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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.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

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It’s funny. So much energy expended in the discussion of building a wall to keep out the Spanish speaking hordes from Mexico, but an island famous for its walls is already inside “Fortress America” and the savage category 4 hurricane named María seems destined to bring hundreds of thousands if not a million of those Gringo Hispanos to the mainland. Already citizens, they can’t be stopped. No one can prove that the elaborate Chinese Global Warming Hoax played a role in the rapid strengthening of María to a Category 5 hurricane as it passed from Cape Verde to the Lesser Antilles, but I wouldn’t put it past those inscrutable bastards!

The data I’ve seen says that roughly 50% of Puerto Ricans who leave the island come to the Northeast, and roughly 10% of them choose Massachusetts. Springfield, according to some sources, has the 4th highest Puerto Rican population of any city on the mainland United States and Holyoke, part of the Springfield msa, has the highest percentage Puerto Rican population. In talking to my neighbors those numbers are about to increase. Of the 3.4 million people living in Puerto Rico today, an island already in the throes of a bankruptcy process and where out-migration was accelerating, how many will leave in the coming days, weeks, and months is anyone’s guess, but as full American citizens it is hard to imagine that many will not avail themselves of the option to ride or fly northward.

Their most popular destinations in the past include also storm ravaged Florida and Texas along with equally financially troubled Illinois and Connecticut. Some analyses show greater Springfield as having one of the most solid economies in the country…except in the area of growth where it stands in the “Lower 20”:


 

Prosperity though…”Upper 20″:

And what they deem the most important category, Inclusion, “Top 20”:

The growth in question here is economic growth not population growth, but if 5,000 or 10,000 people move to the area over the next few years looking for housing, excellent schools, and employment it could create some real growth in the overall economy.

As I compared the Silver Bullet development that is the MGM resort in the South End to the small scale infrastructural improvements in the North End the one thing both neighborhoods have in common is their dominant ethnic culture: Puerto Rican. Both have Boriqua owned businesses. Both have vacant lots and abandoned buildings. Both could easily accommodate an influx of hundreds of newcomers if given time to do so. 

Schools might be the weakest link in terms of immediate accommodation; the Springfield Public Schools are already the second largest in New England with a population at or near its all-time high. The city has aggressively built, acquired, and renovated schools in the last three decades all while experiencing middle class flight to the suburbs. Families with school age children might very well be the first to leave the island if schools and medical facilities can’t be brought back online quickly.

The weeks ahead could tell an interesting tale. I’ve always found it interesting, even perhaps slightly ironic that at the entrance to Springfield’s most Puerto Rican neighborhood there is a statue honoring the soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American war of 1898. In Spain the Generación del ’98 grappled with the decline of their country, its loss of empire, and conflicts between tradition and progress. The nation which inflicted upon them the defeat which created such bitter awareness of their circumstances is now engaged in the same process, and once again Puerto Ricans, willing or not, are participants.

The Stormcrow

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“You have ever been a herald of woe. Troubles follow you like crows, and ever the oftener the worse. I will not deceive you: when I heard that Shadowfax had come back riderless, I rejoiced at the return of the horse, but still more at the lack of the rider; and when Eomer brought the tidings that you had gone at last to your long home, I did not mourn. But news from afar is seldom sooth. Here you come again! And with you come evils worse than before, as might be expected. Why should I welcome you, Gandalf Stormcrow?”

(Theoden to Gandalf-The Lord of the Rings-J.R.R. Tolkien)

From the moment I heard Chuck Marohn speak I knew that his message was one that not only needed to be heard, but which could also be translated into action. If Jim Kunstler was John the Baptist raling against the American Automobile Slum, Chuck’s message appeared softer and less judgmental, less that is until he commanded your fig tree to wither and die.

Knowing that there was a Curbside Chat program that was ready to be presented to the public in communities just like Springfield I set about to get him here. Post tornado Springfield had developed a plan for recovery and had empowered a local non-profit development organization to spearhead the efforts; it seemed to me that DevelopSpringfield could use the “chat” to give people a broader framework for understanding what was happening, what had happened, and what was potentially going to happen in Springfield. 

I was sincere about what I viewed as the importance of the message, but I also had a selfish desire not so much to meet Chuck, but for Chuck to meet Springfield. The further east he ventured from Minnesota the more he gushed on his blog and in interviews about the “good bones” for building Strong Towns that existed here; in Pennsylvania, even in North Adams, Massachusetts. I knew that I might finally meet someone who would see the beauty which I had always seen here. 

