10th anniversary post: Is a baseball complex a (merit) good?

 

Source: Google Maps

In the summer of 2014, I wrote a reaction to news of state and local government contributions to a new baseball complex outside of Marion. At the time, the state had provided a $1.266 million grant, the City of Marion $750,000, and Linn County had donated the land. Ultimately, according to the operation's webpage, Prospect Meadows secured $5.5 million in public funding, about half the startup cost of the project ("Our Story" n.d.).

At the time I was less impressed by the audacious scope of the project than by the very ordinariness of the public-private transaction. There hadn't seemed to be a lot of controversy or even discussion about the governments donating to the creation of a private business. Yet, in a world (Earth) where government budgets at all levels are stressed, and in which market efficiency is praised as an alternative to governmental inefficiency, this was a lot of money to spend without examining the very basis of the expenditure. I quoted Adam Smith on public works, which are necessary but properly...

can be made only where that commerce requires them, and consequently where it is proper to make them (Wealth of Nations, V.i.iii, Art.1)

and Strong Towns on providing existing businesses with technical assistance rather than handouts to selected ventures, which would include baseball complexes and our current obsession, data centers:

[B]y the way, we'll still be bringing jobs and new businesses in from outside the community. The only difference will be that we won't be paying them to come--they will want to be here. If we are successful--and we will be--they will be paying us to come here. (Marohn 2012: pt.2)

Prospect Meadows began operation in 2019, right before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic--certainly not the most auspicious year for any business, though it did receive over $2.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act money (King 2024: 7A).

Now comes word that the firm is asking governments for additional money to pay off debts. Projections of future revenue remain optimistic, but they have not been hitting their targets, and the well-connected, well-funded management of Prospect Meadows have reached out again. In September, the Linn County Board of Supervisors approved a $250,000 grant contingent on additional funding being raised by the firm. The City of Cedar Rapids, whose city limits are about 10 miles from this complex on the other side of the City of Marion, will consider advancing $300,000 that would eventually go to Prospect Meadows from the city's hotel-motel tax fund (King 2024: 1A). 

Local governments are stuck in an unenviable position, because the risk in this venture has already been socialized. As Linn County Supervisor Louis Zumbach points out, "If it isn't a ball field, what does it become? Any other use is going to cost more money" (King 2024: 7A).

The Lingering Question: Is Government Support for Prospect Meadows Responding to a Market Failure?

In a mostly-market system such as America's, government's role is to act when the private market is not meeting some need. This contingency is known as market failure, which admittedly [a] has a certain pejorative sound to it, unintended, but there it is; and [b] is a vague and plastic concept. You will see market failure where I don't, and vice versa. Not wrong, just different. 

Market failures come in a variety of forms but fall into two broad types. Sometimes the conditions for a market don't exist for a good, like clean air (not excludable) or food safety (buyers have insufficient information) or some monopoly (insufficient competition). Other times all of those conditions exist, but the outcomes are politically unacceptable, like recessions (very unpleasant and scary) or access to parks (everyone deserves this regardless of ability to pay). Market transactions can have externalities, effects that fall on people other than the buyer or seller; these can be negative (pollution) or positive (better educated people in your community). There's much more to this, of course, but we are busy people; if you want to know more, take a course in economics.

Prospect Meadows has been making two market failure arguments for public support. One is based on services they can provide to people who would otherwise lack those opportunities. The Kiwanis Miracle League provides baseball games, equipment and uniforms to physically or mentally disabled young people. The Optimist League of Dreams serves 2nd-5th graders whose families were displaced by the 2008 flood.

The second argument is that players and their families traveling to baseball showcases bring an infusion of money into the local economy through hotel stays and restaurant meals. This is the rationale for financial contributions to Prospect Meadows from distant Cedar Rapids. Board chair Tim Strellner claims Prospect Meadows created over $11 million in local economic impact in 2022, resulting in $1 million in tax payments to local governments (King 2024: 7A). That's out of a gross domestic product for Linn County of nearly $20 billion (FRED).

Allowing for some exaggeration, would that economic activity not have occurred but for the showcases offered by Prospect Meadows? Would the several dozen children been inactive but for the opportunities of their programming? Probably no to both questions, but that's the justification for massive government support for this venture.

Conclusions

Government support for Prospect Meadows over the last decade, and continuing into the next one, likely owes more to personal connections, and the tendency of policy makers to be impressed by big splashy plans. I wish we could be more principled: no government money unless a market failure is conclusively demonstrated. I wish the public would be more allergic to situations where profits are private but risk is socialized. 

$300,000 is admittedly a small part of the city's FY25 budget of nearly $900 million. It's only worth mentioning as one probably common case of expenditure that socializes what should be private risk. Collectively these expenditures have opportunity costs, because money spent thusly can't go to street repair or housing assistance or park equipment. None of those will gin up business for our hotels, but that shouldn't be the business of government. They would enable the daily lives of residents, and that should be the business of government.

