Stop romanticizing the country

Recently on Twitter I attacked the practice of transferring resources from city dwellers to country dwellers. One of my followers tried to defend it on the grounds of "equitable growth" because some people need to live in rural areas for farming, mining and other natural resources management purposes. My response was "fuck 'em" - not the people who actually do farm or mine or maintain parks and reservoirs, or who provide the goods and services for them, but the people who just want a big house in a picturesque area with lots of land, and feel entitled to government subsidies for that.

The specific example we were discussing was the building of new government facilities in remote areas, particularly facilities like universities and administrative offices that have no direct connection to rural activities, but there are many other examples of this kind of transfer of resources. Elected officials can keep taxes low in the country while raising them in cities. They can subsidize credit, transportation, utilities or other expenses of living and working in the country more than they do in the city. They can impose restrictions on cities that impair their efficiency but don't have the same effect on the country, like minimum parking requirements and restrictions on density.

There may be good reasons to encourage people to live in the country. Farming, mining, and other rural activities can be difficult in themselves, and the isolation of the country can make them even less attractive. Financial incentives, improved transportation and resources like broadband and cheap electricity can increase the labor pool and the number of people willing to invest in farms and other rural businesses.

When these incentives are targeted to a real public need, everything is great. But often they're simply targeted at people living in a specific place, or at "rural areas" in general. This can happen when people don't take the time to target initiatives well, or when there's a general hostility towards city life - or city dwellers - or when politicians exploit country dwellers for power. There is also a strong tendency for people to romanticize rural life.

Every mistargeted incentive is an opportunity for free riding, and incentives for rural living attract a lot of free riders. For all the disadvantages of country life that I mentioned above there are many incidental advantages like access to outdoor recreation, pleasant views, cheaper land and lower levels of certain types of pollution.

Many people prefer to live in the country and do something other than farming or mining or resource management, or providing services to farmers or miners or resource managers or tourists. There's a long tradition of artists, writers and philosophers moving to the country for inspiration or contemplation. There's another long tradition of wealthy people buying country houses for recreation and to escape poor people in the cities.

I want to point out here that this practice is largely restricted to white wealthy and middle-class people. In most cities there are creative and scholarly communities that are open to poor and nonwhite people. Rural communities where artists and writers live can be racist and exclusionary. They can also be remote and difficult to access without cars, which can constitute a barrier for people with low incomes. Poor and nonwhite people frequently move to the country for farming or mining, but less frequently to retreat for creative pursuits.

It's also important to note that the incomes of most of these country dwellers are dependent on cities. The farmers and miners are producing food and materials that will mostly be consumed by city dwellers. The artists, writers and philosophers are also producing art, writing and philosophy mostly for consumption by city dwellers. The tourists who rent hotel rooms and buy things in the country come mostly from cities. The wealthy people who buy summer, weekend and retirement houses in the country do it mostly with money they've made selling things in cities.

This pattern of earning money in cities and spending it in the country, and often paying taxes in the country, can be a legitimate exchange for real rural value, particularly when it comes to agricultural produce or mined resources or accommodation in pleasant or interesting places. When it's a country home it represents another transfer of wealth from the city to the country.

When an artist or writer or philosopher produces something in the country that they could have just as easily produced in the city, and receives subsidies intended for farmers or miners, that represents a transfer of wealth with nothing in return. When a worker could earn a living in the city but can't find work in the country, and chooses to live in the country and not work, any public assistance they receive constitutes a one-way transfer of wealth.

A transportation improvement that helps farmers and miners get their goods to market provides value to the producers and the buyers, so it's good for people in the city and the country. A transportation improvement that helps tourists and vacationers is probably valuable too. A transportation improvement that just helps people to make money in the city and live in the country is not a great value for taxpayers in general, and actively bad for city residents,

The absolute worst is when politicians spend tax money to "create jobs" in rural areas. I'm talking about factory, office, academic or entertainment jobs, jobs that are not specifically rural, and could be located anywhere. Jobs that would be much more efficiently located in or near cities.

First of all, this kind of economic development spending is a zero-sum game. It's possible to not spend it at all, and that's often the wisest course, but any jobs created in the country are jobs that are not going to city dwellers. That means that they are more likely to go to white people and people from higher-income backgrounds.

Second, putting office, academic and industrial jobs in the country is inherently less efficient, so we're wasting taxpayer money providing the infrastructure to support these activities beyond what they would cost us in the city.

Third, creating jobs in the country encourages more people to move to the country. They often leave efficient, walkable apartments and move to remote, car-dependent houses. They frequently buy cars, and those with cars typically drive more. They then add to the constituency of rural drivers demanding more and wider roads.

Subsidizing jobs in the country also creates a constituency for more jobs. We see it all over rural New York State: a politician can't get a factory in Plattsburgh without another politician wanting one in Elmira. Nelson Rockefeller built a SUNY campus in every State Senate district, regardless of how little housing there was for faculty and staff nearby, or how much a remote location added to the cost to transport students and supplies.

When farms or mines or rural factories close because the land is exhausted, or because other areas have more subsidies or less worker protection, or because we've subsidized transportation or water or energy, there are often jobs in the city. People used to move to the city for jobs, and they are again, more and more. But sometimes they don't want to leave the country. I get that. It can be hard to leave the place you know, and family.

I'm not blaming the people who don't want to leave the country, I'm blaming the politicians who pander to them by locating and subsidizing office, industrial and academic jobs in the country. Migration is a normal state for humanity. People have been doing it throughout our history.

That brings me to another element that has been underlying this whole dynamic: a romantic view of the country shared by many in power, and pandered to by many more. It is an old view, at least as old as the angels' visit to Sodom in the book of Genesis. In this view, cities are dirty places full of violence and evil people, while the country is clean, quiet and full of honest people.

The view of the country as inherently good helps explain a lot of the counterproductive subsidies I've discussed. Why wouldn't politicians want to subsidize writers and artists and teachers and factory and office workers living in the country, if the country is inherently good? Why wouldn't they want to make it easy for city people to get to the clean country as quickly as possible, so they can become virtuous country folk, or at least benefit from the country's virtues? Why wouldn't they want to help country people get in and out of the dirty city as quickly as possible, to minimize the harm and contamination?

Of course the city is not inherently dirty and sinful and violent, and the country is not inherently safe and friendly and clean. The country is a great place to grow food and collect water and quarry gravel. It's also a great place for city dwellers to experience natural beauty and to get some quiet and solitude and exercise. It's not a great place for factories or offices or bedroom communities. It's not a good place for a school, unless the school is essentially a city in itself. And it's really not a good place to shop, especially if we take into account the cost of transporting goods from where they're made to the shop, and from the shop to the home or business where they'll be consumed.

The city is a shitty place to mine copper. It's also a shitty place to grow food, despite what urban farming advocates may tell you. It's not a great place to get quiet and solitude. But as managers have discovered over and over throughout the centuries, despite everything they may want to believe, cities are great for offices and schools. They're not too bad for factories and bedroom communities, contrary to all the twentieth century rhetoric about light and air and noxious uses. And they're ideal for buying and selling things.

The romantic view we have of the country is doing real damage to both the city and the country. It's making them both less efficient, less safe, less healthy, less inclusive and less fair. We need to use the city for what it's good for, and we need to use the country for what it's good for.

