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Marcia, Marcia, Marcia

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I was standing at the edge of the Saint Lawrence in Montreal waiting for L’International des Feux Loto (fireworks) to begin and as a friend began to explain to me what the various landmarks were I realized how eerily similar it all seemed. There was a city to be sure, and a river with a promenade and pedestrians crossing a railway line, but there was also a casino, a number of bridges, a dome, even a Six Flags theme park, and of course, finally, the fireworks. 

I generally don’t venture down to the river on Independence Day to see the fireworks over the Connecticut River; this year Luna and I walked down to watch them explode over the MGM castle. Watching our local urban equestrians race along Main Street during the event was a surprising addition to the festivities. Because we needn’t commit a great deal in order to watch this yearly spectacle we generally don’t push to get the best view. The most entertaining bit for me is watching the thousands of cars jostling to get out of the downtown once the show is over. It can take a couple of hours to get traffic back to normal.

In Montreal the pace of the cars and of the pedestrians was much less frenetic. We wandered back to the hotel San Sulpice which, now that I think of it is probably about the same distance from the river as our home is in Springfield. Many, many more people in Montreal, it seemed, viewed the fireworks as marking the beginning, not the end, of the evening’s festivities. True to our roots, we were done for the evening.

What fills me with hope after spending some time in a world class city like Montreal is noticing that it still has many of the same issues with which to deal as little old Springfield. There are vacant storefronts, the homeless sleeping on park benches, surface parking in ridiculous places, obstacles to pedestrians, ugly buildings, obtrusive highways; but the takeaway is that Montreal’s positives so far outweigh the negative that it is a scintillating place to experience. 

No one will ever ask which Montreal we visited. Springfield’s early economic and cultural success has given rise to dozens of eponymous communities the ubiquity of which has made it the ultimate generic fictional place from the Simpsons to The Guiding Light. Unlike Poughkeepsie, Peoria, Woonsocket, Albuquerque, Tulsa, Baton Rouge and countless other places it will never be a Cher, a Madonna, or a Sting of urbanism. Wedged in between Boston and New York we are destined to shriek “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” for all eternity if we insist on comparing ourselves to them…and we will.

There’s no comparing the variety and vitality of Montreal to that of provincial Springfield, but we have a plaza here, and a museum there that can compare favorably now and again. Until our friends got us out of the touristy areas every meal we had was overpriced and underwhelming. (After that we found great food, and sometimes it wasn’t even pricey) I read that there’s a movement toward more mediocre places for Millennials, although it might do Baby Boomers a bit of good to find some places to survive in semi retirement with inexpensive housing, cheap entertainment, low cost dining, lots of public transit, and a well funded social safety net. 

In a lot of ways what makes this place so great is its mediocrity. Two readers have recently commented specifically on how a transformed community, whether Springfield or Bellows Falls, can make it unrecognizable and even unlivable to those who would have it transformed. I can’t help but want better for the place I call home, but I do wonder if it ever becomes a shiny new thing to those on the outside if to me it might lose its luster.

Barry Kingston

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There’s an infantile instinct which I’ve never been able to shake. I can remember very distinctly, and therefore probably erroneously, its earliest manifestation. I remember watching the most popular boy in the 5th grade at Washington Street School riding his bike with Lynn (Linda?) D’Agostino on the handlebars up Tiffany Street. Lynn (Lisa?) said hello to me. Really, she did. I knew I had no chance with her; Barry Kingston was already a babe magnet, even before his band had a video on MTV or anything, and I was, well, a kid who was going to grow up to write a blog on urban issues in declining Rust Belt cities.

Later on that day, or a month later or something, the topic of Barry Kingston came up and my next door neighbor said that she didn’t like him. Didn’t like him? “You don’t get to ‘not like him’.” 

It all gets really twisted and contorted in here, so let me give a different example of this infantile instinct from when I was in my early 20’s:

In the late 80’s things in Utah were pretty bleak. It was hard to find a job in Provo that would help pay for my schooling at BYU. I drove in to Salt Lake City every morning to work as an “independent contractor” (read: scam) cleaning movie theaters. It paid very little, had no benefits, and I had to pay the social security taxes as employer and employee. I also worked for two or three hours in the morning at a radio station in Salt Lake. My wife found a minimum wage job at a mall where she managed to get maybe 10 hours a week. Eating out meant Little Caesar’s Crazy Bread.

When our neighbor in West Valley City shot herself, and I ended up with her blood all over my clothes after trying to revive her, we decided to move back to Massachusetts. I got a real job with flexible hours and benefits, and my wife found work at Mass Mutual. I was able to take a free bus to a nearby state school to complete my teacher certification, and buses ran every 10 minutes up State Street to Mass Mutual. Within a few months our lives were stable economically. We could get an actual pizza from a real pizza place(unknown in Utah).

My sister-in-law and her new husband were finding life on the Wasatch Front similarly difficult and paid us a visit to see if a move back east might work out for them. Yes, I had a job with great benefits; but I was a bellman at a hotel. Yes my wife worked for a Fortune 500 company, but it was low level data entry stuff. And we lived downtown in a small apartment so we didn’t need a car. 

Well, they were hoping for more, ya know, executive track positions. 

Wearing uniforms and taking buses was beneath them.

That’s the thing. It is partly the “offense” that somehow what I do is beneath someone else, but there’s something that turbo-charges it when what I am doing is beneath them but they claim to need my help. They can’t afford McDonald’s but want me to help them dine at Ruth’s Chris…by “loaning” them my Big Mac money.

