Author Archives: Steve

Everything is just fine here, but instead of spending 5 days a week intermingling with hundreds of teenagers I find myself in front of a screen trying to pretend I’m actually teaching; instead of my time writing for Rational Urbanism being a quiet release of tension it puts me on a small screen again. Typing.

I will make a decision by the end of June regarding the future of this website and blog. I have two essays in differing stages of development. One called “Whiplash” discusses how many of the things spawned by our current circumstances may indeed be giving us clues as to our future, but in some cases the future may slingshot us 180 degrees in the opposite direction, energy prices being the most obvious example, but many, many assumptions being made right now could be very, very wrong.

The other is called “No True —–man” and it’s a screed against our individual inability to check our own ideologies. As a lefty I am fully aware, for example, that the less than ideal qualities and characteristics of the Soviet Empire are not an advertisement for socialism and I can admit that the fact that Warsaw Pact nations didn’t seem to embody the ideals that Marx, Engels, and Trotsky, and on on and on, could, in fact, be an indication that at its core the “from each according to ability, to each according to need” ethos won’t work, however beautiful a theoretical model it might seem. The refusal of: urbanists, Austrian economists, Keynesians, Environmentalists, and on and on and on to learn the same lessons from their obvious failures is stunning to me, if not surprising. 

Stay tuned…for a little while at least.

I feel as though I have been left to sort through the detritus and analyze the pronouncements of a host of prognosticators. On one side those who can see the way in which urban America, never short of bogeymen, has become the Big Apple Pie face of Covid-19 and who, therefore, are predicting the post-coronavirus demise of cities in North America. These predictions come from both those who saw the trend toward affluence in places like San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Washington DC as a pestilence in an of itself and are now convinced that these places with become the primary long term victims of this modern plague, and those who have seen urbanity in all its guises as fatally flawed and flowing inexorably forward into catastrophic failure. 

I have read some interesting responses from urbanists like myself who counter these pronouncements of Henry V at Agincourt with numbers and statistical analysis; with facts and figures. The problem, as is often the case, is that the facts almost don’t enter into it. (Not to mention “the fact” that many of the anti-urbanist arguments are nearly irrefutable; regarding public transit and density, or private access to outdoor spaces among other thing). Unless there is a prolonged, well documented, and publicized evisceration of the American hinterlands and suburbia which takes place as cities go on to demonstrably overcome this pandemic and come back to life, the emotional take-away from this event will be, apart from individual tragedy, urban crisis.

There is at the end of all of this a giant “however”, and that is that despite the fact that Americans greatly prefer suburbia to cities, and have done so for as long as suburbia has existed, it is not a living arrangement that can be sustained and, simply put, things that can’t go on forever, don’t. 

Talking dollars and cents, which is important right now: For my wife and me, our “nut” living here barely rises to $2,000 a month including taxes and insurance and utilities and groceries and all that. Yes, energy prices have tanked, but anyone who can’t see that this isn’t going to lead to energy becoming unaffordium in the future, whether by prices going up or incomes dropping, isn’t listening to the people with an intimate knowledge of the space. 

Apart from us, and a handful of friends, almost no one who lives where I live “wants” to live here now in the sense that it represents any location on the continuum of preferred options that they would sketch out for themselves in some kind of ideal reality; and yet here they are. I am fully ready for the value of my home to drop 50% or more. Given that I must live somewhere the value of my home was never as significant to me as the cost and, as a function of that, my ability to use it to make money whether as commercial space or as an apartment building. 

Of my suburban and exurban friends, family, and co-workers very few have contemplated how they might use their property to produce, create, or at least provide some income. The cost and market value of their properties has been many multiples of mine and those appraisals are significant to most of them both practically and psychologically. Some of them will be underwater with a 10% drop in home values, all might be with a 30% drop, and they are making multiple payments for cars and insurance adding up to a thousand dollars a month, with property taxes of a thousand dollars a month. Their lives, like our markets, were priced to perfection.

