Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (III)


Marion IA Wal-Mart, Black Friday morning 2019
Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here. Response to chapters 3 & 4 is here.

Chapter 7 of Charles Marohn's new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Restore American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) introduces the concept of measuring a place's productivity by calculating taxable value-per-acre, a concept to which he was introduced by Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 LLC, but which they were both astonished to find was a standard planning tool 100+ years ago before it got forgotten. "It is lost wisdom, abandoned with so many of our ancestors' hard-gained insights" (p. 141).

It might be counter-intuitive, but the most productive blocks in any city tend to be older commercial and residential areas. Marohn includes an analysis he did in 2011 of two commercial blocks in his hometown that will be familiar to Strong Towns followers: the "old and blighted block" with 11 unattractive properties outperformed the block consisting of a brand new Taco John's Restaurant by 41 percent, $1.136 million to $803,000. Minicozzi's compared a downtown redevelopment area in his home of Asheville, North Carolina, and found it produced nearly 10 times the property tax per acre as the new Wal-Mart on the edge of town, as well as 1.76 times the sales tax per acre and a dozen times the jobs per acre (Table 7.1, p. 139). Yet city governments continue to push for the shiny and new, supporting them with tax incentives and wasteful infrastructure. "Across North America, our poor neighborhoods tend to subsidize our wealthy neighborhoods" (p. 141).

This is simple analysis that can be done as long as you have access to tax records, which are open records, or should be. (In researching a 2018 piece on big box stores in the Chicago area I found much of Cook County's tax records to be inaccessible.) Fancier analysis can include the cost of public infrastructure involved in serving the place, but acreage is a reasonable quick-and-dirty substitute. If anything properties closer to the center of the town should get a bonus because their streets, sewer pipes, and such are shared by the entire town, while infrastructure at the edge is used only by the specific property (pp. 114-115).

In Cedar Rapids, between my own calculations and those by my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan, we find results consistent with those found in Lafayette, Louisiana, and other places by Urban 3:
  • Great America Building (2016) $13,999,048
  • Bever Block (2017) $2,153,423
  • 1420 1st Av NE (2018) $1,740,695
  • SW Wal-Mart (2016) $501,557
  • NE Wal-Mart (2016) $456,917
The Bever Block and 1420 1st Av NE have been demolished and replaced at some taxpayer expense with nicer buildings that have more parking. They still probably outperform the big box stores, which conjecture can be explored in future analysis. And maybe this summer I can play with some residential property tax numbers.

The moral of the math is, of course, that the more towns expand in a way that doesn't pay for itself in the long run, the deeper the hole they're digging for themselves, and the harder it will go for them on the day of reckoning. "The merciless nature of the math suggests this will be resolved in time" (p. 144). 

That is a scary prospect, one that's explored in chapters 5 and 6, mostly with math and logic. (For a starker picture of the smash to come, see the works of James Howard Kunstler, like The Long Emergency (Grove/Atlantic, 2005)). If we understand enough to pivot to "a chaotic but smart approach to evolving our cities" (p. 123), well and good, but if we can't afford to maintain what we have--and Marohn argues persuasively that we can't--some of our built environment is going to have to be abandoned. That is not going to be pretty or pleasant. And politics being what it is, the desirable approach that is locally-driven, rationally-based and community-minded is likely to be swamped by the parochial interests of those with wealth and political power who drove a lot of the expansion in the first place and don't feel now like they're getting subsidized. Those without means, who suffered from white flight and disinvestment, and now are suffering from gentrification, are going to take it in the teeth again, aren't they?

Happily, beginning with chapter 8, Marohn has some more hopeful ideas about managing the future.

Saturday, March 28, 2020

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (II)

Cedar Rapids City Hall
Response to chapters 1 & 2 is here.

