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Chicfieldyoke

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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.

Micronutrient Pornography

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

The Sustainability of Living Arrangements

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Last week, Chuck Marohn crossed a line. It’s one thing to tell people that some coffee shops, dress boutiques, and banks need to be arranged differently, it is quite another to suggest that actual individuals may need to live differently as well. Chuck runs headlong into the concept that, for most people, a “solution” to a problem is defined as a thing someone else can do to fix the problem. In comment after comment on his essay in the American Conservative people express their preference for suburban living all the while ignoring almost every point made in the piece. In some cases conservatives complain that any sort of urban living arrangement will empower liberals because cities require functioning governments to exist, in others they completely ignore the facts about the funding of their own suburban infrastructure. Not wanting a thing to be true does not make it false.

The commercial and retail side of the Strongtowns message is going gangbusters, as well it should. It is one thing, however, to point to Taco John’s and an old run-down strip of real estate in a small town and say “put the taco stand here and you won’t have to raise taxes as much”, but it is quite another when you imply that millions of Americans are living beyond their means in terms of the costs their living arrangements make on infrastructure. Thems fightin’ words!

Look at the evidence though.

Take a truly mixed urban neighborhood, like the one pictured here, with some detached, some semi-detached, and some (“…stacked like pancakes!”) apartment style residences.

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How many linear feet of sidewalk, and water and sewer infrastructure do they each require? How much in the way of asphalt? What about power lines, gas lines, cable, and telephone?

Look at this suburban neighborhood at the same scale:

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Ask the same questions.

In the first people can choose to have greater or lesser amounts of living space, but it’s a fairly straightforward thing to divvy up the cost to each resident. In the latter however, the disconnect between the overall cost to the system and the value of the living space is apparent. Even more clear is just how much more infrastructure each residence requires…to the point that this “much wealthier community” can’t afford sidewalks.

Suburbia is a Ponzi scheme. I will grant that it is much easier for me to see it because I never liked it anyway. That Chuck Marohn, a guy who clearly preferred suburbia, (at least until he realized it was a Ponzi scheme) is the one who saw through the façade of prosperity in “them thar cul-de-sacs” is a credit to his ability to look at the evidence and follow it wherever it leads. In the end his genius reminds me of that of Charles Darwin. In retrospect their revelations are easy to understand and fairly self-evident. Both suggest that certain notions that people have entertained to prop up their world views are false. Both obligate people to reject ideas they would prefer to hold on to for other reasons. In both cases the revealers of truth felt great sympathy for the institutions their understanding would undermine.

As consolation I would tell Chuck that I believe, though it is just a belief, that many people will enjoy living in a reality-based world, where the fanciful notion of the sustainability of infinite horizontal growth is a thing of the past. (Perhaps even many more people than believe that they could live without it.) Once the fantasy is done away with it will become clear that the challenge is to make these more economically sustainable places enjoyable places to live. Perhaps, in the long run, we will be glad to have escaped suburbia and we will wonder what we ever saw in it in the first place.

Brand Suburb

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“The suburbs” are a brand. It is a brand which so dominates market share that for most families the only question is the type of suburb to opt for. Much like the illusion of choice in our political discourse, the expression of difference is highly encouraged, but only within severely limited boundaries. In most regions of the United States for most of the middle class it’s Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, Regular Coke, Sprite, Dasani…you can take your pick…but you’re buying a Coca Cola product.

Convincing people to rethink auto-centeredness is akin to doing the same with patriotism or religion. The concepts are nearly identical in that the place where you are raised is so key to your mindset. It’s fairly obvious that the most patriotic of Americans would have been patriotic Italians or Danes had they been raised in Italy or Denmark, and the most devout Christians, devout Muslims had they been raised in Islam. So too, a suburbanite in the U.S. would believe that the traditional way of raising a family in Spain or Japan was “right” had they been brought up in that culture. If one has grown up in post war America, raising a family in a detached single family home in a community divided by the norms of Euclidean zoning practices is what one does if one is able to do so.

The difference between this “American Way of Life” and other traditional ways of life is that the former is untried and untested over the long term. It has thrived for a brief period, propelled by an increase in the extraction of fossilized energy at a pace which will be impossible to maintain. As absolutely true and undeniable as the previous sentence is, for most American adults it is all they have ever known, and for many it is all that they have ever seen. Convincing Americans that a people centered place, a walkable place, perhaps even an urban place would be a better place to live and perhaps, to raise a family would first require that something, in the words of Daniel Dennett, “Break the Spell”.

For me it was living in Spain, spending years living in six different Spanish cities and visiting dozens more and seeing with my own eyes how much happier, and how much more autonomous, young people were there. Very few of my American colleagues would notice it however. Most of them were from west of the Mississippi and could only bemoan the lack of jet-skis, pick up trucks, and In-n-out Burgers, and the delay in the arrival of the newest American film or song. I’m sure that the time I had spent in Springfield’s traditional, if declining, downtown prepared me to understand Spain in ways my friends from suburban California and Utah were unable to do.

I read what is being written now by parents bemoaning something different, something they see as having been lost in America: childhood. Children’s lives are too scheduled they say, with too much time spent strapped in a carseat being chauffeured from place to place. What about free play? What about going to the playground and making new friends? Auto centeredness has atomized us so thoroughly that everyplace which is not our home or our yard is enemy territory: “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists”.

(This attitude is not altogether irrational as the suburbs are incredibly dangerous for young people in particular. Traffic deaths and suicide take more children than any other causes. They are both negatively correlated to density. Taking your child on, or forcing your teen to make, more trips, more often, over longer distances, at greater speed in an automobile puts them at greater risk. Living in isolation puts them at greater risk.)

A place where you still see hordes of unaccompanied children walking the sidewalks, riding their scooters, riding their bikes, shopping at the corner store, playing on playgrounds, and hanging out with their friends is the city. The kids doing this, in my town at least, are mostly black or Hispanic, and relatively poor. Their parents are not part of the culture which now demands helicopter parenting, although when they do intersect with that culture the minority parent is often judged to be lesser. Much like young black girls and body image, many urban parents are sufficiently isolated from the broader culture that they remain untouched by its detrimental effects. In cities “Free Range Parenting” isn’t a movement, it’s…parenting.

But the city has absolutely no marketing. At least no affirmative marketing. If I can be forgiven for stretching my original metaphor just a bit; city living is tap water. In spite of the fact that, in some places, it is of demonstrably higher quality than some bottled waters, and is much less expensive, is more readily available, and does less damage to the environment, tap water doesn’t have much of a corporate machine to drive it. Suburban sprawl, like bottled water, has built for itself a constituency. James Howard Kunstler would list home builders, road builders, bankers, and of course, the millions of Americans who are convinced that a suburb of some sort is the only decent place to raise a family, as cheer leaders for sprawl.

What is it that would make suburbanites consider moving to the city? They would have to see things with fresh eyes. Instead of seeing the green lawn, the driveway, and the white picket fence and thinking “this is the place”, they would have to start from a zero base and analyze exactly how a place works for children, and for adults, in terms of autonomy and engagement in the living of life. If they look carefully they’ll see that it’s where traditional America, perhaps the real America, still exists, especially for young people, if, right now, somewhat more impoverished and darkly complected.