Whitcomb: More Little Houses, Please; Facebook Faces the Music; Judging Judges; Fane Tower Is Alive
Sunday, December 13, 2020
“These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in tapestries of afterthought.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTMore time, more time….’’
From “Year’s End,’’ by Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), Massachusetts-based poet
“All my life, affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.’’
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright and critic
“To me Newport could never be a place charming by reason of its own charm. That it is a very pleasant place when it is full of people, and the people are in spirits and happy, I do not doubt. But then the visitors would bring, as far as I am concerned, the pleasantness with them.’’
-- Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), English novelist and civil servant.
Need Small Houses, too
Housing in America, especially in and around the richest cities, such as Boston, has become too expensive for many workers, which can make it difficult for some employers to get the employees they need. In Massachusetts this led to launching the new Starter Home Zoning District, in 2016. The idea was to encourage suburbs to loosen restrictive development rules to encourage the building of the sort of small, affordable and close-together houses on small lots that went up like mushrooms in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
But four years later, reports Commonwealth Magazine, not one house has been built in the program.
It seems that a killer is that the law requires that any new starter home be close to a train station and/or other amenities. The admirable idea is to encourage walkability and discourage sprawl and its environmental damage. But the laws in Massachusetts and some other states have advocated the construction of condos and apartments near train and other transportation hubs to encourage the sort of anti-sprawl density you don’t get with single-family houses; there’s little room for single-family houses in or near many of these hubs. And at the same time, “snob zoning” in many communities has set big space minimums for land for houses away from these hubs. This has encouraged the construction of many McMansions on parcels of at least an acre, keeping out the peasantry.
To read the Commonwealth piece, please hit this link:
In practical terms, all this means that there’s not much space available for the old American dream of a house affordable for people of modest means.
Obviously, a lot of people would prefer to live in a detached house, however small, than in an apartment they rent or own. Healthy communities and regional economies need a mix. Owning and living in a house gives a certain kind of resident a strong sense of place, with the local civic-mindedness and stability that goes with it, that they don’t feel in a condo or apartment.
Dispersed and often solitary Americans, who live so much of their lives online and many of whom don’t even shop together in person anymore, as Amazon, etc., continue to ravage in-person retailing, makes it all the more important that as many people as possible feel anchored to a physical place and so feel some commitment to participating in the community there.
Civic disengagement and social disintegration (starting at the family level) continue to undermine America. Fixing some of our housing problems would help mitigate this.
Perhaps the sort of places where small houses could be built without hurting the environment would include on the land at the ever-growing number of closed malls, with their vast parking lots.
Hartford Courant Is Forever Homeless
Increasingly, America has become what Gertrude Stein complained about Oakland, Calif.: “There’s no there, there.’’ This leads to a sense of loss and to anomie, that, among other things, leads to the success of demagogues. The pandemic has only increased Americans’ growing solitariness.
Chris Powell, the excellent columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., noted that The Hartford Courant, for many decades the nearest thing that the Nutmeg State had to a state paper, is selling its big headquarters in downtown Hartford. Its few remaining journalists will work from home, and its printing is already done in Springfield, Mass. Can they really call it The Hartford Courant anymore? It’s another example of how we’re losing the sense of place provided by institutions. Local newspapers, with their big downtown offices, used to be an important part of the public square, along with local government, schools, locally based stores, churches, etc.
Maybe a Connecticut sugar daddy, perhaps a hedge funder from the Fairfield County Gold Coast, will come along to save The Courant, now owned by Tribune Publishing, which is apparently about to try to sell it.
To read the Powell column, please hit this link:
Facebook Faces Foggier Future
It’s good news indeed that the Feds and 46 states are finally suing on antitrust grounds that rapacious monopoly (consider its ad structure and absorption of Instagram and WhatsApp) and cesspool of lies and misinformation (amidst the cats, dogs, kids and sunset shots) called Facebook. It, like Google, is far, far too big and powerful. It’s long past time to break it up.
By the way, regarding the stuff above about sense of place, one of Facebook’s effects over the years has been to reduce its users’ interest in, and concern for, where they live because it’s so easy to communicate on a screen with people far away. It makes it so easy to be everywhere and nowhere.
Rather than building real communities, the Facebook blob, designed to be additive, tends to dilute them or create temporary ones based on momentary emotions. But you can’t sue ‘em for that!
Wait It Out, Redux
Without the ability, or political will, to use testing to rigorously isolate by neighborhood those with positive COVID tests (as has been done in countries that have slowed or even stopped the pandemic) an ability we lack in this crazy, hyper-individualist, angry and federalist nation, we’re doomed to suffer more and more death and injury for weeks to come, until vaccines finally quell the pandemic.
All too late now anyway.
It’s Alive!
I’m surprised to be saying this, but at this writing, it looks likely that a development group run by Jason Fane will build a $300 million, 46-story luxury residential lower, to be named Hope Point Tower, in Providence’s Route 195 relocation district. I’m surprised because I didn’t think that Mr. Fane would get the financing, especially when the pandemic makes downtown developments look like bad bets and Mr. Fane continues to face loud and well-organized opposition from some establishment groups.
Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Brian Stern okayed the project last week, ruling that the City Council was within its rights in approving it. Foes, including Mayor Jorge Elorza, will appeal to the state Supreme Court, but that seems very unlikely to succeed.