NEW SOURCE: Grace King, "Prospect Meadows Complex Seeks Public Aid," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 18 September 2024, 1A, 7A

The Suburbanization of New Bohemia

900 3rd St SE: Loftus Lofts (186 units) under construction

(9/17/2024) The New Bohemia neighborhood, located on the east side of the Cedar River south of downtown, was largely decimated by the 2008 flood. What had once been an industrial area with some working class housing and artists' studios suddenly became a tabula rasa. When I started spending serious time here in 2016, several historic buildings had been functionally rehabbed, joined by the New Bo City Market in a former factory-warehouse, and the newly constructed Geonetric building. There was also a great deal of open space. 

1014 2nd St SE, 2012: Where the Row Houses are now
(Google Earth screenshot)

That space, so close to the city center, was going to be filled with something, though for years what that something would be was up to the viewer's imagination. So it was possible for to look out over an area dominated by bars and hair salons and touristy shops, and imagine an emerging urban village, where a diversity of residents would find all the necessities of life as well as food and entertainment within convenient walking distance. There was a time when it seemed a highly likely outcome. It wasn't there yet, but that was okay, because New Bohemia was very much a work in progress.

Big plans for New Bohemia: 2019 Action Plan, p. 40

It's still a work in progress, and ten years from now it will still be a work in progress, so we are far from pronouncing a final verdict, even as some of that open space gets filled up. Quite a few residential units, mostly apartments and condominiums, have responded to the gap in housing, with more in process or proposed. 

Adaptive reuse:
Water Tower Place Condominiums, 900 2nd St SE

 

 

Compatible construction:
Row Houses on Second, 1008-1018 2nd St SE

The Cedar Rapids Gazette, in one of the last stories by ace reporter Marissa Payne (cited below), listed a number of ideas in circulation for some of the remaining lots in New Bohemia:

900 3rd St SE: Loftus Lumber site under construction by Conlon Construction, to be five-story mixed-used property including 186 market-rate apartments ranging from studio to (two) two-story lofts. [In the Action Plan, the 10th Avenue side is projected to be a "shared space street."]

Loftus Building, taken from the Cherry Building

1000 block of 2nd St SE: Conlon Construction proposed a 150-room hotel plus 10 townhomes between 2nd Street and the river, across the street from the Row Houses, on what is now part of a long parking lot. [In the Action Plan, this land is projected for apartments.]

Future hotel site? The federal courthouse is in the background

116 16th Av SE: Darryl High wants to build Vesnice, consisting of one six-story residential building (63 units) facing the river and one four-story mixed use building facing 2nd St with 22 residential units above 1443 sq ft of commercial space. [In the Action Plan, this land is projected for apartments.]

1600 and 1700 blocks of 2nd St SE: Chad Pelley has bought land (from Brett "Bo Mac" McCormick), and intends to purchase additional city-owned parcels on both sides of 2nd Street.

View from the riverside trail of the property under construction, 
New Bo Lofts in the distance

Pelley hopes to build a mixed-use development that's heavy on owner-occupied units. Before he acts, he told the Gazette, "I definitely want buy-in from this neighborhood. What are we missing?" [In the Action Plan, this land is projected for townhouses. 2nd Street will be extended beyond the current cul-de-sac to an unnamed cross street, which will run to 4th Street, past a planned Sinclair Plaza.]

Looking towards the river from the cul-de-sac at the end of 2nd St,
National Czech and Slovak Museum in the distance

Besides these, the Matyk Building, which until recently housed the delightful but financially unsustainable Bohemian (1029 3rd Street SE), is up for sale. Asking price is over $700,000, about double the assessed value. Maybe the hope is someone sees the future value of that land surging? And uses it to build... what? (The only reason I can think of that someone would pay double the assessed value for a property is because they believe it would bring more value with a more intensive use.) 

For sale: Matyk Building

While 1st Avenue East empties out, building and occupying are going gangbusters in New Bohemia. Demand is clearly here, not there. Marissa Payne in the Gazette attributes that to "[t]he NewBo District's arts and cultural scene, entertainment options and a mix of restaurants." Community Development Director Jennifer Pratt told the Gazette: "It is a continuation of what we've seen since the reinvestment after the 2008 flood.... We definitely saw in the market that people were interested in walkable neighborhoods. That has just continued to grow" (Payne 2024).

☁

Friends of New Bohemia are beginning to express anxiety about all the development. A lot of the newest construction has been of the cookie-cutter variety, and some of the proposals are relatively huge. Given that a lot of New Bo's allure relates to its historical character, it should be a no-brainer to insist on compatible form. In the words of the city's Assistant Community Development Director Adam Lindenlaub, "There's an aspect of character that is unique here that you don't see in other parts of the city" (Payne 2024). Beyond that, though, you don't own your view, and when all is working well, the core neighborhoods will be the densest and most valuable in the city.

