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The Next American City

General Session Plenary  National Trust for Historic Preservation

Thursday, October 28, 2010 – Austin, TX

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Good morning.  Thank you very much for having me here today.  I am delighted to join you.

I was asked to be here by my friend Kennedy Smith, and to bring with me some thoughts about preservation and cities and community development from the perspective of someone in a related but different field.

A number of people gave me help crafting this presentation or have influenced me in deep ways.  Aaron Lubeck from Durham, NC – the author of Green Restorations.  My friend Scott Page from the University of Michigan.  Wendell Berry, the great environmentalist from Kentucky.  Memories of Sambo Mockbee, my old and departed friend and mentor from Alabama.  And of course Kennedy Smith.  Whatever you find valuable in this discussion please know it owes to their expertise and insight.

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As for me…so you know, I am not a preservationist.  I am a community developer.  The two are not the same.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from each other, and perhaps work less towards strict preservation aims or pure community goals and more towards something yet to be mapped out, some combination of the two..

I am not anti-preservation.  It’s just that I don’t label myself a preservationist.

I am pleased to conserve when it makes sense.  Pleased to preserve.  And fine with new.  But the aim of my work is diversification.  Of buildings.  Habits.  Viewpoints.  Purchasing power.

So long as the coffee good – I simply have no patience for the development or Main Street or city without good coffee – I am about diversity, which, to fast forward to the end of my comments, is the ultimate aim I hope to persuade you to be striving for as well.

Not because I personally like diversity; generally speaking, I don’t.

I don’t want rednecks living next door to me.  Nor do I want to listen to hip hop down the street.  I am happier on a block full of quiet people.  So long as they race mountain bikes, are in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, do their own gardening, and root for the Tarheels, it’s fine by me if they want to live in my neighborhood of old houses that take hours to maintain, and often cost a fortune to heat.

Putting aside my personal preferences, the reason my work is all about the pursuit of diversity is because I am convinced that it is in complexity that we come close to sustainability.   It is in diversity through aggregated specialization that we become excellent.

Consider that the development of low income housing tax credit projects are just about as far as one can get from a sustainable enhancement to either the built environment or the civic realm.  To suggest that more units of poverty housing is a fair gain in exchange for weakening a market is ludicrous.  Yet that is the monochromatic housing system we have built.

Likewise, the Con Agra worldview – which thinks sustainable agriculture is the soybean – wheat – corn – soybean merry-go-round – is akin to saying there such a thing as clean coal.  Or that the 2008 Kingston, Tennessee fossil plant coal fly ash slurry spill won’t pose threats to local drinking water.

But what in the world might this have to do with historic preservation?  In short, it has to do with system and system complexity, with the confusion of ends and means, and with cost shifting.  It has to do with linkages.  With interconnections, yes; but mostly with interdependencies.

It is, to lean on Wendell Berry a bit, in the hedgerows where we cultivate mycorrhizae, without which our vascular system ceases to function.

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In contemplating the title of this conference and this plenary – The Next American City – more questions have come to mind than answers.

I hope that is alright.

I’d like to share some of those questions with you, and also rely on two short personal stories to help fill in the blanks.

The first story takes place in 1996 in Berkeley.  The second about the same time in Alexandria, VA where I live now.  I will leave it to you to decide what these stories illustrate.

It was late afternoon in late spring of 1996 and I was heading towards a part of the East Bay called Kensington, just north of Berkeley near Tilden Park.  I’d given a lecture at Cal that day and was invited to a faculty dinner party.  As I ventured along Shattuck and then down into the rolling hills of Arlington Avenue, I was looking for a wine shop to pick up a gift so I’d not arrive empty-handed.

It was an election year – Clinton v Dole – so there were bumper stickers and yard signs.  As a political junkie, for years I’d kept abreast of the bluest districts.  Full disclosure:  I live in a district that went 88% for Dukakis, 90 for Clinton twice, 88 for Gore, 89 for Kerry, and 92 for Obama – and I knew where I was that day in Berkeley.

Still, as I was looking for wine, I noticed that I simply could not locate a Dole for President sign.  Nor could I locate a red pick up truck.  Nor for that matter an American made car.  Now this would not ordinarily be a problem – and I am not saying it is.  In fact I believe in a free market and in some kinds of segregation; we are, after all, birds of a feather and the Boston Globe and Boston Herald are different kettles of fish.

Amarillo, Texas is red.  I expect Ford F150s.  And big steaks.  And flat open spaces with four story tall crosses lit up at night for believers to see from 10 miles away; and I cannot help but wonder if those structures will someday appear on your endangered list.

Alexandria, VA is blue.  It’s no surprise to find good coffee there, or sailboats, and on the Netflix “who is renting what” index, such titles as “Frontline’s Obama Deal”, The Baader Meinhof Complex” and “The Syrian Bride” as the most popular.

Not exactly Amarillo’s “The Dark Knight”, “Righteous Kill”, “Eagle Eye”, and “Death Race”.

In any case, just that day at Cal, on a panel where I was one of a number of guests, the issue everyone was speaking about was diversity, and it turns out that those most strongly supporting what might be called a diversity agenda lived in some pretty monochromatic neighborhoods.

And I had to chuckle coming out of that wine store and seeing all those Volvos and Subarus and other blue affectations.

It was diverse all right; if by diverse we mean in the way a class at the Kennedy School is, what with the daughter of the Greek Prime Minister sitting next to a Venezuelan Governor on her right and the son of an Irish shipping magnate on her left, all taking classes in political theory and regression analysis.

We must go back to Schelling and Axlerod and the Rand guys who remind us that it is impossible to be in two different places at the same time; if all the finite number of reds are in Amarillo, by definition they cannot also be in Alexandria, which becomes, also by definition, blue.  The operative questions regarding market strength and social capacity is whether an all blue Alexandria is less powerful than a red and blue Alexandria might be.

