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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.

Of Blind Squirrels and Broken Clocks

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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.

MegaProject versus the North End

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We’re running, quite by accident, a nearly perfect test of the philosophy that the small project focused on marginally increasing value in a relatively undervalued neighborhood is better than a mega project designed to transform a place. It would appear to be a totally unfair fight between a project in the North End which repairs sidewalks, improves lighting, plants trees, and re-paves the street, and a nearly billion dollar hotel, entertainment, retail, and housing project in the South End.

The South End would appear to have all the advantages: It is connected to the downtown, it has retained a healthy core of businesses from its Italian heritage, and it connects to a number of healthy, and relatively wealthy, historic neighborhoods. The North End is separated from the downtown by a Le Corbusier inspired urban removal district and a massive highway interchange, whatever the North End’s previous ethnic heritage (French Canadian? Polish?) it is such a distant memory that I can’t recall what it is, nor do I see any remnants thereof, and the one huge employer in the neighborhood((Baystate Medical Center) is so monolithic and self contained that there is no tradition of leaving the campus to purchase even lunch from one of the many Caribbean restaurants along Main Street.

The North End does have a much more visible and lively public park than the South End, and both connect at about the same distance to at least somewhat comparable larger parks in Forest Park from the South End and Van Horn Park in the North End. Both are poor even by Springfield standards, both have a majority of Hispanic residents with the North End being less heterogeneous. The North End also carries with it a heavier burden of being perceived as dangerous. From my own childhood the North End and what used to be called “Winchester Square” were understood to be two nearly “no-go” zones for the White middle class. 

On its face the North End experiment has every disadvantage: no connection to the amenities of the downtown, ethnic isolation, physical isolation, endemic poverty, and is getting a relatively small investment. On the other hand there is very little to lose here. Property values are already low, there are some incredibly well maintained and well restored historic buildings, but there are also vacant and blighted buildings as well. At least one major employer in the neighborhood is moving operations to a different part of the city(PVTA), whether they will continue to own and maintain their property or retain it for some use I do not know. Near the southern terminus of the neighborhood there is already some investment going on, but there are also a half a dozen or more vacant lots along Main Street which haven’t been turned into parking lots.

The North End (aka Memorial Square)

Le Corbusier-ville and the viaduct:

Main Street in the North End:



If we see over the next 5-10 years further movement toward rehabilitating the vacant and blighted structures, and some infill development occupies the now vacant plots along Main Street then I think the city will have seen adequate return in terms of maintaining the infrastructure of this stretch of Main Street and its environs.
The South End is a much trickier proposition. Keep in mind that the South End got the new sidewalks, lighting, and amenities nearly 8 years ago, but a tornado ripped through it just a few weeks after the project’s completion and a number of highly productive commercial and residential buildings were destroyed. Apart from the MGM project I can only think of one building which was completely destroyed having been replaced; many severely damaged structures were repaired, but there are still a handful of vacant lots along Main Street which had contained significant buildings before June 1, 2011.

The South End:


MGM and Main Street in the South End:

One consequence of the combination of the damage from the tornado and the volatility created by the enormous MGM project is that a very high percentage of store fronts from Central Street to State Street remain vacant. It has been reported that landlords have raised rents in anticipation of an MGM boom, and it is clear that potential retailers and entrepreneurs have no desire to get out ahead of the curve. In this we can glimpse a very large potential downside to the project; instead of breathing life into the district, it could suck all the life out of it. The tens of thousands of square feet of retail contained within the project could soak up all the demand created by the project and then some, the developer’s desire to give the core of the development a local flavor could remove that same flavor from the surrounding streets. 

On the other hand the potential upside is enormous. If the resort complex as a whole transforms the perception of the city and the massive investment in policing the Main Street corridor 24/7 induces people into engaging with the center city as a whole the benefits could be immeasurable. A 15-20 minute “walk shed” with museums, entertainment venues, restaurants, hotels, historic architecture, a major transportation hub, and a variety of residential options is not combination to be found just anywhere in North America.

