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The Future Is Not Now

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Definitions in the world of urbanism are amorphous at best. The word “city” itself is a very good example. We make judgements based on the population, economic output, crime, and numerous other things relative to the boundaries of a given city. These are the numerators, if you will. But these cities range in geographic size from areas of 10 square miles to almost 1,000. They can be as isolated from the next closest city as hundreds of miles, or they may border one or more other cities. In this sense we look at data which has been painstakingly compiled to give us as exact and precise a representation as can be achieved which we then use to compare to other communities whose “denominators” could not be more different making their use in comparison arithmetically pointless.

 I spent a few hours clicking through the Brookings Institute’s metro data and the newest census estimates for 2017 and that led me to wander through Wikipedia’s entries for various communities. I could see patterns developing within and between cities and metropolitan areas. Occasionally a data point would jump out at me: “Columbus has a population which is growing incredibly fast…for Ohio. Wait. It covers 200 square miles? Has it been annexing surrounding communities? It has. To gain access to Columbus’ water and sewer systems you must agree to be incorporated into the municipality.” If you just look at the raw data you’d think it was really bucking a trend; not so much.

The census data was sobering. After years of reading, granted from a self selected coterie of websites, that the trend toward suburbanization was over and that Millennials and Baby Boomers (Hey, that’s me!) were moving back to the cities the “we don’t have a dog in this fight” census numbers were showing a post 2007 crisis move back to even more suburbanization. I can hear the cheerleaders making excuses already: 

“Sure, suburban growth is outpacing urban growth again BUT, it’s no longer outgrowing it at as rapidly growing a rate as it was before!” 

“It’s not fair. Government regulators, bankers, and the developers all have their thumbs on the scale and so we can’t really see what people’s actual preferences are!”

My favorite one is that home values in urban areas are outpacing those in non urban ones. I have no doubt the numbers are correct, but it’s pretty easy to see how ridiculously hyperinflated values in a handful of enormous markets along with an epochal low in home values in urban areas generally makes this data meaningless for places like Springfield. From the very beginning of this blog I’ve made clear that this isn’t about just some generalized “urban living”, it’s about the places which have been struggling for survival for half a century. 

When the larger cities of Boston and New York started to pull out of their tailspin in the 1980’s I was among many who hoped that they were enormous canaries in the coal mine for smaller cities like Springfield. The change in Springfield’s skyline which took place in the 80’s, along with the construction of thousands of units of yuppie housing in the downtown were indicators that the private sector thought that the rebound was imminent. What is apparent in hindsight is that the back to the city movement, however organic in nature, was short circuited by centralization and mergers in the corporate sector. Looking at the four modernist Springfield scaled “skyscrapers” that dominate the horizon, three of which were built by financial entities headquartered in the city, not one of them is the headquarters of a bank or other financial institution today; in fact the City of Springfield does not have anything apart from a credit union headquartered here. Not a single bank headquarters where once there were at least half a dozen. 

The Dow of cities then, is a lot like the actual Dow Jones Average: it tells us a lot about a tiny sliver of the economy but it hides much more than it reveals.

Returning to the Brookings metro data for the northeast, it reveals some interesting things. As the narrative of the report suggests, those metro areas closest to Boston and New York City are starting to see spill over from the over-heated real estate markets of those two giant regions. Regions containing state capitals also have an employment base equivalent to a corporate headquarters or two which can provide stability. A city like Providence has proximity to Boston and a small state bureaucracy on its side, Syracuse has neither. That may very well explain a great deal more about their relative prosperity than the opening of a new coffee shop.

It’s fun to read and listen to enthusiasts who want to claim that this or that decision has made all the difference in creating, or not, prosperity in their urban neighborhoods when much larger processes are at work. A link from one of the aforementioned articles described a shortage of cities. I have no doubt that Manhattan would make do with a few square miles more of Manhattan, and San Francisco could double in size tomorrow fourth dimension-ally and it would not be nearly enough to slake the thirst for living in that city, but there are dozens of architecturally stunning, fine grained, walkable cities, with good bones and tremendous potential just rotting in the rain; because there is no demand for them. I’ve been told a dozen times that my townhouse would be worth a million dollars if it were in Boston. But it’s not in Boston. And that makes all the difference.

