Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving


Whenever I make a pie, a loaf of bread, or pick a home grown tomato I often think about the scale of production required to supply a single grocery store, let alone dozens, hundreds, or thousands.  How many plants, how many bakers, pickers, etc. are required is mind boggling, let along the logistics and supply chain that gets that food into the store.

This CNN story,"See what farm workers do to get your favorite holiday meals on the table," shows how hard and fast farm workers work cultivating crops.

2.  In the face of the pandemic, the number of people going hungry is growing because they can't afford to buy food.  There have been many articles about food banks, the long lines, etc. ("'No end in sight': hunger surges in America amid a spiraling pandemic," Guardian).

-- Feeding America is the national association for food banks

3.  The Stop is a "food bank" in Toronto that has repositioned around being a community food center, rooted in the food bank, but with a broader focus on food, civic engagement, and community.

-- "Food activist Nick Saul on why we’re ripe for a revolution," Toronto Star
-- "Nick Saul: The man who built the foodie bank," Star

Nick Saul, the leader of that repositioning wrote an excellent book about it, The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement, and has since left the organization to start an organization, Community Food Centres Canada, working with other communities on creating or repositioning their food bank programs.

-- "Rethinking the food bank: It’s no longer just about handing out food to the hungry," Star

4.  I don't think the approach has caught on in the US, although one example seems to be the Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City.  A number of low income support programs do include food access as part of their programming, but without a civic engagement focus.

Although separately there are various community food center like initiatives which are quite interesting.  Some focus on food as entrepreneurship, others on children, cooking, health, etc., such as:

-- The Ecology Center, San Juan Capistrano, California
-- 18 Reasons community cooking school, San Francisco (a spin off from the for profit Bi Rite Market)
-- Forge City Works, Hartford, Connecticut
-- La Cocina," San Francisco, a food focused entrepreneurship development program for immigrants
-- Together We Bake, Alexandria, Virginia
-- Flint Kids East Fresh Foods and Flint Kids Cook, Flint (Michigan) Cultural Center Academy ("COOKING CLASSES IN MICHIGAN ARE CHANGING KIDS LIVES," ChopChop Family)
-- Tomato Independence Project, Treasure Valley/Boise ("TREASURE VALLEY’S TOMATO INDEPENDENCE PROJECT," UC Food Observer)
-- ChopChop Family, nutrition magazines for children and families
-- Food Share (Toronto)
-- "How a strip of warehouses became a community hub," Toronto Globe & Mail
--
Afri Can Food Basket, Toronto ("How an activist cultivates teenagers," Toronto Globe & Mail)
-- Food Forest, Capital City Public Charter School, DC ("For D.C. students, lessons in growth, of the garden variety," Washington Post)
-- community orchards and food gleaning programs
-- many supermarket chains are integrating cooking schools into their stores, there are standalone cooking training programs like The Civic Kitchen in San Francisco, some public markets have demonstration kitchens, etc.

You also have the Master Gardener program within Agricultural extension programs, which is another model.

In the Eastern Market plan document I aim to finish within the next couple months, a main thrust is repositioning public markets in the 21st century as community centers for food.

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Tuesday, November 24, 2020

What should a domestic Marshall Plan/21st Century New Deal look like?

A number of Midwestern mayors wrote an op-ed published in the Washington Post, "Eight mayors: We need a Marshall Plan for Middle America," about the need for an economic revitalization program for their section of the Midwest, the Ohio River Valley.  

(After WWII, the Marshall Plan was launched as an economic revitalization program for the war torn nations of Europe.)

Making the point that the region is forecasted to lose 100,000 jobs in response to the decline of the fossil fuel industry--oil was first discovered in the US in Pennsylvania, and the region is a leading producer of coal and oil and natural gas by fracking.

From the article: 
According to our research, taking advantage of our community assets, geographic positioning and the strengths of our regional markets can help create over 400,000 jobs across the region by investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency upgrades to buildings, energy infrastructure and transportation assets.

Then again, there is a similar piece from 2009, by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, but more broadly focused on the Midwest.   

But as far as cities go, the issues of Midwestern cities like Youngstown or Pittsburgh aren't different from those of Baltimore or St. Louis, Stockton, California or Tacoma, Washington. 

In short, a domestic Marshall Plan/New Deal needs to be applied nationwide.

To me, the much derided "Green New Deal" should be one leg of such a program ("What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained," New York Times).  From the article: 

Introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, the proposal calls on the federal government to wean the United States from fossil fuels and curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions across the economy. It also aims to guarantee new high-paying jobs in clean energy industries.

Hoover Dam, Nevada, constructed between 1931 and 1936.

Speaking of the New Deal, it's a much better example and perhaps more relatable than the Marshall Plan, because it was a US-centric program.

Certainly New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, WPA, PWA, the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification initiatives--not just creating the ability to deliver electricity to individual homes and businesses, but the building of hydroelectric facilities in the west like Hoover Dam and the creation of the Bonneville Power Authority demonstrate that the nation has been able to act in the face of great need.

Note that the categories below are not mutually exclusive. 

Reorganizing the federal government's approach to both cities and rural areas.  After the Obama election in 2008, I wrote about reorganizing HUD and related programs, recommending the transformation of the agency into a Department of Cities and Regions as a better way to focus on the needs of cities, and about reorganizing USDA and related agencies in a similar fashion as a better way to focus on rural needs beyond "growing more food."

