Home » Posts tagged "Strong Towns"

Tag Archives: Strong Towns

One May Smile, and Smile

Posted on by

I chose to raise my kids in a city. Not a superstar city, not a boutique city, not a city where most of the white middle class choose to do much of anything but leave. I took a lot of heat for that, and it wasn’t cast in “Minnesota Nice”; I was told by just about everyone who cared to offer an opinion that voluntarily subjecting my daughters to an urban lifestyle in a poor neighborhood was tantamount to child abuse. 

My reasons for doing so began, undeniably, with an unusual preference, given my late Baby Boomer demographic: I loved cities. Whether it was taking the Springfield Street Railway (bus) as a 12 year old to visit my mom as she worked her part time job at a downtown shop, or skipping class at Classical High School and wandering down to the hockey themed storefront McDonalds to buy a Big Mac, I preferred the hustle and bustle of downtown to the residential street where I grew up. The contrast between the sprawling Circle K festooned stroads of my Provo-Orem university experience, and my East Coast hometown (and later Spain!) confirmed for me that I wanted to live in what people now call a walkable environment. 

I didn’t have that vocabulary yet of course. I had read William H. Whyte’s “City: Rediscovering the Center”, but that was about public space, not about making the choice to live in the city. It was Kunstler who first gave me some vocabulary to use to describe what underlay my aesthetic but he never denied that the American city was decaying and in decline. Nope, the verdict was in: my daughters would become illiterate, homeless crack-whores (that’s a more or less word for word quote) because, rather than purchase a very reasonably priced raised ranch in East Longmeadow, I chose to subject them to apartment living and being educated in the poorest city schools…and even that dire outcome optimistically assumed they even survived the vicissitudes of gang warfare and random urban violence.

I hadn’t yet found, or in some cases it hadn’t yet been discovered and published, that “stranger danger” was actually more acute the further one got from a city center, that drug use was higher in the suburbs, that self annihilation was not just a greater threat to young people than street crime, but that suicide was negatively correlated to urban living. What I was able to discover from my own investigation, and published research was that much of the argument for the superior quality of suburban public schools was specious. 

That was enough to get me to start pushing back a little bit, but my push back never took the guise of telling people that they should like cities, it was just making the case that raising your kids in the city shouldn’t be viewed as a completely non-viable option. I had lived it myself, I had seen it in Spain, and there were differences I could detail and describe in the incrementally expanding autonomy of young people raised in traditional, walkable, urban places which contrasted sharply with the barriers that auto-centricity first threw up against that autonomy, and then unleashed in a sudden dangerous torrent.

These, then, are the origins of RationalUrbanism. It was never intended to convince people who love suburban and rural life that they should prefer cities, but rather to make the case to people who like cities that many of the arguments they will hear to discourage them from living in especially the most affordable cities are not based in fact. People do pick on and make fun of small towns and rural areas there can be no doubt, but when it comes to raising a family, or even finding community, the zeitgeist in America has leaned heavily in the favor of these places in contrast to what I think is a general consensus against traditional, densely populated cities.

I won’t deny then that all of this left me seething as I listened to last week’s Strong Towns Podcast. The author is being interviewed in connection with Strong Towns because of her thinking and writing about the importance of place, which is all well and good, but the discussion immediately degenerates when it becomes apparent that what is overtly stated numerous times to be a contrast between urban versus rural is really the difference between staying in a community where you have roots versus moving to a completely new place especially when a person chooses to live a commuter lifestyle.

What follows, then, is a point by point response to the assertions made in the interview both by her and by my good friend Chuck. If you haven’t heard the interview you can listen to it here. From the outset I think it’s important to acknowledge that it is the clear intent of Gracy Olmstead to contrast rural with urban lifestyles; to deny that is to deny what she makes clear is the operative premise of what she is doing. If I say “suicide is proportionally less frequent in urban areas” I don’t need to add “as opposed to rural ones” to make clear that is what I am saying; what else could it mean? “Suicide is proportionally less frequent in urban areas than in the audience of dramatic readings of The Cherry Orchard”? I would probably need to clarify that I was making that comparison.