If there were really some general passion for urbanity it wouldn’t just be manifesting itself amidst all the usual suspects and expanding more or less only at their peripheries and in a few boutique neighborhoods in rapidly (once again) expanding areas in the Sun Belt and out west. I do believe that the future will be about walkable urbanism and local food production: traditional cities and productive farm land. But the future is not now. Given current realities, people want to live in McMansions in homogenous suburban communities, they want to live in hot climates without snow or even rain, and they want to commute 27 miles to work in an SUV on an 8 lane expressway. And they are going to continue to do so until they can’t. 

The irony, and perhaps even the paradox for me is that my community will suffer as long as the economy at large keeps moving forward at pace, or will prosper only relative to decline overall. Such is the fate of a natural born contrarian. I may not like it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to pretend that it isn’t true.

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Some interesting visuals from the Brookings’ data (Dark Blue is best, Dark Red worst, gray is middling):

Metro Springfield is a slightly more prosperous than average metro, and metro areas, as opposed to smaller, or “micro” regions are generally much more prosperous making this area fairly well to do:

The metro does incredible well in terms of inclusion, being considered number TWO in the country by Brookings’ measurements from 2006-2016:

Growth here is slow, but better than most metros the region:

In terms of population Springfield (at the top) chugs along at a snail’s pace, but unlike similar places like Rochester or Syracuse (highlighted), it does continue to grow:

And these estimates are as of July 1, 2017. Given that Hamden County has taken in more María refugees than any county outside Florida:

I assume that the trend will not only continue, but may quicken slightly.

The 9th (or 10th) Commandment

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I was the Community Liaison for the Armoury-Quadrangle Civic Association and we were engaged in an effort to beautify the neighborhood. I spent a lot of hours picking up trash in parks and on sidewalks and our executive board leveraged some services from the park department and the Business Improvement District to hang baskets of flowers and some newly designed banners. As we presented the idea for the banners to the group one person, that I can’t remember ever seeing before, objected strenuously; How could we justify wasting money in this way when children in the Springfield Public Schools were in need of things like books?! 

Leaving aside the fact that I was a parent representative on the School Centered Decision Making Team at the nearby elementary school and that the children there were not any more in need of books than any other children, the pot of money from which the banners and flowers were to come would not flow to “books for neighborhood kids” if we chose not to use it, but rather it would flow to some other neighborhood, perhaps in some other community, for their neighborhood beautification efforts. The commonwealth spends hundreds of millions on public education. I’m sure every school could use more funding, but I highly doubt the tiny fraction of public funding that accrues to neighborhood beautification in any way impacts school funding.

(At least two of the banners still flying)

Apart from just the “do-gooder-ishness” of the visitor’s commentary there is also a touch of the bias which shows itself, as Noam Chomsky describes it, as requiring a much higher level of morality for the poor than for the affluent: Rich neighborhoods can have hanging baskets of flowers and banners, but for poor neighborhoods it shows a wanton disregard for probity to squander funds on such trivialities! I would take it a step further; the rich can have their own private flower gardens in their own fenced in yards and hang ridiculous banners from their front porches representing whatever their banal obsessions might be, the poor have only the public space and often spend a great deal more time in it. Why not some flowers to beautify their walk to the dollar store and some banners to inform them that they do live in a place with people who have an identity and care about the public realm?

And here we scratch the surface another debate NOT raging at Strong Towns: the foolishness of spending money to attract tourists to older urban neighborhoods. “Stop wasting money on creating amenities for visitors and focus on your residents!” Except, I can’t think of an amenity for a visitor which couldn’t also enhance the life of a resident. When I worked at the Sheraton downtown, an amenity for visitors if ever there was one, that hotel gave me a job that I could walk to with hours that allowed me to go to school in the daytime and work on the evenings and weekends.

Yes, the newer fancy pedestrian enhancements here are designed for visitors to MGM, but my neighbors and I get to use them as well. More shows at Symphony Hall and the civic center will give visitors more entertainment options to choose from…and residents too! Is the problem that the poor shouldn’t go to shows or concerts, or is it a bad thing that people who aren’t poor might decide to move to the neighborhood because there is so much going on? Gentrification! Gentrification! To quote a headline from from the American Conservative (in an article republished at Strong Towns): Rust Belt Cities Need Investment, Not Gentrification Worries.

Halle-frickin-lujah. Can I get an “amen”?!

I’ll take it a step further. I often attend the symphony. I absolutely love it. Ditto the American Hockey League Springfield Thunderbirds. At both venues I guarantee that suburbanites make up the overwhelming majority of attendees. “Boo! Boo! You’re catering to the outsider, the person who just comes into the city to have their little ‘experience’ and then they run home to their white (emphasis on the white) picket fence!” 

