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Ethnography

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

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

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding a Dead Horse

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If you are growing tired of my recent obsession with transportation then I’m afraid I have horrible news for you. While I am easily 10 essays behind in terms of ideas on my list of blogposts to inflict upon you I feel compelled to focus my attention this week on Springfield being listed as the third best mid sized metro in which to be car-free. The results apart from the inclusion of my hometown seem to check out with reality and so the methodology seems solid, but the essay written to accompany the study left me amused and has caused me to ponder some much more ephemeral things.

In that essay Richard Florida opines that on that list of mid sized metros Honolulu is an outlier, hard to argue given the unique nature of its location and the impact that alone would have on car use, but he goes on to say that “most” of the remaining top five being “college towns” demonstrates the impact of higher education as a cultural driver for people being car-free. He then lists every other city in the top 5 except Springfield. Of course, what is funny about that is that a case could be made for metro Springfield being among the most higher education intensive mid sized metro areas in the United States; what differentiates Springfield from, say, Madison or New Haven is that of the largest and/or most highly regarded colleges in greater Springfield, none of them are in the city. 

Amherst, Smith, and Mt Holyoke have the strongest academic reputations, and they are in Amherst, Northampton, and South Hadley, and the enormous flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts is, of course, also in Amherst. Of the other 8 colleges and Universities clustered in this relatively tiny metro area, only 4 are in the city of Springfield. None of those are household names, unless you are obsessed enough with the history of basketball to know that the YMCA college where the sport was invented is now Springfield College, or you’re into politics enough to know that the current Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee went to American International College, or if you want to know what law school does a better job of preparing students for the Massachusetts Bar Exam than any other; that would be the Western New England University School of Law.

All kidding aside, the final decision to locate what became the University of Massachusetts came down to Springfield and Amherst; it would be interesting to see how the city and the region would be different had Springfield been selected. My guess is at the time it was an afterthought given the wealth and industrial prowess the city then possessed. As with so many things, the fact that Springfield doesn’t exist as a more powerful and prosperous central node of the region seems to diminish the luster of the region as a whole.

Returning to the theme of auto-dependence or lack thereof, I can’t help but think that the aforementioned study is indicative of some real strength in the area. The beautiful clusters of walkable neighborhoods in each of the larger cities in greater Springfield, with people oriented downtowns like Easthampton, and West Springfield, and Holyoke create a healthy network of nodes which can be stitched together fairly easily into a coherent network of public transportation. 

And it is with that idea that I return again to the north south rail corridor as a spine. Not once have I heard a single commentator or politician who advocates for improved rail service in the valley highlight how it can be used WITHIN the valley itself; all of the cheerleading is for better connecting us to Boston, or to New Haven and New York City. 

It needs to be viewed as a way to better connect us to ourselves! Going car-free can be such a relief, and not just in terms of finances. Not just while I lived in Spain, but when I worked downtown, and took the bus to college I relished the fact that I didn’t need to think about oil changes, or alternatives to the car if it needed repairs. My feet got me where I needed to be without fail and traffic was never an issue, and I loved taking the bus not least for the people watching and the time it afforded me to unwind in a schedule which at the time saw me out the door by 7 a.m., and not back home until 11 or 12 at night.

I’m surprised, but not shocked, at the fact that Springfield is among the least car dependent places in the United States. I continue to marvel at how little impact that has on the region’s popularity. I read at least three articles just this week on how (to me) horrible, unwalkable places, places without even enough water to sustain life, and with no jobs to offer residents anywhere within a 100 mile radius are in the process of building literally tens of thousands of homes “to meet the demand for housing”! 

“So, this place has no infrastructure, no available water, no jobs unless I drive for over an hour and the shitty new homes you’re building will cost, at a minimum, $500,000? Fuck, at least it’s not western Massachusetts! Where do I sign?”

To say “I don’t get it” is the understatement of all time, but I do get that I’m an outlier. I’m like there was just one guy to whom cilantro tastes like the fucking magic that is cilantro and everyone else just tastes soap. I’ve thought about the places I’d live if I had to leave Springfield: Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Albany, or Troy, New York, Middletown, or Winsted, Connecticut and a whole host of other places, and who knows how many places I’ve heard about but never really gotten to know like Rochester, Portland, Maine, Providence, Worcester and the like. None of them are in the desert, or would require a car, or be exclusively White (except maybe Portland!), or be devoid of seasonal changes in the weather; but those really do seem to be the common denominators/driving forces behind the population growth and shifts in the United States apart from the economic powerhouse Super Cities.