I’ll start with a comically fallacious assertion; because one tends to interact with more strangers in an urban environment one necessarily sees fewer people one does know. Um. That’s not how it works. I may see 100 people I don’t know on the way to the drug store, but the five I see that I do know are still there to provide community. We live this. Every time we walk to our favorite restaurant, or go to a hockey game, or the symphony, or a random event each one of us; Liz, Luna, and I, sees any number of people we know. That hundreds or even thousands more people we don’t know are there does not diminish our community and the “intimacy, knowledge, or background” that we share with the people we do know.

There’s a strange assertion made very much in passing about this topic in the podcast as well. It describes walking and driving as equally ineffectual at creating community: “You have to drive to get it, walk to get it, or whatever.” I would first claim that, unless one lives in a commune or one confines one’s community to a nuclear, albeit multi-generational, household one will need to move to interact with community, and clearly one of those modalities is superior to the other. Except on rare, usually gesture intensive occasions, people don’t interact with other drivers on the road, but walking permits, and sometimes demands (against every wish, and against every fiber of our being) that we stop and talk to friends and family: If we had made reservations for Liz and Luna’s birthday dinner at Panjabi Tadka we would have been late we had to stop and talk to so many people!

“Families were closer, generations of families used to live together in one household…being in the city for several years I was too far from any family member. In a rural context that question would have never come up” Until my sister died, 4 generations lived under my mother’s roof. My nephew and his family now live in that same house in the city of Springfield. When I was raising my older daughters, Xela and Mckenzie, they stayed with grandma and grandpa; for childcare, as babysitters, or just because the four of them wanted to go and do things together. Mckenzie was my father’s pride and joy until he passed away, and Xela Rachel Shultis was holding my mother Rachel’s hand when my mother died two years ago. Gracy Olmstead is ascribing the problem she had of not having any family nearby to the typology of the environment and not, as it should be, on having moved 2,500 miles away from her home.

One of the reasons I stayed in Springfield was to give my children just the kind of rootedness which, apparently, doesn’t exist in places like this. Or maybe people, whatever the typology of their place, sometimes choose to exchange that for other things? I wouldn’t make the claim that it would never be the right decision, but if I made that choice and moved to rural Idaho I wouldn’t blame country living for severing those roots.

“In our small towns, we watch out for each other.” The story of the Idaho girl who sees the familiar hometown license plate and is relieved that she will have someone to turn to in an emergency is given to illustrate this point. So, would it be completely ridiculous then for me to point out that, when I went to college 2,300 miles away from home it was my next door neighbor from Springfield, Massachusetts, Jim Dabakis, who picked me up at the airport and let me stay at his place while I got ready to attend my first semester at BYU? Just coincidence then that we were from the same neighborhood. And that hometown friend and then sophomore Krista Robison made sure to check in on me all the time my freshman year, that would be coincidence as well. 

“In rural America it comes from the sense that people have long histories there.” I have to admit that, despite the fact my family arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620 (John Alden and Priscilla Mullins), and I also descend directly from Rebecca Nurse of Salem Witch Trial fame, my parents moved from 5 towns away to live in Springfield only in the late 1950’s. I was born here in 1964. On the other hand, Luna has had theater classes with a descendent of the first Europeans who were deeded the property we live on in 1636. The family of our handyman’s wife owned the tavern which George Washington visited on two occasions. But, you know, people in Minnesota and Idaho have roots.

There is even a claim made that urban living puts a strain on finances. As someone who lives like a king on a teacher’s salary I would say that it depends, as it would in a suburban or rural location, on which one you choose. I live in a very unpopular place. It’s urban, but it’s cheap and it’s awesome. Chuck has had our $2 Italian pastries. I live in a huge Victorian townhouse that cost me less than my yearly salary. My yearly taxes are much lower than most people’s monthly mortgage in the superstar places. I get free admission to 5 municipal museums with a better fine art selection than can be found anywhere outside a handful of non-northeast cities. Look at these seats at the symphony:

Almost nothing. 

That’s the mayor behind my friends at the Thunderbirds game (Springfield 8, Hershey 1), my friends paid and I didn’t even ask to use their magic V.I.P. token, but I was tempted to ask the T-birds mascot Boomer what special powers it gave me. My wife decided to spend the evening with friends and, since she intended to drink, rather than take an Uber she took the bus there and back; super cheap! 

