The content won't be new to many of you, but as part of the publicity for the big ole report I was working on forever, I've posted something on EquityBlog about what I like about living in a small city...
I also forgot to post my last column, in which I came back to the topic of gender assumptions about children, which I hadn't really written about since I was pregnant.  Footnote: trying to walk our talk, this week we let Nadia choose the bike helmet festooned with pigs riding ATVs. Ah.

Courtesy of a missing space in a news article about Buffalo, NY:

"Buffaloonly"

(In context: “Sadly, this is not a Buffaloonly problem”)

I'm thinking the definition ought have something to do with unproductive city-county feuds while everything goes to shit. (I'm not, by the way, hating on Buffalo. Some good work is being done there, and they're certainly not alone in having such dynamics...)

So, welcome to Rooflines, courtesy of the National Housing Institute.

My first post is entitled, grandiosely, Preparing for Peak Oil: Nutty Survivalism or Crucial Equity Issue?

I have committed to posting on Thursdays, and I might well post more often. (Though I probably shouldn't if I know what's good for my work life.)

If you're interested in affordable housing, community organizing, urban planning, social justice, etc., check it out. There are already some interesting conversations getting started. (RSS feed was up and running this morning.)

like, in December, I was writing this article on Columbia University's expansion plans for the Manhattanville neighborhood, and how eminent domain figured in the fight over the plans.

Being that it was for a quarterly, which was then redesigning its website (and you know that always takes longer than planned), the article's only recently gone online. It's probably somewhat out of date, but for those who might be interested, here it is.

A level playing field for cities (points for his ballsy comments about Thoreau, whom I love as much as the next nature-lover)

"Urban poverty does not reflect urban failure, but rather the enduring appeal of cities to the less fortunate. Poor people come to cities because urban areas offer economic opportunity, better social services, and the chance to get by without an automobile. Yet the sheer numbers of urban poor make it more costly to provide basic city services, like education and safety, and those costs are borne by the city's more prosperous residents. Taking care of America's poor should be the responsibility of all Americans. When we ask urban residents to pick up the tab for educating the urban poor, then we are imposing an unfair tax on those residents. That tax artificially restricts the growth of our dynamic cities."

And why Finland's education system is better than ours.

Both thanks to Richard Florida's blog. (edited to add the money quote from the Boston Globe op-ed. Cite: Edward L. Glaeser February 29, 2008)

Given that I spend so much time paying attention to the ill effects on the residents of cities who have been left behind over the decades when (mostly white) people with choices headed off for the suburban fringe, I have trouble not being grimly satisfied to hear that all of us who said it wouldn't last weren't blowing smoke. In the Altantic...

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character [ed. note: as an editor I wouldn't have let that phrase stand] occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”

Only because they're crappy houses, the decline may be more rapid than the cities' were:

"Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up. [emphasis mine. drywall? I mean, I knew it was bad, but...]

As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone, and they’re not likely to find many buyers; offers from would-be landlords will start to look better, and neighborhood restrictions will relax."

We can only hope they can't sell to anyone except farmers and the houses just come down. Because concentrating poor folk out there away from public transit and services is not the way to get over being "Two Americas." And we need more farms.

The rest of the article is all about the pent-up demand for walkable, urban (by which they mean anywhere with a downtown of any size) housing. That's not news per se, though we're still waiting for it to reach the hardest hit cities. It's mostly interesting to hear someone actually noting that suburban housing developments are not immune to the same forces.

I went outside Thursday to shovel, not realizing how warm it was, and found that our sidewalk didn't need it. But I've been craving exercise, and so on a whim I went down to clear the annoying, slippery sidewalk in front of the empty house two doors down. It was compacted and heavy and so somewhat slow going, but satisfying.

However, when I was about 1/3 of the way through, a nattily dressed man (pressed grey overcoat, black fedora. think black preacher man) came by and energetically said "Let me help you!," pressed the  bag and mail he was carrying into my hands and proceeded to shovel the entire rest of the patch, in a wider swath than I have been aiming for, at a frenetic, teenager-like pace. I tried to take back over once, but to no avail. It was clearly a matter of honor not to pass by a woman doing hard physical labor. Although at least he never actually made any condescending comments about it. He just cheerfully proceeded as if passersby took over each other's tasks all the time. Amusingly, when we was done speeding through, he wiped his brow and said "I don't like to do that. People get heart attacks doing that." What to say?

