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Main Street, Galena, Illinois (photo by Robert Manson)

Bob Manson's latest entry on his terrific blog survey of independent bookstores, The Indie Blog Spot, takes him to Galena Book and Paper in downtown Galena, Illinois. Bob describes at as "a very comfortable space... a beautiful, well-lit store with a creaky wooden floor" in "an excellent location, nestled on Main Street alongside many other fine local businesses."

Bob's picture of downtown Galena is arresting. It shows a highly walkable district with numerous mostly local businesses in historic buildings that have been purposed and repurposed many times. Go up the bluff about two blocks and you're in a residential neighborhood, making Main Street eminently walkable albeit crowded during peak tourist season. Ironically, it was made possible because when the river town fell on hard times, it couldn't afford to tear down its old buildings, until eventually they became attractions. Galena's Main Street, along with historic downtown Dubuque, are the two most widely-known of their type in the region, perennial tourist magnets, and have been models for other towns (including New Bohemia and Uptown Marion).

So its success has led to replication, but largely as tourist districts. All of the districts named above have independent bookstores, and good coffeeshops, but no grocery or hardware stores. (There are specialty food stores on Main Street, but locals buy their groceries at the Piggly Wiggly with the gigantic parking lot in an unwalkable location on the edge of town.) Schools are rare. (Yay, Marion.) These are places to visit, not to live. Residential choices remain largely between houses in single-use residential districts, high-end condos, and low-end rentals.

It's possible that Main Street Galena and New Bo only attract people for the experience of an afternoon, but we seem loath to try urbanism on any scale, with the partial exceptions of small college towns (e.g. Decorah, Fairfield, Mt. Vernon). If people find showplace urbanism attractive for shopping and dining, why wouldn't at least some of them want to live in organic urbanism?

I think this house will be o.k.

 

It's not often my neighborhood makes the news, but last week the Board of Adjustment was called in to grant a zoning waiver to a house on my very block. The house pictured above, built in 1930, was crushed by an uprooted tree during the August 2020 derecho storm. Earlier this year, the wreckage was cleared away, and now the owners are rebuilding. The lot is 50 feet wide and 140 feet deep.

The first thing you notice about version 2.0 is the garage. The former garage was behind the house, with an alley access. Now there will be a garage that faces the street, with driveway access. This comes dangerously close to the "snout house" design I criticized in October 2016 for infill housing in Oakhill-Jackson. 

It is true that the garage is typically not the loveliest part of the house, and that no other house in our neighborhood has this feature. Even those houses nearby that have driveway access to the street have their garages behind the house. More substantively, as Daniel Herriges (2020) argues, the design creates two problems for any neighborhood: By putting the part where people live behind the garage, it takes away the "eyes on the street" that make pedestrians feel safe, and takes away the signs of human activity that make for an interesting walk.

The traditional city is a sort of social compact. It adheres to certain rules of design not because of aesthetic conformism, but because they produce an environment that is pro-social. The public realm enriches the buildings that front it, and the buildings enrich the public realm.

A front-loading garage, a blank wall, an absent or hard-to-find front door, an over-tall fence around a property: these things spit in the face of that social compact. They send the message, "My world is made up of my private space and the other private spaces I travel to and spend time in." (Herriges 2020)

There is the additional matter that this design feature is prohibited under our town's recently adopted form-based code, as we are "traditional residential-1," at least on that side of the street. (See pp. 215-216.) For that reason the plans were rejected by the Planning Commission, before they were restored on appeal to the Board of Adjustment. Why have a zoning code at all, or a Planning Commission, if we are just going to toss them out as soon as they are challenged by an experienced development team?

That having been said, I'm okay with the outcome. The design of the new house is less aggressive than a lot of the snout houses in subdivisions around our town, and as one of my neighbors noted, it will have a covered front porch and cedar shingles. As troubling as the practice of making zoning exceptions is, I'd have been very o.k. if the owners had decided to build a small store, or a bar, or "missing middle" housing, all of which our neighborhood could use, even if the form deviated from the code. Finally, the clincher is that the owners of the old house are maintaining ownership. If they'd sold the lot to a developer, I'd probably feel differently.

Meanwhile, builders are at work digging the new foundation...

...which is the most excitement our block has seen in a long time. Really, I think this house will be o.k.