Jay Minkarah, the president and CEO of DevelopSpringfield, took Chuck and his incredibly insightful sidekick Jim Kumon on a walking tour of the neighborhood and I was hearing what I knew I would hear: Chuck and Jim were impressed with Outing Park, a subsidized housing complex that looked more like a million dollar enclave in Manhattan; Jim made the whole group pause to appreciate the architectural detail of the façades of two buildings facing each other in an alleyway; later we bought grinders at Frigo’s and Chuck famously bought some pastries at La Fiorentina and went back to my house to talk about schools, cars, making America function again, and how it was that so much good food could cost so little money!

The chat went well. I was a little too passionate in my intro to Chuck but the rest of the program along with its Q and A were exactly what we had hoped for. Chuck had changed the bit about “believing that growth could solve all your problems” at my behest: No one in Springfield is infected with that mindset. Our problem is that we don’t see how our stagnation over the last 40 years has left us with a lot of neighborhoods and streets which, with a little TLC, could be transformed into truly prosperous places. The major take away from the chat and the follow up discussion on the next day was that the North End was a perfect place for the city to focus attention. It constituted a real small town Main Street on its own, but the beat up sidewalks, declining street trees, along with its isolation were leaving its potential untapped. 

On the way out the next day I gave Jim and Chuck a quick auto tour of State Street. Jim laughed at our New England version of a stroad. We didn’t make it as far as the changeover from State Street to Boston Road where our Yankee stroadiness is as crappy as anyplace in the good ole U.S. of A. because I wanted them to tour the North End. They could see the potential we had discussed earlier. I told them that Holyoke was like the North End on a much larger scale. As an aside: In my opinion there is no better community in the Northeast in terms of its long term future potential than Holyoke, Massachusetts; I cannot believe that no one in Holyoke has thought to bring in Chuck.

But now we get to the sad reality of the aftermath of the Curbside Chat in my hometown, of the unforeseen consequences of that amazing visit by Chuck and Jim: Springfield has become a hiss and a byword. (Here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) One of the worst things imaginable for any neighborhood took place in my neighborhood on the evening Chuck was presenting the Curbside Chat, perhaps even while he was asking all of us what our priorities were regarding traffic engineering and design: 


A little girl was killed, and her mother and her cousin seriously injured in a crash on State Street. 


As fate would have it the crash occurred in the exact spot my own daughter had made a video about pedestrian safety in conflict with street design which I had sent to Strong Towns to be part of their “See It Differently” YouTube channel. I had sent it because another video had appeared on their channel with a much less impressive library on a much less impressive corridor; it was a humblebrag: “When we screw up our pedestrian-traffic interface we do it with City Beautiful architecture on historic avenues!”

Chuck, much to his credit has made not just pedestrian safety in this city, or in this neighborhood, but on that very street at that very spot his cause. He has made our decades long fight his fight without being asked to do so. I want to say “I don’t believe in destiny”, but under the circumstances I must use the more clumsy “I have no belief in the supernatural”. Chuck does. And I do believe that he sees or feels that this confluence of events: publishing the video, being in the neighborhood, crossing that street, giving the chat, and spending the night in a home all in close physical and/or temporal proximity to the death of Destiny González makes him somehow obligated to take up this cause both as symbolic and as an end unto itself in his efforts to protect the American people, and in particular American children, from the scourge of the automobile.

I’ve contributed something to this fight, but what I have “sacrificed” pales when compared to what the González family and thousands like them have sacrificed and what Chuck Marohn, Jason Degray, and countless other members of the Strong Towns movement have given to change everything from the overall zeitgeist of a continent to one small stretch of roadway in an insignificant New England city. From a completely selfish perspective it hurts to know that, in the short term at least, my efforts have redounded to the discredit of the city I love so much, but I also know that to enable and overlook is not to love; helping another to overcome their weaknesses and achieve their potential is love. May we prove worthy of it.

Rochester Americans

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(That’s two AHL inspired headlines this month)


I had the most interesting experience while hanging out at my favorite local farm last weekend. I was in conversation with a father who described how beneficial the experience of being on a farm had been for his “city kids”. As the family seemed clearly to be middle class my interest level ratcheted up quite a few notches. His wife corrected him: “Suburban kids”. As the gathering included friends and family, my family and I being in the former group, I had to ask where they were from; Rochester, New York I was told.