I wrote about one particular case.

I happened to see, not long ago, where Springfield was very high on a list of cities where people had owned their home for the longest average time. Being honest, that is because values here have been stagnant for decades, and that primarily because it is not a hot, in-demand, market; very few people particularly want to live here and many have stayed who might have preferred to leave, and would have, had their home only increased enough in value for a huge Florida-Arizona retirement payday. I don’t think many Springfield people ever felt assured that their home was a ticket to uber-wealth.

Is this an argument against post virus economic stability in high cost cities as well? Of course it is, and real estate, in Boston, and San Francisco, and Seattle, and Portland, and New York and many, many other places all around the United States was obviously once again in a bubble long before trouble started brewing in Wuhan. What I don’t know, and what I don’t think anyone can be certain of right now, is which places will be able to recover first from an initial price collapse and general deflation, and then from the stuttering, halting relocalization of industry, a 70’s style energy reality, and the ensuing inflation whether of “hyper”, “stag”, or some other variety. 

People, a large number of people, were never going to return to the small, decrepitating traditional Rust Belt cities because it was their first choice. The initial response to this crisis may very well be for everyone who can to either depart or to stay away from cities of all shapes and sizes, but an urge for economic survival may drive people of modest means to cities regardless of preference. As I have said many, many times: this is a good place to be poor. In the past I have thought of that as a description of conditions for the individual, but for our society at large it is also true. 

I’m impatient now for this stage of the crisis to end and for the next to begin. I would be lying if I said that I haven’t taken a certain amount of pleasure from watching the disaster unfold; no joy at the death and suffering of others, none at all, but from the fact that people who not only ignored all warnings to be prepared and to expect the unexpected, and to add to that were not only dismissive, but who openly mocked me for contemplating discontinuity, are opening their eyes to the obvious fragility of our society.

When MGM was planning construction on its billion dollar resort a block from my house I asked, as a member of the Historical Commission, if there would be put into place a construction bond to guarantee completion of the project if some sort of economic dislocation were to occur before the project was completed: I was literally laughed at. The idea that anything might occur in a three year window which might completely alter the viability of the plan was unthinkable!. Did I anticipate Covid-19? Not at all. I anticipated that events can take control and that it is an absolute certainty that at some point our tomorrow will not look like yesterday.

Some years ago when the case of Amanda Knox was becoming quite well known here in the United States I watched an hour long news program on the matter and came away with no opinion regarding her guilt or innocence. What struck me most was that while the Italian and British public were certain of her culpability in the matter, Americans looking at the same information were just as confirmed in their belief that she was being wrongfully accused. It seemed obvious that no one in the public was really looking at the data: Brits wanted someone to be punished in the death of an English woman abroad, the Italians wanted it to be a foreigner, and we couldn’t imagine a nice West Coast girl ever doing such a thing.

Listening to the Useful Idiots podcast this week I heard Matt Taibbi discuss the experience of a molecular biologist in England dealing with Covid-19 and treatment options. In Europe he was finding generally mixed views on hydroxychloroquine, with people looking for better understanding given a wide range of experiences. In dealing with Americans he found absolute certainty both for and against the treatment depending completely on the political views of the person he was communicating with; and so he no longer views information from the United States as being at all useful on the topic. As Emerson says, knowing your party I can anticipate your argument. 

At this point I am contemplating the creation of a database with links to articles from ZeroHedge predicting Urban Unrest. One piece had “Rioting and Looting” in the headline without a single reference to either in the text. I am disheartened at what so far seems to be the disproportionate impact on places I care deeply about like Spain, and cities in the Northeast, but I may have to accept that this outbreak will be another setback, perhaps an enormous one, for places that I had seen making progress. 