Inevitably, a lot of the concerns about development in New Bohemia center on parking, particularly for major events. If parking is used by residents, where are the rest of supposed to park? they ask. Sigh. It should no longer be debatable that parking is the enemy of vibe, not to mention wasteful of city finances and land) and no place with plenty of parking is worth visiting (see, for example, Grabar 2023). In this car-dependent city, though, we always imagine ourselves one surface parking lot away from paradise.

Is this heaven? No, but it has a lot of parking!
(New Bohemia on Google Earth, 2019)

And yet, the parking-concerned are not wrong to sense an issue, because New Bohemia has developed in a way that is heavily dependent on traffic from outside, which in the vast majority of cases is going to arrive by personal car. (So has Downtown. Don't even start me on the casino, which the Gazette reports is now Miss America-approved.)

This, then is the real issue: New Bohemia, though still a work in progress, has become a suburb. It is "walkable," to recall Pratt's description, but only for entertainment, and even then walkers must contend with many moving vehicles in search of the same entertainment. Other than that it is a bedroom community. The Czech Village/New Bohemia Main Street District claimed 250 businesses in 2022, but few are significant employers. Schools, groceries, hardware, and pharmacies are far away, and bus service is spotty. There isn't a park (though the west side Greenway will be close by once it's built).

Stoney Point, August 2013: More houses, fewer apartments and bars

The only difference between New Bohemia and, say, the world of Leave It to Beaver, is most of New Bo's housing is multifamily and there are a lot of bars. Maybe too many? The closures of Chrome Horse and Bo Mac's are possibly signs that such an economic monoculture is not sustainable, particularly when bigger newer bars (like Big Grove in Kingston) inevitably come along.

With apologies to Andres Duany, the transect in Cedar Rapids starts with commercial playgrounds in the center, surrounded by a moat of emptiness (MedQuarter, I-380, parking lots for the impending casino); beyond these are residential areas, where getting almost anywhere requires a car. Beyond those are greenfields, waiting to be subdivisions, or part of a wider I-380. Maybe all this was inevitable, but it is indeed regrettable. At least the city should stop subsidizing more of this sort of development.

SOURCE: Marissa Payne, "New Development Coming to NewBo," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7 September 2024, 1A, 10A

SEE ALSO: "More New, Less Bo?" 4 July 2022

"Where are the Metro's Destinations Heading?" 28 July 2021

"Bridging the Bridge," 26 June 2019

"Envisioning CR I: A 24-Hour Downtown," 1 March 2015

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post named the former owner of the Matyk Building. It has been updated, with passive voice being used.

The gentleman-urbanist confronts cyber-threats

(swiped from sadefenza.blogspot.com)

I am surprisingly old, faithful readers, old enough in fact to remember the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union possessed enough nuclear weaponry to destroy all human life multiple times (as if once wouldn't be bad enough?). My response to this ever-present danger was to ignore it, because there was seemingly nothing I could do to change it, except to sign a nuclear freeze petition, which seemed and seems rather ineffectual. According to former Assistant Secretary of Energy Thomas P. Grumbly (2021), there are still too many nukes, and I'm still ignoring them, all 13,400 of them.

(L to R) Paul Ness, Alexis Diediker, Aaron Voss, Colin Gage

I was thinking about my life under nuclear threat while attending a panel on cybersecurity that was part of the Cedar Rapids Gazette's Business Breakfast Series. The panel--Paul Ness of Foliance, Alexis Diediker of Pro Circular, Aaron Voss of True North, and Colin Gage of Farmers State Bank--discussed "Lessons Learned from a Global Tech Outage," specifically the CrowdStrike incident of July 19. Do you remember that? I'm ashamed to say I'd already forgotten it. Maybe if I'd been flying anywhere that day?

July 19 was caused by faulty software, not malefactors, though there are plenty of malefactors out there. All panel members are involved in some way or other in protecting firms and other institutions from the effects of hacking and other dangers of our cyberconnected world. (Diediker has the intriguing job of penetration tester i.e. she tests organizations' systems for both technical and human vulnerabilities.) As a non-technical gentleman-urbanist, I don't think I'm unusual in leaving cybersecurity up to our friends in information technology, except to complain about multifactor authentication and security awareness training they make us do. Math is hard, and I've got urbanism things to do. (Worth pondering: If Google, which owns Blogger, ever disappears, this blog is disappearing with it.)

One could say, correctly, that I am not paying enough attention to the threats to my own as well as my organization's security posed by cyberthreats. After all, one tech outage can ruin your whole day. The panel called for better communication between "the basement and the boardroom" (Voss's phrase) and for that matter, the rest of the organization as well. Gage referred to "a balancing act" between connectivity and security, and while the technically trained are best equipped to enact that balancing, everyone should understand the basics of how that balance is struck.

