Whitcomb: Providence Place Makeover; Data Centers as Utilities; Spend More, Tax Less, Wait for Crash
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Providence Place Makeover; Data Centers as Utilities; Spend More, Tax Less, Wait for Crash
“Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.’’
-- From “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you,’’ by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (born 1974), American poet, editor and essayist
Notably silly song about the month of May from Camelot, the Kennedys’ favorite musical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg4YrOlAkds
“Every country has the government it deserves.’’
-- Joseph de Maistre (1792-1840), Savoyard lawyer, diplomat and philosopher
“The day unravels what the night has woven.’’
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German philosopher
“The real tragedy of life is not that nothing lasts. It is that we sacrifice the only moments we have trying to create something that does.’’
-- Charles Black, M.D., a general surgeon, writing in Medium
I was up early the other morning and enjoyed the fact that birdsong is now at about its strongest of the year. It unexpectedly reminded me of the avian chorus in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., that we heard around dawn one morning in May 1970 after an all-night party. The birds, the light and the scent of blossoms made everything seem briefly paradisical in the Hudson Valley that morning. Of course, we then slipped into comas….
By the time you read this, most of the petals from flowering trees will probably have blown away, but what a show it is every year!
And the daily gain of light is slowing.
Mall Makeover
Now that a development group led by former Providence Mayor Joseph Paolino will be buying, for $133 million, the very big Providence Place mall, many folks are chiming in with suggestions on how to revitalize the architecturally distinguished facility – and of course boost downtown Providence in the process.
It looks as if the plan includes luring the huge discount shopping chain Costco to set up shop there. If so, it would presumably act as the biggest economic foundation for the mall, designed by the late great international architect Friedrich St. Florian, of Providence. That could lure throngs of bargain hunters. Many, it is hoped, would check out the other, mostly pricier establishments in Providence Place.
Obviously, parking would be an issue. Could a floor or two be added to the mall’s parking garage? Could there be nearby satellite parking lots to be served by buses to and from Providence Place? More MBTA trains through the Amtrak station, which is virtually at the mall, to carry shoppers?
Here are my two cents:
First, put back a police substation there now, preferably in a very visible spot in the middle of the mall, and more often patrol the parking garage. That will stop many bad incidents that threaten such urban public places. The fear of crime, however exaggerated it may be, can be devastating to the popularity and prosperity of commercial places.
Retrofitting can be very expensive and complicated (what to do about windows?), but finding a way to put in nice apartments – rental and/or condo – in Providence Place would be a boon. Increasing the mall’s visible – and 24/7 -- population, whose members would also be buyers of goods and services there, would help act as another stabilizing fiscal base and would improve security. And, God knows, Providence always needs more housing.
The developers should consider putting in more stores and services that appeal to the elderly, which is the most rapidly growing (and richest) part of the population. Of course, this doesn’t mean that much retail won’t continue to mostly market to teens and younger adults.
Fitness clubs might do well at Providence Place. It might be structurally impossible, but one with a pool would be a big hit.
Small high-end grocery stores, offering specialty (gourmet?) foods, could prosper there, as could a beer and wine store. So could independent bookstores, which have seen a national revival in recent years. All the better if they also sold vinyl records and maps. Yes, I know there was once a big Borders Bookstore (part of a now dead chain) at Providence Place, but small, intimate bookstores are quite different. Consider the successful Books on the Square and Paper Nautilus, on Wayland Square. Such stores are often venues for such events as readings by well-known authors and even wine tastings.
Small jazz and other music-based “nightclubs” could draw many.
Providence is a famous art town. The mall could use some galleries and maybe some programs connected with the Rhode Island School of Design.
Great News for MBTA Finances!
The agency reports:
Round-trip train tickets between Boston’s South Station and “Boston Stadium” (real name Gillette Stadium) for World Cup (soccer) matches will be $80. They’ll be good for travel on the entire Commuter Rail network on match days, in the June 13-July 9 period.
See:
https://www.mbta.com/guides/world-cup-guide
Most anything beats driving on Route 95.
We’ll see how many fans, especially foreigners, decide to boycott the matches in the U.S. to protest our immigration and other policies. A few foreign fans who might have wanted to come have (exaggerated) fears of being arrested and thrown into an ICE concentration camp. Others don’t like the corruption of FIFA, the worldwide governing organization for professional soccer.
Whatever, it’s a hell of a thing to watch, and that it’s the most international sport is good medicine for us provincial Americans.
A Paranoid Cult, Not a Party
Trump and his lackeys, heavily laden with plutocrats’ cash, have managed to drive out of office some old-fashioned Indiana Republican state senators who bravely opposed the mobster-in-chief’s gerrymandering plan. But I think that this will come to be seen as a pyrrhic victory.
That’s because it reinforces the image of the GOP as a nasty and corrupt personality cult rather than as a party with principles that encompass a broad range of sincerely held conservative positions. Of course, the Trump regime is not at all “conservative.’’ Its policies are grotesquely fiscally irresponsible, it loots federal funds, breaks constitutional and other laws all the time, viciously and illegally persecutes its political opponents, and has little respect for federalism.
It’s all about gaining money and power. Of course, money means power in our plutocracy-based system.