Ok. Except, those are the suburbanites who care, at least a little bit, about the city. At least in my experience. Maybe they also hit up a restaurant or a bar in the city when they go to a concert or a game. Maybe they play a little pool at Smith’s Billiards too, or they have dinner at a friend’s house nearby. There is a difference between ignoring your residents’ needs and enhancing your city for visitors. I suppose it’s possible to do both at once, but I have actual experience in an urban neighborhood where, from my perspective, every enhancement for visitors has enhanced the area for residents.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the lifestyle I have chosen is that, were I to magically inherit tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars I would not want to leave my home, but most of my neighbors, if they were to come into a thousand would use it to leave. The irony is that money is not an obstacle to so many of the rich experiences I have here. Just yesterday my wife and I went to the annual flower show at the museums. We choose to be members in order to support the museums in what they do, but any Springfield resident can go to any of the museums for no charge as often as they choose. 

It really is a metaphor for the experience here; so much is accessible here for so little, but the people who perhaps need it most access it the least. Nothing helps one to appreciate what one possesses like seeing someone else experience and appreciate it. I’ve always thought that the only really valuable outcome for the emphasis we’ve placed on getting outsiders to value the assets we have here is that in so doing the people who live here might actually look up and realize the exact same thing for themselves.

This Is Part Two

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You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in my recent essays. I’ve never had much patience for dogma. To me, flip-flopping, or in other words changing strategies when the old ones aren’t working, just makes sense. I’ve spent much of the last 40 years not just thinking about, but working towards improving what has become “my neighborhood”. I’ve planted trees, painted benches, picked up trash, participated in workshops, written letters, prepared reports, met with department heads, and today I serve on two city boards.

I know that my writing and the writings of others I’ve encouraged people to read about place making and building for people have influenced thought and made a difference in designs that were eventually executed, but I’ve also seen that local developers are the ones who hold the real power when it comes to small to medium sized developments. The problem with that is that the money over the last half a century has been made mostly in horizontal development, or what is commonly called “sprawl”, and the people who have become “successful local developers” see absolutely nothing wrong with what has become standard auto oriented design. For that reason, when called upon to do anything, even in a traditional downtown and despite the urging of planners and economic development officials, they demand excessive surface parking and pedestrian killing setbacks.

It is for that reason that the barrage of writing, especially at Strongtowns, of the one size fits all mentality that anything done at scale must be bad when my actual lived experience in this one medium sized rust belt (typologically if not geographically) city is that there are precisely two forms of economic development that preserve a walkable environment: historic rehabilitation, and mega-projects. Everything else turns Main Street into a stroad. Would that it were not so, but I have documented that fact here. Your community is much more enlightened and you have local developers building combination retail/commercial/residential structures built to the sidewalk with little to no surface parking? Bully for you, but I’m trying to preserve MY community under the terms of today’s power reality and I have a feeling that the same thing is true of a number of places.

You know what? The enormous MGM resort casino does pose a risk to what’s left of the fine grained urbanism of the downtown and the South End of Springfield, but that risk is really just that the decay and decline will proceed at an even faster pace than it has in the preceding 5 decades. On the other hand, how many orthodox incrementalists really would cast aside not only a project which in and of itself contained movie theaters, retail shops, and recreational activities long sought after in the core city, but which has also led to tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure maintenance both below ground and above including the complete restoration or rebuilding of three downtown parks?

And the repair of miles of downtown sidewalks including the addition, for the first time ever, of bicycle infrastructure?

And led to the further enhancement of yet another historic plaza and the rehabilitation of the grounds of a National Historic Site?

Of course, if you live in an already thriving urban oasis I can understand why you wouldn’t want all this in your back yard; turns out you’re a NIMBY after all! But if you live in any one of dozens of moldering traditional formerly industrial cities I bet you’d gladly embrace the whole idea; in private at least, all the while chiding the cheerleaders of the project as sell-outs! Honestly, Utica wouldn’t want this? Rochester wouldn’t take this deal if it were offered? Syracuse?

“All things in moderation”. Including moderation I’d say. Sometimes a little excess is what’s needed. In the long term the realities of energy, the environment, and demographics will determine if Springfield declines, thrives, or even survives. In the long term we’re all dead as well. 8 months from now my wife and I will be able to walk to a movie theater on a sidewalk that’s no longer crumbling into dust, or take LuLu ice skating on a brand new outdoor rink. A year from now the plaza connecting the Quadrangle museums to Main Street will be reopened for the first time in years with a new design that won’t promote public urination. Will this be the spark that ignites the fire of a long dormant city or will it be just another flash in the pan? I can’t say that I don’t care, but if the last 40 years have taught me anything it is that there are no guarantees. 
Sometimes you just have to say: “What the hell!”