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For sure, it’s a provocative few words:  The Next American City.

At the very least three questions come to my mind.

First, “what kind of a city do we have today?”  By which I mean to ask:  are our cities beautiful?  Competitive?  Innovative?  Reflective?  Or are those attributes better applied to the people and communities who live in our cities?

Second, “what are the forces shaping today’s city?”  Are those forces new and evolving or ancient and timeless?  The cost of land?  Demand pressures?  Carrying capacity?  Governability?  Racial and cultural affinity and division.

And third, “what influence does today’s American city have on the rest of society?”

When I reflect on these questions, I am reminded of what the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen said in 1943 about city growth and decay:  “show me your city, and I will tell you what are the cultural aims of its population”.

I am also reminded of an editorial written in 1986 by Kurt Vonnegut who after scanning the globe for architectural and musical grace, wrote:  “if a flying saucer person were to ask me what Earthlings considered their most habitable city I would reply without hesitation:  Come with me to Prague.”

And I should tell you my father came from a small Hungarian village in the shadow of Vienna, my mother from New Orleans, and I myself grew up in an old milltown along the Delaware River.

But when I juxtapose Saarinen and Vonnegut, it’s not so much The Next American City that comes to mind, but the next American place.

In any case, no less a hothead than my beloved friend Jim Kunstler thinks any suggestion that city and suburb are two halves of the same coin – much less one and the same – is ludicrous.

At the risk of incurring his wrath, I think there is a lot to this, and that he is wrong.  That it matters less whether we are designating Arlington, VA a suburb and the District of Columbia a city, than that we focus on the more salient matter:  The one that gets us to be circumspect about what really drives settlement and what really are the consequences, and for us here today at least, what that means for preservationists like you and community developers like me.

So what kind of places do we live in in America today?  What are the forces shaping our settlement and what do our settlements say about our cultural aims?  What are the influences that shape decisions by individual households in choosing where to live and what of their will to impose on the place they eventually call home.

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As I said, I am not sure it helps advance our understanding of place to draw distinctions anymore between the city and the suburb.

Far more helpful – and I would argue more accurate – is to appreciate that we settle based primarily, if not entirely, on two things:  our ability to pay, and our willingness to be where it is we can afford.  And that we remain in a place based on our ability to stay, and our willingness to do so.

When you start to evaluate the landscape we have made, the one we have today, our cultural aims – and more importantly our consequences of those aims – become quite clear.

As Paul Goldberger of the The New Yorker wrote, “architecture is the ultimate symbol of a culture, even moreso than its flag.”

The Hopi have a word for this:  Koyaanisqatsi – LIFE OUT OF BALANCE.

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The system is broken.

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And inside this massively broken system are families of steelhead swimming upstream owing to many things, not least of which is a confusion of ends and means on one hand, and a kind of pollyannish melodrama on the other.

• Community developers are working against poverty and its effects.  Nevermind that so long as society is willing to compensate the surgeon more than they are the sheet metal worker, or the Nobel Laureate more than the janitor, there is no such thing as equality and no such thing as a poverty-less society.

• Organic farmers are working to remove toxins from our salad greens and tomatoes, but these are costly, and in any case less job-generative than an Archer-Daniels-Midland infrastructure of Dow Agro Radiant C insecticides.

• Preservationists are working to save and recover the skeletal remains of earlier generations.  But it is hardly clear at all whether it is best to have a vacant shell, a rehabilitated building with Home Depot Windows and a Caribou Coffee inside, or a restored building not with a Starbucks  or Peets, but instead a local vendor but whose product line and pricing structure renders the business completely inaccessible to the people who live in the new building’s shadow.

Think Santa Fe, Chapel Hill, Boulder, Charlottesville, Ann Arbor.  I could go on.

• This to say nothing of tomorrow’s challenge facing preservationists:  what label to put on what was built between 1946 and 1964, a period not generally known for much of anything not straight out of some Soviet architect’s pattern book.

• Affordable housing advocates are trying to make more homes and put them within reach of low-income families.  But in choosing affordability over viability, the portfolio of the LISCs and Enterprise Foundations and their funders at Macarthur and Ford bear striking resemblance to the business models of Countrywide, Bank of America, and Enron.

• And lastly, urban designers are trying disentangle a suburban dystopia, but in their aggressive self -confidence they have misreduced the entirety of the challenge of the built environment to a problem no more complex than its new urbanist solution is one-dimensional.

When we reflect on what kind of a community – if that’s the right word for it – we have created, we come face to face not just with contemporary tax policies that distort the math that builders use, and which allocate 70 cents of every development dollar to new materials at a time when unemployment is hovering near 10 percent……….but with the disturbing presence of a network of connections

• that keep poverty concentrated,

• of an alignment of a Panera Bread, a Barnes and Noble, or a Hardiplank with historic preservation, and

• a common pattern language binding Monsanto’s monocultural corn and resulting high fructose high to the securitization of mortgages on the other.

Indeed, the fractal nature of human systems in 2010 in America is defined by separate and monochromatic, and fed by the nostalgic view in America that what’s wrong with Obama’s America can be fixed with a little more Ike, and a more robust General Motors for good measure.

We must acknowledge that the system of place-making in our country is but one small part of a large interconnected and very broken larger whole in America predicated on cost-shifting.

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We have become an extraction society.  We extract minerals from the soil for corn we feed to cows who give us marbled steaks that give us sclerotic arteries that we by-pass with shunts made of plastics made from oil percolated in Saudi Arabia by petroleum syndicates that reduce their taxable income by investing in low income housing that concentrates the poor in Houston’s own Fifth Ward, which turns to Bank of America to refinance their underwater mortgages on streets deracinated by redlining and made worse by the effete intervention strategies of do-gooders.