-- "Metropolitan Revolution (book review)," 2013
-- "Resurging cities, resurging metros, the impoverished and the Metropolitan Revolution," 2013

Poverty, the precariat, neoliberalism and globalization. Neoliberalism--the idea that the market is always more successful than government action--might have been an okay paradigm if it hadn't been accompanied by a reduction in government supports simultaneous with an increase in economic and social vulnerability.   

Instead of developing new supports in order to help people succeed in a neoliberal economic environment marked by Social Darwinism--survival of the fittest, we reduced the availability overall, and didn't develop new approaches to match different and more difficult circumstances ("The dangers of a 'winner take all' economy," Maize Magazine).

In short, when people needed more help, we provided less.

Globalization has limited intra-national labor market protections, pushing down the value of labor in high wage countries like the US reset towards the prevailing wage in low cost countries--India, China, Mexico, etc.

Manufacturers either moved their operations overseas, to lower cost or non union areas within a nation,  and/or have significantly reduced wages, like how Caterpillar bought a locomotive manufacturing company from GM, closed the higher wage Canadian plant, relocated all production to a plant in Illinois, reduced wages across the board, and later threatened to relocate the plant to a Southern non union state ("Electro Motive Diesel considering leaving La Grange facility," West Cook News).  Boeing's been doing the same thing, moving production from high wage Metropolitan Seattle to nonunion states in the south and midwest ("Boeing to move 787 production to South Carolina in 2021," Reuters).

Outsourcing is a related phenomenon.  Companies reduced the number of direct jobs by contracting out various functions and the labor necessary to perform those functions.

Replacing labor with capital.  Plus replacing workers with capital--machines, equipment, computers, software applications, etc.--also reduces employment more generally and depending on the business sector, can reduce wage income for many, while improving outcomes for some.

For example, microcomputers have eliminated secretaries, spreadsheet software has eliminated bookkeepers and accountants, and a typical automobile manufacturing plant has one quarter of the number of employees compared to 1970.

It bugs me to no end when Republicans lambaste cities and Democrats for failure, when those failures have been produced by economic dislocation having zero to do with the decisions of locally elected officials.  (Book review, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, New York Times, 1996).

What to do?  To assist labor in such conditions, we should have done two things.  First, create a national health care system independent of employment.  Second, invest in education at all levels.  Not just traditional "book learning" but trades too (our plumber in DC makes as much money as good lawyers).  Retraining.  Self-improvement, etc.  All types.  And less expensive access to education too.  I don't know if that should mean "free."  (More about "free" education in another proposal.)

Components of a New New Deal/Domestic Marshall Plan

1.  Real national health care and a public health system.  The pandemic is further proof that the way we organize and deliver health care is flawed.  Tying health care to employment fails in recessions, when unemployment rises catastrophically.  

It's even worse when government makes decisions based on ideology and politics rather than on science, evidence, and need ("Blaming the victim vs. blaming the system: Federal officials blame pandemic deaths on poor health practices of individuals").

2.  Responding to urban poverty.  I've written a bunch about equity planning, social urbanism, and new and integrated approaches to addressing multi-generational poverty in cities.  

Social urbanism is an approach, pioneered in Medellin, Colombia that invests in community infrastructure such as libraries, schools, parks, and transportation access as a way to (re)build social inclusion, public safety, and economic opportunity.


Co-location of programs and services should be a priority.

Slide from a presentation by David Barth and Carlos Perez.

3.  Investing in rural social infrastructure.  It happens that the field of community development is in part derived from the rural economic development function of agricultural extension programming ("Community development in America: A history," Sociological Practice).  I recognized in college that the work in community development is equally applicable to either rural and urban settings in most cases.

-- Downtown and Business District Market Analysis, University of Wisconsin Extension

Social "urbanism" isn't about urbanism so much as it is about investing in what sociologist Eric Klinenberg, in Palaces for the People, calls "social infrastructure," which are civic institutions like schools, libraries, parks, and other assets, complemented by programming.  This approach to community investment and reinvestment is equally relevant to rural areas.  

Although too often attitudes in rural areas, focused on "individualism" and fatalism when it comes to community and collective action can make this quite difficult ("In the land of self-defeat," New York Times).

4.  Urban and rural economic development.  Needs to focus on  entrepreneurship and business development, harvesting existing knowledge and material resources and transportation systems.  

A key element is leveragng higher education.  Spokane and Greensboro, North Carolina are great examples of how to do this ("Better leveraging higher education institutions in cities and counties: Greensboro; Spokane; Mesa; Phoenix; Montgomery County, Maryland; Washington, DC," 2016).

But it's not just any kind of education institution that has economic development potential ("Can a coal town reinvent itself?," New York Times, "Lessons from the CNN story on Allentown, Pennsylvania," 2020).  They have to be focused on productive outputs--engineering and technical colleges, scientific research, business development, etc.

And different forms of business including cooperatives and other forms of business organization that focus on keeping revenues and profits circulating locally.

For example, cooperative business ventures are a way to keep retail operating ("Economic development for small towns needs to include the development of cooperative stores," 2014; "The need for a new rural community cooperative movement," 2017) as populations shrink or in communities that have been abandoned by chain retail.