Wrong Again

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What do you call it if you feel schadenfreude for yourself? Suischadenfreude? 

Years ago I was reading on all of the usual platforms the celebration of the Great Inversion: America’s return to the city. I wrote a piece on how my anecdotal evidence showed no such transition; Millennials, my former students, were all posting pictures on Facebook of their new suburban homes, and one or two were even moving out of starter homes and into exurbic Mc “m’eh” nsions. The only one of hundreds of former students I could find doing an urban thing outside of the usual NYC, Boston, San Francisco types of cities was one kid with political ambitions fighting for social justice in Hartford …home residence unspecified.

Seeing an article from Governing magazine linked at Planetizen proclaiming that domestic migration from cities to suburbs was accelerating didn’t surprise me. I’m not sure if even the idea that even the most sprawling of larger metros were ex-urbanizing even more surprised me. What I did find funny was the fact that right above the link to this article was another link to a Guardian piece proclaiming Phoenix, Arizona THE WORLD’S MOST UNSUSTAINABLE CITY! 

Also the sprawlingest and fastest growing; see census estimates.

My “large urban county” lost population to domestic migration…which does NOT include Puerto Rico somehow…but saw a net gain of 700 people through international migration (which may include Puerto Rico, it’s not clear) and childbirth. It was incredibly interesting the other day to hear a young person discussing her family’s unwanted move to the Carolinas due to affordability issues. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to interject but I couldn’t help but think about all of the assumptions bound up in the conversation.

It begins, of course, with the idea that there are no affordable places to live in this region. The obvious assumption was that the only acceptable places to live in the region were the unaffordable ones. As someone sitting in a nearly 4,000 square foot Victorian purchased for $90,000 who pays less than $2,500 a year in property taxes who lives “in the region” I would dispute the idea that there are no affordable residency options, they just aren’t in the mostly white wealthy suburbs. Schools usually come up as part of the conversation, but I would argue with anyone trying to imply that schools in either North Carolina or South Carolina are superior to those in Massachusetts.

What that leaves is, if you want to live cheaply…with white people…in suburbia…then this area is unaffordable. I find it hard to sympathize with people who complain about how difficult it is to make ends meet when they’ve chosen to pay a premium of literally $30,000 to $40,000 a year for decades not to live in perfectly wonderful homes in nice traditional neighborhoods while sending their kids to school with brown people. So they leave exclaiming that Tax-a-chusetts has forced them to do so.

Back to the inverting of the inversion. I don’t see the the de-inversion of the Great Inversion re-inverting until circumstances give people no other choice; Maricopa County may be the world’s largest experimental die-off Petrie dish, but “ain’t nobody going nowheres” until the water runs out, the gas gets too expensive, and the AC gets shut off! And that brings me back to something of a motif of late; the ridiculous ignorance, or let’s call naïveté, of the young urbanists: “You know what will revitalize your down-on-its-luck Rust Belt downtown? A coffee shop!” Thanks Jane Jacobs. Wow. What an insight. 

If only we had thought of that before.

“Housing? Try bringing housing to your metro center! You know, cool lofts and stuff.”

Did it. 40 years ago. Lofts and exposed beams and brick walls.

“Meds, beds and eds?“





Yup. 30 years ago. Didn’t change anything.

The simple fact is that the success of all of these things is the effect, not the cause of resurgence. Coffee shops have been opening and closing all the while decline has been happening. Hell, in Springfield there are coffee shops that are still here which were here before the decline began. 

Springfield, Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Syracuse, Albany, Rochester, Worcester, Providence, and Utica all didn’t experience decline while southern and western cities experienced growth because the former didn’t have coffee shops, or hotel rooms, or colleges and the latter did. Spain, England, Portugal, France and Holland didn’t beat Italy, Austria, and Turkey to the New World because they were better, faster, stronger, and had more coffee shops; looking at a map will give you some clues as to why. In the case of Spain, being first and best in the New World didn’t actually do them a lot of good in the long run, though it did make on of their languages hugely more significant than it would ever be in its own hemisphere.

