Holy Mountain: A Blog about Our Common Life: October 2017

Monday, October 30, 2017

What future for Cedar Rapids

Downtown Cedar Rapids, spring 2017

As Cedar Rapids prepares to elect a new mayor next month we should be encouraged by the optimism of Aaron Horn, the new chief operating officer of the startup cooperative NewBoCo:

There's this high-level desire to see [startup growth] happen here, and if you don't have people trying to make that happen here, it just won't.... I just had this idea that why would I run off to Chicago or Silicon Valley to be part of startup activity when people were trying to do that here (Patane 2017).

Cedar Rapids seems to be out-performing its peer cities in the 2010s. We're three weeks away from a city council election, including eight candidates vying for an open mayoral slot. It's been a rather bloodless campaign so far, with no burning issue or group conflict to polarize the electorate. There's been a lot of talk about fixing streets and filling potholes, which speaks to a certain confidence in our future. Or maybe it's a lack of concern? We are so sure we're not Steubenville, Ohio, and are never going to be, that our concerns can be potholes vs. bike lanes or which neighborhoods are getting shorted on city spending.

Do we know why we're in the position we're in? To be sure, we were early on the tech train (Rockwell Collins, McLeod USA) at least for this part of the country, our economy has diversified from the agricultural days, and we're reasonably close to the University of Iowa--though that's in Iowa City, a separate metro with a remarkably similar income pattern. We've been blessed with some visionary leaders--a group Horn seems fixing to join--and a moderate, tolerant political culture. We're doing a lot of the right things: re-examining our zoning code, re-developing downtown, flood protection, building sidewalks and trails, re-converting our one-way streets. It would be interesting to re-run the last decade without the flood, and see whether we'd be better or worse off today, but alas, this is not experimental science we're doing.

Nationally, it is widely known that generally favorable economic data since 2010 mask a wide variety of experiences. In an early crack at the data, I showed in June 2016 just with population data that the back-to-the-city movement affected the central cities in the largest metropolitan areas differently, from dramatic growth (Charlotte, Austin, Raleigh) to steep declines (Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans).

More studies have dug deeper into the data. A Brookings Institution study, based on analysis of Census Bureau data, analyzes changes in inflation-adjusted median household incomes in 300 metropolitan areas (Berube 2017). They divide the metros into five groups:

booming (25), including large tech hubs and small cities around oil and gas finds;
stabilized (37), tech and other large cities that have been able to sustain gains through tough times;
recovering (73) i.e. from de-industrialization or the housing crash;
struggling (86), mostly middle-sized cities which had relied on manufacturing;
hardest-hit (76), mostly older manufacturing cities.

Spread out that way, the urban renaissance appears so far to be concentrated in relatively few places, with more trying to keep up and still more genuinely floundering. (That's sort of my impression of today's economy at the individual level as well.)

A New York Times business column (Porter 2017) highlights a study by Mark Muro, also of the Brookings Institution, noting that cities the size of Cedar Rapids are on the whole doing less well than large cities. The key graphic from the article:

Where Disruption Has Hit U.S. Workers Hardest

Automation and foreign trade have buffeted the nation’s labor force, especially across the Midwest and Southeast. But big metropolitan areas have been more successful than smaller places at recovering from economic shocks.

"Small metro areas" are here defined as those with populations between 80,000 and 250,000. Analysts suggest these areas lacked the critical mass to respond nimbly to changes in the economy. The Times writer quotes Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti:

The thickness of a labor market is crucial in the innovation industries that are the drivers of economic success today. This applies to the biotech engineer but not to the welder, who has more replaceable skills.

According to one estimate, 80 percent of new jobs in 2016 were created in metropolitan areas of 1,000,000 or more. Counties with populations below 250,000 actually had a net loss of jobs (Bishop 2017). Small metro residents are feeling it, too: Voters in small metros showed their frustrations by favoring Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election by nearly 20 percentage points, almost the same as rural voters (Florida 2017). Struggling World is close by, too. A New York Times magazine story out of Clinton, 90 miles to our northeast, argues that the sharp statewide swing towards the Republican Party in the 2010s has its roots in the loss of college-educated young people (Tackett). In Iowa, Wisconsin and elsewhere, the educated young move elsewhere to get work, while the economically-insecure folk who remain take out their anxieties at the polls, leading to policy outcomes with mostly symbolic payoffs that if anything just create frustrations for the cities that are the engines of the states' economies.

There aren't enough data in the study from Cedar Rapids, but what there are would put us in the "stabilized" group: 2016 median family income ($63385) is up 6.4 percent since 2009. That makes sense when you consider that our catastrophic flood occurred in 2008, and much federal aid and private investment has followed. Compared to 1999, though, we're down 2.7 percent.