But he was friendly and I like talking with neighbors. And then the guy who runs the little model train store next door came out and said "Why'd you shovel that? It's not your job. We should call the city about it. I've been trying to find our who owns it. I took a bad fall there a few days ago when it was all icy." We had some chitchat about irresponsible owners and unresponsive city agencies, and then he got around to asking where I lived and about different people who lived there I danced around the relationships of all the people in the house. Then he said "One of the girls there writes for the Metroland." And I knew what was coming, but I admitted it was me.

"You wrote about my sign last year. That hurt."

I had, in passing, joked about how his sign read "Delaware Trains keep Christ in Christmas." in a column last winter. I suspected he'd read it because the sign changed the next day, but I hadn't known until this conversation that it was my mother-in-law who showed it to him (?!). In any case, he admitted that he'd been in printing for many years and recognized what he'd done as a major gaffe. But it still wasn't entirely clear that he wasn't still pretty grumpy about it. But still this was our first ever conversation, and it was civil and pleasant, so that has got to be going in the right direction.

From the Environmental Impact Statement for Columbia University's planned expansion into neighboring Manhattanville:

"Demolition of the former Sheffield Farms Stable at 3229 Broadway in the Academic Mixed-Use Area constitutes a significant adverse impact on this historic resource."

So I haven't written my car-free erranding story yet, but one of the replies I got did inspire this week's column, "I'm Too Busy to Go by Car." It's timely, since Take Back Your Time Day (Oct. 24) is rapidly approaching. (Not to mention that I've managed to overschedule myself with projects again. I think. Or maybe I've hit it just right. I won't know until a few weeks from now.)

“I wonder if you could be persuaded to consider the viewpoint that bending over backwards not to use a car might not be good for the environment,” wrote one fellow folkie. “If doing without a car . . . means things take a lot more time and hassle, that’s got to reduce your productivity, keeping you from doing whatever it is that you do best. That ultimately will reduce the amount of wealth and time available for solving environmental problems in other ways.”

Dutifully, I considered."

For those with an interest in cities (especially Rust Belt cities) or planning or advocacy for low-income people or affordable housing I have an article in the summer issue of Shelterforce on the Shrinking Cities "movement":

"No community developer likes to be told that the housing she just built was "not doing anybody a favor." But that's what Jay Williams, the young, incredibly popular mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, said to Governing magazine last fall about much of the low-income tax-credit housing built in his city over the past decade.

Williams is not anti-affordable housing. But Youngstown has lost more than half its population since 1970, dropping to 82,000 from 170,000."

A couple of weeks ago I sweated out a "Scenery" column for Metroland on the Historic Albany Foundation's Walkabout Wednesdays.

It was an awkward thing to write, on account of my being fond of the organization, supportive of its mission, and interested in the walks—and yet there being no way I could avoid the overwhelming cultural weirdness of a bunch of well-off white people tromping around poor neighborhoods cooing over the buildings. And since the assignment was a description of it as a "scene," it wasn't exactly the place to get into recommendations and suggestions, which can often show that one is interested in more than poking fun. However, for all that, I'm pretty happy with the balance I ended up with. (FYI, there's a missing paragraph break online between "Well, about 50 will do" and the next line. It makes a big difference in feel.)

I also took pictures: Pastures  -- South End

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, wants to hear about it.
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As a budding young environmentalist, I organized regular "litter pick-ups" of my local stream, dragging along my little brother and often a couple neighborhood kids. Toward the end of the 6 months we spent in England during my father's sabbatical, I turned ten, and the main activity of the party was a neighborhood litter pick-up. My friends thought Americans had very strange ideas about birthdays.

So I have felt rather guilty that until today I had not managed to make it to a single neighborhood-association clean-up walk since we moved here. I think Robin made one, and he's been putting me to shame about making a habit of grabbing trash whenever we're walking anywhere.

But having a kid suddenly makes 9am on a Saturday not so unreasonable, so I headed out yesterday and put in a good hour (with an interruption in the middle for a yard sale).

I'm glad I did, but it was also uncomfortable. The dominant narrative of what we were doing amounted to "saving our neighborhood" (a direct quote), fighting back against horrible trash-strewing people ("some people are just slobs") who were going to drag us all down the drain with them if we let them. One of the organizers, who also brought out brooms to sweep people's sidewalks (?!), took to muttering about code violations at one point, when all I could see was an (admittedly very frustrating) side yard where someone had mowed over a moderate amount of trash.

