Archive for the ‘Community and Attitudes’ Category

In some analysis three years ago for a client between NYC and Boston, we thought (and said, and said again) that the housing seemed over-valued.  No, we were told, emphatically, by the economic development folks.  Absolutely not.  We have an acute affordable housing shortage we were told; there is no bubble.  What signs are there of such a bubble, they asked sarcastically.

During the field work for that report, I happened to be going through some of the neighborhoods on the south end of the city, in mid February.  It was exactly what you think of when you think of coastal New England that time of year.  Leafless and seemingly lifeless (save an occasional winterberry holly) wooded lots between distressed three flats provided some relief from colorless and grim and weather beaten shiplapped.

Importantly, all was as it ought to have been.  The cheap part of town, with dilapidated housing, on the wrong side of the interstate, windblown Tyvek on it’s last staples before sailing toward Long Island.  Older make cars and their crooked license plates, brining in sea salt.

Suddenly a flash of orange.  A man wearing an orange hat is running through the wooded lot.  It’s about 35 degrees.  Last week’s snow is still on the ground.  It’s 11 in the morning and it’s gray everywhere except for those holly berries and this man’s orange hat.

I wanted to see what this was about.  The man was clearly not jogging on the side of the road.  I was out there with my parcel maps and notebook, doing field work.  Not every day you see a man running through a wooded lot at top speed.  I stopped the car and put it in reverse to have a better look.

My seatmate, an irrepressible Chicago community developer who’d come east to help me think about the housing challenges in this ethnic community of neighborhoods, would have none of it.  “No! This is too strange, something’s not right, why the fk are you stopping the car?  Let’s get outta here!”

Moments later we saw why the man was running, and apparently for his life.  For 30 yards and a few seconds behind him was a bearded man with a crossbow, at full gallop through the shrubs, trying to shoulder-rest his bow and get a bead on the man in the orange hat.  We drove away, leaving Vladimir and Anatoly to work out on their own whatever it was that had come between them.

The issue that remains salient though is the matter of what is normal.

It’s perfectly normal for a New England coastal community to be gray in February.  For the poor side of town to be extra worn.  We expect this.  We order our days around these expectations.

And it is completely abnormal for a man in an American inner city neighborhood to be chased by another armed with a crossbow looking like a very angry Raskolnikov.  Yet as we drove on to leave the crossbow and the hare to their own destinies, we passed people walking down the street, and none of them were pointing towards the manhunting exhibition that had, one could surmise, simply faded into the background of our evolving urban milieu.

Which brings me to the leaf blower, my Nicaraguan house cleaner, the foreclosure nightmare we’re in, and cheap meat.  Or, put another way, to the suburban environment we’ve become immune to, decisions and their consequences, our time-honored tradition of kicking the can, and the double whopper.

In suburban Northern Virginia, November makes good on two promises.

The first is that the many maple and oak and other shade trees that are our beloved canopy drop their leaves by the ton.  It turns out this makes wonderful leaf mulch and like so many communities nationwide, my town sucks them up and transports them by the yard to the magic mulch making place across town whereupon they become next year’s ground cover for whomever wants it.

The second is that what should ordinarily be a rather quiet neighborhood is instead a place of constant noise.  From 10 am to 3 pm each day, the neighborhood is assaulted by five foot five inch Central American men in fall clothing wrapped in leaf blowing machinery.  Trucks arrive mid morning like military assault vehicles.  From each of their maws emerge a half dozen short men.  They strap on two-stroke John Deere blowers and start moving next spring’s mulch to the street.  They unleash a low roar that won’t stop for two hours.  These yard assault teams break for lunch and then all the way through dusk tornado the lawns of a middle class unable to reach for a rake, that is if they know how to use one.

This phenomenon has been in full tilt for at least a decade in middle America, by 2000 rich enough to hire Juan and Carlos and Miguel to keep the grass green, and too busy (in their minds) to clean their own homes.

What’s fascinating – and troubling – is that the voting district I’m in, where every day these battalions of Central American leaf blowers visit and contribute to the wasteful consumption of fossil fuels their machines demand – voted overwhelming for Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama.

My district’s voting habits could be a body double for Berkeley, but what we have on our streets are Nissan Armadas, Chevy Tahoes, Range Rovers, and oh yes, the leaves from the yards of all those left voting pro environment folks who no longer own a rake owing to the availability of so many short brown men and their portable John Deeres.  Now we have our share of Prius’s (is the plural of Prius Pruii?  (Scary close to Pruitt Igoe)), but they’re still outnumbered four to one by the big vehicles with the jingoistic yellow ribbons on them supporting troops that never come from our neighborhood.  Never.