The multi-business Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland and the Push Buffalo and Green Worker Cooperatives in the Bronx energy conservation business cooperative are examples of business forms where the workers are owners.   The Mondragon Corporation group of over 250 worker cooperatives in the Basque Country of Spain is Spain's 10th largest corporation.  The National Co-operative Bank helps to fund cooperative enterprises.

But there needs to be a recognition that smaller communities in rural areas can be harder to help when it comes to economic development in the face of a more integrated world economy ("Small cities struggle," 2017).  

The Massachusetts approach to revitalizing "gateway cities," the once booming smaller cities across the state that had once been thriving manufacturing and business centers, which declined as industry consolidated and moved away, needs to be further developed and applied more widely. 

And there needs to be a change in business recruiting, which is often a race to the bottom in terms of tax incentives and competition between states and cities to land firms ("Tax incentives to attract businesses: Wisconsin's Foxconn debacle," 2020).  

5.  Investment in "Infrastructure."  The Trump Administration said it wanted to build infrastructure, although mostly it proposed loans, the sale of existing assets, and focusing on infrastructure with positive revenue streams ("Trump Administration Infrastructure Program Priority List," 2017). 

But even if the Trump Administration were serious (" How 'Infrastructure Week' Became a Long-Running Joke," New York Times), the anti-government, anti-investment philosophy of the Republican Party made such a program a long shot, because they completely uninterested in the government being a player in infrastructure investment..

But infrastructure shouldn't be seen as either a Republican or Democratic issue.  It just is.  And it's fundamental and foundational for economic success and growth.

While Oklahoma City is a "big city," it is in "flyover country," not coastal.  

Former Republican Mayor Mick Cornett's book, The Next American City: The Big Promise of Our Mid-Sized Metros, outlines a world class approach to a community social and economic infrastructure development program aimed at making the community better and more attractive for business and residential recruitment.  It demonstrates that urban success can happen anywhere and isn't limited to the East and West Coasts.

A domestic infrastructure program should address energy, roads, bridges, transit including ferries, ports, parks ("National Park Service delayed $11 billion in maintenance last year because of budget challenges," Washington Post) etc.

And unlike the Obama era ARRA ("Roads vs. transit and the stimulus package" and ""Chance" continues to favor the prepared road builders"), transportation projects should be multi-modal, whereas too often in the US, road projects fail to include transit, unlike in European countries like Denmark 

6.  Energy and climate change infrastructure. 
The proposed Green New Deal is a way to position an infrastructure agenda for energy and climate change.  

The challenge is the investment in legacy fossil fuel production and consumption systems (including sprawl), and the (un)/willingness of legacy companies and governments to shift to new paradigms ("Petrostate vs. electrostate," Economist).
  • Renewables are key.  
  • Improving the resilience and capacity of the electricity grid.  
  • Retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency.  
  • There's a lot of discussion about the opportunity of "green hydrogen."  
  • Transportation remains a ripe opportunity
  • Dams and hydropower (last summer's collapse of dams in Mid-Michigan, leading to the flooding of Midland, is an example of under-investment and failed regulation)
  • shifting from gasoline to electric and hydrogen powered vehicles ("California’s Ban on Gas Cars Could Go Nationwide — But Still Doesn’t Go Far Enough," New York Magazine/Curbed)
I am particularly intrigued by offshore wind power as a way to make electrification work.  For example, offshore wind off Maine is capable of generating 36x the state's current energy needs ("After Scotland Tour, Maine Hatches Offshore Floating Wind Turbines Plot," CleanTechnica).  Puerto Rico shouldn't be burning oil for electricity, but reaping renewable energy opportunities from the sea.  There are 20+ states with significant seacoast access.

(Better than e-vehicles are a shift to transit and other sustainable modes.)

7. Transit and transportation. There are so many opportunities. 
  • Expanding urban transit systems, especially strengthening and extending connections between stations, major trip generators (like airports), bus system improvements including busways, etc.
  • Expanding state and multi-state railroad and bus networks (Colorado's growing Bustang network is a model), with a focus on electrification of railroad passenger systems, powered by electricity generated from offshore wind.  (More on this later.  I've been strongly influenced by how railroad services are organized and delivered in Japan, and of course cities like London and Paris.)
  • Shifting shorter range airplane travel to railroads.  
  • Development of high speed rail passenger services.
  • Freight railroad system improvements, especially as a way to "expand" capacity on Interstate freeways by shifting trips from trucks, and to support rural economic development
  • Hydrogen fuel networks for long distance trucking.  
  • Expansion of ferry and water taxi systems.  
  • Opportunities at ports and inter-modal connections with railroads.  
  • Canals and barges.
  • Metropolitan scale bikeway networks, bicycle parking systems, payroll deduction and loan programs to buy bicycles, and active programming to shift people from the car to the bike
  • promotion of e-bikes as a way to support longer distance bike commuting
  • Implementing Signature Street urban design programs ("Extending the "Signature Streets" concept to "Signature Streets and Spaces""), low traffic neighborhoods, and pedestrianized districts ("Why doesn't every big city in North America have its own Las Ramblas?" and "Diversity Plaza, Queens, a pedestrian exclusive block") in cities
8.  Water and sewerage system improvements
. Many rural and urban water systems face massive upgrade costs to improve water quality and reduce stormwater and sewage discharges into rivers and lakes.  The GAO estimates more than $600 billion in needs over the next 20 years, while the American Society of Civil Engineers says over $1 Trillion over 25 years.