Windows on the Van Wyck

A few weeks ago I went for a walk in Briarwood and Kew Gardens Hills. I got off the train at Jamaica-Van Wyck, the first time I’d ever used that station. It was full of red brick, reminding me of other stations that were opened or renovated in the seventies and eighties, like 21st Street-Queensbridge and 49th Street, but it was uncomfortably dark, despite the high ceilings and fairly bright lights.

I looked up and saw an elevated walkway inside the station, leading to the exit, similar to other grand stations of that era like Queensbridge, Auber in Paris, or Dupont Circle in Washington. On the other side of the station I saw what looked like balconies or windows above, but there was no light coming through them.

When I got outside, I crossed the Van Wyck Expressway on Jamaica Avenue. I looked down, and could actually see the outside of the station in the trench next to the highway. It's even more obvious in this Bing aerial photo:

It's hard to tell through the fence, but the panels on the walls look like they could be windows covered with paint or plastic.

I then looked up the station on the web, and found more information. The windows were uncovered as late as 1998, when Wayne Whitehorn took a series of pictures including this one:

Nycsubway.org has that photo, plus a couple of other good ones. According to user R32 3671 on the NYC Transit Forums, they were covered over by the year 2000, due to "vandals." Some commenters on SubChat said that the vandals actually broke the windows; others only say that they spray-painted graffiti over them. There was certainly graffiti all over the window covers when I took these pictures.

If they uncovered the windows now, in 2016, how often would people try to tag them? How much would it cost to keep them clean and guard them? Would it be more than the cost of maintaining the "Low Line" park proposed for the Manhattan Terminal, plus the amortized cost of constructing that park, estimated at $55 million in 2013?

Coming downstairs, bump, bump, bump

Last year, a number of people noted that recently there had been a significant drop in vehicle miles traveled across the country. At a minimum, this shows that transportation engineers are wrong to base their recommendations on simplistic linear models. Connecting this with similar drops in vehicle sales and sales of sprawly houses, some felt that there was evidence that Americans are "falling out of love with the automobile."

John Michael Greer. Source: adruidway.wordpress.com

I tend to agree with both of these points, and they're the kind of change I would like to see happen, but more recently the picture has clouded. Vehicle sales are up, the average fuel efficiency of vehicles sold is down, home sales in some sprawly areas are up, and VMT is rising again. What's going on? Was all that good news just a blip? Should we keep building big roads?

The Archdruid has the answer. I've tweeted about him before, and … crickets. If you're reluctant to click through and read him, let me just remind you that you're reading a blog by a guy with a name that sounds like a superhero crossed with a sugar cereal mascot. Go read the Archdruid, he's good.

So John Michael Greer, the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and an occasional guest on the KunstlerCast (December 2011, July 2014, December 2014), predicted that we'd see something like this. Basically, when a society has built more capital (infrastructure, buildings, mines, etc.) than it can maintain, it begins to defer the maintenance of that capital. When it can't defer maintenance any longer, there is a crisis. This crisis is compounded if the maintenance is dependent on non-renewable resources.

The critical thing to note is that we don't fall all the way down. When someone claims that a situation is unsustainable, one popular response is to deny it and predict business as usual, and another is to predict a complete and sudden collapse, all the way back to nothing. The Archdruid predicts something in between, something a lot like what we've been seeing.

Greer observes that a collapse has the effect of tipping "some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster." That relieves the society of the responsibility for maintaining it, providing an opportunity to recover some balance and stability. It can seem like the fall is over, and many people will then pick themselves up and resume business as usual. But business as usual will just lead to more capital that the society is unable to maintain, and eventually to another collapse. And so on.

When the resources used to build and maintain the capital are not renewable, it makes things worse, because the periods of stability and regrowth are shorter and the collapses are bigger. The result is what the Archdruid calls a "stair step down": with each crash, the standard of living gets lower and lower.

Our energy and economic crises fit the pattern that Greer describes. In 2008 we abandoned large tracts of McMansions, malls and Mitsubishis for apartments, streets and transit, and that helped us to recover a bit (in combination with unsustainable emergency strategies like fracking and quantitative easing). If we were smart we'd use that time and energy to build more sustainable trains and apartment buildings. But we're not that smart, so a lot of us have gone back to building mega-bridges and sprawl. That means that the next step down is not far off, and it will probably be painful.

I am Monoculture, Destroyer of Worlds

There's an idea going around that "gentrification" imposes a monoculture on the neighborhoods it touches. In a whirlwind of destruction it sweeps away the indigenous diversity that existed since the dawn of time, tearing up unique old buildings, tossing aging deli owners as for away as Florida and scattering younger ones to the Five Towns. In its wake it leaves a sterile landscape of Vertical Suburbs, identical high-rises anchored by chains like 7-Eleven, the Gap and Trader Joe's!

Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Flickr

What's that you say? The old buildings are recent and identical? They're already full of chain stores, clone restaurants and relatively newly arrived inhabitants, selling the same mass-produced stuff? The residents haven't moved out at a higher rate than any other time in the past fifty years? The new businesses aren't chains, and many of them sell handmade and secondhand items?

Well, it's still a monoculture! In a whirlwind of destruction it sweeps away the hopes of immigrants just beginning to put down roots with their first bodegas and Dunkin' Donuts franchises, swamping the old residents with hipsters from Ohio in identically unique flat caps and tattoos who produce a sterile landscape of coffee bars and vintage stores!

The great thing about this argument is that these elements can be combined in infinite ways to fit the situation. Any time there's a change you don't like, just highlight the diversity in the old and the similarity in the new. Bonus if you can sniff out any privilege the new people have over current residents!

Meanwhile, if you look at culture from a place of curiosity and not a place of fear, you find similarities and differences everywhere. Fads, formulas, common suppliers and the desire for a consistent customer experience are indeed forces that promote uniformity, but it is often a superficial uniformity. Uniformity is unsustainable, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that diversity always wins in the end. The Goths convert to Christianity, but then produce the Reformation. The Romans may have gotten the Iberians to speak Latin, but within a few centuries the Italians can't understand them any more.

When you get people from all over the country, and all over the world, coming together in one city or one neighborhood, of course you get some assimilation. But you also get a lot of continuity. A friend of mine is doing the artisanal hipster food thing, but she's actually using recipes and techniques passed on in her family for generations, knowledge that might have died out if she had taken a nice office job.

Yes, there is displacement, and it's not all good. There's a lot that we should be doing better. But we're not losing our diversity. The encroaching monoculture is a myth, a scary story that people tell their kids at bedtime. We're grown up now, and it's time to face facts. There is no monoculture.

Do New York's "manufacturing zones" promote driving?

I read on YIMBY that some people who live or work in the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx are concerned that rezoning the area to allow residential development could price out many of the auto body shops and other car-related businesses that operate in the area. I sympathize with the concerns, but I think things have to change. And the more I think about it, the more important it seems to me.

A walkthrough of the Jerome Avenue area conducted by the Department of City Planning, January 2013. Photo: Gerard Flynn.

It seems pretty clear that allowing residential uses will price out auto-related businesses. There is a tremendous demand for housing, and housing is displacing auto services wherever they are allowed to compete, from the gas stations of the East Village to the garages of the Upper West Side to the used car lots of Woodside. I am not including Willets Point in this: there is no competition there, only government fiat.

As a business owner, I am not exactly happy about small businesses being unable to survive. My brother-in-law is an auto body mechanic, so I also appreciate the value of good technical jobs that do not require a college degree. And yet, there is such a thing as a job that costs too much. I have argued that the costs of each Tappan Zee Bridge construction job, in terms of sprawl, pollution and yes, death and destruction, are too high. I would say the same thing is true for auto related jobs along Jerome Avenue, and elsewhere in the city.