In an important way these fossil fuel consuming two stroke strap on leaf blowers and the ceaseless noise they make are now part of the background.

They are a part of the suburban system that has so absorbed their presence they no longer stand out.  All of these yardmen should have been a sign of an awful lot of disposable income, a sign of an awful waste of precious carbon absorbing capacity.  Instead they are like the servants from an Edwardian downstairs, sneaking in and out with ladles of gravy and another mis en bouteille poached from a Buñuel screenplay.  They’re not seen and neither is the full impact of all those leafless lawns considered.  It’s our norm.  Welcome to the Monkey House.

And it’s all connected.  It turns out that one of the wives of one of the leaf blowers is a woman who has cleaned my house every other week for the last 12 years, too busy as I am (in my mind) to do it myself.

When she first started, she would arrive at my home in an older Honda or Toyota or Datsun, as would befit one’s expectation.

Some time in the late 1990s she arrived in a Land Rover.  I made a mental note of this, how interesting it was that the lady who was cleaning my house arrived in a car twice the cost of the one I was driving.  I mentioned it laughingly now and then to others, remarking “you gotta like this economy where my cleaning lady drives a Land Rover.”  But though I noticed it, and took enough notice to mention it to others I didn’t really ever think about it.  Never connected the credit scoring and predatory lending dots that in hindsight are so easy to see.

At some point I gathered she and her husband had purchase a home.  I did a few back of the envelops to see how the math could work on her and her leaf blower’s salaries, and it never really penciled out.  But I let it recede, no doubt in the same way my neighbors drove to the polls in their Chevy Surbuban to vote for Gore.  My 401-K was performing, so why bother to unpack the inputs that enabled a cleaning lady’s salary to go from a Land Rover to a Hummer and buy a home in one of the nation’s costliest housing markets. And I’m in the housing business!

At some point in the early 2000s my cleaning lady called to say she had car trouble.  The next time she arrived though she came in a Hummer.  While I was making five to ten times her salary, she was busy buying a car twice as expensive as mine and more than twice as expensive to fill up.

I had a cleaning lady who had been driving a Land Rover only to switch to a Hummer.  Out she would come, emerging from her assault vehicle in one part of my neighborhood to clean homes while her husband would emerge from another kind of assault vehicle two blocks away to clean lawns.  I would arch my eyebrows a bit every time I saw this, but I never really registered it in a canary in a coal mine sort of way.  Didn’t stop to really think about how it might be possible for her to afford these cars, to say nothing of owning a house in the half million dollar Northern Virginia suburbs on a noisy leaf blower’s wages.

The sheer oddity of this faded into the background.  Her Land Rover was as much an assumed part of life as the idiocy of blowing leaves when a rake will do just fine.  Of course she now drives a rather beat up minivan, long ago discarded no doubt by some soccer mom in Falls Church whose husband today blows his own leaves with his Home Depot Troy- Bilt, given the collapse of the value of their stock portfolio.

How it is that an army of Central American leaf blowers descending every day into suburbia could not arouse as much notice as Vlad the crossbowman remains a mystery.  But then again I was standing in line in a Burger King in Fredonia, NY not long ago trying to pencil out how it is that burgers could be so cheap and what kind of an industrialized business model must be in place for a double whopper to cost the same as an organic apple.

Then again I’ve not take responsibility for my role in the terrible condition of the teeth my cleaning lady can’t afford to fix.

25 years ago (gulp) when I was a student in Chapel Hill, you could go to the Carolina Coffee Shop and get a fairly bad cup of coffee. By 1986 could you get a really first rate cup of coffee only if you went to Broad Street Roasters in Carrboro.

Even the Ninth Street Bakery, with its tremendous Bear Claws could not give you a decent brew. Magnolia Grill (where I would work) had not yet opened and Lex Alexander had not yet bought the old grocery across the way and turn it into the Wellspring (eventually to be Whole Foods).

After college while living in Washington, DC it was the same story. No decent coffee. So I arranged for Broad Street to send me three pounds of beans a month. A pound of Guatemalan Coffee. A pound of French Roast. And a pound of Sumatra, which I would blend.

Each month the box came to my apartment on Lincoln Park, smelling wonderful.

I traveled in 1990 to Portland and had a great cup of coffee at Starbucks, and not long afterwards, Broad Street told me they would not be able to keep shipping me coffee. I called Starbucks and they happily filled my orders and every month my shipments came. About two years later Starbucks too ceased to deliver beans to my house, but by then they had begun to open retail outlets in the DC area – and elsewhere – and I could get beans that way. Their influence began to widen, of course, and it became possible to obtain coffee from Peets and other retailers.

In 1995 I and others started a farmers market in my new community – Del Ray, a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. But the retail strip we ventured onto was merely storefront churches, beauty salons, decrepid redneck bars, and vacant lots. No coffee.

