Memphis Blight pt 2 (Hickory Hill)

My friend Dmitry and I decided today to go out and take some photographs of Memphis. I don't think we necessarily intended to go photograph a bunch of apocalyptic blight, but that's how it turned out. We spent about 2 hours in Hickory Hill, in southeast Memphis.

Hickory Hill has about 65,000 residents and was once its own independent city. In the late 90's it got incorporated into Memphis, and as history has shown over and over in this city, that caused a great deal of white flight, and the neighborhoods, and subsequently the city, went downhill. Its demographics now echo, pretty closely, the rest of Memphis, with the African American population there about 60%. Supposedly it also has the highest Hispanic population of any neighborhood in the city.

Never having been there, it felt pretty solidly middle class and suburban to me. Most of the streets we drove down reminded me of the ranch-style, 1980's-era homes of the neighborhoods in my hometown. Most striking, though, were enormous apartment complexes that had been lost to fire or simple abandonment, often sitting there rotting in the middle of otherwise perfectly benign suburban streets. I've attached some pictures here. Many more can be found at my Flickr site in my Memphis set which I hope to be adding to on a pretty regular basis. With nice stuff too, not just ugly blight.

Habitat For Humanity is building a huge subdivision next door to this acres-wide eyesore.





You see a lot of these on abandoned buildings in Memphis.

Rethinking the Suburbs (again! or, still....)

The Atlantic article that I posted about back in February is quoted in a NYT article from today, entitled Rethinking the Country Life as Energy Costs Rise. The specific quote is, “Many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s — slums characterized by poverty, crime and decay,” declared Christopher B. Leinberger, an urban land use expert, in a recent essay in The Atlantic Monthly.

The NYT article is one more in a long line of articles recently extrapolating the rising costs of living in suburbia, or exurbia, and how home prices are plummeting. People are realizing that this whole $4 a gallon thing is probably gonna stick around, and only get worse.

Basic household arithmetic appears to be furthering the trend: In 2003, the average suburban household spent $1,422 a year on gasoline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By April of this year — when gas prices were about $3.60 a gallon— the same household was spending $3,196 a year, more than doubling consumption in dollar terms in less than five years.

...

But life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. Mr. Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. In March, the last time he filled his propane tank to heat his spacious house, he paid $566, more than twice the price of 5 years ago.

Though Mr. Boyle finds city life unappealing, it is now up for reconsideration.

...

Juanita Johnson and her husband, both retired Denver schoolteachers, moved here last August, after three decades in the city and a few years in the mountains. They bought a four-bedroom house for $415,000.

Last winter, they spent $3,000 on propane for heat, she said. Suddenly, this seemed like a place to flee. “We’d sell if we could, but we’d lose our shirt,” Ms. Johnson said. Recently she counted 15 sale signs. One home nearby is listed below $400,000.

“I was so glad to get out of the city, the pollution the traffic, the crime,” she said. Now, the suburbs seem mean. “I wouldn’t do this again.”

I guess if you have enough money to buy a $415,000 home and commute, you don't think too much about fuel costs until they're an issue. But I find that so strange. How could you not? It's like when I was watching The Unforeseen, the documentary about growth in Austin, when they talking to the couple who bought the home in a tract subdivision out in the middle of desert nowhere, with fake grass and trees planted everywhere. The couple was shocked when suddenly they were being forced to ration water, not being allowed to water their lawns, and their home values were plummeting.

Oh, really??? What did you expect? I'm not righteously blaming these people necessarily; I understand the desire to own your own home, and it's just not doable in the city for most people. It's sad, though, the position these people have put themselves into.

And speaking of that, one more reason why I'm changing my stance on welfare medicine: the CDC reported today that 8% of Americans now have diabetes. And another roughly 16% have pre-diabetes risk conditions.

I asked a good friend this morning who originally pointed this out to me if my new stance against socialized medicine* made me a Republican, and he said no, it just made me someone who didn't want to have to pay for other people's bad choices.

*I'm not really against socialized medicine per se, just against a welfare system. I think people who take care of themselves and take preventative measures should be rewarded, while those who don't should have to pay for the extra care. As my friend said, he thinks this country knows the difference between someone who gets fat and lazy and eats badly and someone who needs help because they were in a car wreck. Touche.