The conversation continued. I was eager to talk to people who so readily accepted a connection to a hard luck northern tier industrial city like Rochester, as those people are few and far between in the suburbs of Springfield. In that vein, and as the conversation continued, I made reference to just how similar Rochester and Springfield are. Not even his reflective sunglasses could hide that the comparison made my discussion partner cringe; I mean he literally, visibly, winced. “In population I suppose.” He then went on to proudly defend Rochester in a very measured but assured way.

With a facility indicative of experience in a classroom setting he asked me about Springfield’s economy referencing jobs in particular. I mentioned that most of the region’s major employers were in the city from Baystate and Mercy medical centers to the second largest corporation headquartered in Massachusetts, MassMutual, along with a handful of colleges, Big Y, and Smith and Wesson: “The problem is that the people who have the best jobs choose to live outside the city. The region is actually very prosperous” I concluded.

When we got home after the party I went right to Wikipedia. I was very surprised at what I saw. Instinctively I think of Rochester, and Syracuse, and Bridgeport, and Scranton and perhaps a dozen or more other cities in the northeast as being, essentially, the same as Springfield. Given the obviously strong visceral response I had seen when I compared Springfield to Rochester I assumed that I was going to find data which confirmed that perhaps my assumption in that regard was a bit hasty and inaccurate. Indeed it was. I’m sure the City of Rochester has a lot going for it, maybe as much or more than Springfield in ways that can’t be measured, but what I was startled to find was that Rochester is in pretty rough shape demographically, even when compared to The City of Homes.

People often perceive Springfield as having a violence problem; I was surprised to see that Rochester had over 3 times the homicide rate of Springfield. Springfield is thought of as poor; Rochester’s per capita, household, and family incomes are anywhere from 10%-20% lower than Springfield’s. In terms of population Rochester has lost roughly 1/3 of its population, losing 120,000 people since its peak; Springfield’s population loss has been around 10%, losing almost exactly 20,000, leveling off, and actually growing slightly over the last 40 years; Rochester has lost nearly 10,000 people per decade just since 1980.

I also found it interesting that Rochester’s 209,000 people are spread out over almost 90 square miles. If Springfield were to annex Chicopee and West Springfield it would still cover 15 fewer square miles but have a population of 238,000.

It sounds like I’m picking on Rochester, but that’s not the purpose of my post. What I want to know is, how does a place in such demonstrably worse shape than my hometown illicit such pride from its suburban inhabitants when I find it a challenge to find anyone, resident or suburbanite, who has a kind word to say about Springfield? It could be that I just met the only well-to-do people outside of Rochester who feel kindly toward it, and I just happen to be acquainted with only naddering nabobs of negativity in Western Mass, but I don’t think so. Is it just so much further from Boston and New York City that expectations are lowered? I’ve often thought one of Springfield’s biggest problems to be its proximity to two of North America’s standout cities and therefore expectations are too high.

In further conversation the family revealed that they live in a community which borders a community which touches Rochester. If we ever see a day when people in Southwick, Hampden, and Belchertown feel about Springfield the way these folks feel about Rochester it will be a marker of tremendous progress. 

Syracuse, Crunched

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Read this:


Did you catch it? Read the excerpts of this one now:


There you go. You see? The Quality of Life ranking is for the METRO area, not just the city. People in Syracuse might miss that, despite the brief nod to “metro area” in the story, and walk away feeling good about their municipality. No such fears in Springfield: the headline makes clear the study refers to the entire “Pioneer Valley” and, well, the focus of the entire piece appears to be making sure that no one accidentally believes this has anything to do with Springfield the city.

On the other hand, a quality of life survey which uses “averages” in the Springfield metro will be heavily impacted by the  quality of life in the city of Springfield: quality of “life” generally being divided by the denominator of “lives” of which Springfield is one quarter or more. Educational attainment is measured, and more children go to public school in Springfield than there are people in Northampton. As far as weighting goes, more than twice as many lives are lived in Springfield than in the entirety  of Franklin County. Access to health care? Imagine if Springfield’s hospitals and medical offices were removed from the study.

I’d say this survey actually does say something about life in Springfield, so to the rest of the residents of the Valley I say “you’re welcome” on behalf of the residents of the city. Glad we helped make you look so good.