We have driven away many of the port jobs and the manufacturing jobs, and auto related jobs are a good chunk of what is left. As my friend Stephen Smith, who used to write for YIMBY, has observed on Twitter, the vast majority of businesses in M zones around the city are not involved in manufacturing anything.

Every time I have heard about a gas station closing or a parking garage converted to apartments, I have smiled inside. I smiled because I remembered the difficulty of crossing in front of these gas stations and garages. "Difficulty" is too nice a word: I remembered the dread I felt trying to walk in front of the gas stations as drivers cruised in and out across the sidewalk at high speeds. I remembered the humiliation I felt when garage customers parked across the sidewalk, forcing me out into traffic. I smiled at the thought that nobody else would feel that dread and humiliation again.

I and many other pedestrians have been similarly threatened and humiliated in front of car dealerships and repair shops in "industrial zones" across the city. Some have been killed. You will forgive me if I am not horrified at the prospect of losing an industry with such little regard for safety.

But we still have millions of cars stored in our city, and millions more that come in for the day. Where will their owners buy and sell them, and bring them to be serviced, if not on Jerome Avenue, Northern Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue or Atlantic Avenue?

Well, if they had to they would go to Hempstead Turnpike, or Kennedy Boulevard, or Boston Post Road. But that makes me think: if these businesses can't survive on Jerome Avenue or 21st Street without being protected from competition from housing, that means that we are essentially subsidizing the cheap rent, and thus the cheap repair jobs, with our expensive apartments. My mom is paying more every month so that the guy who cuts her off in the crosswalk can pay less to have his oil changed.

And that makes me wonder: what if we didn't have these bogus "Manufacturing" zones? What if we allowed people to build apartments wherever they thought they could rent them? Would the rents continue to rise? Would there be the same pressure to waste public money on railyard decks? Would we still have as many cars clogging Queens Boulevard every day? Would we still have Levels of Service that make our traffic engineers loath to build real crosswalks? Would we still have community boards packed with parking-obsessed NIMBYs?

Please, let's find some jobs for these people so that we can shut down the M zones.

The long game in transit advocacy

While I generally appreciate other transit activists, I’ve criticized plenty of them in the past. Recently I’ve figured out what it is that bothers me most: a lot of them are playing a very short game.

They’re playing up routing improvements and park-and-rides as long as they don't inconvenience drivers, supporting billions of dollars for new roads in exchange for supporting millions of dollars for new buses, promoting a car bridge with the hope of getting a bus lane on it, ignoring existing plans for new subway lines and demanding inadequate bus route plans, complaining about wasteful transit projects with only the barest mention of bloated highway budgets, and declaiming Our Nation's Rotting Infrastructure without setting any priorities for what gets repaired or rebuilt.

All of these strategies reveal an impoverished vision of the world. In this vision, if there is economic equality it means everyone driving to the health food store in their own personal Subaru Wagon – or everyone commuting to work in a packed Transmilenio bus. Wasteful comfort or cheap discomfort.

Usually, the vision is not even that complete. The short game players simply assume that the world will always be dominated by drivers who monopolize the money and the space. Their vision is not compatible with a future where the vast majority gets around by transit. They have no way of dealing with their own success.

What would real success look like? It's not a reworked bus network. It's not an abundant supply of the latest buses. It's not one lane for buses and eight lanes for cars and trucks. It’s not a train tunnel and a highway bridge being built simultaneously with the latest efficient methods. It’s a world where personal motor vehicle use is minimal, and public transit is abundant, safe, comfortable and reliable.

We have to be prepared to put that vision into practice, and that means taking the long view. It means doing some things that may seem inefficient now, but that will pay off in decades. It means taking advantage of the transportation cycle. It means pushing cost-cutters to cut roads, even if that upsets some potential short-term allies. It means pushing big spenders to spend big on transit, even if they waste billions in the process.

Did you bring enough housing for everybody?

When I was a kid, one of the things the teachers told us was that if you bring snacks or candy, you have to bring enough for everyone. If you don't, it winds up going mostly to your friends and excluding a lot of kids, which isn't fair.

I realized recently that this also applies to people who want to keep rents down through rent controls, not increasing the supply, like Tom Angotti:

At bottom, developers typically argue, the housing problem is all about supply and demand. Let us increase the supply, they say, and there will be more housing to go around for all. This, not rent regulation, will keep rents from rising. That’s good old trickle-down economics, which never works. Indeed, we’ve just come through a couple of decades in which the total housing supply has grown dramatically, and so have rents, but there was also a huge loss of low-rent housing. Over the last 20 years almost 250,000 units of rental housing were deregulated.

I want to give Angotti props for two things: unlike many rent control advocates, Angotti actually listens to people who advocate increasing the supply, and he takes the time to write an articulate response. So even though I'm criticizing his arguments, the same criticism is even more true of other people's arguments.

First of all, one sorta-valid question that Angotti raises: if total housing supply has increased (I don’t have the figures, but I’ll assume that it’s true), and rents have also increased, doesn’t that falsify the supply-side argument?

Well, no, because Angotti’s representation of "what developers typically argue" is inaccurate. I honestly don’t know what developers typically argue, because I’m not one and I don’t spend much time listening to them. But if the problem is all about supply and demand, then Angotti left out the demand side. A fairer statement of the argument would be "Let us increase the supply to match the demand, and there will be enough housing to go around for all."

If we phrase the proposal this way, we have to look at demand, and all signs point to a huge increase in the demand for New York’s walkable urban spaces and its well-paying jobs. But Angotti does not want to look at demand. Instead, he shrugs it off as a “speculative real estate fever.” He acknowledges that “the plan claims the city’s population is bound to increase in the next decade,” but argues, bizarrely, that the projected increase is not based on evidence of real demand but of demand induced by “the development of smaller housing units.” That is all he says about the demand side.

To people who currently rent in the city, Angotti’s blustering about "gentrification" and displacement may be comforting, but for me it rings hollow. I’m a fourth-generation New Yorker, but after college (two decades ago, which is as far back as Angotti goes in his piece), I couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood I knew best, the Upper West Side. Even now, with a solidly middle-class family income, four of the neighborhoods that my family has called home are now out of my range.

Things might have been different if my parents had not done the back-to-the-land thing in the seventies. They might have been different if, when I spent a few years to go to school in another state, I had played the illegal sublet game instead of giving up my rent-stabilized apartment. They might have been different if one of my family members had gotten a bigger apartment for me to illegally inherit when he died. But as it is, my family has given up several rent-regulated apartments, and I am displaced, one of the victims that Angotti and his fellow rent-regulation advocates cry for, and the Upper West Side community is poorer because the studio I inherited there was too small for my family.

Except that I’m not one of the victims that Angotti cries for. My family didn’t live in any of these places for "decades and generations," but instead migrated around the metropolitan area, chasing dreams of suburban comfort, rustic peace and creative success across the generations. Because we left our rent-regulated apartments semi-voluntarily, I don’t count as one of Angotti's displaced. I have no right of return.

You know who else doesn’t matter in the world of the rent-regulation advocates? Immigrants from other countries, looking for cheap places to settle in the U.S. The talented and ambitious from other parts of the country, looking to make it in New York. The queer and the weird and the non-conforming, chased out of their tight-knit communities in small towns and suburbs. Anyone who wants to live without a car and not be part of a small, oppressed minority.