Yes, if you choose to live in Alexandria, work in D.C., and go to church in Fairfax it isn’t the fault of D.C., or Alexandria, or even Fairfax if you feel fragmented! Commenting that she wanted to feel less spread out in terms of living her life made her want to move to a town of 300 or so people just doesn’t make much sense to me. Sure, I suppose it’s possible that some places with tiny populations contain dense core areas which provide the infrastructure for having community and not being spread out, but certainly that is the defining characteristic of a traditional, pre-Euclidean city. Working, shopping, mailing packages, going to the doctor or the dentist, seeing a movie, dining at a friend’s house, attending a party, going to school, attending a municipal meeting, a farmer’s market, a concert, voting, and any number of other things are all activities in which we can and do engage within walking distance of our home. If I were still LDS I could even walk to a Mormon church; thank god for atheism, it’s right up the street but that hill is a killer.

We all go through phases of life, we struggle with decisions we’ve made, opportunity costs we’ve opted for, roads we’ve not taken, but taking responsibility for them ourselves, acknowledging the trade offs that our volition has imposed is the best way to move forward with an examined life that allows us to maximize our gains and minimize our losses.

As an aside, I’m someone who writes a lot about place, pride of place, and why it matters. Try to find an interview with me where I don’t reference Springfield, Massachusetts 12 times in the first 8 minutes. It’s tedious I’m sure. Where does Gracy come from? Where does she live? I didn’t catch that. I listened to the podcast 3 times, but I guess I missed it. I’ll let the previous Strong Towns go-to person on pride of place have the last(ironic) word:

Chicfieldyoke

Posted on by

So here’s the comment that got this brain train rollin’:

September 16, 2019 at 5:35 pm



Steve,


I’ve been reading the blog for about a year now; I found it somehow, not totally sure, but I am glad I did. I just moved (begrudgingly) to Windsor CT as my girlfriend works in Hartford and I in Springfield still. Previously I was on Mattoon for a year, before that in East Forest Park, and originally in Sixteen Acres when I first moved to Springfield just over 4 years ago for graduate school. Springfield became my home and I loved it, especially my time on Mattoon.

Anyway, I’ve noticed you accurately refer to this part of New England in regional terms. That is, New Haven-Hartford-Springfield make up a densely populated region rather than 3 separate cities and their own suburbs. I’m curious, then, as to your thoughts on annexation, what it would mean to each independent city, and to the region as a whole. It seems to me that if Hartford incorporated West Hartford, East Hartford, and possibly some other bordering towns (Bloomfield, Windsor, Newington, Glastonbury, Wethersfield) it would reach more than 300,000 people within its city lines, with considerably more corporations considered to be headquartered in Hartford (i.e. Cigna, Colt Firearms, Pratt & Whitney) and therefore offering massive tax dollars to the region. It would also now contribute enormous tax dollars of the high earners (who benefit from being next to Hartford proper) in West Hartford, Glastonbury, etc. to Hartford’s base, while also consolidating the amount of town costs (each has their own fire dept & chief, police, etc.).




I mean, for Hartford to annex this handful of towns would probably put its geographic size close to that of Atlanta (134 sq miles, ~500,000 population). To put it further, Hartford County is about 750 sq miles with close to a million people in it. By comparison Allegheny is about the same geographic size and 1.2 million citizens, with Pittsburgh as its county seat. The narratives on Pittsburgh and Atlanta are much different than Hartford-Springfield-New Haven, I think mostly due to the nature of the cities land base. Because they are larger, they have more residential areas and neighborhoods, which stabilizes the perceived “crime” rate, and their city services are condensed coherently with opportunity to create public projects with the regions interests in mind. Perhaps that’s another reason they get more attention from journalists and we don’t. We are completely misrepresented as a region.


My point is this: doesn’t it seem that this region, with cities technically using a small amount of space in comparison to the region, is structured so that the cities are destined to fail? With each suburb competing against the city, pulling tax dollars (both corporate and income) away from the traditional areas of business, the city proper is left with nothing, and is then blamed for its problems. Hartford is tiny, only about 18 sq miles. Springfield is a bit bigger (33 sq miles) with about 30K more residents. New Haven is in the middle, about 20 sq miles and about as dense as Hartford.


Why are we not talking about regional cooperation? It seems your calls for regional prosperity are on point, but how can we ever get there if our cities are not major metro areas that benefit from occupying larger space? Nowhere else in the country does this issues really exist (and I recognize that New England towns have their own identity and would likely resist this process).