I’ve said many times, and it continues to hold true, that people will alter their behavior only when obligated to do so by circumstances. Maybe, but I reserve the right to complain about it. Repeatedly. Probably again next week. 

Take a Flyer

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The pilot program Valley Flyer train service began last week bringing something like commuter service to the communities north of Springfield. I say “something like” commuter rail service because, perhaps as a pilot program should, it only expands two way travel options to a very small subset of potential users of the corridor north of the newly reopened Union Station.

In searching for news and opinion on the Valley Flyer I happened upon an incredibly nerdy but rather informative old fashioned message board devoted to the “Amtrak Northeast Corridor, Springfield Shuttle, Regional, and Greenfield Route”; over 100 pages of experts and rail enthusiasts opining on everything imaginable and quite a few perhaps unimaginable things. As often happens, having access to the back and forth of people who are highly focused on a particular topic helped at the very least to expand my awareness of my ignorance on topics like the interplay between freight and passenger service, equipment adaptability and storage, and crew accommodation.

Turns out you can’t just make more trains appear wherever, whenever and have them go any which way at any time! Who knew?

So with a nod to the realities of expanding service on a busy rail corridor I want to lay out what this new service facilitates, what it doesn’t, and what I would love to see it turn into if the rate of use of the new service appears to warrant it.

When CTRail began its New Haven to Hartford, then Springfield, service it became possible to get to New York City reliably on a daily basis in the morning. For people leaving from Union Station in Springfield that also meant that commuting to a job in Hartford or New Haven by rail became a legitimate possibility assuming that said employment was situated either near a handful of train stations or was connected, reasonably, by other transit. Given the number of employers in downtown Hartford and New Haven and the close economic ties which have been shown to exist along the I-91 corridor this wouldn’t be an altogether unusual circumstance. 

I would add that, despite the existence of “Super-commuters”, I can’t imagine someone living in Western Massachusetts commuting every day of the week to a job in New York. For someone who travels to the city say once or twice a week, however, I imagine this service is highly useful.

What this service has never done is allowed people from Connecticut to get to jobs in Springfield before 10 a.m.. Obviously Springfield’s downtown doesn’t have the density of employment of Hartford, but Union Station does offer excellent service on the PVTA’s two primary axes of service to Mass Mutual, Baystate Medical Center, Mercy Medical Center, American International College, and Springfield Technical Community College to name just the most prominent institutions.

Unfortunately, this expansion of service not only does nothing to remediate that, it perpetuates it.

Using the Valley Flyer will give people in Greenfield the chance to go by rail round trip to NYC in a single day. It could also provide transportation to and from a morning meeting anywhere from Northampton south to New Haven provided you were done and ready to return by early afternoon. If, however, you wanted to commute daily anywhere along that same NoHo-NHvn stretch you wouldn’t be able to return until after 9 p.m.; hardly a reasonable option.

So, putting CTRail and the Valley Flyer together: you can commute from Springfield to points south on a daily basis; you can get to Springfield after 10 a.m. from Connecticut and return in the early evening; and you can get to New York City in the early morning from Greenfield, Northampton, and Holyoke and return that same evening. What you can’t do is commute into Springfield, Holyoke, or Northampton from any direction. From the south there is no morning service which extends north of Springfield and what service exists to Springfield arrives after the start of normal business hours. If you leave from anyplace north of Springfield then you cannot commute to Springfield or any points south because the only service after mid-afternoon doesn’t depart New Haven until almost 8 o’clock in the evening, departing even later then from any other location.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is subsidizing the Valley Flyer service, and the stated goal was to provide service for people north of Springfield to get to New York and back in a single day. This does that. Maintaining and expanding the service beyond the two year window the state has funded will require that ridership reach 24,000 trips a year. When you add up the number of trains each way given 4 trains on weekdays and 2 on weekends and holidays that means an average of around 20 passengers per train. That’s certainly not a ridiculously high bar, and while the populations they service might be very different, overall demand for this current service isn’t an unreasonable barometer to use when trying to get a sense of the other.