9.  TOD and affordable housing.  Transit oriented development builds higher density mixed use housing and other uses at transit stations.  This encourages transit use and reduces car trips.

Not only is there tremendous demand for new social housing as population continues to grow, as well as a greater diversity of housing types, including Single Room Occupancy, housing the homeless, etc., there is a tremendous backlog of maintenance needs for existing public housing, over $30 billion ("Fixing Public Housing: A Day Inside a $32 Billion Problem," New York Times).

In return for funding, communities should be required to agree to higher density.

Maybe a national program to help finance a wider scale creation of accessory dwelling units in cities.

10.  Broadband/Community broadband.  The pandemic and shift to online schooling has made very clear the existence of a digital divide in both urban ("What the coronavirus reveals about the digital divide between schools and communities," Brookings, "“The cruel irony of the digital divide” in Colorado: Urban poor are left behind even as access, technology improves," Colorado Sun) and rural ("No signal: Internet ‘dead zones’ cut rural students off from virtual classes.," NYT) areas.  

Plus rural areas need faster Internet access to support economic development.

It's possible to create community broadband networks to make signal more widely available, usually involving a mix of public and private resources ("The Dos and Don'ts of Community Broadband Network Planning," Government Technology,).

Relatedly, this Wall Street Journal article,  "Private 5G Networks Are Bringing Bandwidth Where Carriers Aren’t," discusses how businesses are creating their own private 5G networks to cover facilities at a cost as low as $5,000.

It's can be harder to do in rural areas, but still eminently possible, through electricity providers, municipalities, states ("Internet network set to beam into Md.’s rural areas won’t help students this fall," Washington Post), and other entities.  

Cities and nonprofits can seed such systems in lower income communities in urban areas ("Building the People’s Internet," Urban Omnibus).

-- Community Broadband Networks, Institute for Local Self Reliance

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Sunday, November 22, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving: Stay Home!

A goodly portion of this entry is reprinted from last year.
     
Image: a postcard sent out by Coldwell Banker realtors to their clients.

The foods of the Thanksgiving meal are probably my favorite--not the godawful "green bean casserole," but turkey, gravy, dressing, mashed potatoes, bread (this year there's been a request for biscuits and I will use this recipe), squash, cranberry sauce--once I learned how easy it is to make a stellar cranberry sauce, I can't ever go back to canned, and of course pie--varying from pumpkin, sweet potato, pecan, and apple + vanilla ice cream.  Sometimes roasted brussel sprouts.

This year I also will make a three pound round of no knead kalamata olive bread.  (Out here in Mormon land, one of the grocery chains sells 25 lb. bags of bread flour for $5.99!)

Friendsgiving.  Last year, I saw lots of articles about "Friendsgiving," holding Thanksgiving with friends ("Friendsgiving has become just as fraught as Thanksgiving ," New York Times), not family, but that is likely a very long tradition.

Certainly I have memories of such events of my own dating back to college, an experience which is also captured in a great essay by the author Ann Patchett, "Collecting Strays at the Thanksgiving Table."

Pandemic.  But this year there are no articles about Friendsgiving, but about how you should limit your Thanksgiving event to your immediate family, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus ("With people encouraged to stay home, what will Thanksgiving week travel look like this pandemic year?," Seattle Times).  

And don't go out to restaurants, as much as you might want to ("Don’t Eat Inside a Restaurant The risk of catching the coronavirus is much higher indoors," Atlantic).

Canada's Thanksgiving, held in October, has been a significant contributor to their rise in coronavirus cases now ("Canada’s Thanksgiving Brought a Surge of COVID-19 Cases: Will That Happen in the U.S.?," healthline, "Will the U.S. heed Canada's Thanksgiving lesson?," Politico).  Cases have risen about 150% since--from 2,000 per day to 4,776--and Toronto just went into a one month lockdown ("Toronto, Canada's largest city, put into lockdown as infections soar," CNN).

This digital ad for Whole Foods appeared on the Nextdoor neighborhood social media platform.

Relatedly, there are tons of articles on how you can buy thanksgiving dinner from independent and chain restaurants.  We always talk about it, but we like making the foods of thanksgiving, so it doesn't seem worth it.

We took the land.  The Boston Gobe's review of the book This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by GWU Professor David Silverman reminds us of the reality that the land we have, America, was taken from Native Americans.



This year the Globe has an interesting story on Plimoth Plantation, the re-enactment heritage park focused on the origin story of English settlement in Massachusetts.  Recently, the site was renamed Plimoth Patuxet Plantation, to directly include Native Americans, although the article argues the site has a long way to go to tell a richer, more complete and accurate story ("More than name change may be needed at former Plimoth Plantation").

The New York Times has an article, "The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year," about greater efforts at re-examination of the mythology around Thanksgiving, and the putting forward of the Native American interpretation.  For decades, Native Americans in New England have termed Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning, to recognize the trials and tribulations in the face of English settlement.

