Takes One To Know One

For further proof that all real estate developers want to do is pave the world, see the most recent report from Columbia University's Center for Urban Real Estate. In it, the center recommends connecting Lower Manhattan with Governors Island, the former military base that the city has niftily turned into an outdoor and arts destination, by putting 23 million cubic yards of landfill in the city's harbor and creating a new neighborhood called, of all things, "LoLo." Disrupt the harbor, create mammoth but perhaps ultimately solvable infrastructure problems, spend billions planning for this? Why not? It will create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion of tax revenue for the city.

Now let's assume that these two projections are correct -- even though in the great tradition of consultants they rarely are -- and this new connection solves all of New York's looming demographic, development and fiscal problems in one decades-long swoop. Everything else about is totally ridiculous: When perhaps the greatest problem facing the urban built environment in the early 21st century is the effect of climate change and rising seas on massive coastal populations, this idea decides to place hundreds of thousands more people at very close to, if not below, sea level. In addition, it promises to disturb coastal tides and marine wildlife for generations, when they're already likely to be warped by climate change. Most absurdly, the same center, according to the Times' report, has found that there are four billion square feet of unused development rights in New York, 765 million of which are in Manhattan! If the city were to effectively encourage redevelopment of the land it already has, the 88 million that would come from an environmental wreck would be irrelevant.

When Robert Moses is remembered wistfully, it's for all that he did -- new state parks, highways, bridges, housing, etc -- in the span of about 40 years. He had visions and executed them, which is very difficult to do now that every proposal, no matter how modest it seems, has an abutters' lawsuit following right behind it. The Center for Urban Real Estate's proposal is the most spectacular version of Moses-like thinking I've seen in awhile. Grand and bold, it promises something different. But it's a different kind of utopia, geared toward development rights, not the higher kind of living that Howard, Le Corbusier and many others all dreamed of (and didn't realize). Speed is also falsely alluring: Often enough, there are good reasons why the government shouldn't be able to embark on 10 new highways or a massive landfill project to connect two islands and finish it within five years. China might be able to build an entirely new subway system for Beijing in several years while New York takes decades to create a line for Second Avenue, as Thomas Friedman often likes to remind us, but then again, to oppose such a project in Beijing could also likely land you in jail.

The development opportunities that New York needs are much more likely to be latent in its existing landmass than in new landfill. They need creativity and patience to access, not lots of new permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. Maybe I'm being damagingly simplistic here and sure, it's very worthwhile to think boldly. But doesn't this contradict everything we've learned over the past 50 years about what comprises sensitive, reasonable and successful approaches to development, planning and politics?

Ten Years Later

It's hard to believe, but Beachwood Sparks' second album, "Once We Were Trees," is 10 years old now. When I realize that albums that seemed so new, obscure and different at the time I first heard them have now reached that age, I feel older. Beachwood Sparks is one of those bands disappointingly lost in the shuffle as one decade turns to the next. They were on Sub Pop, but only had a couple of albums and dissolved quickly; now, their brand of rock -- a combination of the faded sun in country fields and the mesmerizing size of the universe -- isn't popular or influential. Sometimes in Real Estate's songs I hear the same washed warmth in the guitars and an understanding that you can be sleepy-eyed and poignant at the same time, but Beachwood Sparks barely pokes its head through anywhere else.

"Once We Were Trees" is a great record, though. It's loosely Transcendentalist, sprinkling around lyrics about the pleasures of nature and the downside of commerce (e.g. "You take the gold and I'll take the forest / You can take what's bought and sold 'cause I can't take much more of this"), with a zonked-out approach to country. There are slide guitars and banjos, yet the album ends in a series of warped guitars and noise -- paradise lost, perhaps? Overall, it sounds like sitting around a campfire among the stars rather than gazing skyward at them. The band titled its final EP "Make the Cowboy Robots Cry," which I've often thought does the best job I've ever heard of capturing a band's sound in an album title. It suggest something western, something futuristic and something touching, all at the same time, which Beachwood Sparks somehow achieved.

Above is a 2000 video of the band that appears to be from a Spanish radio or television station. The quality is surprisingly high. Speaking of 10 years, I'm heading to my high school's 10-year reunion tonight. Yes! I get to see my friends!

So Much For All That, Part N+1

When Ohio's voters last week rejected at the ballot the state's new law barring public employees' longstanding right to collective bargaining, Gov. John Kasich said, chastened, that the law moved too far, too fast. What a common phrase this is among politicians this century: George W. Bush said some version after his attempt to privatize Social Security quickly imploded after his re-election as president. Democrats said some version two years ago when their relatively liberal agenda led to widespread losses at the ballot. And now, numerous ultra-conservative state ballot referenda have been defeated at the polls and Kasich's political partner, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who signed the first, most controversial anti-union bill, will likely be the subject of a recall next year. (His approval ratings are in the high 40s.)