AvP

Looking for housing in Portland has been an eye-opening experience, but not in the ways you might expect. I understand that Austin is a desirable city with lots to offer: steps away from nature; a local, unique vibe in the culture; lots of art; low crime; a friendly population; overall good weather; beautiful scenery. But let's face it: it's also incredibly overpriced for what you get. Especially considering that as big of a city as it is, there are very limited job opportunities. And now that everyone is converting shitty apartments all over town into overpriced condos, there is swiftly becoming a very shrunken rental market. Gone are the days when you can survive in this town on minimum wage, or even really twice minimum wage.



So I expected Portland to be very expensive and for house-hunting there to be a formidable and frustrating process. It's a coastal city, everybody loves it, they have severe anti-sprawl laws to prevent suburbs and create density. But it seems like a renter's market. I have no idea what it's like to actually try to buy a home there, but renting? It's cheaper than Austin.

In Portland (at least what I've found so far) you can get a 1,000 square foot, 2-bedroom home, with wood floors, huge windows, a yard, right on the bus line, 2 blocks from the MAX (light-rail) line, a block or three from restaurants, coffee shops, bars, grocery stores, and cafes, for about $1,200. And about 2 miles from downtown. (Incidentally, within the downtown area, which encompasses several square miles, all the public transportation is free! Buses and trains.) And that's not rare. Hell, I've found 2-bedroom, corner-unit condos in brand new high-rise buildings downtown for $1,050!

That tells me either that the economy there totally sucks (which may or may not be valid), or these ads are all fakes, like the ones in the back of the Chronicle, where when you call about them the realtor says, "Oh, I just leased that unit literally an hour ago! But I have this other great unit, just a little more expensive....", or it's just a lot cheaper to live there. For whatever reason.

So why is Austin so expensive? There aren't a lot of great jobs. The traffic is wretched. There is no public transportation to speak of. All of about two neighborhoods are walkable, at least as far as anything useful is concerned. And the voters of Travis County just elected Laura Morrison to city council, which means, apparently, that they share her vision of being anti-density, anti-light rail, anti- toll roads, pro-parking lots, pro-sprawl, pro-McMansion Ordinance.

I just don't get it. I was talking to a friend of mine at work who's my age, and grew up in Austin (5th-generation), and he blames a lot of it on out-of-state real estate investors coming in and jacking up the market to be more along California's real estate level. Even though it's totally unwarranted.

I don't really know enough about real estate to agree or disagree, but it makes sense. The market has to be determined by something, and despite what it claims, Austin is very sprawly and big, so it shouldn't cost so fucking much to live here. When I moved here from Dallas, I was in shock when I learned how much apartments rented for here. And that was almost 10 years ago.

I do think Austin is a wonderful city and has a lot to offer (I'd still rather live here than almost anywhere else), but when it comes to its "progressive" reputation, it really has a lot to live up to. And I get more and more scared everyday that it never will. Being progressive is more than shopping at Whole Foods and supporting gay marriage. It's a lifestyle, and a way of thinking about things that looks to the future and tries to create a better world for everybody, not constantly yearning for a past that's gone and sucking as much money as possible out of people just trying to live in a nice place without offering anything in return. I'm pretty sure light rail is officially dead in this town forever. That's really a shame, and really depressing, because the time to build it was about a decade ago.

My friend at work is funny. He's actually moving to London next year because his wife is an art historian or something over there and makes a decent living. So he told me that he's trying to convince himself that Austin totally sucks now and make himself hate it so that it won't be so hard to leave. Maybe in a way that's what I'm doing too. I just don't seem to have any patience left for anything here. But I know the root is just an impatience and excitement to begin my new life. I'm looking forward to it. I am enjoying what time I have left here, though. In the past week, I've been to Barton Springs once and Deep Eddy twice (it would have been Barton all three times, except it's closed on Thursdays. Grrr!!). Just to lay in the sun and soak it all in. I got very sad at Barton Springs on Monday. That place is so incredible, and the people-watching is a riot. I hope someone, somewhere, figures out a way to save this place from itself. I might just want to come back someday.

"Bring it on."

