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A Light Dusting

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We’ve had a great year. Having written those words I just realized that, nearing late December, it might indicate that my intention is to write some kind of “Year in Review”, but that is not at all my intention; it’s only that it feels as though we have found ourselves at a particularly calm moment in a cycle in which, looking back, it feels as though we have a better understanding of ourselves and our circumstances.

I had one of those not-so-snowy snow days this week which gave Elizabeth and me the chance to have our traditional snow day lunch at the downtown eatery of our choice. While we were dating, almost 10 years ago now, we had a day to ourselves when a tremendous amount of snow fell cancelling school while Luna was with her father in New York. We trudged through the snow drifts and made our way to what is now our favorite restaurant: Panjabi Tadka. On this day the actual snowfall and the potential for freezing didn’t cause Springfield to as much as delay the opening of school and so Liz and I had the full day together again.

I walked down to Luna’s bus stop with her just to get a feel for her morning routine as most days I’m out the door before she wakes up. I had already shoveled the insignificant accumulation of frozen precipitation which had granted me a reprieve from school until that day in June when we would make up for this lost time. I started a fire in the wood stove and waited for the time when it would be convenient for Liz to take our constitutional. When she was ready we stopped at the drugstore and bought some wrapping paper for some gifts about to find their way to South Korea. From there we went to the bank and did some up close and personal banking, and then we decided to eat at a new place which is only open Monday through Friday for breakfast and lunch, making it particularly difficult for me to visit except for during school vacations.

It was great. Springfield’ “bicycle beignet guy” has joined forces with a soup and sandwich lady to create “Granny’s Baking Table“. The food was fantastic and, as usual with Springfield, really cheap. Something else really interesting happened. In the article in the paper introducing the new eatery one of the owners had mentioned that the intent of having just the one long table in the dining area was to foster interaction among patrons, and that is exactly what happened! A friend of ours was having lunch with a friend of his, someone we had seen now and again at various events. We sat down next to them and our conversation far outlasted our meal.


From there we wandered through Union Station and I took a few snapshots of the main concourse:

As it turned out we wouldn’t have the whole day to ourselves, Luna was getting out of school just a little bit early and was going to her first orthodontist’s appointment. The office was just on the other side of the station. But on the issue of Luna and school things have been going quite well; her middle school is well suited to her and she is thriving socially in ways she hadn’t in elementary school. That said, I would be remiss if I didn’t share that, in terms of her academic progress as assessed by the MCAS, she is quite literally, almost off the charts:

I point this out not to brag or to claim any vicarious respect for my intellect, after all, she is not my biological child. With the added caveat that, as a teacher I realize that there is much more to learning than any test can show. But it must be said that the “good school/bad school” issue I have so frequently addressed on this site certainly isn’t contradicted by these results: It’s hard to imagine a claim that her skills in mathematics or in language have been stifled by her time in “struggling urban public schools”. I stand by my assertion that any real “good school/bad school” understanding necessitates a thorough analysis of outcomes relative to what we know about demographic predictors.

In any case, after our idyllic day in the snow it was back to school for me. The very next day at school two colleagues happened to mention that they had been in Springfield very recently. One, a close friend, had told me that in seeing their son off to Montreal to continue his university career they had dropped off at Union Station just a few hours after Liz and I had wandered through in the direction of Luna’s orthodontist. He remarked that the station was worthy of a real city. Having previously experienced the old Peter Pan Bus Station, a horror show of 1960’s non-architecture, he was glad to see the change. Another colleague, a person who has lived in the region her whole life and makes a point of dining out as often as possible had, for the first time, visited Springfield’s famous Student Prince restaurant. She remarked on the beauty of the buildings and the lighting of the downtown, the uniqueness of the venue, the quality of the food, and then made the point of adding that the skating rink and the plazas at MGM were also very beautiful.

There we have it, Springfield’s two most recent “mega-projects” bringing people to the downtown, creating economic activity in the city, and most importantly, leaving with a changed view of what Springfield represents.

My usual hockey companions and I were discussing this when one of them showed me a map of Massachusetts stereotypes. Hampden County as you can see is labeled “Blight and Basketball”:

Hilarious.

Obviously, there is so much more to any given place than any generalization can communicate, but the theme of last week’s essay has stayed with me throughout my contemplation of the amazing week I’ve had. Springfield is a great place; but it’s not an easy place and there are so many wonderful places in this region which are much less demanding in terms of what we euphemistically describe as “diversity”.

The automobile has so distorted things for so long that the idea that there is an intrinsic value to living in a community, as opposed to just accessing its resources, doesn’t really exist. For me it mirrors what Michael Pollan has to say about food: In the 20th century we were successful, we thought, at disaggregating the necessary nutrients from the foods from which they were obtained and so began to ignore the nutritional context of food. We live our lives this way as well, not seeing that shopping, dining, learning, working, and playing in the same community where we live can add to the whole of our lives in ways we may not be able to quantify.

Aspiration and Delusion

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Perhaps there isn’t a line between delusion and aspiration; it’s just that there are those with enough good fortune that their delusional beliefs align with reality, and those unfortunate others whose beliefs don’t.

It was unusual enough for me to spend three consecutive evenings going out with my wife, but what made it even more unusual was that we spent all three nights away from Springfield. We spent Thursday evening and Friday evening in Easthampton and Westfield respectively. Both are communities I have visited with enough frequency that I hadn’t paused to notice how thoroughly they have changed in just the time I’ve been writing about urbanism and downtown Springfield. While both communities have undergone remarkable transformations they seem to have been achieved differently, serve different communities, and have visibly distinct outcomes.

Easthampton is the new Northampton, with the latter not so much declining as it is undergoing a transition into a mature form of itself. 40 years ago Northampton stepped up when the region stepped away from downtown Springfield in terms of retail, dining, and entertainment, but now it is not at all an undiscovered, underdeveloped, and most especially, underpriced urbane alternative. Easthampton appears to be stepping into that role very successfully as its active retail storefronts and busy restaurants attest.

The impetus seems to have been very bottom up as even its snow removal efforts in the wake of our recent heavy snowfall were clearly seat-of-the-pants. I should have snapped a photo! Snow banks in front of numerous shops and eateries had hand written cardboard signs saying “No Parking, Snow Removal”. My wife and I parked briefly in a Rite Aid Pharmacy parking lot while she purchased some much needed medication, and I wandered the neighborhood looking for a place we could park while dining. I found a spot 3 blocks down from La Veracruzana, in front of a hardware store which was just closing down for the night but where the snow had already been removed.

Apart from the employees at the restaurant we did not see a single minority individual, although not being either crunchy or hipster, we certainly fell into a minority of sorts. If we owned any Nepalese headwear or perhaps a belt or a handbag made of hemp we might have felt a little more at home. There appears to be one stretch of the walkable downtown of the city which has had some pedestrian improvements imposed with bump outs, raised crosswalks, and decorative lighting, but the rest of the center does quite well and feels integral despite the aforementioned pharmacy, a rather large strip mall (with a dollar store!), and a 7-11.

Westfield is a town I knew well from my teen years. A friend of a friend lived near the downtown, and my uncle used to hang out at the donut shop just a block or so from Park Square. I finished my undergraduate studies and received my certification to teach through Westfield State College. I took the bus every school day through the center of down on the R-10: It left from a stop located half way between my apartment and my workplace, about a block either way, and it was free for students.

I never bothered getting off the bus, the runs were too infrequent to stop for a sandwich or anything and there was neither a uniqueness nor an energy which urged me to do anything grander than that. At some point a few years ago the downtown reached its nadir after a fire destroyed a large, beautiful landmark building in the downtown. That appears to have been a catalyst for a wholesale reimagining from the government side of the traditional center of the city. From the turnpike into the city’s core everything is resplendent, and sends a message of vitality and belief.