There is no housing for us, because the rent-regulation advocates didn’t bring enough for everybody. They only brought enough for their friends, those fortunate enough to be currently benefiting from rent regulation and subsidized housing. If I were their kindergarten teacher I would have a quiet talk with their parents after school.

Honestly, I’m fine: I have a nice co-op in Queens. But it’s the thought that counts, and the thought that we don’t count is pretty damn offensive. It leaves this old lefty fuming at the cozy club mentality that Angotti tries to dress up as justice.

Five migrations in gentrification

In a recent post I noted that the demand driving up rents and prices ("gentrification") in big cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago is a result of at least three distinct migration streams. Thinking about it now, I can identify five major streams. It's important to keep them straight, because they do not have the same cause, and thus the actions we can take (if any) to reduce or redirect the flow of migrants is different in each case.

How many New York City residents are refugees from Rochester's parking crater, winner of Streetsblog USA's Parking Madness 2014?
Image: Google Maps via Streetsblog.

The best and brightest have been migrating to cities since time immemorial, seeking fame and fortune. So have rural misfits – heretics, gender and sexual minorities, people with mixed ethnic, religious or class backgrounds, people with disabilities, anyone who has been shunned by small, close-knit communities. Some of them migrate from small cities to larger cities, searching for a better opportunity, more anonymity, more tolerance.

Immigrants often wind up in cities, because that is usually where the entry points and crossroads are, and where there are the most opportunities. They come through Ellis Island or Kennedy Airport, across the Rio Grande at El Paso or San Diego, and find their way to East Los Angeles or Chinatown or Washington Heights. Maybe they eventually wind up in a small town, or even start out picking berries in the Central Valley or tobacco in the Coastal Plain, but many families spend at least a generation in a big city.

Those two migration streams – the best and the misfits, and international migration – have been going on for as long as we’ve had cities and nations. Recently, what’s been capturing a lot of people’s attention is the white return – the repudiation by Anglo, Jewish, German and others of their parents’ search for comfort and tranquility in the suburbs, supposedly safe from the nonwhite people they feared and hated. I’m part of a similar migration, Back to the City, where the children of hippies and beatniks realized that communing with nature isn’t quite as spiritually uplifting as our parents thought – and it’s not all that great for the environment, either.

The fourth big migration stream that has been getting attention is the move of the white-flighters and back-to-the-landers themselves. Baby Boomers and other people who are now elderly have realized what we knew when we were fourteen: that life sucks in Amityville or Great Barrington if you can’t drive wherever you want to go. They’re buying small apartments in the city themselves, many of them in neighborhoods that they couldn’t afford in 1972.

There’s a fifth migration that I think doesn’t get enough attention: the small city exiles. These are people who are not the best or the brightest, or complete misfits, but they’re pretty bright, mildly kinky or noticeably nonconformist. Or maybe they can’t drive because they’re blind or epileptic (I learned about this last one from Sally Flocks), or they just don’t want to. Eighty years ago they’d have been pretty happy in Rochester or Knoxville or Omaha or San Luis Obispo: reasonably normal, functioning members of society, with enough peers to have a stimulating intellectual and artistic fellowship.

Today, those towns have hardly any jobs at all, especially within walking distance of downtown, shopping and services are sprawled out across the area, and transit between them is inconvenient. With this fragmentation, they can barely sustain a monthly open mike or an Indian restaurant, let alone a poetry slam or a regional Thai place. Our heroes – somewhat large fish in not-so-large ponds – see the grim desperation in the faces of their older neighbors and head to the bigger cities, where there are more opportunities, not just for jobs but for dinner after 8PM.

This is why rents and prices have been rising so drastically in New York, Washington and San Francisco, and to a certain extent in Boston and Chicago. In addition to the eternal migration of the ambitious, the misfits and immigrants, we’re on the receiving end of the White Return and the Back to the City – both the old and the young. On top of all that we’re getting the moderately bright and kind of weird who can’t make a home in the small cities.

Any solution to the problems of rising rents and prices will have to address all three of these new migrations. We can build more big city for them: taller buildings, more transit, upzoning around transit. But the returning retirees and the small city refugees don’t need big cities. They’d be perfectly happy if we could make the existing pedestrian and transit infrastructure of Scranton and Pueblo and Fort Smith work for them again, rebuild what was lost and thrown away, and find a way to make those towns relevant again. They’d be happy if they could live in prewar suburbs like Bethpage and Whiting without having to own a car for every adult family member. This is what the Strong Towns movement is about, and what Duncan Crary says about Troy.

You may say that it’s a tall order, that these towns are never coming back. But I ask you: if we rebuilt the rail connections, rebuilt the housing and shopping and offices where now there is just parking, and tore down the bypasses that made those downtowns irrelevant, don’t you think some of them would start to sputter back to life? Is that really any harder than trying to build whatever mind-numbing amount of "affordable housing" we need in New York to accommodate all these people, and the subways we will need to move them around once the elites admit that “Bus Rapid Transit” will never suffice?

Unpacking gentrification

Transit advocates, pedestrian advocates, urbanists and in general all the people who are trying to improve the quality of life in cities need to talk about gentrification. Not because improvements to transit or walking or urban quality of life lead to gentrification, but because some people think they do. Others, bizarrely, are scapegoating the people moving to urban areas, as though their migration were the result of either nefarious conspiracy or a spontaneous coincidence of individual greed. Some of these demagogues are willing to attack the transit and quality of life improvements, the people promoting those improvements, or the migrants themselves, in a desperate attempt to prevent this change.

Graham Avenue, Williamsburg. Photo: Telethon / Wikipedia

The fact of the matter is that the transit and quality of life improvements are largely the effect, not the cause, of the move back to the cities. The suburban growth ponzi scheme and the hippie back-to-the-land fantasy have run out of money, and the jobs are leaving. As the jobs leave the suburbs and the country, the quality of life goes down, and people flee for the cities.

These migrants may be a bit insensitive, but they are not conspiring amongst themselves to take from city dwellers, and they are not acting out of greed and jealousy; rather, their own dislocation from their homes deserves as much sympathy from anti-gentrification activists as that of the people they are displacing.

This migration is much more powerful than the anti-gentrification demagogues. Even if they manage to keep cities as inconvenient as they are, people will keep coming. The only way they could stem the tide is if they somehow manage to bring the cities down to the level of the suburbs. Short of bringing back the crack epidemic and setting the South Bronx on fire again, I just don't see it.

The demagogues may not succeed in stopping the migration to the cities, but they can do some damage, and make cities, suburbs and country miserable places all around. Fortunately, some of them are motivated by a heartfelt desire to help others that has been twisted to scapegoating and destruction. They may be amenable to reason, and that is why we need to be prepared.

Really, it is the concept of "gentrification" as a thing that leads to this misradicalization. Gentrification may seem to be a neat, easily identifiable phenomenon - uh oh, there's a new coffee bar over here, and a vintage record store over there! - but the effects that people complain about are hardly that simple.

Even though some people may complain about restaurants and "hipsters," these are not the substantive concerns that others take seriously. The worst effects of gentrification are (a) rising prices and rents, which squeeze the budgets of old-time residents and businesses whose incomes have not risen, (b) displacement as those residents move to cheaper areas, (c) loss of services as the businesses close or move away, and (d) disconnection as people and businesses that are displaced may move to different areas and have difficulty keeping in touch.