How Deep Does the Stupid Go?

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As I think about it this could be the blogpost version of the movie “Inception”, but if you enjoy urban design and have a fondness for anachronism it could be worth delving through the layers.

Worcester and Springfield (pronounced “Spring-Field”) are similar cities facing similar problems but all in all Worcester is ahead of Springfield. Worcester never fell as far as Springfield during the bad years, and it has taken advantage of the most recent movement toward urban Renaissance more quickly and more successfully. I think I’d like to explore that in depth in a separate post delving into how the two municipalities got where they are, why, and what their assets and liabilities are moving forward; it might be fun to get some input afterwards from the citizens of Worcester who read Rational Urbanism to get their perspective.

With that relationship between Springfield and Worcester in mind let us continue: Yesterday I was about to head down to Bueno y Sano’s Friday “burrito bar”; Worcester probably has a handful of local burrito places with the menu written out in chalk, clever burrito names, craft brews on tap, all that stuff; we just got one place to agree to opening under a tent for two hours a week at least during the summer! In any case, before leaving I glanced at my phone and, checking Masslive I read the headline of an editorial from The Republican, Springfield’s paper of record:


I’m intrigued, but I assume that the title is a reference to the “slots in a box” casino that Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods are planning to build on the site of an old movie theater to siphon off visitors to MGM’s Springfield casino. I’m sure this does have MGM pretty ticked off, but it was never their revenues that interested me: the movie theaters, the retail, the street improvements, the entertainment, the ice skating, the market rate housing, those are the things that matter to me as a neighbor. But the editorial has nothing to do with that at all.

The editorial is about Worcester. It makes some of the same points that I would about competition between similar cities struggling with similar problems and how Worcester does have some advantages but that Springfield is making enormous headway right now and, if we keep moving forward and don’t rest on our laurels, we can continue to compete. I might have added a few more words about this not necessarily being a zero sum game, but that to should be put aside as we continue down this rabbit hole.

What was the motivation, the concept, the idea, the development which spurred the Editorial Board to write their Knute Rockne speech? Was it news of Worcester’s expanding innovation center, more expansion in the canal district, another local entrepreneur expanding his or her business, yet another market rate housing development coming to the downtown? Nope. I had seen something in banner headlines earlier in the day but couldn’t bring myself to read the article; I’m not a masochist. I can be a bit shallow when it comes to my jealousy; it takes me a while to accept when perceived rivals leap ahead of my community.

Be patient, we’re almost there.

Earlier in the day my wife had asked me about this same Worcester development…it’s called “Sky…something or other” and she had asked me if it was some sort of airwalk or something and I said (remember, I didn’t read the article): “No, it’s some big development, I think it’s a big retail/residential thing. No one is building airwalks anymore. That’s stupid.” But as I read the editorial I clicked on the link and it took me to this:


Yup. It’s an airwalk. An airwalk which, to their credit, the city is only moving forward with because they are being forced to do so because some moron, I assume, promised the developer of a new hotel, obviously another idiot, that the city would do it more than a decade ago. An airwalk. To quote William Whyte: 
 “They have not worked very well. When you take a street away from street level you take away what makes it work. Remove the intricate mixture of people, the pedestrian bustle, the shops, and the traffic, and what you are left with is a corridor. It can be…very bleak…”
This is what the intersection looks like now:


Are these perfectly crafted pedestrian corridors? No, they are not. But way short of $10,000,000 the city could find a way to improve these crossings for pedestrians all the while NOT reverting to the oldestest or worstestest of 60’s and 70’s era gimmicks for revitalizing a downtown.

Here at home we have are own problems. Our local deep thinkers, with all the great things happening in Worcester, find out about the stupidest thing Worcester has done in a generation, and instead of giving us an inspirational exclamation akin to: “They’re  digging in the wrong place!” 


They tell us to keep our heads up because, in spite of this genius move, we can still get to the Well of Souls before our competition! It’s like your best friend sees the chief rival for your promotion shooting heroin in the bathroom and tells you that you still might have a shot at landing the position if you just nail the interview. 

I can’t believe that Worcester only argued that they shouldn’t be made to build the pedestrian bridge because they don’t have the money; they should have gone with the “Your Honor, I know my predecessor said I’d hit myself in the face with a hammer, but…” defense.