Our vacations to the Cape are always last minute. We live fairly close and I can only spend two or three days there before I go a little crazy so we wait and see if there’s a time when family is spending a week or two when we can squeeze in a few days and the weather is nice. Then my wife heads over to Expedia and looks for some deals. 

This year we spent two nights at the Sandcastle Resort in Provincetown. We booked just a few days in advance but it was perfect for what we wanted to do while there: Stroll along the beach and collect seashells, wander up and down Commercial Street, and give Luna the opportunity to make some money busking in front of town hall. 

The accommodations for the three of us were a full sized Murphy bed for the grownups, and a pullout couch for Lu. With both beds open/down there may have been 20 square feet of floor space. There was a teeny tiny kitchenette, and a small table at which to dine…after the Murphy bed and the pull out couch were restored to their original positions. It was fine. Our plan was not to do anything in the room but sleep, shower, and change our clothes.

Two things tickled my fancy. One was that this was called a resort. It had a tennis court, a pool, and beach access on the bay side, but that was about it. Two, signs like this:


referred to “owners and guests”. Owners! There was a time, my guess would be in the 50’s, when this place was built that the beach access, the pool, the tennis court, and its location on the tip of the Cape would have been enough to make the average middle class American feel as though they were having an adequate enough resort experience, given that their last name wasn’t Kennedy, to purchase a unit as (I assume) a time share.

I’m not buying a timeshare, but it was nice enough. And there’s something about the fact that it isn’t enough for other people that grates. This follows in a series of posts where I’ve expressed that, yes, the American Dream is out of reach for many, many Americans because of deindustrialization, the financialization of the economy, the failing safety net and the like. But it is also true that the 50’s American Dream included a house less than half the size of the average home today, and perhaps one car, and a lifestyle that still included public transit, public parks, public pools, and maybe one trip…ever…to “Disney”. Even McDonald’s was still a treat!

I know, I’m getting old and grouchy, and the poor and the working class are getting the shaft today. That said, there’s an economic cohort, of which I am a part, which seems to fancy itself too good for those things that my father’s generation pointed to as luxuries, and yet wants to be seen as victims because (true story) a public school system wouldn’t grant them the use of personal time to spend a week in Bermuda (or the Bahamas or something) during the school year when they had an opportunity for a free trip. 

I’m not railing against avocado toast, see:

If you have the money for avocado toast, have avocado toast; if you don’t have enough money for avocado toast but you still want it, make sacrifices elsewhere so that someday you will. The point is, nothing was ever beneath me. I cleaned toilets, crawled in the mud (fun, actually), drove vans, schlepped luggage, delivered newspapers, fixed pallets, and I can’t remember what else. Sometimes I take my hard earned cash and I splurge on something ridiculous, but sometimes I eat a homemade peanut butter sandwich. 

My life is filled with luxuries and so, more than likely, is yours. For me part of being happy is keeping that in mind, and when I’m with people who’ve clearly lost sight of that it really irks me. My gut says that we’re headed for a time when a lot of things we view as normal will no longer be commonplace. If I’m wrong I’ll just continue to idiotically feel especially lucky because I can have a cheeseburger on a freshly toasted bun while listening to (annoying) jazz music in a beautiful public space. If I’m right? I don’t know, I suppose that if I’m right we’ll all look back and realize how much we took for granted.

Ayuh

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Education popped back onto my radar this week, propelled by two separate online sources. An article at CityLab failed, crashed, burned, and then disintegrated as it took claims made in a report by an equity in education think tank and, in essence, unknowingly made the case that every claim which the report made was refuted by the facts. In the other an interviewer and interviewee reveal that they have spent millions of dollars, in the case of the former, and decades of their life, in the case of the latter, to finally arrive at the conclusion they could have garnered from any one of my “It’s the Schools, Stupid” series: we reverse cause and effect when it comes to educational outcomes and students.

In “The Whiter, Richer School District Right Next Door” Adam Harris selects the Waterbury, Wolcott, and Plymouth school districts in Connecticut to highlight how disparities in funding create disparate outcomes between students. Unfortunately for him a commenter discovered that Waterbury, the “poorer, browner” school district outspends each of these Whiter, Richer School Districts Next Door on a per pupil basis according to ctfinance.org. I was unable to find that data myself and so I just put “per pupil spending” and the names of the towns into Google and got the same results. 

Furthermore, in looking into the report itself I noticed this little tidbit: In Massachusetts, Springfield isn’t analyzed. Hmmm, could that be because the city gets so much state funding that it dwarfs the spending of most of the surrounding communities? Instead, working class but hardly poor Chicopee is made the poster child by comparing it to neighboring Ludlow. I’m not sure, but I think that might be what’s called “cherry picking” your data.

I agree with the basic argument that poorer districts should be able to fund their schools at levels which correspond to surrounding communities, but pretending that balancing out those inequities, where they exist, will lead to similar outcomes belies ALL OF THE DATA. The single greatest determinant of educational outcomes is parental incomes regardless of per pupil expenditures.

Poor schools need more funding because poorer kids are harder to educate. You don’t increase resources in an emergency room in hopes that you can make the outcomes correspond to those of your GP, you do it because the ER needs resources, and you judge what’s done with those resources by looking for overall improvement, or comparing outcomes to those of other equivalent emergency rooms.