When gas prices started climbing so swiftly several months ago, I somewhat self-righteously proclaimed, "Bring it on!" to high gas prices. It's going to hurt for awhile, but I think in the long run, high gas prices cn only really bring out positive changes. As it turns out, some website called "Foreign Policy" (linked by Andrew Sullivan) has compiled a list of 5 reasons to love $4 gas. Some of which seem a little dubious, but others (like the mass transit boom) are pretty certifiable.

Along those lines, the Economist this month has an interesting little article about the Brookings Institution declaring Los Angeles the greenest city in the country! Come again?

Los Angeles is, after all, a symbol of environmental degradation. It became car-oriented well before most other cities. “If I lose my car it's like having my legs cut off,” explains the doomed hero of the 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard”. These days the metropolis is renowned for jammed freeways. Talk to the mayor of almost any Western city and they will outline their plans for avoiding Los Angeles' fate.

Brookings's number-crunchers calculated carbon footprints mostly by studying highway traffic and household energy use. They excluded local traffic and industry because the statistics are bad. Top of their green list is Honolulu, in Hawaii, whose residents accounted for 1.36 tons of carbon each in 2005. Los Angeles, at 1.41 tons per person, narrowly beats Portland, Oregon, which is widely proclaimed as an über-green city. New York comes fourth. At the bottom of the table, spewing out more than twice as much carbon per person as Los Angeles, is Lexington, Kentucky.

It's a short article, and interesting, if you're as obssessed with this kind of shit as I am.

Would you live in the world's tallest vibrator?

At 150 stories tall, including a $40 million penthouse with a view of four states (!!!), the Chicago Spire, when complete, will be the world's tallest residential building, and the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.



Spanish architect Santiago Calantrava says he was inspired by nature, but I can't think of much else that gets you farther away from nature than being 150 stories up in the air pretending to be God. I hate to be a jerk about a building, but is all this small-dicked, Napoleonic, hubritic exclusivity really necessary? Each unit's front door is going to be custom-designed for god's sake!


Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago, the Congress for New Urbanism held its annual conference in Austin (I snicker every time I hear "new" urbanism....), and gave an its prestigious Athena Medal award to Austin's own Synclair Black. According to the Chronicle, Over four decades, he's remained tirelessly devoted to inspiring, cajoling, haranguing and goading Austin to embrace better urban design.

In the accompanying article in the Chronicle, they note that he was commissioned to design the vacant lot on north Lamar, between 38th and 45th street, but that the developer didn't comprehend the value of the plan to integrate the residential, shopping, and commercial/medical components to create community synergy. It eliminated almost all traces of the New Urbanist principles, one by one, and instead built a suburban-style project with disconnected shopping, housing, open space, and a hospital. Aka, it became what is now Central Market, with that hideous and foreboding parking lot and dead space.

He also had a plan to sink I-35 and create park space on top of where it now is, but Texas Department of Transportation has no intention to ever do so.

The "sunken" I-35 plan, where local drivers would use handsome new tree-lined boulevards at street level.

And in 1981, apparently he drew up a "master plan" of downtown Austin consisting of incredibly dense 4-6 story buildings, using Barcelona, Washington D.C., and Paris as his models.

Beautiful Barcelona.

Ah, what might have been. If Austin had been forward-thinking enough 30 years ago to have started implementing some of these "new urbanist" ideas, instead of saying "Oh, shit!" and scrambling to save its ass now by building 180-story condos (which, don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of, although I think a more European-style plan, with smaller buildings closer together and much larger sidewalks creates a far more welcoming and vibrant street life), imagine how different and amazing it could probably be today. For one thing, we wouldn't have all these box stores and gigantic parking lots in the central city, and it would probably all have much more of West Campus feel. I drove through West Campus the other night just to check out all the new construction and stuff, and damn, that neighborhood is dense! There's not a square inch there left uncovered. And it's beautiful and really vibrant. Too bad the whole city's not like that.

Anyway, there's a short list of some of Sinclair Black's other architectural plans (most not ever built, sadly) here if you'd like to check them out.

Extravagant Demolitions

Urban scientist Mike Davis begins the chapter entitled "Las Vegas Versus Nature" in his depressing, but fascinating, tour through urban renewal and destruction, Dead Cities by pointing out that to make way for the future, Las Vegas blatantly and extravagantly demolishes important pieces of its past. It's urban renewal, Vegas-style. In 1993, the Dunes hotel was blown up, and the dust plume was visible in California. The Sands, of Rat Pack fame, was detonated in 1996. The Hacienda Hotel - on New Year's Eve, 1996.