For me, the end goal of this process is a transformation of land use in the valley. If a convenient, reasonably priced, trustworthy fixed transit corridor becomes available then it is reasonable to assume that businesses, for the convenience of employees and customers, will want to locate along that corridor; there is no dearth of commercial, manufacturing, and retail space from Northampton to Springfield which is a reasonable distance from their respective train stations. If employment begins to aggregate along the corridor not only will demand, and therefore level of service increase, but demand for housing along the corridor will increase and a critical mass of all of the above will transform the region into an even more vibrant and resilient ecosystem. 

I was reading an article about the concept of the mega-region. In it the author mused on the supposed Washington-Boston megaplex, but opined that the Hartford and Springfield links in that chain were dubious because they lacked institutions of higher learning. Sure, apart from the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Elms, Westfield State, Springfield College, American International College, Western New England College, the University of Hartford, Saint Joseph’s, Trinity College, Albertus Magnus, Wesleyan, and a few others there aren’t any colleges around here. It is true that unlike Harvard, Brown, and Yale they are not Ivy League and mostly are not within the walkable footprint of the city.

Making Springfield and Hartford more obviously connected to the institutions of higher learning in their corresponding, geographically very small, metropolitan areas could change facile assessments like this. Not all of the colleges and universities associated with Boston are walking distance to city hall, but they feel as though they all form part of a whole. In the Knowledge Corridor they don’t yet seem at all connected to their closest urban center. 

As a final note, I saw on CityLab and at Planetizen articles on the expansion of bus service in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham is one of those cities and metros which is theoretically “bigger” than Springfield and so gets more attention. It has a population of 100,000 more people…spread out over literally 10x the area! I checked the numbers, the Birmingham-Jefferson County bus system has 1/3 the ridership of Springfield’s PVTA. In just over a year Springfield has seen the reopening of a spectacular intermodal transportation center with now two expansions of train service and a significant relocation of its local bus maintenance and operations headquarters, and the introduction of a (poorly designed and nearly unused) free downtown “Loop” service and…not a mention in any of the usual online sources. 

Being wedged in between Boston and New York makes being taken seriously as an urban area very difficult. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam the Springfield to New Haven corridor taken together has a larger population than Denver but in half the area; I’d say that makes this place kind of urban. Massachusetts and Connecticut, together, are making some really intelligent relatively low cost experiments designed to expand transportation options in this area. It seems like the kind of thing that might spark interest in people who publish stuff on walkability in Asheville and Rail Trails in Grand Forks.

Setting Your Watch

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I’m almost embarrassed for the host of the Capitol Watch podcast from the Hartford Courant. I mean, I wish Springfield and Masslive had anything even remotely similar with a focus on the city and urban issues. It is still the case that, even with the multi-million dollar headquarters and broadcasting center of New England Public Radio being located on Main Street in the heart of downtown Springfield, I haven’t heard of a single program devoted to the city in general, or the downtown in particular (Call me!). We will muddle on with “Idiots Discuss the News”, mornings on Rock 102.

Getting back to Capitol Watch; I listened for the first time yesterday. The presentation had that “This American Life” ennui with much higher production value than anything I’ve ever done at KTKK, WHYN, or on my own short-lived RationalUrbanism podcast. There was one teensy weensy little problem: the premise of this episode was based on a (common) misunderstanding regarding ranking data. 

The data being investigated related to the fact that the “Hartford Metropolitan Region” ranks #8 in the nation for % of Millennials with college degrees, and some follow up rankings involving measurements like job opportunities and salaries also being assessed by METRO AREA in which Hartford scored well. The question put to random passers by at a community market was clearly asking if Hartford, as in The City of Hartford full stop, “…is really one of the best places for Millennials to settle down?” What ensued was a ridiculous Hartford slam fest. Kudos I guess to the producers for not editing out all of the negativity, although that is almost all there was. 

As an aside, I’ve seen this same confusion in local Springfield media with rankings; Springfield was ranked number one for college campus quality of life. The survey included Smith, Amherst, Mt Holyoke; but it was interpreted as referring to Springfield College, A.I.C., and WNEU: The response was skeptical. I’ve written about it before.