You get the point.

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Since the 1930s and in accelerated fashion since the mid 1980s, we have become a nation whose norm is to make someone else do the paying, whether the guy down the street, the family downstream, or the generation down the line.  And then put college kids in t shirts and bus them to post-Katrina New Orleans while Rome is burning.

We leapfrog from one new development to another, leaving a less fortunate generation behind to move into what are, by design, more expensive places to own and operate.  This isn’t suburbanization, it’s myopia and selfishness and it is exists in equal measure in gentrified East Austin and Alice Water’s East Bay.

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Now I have no trouble with secondary markets.  Rather, about them, I say “thank goodness.”  There’s a genuine and tangible pleasure in taking an old home and and putting it back together.

And I would not want to live in a world without Chez Panise, even if they just lost their Michelin rating.

But the underlament that articulates construction and settlement in formerly rural Loudoun County, Virginia is the same as that which drives the upwardly mobile to “resettle” West Philly near the University of Pennsylvania, West Oakland near the new BART station, and Denver’s LODO:  what can I get for me and who else can I get to pay for it?

We must acknowledge that incessant demand for new puts self fulfilling economic pressure on the latest subdivision, creating a built in expectation not just of the imputed value of occupancy, but, also, for returns on our initial investment that can only occur when the true cost of materials is off-loaded onto some other poor slob not by accident or oversight but intentionally.  Nevermind of the costs of loading on society at large the costs of resulting economic segregation.  Welcome to our own tragedy of the commons.

This part of accelerated Capitalism I can do without.

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To distort Bruegmann a bit, the “lower densities, fewer poor, less manufacturing, and closer proximity to a Whole Foods” one finds in suburbia is basically the same drawing card that accounts for urban revitalization in downtown DC, Seattle, Boston, and other places reclaimed by the upwardly mobile.

Contemporary confidence in an urban – as opposed to a suburban – life and setting are less about gritty diversity than the same sophomore Mulatto sentimentality that voted for Hope, having not been duly informed by the hard work of bagging groceries, mitering a corner, digging a ditch, gutting a fish, or washing dishes for a living.

Preservationists are left with a Hobbeson’s Choice:  monetize the recovery of Main Street by getting in bed with Starbucks, or watch as yesterday’s new becomes tomorrow’s empty.  Serious dilemma indeed.

So what do I mean when I say the system is broken? And what might that have to do with historic preservation and with the city we have built, about which Richard Sennett wrote was “our” urban dilemma:  that is, “the difficulty of arousing conscience through visual experience rather than representing faith in stones”?

First:  ends and means.  The work we face is almost indescribably complex.

We have huge challenges.  How can we possibly describe the reclamation of an old building as essential in an age when glaciers are calving 24-7?  That’s precisely the point, though?  Isn’t it?

Our job as neighborhood builders or housing advocates is to stop pursuing the stabilization of a neighborhood or the development of affordable housing as an end in and of itself.

Our job as environmentalists is to stop seeing the cleaning up of the Gulf or the Chesapeake as our aim but rather a means to another end altogether in the form of an interdependency.

As preservations we need to see a rebuilt Main Streets as not just a collection of Richard Sennet’s stones in which we can place our faith, but as a space that may allow us to start the process of reconnecting the parts.

Second, the extent to which we are no longer in balance is, in my view, proportional to the degree we are disconnected.  Your work as preservationists must not fail to correct this.

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The work of preservation therefore is to use abandoned real estate recovery not as a tool for addressing vacancy and coming to the rescue of our aesthetic immorality, but to create the kind of real and genuine social and economic diversity that actually does put the urban in urban, converts suburbia appropriately, and in both cases does so by rebuilding not on the basis of the economic power of a disaggregated few but the system strength of a collected many.

Conservation and preservation as means to system rebalancing then, is what I think we must talk about when we say something like “The Next American City”.

We must ask, in effect, not just what will it look like and how will it function, but what is the role of preservation in getting us there when preservation is not the end goal, but one tool among many aimed at creating a system the chief characteristic of which is diversity?

You may recall Neruda’s Enigma, where it is asked:  “where are the people in your system?”

I mention this because in this question – where are the people in your system – are at least some of the tea leaves for figuring out how to go about putting things back in balance.

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In thinking about a personal story of a hardware store, the price of a good cup of coffee, the recovery of an old decrepit but historic retail corridor, and the challenge of inclusion, I am reminded of something Maya Angelou once said:  “people won’t remember what you said, nor even what you did; but, rather, how you made them feel.”

Fifteen years ago I was working on the front porch of an old 1912 balloon frame four-square in Alexandria, Virginia.  I’d pulled the porch columns and was rebuilding one when a beam slipped through my hands and crashed through the brand new bay window I’d just repaired.  I needed new glass; it was a Sunday in the winter.  I had to seal it up and had limited choices.  I had a small hardware going out of business eight blocks from my house as one option; a Home Depot six miles away as another.

Having taken measurements I walked to the hardware.  It was empty except for two old men, one the sales clerk and another someone just hanging around.  They were smoking camels and their faces looked as if they’d been smoking for every one of each of their 75 years, what with darkened finger tips and ashtrays at the register filled with butts.

This part of Alexandria had not yet gentrified, but the pressures were all around.  DC had begun to grow genuinely expensive, pricing many – like me, who were to become first time buyers – out of the District’s good neighborhoods.  The house I bought was affordable, but needed a lot of work.  Others were beginning to discover the merits of this close in neighborhood, older homes, walkable streets, proximity to public transit, and at least a shell of what had the bones of an old Main Street type of a corridor.