It seems, from a macro perspective, that merging our regional cities with its suburbs, is the first step to a rational urbanist agenda.






The claims made in this comment are not just accurate, but incredibly insightful from the city side of the discussion. I agree with every word. With so many of the topics that bubble to the surface at Rational Urbanism the fact is that perception is the reality that must be dealt with, and annexation does change the way data is tossed around and the judgements which are made from it about Springfield and about so many other places like it. It puts me in mind of the end of an interview I did on the Strong Towns podcast about my Death Race 2016 feature. At the close of the interview Chuck asked me what I would have the media do differently, and I, haltingly and choppily, gave a response; why was my response so unsatisfactory I wondered afterword? 

Because it wasn’t the media I was interested in at all, it was the public which was consuming it whose interpretation I wanted to change.

To confront the question of going metropolitan: actually doing it wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell, at least in Springfield, if it were to be attempted overtly with any of our suburban neighbors. Hartford is similarly looked down upon, I think, by the communities surrounding it, and so it is equally a non-starter. Massachusetts already has created the next best thing with a sort of de facto annexation by using what is mostly state income tax revenue to subsidize half of Springfield’s budget. 

As I have commented here repeatedly, I find that 100% justifiable as the incomes taxed are nearly all EARNED in Springfield. As I wrote in this essay, the argument that the community where the income earner lives is more productive than the place the earner works is like ascribing the value of a farm to the farmhouse and not the fields that surround it. 

There is no doubt that annexation can drive a narrative of a growing, thriving city: look at Columbus, Ohio. In a state of dying cities it is considered perhaps the sole survivor. The fact that most of the growth narrative has been perpetuated by forcing surrounding communities who need access to its water district to join (or die) isn’t mentioned when the lists of America’s Growing Cities are released…and positivity begets positivity; my guess is that some real growth and an actual increase in prosperity has taken place because a good story is the best medicine for what ails most cities. 

Going from 35 square miles to well over 200 square miles is a significant part of the real story, but you have to know to look for it. Read the Wikipedia entry on the demographics of Columbus and you’ll only find that the population of the city has skyrocketed at a time when so many other Ohio cities have declined. I talked to people who’ve lived in Columbus who had no idea about the whole annexation thing, they just know that the narrative is “onward and upward!”

As often happens with issues like this, I want to flip the argument, at least a little bit. I’m a true believer in the Strong Towns case for suburbia being screwed in the long run. I want nothing to do with them. Right now we have the most functional places filled disproportionately with the least functional people. To clarify, I would agree with ALL of the arguments that in the case of race, their disfunction is due to a society which has disproportionately created their disfunction, but for this argument that is neither here nor there: the places best suited for human habitation in the region are those which were created before World War II, those are mostly in our urban cores of Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, West Springfield, and Westfield, and those are disproportionately filled with the poor; or in other words those people who have been less successful in our economic system.

These functional places filled mostly with less functional people, by this definition, are surrounded by much, much larger swaths of territory built in an experimental form which has been conclusively demonstrated to be so unproductive as to be unsustainable without siphoning off productivity from productive areas (i.e. The Strong Towns argument). These places are destined to fail. Whether or not they will bring down the productive places around them is the operative question and I think the looser and more fragile the bonds which connect them, the better. 

It may happen long after I am laid to rest, but someday the productive places will again be filled with the productive people, and nearly all of the productive non agricultural work will once again occur in those places. A few, a very few currently “unproductive” places at the near periphery of the productive cores will be reworked to join those cores, but the rest will be let loose to become either productive farmland, or to be a sort of banlieue with little in the way of city services.

So if I could I’d jettison a fair chunk of East Forest Park and 16 Acres, I’d encourage Indian Orchard to hook up with the center of Ludlow, and I’d annex what was left of Springfield with Holyoke, Chicopee,the center of West Springfield, and the part South Hadley just across from Holyoke. It would put the population of my New Springfield at around 250,000. It would unify all of the walkable places, it would have the hydropower of the Holyoke dam and the Cobble Mountain Reservoir…along with its water supply, and it would be easily connected by existing rail and bus public transit.

It would unify all of the places that no one wants now anyway; all of the shit-holes. “It” would be the only place with any value in our manmade landscape. It would be this region’s lifeboat. The real question is whether to fill it with life preservers or harpoons.