Two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have a conversation on the podcast Pitchfork Economics in which they arrive at the same conclusion. Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, and Nick Hanauer, self proclaimed progressive admit that they were both misguided in their attempts to reform the American educational system, and that in the end they both have done more harm than good. They’ve determined that the overall economy and salaries drive successful schools and not vice versa.

I’ve read Diane Ravitch’s book Reign of Error and recommend it, but I was surprised to hear her say in an aside during the interview that “integration was successful”. She must mean that during the brief period before the dynamic impact of integration, White flight, occurred, there were some positive outcomes. Forced integration wasn’t even successful at forcing integration. Having failed to actually create integrated schools, how could it be successful at doing anything else?

I further recommend the Jacobin Radio interview last week with Lily Geismer on Race and Class in the Liberal Suburbs. It more or less covers the same ground I did in my Crossing the Divide  (minute 51) presentation. In essence wealthy liberals talk a good game when it comes to integration, but they pay enormous premiums to make sure their kids don’t go to school with Black and Hispanic kids unless their numbers and characteristics, those of the minority children, are carefully vetted. 

To conclude this media centric post I recommend Chuck Marohn’s interview with Chris Andrade. There’s a lot of there there and not all of it relates to my situation in Springfield, but the idea of staying in a particular community is one which resonates with me. It isn’t that I feel that anyone who moves away from their hometown is maladaptive or evil, but seeing value in a non-superstar place is often viewed as abnormal by folks in the “front row”. It is a much more common sentiment expressed in the MSM and by elites; it was only a little while ago that Richard Florida in particular commented in an extensive essay that the desire of many people to remain in their communities was an obstacle to be overcome. Apparently more of us need to move to San Francisco or Cambridge. What could go wrong?

(Photos by Luna)

My wife just got home from the Food Zone with Luna. The closing of the more mainstream Food Mart at that same location some years ago initiated talk of a food desert here in Springfield. It’s hardly a place where you see a lot of White middle class folk; like my wife and LuLu. But it is right on one bus route and a block from at least two more. It doesn’t stop there, they will not only deliver food to you, but they’ll deliver you to the food if you can spend $50! Non sequitur? Not really. Listen to the podcast with Chris Andrade. Food Zone isn’t Albertsons. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know what half the stuff they sell in Food Zone even is. But I think most of the people in the neighborhood do. It’s not a food desert because I can’t buy a rotisserie chicken or get a nice bottle of wine. 

What? I can get a bottle of wine there?


That can’t be good.

Notes From Underground

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The attorneys who sold me their building ran nine window unit air conditioners to keep the offices cool during the summer. I know because they left me all of them. After 4 years of running between 3 and 6 of those units my wife and I made the decision to try something different. We had insulated the basement and all the walls and the ceiling of the top floor where there quite literally had been none, and I climbed up on to the membrane roof and painted it white with some leftover acrylic paint. (Just two years ago we had to replace the old roof and did so with one intended to be white in color.) We free-cycled the AC units and bought some fans.

Since then my summer routine has been to blow in air on the first floor and set three or for industrial fans to blow air out on the top floor; he basement apartment stays fairly cool without any involvement in the process, and having those windows open would be a security risk. In the morning I close up the house and during the day I see to it that no sunlight enters the home. It does an excellent job of keeping the house nice and cool on most days.

On most days.

The Weather Channel reported two days ago that July was the hottest month ever recorded in Boston, and in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Windsor Locks might seem like a random community to choose, but it is the location of the shared Hartford/Springfield “Bradley International Airport” (The Best Airport in America!). On the other hand, a professor at UMass put last month down as the 6th hottest on record in Chicopee (the former Springfield neighborhood where Westover Air Reserve Base is located).

Either way, last month was hot. Hot enough to make me wonder if the climate was changing if not for my awareness through the media? I still don’t know. In any case one interesting factoid was that not a single daily high temperature record had been broken and despite the threat to do so not once did it reach 100 degrees. On two occasions, however, records had been broken: records for the highest low temperature. 

That is especially important to me because my strategy for keeping the house cool depends much more on getting cool air in than it does on keeping the hot air out.

This is a situation where the house being huge is a good thing energy wise; it takes a lot of warmth from the outside to heat it up during the day and the east side is “insulated” by two other townhouses. On a normal summer night the temperatures drop into the mid to low 60’s and getting the house down to 68 degrees or lower is a piece of cake. Early in the summer I can get it down to almost 60. With the white roof, insulation, and keeping the curtains closed it is 5 or 6 o’clock at night before the temperature creeps up say 5 degrees. By 9 o’clock I’m opening up again to let in more cool air and the process starts all over.

One thing I’ve always known is that the dew point holds the key to all of this. The dryer the air, the more quickly it cools and the farther the temperature will fall. If, however, the dew point is in the high 60’s or even the low 70’s things won’t cool until 10 or 11 at night, and the temperature will only fall so far. On two successive nights last month the dew point was in the upper 70’s. That’s tropical stuff, Florida stuff. 

I was glad that some warmer days in the past few summers had concerned me enough that I purchased one high efficiency portable AC unit for the basement. It’s a two hose unit, important for higher efficiency, which works perfectly with the openings I had made for my solar heater; I swap out the outdoor solar box with the indoor cooler-dehumidifier and the already cooler basement can be cooled even more.


This is no joke. I take the potential of climate change seriously. A recent report had said that Springfield was, so far, among the least impacted metros in the country from increased heat with only 3 days per summer than normal over the average summer temperature in recent decades compared to the mid 20th century. The average for all metros was 15. That said the combination of the urban heat island effect and Springfield’s location in a very distinct valley location makes it warmer than surrounding communities. 