Only time will tell. I hope that both projects will prove successful of course, and as with most “experiments” in the social sciences double blinding is really impossible so we’ll never truly know if the city might have been better off with one particular strategy or with no strategy at all.

All Thinking No Doing Makes Stevie a Dull Boy

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Whenever the topic of social capital comes up I’ll say to my wife that Duncan Crary, a Troy, New York cheerleader, would know more people in the neighborhood after living here for 9 days than I would after 9 years; it’s just the nature of who he is and who I’m not. I was able to put a corollary to my Duncan Crary hypothesis to the test through a recent visit from Johnny Sanphillippo. We had never met but we had gotten to know one another through our work for Strong Towns. 

Johnny and I share a common interest in places which are under-appreciated, under-utilized, and, perhaps, misunderstood. We couldn’t be much different in our methodology, however, when it comes to how we go about our study. Johnny visits new places all the time, scouring the landscape in search of a combination of data, better understanding, and stunning visual representations of what he perceives. I live in my particular model of an under-appreciated, under-utilized, and misunderstood place and try to come to a better understanding mostly by sitting on my couch and thinking.

Johnny said he was looking forward to seeing Springfield through my eyes, but of course, I would be much better served by seeing it through his. I know that there is quite a bit I have a hard time seeing clearly, there are so many places here in my hometown which I still see as they were when I was a kid or as I want to see them or as others have convinced me they are. It would have been really eye opening, I think, had Johnny never heard of me, never read my blog, and yet had visited Springfield and written a piece on the state of my city. 

What he has written is masterful and does a magnificent job of describing my Springfield Strategy: “Live beyond your means within your means”, or perhaps (if you’ll pardon my English) “Live well by living wrong”. Beyond that, knowing what he likes to see I took him to two places, Gasoline Alley, and the Indian Orchard Mills, which I knew would give him glimpses of what he wanted to see.

But I have a confession to make (To you dear reader, not to Johnny, he already knows, I know): These are not really my places. Another friend, who has lived here less time than I’ve been blogging, had to remind me of the existence of Gasoline Alley. I had been there, and to the Indian Orchard Mills perhaps a handful of times in my life (they’ve been around for decades) before Johnny came to town, and seeing them with him made my greatest deficiencies both painfully obvious and horribly clear. I observe, but so does he. And then he barges in, takes pictures, asks questions, asks more questions, laughs and comments, sits and talks, stands and walks, says goodbye…and he’s off to the next place to do it all over again! 

To my credit I was inspired enough by Johnny to start up a conversation with a man who, as it turns out, had just finished running a workshop at his hydroponic farm on a part of the property which didn’t used to be part of the Alley, but was instead a retailer of used building materials; a place I did visit many times while refurbishing my house. I introduced him to Johnny and…the next thing I know we’re getting a personalized tour of his operation. Magic. Turns out he’ll be selling his produce every week at a farmers market just 10 minutes from my house. Good to know for weeks when our CSA or our backyard isn’t fulfilling our produce needs.

The whole experience made me vow to open up a bit more, to widen both my circle of interests, and my ways of knowing. Standing back and watching has its esoteric and antiseptic merits there can be no doubt, but to be “comprometido”, to engage more directly in the struggle can lead to even greater rewards. Partly due to being inspired, and partly as an offshoot of the reaching out I had done to prepare logistically to show Johnny around I had been reminded of an event in my old neighborhood; at the place where my wife and I held our wedding reception. There I saw Jack Wysocki, the hydroponics guy, for the second time in a week, I talked with a candidate for city council and he complimented me on a piece on my blog, and I walked down some streets that I hadn’t walked for decades. Streets that reminded me of what I love most about my city; Vietnamese old ladies watching kids play in the streets, two girls speaking Spanish haphazardly walking a dog while clearly gossiping about something, the back door to a pizza shop,open to let out hot air, revealing the chatter of the cooks. I crossed mid block, like I used to, and went into the Bing theater. 

