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…Not As I Do

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Global warming. Climate change. The ice sheets on Greenland and the Antarctic melting leading to sea level rise, just one in a long list of  potentially catastrophic outcomes; I’m sure you’ve heard of it by now. Only people blinded by politics, greed, or ignorance don’t “believe” it, right? Certainly insurance companies, technology companies, and corporations headed by executives who lean toward the Democrats would be among those who take it the most seriously.

Except, if you look at where they are putting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of brick and mortar investment, it’s going, or potentially going, to places which are considered to be right in the bullseye of the primary impacts of climate change.

Massachusetts Mutual and GE are putting their Boston headquarters here.


Blue means most susceptible to sea level rise by the way.

Look at Amazon’s list of 20 favorites for HQ2:

There are some which could make sense, but many of the ones not likely to be a little too wet are going to be a little too hot or dry…you know, if you believe the most fundamental prediction for climate discontinuity in North America; that the South will become unbearably hot, and anything west of the Mississippi will be drying up substantially, as John Michael Greer expresses here in his chapter on the ecological aftermath of industrial civilization from Dark Age America:

You can tell me what you believe or what you stand for, but if you are seriously considering Fan Pier in Boston or Miami as great places to invest for corporations that have been around and/or intend to be around for a hundred years, you don’t really think sea level rise or any of the other impacts of climate change are anything to be worried about.

The Driving Assumption

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Wednesday was an almost perfect snow day. Schools were cancelled because the half a foot of snow forecasted to fall was to be followed by copious amounts of freezing rain and it was to all be at its worst after noon, when school children would be returning home even if superintendents tried to squeeze in a “half day”. So LuLu and I had nothing but a little overcast to deal with as we ambled over to the museums for a little fun.

The Amazing World of Dr Seuss museum has been so popular that even members, who get unlimited entry into the other 4 museums get only tickets for entry at a particular hour. On this day it wasn’t needed but the procedure was followed in any case. There were only 10 or 15 other visitors there so we had the run of the place. We pushed all the buttons, played all the games, LuLu read me Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are, and we headed down to the “Arts and Crap” (Not its real name) area. They had a scavenger hunt for kids to look for details in the exhibits and murals so we ran through the entire museum again. By the time we dropped off the clipboard and LuLu claimed her prize it had gotten a bit messy outside weather wise and, as we were exiting the crafts room the museum educator offered me a very thoughtful “Drive safely”!

We exited the Dr Seuss museum and the security guard also recommended we “drive safely”, though we were headed to the science museum and the gift shop…read “Toy and Book Store”…on the same campus, on foot. But how was he to know that? We wandered in to the gift shop and we heard that there were rumblings regarding the possibility of the museums closing early: 2 o’clock. It was getting messy out, very few people were going to brave the elements in their cars for a visit to the museums, and all of the school visits were no doubt postponed. 

We hurried up to the rotating program space which housed a really fun interactive exhibit on prosthetic devices. We didn’t have time to see and do everything, but there was no one else in the entire space. Security came in to remind us that the museum was closing early: “Drive safely”.

We took the hint. We walked toward the library, though I wondered if the library was open given the conditions, but I knew that even if the library were closed we could slip out the gate at the southwest corner of the Quadrangle. As I suspected the library was closed, but the gate was also closed and locked. I asked Lu if we should go back and walk all the way around, or jump the fence: we jumped the fence. 

She said she had never felt more like she belonged in Dauntless than she did right then! Cool.

We headed to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. As we exited the Caring Health Center the guard offered a polite “Drive safely”. We were both famished, esurient, hungry-like, so I gave LuLu the option of getting “arroz con gandules” at Raices, something from the deli at Milano’s, Frigo’s, La Fiorentina, or Mom and Rico’s, or chicken biryani (for her) at City Pizza (my preference for their chicken gyro…which is amazing, the pizza…meh). She chose Red Rose. Yes, not one of the options I offered because I was thinking more “grab and go”. 

Were we in a hurry though? Not really. Ok, Red Rose.

We had a great lunch, I had chicken parmigiana, she had chicken francaise, and we both upgraded to the house salad…a must btw. “Drive safely!”our waitress offered as we put on our coats with a bag of leftovers for Liz.