I live, quite intentionally, on a bus line and closely connected to what had been a growing hub for regional transit. My retirement plans included a monthly budget for a bus pass instead of a car. As skeptical as I have always been of the back to the city “Great Inversion” narrative (to me it seems to be more of the same with young people flocking to a select few “Superstar Cities” while third tier places like my hometown continue to decline) I have always hoped to be proven wrong. 
There have been paradoxes in the technosphere in the past where the logistical ability to work separately has led to greater concentration, but if working remotely becomes a new norm will soft demand downtowns like Springfield experience a total collapse in the value of commercial real estate? Is this homeless man sleeping on the porch of the newly renovated multi-million dollar shared work space an anomaly of the stay-at-home epoch or is it a harbinger?

Until yesterday every voice I had heard on the matter, including my own, was expressing chagrin that the coronavirus would provide cover to those whose venality and greed had weakened the foundations of our economic system and our society. Everything can be blamed on Covid-19 and so the corrupt stock buy back schemes and the excessive leveraging which always would have led to disaster will never be punished. Dr Pippa Malmgren expressed a completely different view: Perhaps the obfuscatory character of this global pandemic will allow everyone to move beyond blame, whatever the moral hazards, and on to rational responses to our current circumstances. 

Every moment, every ounce of energy dedicated to retribution won’t be spent dealing with the issues at hand. We need to be thoughtful. I do think that many of the voices calling for “America to be opened up” are sociopaths with a political agenda, and as an individual sitting just outside the target demographic for an ICU bed with a respirator I take it a little bit personally, but they do have a point; at one extreme of a Laffer type curve of production we all die because no one is producing anything, even if at the other extreme our systems break down because too many people are critically ill at the same time. There may not ever be a vaccine, there still isn’t one for HIV. People may not ever achieve immunity, the common cold is a coronavirus. I have no idea, but experts in the field know that they don’t know; I should at least admit that much ignorance.

A dictator wanting trains to be on time doesn’t make punctuality undemocratic. Not obsessing about the source of an idea, but rather weighing the merit of the idea in and of itself, might be the key to getting ourselves out of this in the best condition possible.

My wife and I just finished watching a Netflix series from France: Le Bazar de la Charite or, by its English title, the Bonfire of Destiny. Even the ugliness was beautiful. I don’t believe in being born out of time or in living in the wrong century but I know that for whatever reason the 19th Century forms the bedrock of my aesthetic. When I have the choice it dominates what I read, what I listen to, and even which period pieces I binge watch. I live in a 19th century home surrounded by other 19th century buildings in a city which perhaps reached its zenith in the late 19th century.

I’m driven by my own subjective desires to want certain things to be true, and certain places to thrive ahead of others, but I know that destiny will be, at best, indifferent to my wishes. I have no doubt but that, at the banquet of consequences at which we will feast, I will do my best to dine on those which I enjoy while avoiding those I find distasteful; but it may be that I will find them all distasteful. From these pages, from my pen (as it were) I’ve never tried to convince people who hated cities that they should love them. I don’t think I’ve ever written an attack on the suburban or the Sun Belt lifestyle. Perhaps others have, or in defending rationally held views about economic viability or safety and security I have pointed out objective differences, and even errors in assessment, that people make regarding urban areas which by their very nature are critical of cul de sacs or horizontal development, but I’ve never told anyone they were wrong to live there.

As I wrote weeks ago, events are in control. If this is the moment when sheer force of will can no longer bend apparent facts to our whim, then reality’s unmerciful judgement will fall upon whatever it will fall whatever the sophistry used to defend it. I am reassessing every day and finding myself satisfied in some areas, but less so in others. In truth I’m as excited as I am trepidatious regarding what will follow. I do believe that evidence would show that there is a great deal more animus projected onto impoverished Rust Belt cities than onto strip malls and big box power centers in the culture at large; perhaps because that IS the “culture at large”. That said, I think we will all be dealing with enough in our individual circumstances that whatever schadenfraude we may experience at the decline of some “other” may need to wait until we see how well the things we cherish fare in the coming discontinuity.