Chapters 3 and 4 of Charles L. Marohn's new book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2020) make two critical empirical arguments I'll just touch on here before I get to what I really want to write about. In chapter 4, Marohn deconstructs the case for more infrastructure spending, which relies heavily on the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) to the effect that [a] our current set of roads, bridges, &c. is in poor shape (usually indicated by grades from C to F), and [b] we need to spend X amount of dollars to repair or enhance or replace it, or else [c] we will collectively suffer Y amount of dollars in lost income. (Residents of my town will notice an astonishing similarity to the school district's argument to blow up all but one of our elementary schools.) Marohn points out that X is typically greater than Y, in fact more than double Y in the case he cites, and that it includes unproven assumptions about behavior such as people would be working during the time they spend stuck in congested traffic, or that wider roads wouldn't attract more traffic.

Most of chapter 3 is devoted to explaining what Marohn calls the Municipal Ponzi Scheme (p. 50). Because governments at all levels have built to stimulate future growth instead of accommodating what's already there--discussed in the last installment--we are overbuilt, which means the economic activity in most areas does not generate sufficient tax revenue to pay for maintenance. (See Figures 3-1 and 3-2 as well as his discussion of them.) The only way to make that up is to for new areas to be developed that don't at first need maintenance, so that those real estate taxes can be used elsewhere.
For cities in need of cash, new growth provides it. In the pattern of development we're experimenting with today--one that is government-led, spread out, and mostly homogeneous across the entire continent--new growth gives a local government decades of free cash flow. That makes it easy to understand the natural reaction of city leadership, as well as American society in general, when those liabilities come due and the insolvency starts to bite: pursue more growth. (p. 54)
The discussion can get technical and mathy, but Marohn's prose is quite accessible, and it's well worth the time spent getting through it. Someone's been selling you a bill of goods, and it's good to understand that.

Marohn begins chapter 3 with the controversial proposition that cities should "run a profit" (p. 37). He takes care, after he's shocked us with that, to explain that cities aren't designed to maximize profit, as a business would be, only that in order to run out of money, they have somehow to take in more of it than they spend.

The proposition is shocking because we are used to associating profit with businesses run in the interest of their proprietors, shareholders &c.--as Adam Smith famously wrote, we get our dinner from the baker's and butcher's "regard for their self interest"--while government is attend to the public's wishes and needs with something like the "benevolence" Smith pooh-poohed.

Governments act where there is identifiable market failure--an economic term with a fairly precise definition, although it's applied rather pliably in the real world. At the risk of offending any economist who has read this far, market failures in practice fall into two broad categories:
  • situations where the prerequisites for market behavior do not hold, such as competition among sellers (and buyers), sufficient information for buyers to make a good choice, and excludability i.e. there must be something that can be transferred from the seller's control to the buyer's control for a price. Those prerequisites do not apply in cases of monopoly, complex or changing information about products, or non-excludable things like clean air, national security, and roads. In those cases we can expect government to step in with regulation or direct provision of services.
  • situations where the outcomes of an efficiently-operating market are not politically acceptable, either because everyone is seen as deserving of some good regardless of ability to pay (merit good), or because production or use of something causes harm to other people not involved in the transaction (externalities). Obviously this could apply to almost anything, which alarms political conservatives and should alarm the rest of us, but it traditionally has included things like K-12 education, parks, and libraries. Current controversies over housing, health care, and public broadcasting revolve over whether they are merit goods; controversies over energy production and marijuana legalization focus on their externalities.
Whatever the problem, if there were profits to be made from addressing it, some private actor would have responded to the incentive. So how can governments be expected to run profits responding to political demands the market has certified to be insufficiently profitable?

Marohn isn't, however, expecting cities to maximize value for shareholders (p. 37), only "to endure"(p. 40) which requires it remain financially solvent. Even that is a challenge given the range of tasks local governments take on. Yet, as he pointed out at the outset of the book, cities have been meeting that challenge throughout human history. "Places that were not successful in harmonizing competing interests went away, their failures adding to a reservoir of cultural wisdom on how to build great places" (p. 41). The solution is to take a cautious approach, both to the range of tasks undertaken, and the scope of each task. It is not sufficient to say "people want it" (p. 50)--there must be a reasonable expectation that there will be revenue to meet it.