Ethnography

Posted on by

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.

Looking Backward

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Do as I say, not as I do?

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

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

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

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

Lobster Dogs

Posted on by


An interesting discussion has been taking place at Strong Towns about whether or not the public wants drastic change; for me there are a tremendous number of right answers to this question, all of which contain some truth and many of which seem contradictory. Do people in suburbia want to change the way they live? No. They want to keep doing what they’ve been doing but with different outcomes be they financial, social, or environmental.

A long time ago Chuck Marohn used the hot dog versus lobster example to elucidate the preference for suburban living. While I experience urbanity as the crustacean and the suburbs as the frankfurter in my own gastro-urban aesthetic what he goes on to say  is that the suburban subsidies present in the build out phase of suburbia gave people the option of choosing between lobster and hot dogs without accurate information regarding their relative costs and so people have become accustomed to getting the high cost option without regard to its expense.

Now that the costs are becoming harder and harder to hide with further growth within the Suburban Ponzi scheme, asking if that public wants drastic change is, perhaps, a question which is too easily, if willfully, misinterpreted: Drastic change? Yes, in that they want a drastic change in the reality which doesn’t allow them to consume lobster at hot dog prices indefinitely. 

As a resident of a city where the entirety of the preceding is nearly meaningless, my experiences with the public have been starkly different and in many ways inverse. Here we’ve been paying a different price for a development pattern which, while a bit more on the hot dog end of the expense continuum, has managed to leave us impoverished in many ways and in the here and now. Many people here, especially those who haven’t been exposed to places where the traditional development pattern has continued to function without the baleful impacts of suburban vampirism (i.e. continental Europe), still see auto oriented development as the road to prosperity even as its first adopters fall into decline. 

What this means is that much of “the public” wants buildings razed and the space devoted to parking increased, among other things. As with cargo cults, what they have witnessed is that certain behaviors have brought sought after results but they do not know that the circumstances under which that relationship obtained were provisional. What makes it even harder is that in the case of auto oriented development the benefits of acting out the cultic rituals still bring immediate benefits; if I am the only retailer on a strip of traditional Main Street with an exclusive parking lot the harm to walkability accrues to all, but all the benefits belong to me. This more or less invisible externality gives the public not just erroneous but inverted market signals.

It’s not surprising then that the public often begs to have its throat cut on the altar of sprawl.

In my experience the planners and the experts in economic development HERE have been just as ignorant as the general public on all of these issues until very, very recently and so asking about whether “great men” should contrive to “push through” their grand plans in contravention to the public’s ignorance isn’t a thing I’ve contemplated. I have learned from reading and listening to people whose opinions I respect that other places are very different in this regard; in some the leaders are enlightened and the populace is benighted, in others the reverse is true, yet still in others minorities of the enlightened, or not, hold sway over their adversaries disproportionately. In some areas meetings last into the wee hours with multitudes wishing to have their say, in others, no one gets involved.

Finding a “one size fits all” process which can be trusted to give a desirable outcome is the procedural equivalent of a mega-structure or silver bullet. The processes by which to create the drastic change we need from a system in which the momentum of even the desire for drastic change often flows in opposition to the change that’s needed will have to be as emergent as the change itself.

Chuck’s Response 

Posted on by

I sent the text of the post entitled Magically Fallacious to Chuck Marohn before I published it. The interchange didn’t seem particularly enlightening so I didn’t include it. At Chuck’s request I’m posting it now:

(Chuck’s response)

Thanks for the interest and passion. I feel you’re falling into the trap of taking each utterance as a discrete thing instead of part of a larger body of work. Of course I’m not for highway interchanges and parking lots, but I’m also a skeptic of the person who thinks they can get a big budget and solve the world’s problems. We empower charlatans and fools when we think we’re so smart.

I know the starting point — better than most — and I know the destination. It’s each step on the journey I don’t feel confident prescribing, so we take them a step at a time and see what happens. 

What I see is a lot of people who are basically clueless about the starting point (except their one or two things that bother them), have an obsession about solving a problem and are ready to put on a jet pack and get to that destination as quickly as possible, everything else be damned. Well, those people are the problem in my world. 