Fords were being replaced with Jeeps and Saabs, slowly at first, but over the years a bit more quickly.  A few white families were for a time moving out and into their homes young Hispanic were arriving.

In an empty parking lot I saw what could become a farmer’s market someday, so I asked the city if I could do it, and they were like, “sure, whatever…”  The farmer’s market was slow to start and I had to visit drive all over Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania to get enough farmers to come.  The strip was empty.  No stores.  A wig shop.  An old biker bar.  A dozen empty buildings.  Two storefront churches.

To me a farmer’s market needs coffee.  But this was pre-coffee shop 1992.  But I recalled a coffee cart vender on Capitol Hill and asked her to bring her cart on Saturdays.  She did and to fast forward through the next decade, the accountants and lawyers moved in.  The plumbers and electricians moved out.  Volvos were in driveways.  Lavender replaced marigolds.  Dogs arrived.

Eventually an empty building became a coffee shop, and after a few years of hard work managing the market and working to promote the old buildings, the commercial corridor started to come alive!

So anyway I am working on my front porch, it’s raining and wintry and I let slip this 6×6 and it falls through the window and I now have to get some glass replaced.  I make my way to the hardware and ask for glass to be cut.  It’s incredibly smoky in there, and while I am waiting I strike up a conversation with this old man who is just hanging out.

He asks me where I live and I say “I live over on Del Ray Avenue.”  He says, “oh”.  “Yes” I reply, “a few houses from the coffee shop, the new coffee shop.  You know where that is?” I ask.  He says he does.

As this coffee shop is a very particular child of mine I am delighted, having suffered in my mind the 7-Eleven and its trash and neonage for three years as the only business open on Mount Vernon avenue besides the two wigs shops – the biker bar having gone extinct.  I asked if he liked the shop and he said he didn’t go in there.  I asked if he’d ever been in there and he said yes but not anymore.

This concerned me a great deal and I asked why, and whether he didn’t like the coffee.  He said he liked the coffee but gets his at 7-Eleven.  I said how come, given that we’d priced the coffee to be the same as the 7-Eleven on purpose.  He told me it wasn’t the cost.

There was a long and somewhat uncomfortable silence in the smoky hardware.  He changed the subject and asked how come I wasn’t getting my glass at Home Depot.  I wanted to support the local hardware I said.  How come he was getting coffee at the 7-Eleven when we now had a great coffee shop.

I should pause here and describe him in his gray hair and red flannel checkered shirt and oil stained jeans that hadn’t been washed, the kind of jeans that stand themselves up after a while.  Carrhart workboots with steel toes.

“Why don’t you get your coffee at the new coffee shop if it’s priced the same as the 7-Eleven and the coffee is better?” I asked again.

“Because I don’t feel welcomed.”

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I mention this because while it was never our intent to obtain a good cup of coffee at the price of a resident feeling unwelcome in his own neighborhood, this was most certainly a reality.

In effect – and this is important – his feelings weren’t just sentimentality.  Agree with them or not, his feelings and the decisions he would make owing to them – have a cost, and in this case a cost that had been off-loaded.

We turned an old empty building into a thriving coffee shop.  The economics were not yet so drastically changed that people who longed to stay couldn’t.  This would take another ten years.  But it had come quickly to a point where weren’t all in it together, and the fabric of the community – the old one and the transitionary one alike – was wearing.

People – so far as feelings go anyways – were not part of our original equation. At least not Mr. Johnson’s.  And not Tim the electricians either.

As long as preserved stones and good coffee – important though they are – remain the paramount concerns of preservationists, we run the risk that the places we make are historic, and preserved, but not necessarily valuable in quite the way we might imagine things.

If there is no deliverance without diversity, is it enough to cherish the stones but not make a place for the stonecutter?

If you are inclined to see our post Industrial system as broken – as I do – and in need of repair and love – as I do, then you must be willing to abandon the preservation of even the most beloved stones, if the price of their rescue is the perpetuation of what’s fundamentally broken and somehow, intended or not, the kind of community amnesia paralyzing our country todays.

I pledge to you, here today, for the balance of my professional career, to double down on my commitment to making it possible to re-interpret Kurt Vonnegut, so that if an alien asks me someday what we Americans consider our most habitable city, I can say, no matter where I am:  “hey, right here, let’s go get a cup of coffee.  You might not look like everyone else, but they’ll be pretty welcoming nonetheless.”

Thank you

When attempting to revitalize a neighborhood, our judgment is always to start with what works.  Building on strengths is more affordable than fixing problems.  Doing so catches strong areas before they decline needlessly.  Starting with strengths generates results faster.  And focusing on strengths invariably means working where residents are already taking risks, being good neighbors, and demonstrating valuable and essential investment behaviors.  The strengths approach also has the substantial value of seeing the glass as half-full, an essential ingredient in neighborhood transformation so long as realism and candor are likewise present.  This approach – to build on strengths – is often counterintuitive.  Most communities resist this approach, thinking either that fixing problems is a better way to go, or that investing in what’s already working is somehow an unfair and inequitable use of scarce resources.  Or they think both and wind up selecting areas that work emotionally or politically but which in our experience tend not to work. Probably the most important message we can send to cities and residents is to resist the temptation to spend time and money either fixing things or working on the areas of greatest need.  Neither will work in weak markets.  While trying to fix the blocks that are most broken, those that are only partly troubled will decline further.  And by focusing on areas of greatest need – with what will inevitably be too few dollars – the opportunity costs for failing to catch stronger areas that were at risk will be very high.

Embracing the build-on-strengths approach also requires that the community come to grips with a daunting adaptive challenge.  That is, a historic tendency to fail to build on strengths when trying to revitalize distressed communities – present in nearly every city in the United States – has led to tremendous displacement.  We have found that communities have grown accustomed to discussing revitalization in the context of presumed consequential displacement of low income families, when the more pertinent statistically supported reality is that efforts that fail to build on strengths actually help push out the strongest families who grow weary of the status quo.  When resident leaders who would otherwise anchor a recovery leave or emotionally withdraw, revitalization is doomed.  Period.