Because cities, unlike private businesses, cannot normally cease to exist, their behavior should be risk-averse. A business that takes a huge risk might achieve huge success, or it might spectacularly fail, in which case the owners will declare bankruptcy, its employees will eventually get new jobs, and the world will go on pretty much as it had been. Maybe it's true that businesses "will all eventually fail and be replaced by new upstarts" (p. 40). A city that takes a huge risk cannot fail; it can only "linger on, performing its functions poorly, failing to serve--and in some instances, doing harm to--the people that form the community it governs" (p. 38). Remember that next time someone in your town is promoting some "game-changer" scheme.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Strong Towns' Bottom-Up Revolution (I)

51z8+pLtjaL._SX336_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Marohn, Charles L., Jr. Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020. xii + 240 pp.

I don't remember when I first ran across the work of Charles Marohn, who founded Strong Towns as an urbanism advocacy organization in 2009. It was probably around 2013, when I was doing research for a college course on the phenomenon of place, and in the process fell in with new urbanism. I've spent countless hours listening to the Strong Towns podcast, reading (and occasionally contributing to) the blog, and using Strong Towns material in my classes. (The current work will be assigned reading this fall in my Politics of the City course.) In 2015, Corridor Urbanism, the local group I co-founded, hosted Marohn for a public talk in Iowa City and an appearance before county officials in Ely.

Marohn has published collections of his blog posts--I have two of these in my office--but the current book is the first that systematically presents his ideas. Needless to say its publication has been the object of much anticipation in the Strong Towns universe. What follows here is less a review than a reading diary.

The first two chapters of Strong Towns describe the factors that led to the suburban model of development which has dominated American places since World War II, and why that model is proving problematic. The causal factors were political (land values too high in mature cities for new people to achieve success, concerns about returning to a peacetime economy) and financial (plenty of available money as America emerged from the war as the only undamaged power), but also professional hubris (belief that certain experts possessed the formula for building successful places) [pp. 27-30]. This combination of factors promoted and enabled risky behavior, because governments, mostly the U.S. federal government, were taking on the risk instead of local public and private actors. As a result:
Modern development is built all at once and to a finished state, a condition that does not naturally induce the rising land values necessary to drive redevelopment and renewal. We have defeated the stifling constraint of high land values, but in exchange we sacrificed the stability that has been the hallmark of cities throughout time. [p. 30]
In explaining how so many professionals got things so wrong, Marohn draws on the ideas of philosopher Nassim Taleb and physicist Neil Johnson. All three are redolent to me of the 18th century British political writer Edmund Burke, who criticized the rationalism that dominated the world of ideas in the Age of Enlightenment. Burke viewed with alarm proposals to overthrow social institutions in the name rationality; his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1791, anticipated the bloodbath it would become when its rationalism ran smash into reality. His argument, even early on, was that social institutions contained collective wisdom that no individual or group of individuals could approximate. We aren't, in short, as smart as we think we are, and we should approach change with due caution. (For this wisdom he was long known as the "father of conservatism," though given what conservatism has become today he would surely demand a paternity test.)
Image result for edmund burke
Burke
The wisdom collected over time, contained in our social and political arrangements, makes those arrangements "anti-fragile," in Taleb's words (p. 4), when we recognize and respect their "complexity" (Johnson's term, p.12). Early American settlers weren't philosophers or physicists, but living on the competitive edge of existence forced them to understand their situations or go broke (or die). Once financing became readily available, that level of awareness got lost.
The underlying assumption of the American development pattern is an abundance of resources.... We could, as Johnson suggested, act "cleverly or stupidly, and yet still end up with an embarrassment of riches." And we did.... Have a crime problem? Just hire more police.... Have a traffic congestion problem? Just build more lanes.... Are sales at the big box store stagnating? Just close it and build a new one in a better location.... No matter the problem, and no matter how bad it becomes, there is no force compelling us to evolve our habitat, to change the way we live together. [p. 13]
16th Av SW at Williams Blvd, Nov. 2017
We live today with the legacy of the last 75 years of development, and will inevitably pass it on to future generations. In some places, the inhumane design and inability to keep up with maintenance are already obvious from the dilapidated housing and potholes and empty commercial buildings, or from the impossible traffic in a tangle of high-speed "stroads." In other places, where there's enough wealth or at least financial wizardry to keep things pretty, the inherent flaws might not be so obvious. But they are there.