My recent focus on reading and re-reading some texts on Springfield history only distances me further from the “magical coffee shop” believers. This city exists because it won a competition, knowingly or not, for one of the first “Amazon HQ2” type developments in the newly formed United States of America: The National Armory. Until that moment the city had lost ground and indeed even its regional pre-eminence to Northampton. It was the location of the Armory which brought artisans, craftsmen, industrialists, and financiers here which then lead to the still relatively resilient, vibrant, diversified economy the city enjoys today. 

The first American made car, motorcycle, vulcanized rubber tire, the invention of basketball, the headquarters of one of the world’s largest financial institutions, one of the world’s best water systems, our colleges, the incredible architecture of our libraries, city hall, and commercial structures all go back to one enormous gamble on one enormous industrial employer. Sure, a brief 150 years later the entity that started it all was to close up shop, but, it turns out, all of the cubs that lion had sired were mature and fully grown by then, and so we persist. Struggling? Yes. But still among the most affluent metro areas of the nation, still manufacturing products used around the world, still possessing a heritage that very few cities its size can match in terms of not just history, but architecture as well.

I doubt a coffee shop would have done all that.

The River Gods

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As compensation for spending time at the beach my wife and I will make sure to hit a used book store nearby. Down on the Connecticut shoreline the best one is the Book Barn in Niantic; a house, a few outbuildings, dozens of kiosks, a basketball hoop, animals, some benches and a huge collection of well priced books. 

Last summer I found “Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History” for $4 and as the snow came down last Tuesday I decided to give it a read. I hadn’t noticed that one of the pieces was written by an expert in 19th century Springfield and focused on the community elite and the emergence of local politics. The author, Professor Michael Frisch, takes note of the fact that in the 18th century Springfield’s town elders were known throughout New England as the “River Gods”. He remarks on changes to the political system one hundred years later as being in some way inspired by the fear that the enormous growth of the working class gave a poorer transient population too much control over a community in which they had too little long term interest; the wealthy and their progeny were tied to the city in ways laborers were not.

As LunaLucia and I were spending time at the library yesterday I found another essay by Dr Frisch, this one on the occasion of Springfield’s 350th anniversary in which he notes that, in the 80’s, changes to our economic system reversed that relationship; it is the poor who were most tied to the community. He notes that the upwardly mobile gladly move from region to region to secure improved positions, the corporate bosses live in far away places, and what elites do inhabit the region have chosen to live in suburban locations.

A recently published map at CityLab shows that Springfield’s otherwise little known Hampden County has taken in more María refugees than any county in the United States outside Florida. As my wife and I were planting some new grape vines and another apple tree in the backyard yesterday I struck up a conversation with a neighbor whose back porch overlooks our back yard. He began to talk about the mango trees “he has” in Puerto Rico, and the other fruits “he grows” in Aguadilla. He has only been here a few months. I asked him if he was here because of Hurricane María: “Oh, no. I lived in Waterbury for 15 years but I’m tired of it so I came here.”

He’s been in New England for going on two decades but he still “has” roots on the island. 
If the analysis is correct, Hurricane María has only hastened the exodus which was already taking place because of the economic/debt crisis in Puerto Rico. Before María Springfield was taking in roughly 5% of those emigrating from Borinquen and those numbers appear to be holding. So thousands of people are coming here, most of them for good. Will they ever think of Springfield as home? If they do it just might mark them, despite their citizenship, as NOT being true Americans after all.

Irredentist Happiness

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I often tell my students as they prepare to attend college to be ready, if they meet students from Hispano America, to hear very strong opinions expressed about the United States. This often catches young people by surprise as they have gone about their everyday lives and given very little thought to Bolovia, Perú, Nicaragua, or the Dominican Republic and therefore, in many ways, have not only a curiosity to learn more, but an open-mindedness as to what to think. It is for that reason that the strident nature of these opinions, good or bad, from outsiders can seem capricious and perhaps ill-informed.

The difference of which I try to make them aware is that people in these places spend a great deal of their thought energy on us: “When the United States sneezes, South America gets a cold.” We are the gigante del norte. I recently began watching the film Neruda and within minutes of the credits our role in Chilean politics was being woven in as a driver of the action. Leaving aside how some Facebook posts and, perhaps doubtfully, revealing the contents of actual DNC emails constitutes “hacking” an election, the irony of “Americans” (After all who else lives in this hemisphere?) being indignant over this sort of tampering with our precious democracy…that’s the democracy that gave us the Donald and Hillary as our two options…is precious.

