From Streetcars To Spaceships

Urban Agriculture: what exactly ARE our options?

There has been a steady increase in buzz in recent years about urban agriculture. While cities like Havana and Manila have been seeing comprehensive implementation of this for years now and while projects like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago have been pioneering techniques, here in the U.S. we really don't have even much of a sense of just how much land in a given city would actually be suited to this or even how to make that determination.

Well, here in Portland, there has been a wonderful project called Diggable Cities that has taken on just that. I was lucky enough to have dinner tonight with Kevin Balmer, one of the authors of this remarkably complex and throrough study so now I'm posting the link here.

Hopefully this will serve as a model for such projects in other cities. Maybe even interwoven with the kind of city reinvention that Flint, Michigan is now embarking on and others may take on soon.

It makes it easier to get up in the morning knowing that this kind of work is going on.

-Rustin

How cheaply and how quickly can an abandoned lot be made into a park?

I've been thinking about this for years and puttering away at it now and again in the real world. If you have access to an asphalt-covered lot, especially one that you don't actually have rights to, how much could you do and how cheaply to make it beautiful? I think that there are some non-obvious answers, especially if you have access to a vehicle and a couple of friends. Since moving next to an abandoned area of over five square blocks I've actually been doing some slowly more ambitious jiggerings of the dynamic and maybe one day I'll write about that here but for now let's consider one thought experiment.

Let's say you've got access to a double-sized lot that is covered with parking spaces and (pretty much) ignored by the owner. We'll assume a temperate climate for now. We'll assume that the temperature never goes below 45 degrees Farenheit in the time that you're working.

So let's say that in one day you go with friends and pick up a few hundred used bricks somewhere. Perhaps you found them on freecycle. This is your starting gun since it can take months to get that cheap load of bricks. That night or soon thereafter, you all go to Home Despot and buy 80 cinder blocks and various other supplies.

You bring them all to your chosen lot.

There you mix some concrete.

You pour a broad line of concrete in a wide circle about a foot and a half wide, about an inch tall, and about 11 feet in diameter.

Along the inner line of this circle you put the cinder blocks so they will be held to the asphalt by the hardened concrete. Around four inches outside that circle of cinder blocks you put a ring of bricks. Inside the ring of cinder blocks you fasten about five or six granite "Belgian blocks".

Five of six cinder blocks are fastened to the asphalt with concrete in "random" locations in the lot. Each of these cinder blocks is bordered by one to three Belgian blocks placed a couple inches away but aligned with the cinder block to create protected nooks and crannies for plants to grow in.

In each corner of the lot you use the remaining cinder blocks and concrete to create one brick high boundary walls about a foot and a half from the actual lot line.

Then everybody goes home and leaves the concrete to cure.

The next time you can all get together you all go back and pour about an inch of rough gravel or sand into each cinder block, into the space between the cinder blocks and bricks, and for about a foot outside the bricks and inside the cinder blocks. Onto all the cinder blocks you spray "moss smoothies".

Pour soil over the whole shebang, every brick and cinder block, until they're barely visible. This will settle quite a bit.

Into this loose soil you shove hundreds of various beans obtained by the simple expedient of buying bags of beans at the supermarket. Each bean should be about two inches down and you should end up with about ten various beans per square foot.

Into this soil you also put hundreds of drought-resistant "plugs" of sedum, alyssum, and other very tough plants that propagate themselves and can stand up to plenty of abuse.

Over ALL of this, you then spread a thin layer of fine gravel. Fine enough to be the type used in fish tanks. This will allow things to "rest up a bit" and get settled and keep soil from blowing away or be forced to the side too much by things like dog pee.

Before leaving that day, water this all copiously.

Think of what this would all look like within a month. It would be elegant, welcoming, and have the beginnnings of a local ecosystem. Among other things, some kind of plants or other will "volunteer" and start growing there without your having had to put them there. All those bean vines will be encouraging the soil to stay healthy and tying it all together, literally.