Marohn commends returning to our species' legacy of "small, isolated bets [which are] an opportunity to gain knowledge at low risk.... In fact, it's better to fail early when the stakes are low" (p. 17). But in towns across America, large or small or medium-sized (like mine), the belief remains in an easy fix in some "game-changing" form or other, along with the assumption that a federal grant can be attained to pay for it. We're running out of time to learn this lesson. This book gives Marohn and Strong Towns another crack at teaching it.

Bike lanes are examples of "small bets" that don't cost very much to implement

Monday, March 23, 2020

Book review: Why liberalism failed


Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2018. xix + 225 pp.

It is impossible in these times to read Deneen's book--or read any book, or think or do anything--apart from the context of our pandemic. Why Liberalism Failed can be read through a pandemic hermeneutic, or any hermeneutic, because while addressing himself primarily to the American portion of western civilization, he wisely has not spent too much time addressing specific developments like the presidency of Donald Trump or the evolving Affordable (health) Care Act. So his argument remains universal, and can be read in the light of whatever times it's read in, whether now or a decade or more on.

The core of Deneen's argument is that liberalism has failed because its core of radical individualism has left us unable to meet the demands of the world in which we live. By liberalism he means, not the  contemporary political left as seen in the many plans of Senator Elizabeth Warren, but the centuries-old ideology that grew out of the Enlightenment. In contrast to the aristocratic and theocratic regimes that had predominated through world history to that point, classical liberalism
...conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. Opportunities for liberty were best afforded by a limited government devoted to "securing rights," along with a free-market economic system that gave space for individual initiative and ambition. Political legitimacy was grounded on a shared belief in an originating "social contract" to which even newcomers could subscribe, ratified continuously by free and fair elections of responsive representatives. Limited but effective government, rule of law, an independent judiciary, responsive public officials, and free and fair elections were some of the hallmarks of this ascendant order... (pp. 1-2)
Contemporary western political disputes occur within the confines of this ideology, with the "left" promoting individual autonomy in personal life and the "right" promoting autonomy in economic life. These dimensions of the movements have largely succeeded, says Deneen, while their anti-liberal aspects--state empowerment of the individual through universal education and economic empowerment for the left, preservation of traditional moral values for the right--largely have not (pp. 142-143).
In distinct but related ways, the right and left cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism, although from different perspectives, using different means, and claiming different agendas. This... helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal states--whether in Europe or America--have become simultaneously both more statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches, communities, and even family. (p. 46)
The public triumph of liberal individualism has delegitimized all claims on the individual, paradoxically leaving most people not brimful of power but weak and frustrated. Governments, active in broad areas impossible for John Locke or James Madison to have foreseen, are seen as tools of the wealthy and powerful to maintain their dominance (chs 7 & 8). Consumer goods are widely available, but atomized individuals are powerless against unmitigated market forces that could declare them obsolete at any moment: "Among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress" (p. 29). Education, seen by liberals like Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey as the key to making democratic society possible, has become an extension of the marketplace, where individuals scramble to acquire the marketable skills--mostly "STEM"--they need to attain a modicum of security (ch. 5). Science and technology, which rationalists saw as the means to enlightened solutions to human problems, have themselves been co-opted by governments and powerful private interests (ch. 4).