Getting back to the podcast: The first respondent complained, again, assuming the question was about Hartford proper, that you could get more house for the money in the suburbs(!?): I’m not an expert on Hartford home prices but that seems unlikely to be true, although it seemed that what he was really trying to say is that suburban homes come with more land and are therefore, by default, superior. That the contrast which was being made was, according to the surveys in question, not germane because both Hartford and suburban Hartford are part of metro Hartford, never came up.

The second respondent, while admitting to “not having been a Millennial for a while”(sic) responded that many places have much more to offer than Hartford, taxes are too high in Connecticut, and Millennials would be better off going just about anywhere else. That response seemed to lump the city and its surrounding communities into one whole, and so may have actually been on point.

Respondent number three was a Hartford native and complained that, knowing “what’s really going on” he opined that “it is completely false” that Hartford is a good place for Millennials to settle down. The reasons: crime, poverty, gentrification, segregation: “Charging Manhattan and SoHo prices but ya’ll don’t have Manhattan and SoHo attractions.” He was just “bein’ real”. As he went on he seemed to make a different point. While, perhaps, accepting the idea that upwardly mobile Millennials might find Hartford, “greater” or “proper”, a reasonable place to live, for the not so well off Millennials who already lived there the arrival of the gentrifiers wouldn’t be helpful.

After going 0 for 3 with his “man on the street” interviews the host went “meta” and played some archival interviews which were perhaps more directly related to the question, which were then fiollowed by yet another conversation at the community market which was also both more on point and actually positive in its take. A final interview brought the tally of man on the street interviewees to 2 in favor, 3 against the idea of Hartford being a good place for Millennials to settle down with, honestly, perhaps something one might be able to piece together as “a meaningful idea” on the topic in and among the agglomeration of words.

I am going to presume quite a bit and reinterpret all 5 of the extemporaneous responses:

#1: Yes, suburban Hartford is awesome ’cause lawns. Cities are icky.

#2: Other places have lower taxes and better “culture”…museums, symphony orchestras, probably not his idea of “culture” I’m guessing though.

#3: Being Black and poor in Hartford isn’t any fun (unlike other places?). Rich White folks moving in makes it more expensive. Doesn’t care about amenities, and there aren’t enough of them.

#4: Smaller metros (sic) give people opportunities to be big fish in small ponds. Hartford has a lot going for it. It’s a good place to make a difference.

#5: Buy low, sell high. Greater Hartford is low, so buy, buy, buy!

Overall I understand the temptation to ask “Everyman” what he thinks, and a convincing argument can be made that most people make even enormous decisions in life without putting together a single coherent or more internally cohesive idea than any of the ideas expressed by these interviewees. For many people life works like this:

My brain sees: “Then a crisis happens” in all these formulae where others see miracles!

And yet I still want to disentangle the rest of the math.

Is the City of Hartford one of the best places for Millennials to settle down? I think it likely is, at the very least, better than average. Hartford gets more negative press than Springfield which means its real estate market is likely depressed (Everyman #5), that not only gives one a good chance of buying low, but the generally negative attitudes projected onto Hartford limits the pool of competition for good jobs. There are walkable neighborhoods, some healthy local agricultural concerns, both insurance and state government to provide stability, and improving regional public transit. The regional water system is robust. It is a hub of high culture. Unlike a Springfield, or Rochester, or Scranton, or Youngstown, it sits at the political center of a state which is unlikely to lose sight of its significance. Ask most people in Boston about Springfield and their thoughts turn to Abe Lincoln I’m sure!(Yes, wrong Springfield. Exactly.)

That said, I don’t think Hartford is as well prepared to exceed expectations as my hometown for precisely that final reason: too often Connecticut’s capital has been the subject of well meaning experiments which have eviscerated its neighborhoods and desiccated its downtown and these have served to leave it only more impoverished, segregated, and isolated. Springfield’s school system has been much healthier and more stable, the crime rate much lower, its White flight,not nearly as thorough, its industrial base both broader and deeper, its proximity to significant agriculture even greater, its share of owner occupied housing much higher, its park and library systems much larger.

If Hartford were to become a breakout superstar as cities go it would only be good news for Springfield. Neither of these ersatz Twin Cities have done the other any favors in the way a Worcester has been able to use Boston’s rise to re-energize itself, but we are stuck with each other, or at least near each other, mostly doing a good job of pretending the other doesn’t exist.