If we can under-attend to risks, we can also over-attend to them. One of the factors that has driven the suburban development pattern for the last eight decades has been the perception that urban centers are dangerous and it is wise to spare no expense to get away from them. That has increased social isolation, individual health problems, and traffic crashes (which kill many more people annually than do guns). We can build fences, buy guns and/or post signs saying we're not afraid to use them, take pictures of everyone who passes by, buy larger and larger vehicles, and never go outside--I've encountered all of these in Cedar Rapids--but at what cost to our common life and our own souls?

After the panel, a fellow at my table who'd found out I teach political science asked if there wasn't a danger that the Federal Reserve Board has a plan to use digital currency to enable the government to control our lives? Maybe there is. I can't prove there isn't. But as an entrepreneur, he is in far more danger of a financial catastrophe from a health problem or a cyberattack than he is of the government controlling his life. To deny the government a role in economic stabilization or health care access is to play a far riskier game.

There's a psychology to risk assessment that I only dimly understand. Allowing for phenomena like discounting future impacts, or greater concern for potential losses than potential gains--two common human traits that bedevil urbanist initiatives--it's not easy to predict why some people find some risks terrifying while ignoring or discounting others. I know I've become less self-protective over time, and more concerned about human connection, and I don't even understand why that is.

Maybe the first challenge is to understand the nature of risks. For one thing, as long as we're alive we can't avoid them. We can try to achieve an informed understanding of them, and to give them the attention they deserve, and not overlook the tradeoffs involved in over-focusing on certain risks at the expense of others. (Risk reduction always involves tradeoffs. My Uncle Dwight used to tell a joke about a fellow who quit smoking and replaced the habit with chewing toothpicks, until the guy died of Dutch elm disease.) We can understand the ethics of self-protectively pushing risks onto others. Mostly we can keep in mind the goal of living the best life, which as Aristotle reminds us, is life lived in common.

10th anniversary post: Homes, home churches, and hometowns

 

After Hours Denver is still going!
(Source: afterhoursdenver.org)

We have big holes in our social fabric.--RICHARD WEISSBOURD, Making Caring Common (Shaer 2024)

(9/2/2024) Ten years ago, a pastor's reference to an unconventional church in Denver, Colorado, that meets in bars and focuses on feeding hungry people, led me to reflect on the concept of "home" as applied to houses of worship, living spaces, and towns. But by the end of the piece, I had pivoted to talking about connection: Does the way we create homes of all types, in this era of suburban development, exclude others and isolate ourselves? Belonging is important, but so is connection, and maybe connection is essential to belonging.

Recently there has been a lot of attention to individual loneliness as a public problem, as opposed to a personal one. Loneliness has negative effects on physical health comparable to serious cigarette smoking including raising blood pressure, high cholesterol, and even risk of Alzheimer's disease (Magen 2018, Birak and Cuttler 2017); perhaps this is because connection to others encourages more healthy behavior, but also possibly because the presence of other people can mitigate stress which has its own negative health effects (Holt-Lunsted, Smith and Layton 2010). This goes for mental as well as physical health: loneliness is associated with greater risk of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts (Fu 2020). 

Besides preventing harms to individuals, interactions of various types--ranging from intimate to random--benefit the whole community. Jane Jacobs's landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities is rooted in her observation that it's all those random human interactions that form the basis for community ties: 

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eyeing the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. ([1961] 1993: 73; cf. also Calthorpe and Fulton 2001: 32-34)

For cities, the walkable design and third places that facilitate interactions also support economic activity and financial strength. "Walkable places are thriving places," said Jeff Speck at Cedar Rapids's City Services Center in March 2015. A 2015 study of three cities found:

[S]treets with a mix of old and new buildings have [both] greater population density and more businesses per commercial square foot than streets with large, new buildings... [T]hese areas also have significantly more jobs per commercial square foot... [N]eighborhoods with a smaller-scaled mix of old and new buildings host a significantly higher proportion of new businesses, as well as more women and minority-owned businesses than areas with predominantly larger, newer buildings.... [O]lder, smaller buildings house significantly greater concentrations of creative jobs per square foot of commercial space. ("Older, Smaller, Better" 2014: 4)

Jan and Ingrid Gehl noticed the same phenomena in their observations in Italy during the 1960s, which came to inform Jan Gehl's designs for Copenhagen (Montgomery 2013: 146-150). Kim Samuel (2015), McGill professor and founder of the Belonging Forum, argues that by contrast cities designed around cars inhibit social connection, especially (but not only) for people with disabilities and the elderly.

Building for belonging can mean designing cities for the varied dimensions of people’s lives, with mixed-use environments that integrate opportunities to shop, work, learn and relax; where neighbourhoods are walkable, people of different ages and incomes are mixed together, and natural prospects for connection exist, from pedestrian zones to public parks to farmers’ markets. (Samuel 2015)

Samuel also commends attention to the quality of housing, and respecting local knowledge. (See also Montgomery 2013: 56-58; he titles this section "The Lonely Everywhere.")