Remember, the aim of a revitalization effort is to reposition a neighborhood as a place where the overwhelming majority of home owners there continually reinvest in their own homes.  Reinvestment in this case can be financial, but more critical is effort.  The most important thing to look for, and if missing, attempt to build, are blocks where the majority of homes send an unmistakable signal that the people who live in them care so deeply about their homes that maintenance and care are consistent high priorities.  Absent signals that communicate exactly this, people who are otherwise unfamiliar with the neighborhood will conclude that the neighborhood is troubled and too great a risk.  They will avoid the neighborhood unless they see consistently tangible evidence that  “this is a place people really care so much about they make it a priority”.  The key here is consistency.  It’s critical to build consistency.  That is to build blocks where every home is a place that is cared for, so that the block feels predictable to the wider external market.  Getting this done on blocks where this is already happening, as has been noted, is far more cost effective in terms of time and money than trying to accomplish it on more deteriorated blocks.

When a neighborhood is a place where the overwhelming majority of home owners are continually reinvesting, it has become a community of choice.  People – owners or renters – are choosing to be there.  They are not there because they lack affordable alternatives.  They are not there because they have always been there.  They are there because they choose to be there and choose to continually make it an even better place.  This is a distinct market orientation, and fundamentally is based on the presumption that neighborhoods compete, and for them to do so successfully, resident care is the key to competitiveness.

Imperfections

(excerpted from comments to Preservation NC September 2010)

Durham, NC

Being in Durham in 2010 is a bit nostalgic for me in a circuitous sort of a way.  North Carolina is where I spent time in the army and in school.  The triangle is where I learned to love to hate Duke, and discovered a dividing line between eastern and western BBQ.  Durham is where I found almond and chocolate pastries, and I lived for a short while on Lamond Avenue between the Durham Art School and East Campus.

Before there was a Starbucks to create demand and tap into and build an appetite for third places, it was plain difficult to find a good cup of coffee.   It was hard to dine in a way that was grounded to the nearby land in any meaningful sense.   And no easy task to be present in ways to be connected to the past.

In the last 25 years it’s gotten both harder and easier to be in places that possess what might be called virtuous imperfection.  Easier because of the work you’ve done; harder because of the fully steamed engines of Charlotte-financed sprawl that is still convinced that Chick-fil-A is worthy of human ambition.

But that defines much of what I experienced in North Carolina years ago – from life in the barracks at Fort Bragg, to eggs on sunday mornings in the Greek community of old Fayetteville, to having shad roe for breakfast in Wrightsville Beach.  A kind of place-based goodness comprised of consistent differentiation and layered imperfections that function as a sort of experiential accompaniment to how it feels to handle brick.

I was in school in Chapel Hill, and working at the Fearrington House, learning how to make terrines and mayonnaise and other sauces on some days, while trying to get a good grade from Jim Leutze and Willis Brooks and Doris Betts on others.

The community of such places was quite small, and we’d all pile into Crooks Corner at midnight for grits and wine and conversations that, looking back, were astonishingly anchored by geography and time.  We were in a place, a place that has stayed with me and nurtured me for decades.

Carrboro was where the farmer’s brought their produce.  Fearrington was still in the country.  Fowler’s market in Durham was a real grocery store.

If you wanted barbeque you had to go to Saxapahaw out where I lived for a bit on the river, unless you really were serious in which case you drove to Asheville and headed south to Green River for a proper pork sandwich, fried okra, and fresh iced tea.

You went to see Ma Dip in her cramped Chapel Hill kitchen on West Rosemary to learn how to make celery salt, and to La Res and later Crooks to see Bill Neal about making biscuits.

If you wanted a bear claw, well that was easy – you went to the Ninth Street Bakery in Durham.  And if you wanted jerusalem artichokes, you had to ask someone for directions to where they grew along the roadside.

When I went looking for good coffee I discovered Broad Street Roasters and started grinding my own beans.  It was fun, and smelled good, and there was something tactile about it in the way that laying your own stone walkway can be, or mitering a corner, or cleaning a bicycle.

It was 1985, and once a month I’d buy three pounds of coffee and mix my own blend, a practice I’d continue for years after, eventually having Broad Street ship beans to me in Washington, DC when I lived on Capitol Hill, DC having no roasters of its own.

Unbeknownst to me at the time though, having beans shipped to me in Washington, DC from Carrboro, NC was itself an act of un- as well as uprootedness that I will return to momentarily, for it is connected to the larger issue of what in fact constitutes restoration, what defines preservation.

Eventually I took a job at Magnolia Grill, and for a while would ride a borrowed bike the 11 or so miles each way from Chapel Hill to Durham on Erwin Road.  One day while cooking at Magnolia we were short on ingredients, and I distinctly remember my first impressions walking down Ninth Street to a new market – the Wellspring Grocery, to get some cilantro.

I’d never seen such a place.  It was splendid but was to Fowlers what Starbucks was to Broad Street.

Now, years later, it makes all kinds of sense to me that Broad Street – as I’ve come to learn – has gone out of business after 25 years, and today there are 46 Starbucks throughout the Triangle, just as Durham’s Well Spring and Cambridge’s Bread and Circus and Boulder’s Wild Oats have been absorbed by Whole Foods.

It is also possibly the case that unbeknownst to Lex Alexander and Well Spring was the derascination that invariably would come from trying to monetize authenticity in the form of a national supermarket chain selling locavore ethics.  If I might stretch this reasoning this is also related to what’s happening in East Durham.  Or more accurately, not happening, and if anything were to happen there as it has elsewhere, the uprootedness I’m referring to would come awfully close to gentrification.