And cult members, as they ignore signs of Trump’s mental decline, sometimes presenting itself as psychosis, seem to forget that Trump will be 80 next month. They’ve tied themselves to someone who may very soon be gone. How will future historians write about this creature, and the weird nation that let him run amok?
Make Them Public Utilities
There’s little evidence that most AI sector moguls care much about the public good and democracy, or that they can be trusted. Rather, they seek fortunes beyond all the dreams of avarice, and the power that goes with it.
Thus, I increasingly believe that those huge data centers cropping up like monster mushrooms all over the place, sucking up electricity and water, pouring out air and noise pollution and employing surprisingly few people, should be regulated like public utilities, even as we struggle for ways to regulate artificial intelligence itself, with all its perils and promise.
Free Money!
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-- From “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet
(Even Trump’s new East Wing.)
Many politicians from Trump on down continue to accelerate their promises of tax cuts even as the federal deficit explodes. But, hey, we gotta have the Iran/Distract-Em-From-Epstein War, other foreign adventures and the huge Trump Arch in D.C. and a gargantuan ballroom. And prepare for Donald Trump Jr. to be installed as de facto president of Cuba, with a cabinet of Vegas casino operators?
For example, Trump and others want to eliminate most or all federal income taxes on Social Security, although the old are the richest demographic. But, hey -- they also vote more than other groups.
But the bill will someday come due. The instigation might be the next deep recession, caused in part, like most other recessions/depressions by Republican financial deregulation, or by massive AI-caused layoffs or by Chinese or other foreigners’ disinclination to stop buying debt from a country as ill-governed and unreliable as the United States. Or all of the above.
So one fine day, taxes will have to be sharply raised not only on the rich (who have long been privileged by low capital-gains taxes) but deep into the middle class to keep the government operating.
This may happen surprisingly fast. As a drunken character in Hemingway’s roman a clef novel The Sun Also Rises famously says when asked how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. First gradually, then suddenly.’’
Meanwhile, as we pay for Trump’s wars and his physical and other monuments to himself, and let him and his family steal from naïve taxpayers in other innumerable ways, America’s physical infrastructure, though it got some help from Biden, continues to fall apart. Watch those bridges!
Billionaires Along the Beach
Ken Griffin, the financial markets mogul, is mad at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani because the latter made a video with Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse as a backdrop for Mamdani’s pitch for a “pied-a-terre’’ tax on nonprimary residences of rich folks. So Griffin threatens to move more operations to the part-seedy, part-glittery city of Miami, where his empire is based, and where other billionaires have fled to avoid the taxes needed to pay for local services and infrastructure. We’ll see.
Interestingly, Gotham values for tax purposes Griffin’s 24,000-square-foot penthouse, the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, at just $9.4 million.
The tax systems of New York City and some other big metropolises let very rich people store their wealth in homes, many of which sit empty most of the time.
Gotham’s property levies undervalue high-end condos and overtax renters. So there’s a powerful incentive for some of the world’s richest people to park their money in New York City real estate, whatever their complaints about how the city is run. Large apartment buildings face higher effective tax rates than “single-family homes” (like Griffin’s penthouse) under the city’s laws. Of course, apartment-building owners pass along those tax rates to their tenants
It would be nice, meanwhile, if some way could be found to analyze, in a completely unbiased way, the cause-and-effect inter-relationships between billionaires quitting cities and the effects on economic and social health of the cities and states that they leave. After all, taxes are needed to pay for the services (including public education) and such infrastructure as roads, bridges, and clean-water supplies that enable business to be done.
Yes, as I’ve often written, taxes can get so high they drive away business, including from dynamic New York City, which Pope John Paul II called “the capital of the world.’’ But we need to have a better handle on what the tipping point might be for each locality. For some folks, any taxes are too high.
Many (not all) very rich people increasingly wall themselves from the rest of the population, privatizing as much of their lives as they can. So they don’t care much about maintaining government services. This is part of our ever more extreme income and social inequality, which I fear, could ultimately spawn severe social disorder and economic depression.
Meanwhile, hurricane season is coming. I wonder how the plutocrats who have decamped there will do if very vulnerable Miami, which is barely above sea level, gets a direct strike by a Category 5 storm.
Listen to “Moon Over Miami,’’ about a city with a much higher crime rate than New York:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okd93quAU6A
Read about unpredicted changes in the national housing market:
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More of this to come here, but as health costs continue to surge even as the Feds cut medical benefits as part of the Orange Oligarch’s “Big Beautiful Bill,’’ much more attention should be given to how hospital mergers, including among so-called nonprofit ones, are boosting their pricing power as their senior executives become rich. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division aren’t up to the task of acting on this.
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Many “landscaping ‘’ companies around here have become mostly just heavily polluting leaf-blowing operations.
RIP, Ted Turner
We’ll miss the eccentric, dynamic, funny, and flamboyant businessman, philanthropist, and conservationist Ted Turner, who died last week at 87. He did many, many important things, but inventing CNN was the most important, though that once-revolutionary and responsible journalism outlet was eventually eclipsed by Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing propaganda organ Fox News.
Those of us of a certain age won’t forget the bipolar Brown alumnus Turner’s hijinks in Newport in 1977, when he won the America’s Cup.