The last step, just to add the final touch to bring people in, is to occasionally scatter inexpensive pretty things around the space. On the lots near me I scatter handfuls of semi-precious stones like cornelian, hematite, and clear quartz. Bought by the pound from the right stores, they're only about eight dollars a pound. Shells work well, too. Just be sure to not put them all out on one day or in one place. You will be amazed at the sense of magic it gives somebody to find something like a tiger's eye lurking under a bean vine.

Now let's itemize out our shopping list to see just how much this would all cost. I need to get to bed so I'll come back later and fill in the prices.
80 cinder blocks ($1.40 x 80) $120
200 bricks (used)
40 Belgian blocks ($2.60 x 40) $104
6 bags of cement
6 bags of sand for concrete
3 landscaper's flats of mixed plugs (3 x $50) $150
10 bags of beans ($1.20 X 10) $12
20 bags of soil ($2.30 x 20) $46
30 bags of rough gravel or sand
5 bags of fine gravel
semi-precious stones $40
transport costs $100
random tools,etc. $60

Anybody care to tell me that this will cost more than a large party?

In parking lots, more of the right trellises might be a very good idea.

Okay, so let's see if I'm understanding this correctly.

1.) Drivers tend to park under vegetation if they're given the chance. Shade is good for both keeping the temperature of the car down and for the finish. Bird crap sucks but most folks think that it's worth the risk.

2.) Parking lots are notorious sources of stormwater runoff. Really toxic runoff, at that. They also concentrate pollution by putting all those starting, stopping, and idling vehicles in one place.

3.) All that bare space and all those vehicles make parking lots, especially big ones, prime offenders in the heat island effect.

4.) A lot of species, most notably small animals like squirrels and some birds, will cross a small gap just fine. Put ten feet of asphalt between two vegetated areas and everything from racoons to frogs will make the leap. But put a large parking lot in place, a vast, unbroken vista of bare space several hundred feet across, and many species won't cross. General rule - the larger the unbroken area without living things, the more you isolate the species on both sides. Possibly with an impact reaching for miles, especially at breeding times.

5.) Vegetation acts as a windbreak.

6.) People just plain old like vegetation. It's purty and makes people feel good.

So, all of these would tend to take us somewhere that's pretty much a no-brainer. It takes no great insight to conclude that planted areas are healthier than bare cement, asphalt, or even pavers. The interesting question becomes, how can we add vegetation without significantly reducing available space for vehicles and at a low cost?

Seems to me that one good answer would be to mount raised vertical trellises between parking spots, trellises that start about eight feet above the ground (so as to not impede visibility) and, possibly, with some arched over occasional spots, creating a "skin" of vegetation that is low cost to install and low-maintenence once it's up and running.

A few decisions would be key to pulling this off effectively. Most of these will be familiar to folks who know about projects that I've done and related deocuments I've created.

Instead of starting out with transplanting relatively mature plants, accept the uncomfortable approach of using multiple small starts and allowing them a few years to establish. To buy time in terms of preventing a bare appearance in early years and display the utility of the system, also place quick-growing, low maintenence annuals like morning glories in useful spots. And then (I suspect that a lot of you will hate this) leave the dead, brown remnants of the ivy behind at the end of every growing season to help build the mass of vegetation and speed the creation of a suspended ecosystem up there.

Plants are started in small (about 5 inches across) containers, possibly blow-molded plastic, into which are put starts that have been grown in plain old jumbo styrofoam cups chosen to just fit in the planters. These are dropped in just as is, turning the styrofoam into permanent thermal insulation and a bit of a way to stretch the room for roots at nominal weight and cost. If funding allows, eventually these plants can be transplanted into larger containers but even then the styrofoam can be left pretty much as is, since roots will tend to go right through it anyway.

These containers are mounted about ten feet up.