There is one last, divinely inspired exclamation point on this whole thing. Somewhere, at the Republican, at Masslive, someone chose a photograph to symbolize Springfield’s readiness to compete in this, the dawning era of the new city! And what photo did they choose? Is it the new Innovation Center? The Maker Space? Silverbrick Lofts? The Park Street Lofts? Some part of the new MGM complex? I know, the newly re-opened Union Station? Well, sort of. They chose this picture:

Yes. It’s a parking garage. Parking. The key to any urban resurgence! Build for the car, prioritize the car, make room for the car: People love it when you do that! I mean, weren’t the 60’s great for cities? What could go wrong?

Worth Defending

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The MGM resort casino was the focus of a news feature on Connecticut Public Radio last week. As one would expect from a CPB production it was generally fair, thoughtful, and well produced; it also took very few risks and generally trod the pathways one would expect. 

There were two glaringly contradictory “fear pairs”, each brought up multiple times but without ever acknowledging their mutual exclusivity. My favorite goes back to the original anti-casino campaign in the city and it goes like this: NO ONE is going to come to a resort casino in downtown Springfield…and the traffic is going to be horrific! Coming in a close second to that is: “All the jobs created by the casino are going to be crap…and Connecticut is going to fight tooth and nail to keep those crappy jobs in Connecticut where they belong!”

On a much more important note, especially with the release of Richard Florida’s new book which he says takes an honest look at some of the flaws in his original “creative class” hypothesis, there was the introduction to the piece which showed some marked incredulity at the idea of anyone voluntarily attempting to enjoy themselves in Springfield. Florida’s work tends to be data driven, but I hope he casts an eye on the culture we’ve created which doesn’t allow for love of place unless that place is at some cultural extreme. 

Rather than try to detail how that works in this essay I’d rather take you on a thought experiment. Be patient, this is going to take a few bullet points, but it is precisely that fact which makes the point.

Imagine a friend tells you about a little neighborhood in New York City, or maybe Boston or San Francisco:
It has an art museum with works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, Daniel Chester French in its American collection and Tiepolo, Titian, Picasso, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, and more in its European collection with a smattering of O’Keefe and Calder to boot. 

Across a little plaza there’s a classic little Victorian museum with a huge collection of armor and weapons from Asia along with a huge room filled with American landscapes and other pieces from the XIX century.

Nearby there’s a brand new children’s museum dedicated to the work of Dr Seuss and an interactive sculpture garden inspired by his work in the aforementioned plaza. Before you wander off check out the quirky little science museum and the statue by Augustus St Gaudens just outside the park.

On the other side of this cluster of museums is an industrial history museum with a handful of classic cars, including some of the oldest American cars ever produced and a huge collection of classic motorcycles.

On the way up to the nearby National Park there’s a brand new starchitectural wonder designed by Moshe Safde, and inside the park there’s a museum with an enormous collection of firearms. The park provides a beautiful view of the area below.
If you head the other direction from the plaza where the museums are clustered there’s an amazing historic district with a church designed by H.H. Richardson and some really impressively restored French Second Empire row houses. 

Walk a block from there and there’s a Main Street with some cool buildings and every thing from grab and go food to some really nice sit down restaurants: There’s German, Indian, Cajun, Italian, Barbecue, Lebanese, Puerto Rican, and Chinese to name a few. If you go north there’s a newly refurbished train station from the golden age of the American railroad, if you go south there’s another Richardson building in the region’s oldest park.

The church in that park is neoclassical, the governmental complex is among the finest City Beautiful monuments in the United States (as is the library you passed on the way to the National Park). 

If you look north you’ll see two hotels, in case you want to stay the night, but walking south you’ll start walking past the new MGM complex: movie theaters, retail shops, a wiz bang bowling alley, a food court, some restaurants on the Main Street, an open air plaza for entertainment and a spot for farmer’s markets and craft fairs in nice weather, and ice skating in the winter. They’ll be taking over management of the performance venues I forgot to mention. There are symphony and theatrical productions during the season as well as AHL hockey, MGM promises to bring pop music concerts as well as events like cirque de soleil.


Once you get beyond MGM there’s a little Italian neighborhood with multiple delis, cafes, restaurants, and even a little florist shop and a bakery. That’s where I spend most of my time.