My wife hopped in the car and got some pre-paid fresh vegetables put in the trunk at our “food desert” farm store and then went for a drive around the neighborhood. Construction was moving forward on MGM’s Wahlburgers, and the new Wayfinders building just north of the railroad arch looked finished. Nothing was boarded up that wasn’t boarded up before Covid-19 hit Springfield, and most storefronts were open as convenience stores, phone stores, and take out restaurants are “essential businesses”; I suppose if we had a Gucci store it would be draped in plywood right now.

I was contemplating the state of landlords and their tenants on my block over the last few days. My neighbor to the north purchased his 4 unit building 20 years ago for 30 some odd thousand dollars, he’s had at least two of his tenants since before I bought my building 10 years ago, one unit has been empty since the Day Spa closed, and the other unit is occupied with a relative newcomer. A friend owns the unit just on the other side of that; The Springfield GIS map says he paid $125,000 for his four unit structure not quite a decade ago. On the other side, the attorney purchased the two buildings, one commercial, the other residential, for a combined $185,000 twenty years ago. 

The point is, of course, none of these buildings were purchased at heroic valuations requiring tens of thousands of dollars to amortize; my guess is that none of them have a mortgage and that the rent is likely at or under the $1,000 a month level per unit. The larger apartment building behind the house was sold for just over a million dollars two years ago and has been undergoing renovation with about half the units remaining occupied; I think the idea was to capture a slightly more upscale clientele with renovated kitchens and bathrooms, and access to off street parking through another property they own across the street. There could be some danger in those properties, but two million dollars combined for around 50 units isn’t exactly Park Avenue.

The church and the school are solid, while the Develop Springfield properties across the street will soon be available for pennies on the dollar I’d wager as DS seems to be a zombie non-profit whose time has clearly passed and its corporate backers will seemingly be looking to sell-off and be done once the renovation of the seminary building is completed. 

That’s the lot. It’s not a random sample, but it does circumscribe the properties of greatest concern to me coming out of the Covid frying pan and into the post corona depression. Crashing early and getting a head start may not have been a conscious choice for most of my neighbors, but it still stands us all in good stead moving forward. 

I saw some kind of ad for an on-line home selling app where the purported home owner was talking about how to begin the process; the home was a suburban ranch with a two car garage surrounded by a white picket fence. Value in this simulation: $801,000. Or about the same as a 20 unit apartment building in my neighborhood…with a chain link fence though, there’s the key!

I still see $100,000 as a little on the high side for a house. Sometimes Liz and I have debated whether or not my Springfield Strategy is scale-able; If everyone were willing to live here, wouldn’t home values skyrocket. Maybe. But if everyone looked at a price tag of $200,000 for a single family home, with or without a picket fence, and openly scoffed then maybe not. 

Liz’s job was actually a product of the last recession so we’re holding on to the expectation that her employment will continue. Teaching is acyclical so I could see some reasonable community requests for give backs if deflation occurs, or wages coming no where near the rate of inflation should that appear sooner rather than later. We can last a couple years on our savings even if our jobs were to disappear.

I’ve always rejected the boo-hoo “it’s impossible to make it on one income” narrative that’s constantly pushed by the mainstream. It’s impossible to make it on one income if you tie a rope around your waist and then to the bumper of the Jones’s BMW, sure.  Doing the math, we could get by on 25% of our current income without renting the basement apartment.

But what about my neighbors? I see the same people going to the same soup kitchens as before. The schools are distributing 3 meals per day, including weekends, and still are giving out about half as many as during a usual school day. They’ve made clear that “the student doesn’t need to be present and no ID is required to get food; “Wink, wink”. We’ve got being poor and needy down to a science! The MEDIAN…HOUSEHOLD… income in my zip code is in the mid teens, a $1,200, $2,400, $2,900(!) stimulus check would go a long way. 