In any case, it was this same lack of understanding of the disparity in mutual awareness which can exist which blind-sided me as I arrived first in the Mountain West, and then in Spain. Utahans in particular, and the young people from the rest of the United States all congregated in Provo all seemed to have a resentment for New York and Massachusetts which was not only palpable, but openly and proudly expressed. These, of course, were Mormons, and so what I was to learn was the right wing bent of the church was a major player in this anti-East Coast sentiment. Since so many of the people I met were Californians their anti Left Coast feeling were tempered by pride of place.

It really surprised me though when this attitude extended to Spain. When I first arrived it was within a decade of Franco’s death, and within months of the attempted coup by the military of Spain’s democratically elected left wing government. The backwardness was inescapable. Not only were even national monuments not maintained in prominent cities, whole blocks of towns were abandoned, mules still plodded down cobblestone streets, the airport in Sevilla looked like someone had put a rolly-polly baggage claim carousel into a mud hut, and the toilets were ribbed ceramic floors with holes to aim for.

For all of that the culture was strong, healthy, and proud. Everyday life had a vim and vigor which radiated from it constantly, the houses and streets were solid and dignified, the people energetic and solid. And the young men from the United States were, apart from platitudes about “loving the people”, universally dismissive of their host country; the cars and the streets were small, families living in apartments, not homes, recreation consisting of meeting friends at the Plaza Alta, and not riding jet skis on Lake Powell (pronounced “paal”) or riding ATV’s across some desert moonscape. 

I was all in for Spain. It was poor, but outside the tiny apartments was a full elaboration of a lifestyle I had only glimpsed in neighborhoods in my hometown. If I was confused about anything it was the gaps in city streets, areas that seemed almost burned out, the lack of care with regard to some elements of public space like city parks and rubbish strewn lots, and a really run down transportation infrastructure. I’ve been back many times over the years; a semester during my undergraduate studies, three summers in Madrid to earn my Master’s Degree, 10 trips with high schoolers, and my honeymoon. Four of those trips were after the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2007, including the 9 days for my honeymoon in 2015. What I read is that the economy in Spain has been terrible; young people struggling to find work, various sectors of the economy withering away, the social safety net fraying. I’m sure there’s truth in all of that, but what I see is a place that has combined a solid ancient culture with modernity in such a way that life is a joy to live, and there is beauty, man made and natural, all around.

When I see the vacant lots, the empty buildings, and the decaying asphalt of the parking lagoons in my hometown I remember what Spain looked like in 1983 and I think, perhaps we can do it too. Spain will never again be the center of an empire which spreads across Europe and the Americas, but it doesn’t need that to be a wonderful place to live, to love, and to die. Springfield will never again be among the most prosperous of cities in the United States, nor does it have to be in order to be provide what people most need to be happy: beauty, meaning, and community. 

Rational Views

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I watched this interview with Jeff Speck the day after it took place. It’s rare that I would consider myself ahead of two of the people whose thoughts I have so frequently repurposed here on my blog, but such was the sensation I got from this conversation. I’ve never believed that suburbia was reformable, or that a generalized return to traditional, walkable, urban places would be achieved in any way other than it being thrust upon Americans because there was no alternative. 

The introductory page to Rational Urbanism, unchanged since day one, names my target audience as people who want to live in an urban environment in places where it doesn’t seem reasonable to do so. When Jeff Speck, addressing the same idea of in essence making city living a viable option for people of average income whether living on the coasts or not, he simply restates my message. It’s also interesting that Chuck doesn’t push back on the anti-populist conclusion Jeff Speck draws regarding public input; I agree as well, it’s getting to the right outcome that matters.

Unfortunately he makes many of the same errors regarding his assumptions specifically around schools. He parrots the same line about “middle class parents fighting for good schools” when the fact is and the data shows that the “fighting for good schools” is window dressing; by the time enough parents arrive to “begin the struggle” to improve the schools…the presence of their kids with the inherited competitive advantage of higher parental incomes is already doing the trick. City schools aren’t “bad”, the students they are trying to educate are not prepared to learn. That is what the data shows. Again, take the “best school” in your region and the “worst school” in your region, swap the students with the building and the faculty. Will the higher test scores go with the kids, or with the building and the teachers?

Get it? 