Trellises are built of gridwall that has been heavily painted with waterproof paint like Rustoleum (as in four or five coats on top of two or three coats of primer) and ideally purchased at surplus. Frames are made of plumbing pipe, in some places bent with a standard pipe bender into arches and into goose necks for light fixtures and then, again, painted heavily with waterproof paint. These pipes are placed into holes that are about five inches in diameter larger than the pipe and about four feet deep in the asphalt and whatever subsurface is below it. Concrete is then poured into each hole and the pipe is just dropped in and supported with a temporary frame until the concrete dries.  We're going for low-cost, low-skill, low complexity. Not to mention that since most of this is plain old steel and concrete, it's comparatively non-toxic and recyclable/reusable if need be.

Ideally this time is also taken to reduce the number of those awful sodium lights that so ugly up our commercial spaces, replacing them with smaller, evenly distributed LED fixtures mounted to the same frames as the trellises and powered by photovoltaics, small wind turbines, or other power generated right there at that facility.

I know that none of this exactly sounds like rocket science but I've never seen it done yet and it seems to me like a viable, low-cost, low-risk way to ameliorate a lot of what is worst about those commercial parking lots that so demoralize so many of us. There are hundreds of possible variations on this. In a perfect world, I would love to team up a few classes of industrial design students with a few classes of landscape architecture students and advised by physical plant managers of a few local malls, hospitals, etc.

But for now, I ask that you just take a few minutes and visualize this as described here. Just a typical commercial parking lot with one of these trellises for every twenty parking spaces, ideally staggered a bit as seen from above. Could the cost be gotten down to two hundred bucks per trellis, installed? I suspect that it could. Could the marginal cost to site maintenance be gotten down to fifteen minutes per month per trellis? I suspect so and that lot of it would come down to providing the crew with the right rolling ladders and the right battery-powered tools. Is there, perhaps a better idea that you would prefer to see done?

Think about it.

Thanks,

-Rustin

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

They say that I'm a criminal.

I'm going to tell you a story. Quite a long one. But I promise that none of the details (well, almost none) are pointless and that I will get to that point. I will most bloody well assuredly get to my point.

It's been a great holiday season. Time with the family. Gave a huge mound of gifts to some my friends' kids. (Some of them even educational!) Plenty of parties. Lots of fun. But the real event that makes this holiday season one to remember has been getting written up on a morals charge.

Yup. That's right. One of our fine men in uniform has determined that I am a corrupter of youth and is determined to see me pay.

While I wait for the papers to arrive in the mail, let me tell you all about it.

My birthday is Christmas Eve. As I'm sure you can guess, this sucks. Luckily Christine, one of the people I know from the IPRC, had the same dilemma. So she arranged a party. At first is was to be on the 24th but with everybody planning to go away and the snow getting deeper all the time, she relented and off we all went for goofy times and bad Chinese food.

And that is why, at 1:00 in the morning, with the 23rd fading into memory and the 24th just begun, I was just then leaving Chopsticks, having left the crowd recovering from my unique rendition of There Is Nothin' Like A Dame (it's not my fault that the karaoke machine mixed up the music and lyrics) and the staff (I hope) pleased with the generous tip I had just put on my debit card. It had been a fun night and, if nothing else, it had been cool to finally get a chance to sit and chat with several people like Indigo Kelleigh and Carolyn Main who I had pretty much just seen around the Portland scene and rarely exchanged more than a sentence or two with. In fact, there had been at least ten at our table from the time I arrived until right before I left.

So, in short, I was in a jovial mood. And I had been there so long that I was even (sadly) stone cold sober. (My booze budget had been hit too hard over the previous weeks.) The view down Burnside was breathtaking, the snow was just a picturesque sprinkling, and the wind was gone. So I decided to walk home. And it was so very pretty. Of course a little part of me winced when a bus actually drove right past but overall I was mellow and delighted. And it being not only after one in the morning but also right in the middle of one of the biggest snowstorms in Portland history, the streets were empty. Everything was closed. I walked right down the middle of Burnside much of the way and the view right down the drive and across to the downtown skyline was enough to warm the heart.

So this was the state I was in as I reached 12th Avenue and Stark.