Yes, obviously this is my neighborhood, and I don’t mean to imply for a second that it’s nothing but sweetness and light here but I want to highlight how ridiculous it is that a news outlet would show any incredulity regarding the potential viability of the place as a tourist destination. The only explanation is that even an enterprise like public radio which prides itself on broad based objectivity (except regarding America’s right to bomb…but that’s for a different blog) is infested with the American invective for small (American) cities.

There has always been a cultural pull toward the biggest cities and the greatest capitals of culture of course, that I understand, but even George Bailey had people try to argue him out of leaving Bedford Falls, today it seems everyone, even family, would not only be telling him to leave but would be packing up to leave with him. With so many of our communities having been hollowed out to the point that a young man’s dying thought of his hometown might be “the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Wal-Mart” it makes sense that everyone would yearn to be someplace authentic, but then why do so many of our most genuine places receive more opprobrium than affection?

For me the answer rests somewhere in the culture which can only see black and white: There is one champion and all the rest must be losers. It’s an almost Manichaean worldview where small cities are somehow both the opposite of nature and the opposite of real cities. In this area people claim Boston (somehow) as a relevant cultural marker, but skip on any allegiance to the closer municipalities which in fact provide the economic base on which they exist. In Spain people take pride in their community of origin no matter how humble; to not is like hating your own mother or father. In the United States to love your hometown and to stay there is only indicative of a lack of ambition; you must leave the tribe and your family to show independence.

I’ve always had the opposite view: Any idiot can move to trendy place. The iconoclast sees the uniqueness of the place where he or she is and revels in it. My fellow Massachusetts natives Emerson and Thoreau each expressed this same idea if in somewhat different ways. I have been to 3 continents, 10 nations, 46 states, and countless cities. I’ve lived in Europe and the Mountain West as well as Massachusetts, I’ve travelled with students a dozen times and seen hundreds of historic places; my hometown has no need to be embarrassed by what it has to offer, it has a significance, a value, an attraction all its own as do so many cities its size, and treating with disdain the idea that people might want to experience it for the sake of enjoyment, enrichment, and even enlightenment from time to time is ridiculous.

Micronutrient Pornography

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The unusually heavy sudden mid-March snowfall forced me to change my walking patterns around the neighborhood this week and reminded me of one thing: I live in an astonishingly beautiful place. The buildings, constructed of natural materials at a time when construction and decoration still viewed coherence and integrity as a primary aim, created a cityscape and the snow covered up the shortcomings in landscaping and maintenance (not to mention the trash) and the combination reminded me of what is so special about this place.


My wife is fond of saying that so much of what is discussed and debated comes down to aesthetics. As innate and personal as our individual tastes may seem, they are all molded and mediated by the society in which we live and the experiences that we have. Growing up in Springfield I happened to notice that many of the most beautiful homes were in some of the poorest neighborhoods, and that nearly all of the homeliest homes were in the wealthiest. Whether it was because I recognized the beauty before I understood poverty or because the delineation was particularly clear along the pathways of my daily comings and goings I will never know, but for as long as I can remember my appreciation of what I would now call urbanism and architecture was disconnected from the qualities and conditions more closely tied to wealth.


In Andalusia I had a hard time understanding why the Americans with whom I worked, nearly all of whom were from the suburbs of the West and Southwest of the United States, were filled with such harsh judgements regarding places which I thought were beautiful. I remember the excitement in the crowd when a car was available to drive us to Hipercor, a sort of Spanish version of a Walmart in a Spanish version of suburban sprawl; I hated it. It seemed so antiseptic and banal and required such a tedious journey while the city in which we could walk around every day and fulfill our needs as we went about our proselytizing was gracious and solid, and conveyed unfathomable depth.

I remember standing in a small park on the grand central artery of Jaén and my compañero of the moment expressing his sadness at the lack of grandeur…in the cars going by! They were all small by American standards, and the closest thing to a pickup truck was a sort of bloated tricycle thingy which could turn on a dime but looked to be made of corrugated aluminum. 