The Bing, where I watched the world end more times than I can remember, once or twice in “sensurround”, and where my own life started fresh again with Elizabeth. I owe it to her to explore a little bit more some of the other parts of the city; the places Johnny Sanphillippo and I didn’t even get to like the North End, and places outside the city like Holyoke…or Chicopee. I’m not even sure I know how to get to Chicopee. We’ve never explored West Springfield or Westfield. This summer we hope to go back to Europe again, but maybe in the interim we should get to know where we live just a little bit better.


Thanks, Johnny!

The Dog Whistle

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When it comes to the topics significant to Rational Urbanism my favorite minds are those of James Howard Kunstler, Chuck Marohn, John Michael Greer, Andrés Duany, Leon Krier, and Chris Martenson. When any two of them get together for a conversation I’m hopeful that they’ll break some new ground. In the latest tete a tete among my six horsemen of the apocalypse Chris Martenson discussed a combination of the basics of the Crash Course and his new book Prosper with Chuck Marohn. 

  

The interview started swinging through all of the various elements of Chris Martenson’s ideology, and I was not only on board, but I could point to areas of my life I had transformed in just the ways Prosper and the Crash Course recommended. I was proud that most of these transformations were the results of decisions I had made and understandings I had come to long before I had ever heard of Mr Martenson. (There’s nothing like the anxiety of influence!) 

One of the reasons, from a psychological perspective, I find it so important to point to some level of independence from the ideology of the Crash Course is that I know where we differ, and I know where the Crash Course doesn’t lead; and that is to repopulating underutilized urban settings. Predictably, in the 33rd minute of the Strong Towns podcast Chris responds to a question about the importance of place by referencing a video he posted on the Peak Prosperity website of young men in Oakland firing guns into the air and of police fleeing the incident in fear. What he extrapolates from this is that “some places”, too risky to live in now, are only going to get worse, and that he would recommend moving away from them. 

Scale matters, and Springfield, Massachusetts is not Oakland, California. Having said that, I don’t want to besmirch Oakland either; I have no idea if neighborhoods in Oakland fall into my Rational Urbanism critique of exaggerated societal fear vis a vis American cities. To anyone in western Massachusetts (where Chris Martenson lives by the way) however, the local analog of Oakland is Springfield. 

  
 
My wife was coming to bed late the other night and was witness to an actual arrest just outside our front door. In contrast to whatever anarchic chaos Mr Martenson sees in Oakland, here the interactions between the police and the individuals being arrested were matter of fact, respectful, and so quiet that they failed to awaken me though I was sleeping just 20 feet away.  That really isn’t in any way a direct response the idea that most of urban America is only worthy of abandonment, it’s just an observation. But Mr Martenson’s claim that places like Oakland will only get more dangerous after an economic crash is, I think, much more suspect than he knows. He goes out of his way to say that this claim isn’t really a prediction or a trend extrapolation, but rather an observation, by which he clearly means that it is an obvious irrefutable fact.

But it is a prediction, (here’s my version of his prediction) and it’s probably wrong.

You see, Oakland, and in some ways parts of Springfield are already living in the post apocalypse. Chris is saying, “if this is how people behave during the good times, imagine how they’ll respond in hard times”. Perhaps, but there is an enormous assumption imbedded in that idea. It is up in the little Happy Valley that he inhabits where we have no idea how people will respond to hard times. My neighborhood has been living hand to mouth, scraping by on what could be salvaged, for more than a generation. Going without food for a few days, looking for odd jobs to get by, crashing on a friend’s couch for a few months are par for the course. Now. 

The “urban violence” Mr Martenson references stems from an irrational failed drug policy. Change that and you change the culture almost over night. On the other hand I can foresee the trigger fingers of the Happy Valley preppers getting just a little twitchy as their stockpiles dwindle and the gas tanks on their SUVs deplete. We’ve had crises here in my neighborhood: a tornado, a huge natural gas explosion. There was no looting, there was no chaos. Police were out in force immediately, ambulances were lined up in front of my house waiting for the flood of wounded which never came. Emergency shelters were opened but most people found shelter in the homes of friends and family. 