And there, in the vast lot that has been abandoned for so many years, I saw a wondrous sight. A positive league of holiday enthusiasts, something like ten of them, were building an igloo. And by igloo I mean the real thing. Blocks of packed snow built up like rows of bricks. About eight feet across, two windows, little half cylinder tunnel out of one side, big enough to let you crawl in and out, fit a few adults inside at a time. And even though they were just then starting to taper it in seriously, this wondrous bit of transitory architecture was already up to their shoulders.

And what were they using to build this? A couple of those yellow recycling bins we've all got were being used to gather snow. A beat up little corrugated plastic mail basket was being used to mold the blocks. And an assortment of mugs and cups and a stew pot or two held water to pour over joints and strengthen the whole assemblage. This was American gumption, straight out of Norman Rockwell. And just as pretty.

So, of course, I walked around the lot, up the slippery stairs, down the slope, and over to tell them how cool this was. And, by the way, could they use any help? They said, sure, another person to help fill in cracks and bring snow would be welcome. So I joined in. I told them that chances were good that pictures of this would be in tomorrow's paper, at which point one of them pulled out a camera and started snapping shots of others in the igloo looking out. After a couple of shots they remembered to move the six-pack of Hamms out of the way and to stand so the flash didn't reflect too much.

Well, sadly, this was about it for most of them, so most of the bunch headed in. It turns out that some of them had been there since five or six that afternoon. They were cold and tired and it was time for bed. So this left me and two of the guys. I was sad to see so many of them go since they took a bit of the party atmosphere with them but it let me focus more on things like getting a big chunk of ice to finish off the tunnel entrance and then start packing in snow and ice to smooth out the insides and outsides. Just my kind of thing.

We would have probably been at it for quite a while longer when we saw this guy in black headed our way, dropping his bicycle (!) about thirty feet off. He gets close and his first words are, "I'll need to see some ID; I'm gonna have to be the party pooper here." I would soon learn that "party pooper" was one of his favorite phrases. You see, he was a security guard for the property. And we were trespassing.

Now those of you who don't know southeast Portland won't know the spot I'm talking about. You can see it here. It's a big ol' lot that has people on it all day long. It's used as a dog run. I've seen people wander through it after parties. The only place you won't see anybody is the building, which is so boarded up, chained in, and obviously abandoned that any day now it may be used as the set for Friday the 13th, Part Umpty-zillion.

But as this earnest individual was very adamant we understand, it is, in point of fact, owned by the Portland public schools (from what I understand it actually was used as a school right up until a mere twenty years ago) and so we were on school grounds after school hours and so not only were we trespassing this was about corrupting youth. (Should I ask which youth we were corrupting at an abandoned building at two in the morning? No, I didn't think so either.)

And yes, he did have an additional complaint. You see, once he was there he could see that we had those terrifying cans of Hamms beer nearby. And a couple of them were (as far as I could see) empty. So we had open containers of alcohol in, as he reminded us again, a schoolyard.

