory. It feels as though Springfield is in someways managing to do something similar: blessed with being a metro area with renowned cultural and educational institutions, access to fantastic recreational opportunities, and an amazing cache of low cost, high quality housing, and located smack dab in the middle of the world’s most prosperous mega region, we’re managing to not sink into the absolute depths of economic depression: Goooooo Us!

The Belgian Bronze

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Any long time reader of Rational Urbanism who is eager for me to get back to my roots will be happy to know that I’m about to repeat an old favorite. Overwhelmingly, when someone writing about urban issues, white flight, gentrification, and topics of that ilk uses the words “bad schools” or “good schools”, they have no idea what they are talking about.

This classic reared its ugly head once again in just the last week when an article published on City Lab referred to up-zoning legislation in California allowing for the creation of multi-family homes in single family neighborhoods “that are near”, among other things, “good schools”. 

This is not very difficult to unpack. Data proves that the children of the wealthy tend to be much better prepared to achieve success in education. Where the wealthy have clustered their children will be assigned and attend the same schools, which will receive the appellation “good” because the agglomeration of so many well prepared learners at the same facility will cause the general student body to over achieve. Yes, the community being wealthy, it will also likely dote on the system such that it has all of the bells and whistles of whatever the trends are in education; from top notch athletic facilities to the best internet access, et cetera, but those, according to the data, are not what brings success; that derives from being a school which educates the children of the wealthy.

All of this functions in the opposite manner in schools which educate clusters of the children of the poor, although in Springfield, for example, many of the facilities which the children of the poor attend are newer and have more of the bells and whistles than most suburban schools in the area due to a commitment by the Bay State to urban public schools, and because most of Springfield’s suburbs have not achieved the level of prosperity of those near Boston. Comparing Minnechaug High School, or East Longmeadow High School, to Springfield’s Putnam Vocational, Commerce, Sci-Tech, or even what is now the grand-daddy, (in terms of how long it has been since it was last renovated) Central High School, and not only is there no stark difference in favor of the wealthier suburban school, but the city schools are much more up to date.

That said, Minnechaug, just to select one suburban school out-performs any of the aforementioned city schools in terms of graduation rates, SAT scores, MCAS scores, and any other measure you’d like to choose; so it is a “good school”. As a thought experiment let’s take the just the student body of Minnechaug and exchange it with the student body of which ever Springfield high school you think is the worst of a bunch of “bad schools”. (If you aren’t familiar with the Springfield area you can do the same with similar schools in your region.)

Will the test scores and graduation rates STAY with the buildings and with the faculty and staff, or will they GO with the students? The answer is obvious. So when you read “good school ” or “bad school” no one is talking about the actual facility or the teachers that work there, they are talking about the children who attend the school. 

The key issue then becomes will a particular child do better among a group of children who are very prepared to learn if he or she is not, and conversely, will a child who is very prepared for learning still excel when placed among many children who are not? While pointing at statistics, when most parents are very concerned only about their particular child, doesn’t provide as much comfort as one might seek, the data shows that the unprepared child isn’t much helped by being surrounded by very prepared children, and the well prepared do not suffer much at all from being educated with the less prepared. In other words, your child is the most important element of your child’s education and the choice of school is less important than it seems.

As to the terms “good school” and “bad school”, to really know if a school is particularly good or bad one would need to do the very heavy statistical lifting of comparing what we know of demographic realities like family income, and English language learning status and their relation to educational outcomes to see if, when compared to expected outcomes, a school over-performs or under-performs; the former being good schools, and the latter being bad. 

My favorite analogy is this: If I regularly take 11 random men off the streets of Belgium and win the bronze medal in basketball at the Summer Olympics over and over, am I a better or a worse coach than the guy who takes an NBA All-Star team and usually wins the Gold? Would an all-star caliber player suffer being coached by someone who has become so good at developing among all sorts of individuals a certain knowledge, understanding, and ability in the game? What about the random Belgian bloke? How much do you think he’d get from the all-star coach in comparison to me if I consistently created teams able to compete at the bronze medal level?

As much as we might want our schools to be a place where every child arrives with an equal chance at success, and as admirable as it is to give the best education we can to the disadvantaged, there is no magic wand which will end the inequality of outcomes in our schools as long as there is, and there will always be, inequality in our society.