Deneen is more about diagnosis than prescription, about convincing the unperceptive public that a seeming panoply of problems--political alienation or at best engaged yelling, environmental destruction, economic insecurity, loss of civility, governmental surveillance--are all symptoms of the radical individualism that is produced by unchecked liberalism. And that this situation is doomed to go smash, possibly very soon. "Taken to its logical conclusion, liberalism's end game is unsustainable in every respect: it cannot perpetually enforce order upon a collection of autonomous individuals increasingly shorn of constitutive social norms, nor can it provide endless material growth in a world of limits" (pp. 41-42). American liberals, take note! We can't provide social-economic inclusion and environmental protection without a social order that constrains our individual choices. American conservatives, take note! We can't both put our faith in an unrestrained economic market while perceiving only the obligations that morality places on others.

If Deneen has children, he might tell them that "there's a right way and a wrong way" out of liberalism's unsustainable self-contradictions. The right way involves connecting and empowering local communities. See, you knew eventually I'd get around to urbanism, and now I have!
Such efforts should focus on building practices that sustain culture within communities, the fostering of household economics, and "polis life," or forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation. All such practices arise from local settings that resist the abstraction and depersonalization of liberalism, and from which habits of memory and mutual obligation arise.  (p. 192)
Where do local nonprofits like Legion Arts fit into this analysis?
I am receptive to Deneen’s description of a polity undone by rampant unchecked individualism. I’ve written in much the same vein myself; see this post from 2015. Some days the glass seems half empty, others it seems half full. Even in routine times, it is possible to find evidence from the world around us to support and to refute his argument. Urbanists can testify to the power of the NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard”) phenomenon, the allure of private cars, and how understandable concern for property values limits options for affordable housing. Yet there are also a myriad of voluntary organizations whose members defy the collective action problem to pursue some public good. There is the undeniable draw of civic spaces and third places. And when crises hit, like the Cedar River’s rise in 2016, the helpful response of ordinary citizens is awe-inspiring (see Kaplan 2016).

Both sides of humanity are intensified in the current pandemic. There has been the astonishing run on bathroom tissue among other necessities, gun purchases are up, the array of misinformation and butt-covering starting at the toplevels of government (the Trump administration continues to respond to COVID-19 largely as a problem of public relations), and drivers taking advantage of nearly-empty streets to drive at high speeds. These are happening at the same time medical personnel and paramedics are performing heroically (as are other "essential" workers), ordinary people are by and large attentive to scientific evidence and cooperating with recommendations for “social distancing” and working-from-home, and some are finding innovative ways to support each other across physical separation. In my town Cedar Ridge Distillery and all-purpose entrepreneur Steve Shriver produced batch after batch of hand sanitizer for giveaway, Rustic Hearth Bakery is offering free bread to those in need, singer-songwriter Kimberli Maloy is organizing a city-wide sing-along, and people are sharing ideas about how to support local small businesses. And in our neighborhood, these inspirational chalk drawings appeared over the weekend.


Still, even when we see the glass as half full, we might well ask why in such a far-reaching social crisis it’s only filled halfway?

Eventually, the threat of COVID-19 will recede. Though it will take longer than it did the flood waters in 2016 (or even 2008), when it does recede it will reveal a landscape changed in ways at which we can now only guess. At worst, government and economic elites may be able to use the crisis to expand their power, while those individuals and institutions whose economic vulnerabilities have been exposed by the crisis may never recover. At best, enforced separation might help us understand how much we need and desire the company of others, producing an orgy of empathy and community-building. Or maybe a mix of both, a glass both half empty and half full? Maybe we’ll just be glad to be able to touch our face again without feeling that we’re sealing our own doom.

In any case, Deneen explains why liberalism can’t get us through troubling times. Neither can tribalism, which is pretty much liberalism-in-teams. Only connected communities can do that. As Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns writes, “[D]uring times of distress, leaders—especially at the most adaptable local level—step forward and fill the gaps left by incompetence and inflexibility. We need to support these people because, despite the scariness of the unknown, this is an opportunity to reshape the direction of our entire country. To make our systems more bottom-up and responsive. To make them more humane” (Marohn 2020). Come be an urbanist with me!