Yup. 5 “Drive safelies”(sp?) and a locked gate. The gates to the parking area were open, that’s for sure. The Walkscore of the area we traversed ranges from the upper 80’s to the low 90’s: It’s as walkable a place as there is in the region. There are places to live, to eat, to work, and to shop with some great little parks and plazas dotted throughout. But the assumption is still that just about everyone doing anything, even on a day when the driving is treacherous but the walking is easy, will be doing what they’re doing using our societies #1 prosthetic device: the automobile. 

It would be cool if someday, perhaps 10-20 years from now when I’m at the museum with a grandson or granddaughter, I hear someone say under similar circumstances; “Walk safely there grampa, it’s slippery out!”

Phew

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There is no way for me to know if Mass Mutual ever seriously considered moving its headquarters out of Springfield. I’ve always viewed the second campus in Enfield, Connecticut (just a few miles away) as a sword of Damocles, reminding city and state officials on both sides of the border that relocation could be achieved without too much difficulty for the employees. It’s probably the case that the recent relatively small shifts of employees to North Carolina and other locations as well as real estate sell offs, were intended to be read, not by insignificant bloggers like me, but by people with a bit more authority in terms of offering multi-million dollar tax breaks.

People are pointing out that Mass Mutual’s commitment to increase the workforce by 1,500 people means no net gain in jobs for the region since it seems to entail shifting 1,500 workers from Enfield to Springfield. The other 500-1,000 employee increase within the Commonwealth will all occur in already job rich Boston. Still, better to keep 4,500 jobs here and get a $50 million upgrade of the State Street headquarters than to be watching those jobs leave the city and/or the region. 

It is funny how the state views the Enfield jobs as no different than if a company from Idaho were moving 1,500 employees here, but, state income tax implications aside, this will mean nothing to the region. On the other hand, if the Springfield campus had closed and Mass Mutual’s headquarters been relocated to Enfield all of the positive momentum from CRRC, MGM, and Union Station would have been completely lost. 

It will be interesting, with both the GE and MM departures from the Nutmeg State to the Bay State having just been announced, to see how Connecticut officials and politicians deal with the CT Rail expansion into Springfield and beyond. Add to that the accusations being leveled at MGM over meddling at the federal level with the planned tribal casino in East Windsor and how the CT Rail line will feed people from New Haven to Windsor Locks into a brand new train station just blocks from the $960 million dollar MGM resort and you’ve got the makings for some real top quality grandstanding.

In the end, this has been a sort of economic gardening, but at an industrial scale. Springfield really can’t help that it has become reliant on a handful of huge employers. A city that used to be headquarters for numerous regional banks now hasn’t a single hometown bank; too many manufacturers to name have moved away or gone out of business. Growing smaller enterprises and nurturing startups is great, but losing Mass Mutual, Smith & Wesson, or any other big name or big time employer would be devastating. 

Mass Mutual’s CEO played a big time game of chicken with the state and got his company $46 million for promising NOT to abandon Springfield. We keep the jobs, and Boston can hope that, perhaps sometime in the near future, the City of Homes will cease to be a ward of the state.

No Exit

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It’s easy to be negative about the media. For me anyway. That’s mostly because I’m a contrarian living a contrary lifestyle and writing a blog thereon. So when I read a news item that inverts all my negative expectations it raises my hopes tremendously.

Here it is.

Not only is east-west rail up for a some serious study but connecting the valley from north to south is in the negotiation phase of actually being put in place in conjunction with the brand new Hartford Line of CT Rail! It only makes sense, but that’s the point. 

Connecticut’s budgetary woes aren’t helped by the outlays required for the expansion of commuter rail from New Haven to Springfield. Obviously, if any part of the line needed to suffer cutbacks, the Massachusetts spur would come first. The Commonwealth coming up with some money to throw Connecticut’s way to run some extra trains north to Greenfield both gets the Bay State piece taken care of for less than if MassDOT had to put together the whole thing from scratch, (Keeping in mind that the newly renovated station in Springfield, the brand new station in Greenfield, the recently added platforms in Holyoke, and Northampton, and the modernized rails themselves have already been not only paid for but completed) and can reaffirm the Nutmeg State’s commitment to the program as it extends north of Hartford by making it worthwhile financially.