Hope that makes sense.
-chuck

(My response)

That you “know the starting point — better than most — and…”know the destination” is my point! It’s really not about scale. Of course I understand that at the micro level “knowing where to put the crosswalk” can/should be tested first before it’s permanently installed, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t see that a few million dollars to better link a dozen solid traditional city/town centers is better spent than some fraction of that amount to spur on more auto oriented horizontal development in an ex-urban environment! 

Some bigger ideas are good, and some smaller ideas are really bad. Incrementalism can do wonders, I agree, but there are silver bullets which hit the bulls eye too!

(Chuck’s response)

I’m sorry, but I think you misunderstand me. Probably my fault.

Yes, we know the destination — or we think we know — but as with all long and endless journeys, the destination will change over time. Working incrementally respects that and actually induces it. We’re never done. Silver bullets have place in an approach that is never done.

-chuck 

I assume that the last line contains a typo and was meant to read: “Silver bullets have NO place in an approach that is never done.” My lived experience in a place which has its share of silver bullet projects is that many of them have proven invaluable to the city’s survival and progress. If I’m wrong and it was supposed to read: Silver bullets CAN have A place in an approach that is never done” then I concur. To me, the podcast which inspired this post was a call to engage. I did so. If my polemics were “dickish” so be it, given that Chuck doesn’t cede the point that scale isn’t the only operative characteristic in moving forward, I assume that he disagrees. Great. I’ve made him aware that one proud, founding member of Strong Towns disagrees.

It’s Magically Fallacious 

Posted on by

My youthful preference for cities was sociological and aesthetic with a soupçon of Club of Rome Limits to Growth. That was enough to make me fertile soil for Chuck Marohn’s message of the suburban Ponzi scheme in the Curbside Chat; sprawl didn’t pay for itself but traditional development did. With that a farm boy from Minnesota said to the entire world that the mightiest, wealthiest, most technologically advanced empire in all of history had feet of clay. The American Way of Life which was proclaimed “non-negotiable” was a chimera in more than one way: it was both illusory and monstrous. 

Was it hubristic to believe that a few dozen studies of post war auto-oriented design, a comparison of a taco joint to a block of mediocre buildings, and an anecdote about a small town being encouraged to double down on a waste water system it already couldn’t afford was sufficient to call out the American Dream? Not if you’re right. It’s amusing to listen to the humble Midwesterner project on to his own true believers the hubris he fears in his own message, even going so far as to call himself…I mean members of his own movement…”idiots” if they believe they know the solutions to the problems we face today.

Yes, I agree that our current situation is more of a predicament than a problem and that what we have before us are responses and not solutions. But I do know what we ought to do in the broadest sense, at least here in my corner of the world, facing the predicaments we are facing. And I am not an idiot. In greater Springfield we have a population growing at a snail’s pace and dozens of traditional, walkable city centers and neighborhoods which are underpopulated and underutilized. They already have the infrastructure to satisfy the needs of our citizenry for decades and decades without any more horizontal expansion.

Of course, not only do I know it, Chuck knows it too. To listen to him you’d almost believe that he doesn’t believe his own message here. But as he continuously carries on about “the magic of the incremental” it’s important to understand that he really doesn’t believe in the absolute hegemony of small scale developments, though perhaps he thinks he does. I can give 2 examples from this place (Western Massachusetts) of small scale, incremental plans that he would be four square against. 

1) Now that technology has replaced toll takers on the Massachusetts Turnpike there is a movement to add an exit and an entrance along the 30 mile stretch between Westfield and Lee. The cost wouldn’t amount to a blip in the Mass DOT’s budget, but it would open up hundreds of miles of roads and thousands of acres of greenfield to auto oriented development in a region, as I have already stated, with minimal population growth. 

2)The South End neighborhood is slowly, and incrementally in tiny chunks transforming from a traditional walkable neighborhood to a car centered place. One by one, hotels, car dealers, and fast food joints are purchasing traditional buildings, knocking them down, adding parking lots, and constructing buildings with stroad type set backs. The developers are making money, and unlike the Taco John’s model, the tax impact on the city has been positive, at least in the short run. 

Hey, these are small, incremental bets, but based on the auto oriented model. So you’re in favor of them, right Chuck? Or do you have the hubris to claim that you know better?! I know I know better…but that makes me an idiot, right? 