We found a street vendor who occupied a spot across from the Library of Congress and she agreed to come each saturday to our new and young and tiny farmer’s market. Between her arrival and those of a few farmers, neighbors could get heirloom tomatoes and apples before they became vogue and also get a great cup of coffee.

A local developer watched and saw an opportunity and put in a local coffee shop – St Elmos – on Mount Vernon Avenue, so now we had a farmer’s market on one side of the street and good coffee on the other. The demographics had been shifting over the years so such an enterprise could work.

Del Ray had become less blue collar, more professional. The trucks yielded to the Volvos. The petunias gave way to lavender beds. Sub-zeros were delivered to homes undergoing rehab. Fancy baby strollers appeared. But for me, having a good cup of coffee so close was what mattered.

Of course demand for the coffee at the local shop was not always there. There didn’t magically appear pent up demand and knowledge. It was grown, and in my view not by the coffee fairy but by Starbucks. Much the same way Wellspring and Fresh Fields grew demand for organic produce beyond the hippie dippy set.

This presented no difficulty whatsoever to me. However hostile towards Wal-Mart and Borders Books and McDonald’s I may be, I loved – and still retain some love – for Starbucks, for what they did was expose people accustomed to drinking water that had had a brown crayon dipped in it and was masquerading as coffee to what a decent cup of real coffee could be. It’s not a latte that you would find on Le Boulevard Haussman, but it was not meant to be. It’s a strong cup of three dimensional coffee for a reasonable price now available almost (but still not) anywhere. As Americans migrated from fake bread to the real thing, so too did we leave behind Maxwells and Folgers for something better. A-fukcing men.

Amid this some very interesting class warfare issues took root and hold to this day.

Starbucks became associated with McDonalds and with everything we think about when we think about sprawl and corporate farming and the Earl Butzing of corporate Iowa corn. Why? Ubiquity has much to do with it. But so too does upper class ignorance.

Peets is no less present in some markets, but the Berkeley crowd fitted Peets with a badge of authenticity.

Which brings me to something else that happened 20 some years ago. I was in a poor South Carolina community working on housing issues when the mayor said, beaming with pride, in a slow southern drawl, “we got us a Piggly Wiggly!” A store no wealthy community would want he had recruited and was glad to have.

His pride was instructive, for it illustrated that we all look at retail as something of a proxy for how far we have come, the extent to which we’ve arrived, or how far we have yet to travel. Which it surely is.

Middle income communities want a Nordstrom instead of a Macy’s. Working class communities want to be a step up from Sears. In Mill Valley California when I was polling people there in 2002, they did not want a Starbucks, for that was seen as beneath them. At the same time, residents in derascinated Richmond couldn’t get a 7-Eleven. Santa Cruz could afford to fight a Borders (which is valiantly tried to fend off), while less affluent and less educated places like Fresno were thrilled to have a Barnes & Noble.

In my community in Alexandria, some of the older blue collar types get their coffee today at the 7-Eleven, and have personally told me they do not feel welcomed at the local shop – St. Elmo’s. This is sad and instructive.

In the strangest places you find a Starbucks – off highway 99 north of Madera, California in the middle of grape orchards. Some locals there will still gather at the Fruit Basket and drink light brown water claiming to be coffee, but others have seen Starbucks-induced customer knowledge and subsequent demand as opportunities for local entreprenurialism.

I saw this last week in upstate NY in the weak market city of Jamestown. Jamestown is too weak to induce Starbucks perhaps, but the community has for ten years now been exposed in other markets to what coffee can be and so even in small Jamestown there are two places where you can get local brew that’s quite tasty if not perfect. There, people are employed selling a product for which there was no demand just a few years ago.

Along this journey, two interesting storylines are not often acknowledged.

First is that thousands of coffee shops are flourishing in America only because Starbucks educated a pallid whitebread American palette. Second, they did so while providing health insurance and a great working environment and a growing environmental ethic.

What troubles me about the gripes you hear about Starbucks – and I myself have plenty starting with the proliferation of silly sugar bombs ten inches tall that have nothing to do with food and coffee and everything to do with tasteless kitch – is that Starbucks’ everpresence somehow is aesthetically unappealing and beneath us. That’s the worst kind of elitism and I say this occupying shaky ground on that front.

And worse, other coffee outlets like Peets – which I like fine – are somehow okay, and that the 3,000 small shops across the country that are locally owned would somehow have materialized on their own and become successful.

In elite communities like Santa Fe, NM you hear at the Aztec or in other places the refrain to “buy local”, which is crucial.

I started a Farmer’s Market that had as its original proviso a buy local requirement, and did this 15 years ago.