My people here aren’t much for social distancing, I’ll say that. The coronavirus could hit pretty hard, but the population in the Hispanic community also skews pretty young with, again, only Boston in all New England having a larger school age population. This is a great place to be poor, which makes being middle class here feel like being rich. I’d be lying if I said I’m confident regarding the future, but the crash was inevitable given the fiscal, monetary, economic, and logistical decisions that have been made over the last 50 years. Covid-19 was the pin, but this mother of all bubbles was always looking to pop. I am hoping that being a fair distance from center, like down near the wrinkly blow hole of a balloon, makes our experience of the sudden deflation less explosive, and less damaging, and gives us better opportunities to respond.

(Values didn’t follow that little red trend line either, they skyrocketed!)

If this essay feels like a bit of an I told you so to anyone sitting in a half a million dollar home with no means to pay the mortgage going forward, then I’m happy to know I’ve hit the mark. Housing has been over-valued for 70 years and ridiculously over-valued for most of the last 40. That’s ok, so has my job. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, and it’s important, but I’m not sure society will be able to afford the current going rate in the future. I take it now because it’s being offered but I do assume the relative value of my wages is about to decline, and my “pension”? If the value of what I get is 30% of what I’ve been promised I’ll be fine. I hope 30% is a reasonable expectation. We’ll see. 

I recommend that everyone start with the mental readjustments now. If I’m just an alarmist, what’s the harm? Is it too late to sell the house in Armonk and buy the place in Poughkeepsie? Probably. But that’s not my fault, that’s yours.

There’s a dictum I heard for the very first time, and then multiple times, over the last few days which applies to how I feel at the moment; before a crisis most preparation seems excessive and yet during the crisis feels inadequate.

In terms of food nearly everyone who saw our pantry made a comment or a quip about pasta and beans or the like. If they noticed our two kitchens had two refrigerators with two freezers packed with food the jests would only be magnified. If you’ve read any of Johnny Sanphillippo’s posts on food storage, and shame on you if you haven’t, it won’t surprise you to hear that in comparison we are absolute pikers and this pandemic is giving us time to see and understand what we need to do take our preparation to the next level.

In this particular emergency electricity hasn’t been an issue but if it had been it’s easy to see that our stores of protein and other things would have been inadequate. Liz does a great job of canning tomatoes and relishes and things which don’t require pressure canning but when she makes a bit too much Hungarian goulash or pumpkin soup we freeze it. That has worked fine, but it’s easy to see any number of circumstances in which having her beef stew sitting on a shelf would be preferable to it taking up more space in a freezer.

Our gardening has intensified every year now for a decade, and given the fact that we seem to be inextricably caught up in this aging process, we’ve tried to move more and more toward perennials or near perennials like fruit trees, strawberries, grapes, asparagus, blueberries, and (a so far failed experiment in) hazelnuts. There is some nutrition in that distribution, as well as some seasonal variation but there’s not a lot in the way of calories. We don’t ever expect to be able to satisfy all of our nutritional needs from our little urban garden plot; La Granja. However adding some beans and potatoes to our usual mix of tomatoes, peppers, pumpkin, cucumbers, and lettuce is probably a good idea.

I’m happy with our water storage situation. As soon as the forecast showed an all clear regarding solidly below freezing temperatures, which is to say last weekend, I hooked up the rain barrels: they filled up in one rainstorm. The next day I hooked up the tote and…voilà: hundreds of gallons of water to keep our plants thriving. Liz has really taken to worm-farming and so our composting has really improved. The worms make some truly fine soil for planting, leaves and coffee grounds in one compost barrel give us some slightly less refined soil, and we use the kitchen waste compost at the base of any new beds or planters. The “worm tea” gives us liquid fertilizer, and I’ve spread the ash from the wood stove around liberally in the “orchard”.

(Now full!)

Our relationship with Copper Hill Farm has given us real peace of mind. The farm is thriving more than ever in the current circumstance and they find themselves selling nearly all the produce they have available, with eggs being truly “a box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid”! I recommend you…yes you…do the same. Find a local farmer, figure out some way to go above and beyond to help them survive economically with an understanding that at some future time they’ll be there for you. Greg shares our views on many, many things and our relationship is personal and meaningful. Use your social networks, I guarantee that somewhere nearby there’s a small scale farmer that could use some back-up.