I know that as I age heat can be more dangerous for me than cold. Just as I have purchased a wood stove, built a solar heater, and added storm windows in part to be able to “shelter in place” in any sort of “cold emergency”, I don’t want to have to abandon my home for a cooling center in case of extreme heat. The basement is its own self sufficient apartment with two beds, a kitchen, a full bathroom and its own entrance. It stays cooler than the rest of the house anyway, as most basements do, and giving it a little help makes it quite comfortable. 

So last month, whether the hottest month ever, or just really hot, we ran the air conditioner for all or part of 7 days, and slept down there twice. Twice, for a period of two days each, the upstairs got in to the 80’s, and on two nights the house never got below 78 degrees. It was nasty. It was nice to have the downstairs there for a cooling break. Elizabeth and Luna only slept down there once, and I was the only one who spent any serious time during the day in the basement; doing some boring organizational stuff I had put off for as long as I could. I just wanted an excuse to be in the cold air I think!

In any case, lower lows are more important than lower high temperatures when it comes to keeping a big house cool without air conditioning. A heat wave arriving earlier in the summer makes keeping the house cool more challenging overall. Having a backup plan in place when your Plan A “crashes and melts” is always a good idea. And putting together an outdoor kitchen has become my top domestic priority for Summer 2020. Don’t worry, I’ve already begun to pick Johnny Sanphillippo’s brain for ideas!

Looking Backward

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Some quick shot updates and observations to start this week’s contribution.

Kids are doing wheelies in areas with heavy concentrations of pedestrians in places other than Springfield as it turns out. Commercial Street in Provincetown is the finest example of a shared space corridor that I have seen anywhere. For cars and delivery trucks it is a one way street, for bikes it is a two way corridor, and pedestrians wend their way along sidewalks on either side or along roadway. 

Twice I saw kids “riding recklessly” up Commercial Street, and I was quick enough to snap a picture of it once:

The shops didn’t close, people didn’t run away in fear, and that despite the fact that in one case the miscreant was clearly of the minority persuasion. On that occasion the cyclist did, in fact, slam into a car, but since the car was barely moving there was no noticeable damage to car, to bicycle, or to the rider.

KMO appears to be getting fed up with Bellows Falls, Vermont. My readers might recall I visited Bellows Falls a few years ago with my wife to attend a screening of the Wizard of Oz, and we passed through it while taking the Vermonter to Burlington. It’s a picturesque little town perfectly situated to be just the kind of community which could thrive in the Long Emergency, but KMO is less interested in collapse these days, and much more focused on the chaos which Artificial Intelligence will unleash upon us all. As is always the case with these questions I think the best strategy is to create a life you love which has facets that can be helpful in as many as possible of the multiplicity of scenarios we may face.

As an interesting aside, KMO has spoken at length, many times, about his view that it was at least in part a crisis in his own life which caused him to latch on to what might be termed “sudden collapse doomerism”. While he still concedes that the Peak Oil phenomenon is having and will have far reaching effects, he regrets that his doomerism caused him to both alter his life so drastically, and distracted him from the impacts technological advances were having on society.

All very reasonable. There’s a lot in the tech sphere which doesn’t interest me, most of it in fact. My lack of interest in it, of course, doesn’t preclude it from biting me in the ass, and so I try to keep abreast through those who are interested in it; like KMO.

On the other hand, I find his assertions regarding “doomerism”, and its correlation to an overall failure in life, interesting. For many people it may be so, I wouldn’t argue against that. What interests me more, however, is the tendency of the depressed to actually be better at assessing themselves, i.e. avoiding Dunning-Kruger, and their life situation. That is to say that people going through tough times may very well be more likely to become doomers, but that not only doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it may mean that they are more likely to be right.

Hampshire College appears to be pulling back from the abyss, but their plan for survival, surprisingly, doesn’t appear to follow the guidelines I suggested. I recommended they sell the entire property so that it could revert to farmland, and that they move their campus to downtown Holyoke. For those unwilling to follow the link, the reason I suggested that is that one of their professors, Michael Klare, is perhaps the world’s leading expert on resource depletion, and yet the campus of Hampshire College is perhaps the finest example of edu-sprawl in the United States with a Walkscore of 17 whereas downtown Holyoke has a Walkscore of 90!

Instead, the plan is to sell land for…auto-oriented sprawl! 




Do as I say, not as I do?

If you haven’t read Chuck Marohn’s series on his transformation from free market ideologue to Strong Towns advocate I recommend you change that. The core of the Strong Towns message is still the most important in the United States today. As with many simple messages it can become corrupted with well meaning but misguided and naive orthodoxies, but supporting the traditional development pattern and eschewing auto oriented development is the key to economic and environmental survival.

To close on an optimistic note, some years ago I remarked on the general skepticism of the public regarding intercity rail in the region by highlighting how two significant local radio personalities mocked the rehabilitation of Union Station and the expansion of CT Rail into Springfield as a ridiculous backward looking fixation on a “choo-choo”. Last week Bax and O’Brien discussed (minute 14)the Springfield to Boston rail study, and their only critique was that the state was not moving fast enough to expand commuter options via rail.