Bon Appetit has an article about Native American chefs and Thanksgiving.  From the article:
To many Native people, reckoning with Thanksgiving can be difficult—for obvious reasons. This is partially why the I-Collective, an organization of indigenous chefs and activists across the country, was born ("Brit Reed is leading a new generation of indigenous chefs"). The group hosts Thanksgiving dinners with a decidedly different narrative, celebrating the resilience of their people and telling their stories through food.
Fats and Oils.  Don't forget that you shouldn't put fats and oils down the drain ("Why Can't You Pour Grease Down The Drain?," Business Insider) because it leads to fatbergs.  

According to this Mashed listicle, "Things you shouldn't put down your drain," lots of stuff shouldn't go down the garbage disposal.  It's better to compost.

Even though DC Water got lots of press coverage for their waste energy system using waste products in water to generate energy as well as reusable compost, and how DC code requires that kitchen sinks have disposals, DC Water says it's better to compost separately and not put stuff down the drain ("Do you like using your garbage disposal? The water company wishes you wouldn’t," Washington Post).

Helplines.  The New York Times reminds us that Butterball Turkeys has a help line and so does the "Splendid Table" radio show, which will broadcast a live radio call in show on cooking turkey from 12pm to 2pm Eastern Time.

-- Butterball Turkey Hot Line, 1-800-BUTTERBALL

Jewish, interfaith and immigrant groups hold a rally in front of the White House on Aug. 11 to commemorate the Jewish day of mourning by calling on the Trump administration to change its immigration policies. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

We are all immigrants.  At the same time, Thanksgiving should remind us, given the anti-immigrant focus of the Trump Administration ("There’s no other way to explain Trump’s immigration policy. It’s just bigotry," Washington Post) and the alt-right, that every person in the United States, except for those of Native American descent, descends from immigrants, including people first brought here by force.  (Technically, Native Americans also immigrated, from Asia.)

-- "Gratitude once suffused America. Today, things are not as they should be," editorial, Washington Post

The LA Times food section has a video feature called "Off Menu." One episode looks at people who are food challenged, focusing on Skid Row and social enterprise ventures there.

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Historic preservation battle in Baltimore

I have written quite a bit about the "architecture of its time" versus "architecture of its place" as the guiding principle of historic preservation regulation, based on the arguments of Notre Dame architecture professor Stephen Semes.

"Maintaining a broad stylistic consistency in traditional settings is not a matter of 'nostalgia,'" he says. "It's a matter of common sense, of reinforcing the sense of place that made a building or neighborhood special to begin with. But many academically trained preservationists want to impose their inevitably subjective notions of what the architecture 'of our time' is."

-- "An argument for the aesthetic quality of the ensemble: special design guidelines are required for DC's avenues," 2015
-- "Treating an entire city as a heritage area/conservation district, rather than a neighborhood by neighborhood approach," 2020
-- "Steven Semes: The Conservation Architect," Traditional Building


Generally, the Secretary of Interior guidelines recommend that new architecture look new, rather than try to copy historic architecture.  While that seems logical, the problem is that new architecture tends to significantly diminish the quality of the ensemble of historic architecture.  New architecture ends up being a gash in the quality of the whole.  

This exact dialectic is in play in Baltimore, where an execrable proposed design for an apartment building in the Clipper Mill district of Woodberry/Hampden (really Woodberry but close to Hampden) was rejected by Baltimore's design oversight body for historic districts and urban design matters, the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation ("Signaling conflict ahead, Baltimore historic preservation commission denies approval to Clipper Mill apartment building plans," Baltimore Sun).

-- Poole & Hunt Foundry Complex



The rendering of the proposed new building illustrates the issue quite clearly, especially compared to the historic buildings of the Clipper Mill complex.



This situation is a little more complicated, because another apartment building, shown in the rendering immediately above, was approved before the area received historic designation.  And because the proposal is from the owners of Clipper Mill.  And the owners sued the residents and groups opposing new housing projects ("Developer of Clipper Mill in Baltimore files $25 million lawsuit against residents opposing more housing," Sun).

The proposed building will replace a metal warehouse building next to this stone building that is part of the original complex.

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Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Glass buildings are bad for the environment, the use of energy and the generation of greenhouse gases

Buildings with curtain walls made of glass in Boston's Seaport District.  Photo: David L. Ryan.  

The Boston Globe has a nice article on this, "Boston wants to fight climate change. So why is every new building made of glass?."

From the article:

If architects, planners, and public officials in Boston mean everything they say about sustainability and climate readiness, why is the city’s latest construction boom filling the skyline with so much glass? From the shimmering height of the Millennium Tower to the waterfront views of 22 Liberty, and a boxy office and condo complex going up at Pier 4, glass exteriors have become a major feature of today’s urban landscape. Just as we associate periods in Boston’s history with specific materials and styles — like 19th-century brick apartment blocks and 20th-century monumental concrete forms — glass is the material of the moment. The new buildings mimic others being erected in New York, London, Dubai, Singapore, and other cities around the world. Glass walls have become a shortcut for architecture that is sleek, cosmopolitan, and of-the-moment.  .....  
Yet glass buildings also take a lot of energy to heat and cool. When New York started tracking energy use by skyscrapers, the gleaming 7 World Trade Center — one of that city’s more efficient glass towers — scored worse than the 1930s-era Empire State Building. Oddly, glass buildings are proliferating even as cities like Boston set ambitious goals to deal with climate change. Former mayor Thomas Menino vowed to cultivate “the most sustainable city in the United States”; his successor, Martin Walsh, has called Boston “America’s climate champion” and set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. ...  
But all the talk about sustainability among architects hasn’t actually translated into lots of sustainable buildings in the real world. In reality, the industry faces a massive problem: By some estimates, the building sector consumes nearly half of the energy and produces 45 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Many architects have signed on to an industry challenge to become carbon neutral by 2030, but new buildings are already slipping behind the targets to get there. Permissive building codes, industry inertia, and market demands — like clients clamoring for floor-to-ceiling views — have widened the discrepancy between the kind of buildings cities say they want and what they actually allow. So while the industry inches towards better environmental performance, buildings in Boston and other cities still fall short of the sustainability goals that everyone claims to embrace.

On a number of issues--more to come--it's clear that the kinds of initiatives underway mostly in Europe:

are nowhere near being implemented in the US.  

Yes

but for the most part, substantive world changing initiatives by cities, counties, and states seem to be rare.

More big initiatives are being led by industry, especially in the (sustainable) energy sector (solar power, wind turbines), Elon Musk and Tesla have redefined the automobile industry in terms of the viability of electric cars, and there are significant increases in individual households installing solar electricity systems, although the decline of tax incentives and industry push back on compensation rates could lead to a decline.

The biggest thing cities have been addressing are autonomous vehicles ("The 4 cities competing to fully implement autonomous vehicles," Electronic Engineering Times), and while they can reduce accident, injury and death rates compared to people-operated vehicles, they aren't an environmental initiative.

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Friday, November 06, 2020

2020 National Election: Poor results for Democrats in House and Senate probably reflects a change in how Republicans and Democrats vote

Another way to "balance out the red" in voting pattern maps is to weight the states not by physical size, but by the number of electoral votes it has.  The smaller the population, the fewer the electoral votes, as illustrated by these graphics from the Wall Street Journal.



Democrats as "Drop Off" voters.  The trend in the past had been that Democrats vote strongly in Presidential years, but were less motivated to do so in off elections ("How ‘Drop-Off’ Voters Differ From Consistent Voters and Nonvoters," Pew Research Center).

In 2018 (and 2019 in Virginia), this changed as Democrats enraged by Trump's 2016 victory and subsequent acts by the Trump Administration came out to vote in force, a complete reversal of past voting behavior.  

This didn't make much difference for the Senate--because of how it's structured to favor rural and small state interests--but it made a big difference in the House of Representatives, where many suburban and a handful of rural seats that had been Republican in the past--such as many seats in Orange County, California--were won by Democrats, and therefore, control of the House switched from the Republicans to the Democrats.

This was heralded as a sea change in politics--that formerly Republican leaning suburban voters especially were moving into the Democratic Party camp.

That's why it was expected that what happened would continue into the 2020 election cycle, and that there would be a landslide election in favor of the Democrats, who were projected to not only build their lead in the House--which is why so many Republicans chose not to run again, only we are seeing their seats remaining in the Republican camp, especially in Texas--but to take control of the Senate ("A Biden Landslide? Some Democrats Can’t Help Whispering," New York Times).

It didn't happen ("2020’s Biggest Election Losers" and "Susan Collins and Majorities," Wall Street Journal; "Dem leaders warn liberal rhetoric could blow Georgia races," Politico).

A new see sawing of House seats: are Republicans now the "inconsistent" voters?  I'm thinking this is the result of the mix of the electorate changing somewhat.  Now, the less politically engaged working class, rural, and similar segments have shifted to the Republican side.  They are motivated to vote by the Presidential election, less so in the off year cycle.

Democrats likely are now more politically engaged, and more likely to vote in both the Presidential and non-Presidential cycles of the national elections.

What this means is that in conservative leaning districts, more Republicans will vote in the Presidential election, shifting the seat to Republicans when the margins are tight,  But in the off-year cycle, it's likely that Democrats will continue to vote in higher numbers, and with more Republicans sitting out, the seat will turnover or flip to Democrats.  The switch could then occur in the next Presidential election afterwards.  Although at least with suburban seats, as demographic changes continue to favor Democrats, over time more of these seats are likely to become more permanently Democratic.

Although to do so, continuous organizing is required ("Arizona just showed the right way to harness the power of Latino voters," Washington Post).

The Senate is a different story, Republican control is likely to be maintained.  With a significant number of Republican held seats up for election in the Presidential election cycle, it will become increasingly difficult for Democrats to flip seats in red states.  

The small state bias in the structure of the Senate can probably only be overcome by adding a third seat to the larger states--but a bunch of the larger states are Republican too, so it could remain pretty tight in terms of control for many years to come.*

(Some have suggested statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, which would add 4 Senate seats.  But that could be a wash, because Puerto Ricans living on the island often vote for Republicans for statewide office.)

In this cycle, because Cunningham was stupidly indiscreet ("Cal Cunningham affair included July encounter in NC, new texts and interviews show," Associated Press), he likely cost the Democrats the Senate seat in North Carolina, but the Republicans will win Alaska for sure.  While the count isn't complete, Cunningham is 97,000 votes behind, but the likelihood is that with only about 168,000 votes to count, he can't make that up.