If we don't know how we got stabilized--or worse, are naive about how we got here--how do we avoid regressing to the mean? Does Cedar Rapids, despite its being a small city, have a thick enough labor market to retain college-educated young people through lean times as well as fat? (The current national bull market, seven years on, won't last forever.) One way to enlarge the labor market could be to enlarge the scope of the city by strengthening connections with Iowa City, including better intracity transportation by which I do not mean adding another lane to I-380. Further strengthen those connections with a regional revenue-sharing agreement with a non-compete provision so area municipalities work together to make an appealing, resilient region.

More questions: can we do better at retaining young, educated people, while building an economy (and a community) that includes everyone? Is the city's financial conditions strong enough to sustain us through whatever history and the economy bring next?

Aaron Horn, from his Twitter page

Aaron Horn clearly thinks Cedar Rapids has the potential to remain strong, so we'll give him the last word.

I think we [in the State of Iowa] have a lot of work to do. Generally, especially here at NewBoCo, we just feel like it's not enough. We feel like we're doing a lot here at NewBoCo and it's not enough.... We just take that on personally as we're not just going to sit around and say, "The State of Iowa is not doing enough." We're just going to dig in our heels and say, "Where are the gaps, and what do we need to do to fill that?"

MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
Justin Golbabai, "What Happens if the Delivery Trucks Don't Come," Strong Towns, 18 October 2017
"The Right Way to Help Declining Places," Economist, 21 October 2017
Ellen Shepard, "Chicagoans Had Better Take a Hard and Wary Look at Any Deal to Woo Amazon," Chicago Sun-Times, 28 September 2017

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Seattle public library

Seattle Central Library (Source: Wikipedia)

The Seattle Public Library, built about 10 years ago and designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaas, is a wonderful space notwithstanding its bizarre shape. I was very curious to see the building, which is located on a city block defined by 4th and 5th Avenues, and Spring and Madison Streets, having heard both strongly negative and positive comments over the years. Count me among the positive.

I will grant that, seen from above, it looks silly, and that they probably paid way too much for the design. At street level, it's a different story. It plays well with the street. The sidewalk on 4th Avenue goes by the glass front and an inviting doorway.

4th Avenue entrance

I'm less taken with the ground floor, which has a sterile, industrial-basement feel.

The children's room, to the left, is warmer, but with what I take to be a sad sign of these times.

The rest of the library is a mix of warm and whimsical, but very functional. There are elevators for direct travel, escalators for scenic travel, and steps for strenuous travel.

The non-fiction books, on floors 7-9, are arranged in a spiral. Fans of the Dewey Decimal System will recognize this as the art section.

The upper floors provide comfortable and quiet reading areas...

...as well as views of the city--here, the federal appeals courthouse...

...and here, downtown looking towards Elliott Bay.

I come from a small city, where our very excellent library fits on just two floors, so I don't know how I would feel about scooting up to the 9th floor to retrieve history and biography books, but this is a big library in a big city and I think I'd get used to it.

James Howard Kunstler is a severe critic of the library, and of starchitects in general. His problem is less with the outside appearance than with the disorienting nature of the interior, which he says is contrary to the function of the public building i.e. to help ground people and help them make sense of the noisy world around them. I don't know what if any alterations the library has made in the 9 1/2 years since Kunstler's commentary (cited below), but I found it quite the contrary. The lower floors were well-used, but--like Yosemite National Park--the farther we got from the entrance the less crowded and more quiet it became, and the upper floors definitely were the sort of oases urban life requires. Wayfinding was rather easy.

I liked being in every part of the library, and I think if anything I'm unusually sensitive to noise and disorientation--maybe especially so the day I visited, because that day had started at 5:42 a.m. with some guy outside my window yelling about the Book of Revelation. If I lived in Seattle, I'd be here a lot.


The 1906 version looks grander and less absurd, but does it play as well with the street?

SOURCE: James Howard Kunstler, "The Seattle Public Library and Other Award-Winning Disastrous Architecture," Kunstler Cast #05, 13 March 2008

MANY MANY MORE PHOTOS: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-seattle-public-library-central-library-seattle

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

The scary side of urbanism

Harvey Weinstein (Source: videomovie.in)

Film mogul Harvey Weinstein's resignation-in-disgrace has unleashed a social media campaign, MeToo, in which women have reported experiences of sexual harassment or worse. The basic version says:

Me too.
If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too" as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
Please copy/paste.

#metoo

Several posters, with commendable courage, added personal stories. The clear impression is that verbal or physical harassment is widespread, and affects a huge swath of American women. (Several posters included a rhetorical question asking if any women were exempt.)

