Bob Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: “Maybe Beggars, Such as Providence, Can’t be Choosers”
Friday, November 25, 2016
“Don’t belittle the big; coastal class system; game dinner"
“They all laughed at Rockefeller Center
Now they're fighting to get in
They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin’’
From the ‘ 30s song “They All Laughed,’’ with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira.
A bit of what’s wrong with Rhode Island popped up recently in remarks by Arnold “Buff’’ Chace, a Providence real-estate owner/developer and a scion of an old southeastern New England family. (One of the family’s enterprises became internationally known after Warren Buffett turned the family’s old textile company, Berkshire Hathaway, into a huge, and hugely successful, investment company – a sort of mutual fund for the affluent.)
Mr. Chace said of New York developer Jason Fane’s recent proposal to put three skyscrapers (one 55 stories high), with condos and apartments, on Route 195 land in downtown Providence:
“The scale is a problem for sure. Buildings of that type are not part of the character of our city, and I think it would be a big mistake.’’
First, let us bear in mind that these buildings would compete with Mr. Chace’s rental units.
But more to the point, why would it be bad if such towers changed the “character’’ of the city and state. Is the current “character’’ all that good? Wouldn’t construction of such towers tell visitors and residents alike that Providence was becoming an exciting and dynamic place on the move instead of an often depressed, fiscally fragile place that has seen very little economic growth for years? And what’s wrong with skyscrapers? They are a symbol of hope and aspiration that would look great in downtown Providence and could be seen for miles around. Thank God for the little old skyscrapers that downtown Providence has now that tell visitors that the city once had a thriving economy and so might have one again.
“If I were to do the same project in New York or Toronto, people would love to live in it. And it would be easy to finance, but it wouldn’t particularly stand out,” Mr. Fane told the Providence Business News. “This is where Providence would have an opportunity to change its self-image.”
Of course, it’s healthier if local wealth and job creation come before residential development, or at least simultaneously. Big real estate development usually follows local wealth creation, as do the “hospitality industry’’ and philanthropy. The big long-term wealth creators are: Inventing things, manufacturing things, growing and catching things, investing things and shipping things. So we hope that, for example, bio-tech, design and other job-creating sectors finally move into the Route 195 area to provide the income with which people could buy or rent in the likes of those towers.
But let’s not throw cold water on a proposal that could give people the hope that Providence can become a major and prosperous metropolis again.
When John D. Rockefeller Jr., assisted by his son, Nelson, built, and battled to fill, huge Rockefeller Center, in midtown Manhattan, in the Great Depression, many thought that they were on a fool’s errand. But the expression of faith in New York demonstrated by the spectacular project helped turn Gotham around.
Providence needs to show similar energy and faith. The three-tower plan might or might not work, but in any case the city desperately needs big, dramatic projects, which will bring in smaller ones, too.
xxx
Booming Boston, for its part, is so rich that it has the luxury of dealing with a multitude of real and proposed high-rise projects. Consider the 340-foot tower proposed for near Fenway Park. The Red Sox oppose the current version of the project.
“We have strong concerns that this proposed project would create an unacceptably tall and impactful 29-story building in very close proximity to Fenway Park, and which might have significant negative impacts on the surrounding neighborhood as well as our historic ballpark itself,” David Friedman, the team’s senior vice president for legal and government affairs, told the Boston Planning & Development Agency.
It’s part of the growing controversy in Boston over proliferating skyscrapers putting some buildings, parks and other places in shadows for some of the day. But the owners of these proposed buildings can pay so much in property taxes in what has become truly a world city that it’s hard to tell them to go away, and most Bostonians seem very happy to have them anyway. Compared to Providence, it’s a nice problem to have. “The Hub’’ has become a very exciting city, especially compared to its Dickensian dreariness in the ‘50s.
Maybe beggars, such as Providence, can’t be choosers.
xxx
Perhaps the proposed Providence towers could help offset the tax revenue to be lost when the great job killer, wage reducer and civil-society eroder known as the Internet kills many and perhaps most of the stores in Providence Place within the next five to ten years. What might replace them? A college, bio-tech companies, light manufacturing, design and artists’ studios, apartments? Because of architect Friedrich St. Florian’s superb design and the good building materials used, the huge building should have a good 100 years in it yet, but not as a retail center in the Age of Amazon.
xxx
Contrary to the usual rhetoric, much “government welfare’’ in America, be it through tax policy or direct federal spending, goes to the affluent. A good example is the federal flood insurance program, in which vast sums of taxpayer money are spent to protect the investment of the well off (including some very rich) folks who can afford to have a seaside house, which is in many cases a second home.
This insurance, of course, encourages people to build and/or keep expensive houses in flood zones. Thus over and over the taxpayers have to keep bailing them out (sometimes literally).
We got a reminder of this last week with word that the Army Corps of Engineers said it wants to spend $58.6 million to lift up 341 private structures in southern Rhode Island to make them less vulnerable to storm surges as the ocean continues to rise with global warming. This would be in addition to continuing to subsidize the owners’ flood insurance. Many of the owners are from New York, Connecticut and elsewhere from outside the Ocean State.