As I have written here on a number of occasions, as much as connecting to Boston would be beneficial, history and current data both demonstrate that Springfield is more closely related to Connecticut than greater Boston.

The icing on the cake of the article is the dismissive attitude of the state official to talk of expansion of highway exits on the turnpike. The state understands, I think, that encouraging sprawl in the Hilltowns would end up costing Massachusetts millions of dollars in infrastructure expansion, all the while negatively impacting both the rural and agricultural hinterlands and the urban areas, where billions have already been invested in infrastructure the use of which will not be maximized if the population decants to the hills.

North and East

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The Great Recession temporarily slowed the internal migration which has seen the population moving steadily south, west, and into suburbia. There were arguments about the overall shape, size, and significance of the shift but now that the dust has settled somewhat every source that I have seen indicates that once again native born Americans are resuming the old pattern with the Carolinas, Florida, Texas, and Arizona becoming the primary destinations of choice.

There is, however, a much, much smaller counter movement taking place; a nearly imperceptible shift of the most influential bloggers and podcasters in my life, none of which is aware of my blog or even my existence, to the north, to the east, and, unsurprisingly, not into suburbia. Of the 4, I would say that 2 made the move to where they now reside very thoughtfully in the sense that the place and form of their relocation was intentional and designed to provide for them as the world changed in ways in which they have foreseen. The other 2 moves seem less systematically wrought, but are still conscious manifestations of how they see the world.

Jim Kunstler foresees a Long Emergency. Read the book of the same name or the World Made by Hand series of novels, or listen to a dramatic reading of his play Big Slide and you get an idea of what he envisions and why he lives where he lives. Having predicted (over and over again) the real estate crash of 2008 he rented a place in Saratoga Springs, New York, and used the crash as an opportunity to purchase a home with a sizable chunk of land just outside the small town of Greenwich, New York near the confluence of the Battenkill and Hudson rivers because he believes that waterways, walkable small towns, and local food are the future. For 30 years he looked at what was and what was to come and decided on this:

Chris Martenson has only been on my radar for a few years and he moved from the Gold Coast of southeast Connecticut to Monatague, Massachusetts long before I ever read any of his work. He filmed an infomercial promoting his Crash Course at the local PBS station studios not a 10 minute walk from where I sit right now, but I didn’t see the special until recently and I somehow completely missed the Crash Course for years. It takes everything I’ve lazily and unsystematically believed and coalesces it into a coherent worldview. I’m not sure if Chris relocated to rural Western Massachusetts because he sees it definitively as the best place to be given his take on the condition of the world, or, more likely, that it was the closest and cheapest of a number of places which fit the bill. Read Chris and Jim, or read my prior pieces on them and you’ll see that as closely as I feel my thoughts align with theirs on the shape of the world to come they would both see my choice of living in a majority minority urban location, albeit in New England, as risky and unwise. 

K.M.O. interviews a lot of people and talks about a lot of things that don’t interest me in the slightest, but when our interests do coincide I find his insight and humility to be enlightening and, of all things, very much grounded in the idea of actually experiencing life. He talks quite a bit about his excessive zeal with respect to the singularity, Peak Oil, doom and gloom, and has a nice way of expressing profound ideas in simple ways. I can go months and months and do nothing but delete his podcasts, but when one sticks, it really sticks. He has moved from the Deep South, to New York City, and now to Bellows Falls, Vermont. His many relocations as described in his own words seem to me to be a sort of performance art with every new chapter a response to the previous one as artistic movements react against the constraints and expectations of the older paradigm. He will probably be off soon; his sojourn in New England just another episode in an eventful life. 

The newest New Englander is John Michael Greer. If Kunstler built the foundation of my ideology it has been “The Archdruid” who has refined it over the last three years. His weekly blog and his books “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire” and “Dark Age America” have helped me to better envision what my world might look like in the coming decades and puts my preparations for the future in a more hopeful and less panicked light. He credited, at least in part, his neighbors in Cumberland, Maryland with helping him predict the electoral victory of Donald Trump before he was even the front runner among Republicans. His essay on class and politics in America is still, to me, the single most important work for understanding our current political situation. If people would prefer that the upcoming populist rebellion have a left wing rather than a right wing worldview his essay is essential reading. Hint: calling everyone you disagree with racist xenophobes is not the path to electoral success.