That said, the success of the CT Rail Hartford Line hasn’t been well advertised; I’ve yet to see a story pop up at City Lab or Planetizen despite the fact that the New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield metros it serves have a combined population of 3 million people in an area 1/2 the size of greater Denver. The expansion of service north to Holyoke, Northampton, and Greenfield next month has likewise received no attention despite the fact that it is the start of what I believe could be the most significant transformation this region has seen since the National Armory was situated in Springfield by George Washington. 

Those three communities plus Springfield connected, eventually, by frequent and reliable rail service make the region one of the most dynamic its size in the country with: the second highest concentration of universities, lots of low cost housing, major corporate headquarters, abundant water for drinking, manufacturing, and hydro-power, loads of tourist attractions, quick and easy access to a wide variety of recreation, all wedged in neatly between Boston and New York City.

The 2nd 1st Impression

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A few years ago my wife and I had spent a little time in Albany during the Rational Urbanism Summer Stalking Tour; we went to a movie in Bellows Falls (KMO), drove through Jim Kunstler’s home town, and spent a few nights at a B&B in Troy (Duncan Crary). I was unimpressed. Like Hartford it appeared that the capital city had received too much attention from the state in the era of urban renewal and retained little apart, from some residential neighborhoods, of high quality given my aesthetic.

Last week my wife and I had planned a getaway in Montreal. Our plan was to drop Luna at her summer camp in the Berkshires and then drive up to Canada. Rather than make the trip in the early evening as Lu’s drop off time would require we decided to stay the night in the Albany area; we had no touristic plans for that Sunday evening. The hotel, which was comfortable and offered a great complimentary breakfast (perfect for an early morning departure) was located in about as ugly a spot as imaginable more or less underneath a highway viaduct.

All we wanted was a bite to eat. As is the case with Springfield, Sunday night is clearly not Albany’s “time to shine” in terms of urban excitement; many of the downtown’s eateries were closed. We looked through Yelp and found a few promising places, but most of them were out in “Stroadville” so we decided on Mamoun’s Falafel. The reviews of the food were alright, but some comments spoke about how sketchy the neighborhood was so we just had to check it out; our assumption being that it was much like the comments we hear all the time about places in Springfield.

https://goo.gl/maps/VQ8t3HtnHUT8tdZw8

It turned out to be in a little gem of a district which was, yes, a bit run down, but which even on a Sunday night had some hustle and bustle. Some of the architecture was fabulous, but the urbanism was phenomenal. There was trash everywhere, but the street people were picturesque by Springfield standards. No one asked us for money. Hell, no one paid any attention to us!

The restaurant?


The place was busy enough to entertain but not so much as to make it uncomfortable. Overall the food was good and the baklava, made in a Syrian style, was by far the best we’ve ever had. The proprietor was very nice and didn’t mind answering a few of our questions. It’s a place that’s been there for more than 3 decades, but it feels like it’s been there for centuries.

Places like Albany, and Springfield for that matter, don’t often get more than one chance to cement an image in the mind of potential visitors. Sumner Avenue, Boston Road, Main Street in the North End, Main Street downtown, Parker Street: these are all entrances into the city that can give startlingly different impressions of Springfield. I’m sure the same is true of Albany, and Syracuse, and all the rest.

What a nice little place, Mamoun’s. I’m glad we happened on to it.

La paradoja

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The key question in poetic analysis is why is this poem a poem? That is to say, what is it about the expression of this idea as a poem that makes more more effective than if it had been expressed as an essay, a short story, or a novel. It’s a conceit, of course, but I have found that it helps students to understand what can make poetry special. As I take my students through the steps of poetic analysis I always have them conclude by attempting to uncover for themselves which literary device or structural component of a poem best embodies the theme.

In “Balada de los dos abuelos” by Nicolás Guillén they can see how the two distinct assonant rhymes, one for the White grandfather and the other for the Black grandfather, become one harmonious rhyme by the end of the poem; that new combination of sounds mirroring what has become a new identity in the poetic voice itself.

In Rosario Castellanos’ “Autorretrato” the dearth of poetic language mirrors the theme that she is ill-fitted to the world; as a poet even her poetic self portrait is prosaic:

Antonio Machado writes his ode to the common man He andado muchos caminos in folkloric “arte menor” whereas Rubén Darío announces to his fellow Hispanic Americans that their culture is at least the equal of the United States in “A Roosevelt” in the erudite and grandiose “arte mayor”. 

When I get to the term “paradoja”, if any of my students have any difficulty in understanding the concept I use my go to example: forced integration of the Springfield public schools. A Supreme Court decision held that segregated schools were unconstitutional and the city’s schools were racially integrated and 65 years later the schools are…more segregated than ever. That is a paradox alright. 

What amazes me is that virtue signaling has gotten so ridiculous that political candidates will criticize opponents for being against such an obviously failed policy. I would go one step further and argue that forced desegregation may have been the most harmful policy idea in the post Civil War United States. To explore that only requires a quick study of my hometown, but I am going to begin by stating, categorically, that I personally reject segregation. I live not just in a city, or a neighborhood which is diverse, but just to include the properties contiguous to my own, there are Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants from North, Central, and South America, as well as immigrants from Africa. I know them. They know me.

I was a student who was part of the busing program from 4th grade on. I suffered no ill effects, and my daughters attended schools in the City of Springfield which were still under a desegregation order 30 and 40 years later. Of course when I attended the schools were over 80% White, by the time my daughters began the schools were 80% “minority”, the White middle class population having decanted almost completely to the suburbs; and therein lies the rub.