What happens here when gas prices go to $10 a gallon? We can all walk everywhere we need to go. What about food? Unless Chris Martenson’s predicted crisis comes just at harvest time his neighbors are not only going to be dealing with the exact same shortages as everyone else but the difference will be that my neighbors and I are sitting on all of the region’s primary infrastructure for transportation, water, power, health care, security, fire protection…I have a feeling our minimal needs will be met, and most people here aren’t used to having anything more than their most minimal needs met anyway. 

Look, I agree with Chris Martenson on so many things, first on defining the primary problem as being a belief in infinite growth on a finite planet, followed up with what many of the rational responses to that erroneous cultural belief should be: Get yourself in good physical, and economic condition; prepare yourself to live on much less and in ways that require much less in the way of energy; make yourself as resilient as you can. But I’m not deluded. I know that most of my neighbors aren’t aware of just how wedded to infinite growth our current economic system is. I know that they aren’t preparing for an impending status quo changing economic downturn. But they were never expecting to see the benefits of that fantasy anyway.

By contrast his neighbors, not the ones that come to his retreats and read his blog but the ones who don’t, not only have no idea about the significance of exponential growth or the “rule of 72”, but are completely bought in to the myths he rails against. They’re not growing food on their 2.3 acres and they have no idea how to survive without making the 60 mile daily round trip to work and the 24 mile round trip to the grocery store and heating their 5,000 sq ft McMansion with the heating oil that gets delivered by truck. Yes, those neighbors have never exhibited any bad behaviors but, then again, they’ve never had any reason to. 

I don’t think either one of us has a monopoly on security. The truth is neither one of us knows exactly how impending changes to industrial civilization will play out on the micro scale, and maybe he knows that too, but to write off moving to pretty much any urban place with a large minority population, which the Oakland reference was clearly intended to be a dog whistle for, is both ridiculous and irresponsible. If a successful response to what is sure to come is possible it will involve the utilization of all of our preexisting resources, from man-made infrastructure to natural resources, as responsible stewards. If you think you have what it takes to move to the hinterland and become a self reliant or nearly self reliant farmer then by all means do so. If, however, you are less able or less desirous of that circumstance then finding a place well suited to doing more with less in an urban environment isn’t an unenlightened way to go.

America Needs You, Ian Rasmussen

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(Photos are of potential mixed use buildings one block from my {potentially} mixed use building)

  

Ian Rasmussen is not the enemy, but he is the target; the target audience for Rational Urbanism. Here’s a guy, a married guy, who loves city living, he loves the train, he loves great architecture, and the urban lifestyle, he’s on the board of Strongtowns, for goodness sake…he just needs to find that special place. New York City is out for financial reasons, but he’s looking for a place with a commute, by train, of under 40 minutes to Manhattan in a walkable/bike-able environment. 
  

I was especially excited about Housing Week at Strongtowns not least because I knew a piece of mine about how concentrated poverty looks was going to appear on Thursday and I love it when I have such a great opportunity to reach a wider audience. I listened to every podcast last week, but I listened to Ian’s at least twice. It was great. Keep in mind that an earlier podcast with Ian had inspired my wife and me to use Amazon Prime and Peapod which enabled us to get rid of our second car, a pickup, which we gave to a local, organic farmer, which was the start of our investing in that farm owned by a former student of mine. Now, with my daughter and her husband in the market for a new place (Oh, update, Taylor took the job at the “urban medical center”) and my daughter enamored of the idea of doing something live/worky with her art; Ian to the rescue once again: no dry cleaners, and beware the financing!

