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Promises, Promises

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A zero or even negative interest rate environment, on its face at least, screams out for developers to “build, build, build, build” (“That’s the story”), and according to reports that has happened in lots of major markets, but here in the provinces nearly everything feels stalled once again. I’m not even referring to the dozen or so demo’ed buildings which we were told would become movie theaters, restaurants, art centers, hotels, or apartment buildings; I’m talking about developments which have been announced, some multiple times, as having funding in place to begin, only for actual work never to materialize.

The most significant, and perhaps most bizarre of these is the MGM/Opal/not Opal/Picknelly/Not Picknelly Court Square Building project. MGM has a commitment under the Host Community Agreement to build over 50 units of market rate housing in proximity to its casino. There was talk that these apartments would actually open for residents before gaming would begin on the casino floor; instead we’ve yet to hear if construction on these contractually obligated units will even begin before MGM celebrates its 2nd anniversary. It has been written many times that a finalized plan is only a month or two away. Apparently market rate units to downtown Springfield are what cold fusion is to energy: “It’s the future…and always will be!”

Meanwhile another property which was begun as a commercial to residential conversion by another developer (It stalled, then MGM picked it up as a possible solution to creating market rate housing, and then sold back to the city) is sitting as dormant as can be at the corner of Chestnut and State. Both the original developer and MGM reportedly did some serious site prep which made converting the former insurance and school department building more easily transformable into housing; not enough apparently.

A entire series of building directly across the street from MGM have been announced as becoming hotels, restaurants, and shops, but everything has stalled and so nearly every storefront facing MGM along Main Street is empty. These are some great buildings, which combine architectural beauty and solid urbanism.


One last tornado victim sits next to the new CVS on Main Street. It has been bought, sold back, and auctioned off in the last few years with announcements made about local developers moving local businesses in in short order but, there it sits.

Surprisingly, I haven’t heard anything about the Chicopee Savings building in years. Garbage architecture, as you can see:


In an obscure location at the center of everything on Main Street and Court Square in downtown Springfield no less!


Across the street from my house sits the Female Seminary Building. When Springfield announced the beginning of free public schooling for all boys back in the early 1800’s, local citizens were outraged that girls were not included and built this structure so rapidly that it was ready to educate young women by the time the public schools were open for young men. Happily, within a few years it was made obsolete with the inclusion of girls in public schools. From that time until just 15 years ago or so it served many different functions, but then it was left vacant.  After some work by the Springfield Preservation Trust it was sold to Develop Springfield to be part of their Lower Maple Business Park. When Develop Springfield’s most active leader departed Springfield, mostly because, as this essay demonstrates, the pace of development in Springfield is measured like the movement of tectonic plates, there was a large press conference announcing funding to convert the seminary into a shared work space. Two years later the most prominent changes have been effected by neighborhood kids using piles of leftover bricks as Legos and wood planks from the back deck as bike ramps!


Further up Maple Street an apartment building and some of the city’s most impressive brownstones have been given CDBG money and have been awarded CPC funding for housing and historic preservation from local property tax dollars, but no obvious work has been done in at least a year.


To finish the list I have to include Mass Development’s empty building on Stearns Square. A half a dozen or so establishments have been attracted to the new dining district around the square, and Worthington Street, Duryea Way, and the square itself have never looked better, but the giant linchpin meant to unite them all sits looking empty and forlorn. The challenge of filling such a huge space when so many much smaller storefronts are available for making much smaller and much safer bets must be enormous, especially with so much of the area’s focus falling to the Trinity Block:

That was because even after it was presented as a fait accompli (a recurring theme) it then nearly dropped stone-cold dead. Resurrecting it left very little oxygen for anything else in the neighborhood.

This is not to say that nothing has been done. After more than a decade of promises both the Civic Tower:


And the old Masonic Building(this photo is from before the renovation):


Have both been repurposed. The former as a hotel, and the latter as a school.