To be succinct, the resources do not exist to obligate real and thorough integration. Minority parents don’t want their children in minority majority schools, and neither do White parents, but many of the White parents have the wherewithal to see to it that they don’t. In Springfield houses in the city were more valuable than equivalent houses in suburban areas in 1970 (before busing). By 1990 houses in the City of Homes had declined sharply relative to those in suburban locations because inner ring suburbs weren’t included in “desegregation”; as a matter of fact a 99% White school in Longmeadow was legally considered “segregated” because its population “reflected the makeup of the community” whereas as a Springfield school with a population made up of equal parts White, Black, and Hispanic students (literally 1/3, 1/3, 1/3) was “segregated”…because White kids were “over-represented”! Amazing.

In cities where inner ring suburbs were included in desegregation White folks left those communities as well and pushed suburbanization into ex-urbanization. 

As an experiment in social engineering it failed. 

As educational policy it failed. 

In increasing the pace of suburbanization it has been a disaster for the environment and the fiscal stability of government at every level.

I know it is a policy I WOULD HAVE BEEN IN FAVOR OF before IT BECAME OBVIOUS THAT ITS IMPACTS WERE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO THE GOAL. Seeing that, I’m now against it. Government perhaps can use certain policies to promote a better and higher functioning society, but attempting to force enormous and politically powerful groups to act in ways contrary to deeply held, if abhorrent, beliefs will have unintended negative consequences. Happy that religious loons in Kentucky and Alabama are forced to recognize gay marriage? Cool, soon women in Missouri and Georgia won’t be able to get abortions. Think those things aren’t connected? You’re wrong. 

Race, like religion, is still a powerful factor in our society, it amazes me how assiduously we avoid it. In this region, for example, Boston is the “mega-hub” the all powerful economic jet engine. If you seek to reap the rewards of its vitality you must accommodate its inconveniences. Weird though, how some smaller urban communities in New England thrive or struggle depending on their ability, or their inability, to attract wealthier residents. Hmmm. Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Springfield, Providence even, these places struggle a bit, even with, in some cases, Ivy League universities, major corporate headquarters, and centers of state government, and they seem to have lots of “brown people”. Burlington, Portland, Worcester, these cities are really doing well by most measures and, oh, weird, they’re all, like, “whiter” than the communities on that first list. It almost like you could make a chart of “whiteness” and another for “economic revitalization” and they would, like, mirror each other. Shut! up!

This won’t be made any better by passing a law, but I think it could be made worse. We’ll never know how this region might be different had Springfield schools never been integrated, but I don’t see any reason to think that the snail’s pace of suburbanization and White flight which existed before 1973 would have accelerated like it did without forced desegregation. How much less suburban sprawl would the region have experienced, how many more acres of farmland might still exist, how many more people might be using public transit, how much more economically vibrant might the city be, and finally, how much less segregated might the schools be(!) if we hadn’t insisted on integrating them? ¡Qué paradoja!

Hypocrisy is the Mother of Detention (Centers)

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I was buying radishes at the farmers’ market yesterday when this pretentious ass, you know the type, the kind who buys his veggies at a farmers’ market, tells me I’m cutting in front of the people standing beside me. Now, it turns out that there were two different lines depending on method of payment and the other people realized they were in the wrong line and switched over; though it wasn’t a big deal since the cashiers didn’t seem to enforce the distinction on check out. Anyway, this complete freaking idiot, the pretentious jerk who warned me about cutsies, sees the check out open up in the other line and proceeds to…cut in front of the people in that line.

Classic.

It’s my pet peeve, this hypocrisy thing, although I must say it isn’t so much the existence of hypocrisy, it’s just the inability people seem to have in recognizing or admitting it. I’m a feminist from a philosophical point of view, but I’d have to be pretty un-selfaware not to detect my misogynistic tendencies. Ditto the issue of race. One of the reasons I moved here, to this house in this neighborhood 10 years ago was that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else or living anywhere else given my stated beliefs.

It was thrilling then to read, on my birthday no less, essays calling out hypocrisy (especially of the left, the left of which I am a part) regarding four of my current pet issues: climate change, immigration, “affordable housing”, and America’s illegal and immoral aggression all over the planet. The enormous impacts on our cities of these issues are obvious with the possible exception of the “illegal immoral aggression” thing, but I think the financial effects of 800 bases on foreign soil and a budget nearly equal to that of the other 95% of the population of the planet has an impact, not as much of an impact as the illegal immoral use of a missile blowing up my house and ripping my family members’ bodies to shreds as collateral damage (Tulsi Gabbard 2020), but an impact nevertheless.

On the issues of climate and housing, turns out if we build more housing, but it’s designed in an auto-oriented style then it will have a negative impact on the climate. What, what, what!?!?!?! Who knew? So the way in which we inhabit the land has an impact on our energy use and that relates to our carbon footprint? Whoa. So we could all change our incandescent bulbs to LEDs and, like, it isn’t going to accomplish anything unless our society allows externalities to be priced in to the cost of the way in which we live? The hell you say! Someone else can’t just do something differently so that I can continue to do what I’ve always done? Screw you then!

I was having this discussion with a friend and I pointed out that his habit of traveling by air kind of negates his bicycle use in terms of carbon footprint, later I acknowledged that my “excess house” certainly puts a crimp in my climate change bona fides. (But not before he outed me to his female companion as not necessarily supporting the equal pay argument of the USA Women’s Soccer team. Misogyny? I don’t think the curling team, men or women, should get what the soccer players get, and the lady figure skaters should get more than the men. It’s not gender, it’s the revenue stream each sport creates.) 