So all the parents’ huffing and puffing about improving this and changing that means infinitely less than just the fact that they’re sending their kids to the urban school in the first place. People think their advocacy has produced change, but that’s just post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Which brings me to video number two. I love Chris Hedges and we see eye to eye on everything but atheism. In this interview about Detroit, though, I hear the same complaint I often hear about cities being under supported especially in the areas of education and public parks. Is it just Massachusetts then, or just New England, where that clearly isn’t the case? I live in a very poor neighborhood and, before MGM even entered the picture, it was the case that the city and the state were pouring a lot more money not just into the city, but into the poorest neighborhoods in the city to build new schools and upgrade parks. Even now 4 new schools are being proposed, each of them in the two poorest parts of the city. It should be said; not just the poorest but in each case, the North End and Mason Square, the two neighborhoods most closely tied to the city’s most significant “minority” groups; Puerto Ricans and African Americans respectively.

Don’t misunderstand me, this is as it should be, and perhaps these efforts have really begun to pay dividends, but any underachievement on the part of the poor and minority students can’t be blamed on a lack of investment therein by the city and the state, not here at least, not now.

William H Whyte, when I think about it, would have to be the first urbanist to influence my thinking. Long before I discovered Kunstler through the serialization of his “Nowhere” books in the Atlantic Monthly I found the aisle in the Central Library where there was a smattering of books about cities. City: Rediscovering the Center, a book I still read from time to time, started me down the pro-pedestrian, anti-car pathway, but I had never seen the film which preceded it: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Watch it here. The anachronisms of dress, and even of some behaviors are as informative as the insights which are still salient:

Finally, a video suggested by YouTube served as “Whyte” noise as I made tortilla española for dinner:

I had never heard Fred Kent speak before. Founder of the Project for Public Spaces, an organization inspired by the work of William H Whyte, he elaborates and elucidates ideas hinted at by Kunstler and which have become the bedrock of my philosophy: Love of place is what we need to heal what’s wrong with our society, we’ve produced very few places worthy of caring about in recent times, and real place making is the art of creating spaces worthy of affection. Amen.

Crime and Graduation

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Having written so much about crime, and education on this blog in its first few years of existence I rarely return to them as topics. Sometimes contemporary events and their reporting cause me to return to them in order to remind readers, and myself, of what the most significant issues are. 

Starting with crime and the perception of danger two follow-up stories to homicides were particularly enlightening again as to the bias of the media when it comes to urban crime. In Springfield a man was arrested for murdering his wife in a domestic dispute. The arrest was made immediately after the discovery of the body and an explanation as to motive was immediately revealed to the public. As a follow up a local news outlet published this piece:

In another case of suspicious death, but this time in a rural area, with 4 people found dead in their home under what the police are calling “suspicious circumstances”, requesting information on anything anyone may have seen occur in the area in recent days, and advising the public to be vigilant regarding their homes and their families this piece is published:

Any references to fear? Anyone being quoted as “locking their doors” or changing their behavior?

So a man stabs his wife and is arrested…be afraid, lock your doors, think about how dangerous your neighborhood is; also note no comment on sorrow for the victim. But 4 dead bodies are discovered under suspicious circumstances, without motive, or a suspect, officials warn people to keep their eyes open and be alert…but no one is even a little bit concerned about their own safety? Really? Or is the media pushing the narrative in one way or another because it suits them?

On the education front, I can’t help but recall an article from long before Rational Urbanism existed which was discussing the Springfield Public Schools in some way and mentioned, in passing, that 4th graders in the city were reading at the national average, and that Black students in Springfield scored higher on standardized tests than in any other urban district in the state. Talk about burying the lead! 4th graders reading at the national average in a majority minority system with 90% of kids on free/reduced priced lunch and and an enormous number of English language learners; “I took a middle school hockey team to the Olympics, but they only won the bronze medal”. Black students scoring highest in this particular city? Maybe something worthy of further investigation, I don’t know.

In any case, this week it was announced that NOT ONLY had Springfield graduation rates risen 8% in the last year and 20% in the last 5 years, but that African American students were now graduating at a higher rate than White students. That fact wasn’t even mentioned in the article actually. The data was there, but it received no comment. The White graduation rate had increased from 76% to 83%, but he graduation rate of Black students had leapfrogged that in going from 73% to 85%.

Further investigation is warranted of course, and a piece of data consisting of just one year of information is subject to relatively broad swings; there may even be explanations regarding White students and Charter Schools which skew the data as well, but in an age where the achievement gap is an enormous topic of discussion and a very similar nearby district, Hartford, has taken a completely different path in an attempt to reduce the enormous differences in graduation rates between White and minority students this certainly warrants further examination. Or at least a mention.