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Pandemics and our common life


Florida Governor Ron DeSantis addresses the media (Octavio Jones/Tampa Bay Times, used without permission)

This post was supposed to be a report on my first impressions of St. Petersburg, Florida. It's spring break week at Coe College, and my wife a.k.a. "The Other Doctor Nesmith" had planned a vacation to remember. Then, with the world microbial outlook deteriorating by the day, she pulled the plug last Friday and cancelled our flight and Airbnb. Maybe we could have done it, but was our vacation worth the risk of additional stress on a state that has already had 314 diagnoses including seven deaths from the virus (Sampson 2020)?

So, we're staycationing it, and following advice from doctors and public health officials to minimize contact with other people. It's an unusually anxious staycation/spring break, because we're occupied in figuring out how to carry out our college jobs online: Coe, like most colleges and K-12 schools, is not going to reopen campus after spring break.

Even with the unfolding science fiction movie in which we seem to be living, the relative quiet of spring break has given me leisure to think. Mostly when I think, as anyone knows who's read any of the blog so far, I think about cities. And in the current environment, when I think about cities, I'm worried. (As anyone knows who's read any of the blog so far, I do a lot of that, too.)

I am an urbanist and a communitarian. I am an urbanist because I see the suburban development pattern as fundamentally unsustainable ecologically, financially, or socially. I am a communitarian because I believe our best lives are lived in relationship with others, and not just friends and family but the teeming variety of people around us some of whom we barely know. So my policy responses to most questions come down to stop subsidizing separation and start facilitating inclusion and connection. That isn't quite synonymous with increasing the density of population (see Kaplan 2016), but in most cases means putting humans in closer proximity to each other.

Image result for coronavirus
Source: northcarolinahealthnews.com. Used without permission.

Suddenly proximity and connection are the enemies! In the face of a virus of uncommon virulence, we are urged to keep a safe distance from, well, pretty much everybody. Places of meeting--sports venues, restaurants, bars, coffeehouses, libraries, athletic facilities, schools, churches--have either been ordered closed or have closed voluntarily (Rodriguez 2020). Sidewalks, trails, and civic plazas are not closed, but Americans are being advised to work from home if at all possible, to stay at least six feet away from each other, and not to have more than ten people in one place (Sheikh 2020). You might be young and healthy enough to ward off the virus if you catch it, but "Even people who show only mild symptoms may pass the virus to many, many others — particularly in the early course of the infection, before they even realize they are sick" (Mandavilli 2020). You may well slough this thing off without a fuss, but as a carrier you might also kill someone's grandma.

The coronavirus has brought a moral imperative to every decision. Should I go to my office, or work from home? My books are at my office, but I can move the ones I need, and I can do most of what I need to do using the Internet--must do what I need to do on the Internet, because I won't be seeing my students again this semester. On the other hand, I have my own office, in which no one so far has come to see me, so maintaining "social distance" is a snap. I'm here for now, though I've organized myself to move the operation to my house at a moment's notice.

Few things say urbanism like public transportation. I can walk to work, and usually do, but will drive or take the bus if I have things to do in other parts of town--like working out at the YMCA. So, do I contribute to a potential crowd on the bus, or contribute to climate change? Monday the risk I decided to reduce was spreading the virus, and I drove to the Y. But it's unsettling to think the virus is forcing us back into our cars and trucks and SUVs. By today it became a moot point, as the Y is closed indefinitely following the Governor's order. (Meanwhile, the buses are running for free, but are allowing no more than ten riders at a time--another reason for me to leave it for the people who really need it.)