It strikes me that auto centered post war development is the pornography of human settlement. Outwardly it facilitates gratification but doesn’t demand enough to provide a complete experience. It does to society and community what food supplements do to nutrients; it isolates the elements which are more easily understood to be necessary for function, but fails in every way to understand just how other elements, perhaps not as easily identified or understood, enhance, promote, mediate, or control the effects of all the others. As with both industrial food and erotica, the experience of living in the car centered environment provides for the most basic outward needs, but fails to satisfy at a deeper level.
Just as with food and sex, however, if all someone has ever known is the artificial and the inorganic, then there is no way to know that the experience is incomplete, and even upon being given an opportunity for a more fulfilling experience the uninitiated may balk at the heavier burdens that accrue to more complete realities. Thus having to “find” a parking space and having to walk along sidewalks and across streets to arrive at a place where the menu is unique and the logistics are unfamiliar is orders of magnitude more frustrating than pulling into the McDonalds and ordering a Big Mac, but it also holds out the promise of a much higher level of satisfaction and of human connection. 

In my conversations with colleagues or even students at my suburban school any mention to the beauty of Springfield is assumed to be tongue in cheek. I have to become exceedingly earnest in order to convince people that I am being serious when I say things complimentary to the aesthetic value of the city; which is not to say that doing so alters the hearer’s perspective on the city. To them it is an ugly and sordid place to such an extreme that they no more entertain the notion of changing their views thereon than they would do so in connection to feces or mucus.

There are things we never really see for the first time because we have been disciplined as to how to see them before we mastered the art of seeing; the Mona Lisa comes to mind, or the Statue of Liberty, or the Eiffel Tower. In America many of our cities are in this category but the disciple is taught to fear or disdain them. In a very real way the markers of poverty are the elements which ring the Pavlovian bell to categorize a place as ugly and only as those things recede will Americans accept cities as potentially beautiful, and even then for most it will be the markers of wealth and not the deeper grammars and syntaxes of traditional urban design that will stimulate their appreciation.

A Little Swagger(t)

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  I picked up on some interesting, and previously acknowledged, contradictions in my work this week. For some my piece on Ian Rasmussen was too personal, and I accept the criticism. I would not deny for a second that there was at least a touch of passive aggression in what I wrote, but at the core of the essay was an honest query: if devout urbanists won’t colonize your city, who will? 

As the Strong Towns dialog continued though, I was directed to an essay by Gracen Johnson about putting down roots. I not only commented, I linked to an essay I wrote in 2012 about how I feel about the issue of transience versus permanence. It’s how I feel. I should have also linked to a recent kunstlercast where the guest expressed a very similar sentiment.  

What I remember from the writing of the 2012 essay, and what jumped out at me again, was how my own personal feelings of place so contradicted my objective relative to my hometown. From the first moment I left Springfield I knew I wanted to come back. I hated the mountain west, but Europe was a dreamscape to me…and still I wanted nothing more than to return to my home and experience what I could of its remaining residual European style urbanity. To preserve it, and bring to it a renaissance, I wanted, I still want, thousands of people to abandon their “places” and come here. I don’t apologize for it. This is how I feel about my place and my life. Springfielders who feel the same way, all 12 of them, are still here. 

Yes, I seek you, place traitors, to come and see the wonders of this brave old city. 

Sederick and May

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(This is the piece I wrote for Strongtowns about concentrated poverty for their “housing week”)

  

Springfield, Massachusetts is a poor city and the neighborhood where I currently live is poorer still. My wife and I earn a solidly middle class income. I’d lived in a different part of the neighborhood for most of the last 20 years. When I moved into the townhouse at 80 Maple Street the first two people I met were Sederick and May.

Sederick wanted to know if I was the new owner of the place. I didn’t know who this unfamiliar black man was, asking me about a closing that had taken place not four hours earlier; so I lied and said that I wasn’t. A few days later he didn’t ask me, he told me that he knew I was the new owner. I couldn’t imagine how he knew or why he would care, but it seemed ominous. It turned out he lived in the basement of the townhouse two doors down and had an agreement with the lawyers whose offices had been at 80 Maple Street to clear the snow from their steps and from the 30 feet of sidewalk that was the responsibility of “Coolidge and Lauro”: $200 a season and free the following year if we didn’t get 5 shovel-able snowfalls! It was a good deal.

May saw my youngest daughter walk down the hill from Commerce High School on the Tuesday that this became our home. May was the spirited crossing guard at the corner of Maple and Union Streets. Any driver not showing due deference to her or the children got an earful of high-pitched black southern colloquialisms from the full 5 feet and 100 lbs. of her frame. I watched her watch my daughter, Mckenzie, cross the street, walk up the steps to the door, unlock the front door, and enter into her new home. May sought me out to tell me that Mckenzie would be safe under her watchful eye and that, if any creeps tried to follow her home, May would give ’em what for.