On the other hand we have MGM. A huge “silver bullet” project if ever there was one. But not all silver bullets are of the same caliber: The enormous highway viaduct separating the downtown from the river? Horrible! the enormous urban renewal district north of downtown? Disposable. But a half a dozen projects enumerated here? Spectacular. My city exists as it does because of the ultimate silver “bullet” project (quite literally) and preserved its regional preeminence by yet another.* Under the circumstances which go well beyond this one community’s ability to control (the legalization and proliferation of casino gambling for example), the city is leveraging this HUGE project to repair, restore, or redesign 3 downtown parks and miles of sidewalk and bicycle infrastructure; this mega project has shown a respect for the scale existing of the downtown and is designed to encourage walkability in a way that none of the small scale projects have over the last 30 years with the exception of those restricted by the demands of historic preservation.

*(A public-private partnership to build a bridge across the Connecticut to regain the regional pre-eminence lost to Northampton)

If you’re asking me, do I know the best way to communicate to my neighbors the critical nature of the decisions we are making regarding traditional versus auto oriented development? No, I don’t. Which plans in the short term will serve as the best exemplars of traditional development? “Tampoco”. But that is not the same as pretending I don’t know what the broader choices are and what the correct answers are. I do. 

I do get, though, that other parts of the world might be dealing with different issues and people might be positing ridiculous “solutions”: massive, brand new hugely expensive high speed rail projects connecting no place to nowhere in hopes that things will densify on either end. Here, though, we’re just taking already existing rights of way and infrastructure, and used rolling stock to double or triple connectivity to New Haven and New York City: Not high speed, not maglev, just some old trains adding 17, 12, and 2 trains a day at distances of 30, 60 and 100 miles respectively. 

To me, and probably to you, smart, small, and incremental. But to people who view rail as a relic it’s an ill conceived reversal, and a governmental white elephant; why not just a couple more lanes to Interstate 91? It’s incremental! “Use the rest of the $ saved not improving Springfield’s rail connectivity to fix the potholes on my street!?” 

We know better. You know better. THAT’S a stupid argument. To say so only demonstrates hubris if you’re wrong. And you’re not wrong.

As I’ve said before, Paris was a big idea, and it was a good one. Did Robert Moses draw inspiration from Haussmann? Probably. But Haussmann was right and Moses was wrong. Yes, smaller bets pose less risk than larger ones, and there are things we know, and things we don’t know. Of course knowing which is which is key. It is pretending the difference doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist that is idiotic.

We’ve Been Here Before

Posted on by

“The thing that many people forget about today’s urban revival is that people are actually moving into our downtowns again. ”

Mattoon Street

Stockbridge Court

Armoury Commons*

Morgan Square (now Silverbrick Lofts)

Ashford Place* (now Museum Park)

Classical*

The Macintosh

Chestnut Towers

122 Chestnut

The Kimball

Park Street Lofts

From the mid 1970’s all through the 1980’s Springfield saw these areas and buildings rehabilitated, refurbished, or repurposed as housing; some as condos or townhouses, most as apartments. While most of these projects at first attracted what were then called yuppies and now hipsters, as well as a few empty nesters, all but a handful saw a radical transformation to housing poor individuals and families or some level of serious decline.

I lived in three* of these developments in four intervals from 1987-2008 and experienced both as a resident and as a representative of the civic association the changes each has undergone. Almost all of these projects created fairly unique, stylish living spaces even by today’s standards: high ceilings, enormous windows, exposed beams, brick walls, historic built-in carpentry; one unit at Classical has its own observatory! Today perhaps 3 have maintained their value and their clientele, 3 have been redone and are striving to remain market rate, and the rest, at best, represent a challenge moving forward.

More importantly, their existence didn’t in any noticeable way slow the decline of general livability downtown; retail shops continued to close, small groceries didn’t move in, cafes didn’t open and stay open, all the diners closed. 

Now, on the other hand, there is a real chance, albeit only a chance, for the downtown to have all of the amenities I’ve looked for and dreamed of since I moved downtown 30+ years ago, but it comes tied to (cue ominous music and thunderclaps) a huge “silver bullet” resort casino designed to attract visitors to my community. Jane Jacobs forfend.

Anyone who reads my work knows that I am critical of a number of decisions and priorities of the local economic development cabal, but mobilizing in favor of the MGM proposal for the tornado ravaged South End was not one of them for the following reasons:

*The Commonwealth specifically designated this region of the state for a casino development, there was little to no chance that no casino would be built in the area, and the other four proposals had all of the drawbacks with few of the positive attributes of the MGM plan.