While the gap on Elm Street still exists, at the rear of the block is a brand new transportation center. Westfield seems to lack the nighttime energy of Easthampton, and there is a distinctly more car friendly vibe; Easthampton feels more pedestrian first for sure, at least along Cottage Street and parts of Union Street, Westfield looks great from the car, but requires a lot of beg-button pushing (“Wait, wait!”) to get around the square. The crowd in Westfield was definitively older than Easthampton, and as completely devoid of “crunch” and “hip” as it was a melanin.

Each of these cities, for cities they are, are not only within the Springfield metro area, but if Springfield were located almost anywhere else in the country they would stand a good chance of being part of Springfield proper. They present both the finest promise for my city of Springfield, and its greatest threat. If, for whatever reason, the region were to experience a renaissance of any kind the dozen, or perhaps even two dozen or more, of these fantastic walkable nodes would help the region avoid the type of issues that are plaguing successful regions today, particularly in South and West, where walkable areas are rare and demand for housing is high.

On the other hand, if the region continues to grow ever so slowly, or, even worse, if it start to shrink, it is easy to see how those dozens of nodes will provide easier, and let’s say “more comfortable” spaces for the *ahem* “middle class” to reside and invigorate. Not only does Springfield present the challenge of a diversity which goes beyond LL Bean versus 10 Thousand Villages, but it has a retail and pedestrian shed which requires much more to achieve critical mass. For a while I have aspired to being a catalyst for just such a critical mass being achieved. Whether or not this continues to be delusional thinking will be determined much more by the warp and woof of North American civilization than by my efforts, but as long as I enjoy the effort I see no reason to cease in doing so.

Minimal Minimalism

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When I bought this townhouse from the attorneys who had used it as a law office for the previous 25 years there were two or three “no-go” areas that I used for storage. The empty basement apartment had suffered the ravages of a burst pipe over a long weekend and so the lawyers put a giant piece of plywood over the hole and built some shelves in what had been the living room; I called that space “Guantánamo”. The basement utility room was no worse, nor any better, than one might expect of a boiler room in a 100+ year old building.

They had advertised three kitchens in the listing for the place, the only one even marginally usable was the one on the top floor which was used by employees to heat up soup and make coffee. The “drop ceiling” was dropping alright, probably from the weight of nest upon nest of urban wildlife which rested upon it.

As we’ve reclaimed these spaces for use our storage space has declined and we’ve been forced to make decisions about “stuff” which copious amounts of storage space had allowed us to ignore; the house was large enough for us to keep an excess of things without feeling too encumbered by clutter. As push has come to shove we have needed to make some decisions which have forced us to acknowledge the hoarders dwelling deep within us as our prepper selves do battle with a newfound minimalist tinged aesthetic.

Liz and I were discussing different family members crisis strategies: none; a knack for and experience with couch surfing; an ex-urban compound complete with a garden and chickens; and a Cormack McCarthy style rural home with a stockpile of weaponry and scary dogs. We, of course, are urban preppers: some food, a garden, some water, a wood stove, all close to the center of transportation, communication, utilities, and emergency services for a medium size metropolitan region. Using our preparations and our family couch surfer as examples I came to the obvious conclusion that in certain scenarios our little homestead could be a lifeboat or an anchor, and in the latter case my wife’s more nimble sibling might be much better off than we would be. Of course there would be scenarios where that might not be the case, and, on the other hand there may never be any scenarios of any kind at all for any of this to even matter.

But the discussion made us confront our conflicting prepper-ations and our newfound minimalist-minimalism. I justify the three of us, it had been six, living in these nearly 4,000 square feet of living space by pointing to the neighborhood’s walkscore, and by making the case that we have already hosted over a dozen people, and up to 5 all at once, during natural and family crises. A couple of important admissions on my part: I have an apocalyptic bent and I have been wrong many more times than I’ve been right in predicting crisis, though I did nail the housing crash (after predicting it three times!); the core of my altruism in creating a sturdy lifeboat for others has as much to do with wanting to be the captain of whatever lifeboat I’m on as in providing safety for others perhaps.

Can you have 50 blankets in a house with 3 people and still claim to be minimalist? I free-cycled a bag of clothes and a well-to-do friend gave me almost as much clothing, but of much higher quality, the very next day. It all fits in the closet and vertical chest, so do I get credit for the effort? We have donated, via our front steps or Savers, at least a hundred items in this wave of redistribution and we’ve committed to buying less of just about everything but food. Still it’s hard to be the home base for the family’s Thanksgiving celebrations without enough in the way of plates, silverware, serving bowls, tables, and chairs on which to sit and dine.






Liz has dozens of wine bottles and corks ready to receive this year’s wine and mead production. We want to increase and improve our home production and canning; can that be minimalist? We just planted 10 garden beds with hundreds and hundreds of garlic cloves, that sounds like a maximal quantity of garlic. The obvious conclusion is that our “minimalism” is nothing like a purist or a thoroughgoing minimalism, what we mean to do is to continue doing what we’ve been doing while using some of the strategies and ideals of minimalism to reign ourselves in at the margins. We’ve used a budget for years, but we can see where it can be tightened a bit. We’ve filled the house with used furniture as it is, and we have decades old appliances which have been repaired a handful of times; but we did just buy a new stove when the old one malfunctioned for the third time in a year.

As we started the process of culling our stuff back in September Elizabeth, who has taken this much more to heart than I have, was hoping we could conclude all this in a few days. Over time she’s concluded that, perhaps in a nod to minimalism, I was right for once; this is just the start of a process which will take us months to make serious inroads, and will likely never reach a conclusion.

The Lost Art of Bumper Sliding

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I was attending a concert in what was the lobby of the 2nd run movie theater in my neighborhood when I was growing up, the Bing, when I had one of those moments of clarity where a known fact seems to make material an idea or a concept. This is where I grew up. This is where the people I knew growing up walked to the movies. The houses lining the surrounding streets were where they lived their lives, watched tv, ate dinner, and went to bed. These streets are where I road my bike, and played street hockey, touch football, and would go bumper sliding if we had the right snow.

I’m amazed sometimes that we had enough room to play football. We went curb to curb, the cars were in bounds; “Stop and go at the front door of the Buick” we must have said, I can’t remember anymore. We’d move the goals every time a car came down the street when we played hockey, that is if we had brought the goals out and we weren’t using two jackets or some boxes. All the parked cars made sneaking behind a car stopping at a stop sign, grabbing their bumper, and sliding along the road easy to do if enough snow had fallen; it seems to be a lost art.

I have no idea what the neighborhood girls were doing while we were doing all of this and, no, there was no “Tom-boy” who joined with us in our escapades as there always seems to be in any film depicting that era.

This would have been in the mid 1970’s. My parents would have been in their 50’s by then. These homes were evenly split between single and two family: some had gardens, some had grills, none had a front “yard” and for some the back was a mystery unless you were invited. I lived at the end of a dirt road a mile or so away from where all of the action was. There were only a handful of kids on my street and, strangely enough, on most days the dirt and rocks, the woods and fields seemed less apt for play than the gridded streets nearer the X.

And it was all good enough. I never heard anyone talk about moving, about finding a better life (As if that were possible!) in a suburb, or down south or out west. I have no idea how the cost of living compared to those aforementioned places, or if they had jobs to offer or anything like that. This was our world and we, and as far as I know, our parents were happy in it. 