  

Then came the amazing, revelatory podcast with Daniel Kay Hertz. I’ve only been blogging for four years, but I’ve been amateur urbanist-ing for going on thirty and it’s rare that something completely new comes to my attention. Such was the case with Chuck Marohn, Strongtowns, and the math behind the suburban Ponzi scheme, and such is the case with Daniel Hertz’s mention of Robert Sampson and his studies surrounding neighborhood stigma. As lived experience I knew that, in the case of my own hometown, the biggest obstacle to revitalization we face is the negative perception people have about us, that wasn’t new; half of the essays on my blog are dedicated to fighting it. What was new to me was that a sociologist working at Harvard had published studies confirming its importance.

  

I listened to that pod three times and got an email from another great urbanist, Seth Zeren, pointing me to an essay by Daniel Hertz on the topic of neighborhood stigma. And then it hit me. As illustrative of the difficulties of obtaining financing for a mixed use dwelling as Ian’s podcast had been, right from the off he had completely rejected the idea of actually helping to make a Strong Town; he was willing to move to a Town which was Strong already, sure, but Dobbs Ferry didn’t need him and Port Washington doesn’t need him. That mixed use building on Main Street in that overwhelmingly rich, overwhelmingly white community will continue to be used, and will continue to be lived in, and moving into a single family home in a community where median family incomes hover in the six figures and homes regularly sell for over a million dollars is hardly the stuff of transformation. 

  

When he added the caveat that his new neighborhood needed to have, ahem, “good schools”, he made his parameters clear: wealth. Anyone who studies schools and outcomes knows that outcomes are controlled, in the statistical sense, by parental income. People use “good school” and “bad school” colloquially to mean either a school with high test scores and low drop out rates on the one hand, or low test scores and high drop out rates on the other, but serious consideration of educational quality requires an understanding of the underlying demographics and how a given school or school system “over performs” or “under performs” relative to those demographics. Anyplace with, ahem, “good schools” already has rich people. If it’s walkable as well you’re pretty much already there.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t at all hypocritical. Ian wants to live in a walkable environment, well served by transit, with good bones, fine architecture, and charm. Those are all qualities any Strong Town should aspire to, and which too few communities possess. He didn’t move to an auto-centric stroad-heavy suburb or exurb, but as steeped as he is in Strongtowns culture I wonder if he ever considered Yonkers, or White Plains, or New Rochelle? Imagine New Haven, or Bridgeport with an Ian Rasmussen and family in its quiver! Those are places ripe for the transformation Strongtowns wants to create, and with mixed use real estate, I have a feeling, Ian could manage to buy without too much worry about financing.

How much hope is there when, quite literally our best and brightest, our best and brightest with a bullet, and with a love of urbanism, and on the board of directors of Strongtowns is considering a transformative move and the very first thing he does is reject the idea of being part of the transformation of America’s struggling legacy cities?

There are perhaps four currents of Strongtowns: The first, and easiest, is keeping the few places in this country which are already strong, strong; next is making sure that any new places that are built conform to Strongtowns’ principles; third, and least promising, is taking portions of the car-centered American automobile slum and making them sustainable; and finally, the real need, the real hope, and, according to no less experts than Ian Rasmussen and Chuck Marohn, the area where the greatest transformation can be achieved, the reactivation of America’s forgotten traditional core cities and towns. And if Ian Rasmussen won’t do it, who will?

Right in Your Own Backyard

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A prophet is not without honor, except in his own hometown? Perhaps, but sometimes a hometown is not without honor, except in the eyes of locals. In listening to a recent interview of Chuck Marohn with, as it turns out, a fairly local interviewer I was delighted to hear that Chuck, in describing the different challenges facing communities in the United States, was consistently placing Springfield in the position of being just the type of place that could be, in his words, “weeded, and watered” into becoming a truly “strong town”. This he compared with cities in California which would require a total reconfiguration and transformation.