And I say that as a believer in gentrification as a good.  Not an unalloyed good, mind you; but a good nonetheless.

Soon I was in Washington, DC – a different sort of a place altogether.  And yet the Chapel Hill and Durham and the Piedmont I knew then held for me -  as it does now – an originality and an authenticity that I have rarely since discovered.   So if the first word I want to underscore today is imperfection, the second is authenticity.

I have found it in the Shenandoah Valley in north central and western Virginia.  Along the Maine Coast in Damariscotta.  On the vast alluvial plan of eastern Arkansas along the Mississippi River south of Memphis a few hours.  North of Santa Fe, NM in the village of Tesuque, redolent w chiles and lavender, Aspen groves, and Chimoya clay.  In western Marin County, California in the coastal towns of Point Reyes and Inverness.  And along the Delaware River in western New Jersey in old Mill communities along the towpath.  Each distinctly capturing a combination of landed rhythms, time, and climate.

In these and other places I have been fortunate to locate something that approaches what the lyrical Modernist Hans Hofman called “the real”.

About ten miles from Helena, Arkansas across the river in Mississippi is a small place built in the 1920s out in the country.  It’s called Uncle Henry’s and it’s on Moon Lake.  I recall spending the night there and looking at the guestbook and at Tennessee Williams’ signature, and then walking out to the dock and learning what an oxbow lake and who Eudora Welty was.  The menu was precisely what it ought to have been:  thoroughly local long before local underwent a branding exercise.

I hadn’t thought of these places in years, not until I had to sit down and write these comments … though I am certain they are a part of me.

Each of us in our own way explores the world atop our own Rocinantes, more or less anonymously finding along our journey what to keep and take with us; how as Walker Percy might have said, “to be redeemed” against this tide of Burger Kings and post-industrial wanderlust.

My own journey’s inadequate resources required me to work, and that brought me to Kodiak, Alaska to fish commercially and earn tuition, and to half a dozen restaurants in the Triangle to pay for books my Army stipend didn’t reach.

On the one hand these pauses on my journey were of necessity.  While I was fortunate to be born into family a with vision, we didn’t have means.  So Chapel Hill for me was as much about first washing dishes and later bartending at Spankys, as it was about literature, history, and geography.

For me – and I imagine for you – place has special meaning.

We participate in where we are, and we visually breathe in the dust of crumbling pink salmon brick from decaying Philadelphia rowhouses just as we see the smell of nasturtiums and gray whales off the Pacific coastal town of Davenport, California.

We feel the empty buildings that once had life to them, that were alive, and we are comforted by the proportions and, even more important, by the imperfections.

Place-making done well is about differentiation.

And yet in preparing to return to Durham, I am reminded that the new Durham Bulls ballpark is something of an HOK copy of Camden Yards, which is something of a copy of Bright Leaf square, which is something of a copy of a real factory where people actually worked for a living.

I mean I suppose there is a symmetry to that sort of circularity, but if I want to see the Orioles play I will go to Baltimore.   Why on earth should seeing a game in Durham be like seeing a game at Fenway?

I raise this point because in my view there are two central questions we must think about in our work of revitalizing places, assuming of course that we have seriously thought-through our intention to be restorative in the genuine sense to begin with.

The first is what is there?

Is it authentic?  Is it real?  Has it been differentiated?

If I go to Durham and I experience an old tobacco warehouse with its wide plank heart of pine floors, and in there I have a coffee pressed in a unique way by a local vendor, then I have one kind of an experience.

If instead I have a coffee that lacks any geographical mooring, what then?

I would argue that for the genuine preservationist, the success of imperfection is an intentional failure to achieve sameness.

Put another way, the failure of capital markets to seed imperfection is the very basis for the suburbia we all as members of the restorative club decry – whether in its original California-patio-Long Island-ranchburger form, or the more contemporary version of fraud sold to us as new urbanism.

We seek in place-making to differentiate.   Otherwise we are just cookie cutters playing with old materials and combining them with old ideas and new branding.  Yesterday’s Brightleaf Square is today’s artist-housing.  We can be authentic or we can be hollow in our pursuit of a restored Grove Arcade.

In so doing – when done well – we work to add and well as remove layers, hopefully neither recreating nor Disneyfying.  In doing so we take responsibility for the present, and in an irony for historic preservationists, for the future.

Of course, in our differentiation, our aesthetic senses come face to face with economic reality.

How do we make our layers pencil out?  How can we pay for all this?

And that means acknowledging that the work of differentiation is the work of demand.  Of meeting demands, of being appealing…………………….Yet demand in the marketplace is often less a desire for authenticity and its inherent imperfections than, for the mere suggestion of what was once real.

Never forget that an old warehouse that has been repurposed as a gallery is in some ways a dilettante’s iron and brick and pine aperitif:  part homage to what it was like to really sweat for a paycheck in the 1920s, and part nod to the changes we are undergoing as a society that move us daily further from authenticity, all the while giving the market the pastiche it craves in the sterile setting it demands.  How else to explain neo-traditional town planning on both the supply and demand side of things?

When the market wants only a hint of authenticity in the form of an intentionally chipped piece of plaster aimed at revealing formerly imperfect brick walls, the developer is in a bit of a bind.  It takes money for it to pencil out, after all.

The developer seeks an answer to this question, and to answer it herself.

What is there?  Is anything missing?  What is demanded?  Can I respond to demand with a product?  The market demands something that feels authentic, but isn’t really.

How do I supply that?  Does the market really want real?

In trying to find answers to the question “what is there?”, or more aptly, “what is missing ?” preservationists expend enormous amounts of energy trying to fail at providing sameness to the exact level of tolerance the market has for distinctness.