How do I rationalize it, and is it hypocrisy? There’s an element of hypocrisy that’s roughly equivalent to what my wife and I refer to as admitting that “our generosity knows bounds”. Do I care about the poor and the wretched? Sure. I donate to worthy causes. All that I can? No. I could live in a room at the Y, eat at the soup kitchen and donate almost my entire salary to charity. Of course, that extreme sacrifice would have very little overall impact on the problem, but I would be sacrificing quite a bit. 

So I rationalize doing what I’ve done living here by noting that most of the money I’ve spent on this house has been spent on improving energy efficiency. When the old roof needed replacing I paid for a white reflective one, I’ve insulated the attic and the basement from floors to walls to ceilings. The list goes on, I’ve written on the topic before and I’ve continued to the point that I’d say the house uses 1/4 the energy it used to. The next step would be to rent the basement apartment and either sublet rooms or make the place into 3-4 separate living spaces. Will I do that? If I have to. My “generosity” knows bounds.

Of course, just as I start to feel as though the whole world is getting on board with this anti-hypocrisy thing I read about a protest…in Northampton of course, about “closing the detention centers” on the border. Cool. How many random totally undocumented visitors are you willing to take in at your house in Florence I wonder? How many children in your child’s classroom? If you really think that totally open borders are a great thing, why don’t you live anywhere near a border or in a community with a huge percentage of refugees? Sure, the stories of the refugees are so poignant and heart-warming and they are such wonderful people; then why aren’t you relocating to live as close as you possibly can to where they live? 

I know why not: because that’s the hard work. Confronting the difficulties and complexities surrounding culture and accommodation when things stop being just “poignant and heart-warming” and become part of the daily struggle to deal with realities of the conflicts that will arise. 

The Center

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I don’t know if vindication is something I’m looking for most of the time when I put down my views here at RationalUrbanism since so much of what I express here is subjective. I don’t want my hometown to thrive because it’s demonstrably true that some fact or other makes it the rational outcome of a well reasoned process; I want it to thrive because it is a place which matters to me in a uniquely personal way. In the last few weeks though I have read and heard some things here and there which did support some ideas I had pondered on these pages, but in venues more widely respected and, in some cases, after some lengthy technical analysis.

Feargus O’Sullivan is a columnist at CityLab and writes that perhaps “livability” rankings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, that they assess more broadly what cities provide “clusters of amenities” to a certain percentage of people who already live in a particular place and have the means to take advantage of them. In my words, Cambridge and San Francisco might be super “livable” if you’re ultra rich, but they might suck if you’re not. In Springfield I can do so much more for so much less and spend more of my “life” doing and less time earning the money to pay for it.

It also re-affirms in its own way my very recent take on housing for the poor. In Feargus’ example perhaps Zurich isn’t such a livable place for the less affluent, whereas as I don’t see Westport as particularly livable for that same group. Just last week another public meeting got all out of control because a suburban town here in western Mass is looking at the possibility of some affordable multi-family housing being built on the site of a former strip mall. More than anything I enjoy the denizens of these communities straining for arguments to be against housing for the poor without just screaming “Poor people suck, and lots of them are Black and Puerto Rican!” 

One person actually went this route: “Oh my God, the traffic!”

More traffic than the supermarket it’s replacing?

But it’s not a great place for affordable housing. The vacant land 5 minutes, two minutes away from Union Station, the primary transportation hub for the entire region and adjacent to one of the most walkable neighborhoods in all of western New England, that’s a great place for building housing which will be more affordable because it’s reasonable to live there without a car.

Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns uses a study by George Washington University to discuss just how little of our built environment would retain its value without the ubiquity of the automobile. It uses studies and analysis with charts and graphs; I just sat down right where I’m sitting now and thought about it. If we ever do end up being forced as a society to become less auto-dependent then that will occur at a time when we are also limited as to the resources we have to build new human environments. In that case most of what has been built in this country in the last 75 years will become visible as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. 

As I wrote just weeks ago, should that day arrive, there will be a rush to the exits in suburbia, but the escape portal will become narrow indeed. Who will the buyers be and what value will be left in the soil of those despoiled places? And walkable land, like arable land, will have value because “they’re not making any more of it”.

This week my parental duties, as can often be the case, took me into places I wouldn’t normally go if left to my own devices. First, I was in the wealthiest part of the richest community in the entire region; in a residential neighborhood with near million dollar homes. I mentioned off handedly to Luna that Longmeadow was such a small community, both in geographic size and population, that its residents attended high school in Springfield until the 1950’s. My thoughts went back to my time in one of those high schools barely 20 years later when we were told how, at one time Classical High School was arguably the finest public high school in the United States and that a simple phone call from its principal could get any student into Harvard or Yale. 

I assume it was right about the time that stopped being the case that Longmeadow-ites (Longmeadownians?) decided to build their own building on Grassy Gutter Lane. Being rich means you want the best, and if something stops being the best…well, you get something else.

Just a day later I was in what used to be one of the most run down and certainly one of the most violent neighborhoods in Springfield picking up a different set of Luna’s friends for a day at the beach; but, oh! How that neighborhood has been transformed! The developer used both historic preservation and affordable housing tax credits and restored a dozen or more apartment buildings to their turn-of-the-century splendor. Stunning, truly stunning. My guess is the per household income might be 10% or less of that of the neighborhood we visited in Longmeadow the day before.