In contrast the interviewer, who lives only a few miles away, did not ask even the briefest follow up question about what is by far the largest city in his own region. Not once. Before I delve too deeply into this I want to say that, although I had never before heard of Ken Rose I am deeply impressed with the depth and breadth of his interests as represented by the quality and quantity of interviews he has undertaken. The archives of the Ken Rose show are immense and I have listened to all or part of 4 other interviews since listening to his most recent conversation with Chuck Marohn. That said, I can’t imagine that an interviewer in Amherst, even a recent arrival, doesn’t have some knowledge of Springfield. He says that he has never been to the city, but Amherst does sit within the sphere of influence of Springfield. Local television, radio, and print media, cultural institutions, educational institutions, and commercial entities overlap one another between Springfield and Amherst.

At one point in the interview Duluth, Minnesota is mentioned. In a lot of ways Duluth is a Springfield of the western Great Lakes. It is a city which, though still significant, has declined in the last 50 years. As a matter of fact Duluth has lost 3 times the percentage of population that Springfield has since its peak. It seems to have a spectacular history which one can still find in its architecture, much like Springfield. On the topic of Duluth, the declining rust belt city thousands of miles away, the interviewer waxes poetic and claims to feel a fondness though, it seems, he has visited it only once: It is so much harder to love “the problem child” in your own neighborhood. He breaks your windows, tortures your cat, tips your trash barrels over. The troubled kid a few blocks over has the gleam in his eye, the energetic footfall of a person on a mission, and the sass of an independently minded person…and he’s going to tip over someone else’s trash cans.

As the interview progresses Chuck (for whom, yes, Springfield is the distant problem child) time and time again references the City of Homes. He points to it as an interesting place, a special place, a place at one extreme of the continuum of cities that will need to adjust to a new fiscal and energy reality. It is a city with few hipsters, like many a mid size post-industrial northern city, but with a rump of viable, practical hipster associated enterprises. The difference? These places sell cappuccino and espresso for $3 a cup, in a porcelain mug no less, a cannoli for $1.75, and a meatball grinder for $5. It’s affordable.

When he talks about Puerto Ricans creating viable economies in places abandoned by others he is referencing Springfield’s North End. The streetscape is rugged but people oriented. 1-5 story buildings, all with consistently appropriate ground floor uses, “second story-ness”, mixed uses and most importantly, a neighborhood which exists to provide for the needs of the residents of that neighborhood. It’s easy to miss it. Take a trip on street view from Memorial Square down Main Street until you reach the freeway underpass. There are some missing teeth, a few buildings which display too much automobile orientation for my liking, and some tell tale signs of extreme poverty, but that just makes the street’s inherent vibrancy that much more impressive.

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It’s good to get a pair of fresh eyes on your town. It helps you see it anew. But if you’ve ever wondered and marveled at the qualities of the under-appreciated city you visited on business last April…perhaps there’s something similar going on right in your back yard.

Ideas, Process, and Doing

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As daily life goes, things have been hectic and heavy around here for the past two weeks. Getting ready for the holidays and for a visit by the Strong Towns team kept the household buzzing, and events in the neighborhood and around the nation have kept us talking about the most serious of issues most of the time. I want to take some time out, though, and thank Chuck Marohn and Jim Kumon for taking the time to come to Springfield and to share their insight and their enthusiasm with us.

Putting this whole thing together started with Jim, so I’ll start with him. Jim is knowledgeable. I mean knowledgeable to the point of intuiting what you are going to ask before you ask and having an insightful answer at the ready. As an example, when my daughters came to live with me post divorce and I needed to look for a larger living space I looked in 4 of the city’s 17 different neighborhoods. Without me ever bringing that up, Jim pointed to a map of the city and said “the problem going forward is that most of these neighborhoods are cut off from the downtown…except for this area and this right up here” and he had just pointed to everyplace I had considered in my home search.

Jim laughs a lot. He enjoys urbanism so much that the tiniest little thing will start him cackling (and it is sort of a cackle): oriel windows in an alleyway, an exposed brick wall, a new Englander complaining about stroad problems, inexpensive pastries. He never tires of talking about cities. Never. I met my match. One last thing, Jim takes every bit of new data and uses it to reevaluate its impact on his previous conclusions. He is both nimble and courageous in that sense.