So what’s the economic rationale for continuing with this project in a time of pandemic and the deep recession it’s causing? I think it’s that even now, mid-size cities such as Providence with prestigious colleges and rich cities nearby -- in Providence’s case New York and Boston -- and in scenic areas, can look alluring. There would be stirring views from the upper stories of the Fane Tower, though, of course, it’s great height is what its foes would most hate about it – until, that is, they got used to it, if they ever do….
And COVID-19 has made big cities scary for many people, leading many affluent folks to seek to set up homes in less crowded places, even if they, too, are cities and even if some, like Providence, now have high COVID rates, too. And some of the units in the Fane tower would be bought or rented by the many very rich parents of students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. And the pandemic will end, sometime in 2021.
Then there’s the prospect of hundreds of construction jobs at the Fane Tower – a great allure for the state’s politically powerful construction unions.
So, this huge project remains very much alive, as Mr. Fane looks to what Providence might look like after the pandemic.
The Art of Picking Judges
Yes, judicial nominations in all states – and certainly in U.S. courts –usually include varying degrees of politics. (Consider that the far-right, billionaire-funded Federalist Society, which is effectively part of the Republican Party, chooses many nominees to the federal courts, up to the Supremes.)
Thus it is with Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s nominations of Superior Court Judge Melissa Long (who used to work for Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea) and state Sen. Erin Lynch Prata, chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to the state Supreme Court. Both, of course, are solid Democrats. Governors in the states where judges aren’t elected (and electing judges is a terrible, corruption-brewing idea for a judicial system) generally use judicial nominations for two main purposes: To put people on the bench who share, at least in a general way, the governors’ general philosophy of government and justice, and to reward allies and in so doing strengthen the nominators’ political power. So be it. Most of us cultivate allies.
About the best that the public can hope for is that with the promise of long tenancy the judges feel a sense of independence from political pressures and affiliations and may even surprise us, as the U.S. Supremes sometimes do, albeit less than they used to. Not that life tenancy, which judges have in Rhode Island and in the federal courts, is a great thing. There ought to be a mandatory retirement age of, say, 70 or 75 so that people with a more up-to-date understanding of society, and perhaps of the law, can be cycled in. And sharper brains, with better short-term memories….
Please, Staff Up Services
After spending much of a morning yet again on a poorly written and sometimes incomprehensible section of the IRS Web site trying to do a couple of simple updates for a nonprofit’s account, I turned to the grossly understaffed IRS folks on the phone to get help. The four people –I’d guess from their accents from all over America -- I talked with in sequence, after holds of varying durations, were friendly and tried various stratagems to help me but nothing worked. I will rest up a few weeks before trying it again.
Oh, I how I long for the days when such government services as the IRS had plenty of people to help you -- in person. (The impersonality crisis began long, long before COVID.) I think that one reason why so many Americans are so frustrated and angry these days is the crash in personal services, except for the rich, who can hire people to help them with anything. I’d prefer assistance from a competent human, able to quickly answer and/or research issues, over a Web site, even after being dragged up an interminable phone tree – trees grown in order to cut staff.
Ronald Reagan’s administration did some good things, such as some deregulation (though that started under Jimmy Carter) and some foreign-policy initiatives. But with his anti-government rhetoric, and big cuts in the taxes that pay for federal services, he and his minions also did damage. In hollowing out some government services, and reducing respect for federal employees, his regime made life more difficult for many Americans. And he made people forget that we are the government and that our taxes pay for the essential services and infrastructure needed by a civilized nation.
At a lot of organizations when I see “use our convenient Web site’’ I have the same reaction I have when I see the phrase “some assembly required’’ on a Christmas present, with instructions written in Pidgin English as translated from the Vietnamese.
This, for some reason, reminds me of how many companies don’t spend the time and money to train people how to use new systems. The decline in person-to-person training started in the late ’80’s and accelerated in the ’90’s with companies’ increasing obsession with short-term profit and “shareholder value.’’
I saw training fade at The Providence Journal when I was an editor there. When writing and editing were first computerized in the ‘70s, The Journal, in particular, spent many weeks laboriously training people; as the year 2000 approached you were increasingly on your own in adapting to new, cost- and staff-cutting technology.
Progress Against Heart Disease, Too
Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, we might forget that heart disease remains the biggest cause of death in America. But while there aren’t the drama and speed involved in inventing vaccines to stop the pandemic, researchers are making much progress as they map the genes involved in heart disease, particularly those that cause high cholesterol, which can cause heart attacks and strokes.
This research may lead to the creation of, among other things. new medicines for people with genomes that put them at risk of heart disease -- medicines that they only have to take twice a year, rather than those once-a-day statin pills. This will get a lot more attention when the COVID threat fades.
The Baron of Boats
‘Word of the death of Dave Philips at 94 brought back memories! He was best known as the long-time yachting editor of The Providence Journal during its glory days. Dave could report and write well about pretty much any sport, but in covering in such breadth and width boating/yachting stuff he was a baron. He was, of course, assisted by being employed by a locally run media company willing to spend a lot on coverage. Consider that it sent Dave, as part of a team of journalists, to cover the America’s Cup races off Australia in 1987.
Boats are part of what makes Rhode Island Rhode Island, and Dave Philips was in the middle of it.
He had a memorable personality, usually very courtly, friendly and helpful – rather old-fashioned -- but every once in a while, some outrage – being lied to, an article eaten by a computer or something he’d written being mangled, or simply cut, by an editor could set him off into a brief rage. Then the public storm, witnessed by dozens of colleagues, would pass. In those days, much of the staff (which was hundreds of journalists) spent their days in a big newsroom; now, especially with the pandemic, most people in the shrunken staff work remotely.
It was to fun see all these characters acting up.
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