Perhaps because I don’t recall seeing them when I was young, except at church, I’ve always hated the “not good enough”-ers; whether it was the event we were at, the car we were in, the clothes we were wearing, or the television we were watching I never could feel the phantasmic pleasure they got from their aspirational acquisitiveness. It was different from washing your car, or ironing your clothes, it wasn’t improving what you had, it was tossing it out and replacing it with something better. I get the most pleasure out of extending the use of what I have and, to a fault, I’ve needed seismic shifts in my life to force me out of my apartment or my home.

With the ebb and flow of the election cycle and the economic cycle each doing their part, it seems as though the zeitgeist has willed that another round of lamentation take place for the loss of the American Dream: homes are too expensive, cars are too expensive, taxes are too high, and jobs pay too little for anyone but the elites to have that promise fulfilled. Except that is not at all true.

I’m not going to add all of the caveats here. Of course We’ve deindustrialized and financialized the economy and all of that, and my workaround wouldn’t be available to everyone if everyone tried to avail themselves of it…but everyone isn’t. So it is. There are jobs here. There are high quality, inexpensive houses, and low taxes. There is cheap public transportation. There are beautiful parks, well stocked libraries, and high quality schools. 

I’ll admit, I view life differently. Some colleagues were talking about retirement, I’m much closer to it than most of them, and they were, each and every one of them, figuring out what they would “need” to live the lifestyle they wanted. The conversation continued for a while. Only at the end did I offer that my perspective was 180 degrees different: I’m going to make my life conform to what I get, and I’ve made preparations in my life which can flex from sharing 600 square feet with the love of my life in our English basement apartment while we rent out the fancy shmancy parts of the house to our betters, to living high on the hog; which is to say more or less as we do now in my view.

My life will conform to my resources. I won’t strive to reverse that unless I slip below a fairly low bar. I don’t need vacations or a car; a book and a little path in a park or down by the river to walk through will do. This weekend, for much less than $100, I paid for myself and two friends to see one of the best goalkeeping performances I’ve ever seen(unfortunately he played for the visitors!), and my wife and I attended an absolutely sublime musical performance by Peter Blanchette. Betwixt and between we saw Luna perform once again at the Drama Studio. I’m not at all against making or spending money but I see too many people caught up in searching for more things to want, instead of finding ways to enjoy the life they already have.

The Margin

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Spain’s history after the fall of the Roman Empire is so different from the rest of Europe that as I introduce students to the Renaissance or the Enlightenment I have to point out how those differences are manifest in its art and architecture. When I read articles, books, and blogposts on post war America I realize that, even taking into account the anomalies that make any place unique, Springfield has experienced if not a different trajectory then at least some very different demographic shifts which make its situation an interesting hybrid.

Only in the mid 1970’s, as the Greatest Generation’s grip on power began to slip, did the city’s leaders, born in the 1945-64 era, begin to believe that the death spiral the city had sunk into after World War II could be reversed. I’ve documented here numerous times just how easy it is to pick out the moment when that transition took place. I think that the narrative of Boomers moving to the suburbs still holds for Springfield and for the region, but as the Boomers who remained took the reins of the school department, the park department, the libraries, and even began to become significant players in the business community we began to see actual stewardship begin within and on behalf of the city itself.

Before the 70’s and into the 80’s the attitude of leadership was to suck as much value as possible out of whatever it was that stood in need of maintenance and then to demolish it, close it off, or just ignore it: Teachers at my high school literally planted flowers IN the floors of their rooms and watered them, broken pipes leaked water in a constant stream down a stairwell, and windows in light wells had bird guano build-up easily measured in inches. Parks and ball fields were maintained in ways which gave no indication that anything beyond minimal functionality was a concern. Raw concrete, piles of scrap wood, chain link fencing, and industrial trash cans were used interchangeably to mark off territory, close down roads and pathways, or for any other purpose and were stored wherever it was most convenient for them to be stored.

It’s not difficult to understand why this occurred; large swaths of America were growing into the vast drive through dystopia we see today, and Baby Boomers were the ones overseeing that process in much of the country. These were regions which were expanding because virgin territories provided more opportunities for those just entering the work force, whereas here it was the Greatest Generation which was observing the growth elsewhere and the decline here and had no belief that collapse could be avoided unless it was by mimesis of the sprawl which was showing so much promise elsewhere. 

Perhaps it was in the necessarily quixotic nature of the types of younger people who would choose to stay and take on the challenges of apparently irreversible decline that they would do the innovative and resourceful things which they did to arrest this decadence at the very least in terms of all things related to public infrastructure; all things that is apart from rethinking the city’s streets and roads: the DPW remains the primary roadblock to progress.

Despite the possibility that knowledge may very well have been gained from these early, proto-urbanist efforts, none of the younger urbanists I have worked with have ever asked me about the massive redesign and restructuring of the downtown in my earliest years in Springfield and all of the design ideas, the focus on the pedestrian, the coffee shops and bookstores, the creation of new housing through the adaptive reuse of industrial, retail, and institutional buildings. Improvements were made to public parks, smaller entertainment venues were created, local establishments were highlighted in contrast to the cookie cutter national chains which dominated the shopping malls even then.

I think the woo woo core of Millennial urbanists can’t tell the difference between pragmatism and pessimism in the attitudinal sense and they don’t believe that anyone living who was involved in any prior struggles to salvage the core of the city has anything to offer them because those efforts didn’t completely halt the decline. My worry regarding this lack of articulation is that in the long run hope will do more harm than good if it isn’t tempered with the knowledge that history shows that good ideas can “lose” to bad ones in many significant ways and yet still be beneficial.

Investors made a whole lot more money betting on suburban sprawl than the “losers” did who bet on urban infill in most of the country for most of the last 75 years. The amazing work of Springfield Central, to give a local example, from 1976-1990 shouldn’t be judged by the economic, social, and political basket case the city was at the dawn of the last decade of the 20th century, but by the dozens and dozens of buildings, streetscapes, parks, and plazas which their efforts created and preserved to be rediscovered today.

I listened to an interview with Paul Stewart of the Oswego Renaissance Association and I think his ideas for block by block re-energizing of struggling urban areas sound great; but any look at population numbers demonstrate that Oswego is still dying, and many of the places building all the wrong stuff in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways are thriving. Paul, Chuck, and I might not outlast that process, despite all our efforts. In much the same way that markets can remain irrational longer than investors can remain solvent, we seem capable as a society of perpetuating auto oriented sprawl development for much longer than many of us who see its folly will be able to remain alive.

Chris Hedges says he doesn’t fight fascists because he will win, but because they are fascists. I fight for traditional, walkable urbanism not because, in my lifetime, it will be universally understood as being the only sustainable infrastructure for civilization, but because car centered culture is harmful and needs to be resisted.

I don’t see a general shift in the zeitgeist away from what I think is the false promise and the allure of suburban and exurban living. People will do it for as long as they can. I view my role as tugging at the margins in hopes of preserving a rump of viable physical community in my region that civilization can utilize once the fantasy that we can all live lives of splendid isolation in an infrastructure that can’t be paid for comes to an end.

One May Smile, and Smile

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I chose to raise my kids in a city. Not a superstar city, not a boutique city, not a city where most of the white middle class choose to do much of anything but leave. I took a lot of heat for that, and it wasn’t cast in “Minnesota Nice”; I was told by just about everyone who cared to offer an opinion that voluntarily subjecting my daughters to an urban lifestyle in a poor neighborhood was tantamount to child abuse. 