The Zorzi block has a CVS:

The Dave’s Furniture parcel IS becoming a Wahlburgers:

The Underwood Building and the Shean Block haven’t been torn down for parking!

The Willys-Overland building is being transformed into apartments:

Wayfinders is finishing their building on Main Street, Platform C is finally complete at Union Station, and it’s too early to be frustrated by the lack of progress on the Red Lion Inn. I’m sure, given a little time, enough nothing will be done that its developers will meet expectations for frustrating us locals with an immeasurable lack of progress.

Shouldn’t it be enough to pretend to care?

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I’ve read in many places to beware the grand sweeping explanation for all things; “A theory which explains everything explains nothing”. What I would propound is not a clean mathematical hypothesis which can be proven or disproven but, what is even worse, just a sense of any idea which exists as an underlying truth. It is the reason a coffee shop in one community sparks a revival and another, just as quaint, just as folksy, stumbles and fumbles on and on and on but never engenders a renaissance. It is the reason one campaign for revitalization strikes a chord and is remembered as the beginning of a new day in some benighted city, while a second becomes yet another in a long list of punchlines used to mock the pretense of a shithole.

What is this all encompassing existent? Retirement. Not only the concept that we all spend our working lives in pursuit of the dream that we may one day become nothing but consumers in the capitalist utopia, but the overarching idea that all but a handful of places, and most of them located in Florida and Arizona, are unworthy of receiving us as we achieve the nirvana of our species: active uselessness. With that everyplace not deemed worthy of being a worry-less playground for septuagenarians is nothing but a purgatory where doing and making and being are the punishment and only the much worshipped (Disney) vacation represents a momentary liberation from the torture of Tantalus.

And if your current, temporary place in the world has no ultimate meaning, why grant it even proximate meaning? Your true community, the one which awaits you at The Villages, is that which will bring you total consciousness.

And that sweeps everyplace from Youngstown, Ohio to Schenectady, New York on to the rubbish heap of civilization. If heaven already awaits…elsewhere…then your current “material shell”, you know, the place where you may spend decades with your family, and perhaps your parents and your parents parents spent decades with theirs, is nothing but a way station, a temporary shelter from the elements which deserves, perhaps at best, enough care only to keep it from collapse while you seek protection underneath.

This revelation sprang from finding myself, unexpectedly, in a room with an advocate and activist for the revival of dying places. To nearly everyone else present the topic was a bizarre tangent from our daily operations, but I found it fascinating. What was most fascinating, astounding even, was that this former mayor of one of the Rust Belt’s fastest shrinking cities, called to Washington D.C. to assist all such cities, had now come to greater Hartford to take part in its turnaround and, with total awareness of the absolute need of that city to be seen as the center of the revival of the entire region, this man had chosen to take up permanent residence…in its most prosperous satellite community.

If there’s one thing cities need it’s more people on the sidelines telling us what to do; successful suburbanites with absolutely no skin in the game who earn their fortunes telling us how to make our current residents more successful, and how to attract more successful people to our communities…just…not them.

Think of it: As a former mayor of a struggling city he has to know that what Hartford needs more than anything else is prosperous people living there who care about it. Not being willing, even temporarily, to live inside the city’s boundaries shows that, by his own measure, success means NOT living there, and not being seen as rooted there. Which means not only that Hartford is a charity case, but that his commitment to the region runs as deep as his next paycheck.

When you run through the list of significant people in the Hartford region, I wonder, is it the case that, much like Springfield, everyone but the politicians who have no choice lives somewhere other than the city? I wouldn’t be surprised. And do they live somewhere else because Hartford is deemed unworthy of being a place of ultimate destination?

What are the qualities, the characteristics, the values, the rationalizations which can make someone so blind to the importance of embodying what you claim to support? What if I didn’t even live in Springfield? What if I wrote these essays from Orem, Utah? What would it say about my actual belief in the ideas I was espousing? Whether it’s Hartford or Springfield, Dayton or Syracuse, shouldn’t it just become an understanding, a part of the zeitgeist, that a new economic development director, or the president of a cultural association, or the head of a philanthropic organization will live in your city? It shouldn’t even have to be in the contract, it’s like expecting the Pope to be Catholic, the military to attack foreign nations, or firemen to put OUT fires.