The two guys and I had all immediately handed him ID as soon as he asked for it and as he lectured us we all tried to get him to see just what the situation was a little more clearly. As soon as he has finished writing our information in what I assume was his ticket book and given back our ID I asked, "Well, look at this. Can you at least admit that it's pretty?"
His response, in a mumbling into his chest kinda way was, "I built one of those. . . In eighth grade." The pause had been long enough to fit a short opera in, the tone by the end an impressive combination of quietly dismissive and truculent.
"You built one of these. Like this. In eighth grade?" I asked.
"Well, um. . .  mine was a bit smaller."
"A bit?"
"It was smaller. But in my day we didn't have all sorts of special tools and stuff like you guys had. I had to build it with just my hands, just push it together."
Immediately dozens of ads from fifties issues of Popular Mechanics and seventies supermarket circulars started whizzing around in my head. Ads for cheap, easy to use plastic kits for building snow forts and igloos. Not, remember, that we were using any such things. Or, for that matter, that I had needed any in my long ago childhood days of snow fort building.
"but I thought that stuff for making these have been around for ages." Say I. In, of course, the most positively glowingly friendly but sadly perplexed tones. I just need him to explain it to me, you see.
"Well, this was a small town and we didn't have all that specialized stuff."
By this point the ghosts of a hundred thousand onetime children from broke country families, my father, late of the elegant metropolis of Poverty Knob, among them, were surely whizzing all around his benighted head trying to explain to him all that had been done by them with scraps of wood, chucks of discarded cardboard. Even, say, a couple of recycling bins and a box from the curb. But clearly we weren't getting anywhere with this.
I try another tack. I take off my glove again and offer him my hand. "Well, you've seen already from my ID, but even so, hi, my name is Rustin. What's your name?"
"I'm Corporal Saunders."
Corporal. Oh my. Dealing with the upper crust, I see. Actually, he may have said his first name too. He was kinda mumbling that part. But the Corporal came out loud and clear. And I could see Saunders on his little brass nametag so I know that I got that right.
And yeah, by now it was obvious that this was the kind of guy who must have loooved being hall monitor as a kid. Because, you see, it was so unfair that the other kids got to have all the fun. All the kids like me.
The guys and I all try one last time. We're building an igloo for crying out loud. On Christmas Eve. Surely he can cut us some slack. He talks about being "a party pooper" again. He comes back to the open containers of alcohol. I say that I don't know about anybody else but that I haven't had any of the beer and I don't see anybody bring them.
"So they were just sitting here when you got here." he says with a generous helping of sarcasm.
"That's exactly right" I say with complete honesty.
For what it's worth, you'll want to keep three things in mind.
First of all, as you know if you've read from the beginning, I had headed there at one in the morning through a snowstorm and, in fact, hadn't had so much as a sip of beer in the time I had been there. I mean, if nothing else, it's Hamms. I've got plenty of real beer in my place five blocks away. Why would I drink something generously described as PBR's inferior cousin when I had everything from Fat Tire to Bushmills a few blocks away?
Secondly, in the last half hour or so, the other guys hadn't been drinking either. Or at least not as far as I could see. We had actually all been working quite industriously.
Thirdly, it may not have been snowing much but it was snowing. So there is no way that a security guard riding a bike in a snowfall several blocks away could have even seen those few cans sitting amidst tall piles of broken snow blocks and various implements, from, if I understand his original path right, over a small rise.
But our Man In Uniform, from the esteemed ranks of Reliant Security, knows a liar when he hears one and he made a few choice comments more on the credibility of my statement. I would guess that he was about in his late twenties, early thirties but he was determined to come across as a solid authority on this. Which, I will admit, must be hard when talking to a blase guy at least ten years older than you who obviously is nothing like impressed. Though still smiling. Mostly.

Anyway, that was basically it. He made a few more comments, we asked him to let us at least finish the job. He said that we would have to come back and finish it in the daytime. And we all walked off. The next night, round about eleven p.m. I came back with some friends, took some pictures of the now rain-shrunk igloo. Passed a taller guy in a Reliant uniform walking right past. He waved, we waved, we all wished each other happy holidays. We talked to the lady with the dog who was standing right by the igloo and she said that she had been there for a while. I guess that the guy on shift that night was being a bit more reasonable about who was allowed on the fields when.

And now I'm waiting for my charge. Hasn't turned up yet. I'm guessing that whichever cop was supposed to sign off on it has had a good laugh. Of course posting this (with names and all that) has probably increased my odds of being charged tenfold. Which would be cool. I would love to contest it and get a chance to stand in front of a judge (complete, mind you, with a copy of my timestamped receipt from Chopsticks) and tell him the story of my evil deeds building an igloo on my birthday, Christmas Eve.

I could go into more detail. At some point I will.

I could reference the recommended procedure for such encounters from the 2008 training manual issued by the Portland city government that I just happen to have sitting next to me at my desk as I type this. ("Verbal Judo", huh? Interesting run of phrase, that.)