My reasons for doing so began, undeniably, with an unusual preference, given my late Baby Boomer demographic: I loved cities. Whether it was taking the Springfield Street Railway (bus) as a 12 year old to visit my mom as she worked her part time job at a downtown shop, or skipping class at Classical High School and wandering down to the hockey themed storefront McDonalds to buy a Big Mac, I preferred the hustle and bustle of downtown to the residential street where I grew up. The contrast between the sprawling Circle K festooned stroads of my Provo-Orem university experience, and my East Coast hometown (and later Spain!) confirmed for me that I wanted to live in what people now call a walkable environment. 

I didn’t have that vocabulary yet of course. I had read William H. Whyte’s “City: Rediscovering the Center”, but that was about public space, not about making the choice to live in the city. It was Kunstler who first gave me some vocabulary to use to describe what underlay my aesthetic but he never denied that the American city was decaying and in decline. Nope, the verdict was in: my daughters would become illiterate, homeless crack-whores (that’s a more or less word for word quote) because, rather than purchase a very reasonably priced raised ranch in East Longmeadow, I chose to subject them to apartment living and being educated in the poorest city schools…and even that dire outcome optimistically assumed they even survived the vicissitudes of gang warfare and random urban violence.

I hadn’t yet found, or in some cases it hadn’t yet been discovered and published, that “stranger danger” was actually more acute the further one got from a city center, that drug use was higher in the suburbs, that self annihilation was not just a greater threat to young people than street crime, but that suicide was negatively correlated to urban living. What I was able to discover from my own investigation, and published research was that much of the argument for the superior quality of suburban public schools was specious. 

That was enough to get me to start pushing back a little bit, but my push back never took the guise of telling people that they should like cities, it was just making the case that raising your kids in the city shouldn’t be viewed as a completely non-viable option. I had lived it myself, I had seen it in Spain, and there were differences I could detail and describe in the incrementally expanding autonomy of young people raised in traditional, walkable, urban places which contrasted sharply with the barriers that auto-centricity first threw up against that autonomy, and then unleashed in a sudden dangerous torrent.

These, then, are the origins of RationalUrbanism. It was never intended to convince people who love suburban and rural life that they should prefer cities, but rather to make the case to people who like cities that many of the arguments they will hear to discourage them from living in especially the most affordable cities are not based in fact. People do pick on and make fun of small towns and rural areas there can be no doubt, but when it comes to raising a family, or even finding community, the zeitgeist in America has leaned heavily in the favor of these places in contrast to what I think is a general consensus against traditional, densely populated cities.

I won’t deny then that all of this left me seething as I listened to last week’s Strong Towns Podcast. The author is being interviewed in connection with Strong Towns because of her thinking and writing about the importance of place, which is all well and good, but the discussion immediately degenerates when it becomes apparent that what is overtly stated numerous times to be a contrast between urban versus rural is really the difference between staying in a community where you have roots versus moving to a completely new place especially when a person chooses to live a commuter lifestyle.

What follows, then, is a point by point response to the assertions made in the interview both by her and by my good friend Chuck. If you haven’t heard the interview you can listen to it here. From the outset I think it’s important to acknowledge that it is the clear intent of Gracy Olmstead to contrast rural with urban lifestyles; to deny that is to deny what she makes clear is the operative premise of what she is doing. If I say “suicide is proportionally less frequent in urban areas” I don’t need to add “as opposed to rural ones” to make clear that is what I am saying; what else could it mean? “Suicide is proportionally less frequent in urban areas than in the audience of dramatic readings of The Cherry Orchard”? I would probably need to clarify that I was making that comparison.

I’ll start with a comically fallacious assertion; because one tends to interact with more strangers in an urban environment one necessarily sees fewer people one does know. Um. That’s not how it works. I may see 100 people I don’t know on the way to the drug store, but the five I see that I do know are still there to provide community. We live this. Every time we walk to our favorite restaurant, or go to a hockey game, or the symphony, or a random event each one of us; Liz, Luna, and I, sees any number of people we know. That hundreds or even thousands more people we don’t know are there does not diminish our community and the “intimacy, knowledge, or background” that we share with the people we do know.

There’s a strange assertion made very much in passing about this topic in the podcast as well. It describes walking and driving as equally ineffectual at creating community: “You have to drive to get it, walk to get it, or whatever.” I would first claim that, unless one lives in a commune or one confines one’s community to a nuclear, albeit multi-generational, household one will need to move to interact with community, and clearly one of those modalities is superior to the other. Except on rare, usually gesture intensive occasions, people don’t interact with other drivers on the road, but walking permits, and sometimes demands (against every wish, and against every fiber of our being) that we stop and talk to friends and family: If we had made reservations for Liz and Luna’s birthday dinner at Panjabi Tadka we would have been late we had to stop and talk to so many people!

“Families were closer, generations of families used to live together in one household…being in the city for several years I was too far from any family member. In a rural context that question would have never come up” Until my sister died, 4 generations lived under my mother’s roof. My nephew and his family now live in that same house in the city of Springfield. When I was raising my older daughters, Xela and Mckenzie, they stayed with grandma and grandpa; for childcare, as babysitters, or just because the four of them wanted to go and do things together. Mckenzie was my father’s pride and joy until he passed away, and Xela Rachel Shultis was holding my mother Rachel’s hand when my mother died two years ago. Gracy Olmstead is ascribing the problem she had of not having any family nearby to the typology of the environment and not, as it should be, on having moved 2,500 miles away from her home.

One of the reasons I stayed in Springfield was to give my children just the kind of rootedness which, apparently, doesn’t exist in places like this. Or maybe people, whatever the typology of their place, sometimes choose to exchange that for other things? I wouldn’t make the claim that it would never be the right decision, but if I made that choice and moved to rural Idaho I wouldn’t blame country living for severing those roots.

“In our small towns, we watch out for each other.” The story of the Idaho girl who sees the familiar hometown license plate and is relieved that she will have someone to turn to in an emergency is given to illustrate this point. So, would it be completely ridiculous then for me to point out that, when I went to college 2,300 miles away from home it was my next door neighbor from Springfield, Massachusetts, Jim Dabakis, who picked me up at the airport and let me stay at his place while I got ready to attend my first semester at BYU? Just coincidence then that we were from the same neighborhood. And that hometown friend and then sophomore Krista Robison made sure to check in on me all the time my freshman year, that would be coincidence as well. 

“In rural America it comes from the sense that people have long histories there.” I have to admit that, despite the fact my family arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620 (John Alden and Priscilla Mullins), and I also descend directly from Rebecca Nurse of Salem Witch Trial fame, my parents moved from 5 towns away to live in Springfield only in the late 1950’s. I was born here in 1964. On the other hand, Luna has had theater classes with a descendent of the first Europeans who were deeded the property we live on in 1636. The family of our handyman’s wife owned the tavern which George Washington visited on two occasions. But, you know, people in Minnesota and Idaho have roots.

There is even a claim made that urban living puts a strain on finances. As someone who lives like a king on a teacher’s salary I would say that it depends, as it would in a suburban or rural location, on which one you choose. I live in a very unpopular place. It’s urban, but it’s cheap and it’s awesome. Chuck has had our $2 Italian pastries. I live in a huge Victorian townhouse that cost me less than my yearly salary. My yearly taxes are much lower than most people’s monthly mortgage in the superstar places. I get free admission to 5 municipal museums with a better fine art selection than can be found anywhere outside a handful of non-northeast cities. Look at these seats at the symphony:

Almost nothing. 

That’s the mayor behind my friends at the Thunderbirds game (Springfield 8, Hershey 1), my friends paid and I didn’t even ask to use their magic V.I.P. token, but I was tempted to ask the T-birds mascot Boomer what special powers it gave me. My wife decided to spend the evening with friends and, since she intended to drink, rather than take an Uber she took the bus there and back; super cheap! 