John Michael has moved not just to New England, but to a dense, urban, multicultural, economically struggling city in New England, though sadly not my quaint little dense, urban, multicultural, economically struggling community; he now lives in East Providence, Rhode Island. I had somehow missed this but it seems he wanted a bit more mobility in his carless life than a transit poor city in Appalachia could provide, but he wanted a place which was inexpensive, and diverse as well. As his most recent novel was set in Rhode Island he and his wife explored the area and decided to give it a shot. 

As JMG has often appeared on all three podcasts of the others mentioned in this essay, I hope that he will soon reappear on them and that the topic will turn to his most recent move. As with K.M.O. I don’t believe this move represents any sort of definitive statement as to where best to live in order to survive the ongoing catabolic collapse of Industrial Civilization, but I wonder if Chris and Jim in particular will open up and confront JMG on his choice given their views of the latent threat existent in America’s cities.

Johnny Sanphillipo (Maybe he’ll move here too!) wrote that he recently sat in on a Peak Prosperity get together and brought up how his city place had acted as a refuge for people living as homesteaders during the most recent Northern California wildfires. Did that resonate with Chris at all I wonder? Not that he is going to move to Springfield any time soon, but can he see any wisdom in a more urban prepper strategy?

Look, I’m here. I could see a handful of scenarios that could cause me to move, but it doesn’t seem likely. I live in a walkable place, with improving transit, excellent natural resources and a resilient infrastructure. I have a plan for the future which includes food, folks, finances, and fun. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and it will all have been for nought; the denouement of my favorite Twilight Zone episode can manifest in an infinite number of ways. Life is a game, and the rules, the board, and the players are constantly changing. Enjoying it has to be the goal, because if only survival is winning, in the end we all lose.

What was she wearing?

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True story. As a kid I would always hear that, in Massachusetts pedestrians had the right of way. I never really knew if it was true, or why it was such a common topic for discussion among pre teens in the 1970’s. Was it some kind of remnant from the ancient past, like our use of the word “dingle“? 

Anytime my dad heard anything about having the right of way he would comment: “He died with the right of way”. 
I remember the CNU presentation about how it was that the automobile took control of our streets and the specific incident of the mother in Georgia who went to jail because, rather than walk the better part of a mile out of her way to get to the “closest” crosswalk after going shopping with her 3 kids and getting dropped off by the bus, she chose to cross directly across the street. When her 4 year old son was killed by an oncoming car driven by a drunk driver she was deemed to also be criminally at fault.

Just yesterday in Springfield an incident was reported in which a pedestrian died. Each news report decided to include that the victim was not in a crosswalk:

Looking at a map of the area where the incident occurred I would say the victim was clearly much more than 300 feet from the nearest crosswalk:

This is one of the more suburban areas within the boundaries of the city of Springfield.  The closest crosswalk was over three times the 300 feet obligation the law sets out for pedestrians. Is it germane that the pedestrian, then, wasn’t in a crosswalk?

  

I wonder if it will ever be the case that asking if a person crushed to death by a car was in a crosswalk will sound like asking what a woman was wearing when she was raped?

Ajo

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My wife loves garlic. More than she loves me? It’s an open question. Nearly everything she cooks starts with a healthy amount of onions and head of garlic. Why not a clove of garlic? Might as well just sprinkle on a little garlic powder!

As the garden (“the farm” as friends call it) began to expand out back garlic became one of the plants of choice. My wife started by just tossing some grocery store garlic into one of our raised beds; it grew fairly well but…no scapes! Turns out there’s a difference between hard neck and soft neck garlic…and the soft neck variety doesn’t produce scapes. Good to know.

A few of our earliest, mostly succesful, attempts at growing garlic:

Realizing that for us “growing what we eat” would mean focusing on tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and garlic along with the peaches, apples, grapes, and lettuce we were cultivating, we moved the garlic from some small beds to a 12′ x 3′ bed running along the area our fruit trees occupy: The Orchard. After planting in late fall, green stalks began to pop through the snow and looked healthy and eager all winter. By early summer we had all the scapes we could eat. We ate them tossed into pasta, turned into a pesto sauce, and mixed into butter, or just toasted all by themselves. In late summer we harvested 50 odd heads of Spanish red, and 60 odd heads of German white.