I could talk about more serious examples of what happens when "law enforcement" is about "do what makes me feel good" instead of protecting citizens. About Duane Kercic, who was harassed and detained for taking pictures in a public part of an Amtrak station. To get, mind you, shots for an Amtrak-backed contest for best shots of their trains and stations.

Or really serious stuff like Hope Steffey, who was beaten, stripped, and left naked in a jail cell without explanation for six hours for not showing a policeman sufficient "respect" when he arrived to investigate an earlier incident in which she had been attacked.

Or I could talk about my years working right by the New York City Police Academy and seeing them break laws like it was a daily requirement, all while the academy looked on, disciplined none of them, and graduated just about every one for service as a cop.

But I won't because this is just a silly blog post. No real point at all. Just about a guy in a uniform enforcing some laws against some other guys who were all, without doubt, breaking at least one of those laws. After all, the details don't really matter.

Do they?

Happy New Year. Let's make the best of it.

Make districts simple.

I write a lot, and think even more, about issues of organizational, and specifically government malfunction. There are many things one can say about this, and rest assured, I intend to keep going on at enervating length about dozens of aspects of this for as long as I have the time and access.

But there is one measure that applies to governments at all levels from town to sovereign, that is simple, very difficult to subvert, and should be capable of short and long term fundamental improvement in how governments work and how well.

Set geometric limits on the circumference to area ratios of voting districts.

It's as simple as simple gets. Simply provide a maximum numerical ratio, where the length of the line one would draw to go all the way around a voting district can only be but so complex. This simple thing would, right there, cut way down on gerrymandering, one of the most pernicious kinds of political gamesmanship. Ideally, such a law would also limit the degree of change a district could be subjected to in a given period of time. There are dozens of possible nuances that I leave as an exercise for the reader. You're smart folks, afaict; you'll see them just fine. And, as always, you're welcome to comment below.

Think about it.

Commercial to residential. Or mixed. It's the smart move.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America is flooded with surplus commercial real estate. Rental demand is climbing and the available rental unit supply is not up to the job. Thus rental prices stay high (relative to the economy) while hundreds of millions of square feet of real estate sits vacant, not generating income and in some cases, so empty of people as to be at increasing risk of vandalism and theft. And real estate companies are in serious financial trouble. We also need to face that as people get poorer, they'll become more prone to exactly the kind of destructive behavior that any owner of an empty building should fear.

The obvious consequence will be more people living illegally in commercial spaces. Done illegally, landlords will look the other way because they're hungry for the revenue, but the conversions, such as will be done, will be rushed and unsafe and will cause problems ranging from fires to floods caused by amateur plumbing.

This being the case, smart municipalities should be exploring passing temporary variances to allow, and perhaps even assist the use of some commercial spaces as residential. Maybe even allow or even encourage the conversion of zoning with an option for those conversions to be permanent. Or, even better, allow more spaces to be zoned more flexibly, allowing mixed use to be not just within complexes but in side by side units.

Commercial space, in normal times, rents for more per square foot than residential. Many landlords also consider it far less of a headache. 

But these are not normal times.

It's time that we started doing a better job of thinking through how or society can best adapt to that.

$150,000 streetcars.

As I read about Obama's choices and look at all of the public debate about his options (it was nice to see that even Washington Week in Review found his old guard, quintessential establishment choices notable) I just keep thinking the same three things over again. The things that I keep saying here.

1.) We should be buying all of our rail rights of way, widening them, and adding more tracks.

2.) Aid to auto companies should be designed to encourage and aid the spinoff of divisions, manufacturing plants, and other subsets as employee-owned companies.

and 3.) Every possible dollar, EVERY possible dollar should be routed to funding a fast track plan to specify, legally enable, and fund the massive purchase of small, light-duty streetcars with modular components, open source specs to ease repair and aftermarket modification, and a purchase price of $150,000.

If we do these things we will route around much of our current economic disaster, spur amazing and eventually very lucrative invention and development, and become a better country. It really is that simple.