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Charles Marohn is a different sort of character. I made the mistake of mentioning that the Apremont Triangle (The transformation of which will end up becoming the first visible manifestation of the Curbside Chat in Springfield) was named in honor of a Springfield regiment’s participation in the eponymous battle during World War I. Chuck wanted details. But I had just given him all of the details I knew. Luckily I had invited my brother to the post chat get together at Theodore’s and they were able to spend half the night discussing the Great War. Then, first thing the next morning Chuck is coming upstairs bright and early because he wants to get a picture with my stepdaughter LuLu for his little girls at home. He talks with LuLu for the better part of an hour about anything and everything an 8 year old can talk about. He’s thrilled that LuLu’s school is on Mulberry Street…the Mulberry Street. When I interrupt with grownup stuff Chuck is quick to get the conversation back toward LuLu, and recess, and snow days.

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Jay Minkarah of Develop Springfield, as Jim Kumon puts it, “gets it”. Watching and listening to the interactions of these three, Jim, Jay, and Chuck, as they walked around the city from the downtown to the South End and back was a great experience. I am an amateur urbanist. As I have so often made clear, I am not a process guy. In the words of Jorge Luis Borges, the mechanism is of no importance to me, but listening to three people who understand how to get things done was amazing. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what should be. With these three there are ideas for how to do it.

The next step, the most important one of course, is the doing. I can’t wait to learn how to be one of those “doers”. I have a feeling, along with Ben and Paige from Develop Springfield, Wilfredo López Jr. and Katie Stebbins will help me get out of my comfort zone. See you at the Apremont Triangle?

The Springfield Curbside Chat

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With the Curbside Chat coming to Springfield on December 2nd it seems like an appropriate time for me to express just how the Strong Towns message and the Rational Urbanism message overlap, if indeed they do. I can’t remember if it was a blog post, or a podcast, or a reference to Chuck Marohn in some article or another, but somehow, in the summer of 2012 I think it was, I found Strong Towns. Chuck was selling a whole boat-load I’ve ideas which I had already bought into, but for totally different reasons.

I knew that traditional cities like Springfield could never compete successfully with suburbs using automobile oriented development, but intuitively I thought that was in part because sprawl development was so obviously cheap by comparison and they just did it better because it was their thing. In my mind older cities needed to be the best cities they could be and then they would attract a limited number of cognoscenti who appreciated their unquantifiable, ephemeral, esoteric quality.

Strong Towns turned that on its head. Communities wedded to horizontal development had traded short term gains for long turn liabilities and were not and are not economically viable. The numbers say that every big box store, every power center, every agglomeration of cul de sacs, lacks the ability to pay back in taxes what it costs to sustain its infrastructure. It turns out automobile oriented development wasn’t the cause of America’s late twentieth century economic hegemony, but rather the latter provided the excess which allowed the former to appear sustainable for a time. We were rich enough to be very stupid for a time, and then we had what appeared to be the credit worthiness to obtain the credit necessary to perpetuate it…and now the experiment is reaching its end.

Suburbia is going down. It’s like a Titanic that makes its own icebergs: its never a good time to board her.

And this is where Rational Urbanism comes in. For the most part the rational in Rational Urbanism focuses on the fears people have about struggling cities in America which are unfounded, but in this case it also refers affirmatively to a way of life which has proven itself over literally thousands of years. While most of the time I see Chuck talking to people in places that have already gone down the stroad to sprawl about how to find their way back to viability, the Strong Towns message to places like Springfield is to continue being who you’ve always been only more so and with a more solid understanding of why what worked in the past is actually still working in the present if you look at the data.

I’ve always thought of it this way, most of the time Chuck Marohn is explaining to people how to make the place they live a place that works, my message has always been the corollary to that: America still has quite a few underutilized places that were built to work, and you really can still live in one of them.