Politicians, post-election, rush to the far reaches of their party's territory and voters yank them back the first chance they can, yet politicians don't seem to learn. It appears Congressional Republicans will avoid the same fate next year, only because President Obama is so tightly linked with our economic morass (which is fair, though he and many, many others share responsibility). But at least Congress' approval rating was somewhere in the 30s during the Democratic majority -- now it's at 9 percent -- and polls routinely show that people disapprove of Republicans' unquenchable thirst for laying waste to government while protecting, if not expanding, income tax cuts for the wealthiest. I assume they continue to rush there because that 9 percent, or whoever represents the base sitting at the extreme, is the most vocal of their supporters.

Paul Krugman often writes that to sit at the center is to be wishy-washy, valuing one hand and the other hand without ever settling on a definitive position. But to be at the center doesn't exclusively mean to be fuzzy and without conviction. It can mean having conviction in certain approaches, policies or beliefs, while recognizing that they don't have to originate from one party exclusively. The route to a goal doesn't always lie along one path. Convincing elected officials of this is quite difficult, though, which is why we keep running from one far end of the field to the other.

Update: In her recent reportage on Planned Parenthood, Jill Lepore snuck this in: "[Americans United for Life], like the Planned Parenthood Fund, is 'nonpartisan,' a word that no longer has any meaning." Well, it still has a literal meaning -- supporting specific policies and not caring from which party they come. But Lepore is right that it's now devoid of practical meaning because when you name a policy -- women's health care, the Second Amendment, etc -- you know automatically which party supports it and which one party opposes it. Nearly all overlap between the two has disappeared and everyone stays on his end of the field.

The Number Of Readers Of This Blog...

...Can be extrapolated from the photos to the right, taken at my wedding reception. At the time, my friend asked during his toast (given with his wife and another friend) for a show of hands of the number of people who read "Secret Knowledge of Backroads." I'd deduct about 30 percent of this photo for a more accurate number -- people probably didn't want to embarrass me on my big day with an anemic showing.

I don't know why I haven't posted this until now.

Maybe This Leggings Thing Is Nearly Over

Any time cargo pockets are attached to an article of clothing, you know it's popularity is very close to ending. Much to my hilarious dismay then to see this ad in the Times a few days ago. Cargo leggings? Who designed these? Who at Bloomingdale's think it's a good idea to stock them? Who would think, Yes, let's attach these clunky, unattractive cargo pockets to leggings whose whole point is to be sleek and curvy? Who would want to wear them? In fact, the cargo pockets are so egregiously ill-chosen, you almost don't notice the replica ribbed socks at the leggings' bottom!

It's been a good run while it lasted, leggings.

Innovation And Space

Of course every city wants to be innovative. Who wants to be the opposite, left on the side of the road? The more interesting debate is what sort of spaces facilitate innovation. There are "smart cities," whose infrastructure, aka "operating system" among aficionados, runs on constant feedback loops to maximize efficiency. But those are being built at the scale of planned cities, recalling modernist planning. There is New York's RFP for a new university to move to town, specifically with a technology-focused campus to jumpstart an industry that's never flourished there. But the Bloomberg administration's preferred location is Roosevelt Island, removed from the city's fabric.

Then there's the Innovation District in Boston, which the Menino administration coined about 18 months ago to revive the overly planned but never really executed redevelopment of the Seaport District. The greatest, most publicized triumph thus far was the decision by Vertex, a prominent pharmaceutical company, to move its headquarters into a new luxury office building on the waterfront. However, Boston poached Vertex from Cambridge using a host of tax breaks, which is boringly reminiscent of circa 1986 urban policy. As a friend said, the most innovative part is that Vertex's lease was dependent on the FDA's approval of a new drug. (It's been approved.) Instead, the Innovation District has a popular cluster of ho-hum restaurants.

Then there are two buildings Paul Goldberger recently reviewed in the New Yorker: the University of California San Francisco's new stem cell research center and the Rockefeller University's new science center (in New York). "At Rockefeller you can't reach any of the labs without going through the common space first. In San Francisco, lounges are set in between laboratories to encourage mixing," Goldberger writes. These architects and scientists are on to something, and not only because I tried to create a studio project one semester around a similar idea. Innovation happens when new groups of people, with overlapping but not uniformly like interests, interact regularly with each other. Enticing a science company's headquarters downtown sure helps the municipal property tax base, which is important, but doesn't create the ecosystem needed to generate the new thing.

Innovation doesn't equal smart engineers + venture capitalists + lawyers. Rather, there are complex series of interactions between tinkerers, entrepreneurs, professional supporters, academics, and seemingly boring but actually integral suppliers, middlemen and manufacturers, where ingenuity happens in the mutations that come from the products and interactions they share with each other. This is another sort of feedback loop, intellectually rigorous but messier in its evolution than a "smart city" would prefer, where experiments happen as new ideas take hold. Space takes on a very important role in this model. These groups of people interact, but not as often as they should, so buildings, as these two do, need to offer informal and formal points of collaboration that value the sparks that come from proximity; and on a broader scale, real estate has to be developed, and urban land managed, in a way that values the role of the the less glitzy and the workaday. The technologically and economically sexy can't exist without that. Innovation doesn't only come from Class A headquarters. Or, as Greg Lindsay put it in his recent criticism of "smart cities" in the Times, "the smartest cities are the ones that embrace openness, randomness and serendipity."