That gives the Republicans 50 seats.  If the Democrats can win both Georgian seats, the Democrats will gain control of the Senate because the VP chairs the Senate, and the VP will be Kamala Harris.

Conclusion.  The Georgia Senate runoff races on January 5th will test this theory ("Second Georgia Senate seat headed to January runoff that could decide Senate control," Roll Call), although their special nature makes it more of a one-off situation, in that both Republicans and Democrats will be motivated to vote.  If more Democrats vote, both seats will go to the Democrats, and control of the Senate will be split.

We'll see what happens in 2022.  Will seats like California District 48, New Mexico District 2, and Texas District 23 which have or seem likely to flip to the Republicans this year, flip back to Democrats in 2022, only to flip back to Republicans in 2024?

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* Adding a third Senate to the 20 most populated states

Adding a third Senate seat to the most populous states would shift the Senate to the Democrats but only slightly.

New seats added to California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts and Maryland, totaling 8, would be solidly Democratic.

New seats added to Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and Missouri, totaling 5, would be solidly Republican.

New seats in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, totaling 4, are a toss up, but I'd say would lean Republican, while seats in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin would probably lean Democrat.  

It's remains pretty close, although it might be that Georgia is slowly realigning towards the Democrats especially if voter suppression can be staunched, while Florida, might be realigning towards the Republicans, because more conservative leaning Latinos will move there instead of more progressive states--the way that in the past, more conservative refugees from the Soviet Union would come to the US, while more progressive Russian refugees would move to Europe.

If we added 5 more seats--to the 25 most populated states--the Republicans would be favored (South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana), not the Democrats (Colorado, Minnesota).

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We're not a Mean Nation because the Democrats aren't running on a hard left agenda

While it looks that Biden will win--not just the bare minimum of electoral votes, 270, as the addition of Nevada and Arizona to his win column looks quite certain, but because it appears that while extremely close, Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) are likely to move to the Biden win column as well, giving him a comfortable total--there are plenty of negative indicators:

  1. the failure to flip Republican-held Senate seats
  2. the loss of Democratic-held House seats in conservative leaning districts
  3. the fact that in losing, Trump garnered more votes that Obama did in winning the 2008 election (although the US population is 27 million people greater today, 12 years later).

In the Guardian, Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, argues that the reason the election is so close is because the Democrats didn't run a truly progressive, hard left campaign  ("Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes").

The headline is right, but the argument, while righteous and I'd love to believe it, is flawed.  

Sure, that the election is close speaks volumes, there are plenty of lessons for messaging and programming.

But if 69+ million people voted for Trump, it's not like a goodly number did so because they didn't think that the Democrats weren't progressive enough--that they thought that the Republicans can do a better job bringing about universal health care, a $15 minimum wage, and a strong public health response to the coronavirus ("The Counties With The Worst Coronavirus Surges Overwhelmingly Voted For Trump," AP).

Senate.  I am floored at how many Democratic Senate candidates that were touted as able to win got absolutely crushed:

  • Montana, Bullock got 45% of the vote
  • Iowa, Greenfield got 45% of the vote
  • Kansas, Bollier got 41% of the vote
  • Maine, Gideon got 43% of the vote
  • South Carolina, Harrison got 41% of the vote
  • Texas, Hegar got 44% of the vote
  • + reporting on Espy in Mississippi said he had a chance in Mississippi.  He got 42.5%.
The North Carolina race is close.  And maybe if Cunningham hadn't sent texts of a sexual nature to a woman not his wife (comparable to Comey's October surprise in 2016), he could have squeaked it out.  He's 97,000 votes short, with 300,000 votes to be counted.  It seems too big a deficit to make up.

The only saving grace is Georgia.  Because of a Libertarian candidate, it appears that Senator Perdue won't win 50% of the vote, leading to a runoff.  

Since the Georgia special election for the second seat is already going to runoff, having two Senate races on the ballot in January could actually get Democrats out to vote, when traditionally Democratic turnout for January runoff elections tends to be diminished.

House.  And many Democrats lost Congressional seats in Republican leaning seats (" Even if Trump loses the election, the next Congress will be even Trumpier," NBC)..

There's no way the disaffected but voting segment of the electorate voted Republican because they offer a better agenda for the working class, one that is more progressive.

For example, Republican Will Hurd barely won his Texas border district last election.  By fewer than 700 votes.  He didn't run again.  But the Republican easily won, by not quite 10,000 votes, which is much more than a handful.  Xochitl Torres lost in Arizona.  Some of the seats in Southern California that went Democrat in 2018 appear to reverting back to Republican this year (although maybe those seats will see saw from election to election?)

Can a progressive agenda succeed?  Do I think that a progressive agenda can resonate with good chunks of the Republican-leaning precariat electorate?  Yes I do.

These two graphics show the Presidential vote ("Let’s get ahead of it: A map of the early 2020 results by population, not acreage," Washington Post).  The first is by county or "acreage."  The second is weighted for population.



But there's no question it's not being articulated particularly well ("Why Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump for the US economy," Guardian).  And that includes people like AOC and Elizabeth Warren, not just Biden 

People live precarious lives because economic forces favor capital, not labor.  