My own hypothesis is that the market is almost entirely comprised of consumers who aim to set themselves apart only enough to remain inside the orbit of their own racial and cultural insecurities.

Rare is the customer who is truly capable of achieving escape velocity, who doesn’t want a bear claw but instead wants that bear claw, the one they only make there at the Ninth Street Bakery.  You know you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole when the menu in Los Angeles has shrimp and grits.

So the third word I want to underscore is tolerance.  In solving for the problem of what is missing from our urban landscape, we invariably have to make our response bankable and feasible, and that means we have to work within society’s tolerances.

Naturally this is upsetting.

What if we’re dealing with Philistines?  What if they don’t really want that bear claw from that bakery?

What if instead they simply want something that reminds them of what they once had, or what they read they were supposed to want, or what they see other people having?

What does that mean for the developer of a historic building that may be the keystone property of an old Main Street to where life could return, and possibly in a form that pays down the mortgage, but hardly comes close to being real?

Who closes that financing gap?  And who decides what’s valid and real anyway?

Which brings me to the second question, by far the more difficult of the two, and in my view the one that really matters.

Who is there?

In solving for what is not there, part of our jobs as preservationists or rejuvenators or revitalizers is to locate the nature of demand in the market and respond to it in a way that cash flows.

But in my travels and work, a sad reality in all these wonderful places persistently nags.

How come these places all have people in them that don’t ever look as though they missed a paycheck.  I mean on the customer side of the counter.  How come the historic places we rehabilitate and refinance and revitalize all seem to be missing real and genuine callouses?

I am not suggesting that it is not excruciatingly hard work to buy an old mill and raise the capital to rebuild it, to create a vision investors can believe in, and to mortgage your own home to seed financing.  What I am suggesting is that this is a distinctly different form of work and thus a distinctly different form of sweat and fatigue…..that sweating on the line as a millworker in a building that once housed sewing machines is very different than waiting tables to pay tuition at Magnolia Grill where most customers have a relationship with an institution whose combined tuition, room and board, and books bill exceeds the Durham median income by $2,800.

In the Point Reyes’ and Damariscotta’s and Durhams of the world the conversion of places formerly on their knees owing to macro forces beyond their immediate control, there is rebirth.  And in this there is, justifiably, joy.

But to me it is a muted joy.  As often as not we turn Main Streets and warehouse districts into rows of boutiques and loft living quarters and artists studios and the only sweat subsequently located in these places is earned in gyms and swimming pools by triathletes able to afford $10,000 Cervelos and Serottas.

In our pursuit of place, where we seek in part to answer the question “what is not here?” with re-used materials and lighting and concepts sufficient to create the hint of imperfection, and thus marketable differentiation, I am afraid we have not taken enough time to factor into our equations the janitor and the nurse and the secretary and the farmer and the welder in a meaningful way worthy of our abilities.

If solving for what is missing in the built environment has led to the successful and praiseworthy recovery of thousands of Main Streets and historic districts and countless old hotels and rail depots and corner stores and textile factories, I would like to think that we may now have enough collective wisdom to leverage these significant accomplishments and turn our attention to tackling the issue of who is there, or more aptly, who might we be leaving behind?

In my work – which is not really about building and design so much as it is about supply and demand, I am often confronted with the terribly uncomfortable reality that demand is ultimately the first cousin of choice and consequence, and that we live in what is for the most part a free market.

People make choices as much about where to eat, and where to stay the night, as they do about where not to go.

They makes choices about who they want as neighbors and who it is they demand to be distant from.  And I submit this is the next frontier of preservation and revitalization:  remaking places that sufficiently appeal to pioneers without kicking out or walling off the Indians, or as Saskia Sasen might have said:  creating magnets for “enterprising nomads” without creating refugees.

I would argue that the physical imperfections the market seeks (and in places like Durham finds in refurbished warehouses and old grocery stories like the one that Magnolia took over) – or in some cases only thinks it wants – mirrors similar tendencies when it comes to people.

The irony for me is that economic diversity is always a more powerful revenue generator than sameness, yet while we pursue a diverse, and layered, and organic built environment through careful preservation and restoration work, the results are often a bit more socio-economically vanilla than I think is healthy for a self reflective society.

Which brings me to the final word I wish to underscore.  Vanilla.

Imperfection.  Authenticity.  Tolerance.  Vanilla.

As you seek to to be more imperfect, as you seek to be authentic, please push the tolerance level of your community and your mayor and your banker to be even more creative, and even more morally assertive, mindful that we can do better than Vanilla.

What will this require?

In my experience it means coming first to terms with the fact that you will cause casualties.  Either people or buildings or memories or rootedness.  Regrettably, here will be losses.  Human beings compete for sunlight, after all – whether in the form of diesel or de-hydrogenated vegetable fat.

Second it means intentionality is required.

The axiom ‘you get what you measure’ holds.  If you measure building improvements, but not retention of Indians and Indian culture, you will only get building improvements.

Third it means choice-making.  Hard choices.  Deals have to pencil out and sometimes that means you finance authenticity over there with kitsch over here.  There are not perfect solutions when aiming for imperfection.

And finally, it’s all about demand.  Not need.  Not affordability.  Not inclusion.  Not process.  Demand.  Grow it.  Tap into it.  Nurture it.  Without it, you have no market and with no market you have empty buildings.  Empty buildings means blight, and you’re right back where you started – thinking that a broken building is the problem and not seeing the neighborhood and the community of people in its shadow.

I am no egalitarian.  I don’t believe in equality except as it pertains to opportunity.

The opportunity I am referring to of course is the opportunity to authentically create our own histories in authentic places.