But people can also experience urban areas as hideous parodies of belonging and connection, where the bad effects of loneliness are even magnified. When Olivia Laing (2016) first moved to Brooklyn, she found no sense of belonging and only intrusive connections:

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn't anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about a stained or threadbare piece of clothing....

Outside the window, people threw dinner parties. The man upstairs listened to jazz and show tunes at full blast, and filled the hallways with pot smoke, snaking fragrantly down the stairs. Sometimes I spoke to the waiter in my morning cafe, and once he gave me a poem, typed neatly on thick white paper. But mostly I didn't speak. Mostly I was walled up inside myself, and certainly a very long way from anyone else. I didn't cry often, but once I couldn't get the blinds closed and then I did. It seemed too awful, I suppose, the idea that anyone could peer over and get a glimpse of me, eating cereal standing up or combing over emails, my face illuminated by the laptop's glare. (14-15)

As Laing's experience suggests, cities aren't automatic solutions for loneliness, and can even aggravate those feelings. Loneliness exists in multiple forms and has numerous external as well as personal causes, and a recent New York Times Magazine article manages to survey the whole scene without once mentioning suburban sprawl (Shaer 2024); the "holes in the social fabric" referenced by Richard Weissbourd in this post's opening quotation may or may not be surface parking lots. 

Improved design is a necessary but not sufficient condition for connection. A survey of Americans finds connection improving after the coronavirus pandemic, but still down long-term, particularly among nonwhites, the working class, and those with less than college education; for example, college-educated respondents spend more time in public and community spaces like parks and coffee shops (Cox and Pressler 2024). At least one analysis found social isolation so strongly correlated with demographics that more walkable older neighborhoods actually had more social isolation because they had more elderly and poor residents; it's worth noting the study was done in Korea, where even the newest developments are nothing like American suburbs (Kim and Kim 2024). 

However, design done right can facilitate social connection. Andres Duany and colleagues focus on the public realm, the existence of which requires places to which people can walk, narrow streets to slow the cars, a sense of enclosure (from street trees and right-sized buildings), and visible signs of other people (2010: ch 4; for a fuller treatment see Speck 2012). Jane Jacobs highlights the need for stores, but not too big as to be impersonal, and accommodations like benches in public parks (among other trenchant observations about what works and what doesn't work for sidewalks, parks, and so forth. 

Besides complete streets designed to human scale, Jay Walljasper (2011) commends housing built around common space, whether semi-private neighborhood squares or residential pedestrian streets. Happy Cities (2024) has a multi-unit housing design toolkit with plans for designing common amenities, circulation spaces, and outdoor areas. A 2018 post in The Conversation looks to "third" places where people can gather informally and interact, like community gardens and space in a park for tai chi classes (Matthews and Dolley 2018). In Shanghai, retired people, particularly singles, have been gathering at People's Park and the Ikea cafeteria (Stevenson 2024). 

Montgomery, whose book fuses city design with findings from neuroscience research, notes that certain places draw people and encourage them to linger, long enough to connect. The Project for Public Spaces is credited with the discovery of triangulation, "in which external stimuli are arranged in ways that nudge people close enough together to begin talking. In its simplest form, triangulation might mean positioning a public telephone booth, a garbage can, and a bench beside one another, or simply giving a busker permission to perform near a set of stairs--anything to slow people down in proximity" (2013:165). Things that alienate people are sharp architectural angles (light up the brain's fear centers), long dead facades like blank or smoked glass walls, painful or no seating, dark areas, parking lots, and closeness to high-speed or high-traffic roads. "No amount of triangulation can account for the corrupting influence that high-velocity transport has on the psychology of public space" (2013: 168).

Tiffany Owens Reed of Strong Towns argues that proximity does not produce connection unless there are common projects, and suggests cities outsource tasks community members can do, like playground cleanup and sidewalk snow removal (Owens Reed 2022). After Hours Denver may be onto something with its assembly line of congregants constructing peanut butter sandwiches. Jacobs, however, cautions that people want most of their connections "without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships." Faced with the choice between too much "togetherness" and no contact at all, many people will choose solitude; "either has distressing results" ([1961] 1993: 81-82).

I remember when I first read The Great Good Place and, while I was enthusing over Ray Oldenburg's depiction of third places, I was also reflecting that without prior experience I wouldn't know how to act in such a place. Once at a train station in England, Laing was chatted up by an old man until she finally succeeded in freezing him out and he walked away (2016: 25). She felt guilty afterwards, but no one wants to be the unwelcome old man in that story! When everyone else seems to how to mix (or not) in public, it can cause people to turn in on themselves, adding feelings of incompetence and inadequacy to the already-toxic personal stew. I wondered after reading Oldenburg "whether after 70 years out of practice we still know how to behave in [third places]." Maybe there are sets of lessons we could take? Or is there an app for that? Apparently the late Dr. Ruth is on the case!