Both Sederick and May were dead within three years. Neither was yet 60 years of age. Both looked over 70 to me. Both died of cancers which were too far along for any hope of treatment by the time they were discovered. May’s second job was on the night cleaning crew at a local hospital. I never asked which one. I wondered if she died in a room she had often cleaned but never accessed as a patient until it was too late. 

It’s a hard thing for me. My presence in the neighborhood is something of a curiosity to the neighbors, but their presence is what makes my ridiculous lifestyle possible. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a Marxist rant; it’s just that as a practical matter the $14,000 a year median household income of my neighbors, among other things, keeps my expenses low.

I remember when I was negotiating to buy the house one of the owners mistook me for a contractor and told me that “the guy who’s looking to buy this place has two daughters. He’s a lunatic, this place is the Wild, Wild West after dark.” When we sat down at the conference table to discuss terms it was, perhaps “priceless” is the wrong word, to see the look on his face when he recognized me; there goes another $10,000 off the asking price! I’m sure the numerous shopping carts and the tinkle of their returnable bottles and cans is part of what keeps housing demand from the middle class, and therefore my home value and property taxes, extremely low.
  

At school my daughters in prior decades were, and now my step-daughter is, offered free breakfast and lunch despite not qualifying for “free or reduced price lunch”; so few students aren’t eligible that it’s not worthwhile to maintain a system of collection. The millions of dollars the Commonwealth of Massachusetts throws at the school due to the underperformance of the impoverished school population puts my stepdaughter in a classroom with 15 other students and with a full time paraprofessional. Funds for a music program gave her a chance to perform in an important role in a school produced play, the only second grader to do so. My oldest earned a scholarship from Smith College as part of a Smith/Springfield partnership; I have a feeling she does NOT represent the intended demographic target of the school’s largesse, but she was the most qualified candidate.
Being poor is hard. Whether the poor living here think so or not, in many ways this is a great neighborhood in which to be poor. Whatever the general state of public transit, living where I do gives people a tremendous mobility that no other location in the region does. Just about every governmental body and institution has a branch or outlet here. Living in an urban center gives the poor access to many of the services which cater to their needs. Residing near the region’s hospitality industry (7 hotels now, 11 by 2018 with thousands of guest rooms), universities, and medical centers makes access to thousands of entry level jobs possible. 
But these are mostly not actually benefits of the concentration of poverty, they are the benefits of living in a city center. One problem of the concentration of poverty is how it normalizes dysfunction. I see the dysfunction every day. Some gentrification is what the neighborhood needs. Concerns that it could go so far as to displace tremendous numbers of people here are misguided in my view. That is not to say that it wouldn’t create new challenges for the people living here–far from it, of course it would. But in many cases what these people need is a buffer of “function” between themselves and their neighbor’s dysfunction. Someone needs to call the police. Someone needs to care enough to pick up the nips bottles, the used condoms, and the dog poop. Someone needs to be at the city council meeting, and the PTO meeting.
Looking back to my childhood, I can see that poverty was concentrated in a few neighborhoods in the city, but the city also contained large pockets of great wealth. With school desegregation, white flight created a vacuum which has (in a paradoxical turn of phrase) given concentrated poverty a chance to expand. With the middle class and the wealthy having fled to the suburbs and the exurbs, one result is that many of the rich not only do not ever see poverty, they also have a very warped sense of their own disproportionate wealth. That is to say: I know families with incomes a quarter of a million dollars a year that think that they are middle class.
The concentration of poverty does not just isolate the poor in their behaviors, attitudes, and dysfunctions, it does the same to the middle and upper classes. The recent epidemic of opioid overdose deaths in more suburban and rural parts of the country has led to a spate of articles acknowledging that “we can’t just incarcerate our way out of this problem.” Funny how that same realization never occurred to people when most of those being locked up over drug problems were from “that place, that class, and that race.” When “that place” is your place, and people of that class and that race are your neighbors, that realization might well come sooner.
A fact became clear to me a short time back, it is now almost something of a mantra: Were I to find a billion dollars, my dream would be to stay here. Were most of my neighbors to find a thousand, their dream would be to get out. It isn’t the place so much as it is the people around them. When you have resources you can be in this world, but not of it, so to speak. The poor do not have that luxury; the poor are always with them.