Community gathers at the Balloon glow at Brucemore Natonal Historic Site
I worry that the pandemic is feeding our fears of the other, and that it will reinforce whatever individualist drives make us want to spend society's money to create distance and barriers between us and them. President Trump, who has built his political career exploiting social divisions, doesn't help when he calls it the "Chinese virus" (Forgey 2020). Is this the end of the urbanist dream of people living and interacting in relatively close quarters? Close quarters make for a fertile feeding ground for a virus like this. It's not coincidental that a city like Seattle was the first American hotspot, and densely populated New York and San Francisco have struggled to contain it. Joe Cortright
notes:
The particular irony of a viral disease like Covid-19 is that it is so closely related to a city’s core function:  bringing people together. The flourishing civic commons that brings people from all over China to [cities like Wuhan] for the Lunar New Year, or which makes cities like Seattle closely connected to a global community, are exactly the characteristics that expose them to greatest risk. (It’s little surprise that West Virginia is the last US state to be infected with Covid-19.)
Is this evidence that close quarters are dangerous, and that advocates of subdivisions, gated communities, snout houses, single-occupancy cars, and interstate highway widening were right all along?

(Yet you know what group we're not talking about that is most at risk from community transmission because they're crammed into those evil, squalid detention centers? The themmest of the them, stuck behind the barrierest barrier. The centers are stupid, too: The refugees can't get out, but the virus sure can.)

The optimistic option is that the pandemic, and the enforced isolation it requires, show us how much we need each other. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni notes, "At the very moment when many of us hunger most for the reassurance of company and the solace of community, we’re hustled into isolation" (Bruni 2020). Strong Towns blogger Daniel Herriges reminds us that despite the dangers of cities, their advantages remain strong:
The city is a marvel, a creation as uniquely human as the ant hill or beaver dam is to their respective architects. Its most marvelous trait is the way that cities concentrate and amplify human ingenuity and initiative and compassion, and allow us to do greater things together than we could alone.
They cultivate in us, too, a sense of shared destiny, of belonging to something greater than ourselves. Witness the stories of citizens of Siena, Italy, singing together from their balconies during quarantine: not just any song, but a patriotic anthem about Siena itself.
We don’t build cities for today, next year, or this decade. We build to leave something much greater behind us when we go.
And Cortright again:
When cities work well, its because, in all their spaces, they overcome or bridge social distance. That’s true whether we’re talking public spaces and the civic commons, like parks and libraries, or whether we’re talking the nominally private spaces where we socialize and interact with others (bars, restaurants, workplaces). The reason we find social distancing so difficult, and so off-putting is that it runs counter to so much of what makes life, especially city life, worthwhile.
When all this is over, whenever that is, maybe our pent-up need for human contact will lead us to do more than rush back to the familiar bunch at the office, the health club, or church. Maybe we'll come to recognize that the humans we missed seeing included that person you pass every once in awhile who dwells at the edge of your consciousness. Maybe our appetite for social contact will lead us to recognize that we've all this time been part of a community that was larger and more diverse than we'd ever imagined, and we'll look for ways to strengthen those ties?

From Italy, so far the hardest-hit country in the West by the virus, Pope Francis urged Italians to "small gestures of affection" for each other, particularly those afflicted. "These gestures of tenderness, affection, compassion, are minimal and tend to be lost in the anonymity of everyday life, but they are nonetheless decisive, important” (Lavanga and Talmazan 2020). Important words now, and important words for the post-pandemic era, too.


SEE ALSO:
Frank Bruni, "Why the Coronavirus Is So Much Worse Than Sept. 11," New York Times, 17 March 2020
Joe Cortright, "Cities and Coronavirus: Some Thoughts," City Observatory, 18 March 2020
Russell Arben Fox, "The Coronavirus in Kansas: The First Week," In Media Res, 18 March 2020
Daniel Herriges, "Let's Not Forget What We Build Cities For," Strong Towns, 18 March 2020
Jane Claspy Nesmith, "Swimming the Pandemic," Journal of a Plague Year, 18 March 2020 [first in a series of ongoing reflections]
Steven Shultis, "Hello from the Other Side," Rational Urbanism, 15 March 2020
[ADDED LATER:] Marc Sollinger, "How the Coronavirus Will Shape Our Cities," Innovation Hub, 27 March 2020 [interview with Richard Florida]