In general, I'm not really swayed by the loss of services argument. I may mourn the passing of Big Nick's Burger Joint or Shakespeare and Company, but I actually think the Shake Shack burgers and the browsing experience at Barnes and Noble are better than their predecessors.

I'm also not troubled by displacement in itself: migration is a fact of life. The idea that the children of African Americans or Puerto Ricans who moved to the neighborhood forty years ago have more of a right to it than the grandchildren of Jews and Italians who moved there eighty years ago is just bizarre. The problems come when the displacement is too fast and too extreme, and scatters people who otherwise want to be together.

The real question is not whether to avoid or stop "gentrification," it's whether we can slow or ease the displacement, and make it so that when people do get displaced, they wind up in places that are almost as nice as the places they left.

In order to do that, we need to further unpack "gentrification." This migration is not a simple one: in fact, it is at least three migrations combined, and not all of them equally necessary. We need to do what we can to reduce that inmigration. The displacement is not automatically necessary: we need to increase the amount of housing and jobs in the city, so that the old-timers can live alongside the newcomers instead of being forced out. We need to make sure that poor city dwellers aren't simply being displaced to the same dangerous, unpleasant, disconnected suburbs that the middle-class migrants are leaving behind - with less ability to afford cars.

Will this convince the misguided radicals who see gentrification in black and white terms? Hard to tell. Will it help me feel better promoting transit and urban life? Yes. I'll talk more about these issues in future posts.

Strong towns don't have pension problems

Joe Nocera and Rana Foroohar were talking about municipal pension woes this morning. Or at least that's what Charlie Herman told them it was about. Really, it was about budgets and commitments. It's the same thing when Stephanie Miner talks about pensions, or Andrew Cuomo talks about taxes, or Steve Aquario talks about Medicaid, or Chris Carey talks about tolls on the Tappan Zee Bridge. It's not about pensions or taxes or tolls or Medicaid. It's about the fact that states, counties, cities and towns have committed to spend money, but the taxes and tolls coming in don't cover those commitments.

Syracuse's Central Station once received trains and then buses, and is now a television studio.
Photo: Crazyale / Wikipedia

Politicians love to do this. In fact, the system is so set up for it that people thought I was nuts when I asked if governments ever save up for big infrastructure projects. And two former mayors of Huntington, West Virginia thought Chuck Marohn was nuts when he suggested that projects should even be judged on whether they can be expected to generate enough revenue to pay off their bonds. Everyone likes to make promises for the next generation, whether it's pensions, Medicaid, infrastructure, borrowing, low taxes or low inflation.

Eventually someone has to acknowledge that the previous generations overpromised and that at least one of these promises has to be broken. There's a smart way to do this, and a stupid way, and a dishonest way. The smart way to is to openly list the promises and prioritize them. The stupid way is to notice one or two promises that you'd like to break and focus on those while remaining blissfully oblivious to the fact that other commitments exist. The dishonest way is to pretend that you don't realize about the other commitments and hope nobody points them out.

Foroohar acknowledges this in the financial sector: in her Time column, she wrote, "My worry was always that, as in parts of Europe or Latin America or even California cities that have gone bankrupt, pensioners [in Detroit] would be left holding a disproportionate share of the burden of cuts, while other creditors took less of a haircut." But it's true beyond finance, in other promises made by these states, counties and cities.

The fact is that most American cities made a series of really stupid decisions in the late twentieth century. They relocated valuable infrastructure like canals and railroads out of their downtowns, so those downtowns were no longer "on the way." They built oppressive, noisy highways through those downtowns, allowing drivers to shoot through on their way to someplace else. They copied zoning codes that outlawed mixed-use neighborhoods, and gutted the mixed-use neighborhoods that existed with highways and "urban renewal." Then they built other highways to bypass the downtowns, and subsidized development in the suburbs. I happen to be particularly familiar with Syracuse's tragic flailings in this regard, but you can see the same pattern in Albany, Buffalo or Binghamton, and all over Rockland County.

The people who ran these municipal governments borrowed money to build these highways and other infrastructure. They promised to pay it back with interest (Nocera noted that this was missing from the pension discussions). They promised their residents that no matter how far they spread out, no matter how much they drove, they could still count on roads, bridges, power, water and sewers. They promised that the government would pay for all that indefinitely and somehow keep taxes and tolls low. Oh yeah, and they promised their city workers secure retirements, and their poor people healthcare.

Of all these promises, Cuomo focuses on taxes, Miner focuses on pensions, Aquario focuses on Medicaid and Carey focuses on tolls. We may actually wind up with cheap taxes and tolls while cutting pensions and Medicaid, and that may get these guys elected to powerful political offices for many years. But you and I know that it won't actually solve the real problem: we can't afford to maintain the sprawl that's sucking the revenues out of our hollowed-out cities and towns. And we can't afford to pay back the money our parents borrowed to build that sprawl.

These four are not handling these overpromises the smart way, so that means they're either handling them the stupid way or the dishonest way. Hanlon's razor says "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," and I know of no evidence that Cuomo, Miner, Aquario and Carey are lying, power-hungry, heartless crooks. For now I have to assume that they're simply incompetent idiots with a particular blind spot for the ugly sprawl that is choking the life out of the many lovely towns of my home state.

Will "Willets West" relieve Flushing Meadows's parking curse?

One of the least pleasant things about Flushing Meadows is the sheer amount of parking, as I've helpfully highlighted for you on the Google satellite photo below. Unfortunately the photo doesn't do justice to the enormity (and I do mean enormity) of the situation. Even the smallest of these parking lots, like the one behind the Hall of Science, is depressing. The Citifield lots are just soul-crushingly huge; the Mets organization says there are 8,500 parking spaces available.

This parking doesn't just waste space that would be better used as parkland or even swamp. It ruins everything around it, because as we know from study after study, more parking means more driving. The parking is why it's almost impossible to walk anywhere in the park without some self-righteous asshole in a minivan forcing you off the walkway. It's why the only entrance to the park that's at all pleasant for pedestrians is the number 7 el that carries you over most of the parking and connects you to a boardwalk that crosses high above the rest. It's why even the other entrances near the Botanical Garden and the Hall of Science are still pretty nasty.

Citifield is actually a minor improvement over Shea Stadium in that it's relatively close to 126th Street, making the walk to the bay a little less oppressive. These parking lots are much more of a blight than the auto body shops of Willets Point, which do after all constitute a functioning business district. I think on some level the Wilpon family realize that - and of course they're getting a lot of pushback from the Willets Point business owners.

This probably explains why the latest proposal to develop the area involves putting a giant mall entertainment complex on the site of the parking lot. In theory, this could be a very good thing for the pedestrian environment. It will replace the parking on the entire west side of Citifield with mall façade, which may actually interact with the pedestrian space more than your typical mall. It's hard to tell for sure from the rendering below, but it may also make that stretch of Roosevelt Avenue less of a hellscape.

One thing that's kind of puzzling in all this is that I haven't seen any mention of floodproofing. The entire valley flooded during Hurricane Sandy, like salt marshes do, and will probably flood again every year for the foreseeable future. It should be possible to build this mall in a way that is less vulnerable to flooding, but all the EDC says is that it's "necessitating a significant increase in grade," meaning that they'll dump some rocks or dirt and build on top of them.

The biggest improvement, in theory, could come from reducing the amount of parking in the Flushing River Valley. People are driving less and taking the train more, and new development means a chance to change old travel habits. This would not only make for more pleasant places to walk, but also remove a number of the worst-behaving drivers from the streets.