In greater detail, he extrapolates further as to why Las Vegas, even more than its hideous brethren Los Angeles, represents the very antithesis of smart, thoughtful, humanistic, and sustainable urban planning. It can only represent the end of the line, he basically says, and yet it keeps gobbling up land and resources like the desert parasite that it is. He even contrasts it to the White City of the Chicago World's Fair at the end of 19th century: Las Vegas represents the end the same way the fair was supposed to represent the possibilities of the future.

Each week over 1,000 new residents arrive in Las Vegas, an odd mixture of immigrants seeking jobs and retirees from Southern California seeking gated communities and an escape from the urban turmoil. Per capita, Las Vegas consumes 360 gallons of water per day, compared to L.A.'s 211, or Oakland's 110. 60% of that water use goes to irrigation of lawns and golf courses - in a region of the country that only sees 7 to 8 inches of rainfall per year! Sucking water from nearby Lake Mead has caused groundwater overdrafts that have actually caused ground levels to sink: the Strip, for example, is now several feet lower than it was in 1960, and a few nearby subdivisions have had to be abandoned.

In 1989, the Southern Nevada Water Authority stunned rural Nevadans by laying claim to over 800,000 acre-feet of surface and groundwater rights in 3 neighboring counties, to the degree that a mob of ranchers, miners, farmers, and environmentalists banded together and vowed to blow up any sections of pipeline laid down to steal their water. The Authority has also teamed up with the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to increase its withdrawal of water from the Colorado River stored in Lake Mead so as to allocate distribution away from agirculture and towards their respective metropolitan regions (which also means hijacking Northern Arizona's water allotment). Meanwhile, large amounts of toxic waste have been found in Lake Mead, and in 1994, 37 people, most of them with AIDS, died from drinking the tap water. The unprecedented growth cannot keep up with water and waste treatment facilities.

In addition, Las Vegas also only gets 4% of its energy from "clean" hydropower: the rest comes from dirty coal-burning plants on the Moapa Indian Reservation and along the Colorado River. LV has the lowest vehicle occupancy rate of any city in the country, in tandem with the "longest per person, per trip, per day ratio." Its smog has already left a cloud over the Grand Canyon. The Lower Colorado River Valley desert landscape has also been seriously degraded and compromised environmentally by its use as a desert base camp of recreation (dune buggies, jet skis, dirt bikes, speed boats) by tourists and weekenders from Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

The term "urban sprawl" was actually coined by sociologist William Whyte, flying from Los Angeles to San Bernadino and looking out the window at "an unnerving lesson in man's infinite capacity to mess up his environment." Las Vegas is blindly and stupidly following in all of Los Angeles' idiotic footsteps in what not to do, including abdicating a rsponsible water ethic; fragmenting local government and subordinating it to private corporate planning; producing a negligible amount of usable public space; dispersing land use over an unnecessarily enormous area; and embraced the resulting "dictatorship" of the automobile, among other things.


Las Vegas has been diabolically split up into sprawling electoral districts to intentionally weaken the power of minorities and working-class voters. Only one-third of the metropolitan region is actually encompassed within the city limits: the Strip, Convention Center, International Airport, and the U of Nevada LV are all located in an unicorporated township named Paradise. Poverty, unemployment and homelessness are all concentrated within the boundaries of LV and North LV. This more easily centralizes land-use decisions in the hands of gaming corporations and giant residential and commercial-strip developers. Hop-scotch patterns of development with no regulation raise the costs of streets, utilities and schools, while covering up any available public-use land (commons areas) with vacant lots. Compared to the recommended national average minimum of 10 acres of common land for every 1,000 residents in most Eastern and Midwestern cities, LV has only 1.4 acres of commons area for every 1,000 residents.

As a result, sprawl is driving everything, from tourism attractions to gated communities, to the very periphery of the city, encroaching more and more upon the fragile desert landscape. The physical possibilities seem endless, with countless edge cities (including, seriously, gated mansions within larger gated communities, upon artificial lakes and major new resorts) popping up to provide exclusive enclaves and "upscale alternatives for Las Vegas."