When is it going to stop? Have boards of directors grown so accustomed to hypocrisy that they just accept it? Or do they not live in these cities either?

The other people who were forced to listen to this particular speech with me, not one of whom had any interest in the topic, all noticed the screaming duplicitousness of the speaker who one minute called on all of us to come to grips with the inequality of opportunity which held back this region and then in the next breath admitted that his commitment to that end was to give speeches regarding it and take his paycheck therefrom and get as far as f#<€ away as he could from confronting that reality.

It’s not a Superstar Place, nor are there palm trees, or desert golf courses, and therefore it should expect no more than mercenary services from people who view themselves as too good for these communities they serve. If you live in a place where the transit chief takes a train, or your community development boss lives in the community count yourself lucky, you must live in a place which is actually considered ok to view as worthy of a decent person’s care and affection. The rest of us just have to hope that one day we have the chance to move to The Villages.

When a Bubble Calls

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Richard Dawkins describes how we have evolved to exist in what he calls “middle world”. The properties of immeasurably small and incomprehensibly large matter never came into play in terms of the survival of our ancestors and so, unlike the properties of matter in middle world, understanding their behavior is nearly impossible for us to the point of being ridiculously absurd.

Johnny Sanphillippo’s latest post at Granola Shotgun makes clear that, for me, the same is true of the real estate market.

I bought my home 10 years ago for $90,000. Zillow says I could get anywhere from $168,000 to $190,000 for it today. The city says it’s worth $140,000. I can’t imagine getting anywhere anywhere near that much for it if I put it on the market. I wouldn’t pay that much for it, not because I don’t love it, but because I just wouldn’t want to shell out that much for a home. I’d rather focus my efforts on annoying my realtor and finding a place for, well, less.

My brain is attuned to my own little economic middle world. Even imagining putting down $365,000 as only a down payment for a $1.8 million 1,500 square foot condo, which would entail payments of nearly $10,000 a month for mortgage, taxes, insurance, and condo fees for 30 years, describes a reality which is completely beyond my ken. 

While it isn’t the circumstance Johnny describes, I suppose it might be clever to buy such a place in hopes that in a year you could turn as much profit as it takes me 10 years to earn as a high school teacher; and if it crashes and burns you kiss the cash you’ve invested goodbye and move on to the next wild speculative gamble. To do it under the assumption that you could keep earning 5 to 6 times the median family income in the country for over a quarter of a century, without interruption, in a field (“tech”) which by definition advances and changes at lightning speed, shows either remarkable confidence, a reckless lack of caution, or both. 

Back in my world I can’t help but think of what the $365,000 down payment alone could do. You could buy a pretty decent palace outright for cash, and have a good quarter of a million dollars left to do whatever. I’m sure someone in the tech field could find a pleasant job for $40-$50 grand a year and, with monthly home expenses in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands, have enough to live whatever lifestyle you chose. And that’s understating the tech opportunities here; the Hartford, New Haven, Springfield metros actually are above average in that regard. I get that there’s much more to life than money, or even stability but, wow. Boston is an hour and a half away, NYC is between 2-3 hours away and there are a dozen trains going both ways every day.

But I get it. Middle worlds like mine are as imperceptible as a quark to people in the Bay Area or Toronto, in the same way the Bay Area and Toronto are as incomprehensible to me as the physics of an astral cloud or a black hole.

In my world even the ideas that a home should be up to 3x yearly earnings, or take up as much as 1/4 of your yearly gross income seem insanely extravagant. I read a piece last week at ZeroHedge recommending a 1x earnings test and, I think, no more than a 15% drain on net income: That seems more like it. But impossible. Unless you’re willing to live…in the kind of places the virtues, and vices, of which this website was intended to describe. I suppose a problem with San Francisco and Toronto is that there are no high quality “bad” neighborhoods left to move into; an idea I can’t comprehend as a resident of the greater Springfield area.