SOURCES

Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Island, 2001)

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point Press, 10th anniversary ed, 2010) 

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, [1961] 1993)

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016)

Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013)

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Paragon House, 1999)

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012)

Now we can all sing along... (5:15):

Downtown Mt. Vernon and Lisbon

 

1st Street NW, Mt. Vernon: Downtown with homey feel

Two small towns in eastern Linn County, Mt. Vernon and Lisbon, have retained pleasant traditional downtowns with historic buildings and nearby residential areas. The towns are growing in population, unlike most small midwestern towns, probably because they're within commuting distance of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Note that Mt. Vernon has grown more (nearly all in the first decade of the 21st century), and is younger and more middle class than Lisbon.

	POP 2000	POP 2020	% INCREASE	% BACH DEG	MED AGE
Cedar Rapids	120,563	137,710	14.2	35	36.4
Lisbon	1,922	2,233	16.2	27	40
Mt Vernon	3,394	4,527	33.4	49	28.2
IOWA	2,926,324	3,190,369	9	32	38.6
USA	281,421,906	331,449,281	17.8	36	38.8

(data from U.S. Census Bureau)

Cornell College in Mt. Vernon brings in some outside money and youthful energy. The campus begins at 5th Avenue SW, and includes the public library. Cornell's enrollment has grown about 7 percent since 2017-18, defying national trends, from 1009 in '17-'18 to 1074 in '22-'23 ("Cornell College Institutional Profile").

101-103 1st St NE, Mt. Vernon (built 1894)

Fuel Art and Espresso is a friendly coffee house, surprisingly full at mid-morning, with a fair number of groups and a lot of interaction between customers. Another coffee house, Little Scratch, is two doors down at 113. There are a variety of bars and restaurants as well. The Lincoln Wine Bar is among the tonier:

125 1st St NW, Mt. Vernon (built 1893)

Their wood-fired pizza is worth the trip over from Cedar Rapids.

Downtown Mt. Vernon abuts the college and several residential neighborhoods. Two blocks from 1st Street, I found this creative reminder to drivers to keep their eyes out for children coming down the hill on 3rd Avenue. "Pres Hill" is left unplowed after snowfalls for use by sledders.

3rd Avenue and 3rd Street NW, Mt Vernon

I rode my bike over to Lisbon. I live in hope for the interurban trail, but for now 1st Street to Lisbon Road (Main Street in Lisbon) is workable. It follows the route of the original Lincoln Highway. There's a wide sidewalk for an alternative to the street.

I didn't get as good a look at downtown Lisbon because Main Street was closed for Sauerkraut Days!

Gearing up for Sauerkraut Days:
South Washington Street approaching Main

Downtown Lisbon is two blocks' worth of Main Street, with one restaurant, a couple of bars, and (gasp!) no coffee. There's also the public library and an arts space. (Parallel to Main is the perplexingly-named Market Street, which has no businesses on it.) You see the same mix of older and compatible buildings as in Mt. Vernon... 

Downtown living: Lisbon Apts, 145 E Main St (1899)

...and a lot of the houses have capacious front porches.

There are several vacant buildings in the downtown area.

Vacant restaurant, 125 E Main St, Lisbon (1877)

When I returned after Sauerkraut Days, I estimated at least a third, and possibly as many as half of downtown buildings are vacant, though the existing stores are very up-to-date.

Gwen's, at 119 W Main St, was a Lisbon institution in an 1894 building mentioned in a Dan Bern/Dan Colehour song, but it has closed

 A recent city survey found 76 percent of Lisbon respondents favoring a "more prominent Main Street with more commercial opportunities" (City of Lisbon Comprehensive Plan 2021-2041, p. 7). This will be even more of a challenge if the center of the town's gravity shifts towards the highway bypass.

Lincoln Square Park, at the corner of Main and Walnut Streets, commemorates the Lincoln Highway and has a nice picnic shelter

Back in Mt. Vernon, just over the boundary line is a short north-south ped/bike trail...

Just off 3rd Street NE

...that goes by the skate park.

Under Hill Skate Park, 331 B Ave NE, Mt Vernon

This gives a safe alternative to the street for the boys who were just leaving the park when I arrived, and could eventually connect up to the planned Interurban Trail to Cedar Rapids.

Lisbon Future Land Use Map
(City of Lisbon Comprehensive Plan 2021-2041, p. 11)

Development along the recently-constructed US 30 bypass is likely to bring in some new property tax revenue to both Mt. Vernon and Lisbon, although that's not a long term winner (see Strong Towns on "The Growth Ponzi Scheme") and may ultimately draw resources away from the town cores and/or the residential neighborhoods. That's for the towns to figure out, for at present they have downtowns worth keeping.