But the gripes about Starbucks are the same as those hollow ones about Whole Foods, for neither see that Starbucks and Whole Foods made possible the financial success of local coffee shops and local small farms by educating a rather ignorant America on one hand, and aggregating buying power on the other but in responsible if imperfect ways. And both are exemplars of responsible business stewardship.

Across America poor communities (which is where I work) pray for retail of the sort that Starbucks and Whole Foods bring. A stamp of arrival. Responsible stewardship of business relationships. Ethical employment opportunity. Tax base. They pray for grocery stores that might bring fresh produce and quality products. Jobs – imagine that!

On the other sides of those same towns, snotty buy local efforts miss the forest they want to save for the trees they themselves are milling, by looking down their noses at a Whole Foods or a Starbucks as insufficiently perfect.

Fifteen years ago two tiny farms came to my farmer’s market: an apple grower from Pennsylvania and a vegetable grower from Maryland. Neither could really make much money. They had only a few markets as outlets. No big buyers. They were eeking out a living as organic farmers and neither Safeway nor Giant had any interest in them.

Last year my Whole Foods in Alexandria had a display of local tomatoes and other produce featuring both those farms, which are now flourishing. My local farms can finance their organic aspirations because an admittedly imperfect buyer arrived to make it possible and now educated consumers demand such things. This is the same with Starbucks.

Welcome to the real world.

An astonishing challenge I face everyday in poor communities is that the good my work can often usher in is challenged not by them, but by their putative advocates who allow an achievable good to be killed in want of a distant perfect. They do this in housing circles when they resist making distressed neighborhood better for fear of gentrification and they do this when it comes to retail that is not perfect.

Is Whole Foods perfect? Far from it.

But I was there in Chapel Hill and Durham when Lex Alexander made Wellspring a beautiful contribution to our palettes and community and I welcome Whole Foods today.

Is Starbucks perfect? Far from it. But you can be sure the person making your coffee – even if they are making some stupid cream swirl thing for someone else – has health insurance and a good wage. These are not to be trifled. This is what community development is all about.

Our work in strong economies is to soften the harsh edges of a healthy market to create opportunities for people otherwise left behind, and do it in ways that don’t weaken market incentives.

Our work in already weak places is to make them strong.

The kinds of businesses we have in our communities – or don’t have – says much about the capital those communities bring to the table: social and financial.

Our work should not be about keeping an imperfect Starbucks or Whole Foods out on the basis of an ephemeral definition of authenticity, but how to move entire markets get quality products in sustainable ways to people in all kinds of circumstances, and do so in a manner cognizant of the world as it is. The achievable good is the necessary step towards anything better.

Be Saved, Smoke, and Shoot Thy Gun

Virginia is a larger state than one might imagine, and the drive from the DC area to the Knoxville-Chattanooga corridor can take a long time; long enough to generate a sense of confusion as one tries to sort out the sordid from the sorghum.

Cigarettes are big part of life between Roanoke and Bristol along 81, as is Jesus, his legions, and their guns.

Dickey referred to those in North Georgia and parts of eastern Tennessee and western NC as being from the land of nine fingered people. But I think he had it wrong in some material way; derisive and observant, such descriptives fail to see a deeper, richer hue.

It’s not the land of nine-fingered so much as it is the place where dogs aren’t on leashes, where dogs are bred and fought, where dogs are loose on country roads, where dogs are strayed on highways but not spayed at the vet, where dogs are shot when no longer convenient.

It takes a special kind of person to have a dog but not care for it. Such people surely live special kinds of days.

I imagine they get up and reach for a cigarette. Then they head over to the the bait and tackle to get ammo for their guns, pausing to genuflect at their own calvary. They take a breather between sermons to raise pups they’ll let wander the dirt roads, then drive their oversized F350s past a handful of a few more dogs on the side of the road.

Yet they are courteous people, and genuinely so. Deeply so. Careful drivers. Their farms are family farms at a family scale. In parts of Maryland where its more sophisticated, the farms reek of manure ponds and industrial scale. South of Knoxville n a country road last Sunday at 6 am the farms smell good, healthy. Even in the heat of the afternoon it smells like a farm, the way it should. When lost I found supportive, kind people offering direction and coffee, if not a ride to Sunday services.

There are always multiple truths.

As Daniel Quinn wrote, the world is divided between leavers and takers. It’s not blue and red as I used to believe. It’s those who think and those who don’t.

My farmer friend from near Hiawassee said to me overlooking the Tennessee River at sunset contemplating the Trail of Tears, “you can’t teach stupid.” And in some way I suppose he was right. But stupid is often courteous. Sophisticated is often selfish.

It’s grace I am looking for, in whatever color, along whatever road.