If you listened to the entire podcast you heard them discussing tourist slogans for the city and the state. hARTford or The H(arts)ford are the way to go: The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Stage, Mark Twain, and all the rest. The Simpsons used up our best idea already:

What puts the spring in Springfield?

Come find out!

It’s the Worst

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USA Today and 24/7 Wall Street have concluded that I live in the worst city in Massachusetts, or at least that Springfield is the worst city in which to live in the Bay State. It comes from a list of the worst cities in each state. It’s hard to imagine what the justification is for even making such a list unless they admit that it’s just click bait. The instinct to bully is at its core: Given the criteria I hardly think that any of these communities weren’t already known to be among the struggling. Also, using “worst” avoids such inconvenient terms as “blackest”, “poorest”, “puertoricanest”, or “mexicanest”.

It’d be cool to click on a list like this one and see suburbs like Greenwich, Lexington, and Katonah. I mean, those places would really suck for a lot of people; say about half, who earn less than the median income but who would still insist on having luxuries like shelter. 

Much like the “best schools” lists it actually inverts the relationship between the data and what it communicates. What it tells you is not “what place NOT to live to lead a ‘good’ life” but rather in what place people who live the worst lives tend to live. Instead of “where not to move to be happy” it tells you “where to go to find unhappy people”.

And the difference matters. 

As I have said many times it does not go unnoticed by me that so many of my neighbors would take any opportunity to leave this place; the museums, restaurants, parks, architecture, educational opportunities, jobs, public transit, and health care facilities notwithstanding. What they want is away from their lives and a study like the one in question confirms for them that their problem lies in their urbs but not themselves. 

From the outside the effects are almost as insidious. As often happens at cultural events my wife found herself talking to a suburbanite. In the course of the conversation my wife said that Springfield gets a bad rap. In response…while actively participating in a wonderful outdoor event in a beautiful downtown venue…this man responded that Springfield deserved every bit of opprobrium that it received. The irony of paying for the opportunity to experience an event in an almost one-of-a-kind atmosphere like the Quadrangle apparently went unnoticed. 

Quality of life on these lists is measured by things like average income and educational attainment: Is your employer going to cut your pay 63% if you move here? Will your Master’s Degree be decertified upon taking up residence? 

I’ll spare my readers, this time, a repetition of why living here is sometimes so heavenly, I’ll just say that there are probably a few people who wouldn’t mind living my life as I live it here, in Springfield, the Worst City in Massachusetts.

Irredentist Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Welcome to my $#!%hole

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Being appalled at someone using the word “shithole” to describe a place is easier than acknowledging the influence American policy has had in making it a shithole I suppose. And while it is impossible to double blind history in order to see if El Salvador, Haiti, or the Middle East might be remarkably different than they are now, I think it would be pretty easy to make the case that U.S. foreign policy has not had a salutary effect on them.

That said, I live in a shithole. Read the comments at the website of the city’s newspaper of record and “shithole” certainly outnumbers “The City of Homes”, “The City of Firsts”, or “The Birthplace of Basketball” as a nickname for my hometown. It’s likely that a lot of the same instincts which lead to El Salvador and Haiti being called shitholes get Springfield called “shithole” as well. I’m sure “immigration” from Puerto Rico would be addressed in the same way if Puerto Ricans weren’t citizens and Puerto Rico weren’t part of the United States; but it is and Puerto Ricans are migrating within the United States by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. As it happens, more Puerto Rican students have enrolled in Springfield public schools than in the next 2 most impacted districts in Massachusetts combined, and Massachusetts ranks only behind Florida and New York as a destination for these refugees. 

Perhaps it is because they’re finding that this is not such a shithole after all?

For people fleeing from a failing island with underfunded schools and understaffed hospitals Springfield may be as solid a place to land as any in the United States. The city and the Commonwealth together have rebuilt a neglected public school infrastructure over the last 25 years at a pace that is truly stunning; the high school which has gone the longest since a major renovation in the system was built after I graduated in 1982. While many new schools have been constructed and historic schools have been completely modernized, the oldest and most problematic buildings have been given necessary upgrades and consistent maintenance while they await renovation or replacement: during the most recent sub zero cold snap a number of suburban schools had trouble staying open, but none in the city.