Now, I am not above head-shaking at the number of people who don't seem aware that the ground is not where trash goes, and I try to be obsessive about picking up whatever  blows onto my lawn. (An awful lot of our litter comes from lackadaisical garbage-can emptying by the city.)

And it is true that really serious levels of litter (approaching dumping) can be one of the causes/signs that a neighborhood is in trouble. But our neighborhood is *so* not there.  It does need saving from time to time, but from bad development proposals mostly. (The neighborhood association has been invaluable in organizing against those.)

Still, being in the company of a mostly white, mostly well-off group talking about the problems caused by "some people" puts me on edge. It's so easy to shift from talking about bad behaviors to talking about bad people. It seems to be an occupational hazard of neighborhood activists, especially in mixed-income neighborhoods like ours.

More broadly, I get the feeling that in many people's vision of a healthy, stable neighborhood, we wouldn't have to do neighborhood clean-ups at all. I don't feel that way. Cities are chaotic and uncontrollable and sometimes messy. In my ideal world there wouldn't be very much to clean up, and everyone would take turns pitching in to do it. But I fear the kinds of places that manage to stay clean all the time.

This week's Looking Up, The Unapologetic City, would be the introduction to my thesis if I were going for an urban planning or public administration masters. On a drive out of Albany and through Delmar a month or two ago, something just clicked for me about what never gets said in all these reports on "weak market," "third tier," or "rust belt" cities that I'd been slogging through for weeks. The nutshell:

"Cities are described as places to be pitied and to be helped back on their feet because it’s the right thing to do, or possibly because otherwise their troubles will spread outward. At most, they can’t compete because the suburbs have all these unfair advantages. This isn’t exactly wrong. But it’s partial, and it’s patronizing. . . . Let me say this baldly: Suburbs, even today, would be up a fiscal creek without a paddle without their center cities."

And that's not a bad column with which to introduce my new blog, The Big Questions: The path to Albany's first comprehensive plan. It's still bare bones, and needs things like tags and links and RSS set up, but there's content, and there will soon be more. We wanted to get it launched before the comprehensive plan enabling legislation goes before the full Common Council on Monday. If you've got any interest in Albany and this process, check it out. If you don't, well, you'll be spared me being tempted to blather at length about it here.
 

From the state of Michigan's Cool Cities economic development program's FAQ:

17. Are you saying we need a (larger) gay community to be cool?

We recognize that diverse communities with a welcoming environment for all types of people attract and retain more creative sector people, jobs and businesses. The presence of a gay community may be an indicator of community acceptance of different people and ideas and therefore are open to people from different countries, races and backgrounds. Communities that support the opportunities diversity brings are more competitive. This is something universities recognized many years ago. Their need to attract top talent in a highly competitive market requires a commitment to diversity.

In December 2005, Kalamazoo, Michigan, launched perhaps one of the most elegantly simple economic development initiatives I've ever heard of. Anonymous donors set up a fund and promised to pay full tuition at a state college or university for every graduate of the public school system. (Well, actually 100% of tuition if you've been there since kindergarten down to 65% if you got there in 9th grade. But still, a lot.) Maintain a 2.0 when you get to college. That's pretty much it. It's called the Kalamazoo Promise. It has generated a ton of excitement. People are moving back to Kalamazoo, property values are rising, the city is building new schools for the first time in decades. And as major philanthropic investments go, well, there are more expensive ones out there certainly.

It's a great example of how investing in people can be investing in place also.

Not surprisingly, other places are trying to emulate it. This makes me wonder if the idea will remain effective if you can move to any old struggling city in order to get your college tuition paid. But I get way ahead of myself here: having a half-dozen other programs is a *long* way from that.

And besides, some of the ones doing the replicating don't quite get it. Hammond, Indiana's, for example, is just creepy. In the name of promoting homeownership (often a good goal, within reason), they're only offering scholarships to children of parents who own their homes. (I kid you not.) Not only that, if your parents own a home in Hammond and you go to private school elsewhere, you still get the scholarship. (So people can still flee the school system.) But no matter where you went, you only get it if you've maintained a 3.0 in high school. If they'd sat down and tried to figure out how to make the most regressive scholarship program possible, this is something like what they would have come up with.