The Republicans have been successful at wedge politics in creating a "coalition" made up of a chassis of angry mostly white and/or rural voters, topped with a body comprised of corporate ("How the Koch brothers built the most powerful rightwing group you've never heard of," Guardian), wealthy ("How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump," New Yorker), and other conservative interests ("The Unseen Agenda Behind Trump: Destroy the Public Realm to Free the Rich," CounterPunch; "Dark Money Funds Campaign Pushing Supreme Court to the Right," Between The Lines).

As long as the white precariat doesn't want people other than themselves to benefit from government programs ("Why More White Americans Are Opposing Government Welfare Programs," NPR), it is difficult to define a unifying progressive agenda.  

For Democrats and Progressives to be successful going forward, especially at the level of the House and Senate and state legislatures, Democrats and Progessives must redefine and re/build a positivist consensus about what the USA is about. 

Identity politics and singular versus plural identities. A big problem is that "identity politics" in the way that it tends to be defined in the US, is exclusionary in that people focus on their separate identity without also acknowledging an identity as part of a greater whole ("book review of Identity and Violence," New York Times; "Modeling Plural Identities and their Interactions").

After all, the US motto is e pluribus unum--from many, one.

Instead we're very much a divided nation.

-- "This Election Highlights How Divided the Nation Remains:  In many places, the results confirmed that red America is growing more red and blue America more blue," Wall Street Journal

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Wednesday, November 04, 2020

Mean Nation

I guess we're more like anti-EU, anti-immigrant Brexit Britain than I realized.  It's hard to be a "city on the hill" if people don't feel they can afford to provide some of their resources towards satisfying collective needs.

I didn't watch television coverage of the election, but have looked at some articles, and it doesn't appear as if Biden can win.  

Looking at the New York Times website, and handicapping the vote of the states that haven't declared a winner yet, it seems as if Biden will get 269 Electoral votes, and you need 270 to win.

I could be wrong.  I say Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin will go for Biden for sure.  If Michigan does too--Trump is leading in the reported vote, but it's close, then Biden will win.  It seems certain that the other states--Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia will go for Trump.  

But I'm not sure about Michigan (my former home state, I can't f*ing believe it)--Trump is 28,000 votes ahead, but 86% of the vote has been counted.

Screengrabs from the New York Times.

The thing now is that Michigan is scarily Republican due to the decline of manufacturing and the loss of blue collar Democratic worker-voters.  The only reason I'm willing to say that Michigan will go for Biden is that two of the largest voting counties that are Democratic, Wayne (64% of votes reported) and Oakland (85% of votes reported).


I looked at all the Michigan counties--most have reported more than 90% of their votes, and with a couple of exceptions, Wayne and Oakland are the only counties with significant numbers of votes to report, with a much higher likelihood of the votes being cast for Biden.

I don't understand how virtually every swing state went for Trump, nor how the polls consistently came to the conclusion that Biden had big leads,  significantly over 50%, and yet, the voting is about 50/50.  Sure voter suppression has an effect, but that can't be the full explanation.

Drilling down deeper into the states where the vote count continues--each state is broken down by county, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, it seems almost foreordained that Trump will win.  But again, it looks like Biden will take Michigan, and in terms of the Electoral College, Biden will get the absolute minimum number of EC votes--270--to win the Presidency.

I guess the thing about the "Shy Trump voter" is absolutely true.  Because Biden was supposed to be up 56ish to 44, not 50/50.

I can't really take solace in anything about this election.  Similarly to the polls being off, it doesn't appear as if any but a couple of the Republican Senate seats that were stated to be in play were actually in play--Ernst, Daines, the seat in Kansas, Graham, maybe even Tillis, all seem to be comfortably Republican.

And the talk of Texas or Georgia going blue, let alone Florida, seems to have been a pipe dream.  Could Beto O'Rourke running for Senate in Texas and Stacy Abrams running for Senate in Georgia have made a difference?

The talk of a Republican hibernation seems to be a pipe dream as well.  Even if the vote is 50/50 and slightly favors Republicans, how are Republicans supposed to be chastened as they get everything they want, the Senate, maybe not the Presidency, but the Supreme Court?

I don't understand how when the US death rate from coronavirus is more than 5 times higher than Germany, let alone 76 times higher than South Korea, that anyone could vote for him.  He's malfeasance and misfeasance has killed almost as many people as Saddam Hussein.

After the 2004 election, The Stranger, one of Seattle's alternative weeklies, ran a piece called "The Urban Archipeligo," about the cities vis a vis the rest of the country.  


In 2020, The Stranger's relative optimism in 2004 about cities being able to go their own way is misplaced.


Given Trump's vindictiveness and active program to deny resources to those communities that don't vote for him.  As well as his destruction of the ability of the federal government to be competent.

If he wins, he will act on those tendencies much more proactively.

Even after the 2016 election, I didn't feel that I had to move to another country, although for the most part I did stop watching television news.  Now, I'm not so sure.

The US has severely reduced the acceptance of immigrant asylum claims.  I wonder if Democrats can make credible asylum applications for emigration to other countries in the face of this election.

There's no question that the United States of America is a very different country from what I was taught that it was, what it stood for, and how it acts.

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