Further, I would challenge anyone to find a community with a better system of public parks, public libraries, and public museums. This is the central library:


But many of the 9 branches have been renovated as well in the last 20 years and provide neighborhood after neighborhood with the type of access to information that can help motivated people get out of poverty. 

The park system is even more impressive and well distributed. Forest Park is a world class resource but even the poorest neighborhoods in the city have remarkable recreational spaces which are adequately maintained; I say adequately because it is stunning how much the parks department gets done with a skeleton crew and minimal resources. Seriously though, in most cities Blunt Park, or Van Horn might be the crown jewel in the park system, here they not only pale in comparison to Forest Park but there are another half a dozen or more parks that rank just barely below them, and that is only for a lack of open space, not because they lack in recreational opportunities.

The park department website lists 21 parks, but that list is not exhaustive. Take “Jonny Appleseed Park”:

It’s in a tough neighborhood. It consists of a playground and a basketball court, one of the most used basketball courts in the city. A few weeks ago a car crashed into the fence separating the court from the street. Well, it’s wintertime, guess that will have to wait for Spring? Nope. That court has kids playing anytime the court isn’t snow covered regardless of season. It took a few days but the fence was repaired and it was back to business as usual.

Free museums? Yes. Any Springfield resident gets free access to the Springfield Museums every day. That’s this:

And this:

And all this:

Puerto Ricans who migrate to Springfield find not only a welcoming Hispanic community, but home prices that are dirt cheap and, at the very least, a functioning system of public transportation. That goes for people arriving from other places as well, the jobs are here, the colleges and universities are here, the hospitals are here. 

To everyone I say welcome, welcome to my shithole.
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The Noho Curbside Chat

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My daughter, graduating from Smith College(see curly headed one waving at the camera!):

Revisiting the Curbside Chat, and Northampton, for the first time in a while was enlightening. Media reports of the decline of Northampton’s Main Street have clearly been greatly exaggerated; yes there are a few more cell phone stores and corporate outlets, but Noho’s commercial and retail district must still rank in the top 1% of America’s walkable downtowns. It had been three years since I’d seen “the chat” live and in person. There are two responses to the chat: An understanding of why the car centered post war horizontal development pattern doesn’t work; or the rejection of the premise based on critiques that come from a desire to perpetuate the status quo. I find it interesting that a Paul Krugman presentation entitled “What’s the Matter with Economics?” given at UMass the same day got so much press attention when I’m sure the best answer to the question was given at Smith College by Chuck Marohn.

The most predictable question given Smith College’s focus on issues of social justice in the post chat q&a had to do with Chuck’s revelation, from Joe Minniccozi’s data, that poor neighborhoods always subsidize wealthier ones when municipal taxes and services are analyzed. It was obvious that Chuck had heard the question many times before. His response was exactly what you’d expect from an engineer; succinct, precise, and devoid of emotion. While rejecting an intentional exploitative agency in this universal reality, he merely pointed to examples which demonstrated that the poor tend to live in more traditionally designed areas, built and expanded incrementally, and that their design lent themselves to lower maintenance costs.

Putting myself in the head of a student at the ultra left leaning school, I can imagine that the constant harping on fiscal responsibility, even the repetition of variations on the theme regarding how “local government” should do “business” were setting off alarm bells. I kept wanting to scream “He doesn’t mean what you think he means!” I know Chuck wants sound development practices, in part, so schools can have art and music programs, so the sidewalk outside grandma’s house can be fixed and she can walk to the grocery store, and so that the library can be open 7 days a week, but I worry that they hear a more sinister (ironically), more right wing message. 

Returning to the theme of Northampton, I was surprised that Chuck asked me if I thought it was “true” that Noho’s prosperity came, at least in part, at the expense of Springfield. Absolutely. My lived experience is that hundreds of the best paying jobs in Springfield are taken by people who expressly state that they only drop below the Tofu Curtain to work. How many doctors at Baystate, professors at Springfield’s colleges, executives at MassMutual, and public service employees earn pay checks here and spend them almost exclusively up there? 