For our first big planting we ordered our seed garlic from Possum Hill Farm in Lakeville, CT. It’s owned by my wife’s uncle, and her cousin is in charge of the garlic. We were thrilled with the results; pounds of garlic from one bed in the garden. We used it all up, so we ordered more seed and planted again that fall in the same bed. Possum Hill had only German white to plant last year so we went with that. It grew well but wasn’t quite as vibrant. Perhaps two years in the same bed was too much, but we got 80 or so heads of garlic and once again had scapes in the early season. 


We knew that we could dedicate our entire backyard to garlic, however, and it still wouldn’t be sufficient for our needs. As it happens, our friends at Copper Hill Farm had some land they weren’t using, quite a bit of land in fact, certainly more than we could use; so we bought 50 pounds of seed garlic from Possum Hill, and spent a day or so “popping” the heads into cloves to plant. I even built a “dibbler”: kind of a thing to make the evenly spaced holes to pop the cloves into. 

The seed garlic:

My wife and I worked together one afternoon; I raked over the soil Greg, the owner of Copper Hill, had tilled for us and I dibbled the holes. My wife planted and covered each clove. We got less than half of the field planted on that first afternoon. We had planned out the prior weekend to spend it together, along with LuLu, planting. But nature had not cooperated: it had rained furiously and the field was too wet. The autumn had also gone from too warm to a bit on the cold side in a flash. We had other pressing issues and so Elizabeth, my wife, had to come back later in the week on her own and plant the rest of the field. When she noticed that there was another patch of land which Greg had tilled but which we hadn’t intended on using, and that we still had plenty of “popped” garlic we asked if we could plant there. Greg said yes, of course, and we went back one last day to plant a bit more and to mulch. 

We lost track of exactly how many seeds we planted. With any luck we’ll have enough to supply our own needs, a few hundred heads to the Copper Hill Farm Store, and to reserve as seed for next year. My wife used two different techniques for spacing in the two separate areas we planted in order to see which will work best for weeding and harvesting.

 

As far as what to grow where the garlic had been, we’re thinking Bolivian peppers. Amazing little red peppers that look like Christmas lights and are comparable to a very spicy jalapeño on the Scoville scale. Here in New England we’ve seen that if you bring the plant inside the purple peppers turn yellow, orange, and red just in time for Christmas. They might make for some really spicy holiday gifts. 

Thinking about the garden, and writing this little post in fact, have raised my spirits a bit. We have space for one more fruit tree, we’re making room for a few more grape vines, and the asparagus bed will be in year two. It’s a mess right now, but I can’t wait to get out there in the spring and set to the work of bringing it back to life.

Conspicuously Absent

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It’s late January and the usual “Homicides Are Up; run for your lives” or “Homicides Are Down: don’t be worried though, Springfield is still dangerous” article hasn’t yet appeared. The 5 year rolling average for murder is 15 and last year came in at 14 with the city being homicide free now for 3 months. It’s an increase of two over 2016.

I wonder if the storyline has become tiresome to the editors or if future advertisers MGM have suggested that they’re  not too keen on supporting a publication which hypes violence in the community where they will need to attract hundreds of thousands of out-of-towners in order to make a profit. My wife thinks that my message is getting through. If so, I’m sure it’s indirectly. I somehow missed homicide 14 and was preparing to write this assuming 13 was the magic number for last year. On the WWLP “Springfield Homicide Tracker” (map included!)they listed 14. I did a search for the victim’s name on Masslive and, sure enough; 14. What also came up was an article about a person of the same name being arrested for possession of heroin with intent to distribute: coincidence, I’m sure.

Sarcasm aside, it isn’t at all that I want anyone to be murdered, but years and years of experience demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of victims are engaged in gang activity, drug activity, or were in a violent relationship. That doesn’t mean they deserve to be killed but it does mean that living in a city is less the danger than the behavior they engage in and the people with whom they interact, in a city or not. 

Still conspicuous by its absence is any “Motor Vehicle Death Tracker” anywhere in the media. It’s a phenomenon which is: more causally connected to place than homicide; impacts more people in this region; and is more random in its distribution in terms of race, age, and gender.