I think that food price inflation is inevitable given the current circumstances. To stay ahead of it our plan is to do more dry storage of grains, beans, and legumes that we use all the time anyway, and to slowly over time use pressure canning to store the excess of what Liz makes us for lunch and dinner all the time anyway. We plan to continue to scale up our growing while we add more seed saving, indoor growing, and cold framing of lettuces and greens.

The lesson from my parents’ basement stays with us however: my parents level jumped from having some extra cans of soup and such along with some powdered milk in the basement to buying hundreds of pounds of soy product which they stored in barrels which, surprise surprise, after 40 years were only disposed of by leaving them out in the backyard for deer to feed on. It was nasty.

Lesson: Don’t go too far too fast.

I hope where ever you are preparation wise this experience is useful in helping you plan for the next, inevitable, discontinuity.

For some reason my gardening activities have been a bit more focused this year.

We planted hundreds of garlic bulbs last fall because the weather and availability made it impossible for us to plant at Copper Hill Farm:

The asparagus bed is due for its first year of full production:

We’ll see.

We’ve got four beds of onions and other such things:

The peas are in:

We planted lettuce and spinach last week:

The strawberry plants and the lone blueberry bush may give us a few berries here and there as usual:

We’ve got seedlings going out to the mini-greenhouse on sunny days, and sitting on little heating pads the rest of the time. We over wintered some pepper plants which worked well last year:

We’ll get grapes for sure. Peaches, probably. Apples? Doubt it. We’ve started growing potatoes in pots.

My neighbor has a plot almost the same size as ours that he allows to fill with weeds every summer. As soon as we go into lockdown I plan to ask him if we can plant some veggies there; it gets more sun than our space:

We’ve got the seeds. We could grow a lot of food on that lot of land.

I wrote these two essays for StrongTowns almost two years ago:

The Elements of a Resilient Life

In the Face of an Uncertain Future

I don’t suppose I need to convince anyone whose been reading my blog for more than a few months that my overall outlook is apocalyptic. I’ve often softened that perspective by explaining that having been raised “Latter Day Saint” it was not surprising that my neural pathways would contain deep ruts connecting events and scenarios for the End of Days. That said, I think the primary motivator of my apocalypticism has been the fact that I live in a society that has been in overshoot relative to its resource base for most of my adult lifetime and things that can’t go on forever generally don’t.

Regarding the current trigger event for what certainly seems to be the inflection point of discontinuity for industrial society I have to give Chris Martenson at Peak Prosperity 100% of the credit for sounding the alarm and giving Elizabeth and me time to become at least a little bit more logistically and emotionally prepared for what was to come. In late January we started to discuss at our morning conversations over coffee and our evening conversations, sometimes over a small glass of wine, what we ought to do to be able to spend an extended period of time at home. Being natural born preppers, and with helpful tips from Johnny Sanphillippo at GranolaShotgun and some of my wife’s family members, we looked around and thought that what we really needed to do was make sure we had what we thought we had and…”steady as she goes”.

On February first my wife sent a text to a family member in Westchester County who is a “first responder” in both his full time and part time careers. His wife has a very significant position in a portion of the health care system which is at the front line of pandemic response. My wife listed some things that we had done and were doing to be ready for what was clearly headed this way regarding what is now called Covid-19 and this is the response she got quoting a local leader:

It is ironic of course that their community is now the location of one of the first clusters of the coronavirus here in the United States. 

Is this just a long, drawn out, “I told you so”? 

A little bit, sure.

Mostly however, it’s about improving my understanding regarding what I should expect in terms of the responses to what comes after.