Abbe Creek School Museum, just west of Mount Vernon

P.S. With traffic having been rerouted twice from the original Lincoln Highway, you don't have to get far out of town before you get a real country road feeling. I drank my coffee on the grounds of this one-room schoolhouse built in 1844, kicked off my sandals to walk in the wet grass, and then walked barefoot across the highway to this cemetery, where about half of the occupants seem to be Keplers.

Abbe Creek Cemetery

Project 2025 and Our Common Life

Heritage Foundation, Washington DC,
on a cloudy day in 2012

The first thing you notice about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's massive policy book for the next Republican administration, is not its content but its tone. Considering it's ostensibly about public policy, it has a lot about who it targets rather than how it proposes to solve public problems. The foreword, by Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is barely underway before it throws blame for today's problems on "wholesale dishonesty and corruption" of "the ruling and cultural elite today" (p. 1). Nothing happens unless it's someone's fault?

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s "radical chic" to build the totalitarian cult known today as "The Great Awokening."... Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril. (1)

Fevered, ad hominem attacks and name-calling continue throughout the foreword. 

In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones (2).... The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children (5)... Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists (8)....

...and on and on. References to the "global abortion industry" (261) in a chapter on foreign aid, and "the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb" (642) in a chapter on veterans, aren't going to gain you allies for the policies you advocate, either. 

Given the Heritage Foundation's own massive endowment and presence, one could be forgiven for thinking that they themselves are part of the ruling elite. Perhaps "ruling elite" is defined here as "smart people who disagree with us." 

Beyond the fantastic quality to this screed that seems remote from anyone's actual life, I think the tone detracts from the substance they are trying to promote here. Joe Biden comes in for a lot of criticism, as does Barack Obama, while Donald Trump gets none until page 722 relating to the Export-Import Bank. (Anyone who does appear to criticize Trump, like U.S. international broadcasts discussed in chapter 8, get roundly flayed.) I realize I'm not the target audience for Project 2025, but if I were to pick up a paper on, say, climate change, and it began with a lot of attacks on Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or capitalism, it would lead me to question the credibility of the policy thinking that accompanied them. Are we even trying to solve public problems here, or are we just trying to elect Republicans and shout down people we don't like?

This is a problem because, whenever Project 2025 stops screaming about elites, it discusses some rather serious problems our society faces, like challenges to the family, from China, and for government budgeting, as well as the loss of separation of powers in the government. I feel I'd like to talk with these (mostly) guys, about these problems individually, or better yet as common symptoms of some deeper dysfunctionality, but the authors in Project 2025 prefer to reverse engineer their approach based on crushing their enemies. In reality, our American/human destiny is a common one, and we need to hear from all perspectives. Conservatives certainly have important perspectives, but there needs to be more engagement and less of what Daniel Pink (2024) called "authoritarian revenge porn."

The 30 chapters that follow contain some valuable practical advice. Chapters 1 and 2, by Rick Dearborn and Russ Vought, respectively, provide a basic introduction to the Executive Branch of which any citizen should be aware, and certainly anyone undertaking to work therein, whether or not their principal motivation is "combating the Left’s aggressive attacks on life and religious liberty, and confronting 'wokeism' throughout the federal government" (38). Chapter 7, by Dustin J. Carmack, gets 17 paragraphs into a careful analysis of the challenges facing intelligence in the post-9/11 world (201-204) before he suddenly seems to realize he hasn't attacked "woke culture" yet. There are interesting exchanges on trade in chapters 23 and 26.

I certainly don't have the policy expertise to evaluate the many recommendations in Project 2025. Nor do I have the resources to evaluate the truth or falsity of its numerous claims. (For responses to chapters 11 on education, and 8 and 28 on communications technology, see Perera, Valant and Meyer (2024) and Muenster (2024), respectively.) Project 2025 contains a lot of inside baseball, or #iykyk, nearly all of which goes over my head. A seemingly obvious proclamation like "To fulfill its mission, USAGM should also aim to present the truth about America and American policy— not parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda and talking points" (235) is certainly a red flag that the writer is grinding some axe or other. I will say it is sobering to read how much investment there needs to be in the military (ch. 4) so quickly after condemnation of the national debt (chs 1-3) while we are also expecting to cut taxes (ch. 22). 

From the perspective of our common life, which is what we're all about here on Holy Mountain, there are reasons to worry if Project 2025 becomes the blueprint for the next administration its contributors clearly hope it will be.