*The enormous tornado damage to block after block of historically significant structures in this economically struggling neighborhood made it very unlikely that a patient incremental response would be up to the challenge of remaking the neighborhood before even more vacant, undeveloped structures began to further erode what remained of our good bones.

*ALL smaller scale projects in the last 20 years in the South End have followed a suburban auto-oriented design model and MGM showed a commitment to good urban design principles even going so far as calling on Jeff Speck as a consultant.

*The MGM proposal takes an area which paid roughly $500,000 a year to the city in taxes and guarantees to increase it to more than $20,000,000.

The simple truth is, inviting this behemoth in is a risk, for the last 40 years different pundits and experts have promised a resurgence based primarily, believe it or not, on many of the very same arguments the most sober commentators make today. The city put lots of effort into façade grants, quality of life improvements, schools, parks, and library enhancements in the urban core; all to no avail. Yes, other silver bullet approaches were tried too: the downtown mall, the no car zone, large scale “urban removal”, the giant arena, the convention center (phases 1 and 2), and the Basketball Hall of Fame (versions 2 and 3).

There is a nagging voice in the back of my mind saying “this is too easy, this is too simple, this is too good to be true”. From the movie theaters to the street level retail this project produces ex nihilo all of the amenities I’ve been waiting to see return downtown for the last 30 years: in many ways it isn’t “promising” to bring what I want, it IS what I want. At the same time it could be, I think only without looking at the specifics, the most un-strong-townsy project ever.

Moving forward everything good or bad that happens in the city will be claimed to be a consequence of MGM. Given that there is no way to double blind the future we’ll never know, if “Mom and Rico’s” closes, it will truly have been because of MGM or if it would have happened anyway. Maybe the TD district will thrive as an alternative to the Vegas environment, or maybe it will fail because the billion dollar resort casino consumes all of the available development “oxygen”. What I do know is that most opponents will claim the city was destined to thrive if not for the project, and opponents will say doom was inevitable without it. 

I know that I don’t know and that I’ll never know. but since MGM IS coming to town, my town, I want to make it work. It should work. Not because casinos are a wise economic development model but because the city is built on a fundamentally strong foundation of prewar design, extremely high quality housing stock, dozens of walkable neighborhoods and arguably the best designed municipal water system in the country.

The Stormcrow

Posted on by

“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.

Of Blind Squirrels and Broken Clocks

Posted on by

I’ve been involved with the issue of pedestrian safety on State Street for more than two decades now so when Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns asked me to snap some pictures of the “desire paths” around and through the fences and hedges the city had “strategically placed” to discourage people from crossing the street at the Central Library’s main entrance I was eager to oblige. Word is that Chuck’s open letter on the topic has created a stir at Tapley Street and around City Hall. 

The 5 minutes I spent snapping pictures were entertaining, infuriating, and encouraging. Entertaining because I saw people scrambling between the chains along the desire path:

Infuriating because I feared for this older gentleman as he made the dangerous crossing:


And encouraging because, as I explained to people why I was taking pictures of them crossing the street to go to the library everyone agreed that the current situation was ridiculous and dangerous.

What I failed to notice until I passed by the library just yesterday however, is that the traffic itself is quite literally going out of its way to destroy the most prominent feature of the engineering profession’s failed attempt at a fix:


Can you see it? Automotive impacts are eating away the concrete and have eliminated entire segments of the safety rail. Imagine the inconvenience created if someone notices and these stairs are closed off to the general public while they await repair. I mean, if anyone ever used them it might create an inconvenience. Actually, since that stairwell provides the ONLY official pedestrian access to the lot, shouldn’t the entire lot be closed? You can’t have people entering and exiting the lot via the automobile entrance or down the embankment…”officially” I mean…since nearly 100% of visitors actually DO that already. But the city can’t admit that by just allowing this ridiculously expensive, unused, and now NOT TO CODE (is it?) stairwell to just sit there as is…can they?

Actually, the lady who was sitting on the concrete ledge waiting for her bus to arrive told me it had been like this for a long, long time. It does make for a nice place to sit and wait for the bus at least. Something to add to the list: broken clocks, blind squirrels, and ridiculously expensive over-designed staircases.