No small wonder, writes Davis at the end of the chapter, that Las Vegas, with its obsession with sin and excess, is the manifestation for Satan's earthly capital in Stephen King's novel The Stand. No other city in the American West, he concludes, is as driven by occult forces or as unresponsive to social or natural constraints.

"Noisy ghosts"

On Saturday night I caught an unedited broadcast of Poltergeist, which was probably one of my favorite films of my youth, and by far my favorite horror film. I must have watched that movie 20 times on HBO, and then when it came out on VHS, I rented it multiple times. I have no idea what attracted me to it so strongly when I was a kid, but I have no doubt, after watching it the other night for the first time in years, that it was the most influential film of my childhood.

I guess I never realized just how scathingly critical it is of the suburbs, and sprawl, and reckless development. The patriarch of the Freeling family, Craig T. Nelson, plays a somewhat bumbling and disingenuous realtor/developer who can't even muster up enough enthusiasm towards his own cookie-cutter subdivisions to sell them to families desperately hungry for a place to call home. JoBeth Williams is the ideal suburban, stay-at-home mom, excpet that she was also a teen mother and is still a pothead. Though both of these things are presented quite matter-of-factly and entirely without judgment. When the home is first invaded by the "TV people," and they're playing harmless pranks, she's so excited for a distraction from the mundacity that she can't even contain herself.

The film turned the national anthem into an ominous signal of doom, and, even as a child, made me start questioning what was underneath the everyday blandness of everything shiny.


Mocking the complicity and peace of the suburbs, or at the very least, turning over the rock and looking at what lies underneath it, has been a staple of indie film since the 80's at least. But I bet Poltergeist was one of the first, mainstream, star-fueled films to take a sledgehammer and ax to Middle America and criticize everything it holds dear. And then sell their clueless optimism back to them in what is no less than a raging, politically-driven popcorn movie.

Spielberg kind of specializes, I guess, in looking at the extraordinary among the oridnary (i.e., weird shit in boring-ass suburbia), but Poltergeist felt to me like a particularly angry and frightened film. Like nothing less than a warning call to Americans everywhere mindlessly gobbling up resources, and rotting their brains with television and soulless lives.

Maybe I'm reading far too much into it, but it seems so obvious when I watch it now. And makes me like it that much more.

Suburban Decay

The latest issue of the Atlantic has an article about what will most likely become America's next major crime-ridden slum: the suburb. It's not an entirely new theory, and if you look at the patterns and data, it makes sense.

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes in the United States by 2025. Foreclosure rates in 2005 and 2006 have been highest in suburban and exurban areas, with crime increasing in some of the harder-hit neighborhoods by 33 percent.

As more and more Americans, especially wealthy ones, start converging back upon the urban core that they all abandoned in the 1980's, property values are going to sink in suburban neighborhoods, along with tax revenue, which is highly dependent on house values and new development. 66% of suburban residents who live on the fringes of larger cities say they would prefer to live in the cities, and would give up extra space and cars to live in more crowded, dense, walkable neighborhoods, but just have no economic way of doing so. The more heating and gasoline costs go up, though, the more expensive the suburbs are going to be in the future. And with the loss of the wealthy tax base moving in the denser, urban areas, out will also go the good schools and safe communities.

One solution to this problem is the proliferation of what are called "lifestyle centers," or basically faux inner-city neighborhoods. We've all seen them: they combine retail, residential, office, and some open space, except they rise all at once and are fairly uniform. The biggest drawback with these, though, is that they must reach critical mass very quickly, and creating and filling a neighborhood out of thin air isn't easy.

There is definitely a trend in the United States towards more urban living, especially among the young, who yearn for good public transit and vibrant neighborhoods. So what will become of the sprawling 'burbs and giant McMansions that no one in the future will be able to afford anymore? Some will be bulldozed and probably turned back into public space, though, as the article states, this will be very few, as once a suburban infrastructure is built, it's very difficult to unbuild it. Most will be sold off to the lowest bidders and divided up into apartments to provide housing for lower-income residents and immigrants.

Those close to inner cities, though, and especially those along rail lines, will most likely be able to stop their population hemorraghing and survive. Those poorly served by public transport or on the undesirable parts of town, will suffer badly. The worst of it, though, will probbly be those on the far suburban fringes, with no public transport and no real core - basically, the country's most recently-developed areas.