On a lighter note, I leave you with this, from another community in Michigan explaining why it wants to create its own promise: "The community is becoming a magnate for families who value education and teachers who want to teach motivated students." Ah, benevolent, influential Kalamazoo, a magnate of good education. Amusingly, this may be becoming true, though I'm sure the writer meant to say magnet.

Lots of you know that I'm a big nerd about city planning. So it's pretty great, as far as I'm concerned, to get to watch the city of Albany go through its first ever comprehensive planning process. (I spoke with someone at the American Planning Association about this for some background, and he was quite surprised that the capital city of New York had no comprehensive plan.)

I expect to be following the process regularly, and writing periodic columns about it at key junctures.

The first of these appeared today, talking mostly about what it actually means to have a process that's transparent and relies on public input. (Hint: not flagrantly violating the Open Meetings Law is not sufficient.)

There was a lot to say that I couldn't fit in there, which has me thinking about launching a separate blog to follow and comment on the process in detail. Do I have the time is, of course, the question. Hmmm...

UPDATE: April 6: The original version of this column said the next Planning Committee meeting was April 19. It has been moved to April 24.

UPDATE: May 3: Apparently I do have time for a new blog.

This week's column.
"I sometimes have a tendency to think of that time in college as one where all of us, of all colors, were hypersensitive in a way that college students can be to any part of their lives, focusing in on tiny details because they can afford the brain space. . . . But one part I didn’t have then though, is an understanding of how the physical legacies of racism are linked with the very personal prejudices in an ugly little reinforcing cycle."


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I was originally going to try to work the "real red Indians" story of my last post into this column too, thereby rolling three things I'd planned to blog about into one column. But, I think wisely, I realized it was rather tangential to where I ended up going. Revision is good thing.  

 "At some point you have to choose to have a ruin. You don’t generally stumble one day upon a picturesque, clearly ancient ruin that everyone would agree is something to preserve. Along the way, it spent a long time as a decrepit and merely kind-of-old building, perpetually susceptible to demolition, vandalism, or even restoration."

This week my column is in praise of ruins.

Also, here are links to some pictures of the church in Gary, Indiana, that I talk about in the column. Sadly, the Chicago Tribune says the city is struggling to get the money for even the urban ruin garden plan. I hope they find a way.

gh0sts by Carey Primeau on Flickr (Check out Primeau's other other photos too. Gorgeous.)

Chicago Tribune slideshow

I tend to be a homebody. Recently, between working at home, parenting, and the return of winter weather, it's gotten kind of ridiculous. I can't easily remember the last time I went out to something other than a few folkie events, potluck, or the café a few blocks away.

So it was really, really nice that when Rebecca came home yesterday with a flier for 1st Friday, we realized that we all wanted to go and there was no particular reason not to. First Fridays involve a bunch of museums and galleries and shops with art displays staying open late and offering munchies and a trolley running a loop between some of the more far flung ones. I've heard of things like this in other cities, and thought they sounded brilliant, but I had only managed to tune in a month or two ago to the fact that one had started here last fall. (See above: need to get out more.)

Dinner and baby and such meant that we didn't get there until 8:15 PM or so (it runs from from 5 to 9), but places didn't close bang at 9, and we stuck to Lark Street where there was a lot in close proximity, so we still managed to stop in four different venues, see great art, and have some good conversations. No one actually fell on the icy sidewalks, either, though we basically slid across a few intersections.

Not being much of a visual art connoisseur, I found it pleasantly surprising to enjoy the vast majority of what I saw. In particular, John Hampshire's stuff at the Froebel Gallery exhibit (in the lobby of eba Dance Studio) was incredible. The images online don't do these pieces justice, especially the black and white "labyrinth" pieces, which form gorgeous images out of very minute maze-like doodles (his word). He was fun to talk to as well. If I had a ton of money I would want several of these on my walls. If you're local go check his stuff out—it'll be there for a month.

We also enjoyed chatting with Chris DeMarco at National Upholstering Design and Studio about photographing abandoned buildings, and I loved the L'esperance Tile Works display in the back room of the Upstate Artists Guild gallery.

All in all, a very satisfying evening. Really, it was a better art experience than I ever had in New York City. We definitely plan to do it again.