Rotating Knives

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I remember, or think I remember, a “design-a-thon” on WWLP with William L. Putnam (“WLP”) and Kitty Broman; people phoning in their ideas for Riverfront Revitalization. After that all of the usual economic development publications related to downtown always contained a Riverfront addendum. At first this all meant re-engaging people with the water in some kind of meaningful way: swimming or boating in the river, or hiking, biking, or even living along it.

The earliest designs included expanded marinas, recreational cut-outs, apartments, and restaurants right along the river’s edge. The eventual outcome was Riverfront Park and the second Basketball Hall of Fame. 

The park’s design wasn’t bad per se, but it wasn’t up to the task of being enough of an attraction for people to make the Herculean effort required just to get to it. Add to that the odor problem from the sewage treatment plant on the other side of the river and you’ve got a dead park, which it remains, despite the resolution of the odor problem, even after decades.

The original riverfront Hall of Fame at the very least had the spirit of riverfront development at its core when it was built. Despite being separated from the river by the railroad its entrance faced west as did the enormous windows and the balconies on its upper floors. 

Enter the current Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. What had seemed like such a giant leap forward for the shrine just two decades earlier, leaving the isolated cozy campus of Springfield College and the conservative stately building which housed its collection of memorabilia for a modern “basketball orange” and glass box just off the interstate, was not enough to make the trustees happy with the facility. Using a possible institutional exit for Orlando, the trustees were able to convince local authorities that a new structure was needed.

The newest Hall of Fame is not only larger and a bit more curvilinear in its outline, but, more importantly, contains loads of retail space that can provide a steady stream of income. It was also billed as a continuation of “riverfront development”, but by the time it was built the “river” portion of riverfront development was all but forgotten; the building faces the highway and shows only its service entrances, loading bays, and HVAC to the river.

But this is only where my tale begins.

By Springfield standards you’d have to say that it has been enormously successful. Apart from the restaurants, bars, and fast food joints located inside the HoF’s strip malls, the project has spawned a successful hotel, two separate restaurants, and an L.A. Fitness, with only the restaurant space of the “old hall” sitting vacant today. It doesn’t do a thing to connect the city to the river, it doesn’t add to the vitality of downtown, but it IS a place where people from all over the region come to eat and drink. (Whether or not it can survive and thrive with MGM on the other side of the highway is a question only time will answer.)

At the time the current Hall of Fame’s location and design were being debated I lobbied everyone I could think of for a Main Street hall. What was the point of having it if it didn’t engage with the larger community? I made the case that surrounding the museum with the amenities of a city could enhance both if done correctly. The leadership of the HoF at the time went so far as to tell me that they would go out of their way to recommend to special guests that they NOT visit anyplace else in the city and that, to have a decent meal, they recommended either Hartford or Northampton. 

Wow. So moving to a place surrounded by Springfield on all sides was never going to happen.

Fast forward 15 years or so.

Somewhat lost now in the Springfield casino discussion is the fact that there were TWO other proposals, both of which steered a course aligning much more closely to the Hall of Fame model of establishing a pod as isolated as possible from the city and connected to the outside via interstate highway. In the early days the talk was that the Penn National plan, which initially included a “ring-road” (i.e. “Asphalt Moat”) around the entire facility, had both the political and design upper hand on MGM’s inside out program.

Here is an early sketch of the Penn National design, ring-road included:


Apart from the Monty Pythonesque rotating knives appearance of the casino and its outbuildings, notice how absolutely disconnected each element is from every other with separate parking for each venue and even airwalks to be sure the visitors never mix with the natives.

Perhaps the success of the new Hall of Fame has at some level helped people see that any element of the city whose success doesn’t integrate with the rest of the city isn’t nearly as valuable as one which does. Casinos may or may not be a good idea, but it would have been much less risky for the city and the casino operator alike to just plop a casino pod on a brownfield as far as possible from everywhere else and call it a win. Putting it in the middle of town complicates everything, but it means success could be a real game changer for more than just the resort itself.