Beyond that there is the fact that Northampton provided an option for “boutique urbanism” right at the time Springfield was attempting to reinvent itself as a city in the early 1980’s and that Springfield came up short in comparison. In the long run it may prove beneficial that we have Northampton…and Boston and New York…so close to us providing people with outlets for their desires to get an “urban fix”; in order to be viewed as an acceptable option we will need to be better than we are. That doesn’t change the fact that Northampton’s Whiter, wealthier, smaller, more integral walkable downtown supplied people with activities that Springfield’s emerging reinvented self couldn’t compete with, and that drew away what limited energy there was for urbanity in the 80’s and 90’s: Had there been no Thorne’s, how might The Marketplace have done? Had there been no Calvin, how might the Paramount have done? What if The Hempest had been on Bridge Street here and not Main Street there? Would Johnson’s had become Faces if Springfield had been the only urban option?

Remember, when I was a kid, and we are talking about the mid 70’s here, NO ONE ever talked about Northampton as a destination for anyone but lunatics, literally. As the home of the state hospital it was a byword for a place for the insane. Northampton was no different from Westfield, Chicopee, or Palmer in anyone’s consciousness apart from that. My first experience with it being anything other than that came around 1983 when a friend’s dad happened to be dating a lady who ran a store in Northampton. It reminded me of the boutique my mom had worked at in downtown Springfield in the 70’s, but which had closed after Forbes and Wallace had closed. He took me to a cool record shop…a lot like Belmont Records…which had closed in the same place for the same reasons.

Two Springfield kids who a decade earlier could have had the exact same experience in Springfield were now in Northampton. 

With malls dying, big box stores closing, and chain restaurants struggling, there may be a bit more oxygen for walkable urban places to share. Springfield is trying to set itself up with the TDD and MGM to be, once again, the center of cultural life in Western Massachusetts. As always, there are rivals, and only being an option which rewards people sufficiently for the effort it does take to exit the automobile zone and enter the human zone will be enough to give us a reasonable expectation of success.

Being the Divide

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I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a few weeks ago because someone had heard a commentary I had done for New England Public Radio. I had no idea what I was getting into, what the format would be, or who would be present at the event. I was invited a month before and was told that more information would be forthcoming. When the day before the event arrived and I hadn’t heard anything more I sent an email communicating that I was assuming the event was cancelled. They quickly returned that email communicating that the event was still on(!) but still without telling me what the event was!

Regardless, I went. The program, it turns out, was the first public event in a nationwide journalistic exercise (See here and here) designed to explore the issues dividing America. (For the best treatment of this topic I recommend this piece by John Michael Greer) Once my fellow panelists and I were invited to the stage we were each given a chance to introduce ourselves and our topic. First was deindustrialization. Yes, indeed, the working class has been devastated here in the Northeast by the flight of industry first to the South, and then overseas. Next was immigration. We were joined by a Dreamer who told us her story. 

After that the moderator shifted to the last two panelists who were to speak on education. I was joined by a newcomer to Springfield who was happy with his choice of living in Springfield and sending his children to Springfield schools. You can watch the event here.

If I could add anything to what I said about schools it would be not just that the people in the audience were the problem, having fled from Springfield above the Tofu curtain to send their children to de facto segregated schools, but that this desire to divide America which they have is obviously deep and abiding because they pay a huge premium to do it! The poor kids in Springfield and Holyoke or, better stated, their parents, can’t move to wealthy Happy Valley towns to “undivide” America, but these people could save tens of thousands of dollars every year by living in Springfield or Holyoke. 

The answer to the question: “Who is dividing us?” 

“You are.” How many people in that room at UMass or watching the program on Northampton Community Television couldn’t move to Springfield or Holyoke and send their kids to the schools in question? As usual what the people looking for “solutions to the issues of a divided America” are really looking for are things that other people can do in response to the issue so that they can continue to do what they’ve been doing. 

Call me crazy, be the solution. Segregated neighborhoods and schools bother you? Live in a place that allows your kids to make the schools more integrated. Decaying historic buildings bother you? If you can, buy one and fix it up. Think agriculture should be more local? Buy locally produced food. Climate Change is a problem? Make decisions to reduce your carbon footprint. 

As part of his introduction to the event the moderator discusses a chance meeting at the General Store in his hometown of Harvard, Massachusetts where the idea for this project to understand what is dividing America began to germinate. Yeah, that’s a real head scratcher that is. Here in a town with 6,500 people, 92% of whom are White, with an average household income of $139,000 a year. A real puzzler. Someone should get on that.