In all seriousness, Johnny’s post is one of the most interesting I’ve read in months, and I include my own! When I read articles at CityLab, Planetizen, ZeroHedge, or The New York Times about housing costs or homelessness on the West Coast I’m always concerned about the political slant of the author in trying to promote this or that agenda. 

I can best describe my incredulity by mentioning the way network television covers snow storms here on the East Coast: Every one is this unprecedented disaster threatening the end of civilization as we know it leaving millions to suffer in the wake of its destruction! Except, no it’s not. It’s snow. You shovel it. They plow it. It melts. And it’s not only not a big deal, it’s pretty and it’s fun and you go sledding or build a snow man or you sit in the house for a day or two. I delivered over 100 newspapers on the morning of the Blizzard of ’88. It took me 4 times as long, but school was cancelled so, no big deal. My jet-black mutt Charlie followed me the entire time and we had the time of our lives, and everyone along Tiffany Street got their “Morning Union”.

But if regular people with regular jobs are plunking down 1/3 of a million dollars as a down payment for a nice little condo AND just outside the door there actually are people living in tents and defecating on the streets then I suppose I owe the editors of the aforementioned news outlets an apology. Wow. That really is crazy. All the tropes apply, “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”, etc., but I can’t imagine NOT selling in that environment and moving…somewhere. Maybe not New England if culture and quaintness aren’t your thing, but at least Appalachia or Nebraska or something! Ohio or Indiana, right? Missourri!

Let’s go with, to me, the way too high crazy numbers and multiply the median income of a given place by three. Every nickel over that for housing costs is a bubble, sorry, even if it’s been sustained for 40 years, it’s going to crash. Get out…the call is coming from inside the house!

Our house. Purchase price, 2/3 our yearly gross income. Mortgage, taxes, insurance<10% net income. With a 15 year mortgage. The Springfield Strategy.

Virtue Signaling

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When Commodus explains to Marcus Aurelius that he has virtues, even if they are not the ones the emperor most values it makes me think of Springfield and its virtues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0AMz3G3FCA

The holidays provide more opportunities than any other time of year to meet new people and get a feel for the zeitgeist, but I have to remind myself that if my goal is to do that kind of research I have to not ruin the sample by giving away my biases. Last night actually provided some really interesting information precisely because I came to a conversation late and closed my mouth throughout most of it. It revealed an extremely positive attitude toward Springfield the twist being that both families lived in “Long-mortgage”, the city’s wealthiest suburb, more at the wife’s insistence than anything else.

I’ve delved into these waters before: Women experience the city differently; women are given greater responsibility for child rearing and are judged more harshly regarding it; auto-centric suburban living facilitates the purchase and transport of consumer goods regarding which women are targeted by marketing. Beyond that, a recent article at CityLab noted that the most oft repeated Christmas movie trope on the Hallmark Channel is “woman leaves city for small town and finds true love”; the irony is that all of the romantic dating scenes are filmed in walkable urban locations which are defined as small town centers.

This brings me to yet another pop culture reference, albeit a more obscure one. (So obscure I can’t find it) it’s a video of a good looking guy in a bar who, while hitting on a girl, makes it pretty clear he’s been using social media and the Internet to stalk her; but he’s cute so his target responds positively. Seconds later a more average guy just says “hello” to the same girl and she sprays him with pepper spray and runs off as though she’s been attacked. That is in so many ways the status of the out of fashion city: its virtues are ignored and its vices are magnified or even just imagined. 

On the bright side, it’s still true that visitors from out of town, especially performers who are in and out so quickly they don’t have time to realize that they’re not supposed to be impressed by the city, its streets, and its architecture, will express real admiration for the place. A Beatles cover band, the Classical Mystery Tour, did a show sponsored by MGM at Symphony Hall; it was the final night of a three day, three city New England tour. All three of the band’s front men took the time to mention how amazing the venue was, and how lucky we were to have such a beautiful space to experience their performance. 