Yes, if you choose to live in Alexandria, work in D.C., and go to church in Fairfax it isn’t the fault of D.C., or Alexandria, or even Fairfax if you feel fragmented! Commenting that she wanted to feel less spread out in terms of living her life made her want to move to a town of 300 or so people just doesn’t make much sense to me. Sure, I suppose it’s possible that some places with tiny populations contain dense core areas which provide the infrastructure for having community and not being spread out, but certainly that is the defining characteristic of a traditional, pre-Euclidean city. Working, shopping, mailing packages, going to the doctor or the dentist, seeing a movie, dining at a friend’s house, attending a party, going to school, attending a municipal meeting, a farmer’s market, a concert, voting, and any number of other things are all activities in which we can and do engage within walking distance of our home. If I were still LDS I could even walk to a Mormon church; thank god for atheism, it’s right up the street but that hill is a killer.

We all go through phases of life, we struggle with decisions we’ve made, opportunity costs we’ve opted for, roads we’ve not taken, but taking responsibility for them ourselves, acknowledging the trade offs that our volition has imposed is the best way to move forward with an examined life that allows us to maximize our gains and minimize our losses.

As an aside, I’m someone who writes a lot about place, pride of place, and why it matters. Try to find an interview with me where I don’t reference Springfield, Massachusetts 12 times in the first 8 minutes. It’s tedious I’m sure. Where does Gracy come from? Where does she live? I didn’t catch that. I listened to the podcast 3 times, but I guess I missed it. I’ll let the previous Strong Towns go-to person on pride of place have the last(ironic) word:

A Guy Who Took Some Econ Classes in College Tells You What He Thinks about MMT

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(For those of you about to experience TLDNR mode, the short version of this is: Giving money to rich people probably doesn’t cause bread prices to go through the roof cause rich people can only eat so much bread, but giving money to the poor just might “cuz those folks be hungry.” Enjoy the rest of your day.)

Most people prepare for the apocalypse they want. As for those people who aren’t preparing for any apocalypse; exactly. I include myself in this. I could do some fancy word salad b.s. and obfuscate here, but rather than do that I will be completely honest and admit that I’m about to do that thing which most annoys me about people who claim to want to investigate some concept or idea: start with a conclusion and figure out the means of argumentation most able to get me there.

I want a return to the city, the traditional northern industrial city, but without too too much coal smoke in the air and only enough horse dung on the streets to be, you know, homey. The apocalypse I hope will get us there will be a spiking of energy costs, EROEI and all, which obligates humanity, even in its wealthiest iterations, to focus most of that energy on basics like food, shelter, water, and clothing; like the Good Ol’ Days! I see Springfield, with probably the best and highest quality public water supply in the United States, located on New England’s longest navigable river, in a very productive agricultural valley, not too low in elevation or too close to the coast, blessed with a number of hydropower resources, and with an abundance of walkable communities in its orbit, as well suited to rise to the top of the shrinking garbage heap that will be the industrial world in decline.

The likelihood of that happening as I’ve sketched it is pretty low. I’m ready for the future to be pretty much like the present, only more so as well by the way. I don’t need a crash. If all my worries of economic and social discontinuity turn out to be post millennial hogwash, I am GOLDEN: I’m fully vested in a defined benefit pension, I’m eligible for Social Security benefits (working a second job in the private sector for so long wasn’t so stupid maybe), I have no debt apart from a rapidly declining ridiculously low mortgage, and no need for a car once I retire. 

I don’t need a collapse but I’d be lying if I said that a little part of me didn’t want to see one. I’ve got my townhouse/apartment house/trendy urban co-work space in good shape and I’m zoned for anything from multi family and commercial to light industrial…because the zombies are sticklers about zoning from what I’ve heard.

All of this is preface to the real topic of today’s post: an Econ minor (from 35 years ago) tackles MMT. Keep in mind both real geniuses and morons can do an “interesting” job of simplifying things. All of the experts I’ve listened to and read on the right wing conservative side of the argument criticize Modern Monetary Theory as nothing but money printing. And of course, in a way it is. But they go on to argue that the government can’t just print prosperity because the money itself has no value and printing more just inflates the cost of what goods and services already exist in the market.

Only one of these critics has ever honestly addressed, at least of all the critics I’ve read, the underlying skepticism that the left might have with this critique: The government always manages to do just that when it is to fund shit I’m totally against! Endless illegal immoral wars of aggression (7 of those right now)? Bailing out the richest and least productive elements of our economic system because their insatiable appetite to devour the rest of the economy has made them “too big to fail”? We have managed to create trillions upon trillions to do those things, but making sure grandma has soup and paying for Billy to get an Associates Degree?

 Well, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Oh, how drôle, how very, very drôle you are, Maggie.

The left side of the argument is that demand creates its own supply. If more people can go down to the grocer’s and buy cheese, more dairy farmers will produce cheese, eventually engaging in capital investments to increase production even more and so the end result is only minimally inflationary.

What have we seen with what is, let’s be honest, the MMT experiment we’ve been running since at least 2008, if not well before, with QE and the continued explosion (pun intended) of the military-intelligence budget? Asset prices have blown through the roof with traditional stock valuation tools like “price to earnings ratios” losing almost all meaning. Is the reason stock markets in the U.S. are at or near record highs because so much money has been thrown into the top of the system that it has created a hyperinflation there? Yes, probably. Remember, part of that is super low interest rates for corporate clients who use debt to buy back stock and raise prices. That’s what has also pushed mounds of cash into dubious (on many levels) tech or tech-ish stocks from WeWork and Tesla to Uber and Netflix. If you can’t see that this is just the dot.com bubble/crash part deux then you are being willfully ignorant.

On the Pentagon side, the cost to produce a crappy F-35 going through the roof doesn’t have a direct impact on the family’s monthly budget, but the people who brought you the (I’m not taking the time to look up how much it was) dollar toilet seat have only gotten better at getting less for more as the government has showered them and their defense contractors with money.

The sad thing is that these examples do not bode well for “MMT for the people” being non-inflationary. Of course, demand can create a certain amount of supply, but that is constrained in the short and medium term by actual productive capacity. We have deindustrialized huge swaths of the American landscape. If we can’t produce what we create the demand to consume then prices will need to rise to capture those products from other bidders, including from abroad. The dollar’s reserve currency status, waning but still impactful, can help us to outbid others in the short run, but in the long run we can only consume what has been produced and creating more dollars to chase limited goods must create inflation which erodes the power of the new money to do what it was intended to do.

Making MMT for the people work will require a judicious and cautious attitude that I’m not sure we possess.

I’m skeptical of “renewables” doing anything more than perpetuating the fantasy that we can continue to grow the economy on a finite planet. Wind, solar, hydro, and biomass will each play a role in what I see as our declining total energy future, and making intelligent and strategic investments in them is wise, but conservation should be focus number one and, getting back to my preferred apocalypse, the key to our future is living in ways that require less energy! Walking to work, to school, to shop, or at worst using public transit, eliminates the need for huge amounts of transportation fuels and the embodied energy…the enormous amounts of embodied energy especially in electric cars. Hyper-insulating homes and offices, and only building super-insulated buildings in the future is much more intelligent than producing billions of solar PV panels which will begin to deteriorate shortly after installation and which will need to be fully replaced in 20-30 years. Even in New England we could heat our water with the sun 80% of the time…why are we using fossil fuels to do it?

In transportation we should restrict federal dollars to transportation infrastructure which improves energy efficiency. The physics would dictate that we prioritize walking, biking, water and rail over everything else. Subsidizing air and automobile travel is out in any of its iterations. Make drivers like me pay for every nickel of asphalt. Yes, I’ll say it; make energy hogs squeal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard (just this week!) how it’s unfair to make people who drive more (“A hardship in itself!” oh, yeah, self imposed) pay more to drive. 