Iowa Takes Aim at Voting

 

Jane votes, fall 2020 (Photo by Jane Nesmith)

For this nation to remain true to its principles, we cannot allow any American's vote to be denied, diluted or defiled. The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties, and we will not see its luster diminished.--RONALD REAGAN, November 7, 1981

Amid awful suffering and deteriorating conditions, Texas Republicans decided to fight a culture war. In doing so, they are emblematic of the national party, which has abandoned even the pretense of governance in favor of the celebration of endless grievance.--JAMELLE BOUIE, February 19, 2021

Hold our beer, Texas! We have grievances, too! 

Iowa's legislature is in session, which means the usual silliness is being debated and passed while our rural areas depopulate, we have one of the highest rates of COVID deaths in the country, and individuals and businesses struggle with economic recovery. Among the bills making it through the first "funnel"--Iowa has a part-time legislature with a three-month session, so bills must meet certain deadlines to remain under consideration--are prohibitions against traffic cameras, sanctions on social media companies that "censor" conservatives, scholarships to private K-12 schools, allowing the carrying of guns without a permit (unless you're riding an e-scooter), adding gun rights to the state constitution, a constitutional amendment declaring no right to abortion, ending faculty tenure at state universities, and cutting off funds to cities that "defund" their police departments. 

The most recent piece of legislation produced by this august body aims at protecting the sensitive feelings of white men during discussions of racism and sexism (Sostaric 2021b). It specifically bars school curricula or government agency diversity training that "teach, advocate, act upon, or promote divisive concepts." Among concepts declared to be divisive is "that the U.S. or State of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist." Systemic racism is a serious issue--see Alston 2020, Koh 2017, and numerous other thoughtful takes--which the Iowa legislature is taking on in the silliest way possible.

Three bills that might have a positive economic impact are tax relief for individuals and businesses that have received COVID assistance; a substantial appropriation for broadband expansion; and requiring more ethanol to be sold at service stations. The rest is pure candy for those who like Iowa the way it was, whatever that was. House Minority Leader Todd Pritchard noted, "the Governor and majority party's agenda so far this session has been too focused on divisive bills that will make Iowa's recovery even more difficult.... With Iowa's workforce shortage and aging population, anytime Iowa lawmakers send messages that make Iowa look unwelcoming to others is bad for business and Iowa's future." Some even dumber stuff didn't make it through the funnel, but we can hope for next year!

However, as I said, this is pretty much what we've come to expect from our legislature of late: sundry slings and arrows at anyone who doesn't look or act like 1950s Iowa. But, this year...

This year, we're adding making it harder to vote. Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill March 8 that moves up the deadline for arrival of absentee ballots regardless of when they were mailed, moves back the availability of absentee ballots and early in-person voting to half the time it was before 2017, outlaws mass mailing of absentee ballot request forms (an expedient used during the 2020 pandemic that might not have been repeated anyway), allows each county to have exactly one absentee ballot drop box, requires only the voter to drop off the absentee ballot, and makes disobedience by county officials a criminal offense (Sostaric 2021a). Provisions prohibiting mailing of absentee ballot applications, as well as further shortening the early-voting period were removed on the House floor. The bill was opposed by the Iowa State Association of County Auditors.

This direction is wrong on so many levels: It is part of a concerted effort by Republican legislators across America to make voting more difficult ("State Voting Bills Tracker 2021"). It is by any objective standard an overreaction to concerns about election security, it legitimizes former President Donald J. Trump's five years of baseless complaints that his opponents were cheating, and it disproportionately affects some social groups. Poor and working-class people, racial minorities, people who live in urban areas, and single parents are more likely to find this a hardship. That is what should alarm advocates of community. A common life requires that all be heard, that everyone no matter how humble have the opportunity to be part of the collective conversation. The right to participate is therefore fundamental. This law, passed by one party that represents one demographic (albeit a traditionally dominant one), strikes at the very heart of that. 

The legislative majority annually speaks volumes about who counts and who doesn't in Iowa. This year, they've gone farther, to restrict who can be heard.

SEE ALSO: Erin Murphy, "New Iowa Law Limits Early and Absentee Voting," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 9 March 2021, 1A, 9A

Iowa statehouse (Source: Wikimedia commons)