Small Scale Stupidity

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I would love to see small scale, infill development designed to maintain the walkable environment which already exists in my neighborhood. Ooh, and a leprechaun, I’d also love to see a leprechaun…riding a unicorn. That’d be swell! Unfortunately, in my world, a world which is much more walkable than most and which has somehow retained an incredible core of traditional buildings and streets, small scale infill development means this:


And this:


And this:


And this:


And this:

Those were ALL along Main Street, mind you. And they all replaced what were perfectly scaled and aligned structures. 
In contrast, here are Main Street’s “Silver Bullet-Mega Structures” from multiple downtown shopping malls to a convention center and (“ha-ha”) a casino:

Notice anything? Yup, they all better align with the sidewalk, none of them create ANY surface parking or even garage parking at street level on Main Street or on side streets. 

All of them were also designed specifically TO BRING VISITORS to the downtown as well as to service existing residents: the convention center speaks for itself in that regard, but the other mega-structures include three 250+ room hotels as well. Each one of them has been tweaked over time to better “treat the street” also. Examples?

The Civic Center/Convention Center used to sit well back from the street and featured a low-slung concrete plaza that failed to close off the outdoor room that is Court Square:


Baystate West(Now “Tower Square”) had an enormous airwalk hovering over Main Street, creating a dark cavern beneath and showed nothing but blank wall to its environs:

Now the view down Main Street is clear and 3/4 of its street level and second story façade is glass.

The ONE mega structure with a setback recently upgraded the pedestrian plaza at its entrance to perfectly conform to a PPP design with much higher ledges around its plantings and so, come Spring, will be a great place to sit and take in the sights.
Evan Plotkin turned what was a dead space into downtown’s most delightful public space…in front of a building which is the furthest thing from a small scale infill development:

Large scale or small it’s the design that matters. Of course smaller scale bets are less likely to result in catastrophic losses but we know walkable design isn’t “a gamble” anymore, not because of aesthetics, but because its opposite, auto-oriented design is a guaranteed loser. Look, “urban renewal” wasn’t bad because of its scale,(Haussmann’s Paris was a mega project on the scale of any American city’s Plan Voisin Corbusier-siation) it was bad because everything from hot dog stands to concert halls that was built at that time with a sprawl mentality (Yes, sprawl. It’s a meaningful word. It describes very well what it is and does, that some people don’t use it correctly doesn’t obviate its use.) was shit.  If the government had used the same resources to rehabilitate those same districts I doubt we’d be complaining about it now.

Over a half a century these enormous projects have actually proven their worth. The Civic Center was built almost 50 years ago for a few million dollars. It has been home to an AHL franchise every season since as well as serving as a venue for thousands of concerts, competitions, conventions, and events. The newest mega project is even incorporating it into its operations; I’d say it has proven its value. Baystate West, Monarch Place, One Financial Plaza, and even the TD Bank building have brought thousands of workers downtown every day for decades and their hotels have housed millions of guests, even their excessive retail spaces have been repurposed for university classrooms.

Even building the quintessential “bad punchline” development: a casino, can be a boon to a neighborhood if its physical plant is well designed and its investment well harnessed. More on that in part II.

Slow the Cars = Save the Kids

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My own response, as well as those of others, to the events of September 11th taught me that major crises tend to entrench people more in their beliefs as opposed to altering them. The tragedy in Parkland, Florida does nothing to change my view that significant enough gun control to alter the culture of mass violence in America, i.e. the confiscation of millions of weapons, would cause civil unrest and domestic insurgency, if not civil war. I don’t believe that guns in the hands of my neighbors protect my civil liberties, but they do, and the overlap of that belief with a paranoid apocalyptic worldview makes much of the United States a powder keg. 

My thoughts congealed around an interesting juxtaposition of stories on the horrible impact of the flu this year on children, and the stories of the massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and I wondered if more kids in Broward County would die this year in car crashes, or if more high school students in Florida would die while driving to school this year than died on February 14th? 84 children have died of the flu since October, but more than three times as many have died on the roads just in the new year. I read a piece with this emphatic headline:

Are you asking how you can tell your son it’s safe to drive him to soccer practice?

Sure, let’s get more kids vaccinated with better vaccines, go ahead and tweak our gun laws to diminish the horrible loss of life in these mass shootings, but if you really want to save thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children’s lives (not to mention millions from serious injury) #slowthecars and fight for schools in walkable neighborhoods and build communities where children can live active and engaged lives without getting into cars or walking and biking next to enormous transportation projectiles. We can do it. It’s been done. 

Prioritize people, subjugate the car. 

(What was that I said about civil war?)