"In theory," I said. But even the current plans are disappointing. Before a shovel is dug in "Willets West," they call for a twenty acre parking lot to be paved where there are now auto body shops in Willets Point. Willets West itself will contain 2,500 parking spaces. It's not clear that there will be any net reduction in the amount of parking available, and the planners seem to be pushing right ahead with their plans to open new exits off the Van Wyck Expressway.

Another thing that isn't clear is who all is going to drive to this "entertainment complex." Another mall, Atlas Park, has been dying a slow death because of the economic troubles and because it's not near any subway lines. (Yes, I know, it's a "lifestyle center" and not an "entertainment complex," but it's close enough.) This mall will probably survive because it'll be right under a major subway station and near a Long Island Rail Road station, but then who will want to park? (Yes, I know, the LIRR station is only open when there are major sporting events. They'd be stupid not to stop the trains there when the mall opens, which will be another improvement for park users.)

All these deals are laid out behind closed doors (it's not clear whether the rooms are still smoke-filled), but it may be possible to amend this one with public pressure. Save Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is urging people to testify against the plan at the Community Board 7 meeting tomorrow night (Monday, April 8), and on May 13. The project is not on the agenda, but CB7's Buildings and Zoning Committee will be discussing it Thursday night with no public comment, so tomorrow is your chance to frame the issue for them.

I hope that some of you will attend the meeting and speak about the benefits of reducing the parking in the area and elminating the new highway offramps. I hope that some will also talk about more thoughtful, proactive ways to deal with the flooding. Have fun!

What is the best use for the Flushing River valley?

I've lost count of all the proposals to build things in the Queens Valley. Here's a map from the Wall Street Journal:

In addition to the plans to build on Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, there are also the various proposals for the auto body district in Willets Point, which I covered last year and the year before.

There are several developers and pressure groups (the Mets, Major League Soccer, the United States Tennis Association, the Related Group) in favor of the plan, and a number of groups opposed (Willets Point United, the Fairness Coalition of Queens). Right away, I'm skeptical about the plans, especially the "build lots more parking" parts.

But I'd like to step back a little bit and ask: if we had all the money and power in the world, what would we most like to see there? What use would fit our goals (see up top) best? And what is it already being used for?

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park after Hurricane Sandy. Photo: Will Sweeney / Flickr.

The first thing to think about is the valley's natural role as a swamp in absorbing storm surge. A column by Jim Dwyer in the Times and a thorough op-ed by biologist Jason Munshi-South in the Daily News explaining exactly how this works, and how well it worked during Hurricane Sandy. Most urbanists think of Curitiba as a pioneer in "Bus Rapid Transit," but they also set aside swampland as seasonal parks for flood control.

There is a significant amount of swampland along the Flushing River and its tributaries, including the upper part of the river near Willow Lake and the former Flushing Airport. But north of Meadow Lake the river enters a culvert, emerging on the other side of the Fountain of the Planets into a post-industrial wasteland.

As Scott Fitzgerald famously described it, the "Valley of Ashes" was for many years used as a dump for an on-site garbage incinerator. In 1936 Bob Moses bulldozed the ashes and other trash over to the edges of the valley to form the base of the Grand Central Parkway, and erected viaducts to carry the Whitestone Expressway across from Flushing. In 1961 he built the Van Wyck Expressway on the east side of the valley.

The surrounding neighborhoods rely on Flushing Meadows for recreational space. It also hosts cultural centers for the entire borough: the Queens Museum of Art, the Queens Zoo, the Queens Botanical Garden. And of course there are the sports facilities: Citifield, the tennis complex, the skating rink, the boathouse, the "pitch and putt" golf center, and their attendant parking nastiness.

Then there is the transit infrastructure. E, F and R trains are stored in the Jamaica Yard at the southern end of the valley. The #7 train crosses the valley to the north over Roosevelt Avenue, and these trains are stored in the Corona Yard south of the station. Between the station and the yard is the Corona Bus Depot.

But there's one more issue: pedestrians. During the day, it's a relatively pleasant walk from, say, the Lemon Ice King of Corona to the Flushing Library, if you cross the Grand Central on one of the two mostly-pedestrian bridges and go under the Van Wyck at the Avenue of Discovery. But walking into the park from anywhere else ranges from fairly unpleasant to borderline suicidal, and walking around it takes hours. In contrast, Central Park, Prospect Park and Van Cortlandt Park have edges and crossings that are much more humane and welcoming.

The Bloomberg administration and the developers are right that we need more housing that's conveniently located to jobs in Manhattan, and where else but Queens? Similarly, with all the soccer fans in Queens (when the World Cup was on, no matter who was playing you could find at least one restaurant from that country where the fans were watching, and dozens in the case of Ireland, Colombia and Mexico), it makes a lot of sense to have a soccer stadium. And I'm on record as being in favor of a casino located near the large population of gamblers. On the other hand, I simply haven't looked at the area and said to myself, "You know what we need? Another shopping mall." But in all these cases, why this part of Queens?

Finally, I don't believe we need lots of parking for every possible park use even in Fresno, much less Queens.

All right, well this is a good place to stop. So I'm not going to answer the question in this post. Maybe later I'll work towards an answer. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and on Twitter.

We don't want a Frackin' Zee Bridge

Environmental advocates are doing a great job educating people on how horrible hydraulic fracturing is - in particular, it means hundreds more big, dangerous trucks on the roads - and building an ever-growing movement against this technique for extracting natural gas.

Image: Marcellus-shale.us

Unfortunately, current projections are for our energy use to grow, not shrink. Many fracking opponents also want the government to shut down nuclear power plants like Indian Point, which will further increase the unmet demand for energy. And many environmentalists support converting to vehicles powered by electricity and natural gas. Where will those come from?

Some of this demand can be satisfied through less destructive, renewable sources like wind and solar, but not enough. As long as the demand increases there will be pressure to frack, and we will not necessarily be able to resist forever. To really head off hydrofracking we need to reduce our demand for energy.

We can do some of this by switching to more efficient forms of electricity generation, lighting, heating and cooling, but those measures only go so far. We need to tackle one of the top areas of energy inefficiency: transportation. If people keep driving at anywhere near the rate they're doing now, in a few years most of that fracking gas is going to go right into the power sockets of our electric cars.

We could make a huge dent in our energy use if we shifted most of our freight and passenger trips from cars and trucks to trains, buses and boats. We can cut it even more by shifting those trips to walking, bicycles and elevators. To make the most of it, with convenient walks and transit trips, people would need to move their homes, jobs and stores to within walking distance of train stations.

It's at this point that someone usually brings in a Joel Kotkin-type argument about people really wanting to live in the suburbs or the country and avail themselves of "the freedom of a car." It's nonsense, of course. People also want to live in town with the freedom of walking. People want all kinds of impossible and incompatible things.

People respond to economic incentives. If you build lots of free or low-cost highways and parking and fight massive wars to keep the price of gas low, then people will drive. If you let people deduct part of their housing costs from their taxes, then big houses on big lots out in the suburbs or the country look great. If you make streets big and sidewalks narrow or nonexistent, people won't walk. If you limit the size and number of apartment buildings and require lots of parking to be provided for every home, business and transit station, people aren't going to build walkable communities, and the walkable communities that exist will be expensive. More driving, more fracking.

Now, as gas gets more expensive for people and roads get more expensive for governments, people are cutting back on their driving. Driving has been declining for the past few years. If it keeps declining, we may well see an easing of this pressure to frack.