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Early Bird Cafe closes

Interior, Early Bird Cafe (from their website)
The Early Bird Cafe, a favorite of customers since 2011, ceased operations at the close of business Friday. Owner Brooke "Top Chickadee" Fitzgerald announced on their Facebook page February 11:
Over the last year or so I have been removed somewhat from day to day operations in order to transition and pursue my commercial real estate career with Skogman. The universe once again, has put something in front of me as a vehicle to accomplish more with my life on this earth. In the time of reflection that I have had stepping away, I have realized my time with the Early Bird is complete. I’ve reached the full potential of what I alone am able to do with it. This chapter of my life is coming to an end in order to start a new chapter.... The last day for the Early Bird will be Friday, March 6th. We will be closing our doors at close of business that day and flying the nest. Onto the next chapter of life starlings, my best wishes for your success and abundance, Top Chickadee with gratitude, signing off.
The first Early Bird location was in the Town Centre Building at 316 2nd Street SE, downstairs from Shive-Hattery Architecture. It took me awhile to warm up to it, as my initial impression of coffee places tends to depend on whether they have baked goods bigger than my head. So, I sniffed in the survey of local coffee I did on Facebook that year, the cupcakes from the Wright Touch were "small and twee."

The Early Bird's Town Centre location, May 2013
In time, though, the treats got bigger and my mind got broader. In particular I liked the artsy energy that infused the place, possibly due to visits by performers from the Paramount Theater across the street, or maybe the whimsical decor brilliantly done by Fitzgerald's brother Aaron Murphy. In the spring of 2013 I was spending a lot of time downtown and it had become my favorite downtown coffee shop: "The managers are good-humored, even goofy," I wrote in an early post on this blog, "and the atmosphere is the most pleasant and relaxed." It felt like a place to hang out more than a shop for downtown workers to rush through.

So I held my breath in fall 2016 when the Early Bird moved into the Smulekoff Furniture building on the river side of 1st Street.
Approaching the Early Bird, last day of business, March 2020
I need not have worried. The new layout was open and inviting, a refuge from whatever business brought you downtown as well as a place to run into people you know. (This is a common element of locally-owned coffeehouses of my acquaintance, while chains tend to put people into private inaccessible booths.)
View as you enter
Approaching the counter
So I'll miss the Early Bird. There are other fine coffee places downtown, but I'll miss its many quirks. I'll miss holding downtown open coffee meetups there. I'll miss the delicious coffee, I'll miss the $1 refills which got me through any morning, I'll miss the scones which would have been big enough even to satisfy 2011 me, I'll miss the yogurt parfaits which were made fresh on the spot. I'll miss Stacey Walker or Brad Hart or Bill Michaeel or Emily Meyer coming through while I was there. I'll even miss this giraffe, which seemed pleased at my attending to my hydration and caffeination needs.

I hope the Smulekoff building gets another tenant soon--for that matter, I hope the Town Centre does, too. There's a lot going on in downtown Cedar Rapids, which has proven it can support a decent variety of establishments. The variety will only improve if the residential population attains the critical mass necessary to support a 24-hour downtown.

But the combination of business acumen and artsy sensibility needed to support a truly distinctive shop is rare indeed. Hats off to you, Brooke Fitzgerald, and best wishes in your future endeavors. Since those endeavors seem oriented to commercial real estate--she is employed at Skogman Realty--I hope she will promote the sort of development that supports locally-owned businesses with their own memorable quirks.
Timely advice. But always good advice.
SEE ALSO: Ben Kaplan, "Downtown Cedar Rapids' Coffee Shops Ranked," Corridor Urbanism, 3 February 2019. (Spoiler alert: Early Bird was tied for 1st.)


Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Day

  It seems I'm always ready for March to bring Indian Creek Nature Center 's annual maple syrup festival, even when the last two mon...