There has been, at least in my experience, a weirdly political component to the acceptance and therefore a rational response to Covid-19 among the people connected to me via Facebook. I pretty much quit that social networking platform 2 years ago or more as far as posting my perspective, (or even photographs of my dinner time ravioli) but I do enjoy lurking from time to time to assess the zeitgeist. Among my former students who had joined the military, and the conservative Mormons of my youth there was truly aggressive and pointed mocking of those who were sounding the alarm regarding what was happening first in China, and later in Italy.

One case in particular, a former missionary acquaintance of mine who was also a physician was posting all about this being much less serious than the flu and that panic and hysteria were the only real problems connected with Covid-19. 

What has followed has been “radio silence”. 

The military people have transitioned from mocking those who were getting prepared to threats, always involving firearms, relative to (Wait for it!) the inevitable breakdown of cities at their cores and the ensuing bands of marauding savages:

Weeks before:

With the economic downturn/Greater Depression I think the expectation should be the same. Most people will mock anyone who presents a viewpoint that energy, environmental, and economic realities are going to obligate most of us to change our expectations regarding the future in terms of what we view as normal. As reality becomes impossible to deny there won’t be any cathartic acknowledgement that they were wrong in any way, but rather an understandable fear followed by anger will likely cause them to leapfrog over rational responses right into aggressive threats towards people who more quickly assimilated the new reality and so prepared for it.

The transformation of prepping into hoarding in the vernacular has been interesting. My wife and I haven’t been out of the house for over a week; we haven’t taken any toilet paper from any store shelves; we haven’t been filling our shopping carts with canned goods: Because we always maintain a pantry, we’ve practiced storing food and preparing meals from scratch for years and years. That means that we’ve left space for others who were less willing or less able to do so now to obtain what they need. I imagine communities with large numbers of Mormons, who put great focus on preparedness, have seen a little less chaos in terms of filling pantries with the basics.

 Beyond that we informed our friends and family weeks and weeks ago that perhaps THIS was an important time to take stock of your household and contemplate what a week or a month at home might signify. I think we can point to at least four families that weren’t out during what has been a trying time in the world looking to purchase basic necessities. The problem isn’t so much with those of us who have engaged in preparing for the unexpected as it is with those who’ve had the wherewithal to do so and haven’t.

Do everything you can to stay out of debt, have some money in reserve, have some food and water set aside for emergencies, learn to garden, get to know your neighbors, make yourself more resilient in every way you can. The more of us who can do this who follow through and do it the more focus can be placed on helping people who lack the resources to be prepared. My wife and I have had friends, colleagues, and family members who have asked us for advice on these things but who have completely rejected it as impractical: Instead of setting a price point for a home and finding an acceptable one within those constraints they’ve committed themselves to thousands and thousands of dollars a month in mortgage payments for homes valued in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars with property taxes of a thousand dollars a month. Add to that two monthly car payments and correspondingly high insurance payments, and a comfort level with consumer debt that boggles the mind and, like the economy these behaviors rest on, in a crisis there is almost no resilience. 

In all the things I’ve written over the last 8 years I never once mentioned global pandemic as a concern, and I assume there are a whole handful of crises I’ve never contemplated which may become realities. What I have done is listened to people whom I respect regarding general preparedness. I know that I’m not prepared for everything, but even that awareness is of itself of incredible value. It keeps me in a constant state of auto-evaluation. Even this week I’ve reached out to people (mostly Johnny at GS) for not just advice, but an honest critique of where I am and what I’ve done. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s never too late to start, but the sooner the better for all of us.

I was at the Bernie 2020 rally in Springfield on Friday evening (a week ago) and it was an enlightening experience. My wife and her family were all over the event volunteering; which was the only way I was able to get in. The main arena of the MassMutual Center was occupied by the AHL Thunderbirds and so the event was limited to 4-5 thousand people. When I made my way down a half an hour before the rally the convention center exhibition hall was already filled to capacity and the line still stretched, literally, all around the building and was obligated to snake its way up and down Court Street.

(I removed my Tulsi 2020 pin when I was given entrance to the “Invited Guests” area.)