1. Public problems that are inconvenient to the ideology of Project 2025--like climate change, access to health care, the legacy of racism, agricultural chemical runoff causing a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gun violence, pedestrian deaths, threats against local officials, exploitation of workers, and inequality of wealth and opportunity--are either ignored or dismissed as unbelievable. Climate change doesn't appear until chapter 9 on foreign aid, when the very idea is described as "radical" and "extreme" (257). One page later the text attacks gay rights as "bullying" and "partisan" (258) while alleging "Past Democratic administrations have nearly erased what females are and what femininity is" (258-259). Chapter 5, on homeland security, doesn't even bother with an analysis of immigration problems; it wants control centralized so the border with Mexico can be "secured." (For some ways this approach to border security might implicate current residents, see Krauze 2024.) The Department of Homeland Security "has also suffered from the Left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the Left perceives as its political opponents" (135). We're outraged by phantoms and other points of view while we ignore the most serious public problems.

2. freedom. This is a value popular among the contributors to Project 2025, as well it should be, though perhaps it is not as popular with them as "interests" or "values." Freedom is actually objective #1 under education policy (322). Freedom has a lot of meanings in political theory. Here it seems to mean exemption from liberal policies one doesn't agree with, and the right not to be exposed to ideas not your own. Either we get our way, or we take our ball and go home. Section III features attacks on "the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic" (283). That includes having churches closed on Easter 2020: "What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?" (456). Chapter 8 on quotes Thomas Jefferson (on government funding for churches) to justify its scorched earth approach to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (246). Conservatives--apparently including ex-President Trump and the January 6 rioters (285 and pretty much all of chapter 17)--should have autonomy from anything from which they disagree, but not so liberals who go in for "woke transgender activism" or "abortion as a form of 'health care'" (284, scare-quotes in original). We get the right-to-infect and freedom to discriminate against transgendered people, but not to be safe during a pandemic or to be transgendered people.

3. separation of powers. Vought cites James Madison on separation of powers, urging the President to be bold in clawing back discretionary authority from the bureaucracy (filled with elitists who are often woke!), while restrained in relations with Congress with which they share power. This would be a tricky balancing act under any circumstances, given the long-standing incentives for Congress to delegate power to the executive as well as the inability of the elected and appointed leaders to oversee the vast bureaucracy. Vought is heavy on coordination and direction, and light on restraint. Chapter 5 wants centralized control over immigration; chapter 6 wants centralized control over foreign policy. It is easy to read this, as many have, as empowering the President to do conservative things by overriding checks and balances within the federal government, with self-restraint reserved for inconvenient things like racism and climate change (p. 60).

4. love. This may be a weird criterion to judge a policy book, but the mountain on this blog is a holy mountain, after all. So much of this text is full of animosity. Even chapter 3 on the bureaucracy, analytically written by Donald H. Devine and co-authors, portrays federal employees not as human beings but as overpaid statistics. (How dare they have union representation and a pension plan! We like our workers hungry and scared?) Opponents are enemies, their motives portrayed with cynicism. (Chapter 4 on the military makes several mysterious references to "Marxist indoctrination" and the authors are obsessed with pandemic-era requirements for masks and vaccinations. Chapter 5 refers to the COVID-19 "vaccine" (scare-quotes in original, p. 156).) None of the contributors cites the biblical book of Revelation to advocate political opponents be thrown into a lake of fire, but the same logic prevails that other points of view must not be tolerated. Really? If you love this country, that means loving the people who live in it, including those with other perspectives than your own. Don't hate them, learn from them.

5. sinfulness. Maybe this is an even weirder criterion? If we take seriously that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), we should proceed cautiously with policy change, especially if we're as angry as the Project 2025 contributors seem to be. One of the reasons I like Strong Towns so much is that founder Charles Marohn refers constantly to "humility" in their approach. Admittedly, the very comprehensiveness of Project 2025 may exaggerate the degree of instantaneous wholesale change being contemplated. Nevertheless, the ready-to-go-on-day-one war of good against evil that it is itching to declare assumes all of the sin is by Them, and that We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. This degree of presumption is frightening when you think about it, considering there are real human lives at stake.

Project 2025 has had a bumpy ride in 2024. Public opinion polls show that people who have heard of it by and large disapprove of it (Yang 2024). Former President Trump, the putative beneficiary of its thinking, has noted its unpopularity and thus renounced it (Hawkinson 2024). Vice President Harris, now the Democratic candidate, has been trying to frighten people with it, invoking it even when it doesn't actually contain the content she attributes to it (Dale 2024).

The megalith that is Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership is worth taking seriously; in the absence of alternative ideas in the Republican Party, this is the closest thing we have to a Trump campaign platform. It is full of serious ideas, though with a rich mix of partisanship, grievance, and score-settling. If the next Republican administration, possibly as soon as five months from now, pushes angrily "onward!" while denying the existence of key problems, it is likely to be alarming for advocates of common life.

SOURCE: Paul Dans and Steven Groves (eds), 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Heritage Foundation, 2023)

SEE ALSO: "Religious Freedom for Whom?" 15 December 2020

Amber Phillips, "What is Project 2025," Washington Post, 30 June 2024

Will Sommer, "He Found a Project 2025 Duffel Bag. Then the Police Showed Up at His House," Washington Post, 16 August 2024