To paraphrase my friend Elizabeth Schilling, “we need to figure out a way to give everyone a shot at their history, and create places that allow non-yuppies, non-whites, and non-vanilla souls to be nurtured by history, too.  It is bad enough to appropriate historic sweatshops for a dozen lofts straight out of DWELL or some other such insipid magazine – do we really need to stick the cultural descendants of the sweatshop workers with our worst modern schlock, too?”

If you will allow me to end with a short story about a project I worked on in Virginia.

On a tired commercial corridor in a working class part of town, full of empty buildings and storefront churches of the sort we all know all too well, I’d helped to redevelop a prominent corner into a coffee shop.  It has been a great success and 12 years later it remains fuller than ever of double wide strollers and moms having lattes.

Two blocks away was then and today remains a 7-Eleven, formerly the only place where you could buy anything, including a terrible cup of coffee.

Six blocks away was then and no longer is today a hardware store; it’s been replaced by an antique store, what with Home Depot only a few miles away.  One day, very full of myself for having helped make the coffee shop appear, and working on my house a block away, my hands slipped and I let go of 2×10 rafter that crashed through the very bay window I’d just repaired.  Ugh.

I thought about where to get the new piece of glass.  The local hardware or the Home Depot, and resolved to support the local hardware.  In line waiting was an older, long-time resident of the now fast-changing neighborhood just there to chit chat, who asked why I didn’t just go to Home Depot where it’s cheaper.  I said I was trying to support the local hardware.  He asked where I lived and I replied “next to the new coffee shop, do you go there?”

“No,” he said.  I asked where he gets his coffee.  “The 7-Eleven.”  I said the prices were the same, and asked “why go there if the coffee is better at the new place?”  He knew that, he replied, and said that he did not feel welcomed.

What you have done here in much of Durham speaks to this ambition for authenticity, and to your considerable abilities and accomplishments.

But what has not yet been done through the rest of Durham – between Granby and Pettigrew – and which speaks as much to who is missing from your plans as to what – also is on my mind.

It’s probably on yours as well.

I’ll close with the words of Paul Simon:  “the way we look to a distant constellation that’s dying in the corner of the sky, these are the days of miracle and wonder.”

That’s how I think of neighborhoods I’ve yet to encounter full of people on the verge of or who have been left behind.

There’s no getting around it:  the American South is it’s own place.

Arriving in Colorado or even Northern New Mexico, you are face to face with Tesuque mysticism, with fragrant high desert pignoli and sage and Chaco.

Venture north of Connecticut, which seems to have become just a 200 square mile suburb, and Yankee thrift still eludes; that is until the Isle of Shoals reminds you how fierce one had to be to make a go of it on Appledore, Star, and Smuttynose.

Deep into shrimping waters in and around Grande Isle, Louisiana – well, now or soon to be Valdez waters (or dead shimpin’ waters as the case may be with 42,000 gallons of crude/minute rushing towards what’s left of egret, panther (oops they’re already gone), and pelican breeding grounds) with the thermostat way up thanks to the O and G sychophants – the pace is all langour, the conceit all fertility, the fertility all peat, the time all mossy warmth, and the hue all pink sunlight.

In these places the land and culture seem to have struck a bargain.

In Boothbay Harbor it can seem as if weathered gray lobster traps are actually cultivars from special crustacean orchards around Damariscotta, they are so organically derivative of coastal topography.  Yeats’ silver moons offset Maine blueberries, and a sort of downeast version of a Welsh hedgerow economy has managed to hold fast and trim.

But in the American South it’s different.

Mysticism and land and humus have given way to giant four story metal crosses along the highways that compete against fireworks and tobacco sell-job billboards for real estate on cattle farms that will soon just be roadside truck stops.  Which is to say places for wizened men in their Hemi Rams to get cigarettes, and too many calloused, metastasized women to pump gas into their Sunbirds.  Which is to say places that have forgotten about the land, and where into such forgetfulness has arrived more (and much less) myth than magic, and a kind of gaunt pre-Prague Spring laughter.

Somewhere along the line the Ocoee became the Cahulawassee which was stolen by North Atlanta housing developers financed by Bank of America’s pink white men and their paunches and John Deere-Chemlawn saturdays.

At least they got their Piggly Wiggly!  But I swear if I see one more poor community in a America with five churches and no fresh vegetables, with lots of cigarettes, and no jobs except selling Marlboros at the Pilot, I am just going to cry.

Except that you can’t.  Cry, that is.  You have to swing at the pitch that’s coming.

Because if you really think about it, it’s a kind of comeuppance.

Of the morally bereft form of capitalism our Newts in Georgia and Rubins in New York helped craft.

Of the value-less extraction economy the so-called greatest generation gave us (see Love Canal, Ohio River, Santa Barbara, Valdez, the Gulf…)

In this American South, we have become the Cherokee.  Only it’s we, ourselves who are forcibly removing our children from the land.  To say nothing of dwindling p0pulations of tree frogs.

Leavers or takers.  Indeed.

What has happened to so much of the American South is that it has seemingly moved away from the land in a kind of biblical assault on nature.  As if it’s not a beautiful enough of a place all by itself to bring tears to your eyes that we have to put a cross on top of it like a dog marking territory.

Prolly just as well since dogs are everywhere in the south, anyway; loose and unclaimed whose sole purpose seems to be to wander highways and back roads alike until they become flattened Cohutta Beagles.

Funny thing is, throughout Eastern Tennessee, North Georgia, and Western NC – if this past week is any indication of the norm, two things above all stand out.

First, everyone was nice and smart and genuine.  Second, there’s wasn’t a confederate flag to be seen.  And when lost, people offered sincere and sincerely friendly directions.  When not lost, people offered sincerity and kindness.

Yet in Western NY, a full 250 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, confederate flags are omnipresent.  Get lost and people tell you to get lost.