If it doesn’t hurt enough to change people’s behaviors then it won’t change people’s behaviors. Why does a dog lick his balls…in the suburbs? Because he can.

In education we have to be much more selective in terms of what we subsidize. The huge increases in college costs have come as a direct result of government getting involved incompletely and randomly in the payment process, but not sufficiently limiting costs. When so many “customers” have their price sensitivity diminished by third party intervention, by grants or loans, then costs will skyrocket, it’s as simple as that. Jim Kunstler is right when he says higher education has become a racket. Throwing money at community colleges and state schools with strong oversight makes sense, but there is a much more complicated mess on the private side, especially of the for profit Sally Struthers “of course, we all do” variety.

Health care is a no brainier. Single payer yesterday. 40-60% of our premiums go to paying people to try to keep us from getting care! or at least to make sure our health insurer doesn’t pay for it. Compare that to 4-6% of Medicare costs going to paperwork. We pay the most in the industrialized world and we are, what? # 27 in terms of outcomes? Ridiculous. I’d much rather the tens of thousands of dollars my employer and I give to CIGNA go to the government and that they deal with the hospitals. I’ve lived in Spain, a relatively poor European country with what they consider “m’eh” health care; I liked it, and I was never at risk for going broke because of it. Just like public education, if you want to opt out, go ahead, but yes your tax $ are going to pay for everyone else.

What we will get, I’m afraid, is helicopter money creating hyperinflation. I’m a socialist. A real socialist. Everyone forgets, it seems to me, that there are two parts to even the most simplistic of definitions expressing what that means. Yes, to each according to need. But also, from each according to ability. Giving things away is not socialist. If you want “what you need” you must “do what you can”. Just paying people to consume is a bad idea. Teaching a man to fish is much more expensive in the short run than just giving him a fish, but teaching people that you’ll just give them fish even if they don’t do anything to earn it IS a recipe for social disaster. 

It’s no simple task to create a social safety net while at the same time protecting individual freedoms. There are trade-offs. My apocalyptic view sees a future where all hands will be needed at the pump and those who will not work, shall not eat; the earth and its limited resources will require husbandry, not exploitation, and that will require that we all give a little more as we take a whole lot less of what we don’t actually need: a third set of dishes, bagel slicers, salad shooters, vacations to Disney.

What a surprise. I want MMT to pay for the prep work for my preferred apocalypse. I had a feeling that might happen. Everyone else wants that to, of course. There are so many other things to discuss here: the so-called efficiency of the market versus the “waste” that is social spending. Efficiency! The planned obsolescence of an iPhone a year, and even producing iPhones when people are starving; empty homes and homeless people…markets! (Oh, wait, markets “distorted by the gubmint”) My take on this is game theory. There’s some kind of discontinuity coming. Depending on who wins the war of perception the government will lurch stupidly to the right, or stupidly to the left, with the former being stupid in its direction and the latter stupid in its execution. 

Strong communities are made up of strong individuals. Focus on food, water, clothing, shelter, and surrounding yourself with people who share your values be they family or friends. I have zero confidence in my ability to predict what will happen, but I am going to be ready for what I think might happen and I’ll take it from there. Good luck to you in doing the same.

Bombo-Apocalypse

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As I was preparing to proctor this year’s PSAT with a colleague she shared a story with me about being among the first students to take the MCAS exam over two decades ago. It brought to mind the fact that I was not only already teaching at that point, but my daughters were attending school and I was on the parent advisory committee at their school when it happened. The local newspaper came out with a series of articles on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System of examinations the primary theme of which was “Urban Schools Suck”.

Because I was motivated to believe that my decision, as a parent and an educator, to send my own children to an urban public school was not tantamount to abuse and neglect I did hours of research and number crunching and demonstrated that the MCAS exams did little more than rank schools by which had the most kids on free and reduced lunch.

At the same time I was barraged by friends with comments about the dangers of living downtown. A few specific events which were ubiquitous on local TV and print media started me down the path which two decades later became Rational Urbanism. The first was the arrest of Louis Lent, a man who confessed to being responsible for numerous child abductions and murders. He abducted more than one child while each was riding a bicycle alone on suburban and rural roadways, but was caught when trying to abduct a girl on her way to school in downtown Pittsfield. The second was the terrible story of a young teacher, whose sister was a student in one of my classes, who was abducted and murdered while working her second job as a retail clerk at a small shop in a suburban strip mall.

What I saw, because I was looking for it and wanted to find it, was a pattern of stranger danger possibly being greater in suburban and rural locations. It was years later that papers began to be published in peer reviewed academic journals which supported the hypothesis which I had formulated to support my decision to raise my family in an urban environment.

To be clear, on both issues I got the right answer not because my reasoning was better but because I was motivated to use my reasoning to find what turned out to be an answer which was correct. These experiences along with being the host of a talk radio show every weekend gave me some insight into reasoning at a time when I dearly wanted to avoid being outed as “wrong” on whatever subject in a very public medium. I began to distinguish in a very conscious way the difference between what I wanted to be true and what the evidence seemed to point to as true. All the time. I got to know myself much better, for good or for ill, but I also had to let go of some ideas which I had dearly wanted to be true.

At the top of the list are things like coming to grips with death being the end. Full stop. Or that the right will prevail. Or that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Or that I’m a likable person outside of a high school classroom.

The stark realities I work very hard to obligate myself to live with make me very sensitive to the inability of others to do what I try to do regarding my preferred beliefs. The past few weeks have provided me with even more grist for that mill. Here in the northeast we had a traditional Nor’easter which, apparently, underwent “bombogenesis” and became a “superstorm”. Thousands and thousands were without power in this region for days. Schools were cancelled.

Our lights never even flickered and Luna was upset to find all of the schools open and unharmed. As usual. I can’t recall a single power outage here; tornadoes, remnants of hurricanes, blizzards, and now bombogenesis; never been without utilities once in their wake for even a split second.

A few weeks ago in California power was cut off, on purpose, to hundreds of thousands of customers for days in order to avoid a repeat of last year’s fire storms which destroyed entire rural communities. From what I could see in the press urban neighborhoods in Oakland and San Francisco, like mine here in downtown Springfield with underground utilities, had experienced business as usual.

With all of that as a backdrop I hear two genial, sober, and responsible men discuss in a public forum the idea of finding community and creating a resilient life in what they describe as a sick culture (I agree). To give them their due, they do discuss “staying put” as a possibility; creating a checklist of your various forms of capital, and seeing if what you have corresponds to what you desire. All very useful. All very much designed to accommodate the individual, or the family, in its focus to help people discover what it is that brings them the most happiness.

But I’ve read what these guys have written for years, I’ve even met one of them. I remember the look of panic that came across Chris Martenson’s face when I told him that I not only lived in Springfield, (“Oh, there are some nice neighborhoods there.”) but in the urban core of Springfield (“…………………………….”).

I get it, he sees hordes of marauding “those people” eating my liver without Fava beans or Chianti. And maybe that will happen. If so I hope I’m dead before even the antipasto is served.

But right on cue, when these two begin to discuss what to do if moving is part of what needs to be done in order for you, whoever you are, to find your bliss, the examples are 100% anti urban. People are looking to get away from places where there is no “security and safety”; no mention of how safe and secure you might feel if your access to the grid is cut off. “I need access to natural beauty. I really am sick and tired of living in a concrete jungle and urban grime. I’ve got to figure some way to have access to natural beauty, for instance.”

