Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl
By Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie
Henry Holt, New York, 1998, 276 pages.
Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
By James Howard Kunstler
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998, 318 pages.
As I lay on the couch in my sunlit apartment, reading Home from Nowhere, a breeze feathering in from my fairly integrated, somewhat gentrified Cambridgeport neighborhood, the mail arrived. Bills, circulars, and a largish package (somehow, I’m on their list) from the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. The envelope bore a slogan. In elegant crimson serif, it proclaimed: “America’s Walking City.”
This struck me as funny. Fifty years ago, the phrase “walking city” would be as redundant as “wet ocean” or, as one of the dim-bulb rock stars in This is Spinal Tap calls the Druids, “a race of people.” All cities were walking cities. But it’s not 50 years ago, it’s now, and I’ve been to Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Virginia’s terrifying Tyson’s Corner, plus I know of more splayed, there’s-no-there-there places like Houston or Phoenix. In a country shell-shocked by infinite exurban and suburban sprawl, humane compactness stands out. Shines, in fact. So the Visitors Bureau pushes not history, nor the Red Sox, nor lobsters. It hails the simple restorative fact that you can walk Boston.
The authors of Home From Nowhere and Changing Places would love it if this slogan regained its absurdity. Each book joins the ranks of recent social planning jeremiads – such as The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler’s prequel to Home From Nowhere; Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and Peter Katz’s The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. This genre bemoans the spore-like mallification mildewing our country. “New Jersey’s Miracle Mile” as the caption reads in the Roz Chast cartoon. She’s drawn a highway with hills in the distance, and a road sign. It announces: “No Malls Next 5,280 Feet.”
Home From Nowhere and Changing Places don’t break new ground, pun intended. But both advance the discussion, quite often in provocative ways. Before I chronicle their respective points, know that the books’ primary difference is not topical, it’s tonal. Home From Nowhere is a diatribe and though clearly there is much (much) to rail against in this Hardee’s and Jiffy Lube moonscape of ours, I found it hard to take.
Sometimes Kunstler is plain mean: The man rubber-bullets various people and projects with words like “idiocy,” “pathetic,” and “asinine.” This Saratoga Springs resident who writes for the New York Times Magazine also betrays a class hatred equal to, say, Howard Roark’s. (Remember him, the bourgeoisie-disdaining architectural demi-god from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead?) I quote: “They [apparently us poor unenlightened slobs in front of the TV set] sink into the sofa for another night of microwaved cheese dips and canned laughter . . . When we refer to the suburbs as ‘dead,’ we couldn’t be more precise.”
Changing Places, by Richard Moe, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Carter Wilkie, a former White House speechwriter and an advisor to our own Mayor Menino, is the more mature work. The authors don’t seem to think we’re a bunch of (microwaved cheese) dips; they believe the state we’re in “is largely a story of good intentions gone awry.” They also acknowledge some fundamental traits in the American psyche; we’re a restless people in a still-new country. Tradition doesn’t hold as fast here. This makes us innovative, true, but also renders us less appreciative of what has come before. Hence our tear-it-down culture. “We don’t readily see the opportunity which our accumulated architecture offers us to connect to our past,” Moe and Wilkie write, “nor do we see often enough the opportunity which it offers us for reuse.”
Kunstler, meanwhile, dwells on the fact that this is still a Jeffersonian country, in that we have a long history of disdaining the urban, or even inclinations toward the urban. It’s that frontier sense of alleged individualism. In suburban terms, we crave the lawn, rather than the market square; we want the cul de sac rather than the through street. This suburban mentality has oozed into the cities, too.
Both books are hell-bent on probing how such psychological underpinnings get translated into fiscal realities. “One of the problems with cities is it’s so much easier to get money to build than to maintain what has been built already,” as John Manillo explains. He’s a developer of Lowertown, a revived neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the communities profiled in Changing Places.
By the way, both books are far-flung in geography. Home from Nowhere has a predilection for upstate New York, Kunstler’s stomping grounds, and the inevitable “New Urbanist” Seaside, Florida, where the movie The Truman Show was filmed. Changing Places waxes about Portland, Oregon, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, parts of New Orleans. Boston doesn’t get much coverage in either work, which is odd given Wilkie’s connection to the city. And too bad, given we have much to teach (see the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative) and much to warn against (see the destruction of the West End).
But let’s return to the issue of money and sprawl, lucre and redevelopment. Home From Nowhere and Changing Places each contain examinations of the ruin wrought upon cities by red-lining. Often the oldest housing stock lies in the poorest–viz. the red-lined–neighborhoods and since bankers don’t venture there, it doesn’t get repaired. New money flies to new construction, which occurs in less poor areas. And so on and so on and, God help us, so on.
Pittsburgh is a heartening case of reversing this trend, as Changing Places details. But it took a laborious, concerted effort to entice the financial community–when all instincts pointed to spurning local bankers for years of red-lining. How did this work? Well, in a neighborhood called Manchester, preservationists and community activists drew up a map that targeted all the blighted areas (dangerous housing projects, drug trade zones, etc.). Then they launched a triage. The worst places got the first attention. “If you re-build it, they will come,” was the reasoning. In other words, the banks would step in for the next-to-worst places, if the worst places were handled first.