We got back late from Ocean Beach Park and The Book Barn and so I found myself watering the flowers out in front of the house much later than usual. Two neighborhood characters, perhaps homeless, were wandering by across the street. One drunkenly screamed at the other to give him a light; but then, a moment later, he asked him to give him back his lighter. A brief altercation ensued, a little tussle and it was over. In this neighborhood. In this neighborhood of historic homes. In this walkable neighborhood where all of the region’s energy, transportation, water, sewer, and communication infrastructure is based.

Will the two knuckleheads arguing over a lighter be the inheritors of this amazing legacy? I really don’t think so. The great fear of the Zombie Apocalypse is that the lighter-fighters will swarm over the cities like a swarm of locusts. I think it’s more likely that, as things begin to crumble at the far reaches of the systems we have already put in place that the swarm will be coming from without. Those who occupied the far flung beautiful places will abandon them as soon as they cease being optimal environments for living, and they will once again occupy the beautiful turn-of-the-century places and get access to what they want and what they need.

I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which the wretchedly poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addled have electricity, water, natural gas, Internet access, transportation services, and the like; all systems which flow out from this central location, but the wealthy have no utilities, and are reduced to getting water from trucks manned by the National Guard. That might happen in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, but if it were to continue for any period of time the well-off would find new digs.

Sometimes things fall apart and the center cannot hold, but more often than not things on the edge fall off, and the center is the one place that keeps it all together. In the end that is what makes the center, the center.

A Sunny Monday

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At the risk of giving you more insight than you might want into the inner workings of RationalUrbanism, I tried to multi-task by earning some step-dad bonus points as I slyly took some photographs intended to support an opinion at which I had already arrived. One problem: the experience didn’t match my expectation and so, with much regret, I have decided to alter my opinion instead of selecting some non representative pictures and going ahead with what I had planned to say.


I told Luna she could have some friends over and I’d take them down to the riverfront, make them lunch, and otherwise perform parental tasks so as to facilitate such a get-together. After hanging around the house for an hour or so the girls donned their bathing suits and off we went. We took the pedestrian bridge behind the old Basketball Hall of Fame over to the park and, weirdness of weirdnesses, there were people coming back as we were headed over. It didn’t stop there; there were people crowded along the benches in the shade along the bike path. 

What?

(Tips on becoming a photographer!)

Ok, there was a maintenance guy hacking back the sumac getting ready for the July 4th extravaganza; dependably the ONE day a year the park gets some use…even overuse. But there was also an older gentleman sauntering along the walkway and I could see people sitting by the new picnic benches. And people fishing. And kids at the playground and, oh, the splash pad was already spraying water which meant that someone had recently activated it. The gate to State Street was open and people dressed in business clothing were wandering across the railroad tracks.

(Nice spot for a b-ball court near the Hall of Fame)

I was prepared to make the case that without more amenities, like a basketball court near the pedestrian bridge, (and the Hall of Fame!)the park would quickly fall back to its prior level of (dis)use and become much more of a security and maintenance hassle than it’s worth, but now I’m not so sure. There wasn’t a trickle, there was a steady stream of people coming into the park. We were there just after noon, but in this live news report at the entrance to the park at 5:31 you can see people walking by as well:

Maybe the new play equipment, the splash pad, the new bathrooms, the 9/11 memorial, and the police substation are enough to create sufficient use for now to keep people coming back. The prior iteration wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good enough to overcome the isolation of a spot just outside the downtown but with extremely limited connectivity.

The challenges haven’t changed:

*The bike path is a wholly disconnected segment and isn’t long enough to attract serious bikers.

*Undergrowth creates cover in which the homeless tend to reside and, however benign their presence, makes many people uncomfortable.

*”Overgrowth”… of sumac in particular, obscures the view of the river without which the bike path loses all of its aesthetic power and also increases the sense of isolation.

*No food available within the park.

Apart from confronting these challenges, connecting the bike path to Forest Park and Agawam to the south, to the new and proposed bike paths in the interior of the city to the east, and, eventually, north “to infinity” would completely change the dynamic of the park. It would have been ideal had the renovated formerly private marina had been closer to the park, but at the very least the city should study other ways to give people more access to the river itself in as safe a way as possible. 

I see the next big move, apart from the Hall of Fame contributing to a basketball court, being the presence of Six Flags New England on the riverfront. It’s just a few miles down the river to the largest amusement park in New England; an amusement park which doesn’t have a single major hotel on or near its property, not any closer than downtown Springfield anyway. A water connection from downtown to the former Riverside Park existed for years. Re-creating it with some water taxis to give families a “park once” experience of Six Flags, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, MGM, the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, and the Incredible World of Dr Seuss (as well as the 4 other museums of the Quadrangle), from any one of 7 major downtown hotels might be attractive. Something like a merry-go-round located in the park both for people enjoying the park and those waiting the arrival of the Tinker Bell (the old Peter Pan bus lines pontoon boat) could also act as advertising for Six Flags to the millions of cars which drive by on I-91 every summer.

Many locals can’t get beyond their jaded view of Springfield in general, and the Connecticut River in particular. They look across the river and see the electric plant and know that the Bondi’s Island sewage treatment facility, the landfill, and the trash burning plant are right there, only obscured by the trees; but the plant has a spark of industrial chic, and, for the visitor the rest is out of sight, out of mind. It’s got some real potential and, I’m surprised to say, it isn’t so bad right now.