Sexual harassment is of particular interest to urbanists in part because it violates the spirit of community. Recall the words of Isaiah that inspired the name of this virtual space: "They shall neither hurt nor destroy on all my holy mountain." One person hurt is one too many, but it's clear that so many incidents occur and so regularly that it represents an epidemic. This must not go on.

Another pressing concern is that, while sexual harassment can occur anywhere, many women's stories show that urban living can increase the danger. Urbanists commend density and street life because they are more economically and financially sustainable, better for business, more intellectually stimulating and more fun. But the more unplanned encounters occur on urban streets, without something changing rather drastically for the better, the more incidents of harassment will occur. And public transportation! It's an essential element of a successful urban place, but I've read any number of accounts of groping on buses and trains (not including the train scene in an episode of the Netflix series Master of None). I'm all in on urbanism, but it's no good if it makes women less safe. (See below for other potential costs to some people of even the good aspects of urbanism.)

Clearly we need to strengthen the norm against sexual harassment. But, for goodness' sake, how is it not already strong? I realize gender roles have changed, but that was mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. People like me, in my sixth decade of life, have never known an America where women were not publicly equal to men. Is the problem isolated individuals-with-problems? Subcultures where the value of women's equality has not taken hold? A general fear/respect/awe of financial power that is stronger than our sense of what is right? Low expectations/standards for male behavior?

This problem is clearly widespread, and attention must be paid, for the sake of women everywhere, and for the sake of the community we must be building.

SEE ALSO:
"Peace and Quiet," Holy Mountain, 22 July 2013
Charles Marohn, "Autism, PTSD and the City," Strong Towns, 28 August 2017
Tamara Coffman Wittes, "#I Will? What I Learned From My Week As An Online Activist," Brookings, 19 October 2017

Monday, October 9, 2017

The struggle for justice

National Portrait Gallery (Wikimedia commons)

When Jane and I were in Washington last weekend we visited the National Portrait Gallery on the mall. Among their permanent and traveling exhibitions I was particularly moved by "The Struggle for Justice," an ongoing exhibition that

...showcases the determined men and women--from key nineteenth-century historical figures to contemporary leaders--who struggled to achieve civil rights for disadvantaged or marginalized groups. (from the webpage).

The presentation implies, with some justification, that America's perennial effort to live up to its own ideals has been largely focused on inclusion of excluded groups of people. The premise is that the Framers of our Constitution got a lot right when they designed a political system "of the people, by the people, for the people" (quoting the Gettysburg Address). Injustice happened because they, and many Americans over the years, have had a crabbed understanding of who counts as people.

The stories of abolition, black civil rights and women's rights have been often told, and justly so. What is so moving is to see representatives of each movement here. mixed in with advocates for gays, the mentally handicapped, farm labor and Native Americans. It's quite a gathering--check the slide show on the museum's web page and imagine the whole bunch at the same bar--and to these could be added advocates for prisoners, survivors of violent crime, Catholics, religious minorities, transgendered, the physically handicapped and the mentally ill. Each of them stood up at one time or another to shout "We count, too!" They are truly American heroes. The tragedy is that the shouts needed to be made at all, not to mention how long it took for them to be heard over the steady drone of ignorance and prejudice.

"By Parties Unknown" by Hale Woodruff (1900-1980), at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC

Inclusion isn't the promised land where all our social problems are solved. Inclusion is the baseline for national conversations over how our society will manage its common life. Without everyone having the opportunity to participate in that conversation, we create issues of legitimacy as well as effectiveness. Furthermore, I believe we are at a time in history where we don't have the option of living in separate spheres. The economy, the budget and the environment are forcing us together, whether we like it or not. We need to get used to that idea, and when we do, we'll find it is good for our souls, too.

Although the principle of inclusion is straightforward, it doesn't always provide clear decision rules on, for example, what to do about the class of immigrants known as the Dreamers. Moreover, it can be complicated or co-opted in practice. The week I saw the exhibit, the Trump administration issued a rule change allowing businesses not to provide female birth control coverage in employer-provided health insurance. Vice President Pence walked out of an NFL game in a surely-orchestrated protest against protesting players. In both cases, the officials sought to avoid the issue of inclusion either by claiming greater victimhood (do employers have a right-to-decide employees' health coverage that the government is violating?) or by simply changing the subject (respect the flag!). Meanwhile, a Seattle coffee house owner evicted some customers because prior to coming there they had been distributing anti-abortion pamphlets (Bollinger 2017). Not everyone is covered by the provisions of the Civil Rights Act, but the same principle of inclusion means we can have deeply-held disagreements without being enemies. According to the article, which is written from the hard-to-swallow perspective that the eviction was justified, the coffee house owner is gay, and surely has known exclusion I never have experienced. Still, we all have to live together. All of us.