“We went to the banks and said, ‘We have put a plan together to change our neighborhood,'” says Stanley Lowe, a Pittsburgh community activist who gets much attention in Changing Places. “We know, Mr. Banker, that you can’t invest here until we deal with these problems. We tell you what, Mr. Banker. We’ll take care of this. This is not your job. This is our job. And we’ll deal with it. But when we do, it’ll be time for you to invest.” Mattapan, are you listening? Haverhill? Springfield?
Five years later, Pittsburgh lenders extended $2.5 billion worth of loans to communities they’d barely touched before. One establishment, Integra Bank, committed another $1.67 billion by the year 2000–the largest community reinvestment agreement in the country. It was this roping in of funding–plus making sure residents understood gentrification wouldn’t mean displacement–which did the trick.
Of course, such success stories prove the exception to the rule. “It’s easy to sprawl, it’s hard to redevelop,” admits Henry Turley, a Memphis developer who appears in Changing Places. “Urban redevelopment requires a coordinated effort, a consensus behind a vision of what you want and what you’re doing … [In Memphis], there is very little interaction between [the public and private sectors]. There’s not much common vision. And all of this is overarched by racial distrust.”
The effect of racial distrust on construction and rehabilitation would take an entirely different article (different warehouse of articles). For now, it’s enough to say that not only do cities get more money from local governments for new construction, but retailers and corporations (not poor minority communities, to state the obvious) are also routinely awarded incentive packages. We’re talking tax breaks, sewer and water lines constructed on the town’s dime, that sort of thing. Yes, the historic preservation movement has wrought tax breaks of its own for rehabilitation. But new wins out over old time and time again.
All right, but why the sameness of the new? Here Kunstler’s vitriol actually comes in handy. (As he joylessly puts it, “I believe that rhetoric is undervalued these days.”) Mr. Nowhere can’t stand the aesthetics of sprawl and digs to find out just who’s behind the schlock. “Townships and municipalities had been accustomed for fifty years to buying zoning ‘kits’ right off the shelf from companies that sold generic zoning ordinances,” he tells us. “If you wonder why the suburbs of Tacoma, Washington are identical to those of Scranton, Pennsylvania, seek no further.”
Home From Nowhere, in particular, tackles the tax and zoning structures that encourage new building, and discourage repair. The relevant chapter is entitled “A Mercifully Brief Chapter on a Frightening, Tedious, But Important Subject.” Meaning the property tax system which, among other (misguided) things, bids us to tax buildings much more heavily than the land under them. “The higher the building’s value, the higher the tax,” writes Kunstler. “Under this system, a rational person has every reason to put up crappy buildings that will not be highly assessed, or he has every reason to let his property run down . . ..”
Indeed, those who jump on the preservation bandwagon–who want to rescue the non-crappy buildings–don’t do so because it poses long-term economic advantages. They’re in for the sentiment. The movement itself pretty much began in the 1850s, when George Washington’s Mount Vernon was threatened or, in Boston, when John Hancock’s Beacon Hill mansion was torn down. Trauma, or impending trauma, galvanized the populace. This is a double-edged sword. Moe and Wilkie seem to know that the problem of the preservation movement is as much perception as anything else. The poor and middle class think little old ladies want to sink dollars into pretty historic buildings because of aesthetics and feeling alone.
Preservationists, to this way of thinking, are therefore content to let surrounding neighborhoods dwindle and die, as long as one or two architectural gems are saved and polished. There’s some truth in the criticism. More’s the pity, since preservationists have it in their power to revive whole areas, á la the Manchester, Pittsburgh, strategy. Write Moe and Wilkie: “By focusing on a district and not simply a single property, preservationists can do what market-driven developers cannot or will not do, and that is to reduce the economic risk to investors in a location.”
Surely, rehabilitation makes good economic sense. But let’s be honest here. Kunstler, Moe, Wilkie–hell, Prince Charles, the producers of This Old House, and yes me, too–just plain like old architecture better than new. Its grace and solidity, its hearkening to other eras. All three authors inveigh against modernism, Kunstler being the most savage on this score, of course. Boy, does he have it in for Le Corbusier! And Moe and Wilkie go after Frank Lloyd Wright, who, they tell us, hoped urban areas would vanish altogether. Indeed, Wright counseled his clients to live outside the city “ten times as far as you think you ought to go!” and took his own advice, settling in the Arizona desert 26 miles from Phoenix.
The exodus that he advocated, though, soon showed up at his doorstep and he was none too cheery about this. Indeed, the sage of Falling Water went to court to stop the erection of power lines, needed for the new residents, which would block his views. He lost. The fast-food shopping-mall slurry eventually lapped up to Wright’s place, as it has nearly everywhere. Speaking of the development that would follow Disney’s proposed (since defeated) new park in the Civil War battlefields of Virginia, Michael Eisner put it in his own elegant way: “The First Amendment gives you the right to be plastic.”
What-ever, as they say in Valley Girl-ese. Changing Places and Home From Nowhere know that the right to be plastic is all too apparent in the U.S. of Antisepticism. Along these lines, one of the scariest quotations in either book comes from Matt Wagner, a former manager of a Wisconsin advocacy group called Main Street Sheboygan Falls: “Today there is a whole group of people of a certain age who have only lived in malls and have never spent any real time in a downtown. They don’t remember when, because for them, there never was a when.”
A when that, thank our stars, still prevails in Boston–recalling when every city was America’s Walking City.
Katharine Whittemore lives in Cambridge and is the editor of American Movie Classics Magazine.