One of the biggest incentives to drive is wide, low-cost highways. Since it was opened in 1955, the Tappan Zee Bridge has been an incentive to live far from transit and drive everywhere. Governor Cuomo is planning to widen the Tappan Zee Bridge, but he has pledged to keep the tolls low, increasing that incentive to drive. More driving, more fracking.

If you really care about hydrofracking, you won't just tell Cuomo to stop the fracking. You'll tell him to stop the Frackin' Zee Bridge.

Greenfield toll, HOV and bus lanes are no improvement

The news is that the toll roads in Orange County, California are not bringing in as much money as planned. Similarly with Maryland's Intercounty Connector. In Virginia, high occupancy/toll lanes won't bring any revenue for the state government, even though it spent half a billion dollars on them.

The 73 Toll Road in California. Photo: Melinda Humphreys / Flickr.

Some people, who don't like the idea of toll roads in general, will take these developments as evidence against the whole idea of tolling. It's not; it's evidence against the wisdom of building roads. It's especially stupid to build toll roads and competing free roads at the same time, as was done in California, just as it's stupid to build transit and competing free roads at the same time.

What's really annoying is that for some people, building toll or high-occupancy vehicle lanes is automatically assumed to be a greenfield operation, the same way Kate Slevin insisted that "we can't have BRT without" a wider Tappan Zee Bridge.

Some of this is related to the idea that a toll is only used to finance the cost of road construction - and not maintenance or reconstruction, somehow. That idea was put to rest in 1937 when Bob Moses issued new bonds for the already-built Triborough Bridge. Just as you can always remove or reduce tolls and pay for a road with tax money, you can always collect or raise tolls and use them to pay for other things.

You can always convert an existing lane to toll, HOV or bus-only. It's easier when you have a nice wide, uncongested highway so that you have room to build nice landscaped barriers around the special lanes, but there's usually room for a jersey barrier. And of course you can always make the whole highway tolled, HOV or bus-only.

The main problem is that if you only implement tolls or vehicle restrictions on new greenfield lanes or highways, those highways will be empty a lot of the time. In the past they've tended to fill up eventually, but with current driving trends this will happen more and more slowly. One day someone will look at a ten-year-old tollway and realize that the promised cars will simply never appear. How many of those empty highways will we have built by then?

It's time to stop thinking that all HOV, bus or toll lanes have to be added. That kind of thinking doesn't solve any problems, and only leads to empty roads and empty treasuries.

Real Rockaway train service

As I've written before, the Rockaway Peninsula is one of the least sustainable places in the New York area. This sand bar might be okay for some cheap, replaceable summer bungalows and amusement parks, but it's no place for year-round inhabitants, much less large public housing projects. It's definitely not a place where you'd want to sink lots of money into expensive road infrastructure, but that's what the state has done, and every time it tries to charge people a reasonable fee for maintaining this massive system, they whine about it. The residents also made the mistake of depending for their power on bad sources, first on organized crime and nuclear fission, then on a legitimately underfunded but inept state agency.

For all their tough talk, it sounds like the Governor and the Mayor have passed up the opportunity to dump this money pit. We will rebuild, apparently. We'll rebuild the acres of single-family homes sprawled across the sand. We'll rebuild the parts of the housing projects that were damaged. We'll rebuild the train bridge that makes the commute slightly less polluting. We'll rebuild the telephone poles.

One of the most obnoxious elements of this whole thing was the pride that the MTA staff displayed in putting twenty R32 cars onto flatbed trucks and driving them over to the Rockaways. Don't they get it that this is really bad symbolism? Every time a train car is loaded onto a truck it sends the message that cars and trucks are the "real" transportation, and we have to do all kinds of things with them to get the trains working. On the other hand, these are probably the same MTA managers who live in East Northport and drive to their train yards and bus depots. Their entire lives are spent driving to run a transit system, so how can they ever imagine it could be any other way?

It's not clear how long it will take to restore the trestle across the bay, but the MTA could use some of the reconstruction money to restore the original tracks that went to Rockaway from Valley Stream. That connection came in handy in 1950 when the trestle was destroyed in a fire, and the Long Island Rail Road was able to run trains through Far Rockaway, as shown in this schedule:

Scan: LIRRhistory.org.

Did they learn from that bit of resilience? Nah. In 1956 the LIRR sold the trestle and the peninsular tracks to the city, and in 1958 a quarter mile of track was removed in Far Rockaway. In 1966 the State took over the LIRR, and in 1968 it took over New York City transit, but it didn't rebuild the connection. A supermarket has been built across the old right-of-way, as you can see in this satellite picture:

If the track connection were still there, it would have been a relatively simple matter to move the trains. Better yet, the LIRR could have run trains direct from Penn Station. They wouldn't have to take an hour and a half like they did in 1951, if they went express from Far Rockaway to Valley Stream.

I don't know exactly how much it would cost to buy out the supermarket, rebuild the tracks and adjust the stations platforms for LIRR train cars, but probably only a couple million dollars. For a few million more you could build an elevated trestle over the supermarket and not even have to demolish it. Sure, it's a lot of money, but probably nothing compared to what we're spending to rebuild the trestle across the bay.

On one level, all of this is silly, because we simply can't afford to keep people living on a sand bar year round. It'd be a lot simpler if the train line just had to serve beachgoers; it could be rebuilt every spring if need be. But if we're going to have people living out there all year, they should have some real train service, and despite what Gridlock Sam may say, we shouldn't lower the tolls. That would ensure that they will drive for years more, keeping the trains empty and heavily subsidized.

The Cap'n's Bookshelf: Two Coots in a Canoe and Becoming Odyssa

One of my recreational pleasures is reading what I call self-propelled travel memoirs. I can't stand travelogues that are full of passages like "Our driver warned us..." and I have a hard time relating to windshield memoirs. I like Paul Theroux's books about train travel, and his books where he travels partly under his own steam, like Kingdom By the Sea where he walks a good deal of the way around the coast of England, and The Happy Isles of Oceania, where he kayaks around a number of Pacific islands (traveling between them by ship and plane). I've discovered a number of memoirs by other authors that involve long walks, bike rides or paddles.

Earlier this year I read Two Coots in a Canoe, by retired conservation advocate David Morine, describing how he and his friend Ramsay Peard canoed the length of the Connecticut River. Morine's conversational style made for easy reading, but some of the emotional content was honest and raw, with a surprising twist at the end.

One intriguing aspect of this memoir was that Morine and Peard, both around sixty years old at the time, agreed that they wouldn't camp out once during the trip. Instead they collaborated with other conservation advocates and used the connections they had built over their lifetimes to arrange for free room and board, usually with local activists involved in preserving or restoring a section of the river. In giving voice to these activists and describing their campaigns, Morine paints a picture of the current state of the river and the challenges in sustaining its flow and its wildlife.

After I finished that, I read Becoming Odyssa, an Appalachian Trail memoir by Jennifer Pharr Davis. Pharr Davis's style is a bit overwrought with metaphors, but she gives you a good feel for trail culture, and her honest discussions of her own emotional reactions to the trail are insightful and illuminating. As an atheist, I appreciated that she described her Christian religious beliefs and observances as matters of fact without any attempt to proselytize.

Photo: throgers / Flickr.