What I realize is that these are the same guys who made up reasons to not live in walkable places 30 years ago. They moved their families to the suburbs, they lived empty lives devoid of community, by their own admission(!), and now their solution is to recreate suburbia but as an intentional community! Keep in mind these guys are free marketers, with a belief that what we are seeing now as “horrible consequences” is because of a perversion of the market. But what they are recommending as a solution is abandoning the “free market” that establishes a community and creating a command and control community.

At the same time their claim, in the end, is that community is the most important thing…but they don’t want to be the “tax donkeys” who pay for it! Tax donkeys. They’re the victims. The White suburbanites who abandoned the productive places to live an auto-oriented life (in two ways, car centered and self centered) and suck society’s productivity out to pay for their unproductive lifestyle now want to move on and recreate it elsewhere because the bill is coming due. All in the name of community!

And this idea that beauty is to be found only in nature! Fuck you! Like humans aren’t part of nature, like we haven’t arranged places by thoughtfully combining our artistic sensibilities with elements of natural beauty to create the most amazing places on earth. Sorry, I have seen streetscapes and manmade parks that are more beautiful than any wild landscape. If you disagree, bully for you, but I’d sit and wonder at the beauty and complexity of any number of manmade spaces far longer than I would at any forest or mountain range, and my senses are no less developed than yours, no less attuned to the idea of the aesthetic. Take your biophilia and shove it up your ass.

Some people might want to run away from where they live and start over. Awesome. But not every manmade landscape is a grimy concrete jungle. Just because you, or your parents, left a beautiful manmade place to live in a horrible, soulless post war industrially manufactured suburban subdivision doesn’t mean that every city is ugly and valueless. And it may well be that people have created and lived in cities for thousands of years because there is a survival value in them as well. Hmm, there’s something to contemplate. Maybe running away “to nature”, even as a survival strategy, isn’t such a good idea.

I’ve been through a half a dozen natural disasters right here in this very urban, very poor neighborhood, and in every instance we’ve been the rescuers, not the rescuees, we’ve always been the lifeboats, never the Titanic. There could always be a twist ending I suppose, but ask yourself, is that really what is most likely, or is that just what you want to have happen?

Chicfieldyoke

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So here’s the comment that got this brain train rollin’:

September 16, 2019 at 5:35 pm



Steve,


I’ve been reading the blog for about a year now; I found it somehow, not totally sure, but I am glad I did. I just moved (begrudgingly) to Windsor CT as my girlfriend works in Hartford and I in Springfield still. Previously I was on Mattoon for a year, before that in East Forest Park, and originally in Sixteen Acres when I first moved to Springfield just over 4 years ago for graduate school. Springfield became my home and I loved it, especially my time on Mattoon.

Anyway, I’ve noticed you accurately refer to this part of New England in regional terms. That is, New Haven-Hartford-Springfield make up a densely populated region rather than 3 separate cities and their own suburbs. I’m curious, then, as to your thoughts on annexation, what it would mean to each independent city, and to the region as a whole. It seems to me that if Hartford incorporated West Hartford, East Hartford, and possibly some other bordering towns (Bloomfield, Windsor, Newington, Glastonbury, Wethersfield) it would reach more than 300,000 people within its city lines, with considerably more corporations considered to be headquartered in Hartford (i.e. Cigna, Colt Firearms, Pratt & Whitney) and therefore offering massive tax dollars to the region. It would also now contribute enormous tax dollars of the high earners (who benefit from being next to Hartford proper) in West Hartford, Glastonbury, etc. to Hartford’s base, while also consolidating the amount of town costs (each has their own fire dept & chief, police, etc.).




I mean, for Hartford to annex this handful of towns would probably put its geographic size close to that of Atlanta (134 sq miles, ~500,000 population). To put it further, Hartford County is about 750 sq miles with close to a million people in it. By comparison Allegheny is about the same geographic size and 1.2 million citizens, with Pittsburgh as its county seat. The narratives on Pittsburgh and Atlanta are much different than Hartford-Springfield-New Haven, I think mostly due to the nature of the cities land base. Because they are larger, they have more residential areas and neighborhoods, which stabilizes the perceived “crime” rate, and their city services are condensed coherently with opportunity to create public projects with the regions interests in mind. Perhaps that’s another reason they get more attention from journalists and we don’t. We are completely misrepresented as a region.


My point is this: doesn’t it seem that this region, with cities technically using a small amount of space in comparison to the region, is structured so that the cities are destined to fail? With each suburb competing against the city, pulling tax dollars (both corporate and income) away from the traditional areas of business, the city proper is left with nothing, and is then blamed for its problems. Hartford is tiny, only about 18 sq miles. Springfield is a bit bigger (33 sq miles) with about 30K more residents. New Haven is in the middle, about 20 sq miles and about as dense as Hartford.


Why are we not talking about regional cooperation? It seems your calls for regional prosperity are on point, but how can we ever get there if our cities are not major metro areas that benefit from occupying larger space? Nowhere else in the country does this issues really exist (and I recognize that New England towns have their own identity and would likely resist this process).


It seems, from a macro perspective, that merging our regional cities with its suburbs, is the first step to a rational urbanist agenda.






The claims made in this comment are not just accurate, but incredibly insightful from the city side of the discussion. I agree with every word. With so many of the topics that bubble to the surface at Rational Urbanism the fact is that perception is the reality that must be dealt with, and annexation does change the way data is tossed around and the judgements which are made from it about Springfield and about so many other places like it. It puts me in mind of the end of an interview I did on the Strong Towns podcast about my Death Race 2016 feature. At the close of the interview Chuck asked me what I would have the media do differently, and I, haltingly and choppily, gave a response; why was my response so unsatisfactory I wondered afterword? 

Because it wasn’t the media I was interested in at all, it was the public which was consuming it whose interpretation I wanted to change.

To confront the question of going metropolitan: actually doing it wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell, at least in Springfield, if it were to be attempted overtly with any of our suburban neighbors. Hartford is similarly looked down upon, I think, by the communities surrounding it, and so it is equally a non-starter. Massachusetts already has created the next best thing with a sort of de facto annexation by using what is mostly state income tax revenue to subsidize half of Springfield’s budget. 

As I have commented here repeatedly, I find that 100% justifiable as the incomes taxed are nearly all EARNED in Springfield. As I wrote in this essay, the argument that the community where the income earner lives is more productive than the place the earner works is like ascribing the value of a farm to the farmhouse and not the fields that surround it. 

There is no doubt that annexation can drive a narrative of a growing, thriving city: look at Columbus, Ohio. In a state of dying cities it is considered perhaps the sole survivor. The fact that most of the growth narrative has been perpetuated by forcing surrounding communities who need access to its water district to join (or die) isn’t mentioned when the lists of America’s Growing Cities are released…and positivity begets positivity; my guess is that some real growth and an actual increase in prosperity has taken place because a good story is the best medicine for what ails most cities. 

Going from 35 square miles to well over 200 square miles is a significant part of the real story, but you have to know to look for it. Read the Wikipedia entry on the demographics of Columbus and you’ll only find that the population of the city has skyrocketed at a time when so many other Ohio cities have declined. I talked to people who’ve lived in Columbus who had no idea about the whole annexation thing, they just know that the narrative is “onward and upward!”

As often happens with issues like this, I want to flip the argument, at least a little bit. I’m a true believer in the Strong Towns case for suburbia being screwed in the long run. I want nothing to do with them. Right now we have the most functional places filled disproportionately with the least functional people. To clarify, I would agree with ALL of the arguments that in the case of race, their disfunction is due to a society which has disproportionately created their disfunction, but for this argument that is neither here nor there: the places best suited for human habitation in the region are those which were created before World War II, those are mostly in our urban cores of Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, West Springfield, and Westfield, and those are disproportionately filled with the poor; or in other words those people who have been less successful in our economic system.