This would be a raid on the U.S. Treasury to further comfort the comfortable but will almost inevitably happen, encouraged by the seaside towns because most of these people do pay hefty property taxes. But inland-town folks paying federal taxes might not find this pleasing.
xxx
The destruction of much of journalism by the Internet has been a disaster for civic life. More than half of professional journalists have lost their jobs since 2001. Most of these people were in organizations that required fact-checking and careful editing. Now they’ve been partly replaced by purveyors of fake news, most of it through social media.
The managements of Facebook, etc., have of course profited mightily from the clicks to look at sensationalist “news,’’ much of it consisting of lies, including fabricated conspiracy theories, meant to pump up this or that political (mostly right-wing), business or other group and destroy the reputations of real or perceived enemies. Most Americans are too lazy or busy to research this stuff themselves.
The social-media companies, not wanting to deal with the implications of acting as massive transmitters of lies, claim to be only electronic highways and not media companies. But in fact they are now in effect the biggest news-and-opinion media companies. It’s past time for them to take a few million from their billions in profits and start acting as responsible news-media companies like Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg and so on that assume the moral and professional obligation of checking out the accuracy of the stuff they publish.
Facebook, et al., have made billions undermining civic life. They now need to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. With newspapers and other parts of “legacy media,’’ imploding, social-media moguls, if they care at all about the nation, must take over most of the duties of responsible, fact-based journalism.
Meanwhile, Clay Johnson, who wrote The Information Diet, suggests that one way to approach the crisis of journalism is to get Facebook to shift more attention from national news to local issues. He told Wired magazine:
“If you want to be free of fake news, you’ve got to focus on things that are observable. So there’s nothing that does that going into the community.’’ But would the social media/news moguls put resources into that, and how much would the attention-deficited population of our celebrity-culture country pay attention? Who knows, but it’s worth a shot.
Wired commented: “Promoting more local content … would not only give people a more direct way to participate in issues that affect them where they live, but a more immediate way to verify what’s actually going on. Instead of – or at least in addition to – your usual timeline filled with outrageous quotes from national politicians, you would see information that’s relevant to your community or neighborhood.’’
xxx
I wonder how many Trump supporters have been watching closely the parade of rich lobbyists and other special interests entering Trump Tower in the past few days to curry favor with our new emperor. Remember when Mr. Trump said he’d ‘’Drain the swamp’’?
Will the Trumpists get angry when they realize that they’ve been conned by “The Establishment’’ yet again?
Such as when they find out that Mr. Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its tax cuts to America’s richest 1 percent and many middle-class people would see their taxes rise. We’re just getting going on the adventure of widening income inequality!
Perhaps our new maximum leader will split the difference with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who proposes to give, at first, 76 percent of new-tax-cut benefits to the oppressed 1 percent, rising to 99.6 percent by 2025. Oh, yeah, and get rid of the federal estate tax! Don’t want to give those without rich parents an unfair advantage. Of course, Mr. Trump is very unpredictable. Maybe, in his search for adoration by the masses, he’ll do a 180 on tax policy? If he at least simplifies the world’s most complex and exasperating tax code, I’d soften my opinion.
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In most years for the past quarter century, I’ve joined a bunch of male friends and driven to Bradford, Vt., a small town on the Connecticut River, on the weekend before Thanksgiving to eat at a game supper in the Congregational (aka “Congo’’) church there. It’s held in an assembly hall beneath the nave as the church’s major annual fund-raising event. The food is a wide range of game, including beaver (yuck!), elk, venison, pheasant, wild boar, rabbit and some other animals. (Too bad they don’t offer alligator, which is quite good.)
I generally avoid meat, mostly out of sympathy for the animals and a little bit because of health. But the game dinner is for a good cause, and maybe some of the animals being served are road kill anyway.
It’s tasty enough but the trip has been mostly an excuse to get together and catch up once a year. It’s also a bit of American nostalgia.
The small-town folks manning the supper are a delightful mix of old, young and middle aged. (Some of the teens look a bit as if they’d be drafted against their will into acting as waiters to bring the cider, coffee and dessert – always gingerbread – to the tables.)
There are always a lot of what I used to consider “old people’’ staffing the long buffet tables; I am their age now. Most of the “old people’’ we first encountered in 1990 have gone to their reward, including, I think, the blue-haired lady who used to pound out tunes from old shows such as Oklahoma! on the upright piano in the nave to amuse those waiting to be called by number to go downstairs to the chow.
There’s a big kitschy picture on the wall in that hall showing a boy Jesus teaching his elders; it must date from the late 19th Century. At least this Palestinian kid wasn’t blond, unlike in my Sunday school books in the ‘50s!
The church needs painting and I’d guess, like most mainline Protestant churches, its membership is down, so it was nice to help out a bit to keep the place going. For various reason this was my last year attending this little annual event but it’s been edifying to participate in such a good-hearted community endeavor, and find out what the contemporaries in my little group were up to as they moved from middle to old age.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), who wrote on the special importance in America of community organizations for a healthy civic life and local democracy, would have liked the Bradford Game Supper. “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens,” he wrote.
And Norman Rockwell would have found a subject for a magazine cover or two in this escape from the increasing sleaziness of American life.
It snowed in the hills on our way back to southern New England. Winter is pressing in.
Related Slideshow: 3 Towers Proposal for 195
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