I was disappointed that, apart from some references to the military-industrial complex, Senator Sanders never once even mention the 5…6…is it 7 wars the military is now fighting? I’m still voting for Tulsi on Super Tuesday. From an urbanist standpoint ending the War on Drugs, rebuilding our infrastructure, better funding poorer school districts, and affordable housing were the major elements of his entertaining and impassioned speech.

In 2016 Springfield went heavily for Hillary in the Democratic primary. Yes, the former Goldwater Republican crushed the candidate who actually marched for civil rights; such are machine politics. Springfield was chosen for the non-Boston Massachusetts rally site in part, I’m sure, to reach out to Black and Hispanic voters; there weren’t too many people of color in the audience however.( “Joe 30330” took Springfield this time around. “What do we want? Nothing! When do we want it? When it’s convenient for the donor class!”)

For me what always makes the cheers (and there were thunderous ovations) for tackling the homeless crisis and for building “10 million units of affordable housing” somewhat irritating is that almost none of the people cheering live in places that the poor could even begin to find affordable:

I applauded, but I did add not completely inaudibly: “Yeah, no worries, none of it will go anywhere near where ‘you’ live!” Of course, I’m not against affordable housing either, I’m surrounded by it and, if one takes the term more literally than intended, I live in it: <$30 a square foot. As I’ve expressed before, I don’t think we’d do the poor any favors by randomly plopping “affordable housing” in suburban areas with no public transit, no walkable access to food or services and, even if they could access them, products which have been bid up in price by their wealthy neighbors. (Corollary: a really smart, wealthy suburban friend of mine buys all his furniture at the Raymour and Flanagan in Springfield in order to pay less!)

I still find the enthusiasm hypocritical, much like the claims of disgust with our “Divided America” made by the granola-crunching left living above the Tofu Curtain, where their demands for social justice can be made at a safe distance from the actual struggle.  “Create affordable housing, but not near my enclave.”

Yes, I presume to know this because these people could live near the poor now if they wanted to, with all that entails, but they choose not to.

I have no idea if there is a solution to the problem of affordable housing but while we’re outspending the rest of the planet on armaments I’m not listening to claims that “we can’t afford” to build affordable housing. (Even if it’s by attaching 18 “worker housing” units to a $50 million market rate housing development on Court Square.)

I don’t think there are actual solutions to many socio-economic problems; there are only rational responses. If there is a problem it is the idea that there is “a solution”. The poor have trouble affording housing for the same reason they have trouble affording everything; not being able to afford things is what being poor means. Beyond that each of us make choices and trade-offs in order to afford what we can afford; as individuals we sacrifice on this in order to afford that, and at a societal level we have to decide what, if anything, we are willing to forego in order that others might have expanded affordability options. All of the options have consequences; it’s not hard to see how today section 8 rental guarantees and subsidies push up rents on those who don’t receive subsidies but who are still far from well-off. Giving renters “more rights” protects a vulnerable class of people but makes potential landlords…like me…reluctant to put units on the market: I have a perfectly good one bedroom apartment in my townhouse which sits empty because I don’t need the money badly enough to either do the hard work to avoid, or to deal with, a potential nightmare tenant. I know I’d be more likely to rent my space for less money if I thought I could have an easy time booting someone that wasn’t working out. I’m not saying that’s right morally or ethically; it’s just a fact.

I could see it going for $650 a month all utilities included. Maybe even $450. That’s fairly affordable.

I almost never hear the affordability question put in a Springfield context though, it’s usually looked at from a San Francisco or Cambridge perspective. They are so different that I can’t imagine the best response in each case would be identical…

(That is where last week’s post ended. I generally like to wrap up my essays with some sort of coherent message. My mind is elsewhere, there is a great deal more to contemplate regarding affordable housing for Springfield but for a relatively wealthy metro area housing costs are actually very low here but as I wrote weeks and weeks ago, events are in control now and there are other things to focus on.)