The Smithsonian exhibit is optimistic, depicting an America living ever truer to its ideals--"striving upward towards perfection," to take one of my favorite John Wesley quotations somewhat out of context. May it be so.

SEE ALSO: "Strength Through Diversity," 1 March 2014

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Book review: "The Well-Tempered City"

I grew up in the suburbs, but I was drawn to nearby New York City because it was gritty and alive with what the architect Robert Venturi called "complexity and contradiction... messy vitality," throbbing with street life and jazz, blues, and rock and roll.--Rose (2016), p. x

Planner Jonathan F.P. Rose has produced a prodigious book detailing the interwoven nature of the many facets of cities. The inspiration and model is Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722, 1742), described as both a musical composition and a work of persuasive rhetoric. Bach was promoting a new system of tuning notes that--unlike that which had been in place for 2000 years--enabled harmonization across keys. In the work "Bach moves through all twenty-four major and minor keys in a series of preludes and fugues, weaving them together into a sublime ecology of sound" (p. xi). Just as a masterful composition like The Well-Tempered Clavier requires harmonization of notes and themes, individuals "over the long run will benefit more by contributing to the success of the larger system" than by pursuing narrow self-interest (p. 11).

Cities, like composers, can either blend the many dimensions of human well-being or (as in the Pythagorean system of tuning) set them against each other. Rose argues in his first chapter--a conviction familiar to any reader of Holy Mountain--that global megatrends like globalization, connectivity, terrorism and migration have made harmony urgently important. Probably it always has been, but in the period of economic growth following World War II, it was easy to ignore. Now things have gone VUCA, an American military acronym standing for "volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity" (pp. 14-15).

Most of the book builds a model of a well-tempered city describing five qualities that, taken together, should see us through whatever lies ahead:

coherence, "integrating systems" (p. 66) that connect humans with each other, with nature and with ultimate reality into a coherent whole. American zoning and sprawl produce the opposite of this
circularity, thinking in terms of regeneration instead of linearly, particularly when it comes to consumption of scarce resources like food, water and oil
resilience, ability to respond to stress and volatility by changing to a more adaptive mode
community, "a deeply interconnected metabolic web of families, communities and cognition" (p. 277), including adequate housing and economic opportunity. He cites Putnam's ideas of bonding capital and bridging capital as well as Woolcock's addition of linking capital that connects people across different social classes
compassion, a "desire to relieve the suffering of all beings" through which we find an overarching purpose such as improving the lives of children or the health of nature

Rose's book is replete with historical examples and draws on a wide range of knowledge to show that, in a VUCA world, cities need to be ready for anything, which means recognizing how things are connected before it's too late.

Chapter 1: New Delhi suffered a massive power outage in 2012 because climate change has led to hotter summers and less rainfall, so less water is available to produce food and hydro-electric power just as a larger and more well off population is demanding more of it, requiring more coal-fired power which exacerbates climate change not to mention air pollution. Add in poor infrastructure and an inefficient government and you have a recipe for disaster, which in fact is what occurred.
Chapter 10: Freddie Gray grew up poor in housing whose historically rigid segregation was actually named "the Baltimore idea" after his native city. Even as racism became less overt, the barriers to opportunity it had created replicated themselves as substandard conditions and interracial suspicion. Young Freddie's exposure to lead paint left him contributed to developmental disabilities and behavioral problems that led to his tragic encounter with the police.

The book covers enough topics that it could serve as an introduction to urbanism, but the associations and connections make it rewardingly provocative for the seasoned urbanist as well. For example, in Cedar Rapids our school district is facing a financial imbalance substantial enough that it is considering closing up to a third of our elementary schools. There are arguments for this strategy, such as cost savings can refit the other schools or even build new ones as was recently done in Kansas City. But reading Rose makes me immediately skeptical of such a siloed approach. How will this affect housing patterns (will anticipating sprawl reinforce it?) and the most vulnerable children? How much will transportation to the new schools cancel the cost savings from closing the old ones? How resilient will these decisions prove 20 or 40 years into a VUCA future? Are there better ways for our community to promote the well-being of all children? Can the city and the school district find ways to cooperate to achieve resilience in the face of unreliable state funding? Note that none of this is possible without the connectedness and compassion he commends, without which we're merely scrambling for short-term advantage.

The Well-Tempered City" blog: http://www.welltemperedcity.com/blog/

Holy Mountain: A Blog about Our Common Life