Sustainable transportation advocates will be most interested in the passage when Odyssa (as the author named herself, an Appalachian Trail tradition) comes upon the scene of a suicide. Realizing that the deed has been done, she numbly continues on the trail and dials 911 from her cell phone. On page 204 there is this exchange with the dispatcher:

"I need to know where your car is," she said.
"I don't have a car. I hiked here."
"Well, where did you park your car?"
"I didn't park anywhere. I'm an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker."
"What county are you in?"
"I don't know what county I'm in. I'm at Sunrise Mountain in New Jersey."
"So where do you live in New Jersey?"
"I don't live in New Jersey."
"Then where is your car?"

After ten or fifteen minutes of this, someone else in the 911 call center overhears their conversation and tells the woman "Patch her through to the police now."

Pharr Davis may not have had a car at the time, but in both books I was struck by how much time all three travelers and their companions spent being driven around by friends, relatives and hosts. The amount of driving involved in the average Appalachian Trail through-hike is pretty amazing.

A grand bargain for walkable streets

As I wrote before, after the failure of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing campaign in 2008, advocates realized that the plan had failed to capture the interest of drivers. "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz then came up with a plan that offered "something for the drivers" to overcome their resistance. The problem is that it offers them too much. The proposed toll reductions and highway widenings would encourage a huge amount of driving, offsetting a large percentage of the reduction in driving encouraged by the added tolls and bus service.

The key failing, which I've also observed in other politicians who claim to be pro transit, is the practice of dividing the world into drivers, transit riders, cyclists and pedestrians, with the assumption that there is never any overlap or change among these categories, and that all people care about is their own transportation. This may be a good simplifying assumption to start with, but when it leads you to disasters like widening the Van Wyck, it's time to step back and revisit your assumptions.

So let's go back to what we actually know: that a significant segment of the opposition to congestion pricing came from people who currently drive. These people will probably not be driving much longer, however. I've been to the congestion pricing hearings. Most of the active opponents are over fifty. In thirty years, most of them will be dead, and many of those who are still alive will be too infirm to drive.

There are of course plenty of people under fifty who love driving, hate paying for transit, and fear that losing their status as drivers will infantilize them and drive all the chicks away. But they're a much smaller proportion of younger generations than they are among the Baby Boomers, and even the diehard motorists will think twice about driving when gas gets up over ten dollars a gallon. We shouldn't be building big highways for them.

The question becomes, then, how do we structure it so that "we" don't wind up taking "their" money? What can we do for the people who are currently drivers, and don't see any benefit to decreased Midtown congestion or increased transit funding? Something along the lines of Donald Shoup's parking benefit districts?

Many streets in Riverdale have no sidewalks. Photo: *Bitch Cakes* / Flickr.

I have one idea. Let's take the sidewalks off their hands.

Although the City Department of Transportation oversees sidewalk maintenance, they report that 99% of the 12,750 miles of the city's sidewalks are the responsibility of whoever owns the adjacent property. The only thing the DOT has to do is send out inspectors and then fine the property owners whose sidewalks aren't up to standards. In practice, they have a program where they repair the sidewalk themselves and send the owner the bill.

From a pedestrian's point of view, that sucks. It means that the sidewalks quality is inconsistent from one property to the next. The city is constantly tempted to cut the sidewalk inspection budget, which provides a huge incentive for the property owners to skimp on sidewalk maintenance and hope that the inspector won't notice. When the inspectors do their job the property owners complain, hence the endless stream of kvetching to elected officials, community boards and the media in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

It actually doesn't make sense for the property owners to be responsible for maintaining sidewalks. Most of the sidewalks are on city-owned right-of-way, not private property. The city sets strict standards that leave property owners hardly any room for self-expression. While the city DOT can take advantage of economies of scale to save money, small property owners have to pay regular market rate. On the few streets that are missing sidewalks, it is politically difficult for the DOT to force property owners to pay to build them.

Of course, it costs money to maintain all those sidewalks. According to this article, it cost the City of Los Angeles $172,727 to replace a mile of sidewalk. Sidewalk only needs to be replaced at most every ten years, for $17,273 per mile per year, or $220 million. This is a small portion of the $1.4 billion that Gridlock Sam's plan would raise in bridge tolls, leaving almost $1.2 billion for other projects. If enough of "the drivers" are satisfied with this arrangement, then we don't have to widen the Belt Parkway, and we can put all that money into transit projects.

Would "the drivers" like this? The Census website isn't cooperating with me, but I'm pretty sure that most drivers in Brooklyn and Queens own their homes, and a lot of those, especially the vocal ones who show up at meetings and call their city council members, live in single-family or two-family houses. For them, sidewalk maintenance is a big headache that they don't need.

The best part, of course, is that this benefit will accrue to "the drivers" even if they never drive again. Even if they sell their homes, they will still have well-maintained sidewalks to walk on. And so will the rest of us.

What Not to Rebuild

I'm glad to see that some people have broached the topic of sustainability in the areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and in particular the idea that some uses just aren't a good idea on barrier islands.

I have to say, though, that boardwalks and beaches seem like the easiest things. If the sand gets washed away you can bring more in on barges, and boardwalks are pretty easy to rebuild. Even train trestles - simple ones, across a shallow bay or along a sand bar, away from other structures - are cheap compared to a lot of things. Cheap bungalows, especially the summer-only kind that have no heat or insulation, aren't too bad. Here's a short list of things that were really a bad idea to build in the first place, and shouldn't be rebuilt.

Eric Fischer's map of racial identification in the 2010 census shows the segregation of New York's waterfront communities.

• Racist gated communities. I have sympathy for the people in Breezy Point and Seagate who lost homes and belongings in the floods and fires, and I know it's no fun to be displaced. But we have to acknowledge these places for what they were: segregated enclaves designed to enable white people to live relatively cheaply within the city limits without having black or brown people living next door.
  
  Beyond the sheer repulsiveness of the idea, it corrodes the fabric of the city. I'm not sure these places should be rebuilt at all, but if they're rebuilt with public funds, it should be on the condition that the gates come down and the streets and beaches are open to everyone.
• Housing projects. As the Pratt Center has pointed out, the public housing built on Coney Island and the Rockaways, as well as in Red Hook, is not just vulnerable to storms, it is remote from the city's job center, and a prime cause of the problem of poor people with long commutes. The projects on the Lower East Side are less remote, but still not well-served by transit.
  
  I don't know the current state of the buildings, but we definitely shouldn't put more money into any projects in Zone A. Beyond that, while the Pruitt-Igoe (or Cabrini-Green) treatment is problematic for inner city projects, it makes a lot more sense to dynamite projects on remote barrier islands. Replacing these projects with Section 8 vouchers would probably make the city more sustainable.
• Toxic industrial sites. As the waters of the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek rose, many feared that water seeping through the Superfund sites along its banks would contaminate the rest of the area. There's value to waterfront industry, but we have to be careful about this kind of danger (also highlighted by the Pratt Center).
• Car-dependent sprawl. In my last post, I made a connection between car-dependent sprawl and the climate change that enabled this storm. We shouldn't use rebuilding funds to perpetuate these polluting practices.
  
  According to L Magazine the "walks" on Breezy Point are car-free and safe, but most people get to and from the enclave by car. There's a similar pattern the length of Rockaway and in Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park. Much of the Jersey Shore and the South Shores of Staten Island and Long Island are car-dependent sprawl, especially as you get further away from the train stations.
  
  Some of these areas should be designated as waterfront preserves, with the only construction allowed being cheap summer bungalows and wooden boardwalks. The rest should be zoned for greater density and mixed use.