In a real change from just a handful of years ago when similar comments from performers actually were responded to with derision, and openly so, these comments actually were not only greeted with applause, but one brave soul (not me) actually shouted…non-ironically: “Wooo…Springfield!”

There may be hope after all. Happy New Year.

The Third Visitor

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One of the economists I enjoy listening to propounded an interesting idea last week; low interest rates not only encourage  malinvestment in the economy but also take capital away from the important investments that need to be made. As I had surveyed NIRP and ZIRP and QE and NotQE I had thought of it more as a flood of money which, more or less, spread the cash out in such a way that “the good, the bad, and the ugly”, however one wants to define them, got their share of liquidity and that the next crash would wash out the bad and the ugly.

It’s nothing more than one man’s faint notion but it has informed my view of what I’m seeing in my little corner of the world quite a bit. For years and years, perhaps decades, I have wandered my neighborhood imagining what “should” be in each empty lot and parking lot and yet, not surprisingly, empty lots they remain; the tidal flows of cars filling one lot and emptying another in perfect synchronization all the while never filling more than 1/3 of the spaces. Spaces. Empty spaces too small for this and too large for that, but just the right size to sit, fester, and deaden everything that surrounds them.

Now choose your definition of malinvestment as you will; I see fresh food delivery of the Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, Splendid Spoon variety as classic examples. I’ve kept all of the insulation to complete a solar heater project involving a fairly large window space, Liz reuses the freezeable gel packs in lunch boxes and coolers. It’s been fun using special deals and such to give 13 year old Luna some independence when it’s her turn to prepare a meal and, quite honestly, their various recipe idea have expanded “the repertoire” of meals, as we call it, but I can’t imagine these things being sustainably profitable at scale for an extended period of time. Others say the same about Tesla, Uber, Lyft, WeWork…just name any one of yesterday’s favorite “market disrupters”; imagine all of the housing, the public transit, or the below ground infrastructure which could have been improved with the billions and billions of dollars that these projects have burned through.

At this festive time of year nearly all of our family traditions involve walking through our half empty hell hole of a neighborhood, except, it’s quite remarkably wonderful in its capacity to give quite a return on emotional investment even in its current state of impoverishment. Take our Christmas Eve traditions of distributing baked goods to our friends and neighbors along with hitting up our favorite Italian cafe for cappuccino and treats: We leave the house with enough fresh baked bread to deliver to the homes of nearby friends plus 3 extra loaves just in case. By the time we leave La Fiorentina, having made none of our deliveries, we need to return straight home for more bread. Luna’s former teacher, a parent from Drama Studio, two acquaintances from the world of historic preservation and we don’t have any left for a neighbor we pass as we leave Mom and Rico’s with a bottle of wine as Rico serenades Miss Luna over his sidewalk loudspeaker.

We pick up more bread, wander past some amazing structures, old and new, lose another loaf of bread to a neighbor Luna and I met at a charrette about improvements to the Apremont Triangle: “What’s happening with that?” We don’t know either. After making our appointed rounds we wander down to the skating rink at MGM where Lu takes some laps and Liz and I grab a Kahlua infused coffee and prepare to head home where we’ll sit in front of the fire and read our favorite parts of A Christmas Carol.

I read aloud this tour de force of Dickensian description:




My little chunk of horribly flawed urbanity doesn’t rise to those levels of cohesion, but it’s hard to imagine more than a handful of places in this region of 3/4 of a million people which could match it. Yet there they are; acres and acres of undeveloped and underdeveloped emptiness available at half, a third, a tenth the price of places without anything nearing the resonance of this moldering casque of the region.

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, at least 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’s “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 and 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, on the uniqueness of the venue, and 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 people 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 a 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 actually reside can add to the whole of our lives in ways we may not be able to quantify or even completely understand.

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 town 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 of 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 started to shrink, it is easy to see how those “dozens of nodes” would 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 making the attempt.

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.