Does it mean we’ve turned a corner, that we have in fact “learned a lesson”? I’m not really sure. I think we’re still in the “throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks” stage. Doing it the wrong way has been what has worked for quite a while if by “worked” what is meant is that individual projects have succeeded financially in the short term, while doing things the right way in a mid sized Rust Belt city has brought more often than not, at best, mixed results.

For most people “right way” and “wrong way” are defined exclusively by that short term success or failure. The Strong Towns notion of sustainability, incremental growth, and avoiding the Ponzi Scheme of horizontal development is still fighting for acceptance in development circles and unheard of by most of the public. As long as the consequences of doing things the wrong way are hidden through subterfuge, externalities, and debt, doing things the right way is going to have to compete on an uneven playing field. I’m hoping it can win a few here and there anyway.

Stand by your Megastructure

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Check out Johnny Sanphillippo’s most recent post at Granola Shotgun. His description of Mont Saint-Michel on the Prairie is mind blowing, thought provoking, and scary. I have to admit that I am jealous beyond belief of a place like Colorado which has such self confidence that it can build an entire city from nothing in the belief that soon tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people will flock to it. Of course, as certain as they are that this project will succeed and be succeeded by even more of the same ad infinitum, I am just as certain that it will molder and die, even if it is later rather than sooner.

Responding to this with respect to Springfield’s own “megaproject” is scary because I know that people (like me) can react to probatory evidence which contradicts previously held beliefs in ways which consist of a euphoria in rejecting that evidence. In other words, for me seeing the “evidence” that such horizontal development continues in the dry West despite the decades old cry of James Howard Kunstler that such things are, present tense, finished, perhaps I get just such a rush in doubling down in my belief in the traditional urban cores of the East!
But I don’t think so.

People with no dog in the fight when it comes to urban design, suburban sprawl, demographic shifts, and the future of the Rust Belt talk about the 2000’s becoming the century of water. This map of rainfall shows how blessed we are here in this particular place:

Very few locations can beat interior New England when it comes to precipitation. Sure we have fewer rainy days, but we get more rain than Seattle. Aurora, and nearly all of Colorado, is a desert. The trend is for an expanding “Southwest” to become hotter and dryer. 

I’ll go one better though. Not only is the Northeast nearly exclusively endowed with a combination of abundant rainfall and mountainous topography, the best recipe for this country’s #1 renewable power: hydroelectric; but Springfield seems to have a uniquely resilient water system. During last year’s severe drought cities from Hartford to Worcester, and from Northampton to Westfield put in place restrictions on usage, watering bans, even water quality alerts. Meanwhile Cobble Mountain was never even forced to access its backup system, forget its back up system’s back up system, or the back up system to the back up system’s back up system…which is a thing that exists. For real. Nope. One of the most severe droughts in history (which has now been quite drowned out) and we were never even politely asked to maybe think about using a little less water.

The hydropower thing is curious. I highly recommend the most recent Kunstlercast. Jim’s guest is an entrepreneurial vermonter with an interest in rail. As an aside, this man needs to meet Eric Lesser, our local state Senator, and they need to discuss their ideas about the future of rail travel in New England. The key for little Vermont and insignificant Springfield is to get Montreal and Boston to become serious about their rail connections, and the crumbs from their banquet will become our feast. But I digress. 

In the conversation Jim and David Blittersdorf fret about the obstacles being placed in front of small scale hydropower in both New York State and Vermont. It was fortuitous that just this week an article appeared reminding me that Massachusetts is going very intentionally in the exact opposite direction. Millions are being spent to maximize the Bay State’s existing small scale hydropower plants and opportunities for environmentally friendly run-of-the-river technologies are being explored.

But now, back to the apparent similarity between the enormous hotel and resort at the center of this new development in Colorado and Springfield’s roll of the dice with MGM. Beyond an initial resemblance, they could not be more different. The one is an ex nihilo creation of a full blown modern car dependent city, the other is filling a hole created by a natural disaster in a place which has survived and expanded for almost 400 years. One requires, and will depend wholly upon, the most modern technology and the most abundant energy, the other exists in a core whose infrastructure was laid out in the 19th century.