These functional places filled mostly with less functional people, by this definition, are surrounded by much, much larger swaths of territory built in an experimental form which has been conclusively demonstrated to be so unproductive as to be unsustainable without siphoning off productivity from productive areas (i.e. The Strong Towns argument). These places are destined to fail. Whether or not they will bring down the productive places around them is the operative question and I think the looser and more fragile the bonds which connect them, the better. 

It may happen long after I am laid to rest, but someday the productive places will again be filled with the productive people, and nearly all of the productive non agricultural work will once again occur in those places. A few, a very few currently “unproductive” places at the near periphery of the productive cores will be reworked to join those cores, but the rest will be let loose to become either productive farmland, or to be a sort of banlieue with little in the way of city services.

So if I could I’d jettison a fair chunk of East Forest Park and 16 Acres, I’d encourage Indian Orchard to hook up with the center of Ludlow, and I’d annex what was left of Springfield with Holyoke, Chicopee,the center of West Springfield, and the part South Hadley just across from Holyoke. It would put the population of my New Springfield at around 250,000. It would unify all of the walkable places, it would have the hydropower of the Holyoke dam and the Cobble Mountain Reservoir…along with its water supply, and it would be easily connected by existing rail and bus public transit.

It would unify all of the places that no one wants now anyway; all of the shit-holes. “It” would be the only place with any value in our manmade landscape. It would be this region’s lifeboat. The real question is whether to fill it with life preservers or harpoons.

Ethnography

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The first story I ever read by Jorge Luis Borges was El etnógrafo. (English version) It’s the story of a man named Fred Murdock and his discovery of the secret of life. If you’re at all familiar with Borges you’ll not be surprised to learn that the story ends in a way which leaves the reader reinterpreting the meaning of the story over and over. The last line explains that, after becoming the only White man to possess the secret after spending years living with a tribe of native Americans and deciding not to publish it, he gets married, gets divorced, and is a librarian at Yale University.

Get it? The secret isn’t what you think it is, or doesn’t do what you think it should. His romantic life fails, his professional life is unremarkable. If knowing THE SECRET doesn’t even help you with those things, or doesn’t cause you to drop out completely and be completely satisfied without them, to what realm of life does the secret pertain? What is its function?

Exactly.

In what I think was Chuck Marohn’s first interview related to the publication of the new Strong Towns book he interviews none other than James Howard Kunstler. The connection is that JHK’s The Long Emergency was a seminal work in the formulation and the direction of what became the Strong Towns movement. In the interview Chuck prefaces a comment by stating that the American landscape gets less and less coherent as one travels west. In a later interview Chuck specifies Boston as a city which in its development pattern adheres to Strong Towns concepts.

Chuck would be the first to say that the east-west continuum idea is at most a heuristic. Boston ran highways through its core neighborhoods, Boston has built mega-projects, torn down buildings for surface parking, and neglected many of its public amenities even for generations. But there’s still enough there there to be a model for most of what Strong Towns is trying to elaborate. That said, as I have expressed many times including in my most popular post ever, Springfield is not Boston.

And yet. As the week has gone on and in interview after interview Chuck describes the rational responses to the predicaments we face on the American landscape I see how, in case after case, Springfield is already there. How can that be in a Strong Towns universe where Springfield’s claim to fame is its disregard for its citizens relative to the juxtaposition of one amazing City Beautiful Carnegie library, and its parking lot? There’s more to a town than one parking lot and the one, really the only thoroughfare in the city which turns into an out and out stroad.

Start with housing. Chuck describes a healthy income to home value ratio of 1-2 or perhaps 1-3. If you look at the median family income in the metro, and the average home price in Springfield that’s about where we are. For my wife and me it’s a little more like 1-1 or even 1.5-1.

Maintenance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard commentators at Strong Towns claim that the problem with building maintenance and road maintenance is that there is no ribbon cutting, there is no “photo-op”, it isn’t glamorous or glitzy. Here it is. I can link to dozens of articles and news reports on roof repairs in public buildings, new windows in schools, sidewalk repairs, and new boilers, and insulation…

I have to add here: Patrick Sullivan. In my mind absolutely the most important man in the history of Springfield after William Pynchon. From the moment he took over the parks department, and was given increasingly more and more responsibility as it became clear that he could take the resources he was given and get done what he needed to get done, the legacy that his “Greatest Generation” predecessors was willing to watch decay and rot was nurtured and preserved. Patrick saw the “good bones” with which the city was endowed and was unwilling to let them grow brittle. How he has done it I have no idea. How Springfield has kept him? I can’t understand.

Back to the Strong Towns message: Where to focus these reinvestments? Which neighborhoods get the sidewalks, the libraries, the parks, the schools? I’d call it the Kevin Garnett strategy, but with Chuck being from Minnesota that seems cruel; in a way you take your biggest weakness and make it your greatest strength. Of course, it’s not exactly that as in case after case after case, as Chuck describes it, the poorest neighborhoods in struggling cities have the best bones and give cities the best return on investment. With the caveat that there was no way the city could rebuild and renovate every school in every neighborhood in a school system with more students than any other in all of New England outside Boston itself in 10, 20, or even 30 years, it is remarkable how many schools have been built, rebuilt, renovated, or repurposed in the last 35 years: All four high schools; dozens of elementary schools, magnet schools, Chestnut Middle, and Forest Park Middle School.

That last one makes an interesting case study. There was a push to cast that old shell of a building aside and build new inside King Phillips Stockade, a place about as isolated from anywhere a student might live as humanly possible. FPMS, or FPJH as it was when I attended, remains where it was, all new, all up to date, but still the anchor of the neighborhood and a middle school a tremendous number of children can walk to not only safely, but surrounded by some of the most beautiful streets in the city.

Look at all of the mini downtowns of all of the neighborhoods that were the poorest, most run down, and least regarded when I was a young man: Mason Square, the South End, the North End, and Six Corners. Which one doesn’t have new sidewalks, new parks, new schools? Which one doesn’t have decorative street lights, a more pedestrian friendly core, and a strip of well maintained local shops?

Back to Borges. So we’re done then. Fix one library parking lot deal and we’re all set? Not at all. The Strong Towns message isn’t what you think it is. It doesn’t do what you want it to do. It’s still the single most important message out there to tackle all of the most pressing issues of the 21st century from environmental degradation to the opioid crisis and all points in between. But, as Fred Murdock explains to his professor, the secret is not nearly as valuable as the roads that lead to it. How literally true in this case.

Being strong, perhaps by accident, has allowed Springfield to survive when many others really haven’t. Springfield, like the thousands of cities that came before is an experiment. Whether or not it is an experiment that will earn the right to continue for another century or two, or a millennia, will be determined by forces larger and more complex than anything I could hope to ever comprehend; but focusing on people and their struggles, and finding ways to confront those struggles as nimbly and as adroitly as possible will improve the odds.

Success is survival. Success, by the way, is still having people who have problems that need to be confronted. That’s as good as it gets. If you don’t have problems to confront that means you’re already dead and buried!

We were lucky enough here to be nearly frozen in time when the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world produced what we’ve come to see as normal in our post war automobile oriented development pattern. We have less cancer. Yup. That is a good thing. Yup. But we still have cancer. And other things can kill you apart from cancer you know. And all of the cancer that’s grown up all around us at the regional and national level doesn’t help us. Being a slightly healthier organism surrounded by a dying ecosystem does not signify inevitable success. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king…of a bunch of blind people…which can make getting on with this experiment in civilization that much harder.