MGM’s IS an incremental development. Its hotel has fewer rooms than already existing hotels in the downtown. Its residential component promises to have fewer units than a handful of already existing complexes. The retail space is much less than that of Tower Square. The office space footprint is in a way negative as many offices which were located within the footprint were there because of the nearby courthouses and government offices and were pushed out to nearby buildings in order to make room for MGM’s back of the house activities. The restaurant and bar facilities, and of course the casino, will be game changers in those areas initially, but the increase in total commercial space is not. 

Baystate West was downtown’s largest development prior to MGM. It included a comparably sized hotel, an enormous office tower, and a shopping mall many, many times the square footage of the retail space in the MGM resort. The primary difference there was that Baystate West was designed with a nearly 100% inward facing “three courtyard” model which sought to imitate the feel of a suburban mall; it completely sucked the life out of the neighboring streets. MGM’s design looks less like a box and more like a radiator. The mall at Baystate West, now Tower Square, mostly died decades ago. Some convenience retail (CVS and Dunkin’ Donuts) survives along with a small food court and Hot Table. Most of the remaining space is now Cambridge College and the UMass downtown campus. 

By Springfield standards Baystate West was huge. It didn’t single handedly revitalize downtown…it probably did a little more harm than good in fact, but it hasn’t been an albatross around the city’s neck either. Mass Mutual has mostly successfully kept the street edge alive by removing blank walls and replacing them with glass over the last 30 years. 

The most significant difference between the “build to completion” model discussed in the Granola Shotgun post and MGM is perhaps below ground. MGM sits at the very center of infrastructure in the region; from water to waste treatment and from communications to electricity the corner of State Street and Main Street in Springfield has been the core which utilities have been designed to service for as long as there have been utilities here. If anything, the investment by MGM has allowed the city to upgrade, on MGM’s dime, aging pipes et al which were in need of replacement anyway.

Regarding automobile traffic, even if the optimistic prognostications for visitors pan out, the interstate would see a 10% increase in traffic; no new roads are being proposed, no new traffic lanes, not even any new exit ramps or entrance ramps. Nearby streets are being beautified, but none save perhaps the removal of a median on the Memorial Bridge involves increasing capacity. On the other hand bike lanes and widened and beautified sidewalks are part of the infrastructure improvement plan the city and MGM have agreed upon as is the upgrading and renovation of 3 public parks: Riverfront Park, Pynchon Plaza, and Da’Vinci Park.

As I see it, it’s MGM which is taking the real flyer here in building a “resort” in the middle of downtown Springfield, not the city. As I’ve stated many times before, I get that casinos are vacuum cleaners for community cash, like every other corporate giant, but it IS true that over a billion dollars a year was already being spent by Massachusetts gamblers in Connecticut casinos; that was money which was returning nothing to the Baystate for decades. If casinos aren’t yet at the saturation point I agree that they soon will be. That will be MGM’s problem, but the city has enough going for it that it doesn’t need to be our problem. The city needs to use what could be a 5-10 year period of cash infusion from this project to remake its image, largely by just doing a better job of promoting what we already have, so that it can continue to pay for the services and infrastructure maintenance its citizens need. 

Honestly though, I think it’s possible that marginal changes in energy costs and climate could shift the balance back in favor of walkable urbanity in places other than just a few elite coastal cities and a boutique college town here or there. This isn’t a bad place, and it doesn’t need 150,000 people from who-knows-where to move here for it to be successful, if just a solid percentage of the young people who grow up or attend college here would see it, it would be enough to make an enormous difference. If that does happen, MGM may find itself lucky to have gotten in on the ground floor in Springfield. If that doesn’t happen I don’t see MGM’s development as doing anything more than putting an exclamation point on our decline as it closes up shop however many years hence.

As for Mont Saint-Michel on the Prairie, I may have no choice, but I have no desire to live in a world where that makes sense!
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As an aside, it strikes me that the car makes real estate development the search for land with as little value as possible, as far away from anything as possible, and therefore as difficult as possible in terms of logistics and infrastructure. Take the aforementioned development in Aurora: people have been populating Greater Denver for 150 years…and yet NO ONE ever wanted anything to do with this land…ergo billions in development. Just out my window there are still acres of empty lots; underground utilities of all sorts covering the entire area and immediate access to north-south and east-west interstate and rail, a formerly navigable river, and countless more amenities. No takers. Is it too valuable to be worth anything?