I swear by the blood of Thomas Jefferson that part of me just wants to print up one page explanations of this and spend the next few years doing nothing but traveling America wheatpasting hundreds of thousands of these summaries on every lamppost, bulletin board, and transit shelter in America.

-Rustin

Residential prices stall, commercial plummet. REAL loft living can't be far behind.

Here in Portland and all around America, residential rental prices continue to be crippling. The outrageous rises of the past twelve years haven't really retreated much at all. Meanwhile people are broker by the day and, with more and more people losing their homes and mortgages out of reach, the demand for rentals can be expected to go up. And while all of this happens, commercial real estate is, in a word, screwed. Overbuilt, overpromoted, deep in debt, and racked with cubic miles of empty space before the latest few months.

Seems to me like two things are as predictable as gravity at this point.

Far more people are going to start living illegally in commercial space. In truth I've already heard about two more in the past few weeks.

Smart owners of commercial real estate will agitate for some kind of temporary zoning variance, allowing them to rent their spaces for residential uses for some short period. Maybe five years. Less sophisticated ones will simply turn a blind eye to such conversions.

I'm also guessing that a few smart legislators will have the brilliant idea of New York style loft laws, allowing residential conversions but only on terms tailored to maximize political gain and socially engineer who gets that housing and for how much. Meanwhile, at least a few dimwitted government departments in various, probably authoritarian cities will go on rabid binges of enforcing fire and zoning codes. Probably after some disaster that hits the front pages or simply as yet another round of our continuing war on illegal immigrants.

It's going to be a good time to be a maker or retailer of do it yourself plumbing and room divider materials. And it's going to create an entire new generation of scofflaws. People, most of them creative, ambitious ones, who have made their peace with living lives that are fundamentally dependent on living in a way that is illegal. This will push them even further than the past decade has in the direction of seeing police officers, firemen, meter readers, and just about anybody else in uniform as an enemy until proven otherwise.

Anybody but me realize that every week that legislators put off variances or rezoning is a week we fall further into trouble?

-Rustin

Do you think that you know what it means to get truly seriously injured?

It's been over four years since I blew my apartment to smoking ruin and myself to a charred, bloody invalid. Four years, one month, and twenty-four days, to be precise. And to look at me, I'm now again a vigorous, energetic guy. Somebody who seems to do just fine moving furniture, walks for miles at a time, usually carries a messenger bag heavy enough to make people uncomfortable if I have to check it at a counter somewhere, and leaves most people asking me to slow down when they walk with me.

And that's great. For what it's worth.

I just picked up a seven pound package and a ten pound package at my mailbox and just the act of carrying them the twelve blocks or so to the bus stop was enough to leave my biceps spasming. Now, admittedly, I haven't slept much in the past few days and I haven't exactly eaten as well as I should but I haven't done anything all that strenuous and I do get exercise on a regular basis. What might have happened after six or seven hours of exhausting physical effort before the fire now sometimes happens after ten or fifteen minutes. And I never really know before it happens is this is one of my "good" days or one of my "bad" days.

What's my point? That when you're dealing with people who, like me, have survived serious injuries, the type that leave you in and out of hospitals for months, the kind that leave you needing to learn to use limbs again or dress yourself again or spending a year or more waiting to be able to breath normally again or eat normally again, when you're dealing with people like us, remember that even when we seem healed, even when we walk just fine and don't talk about pain anymore or otherwise seem "still sick", we're still not back to who we were before. And, crucially, you will never be able to judge again what they will find painful or difficult.

People meeting me now don't notice my scars unless I point them out. My body language has returned to what it was. I talk just fine. Unless you're really paying attention, I don't do anything visibly different from a "normal person". But I'm telling you that I work around my considerable remaining physical problems all the time every single day. And, frankly, it's five times more obstructive and tiring to tell people about what the issues are and try to get them to accommodate than it is to just deal with it myself. So don't assume that if somebody doesn't tell you that something is wrong that thereby you know that nothing is wrong.

I just went to pick up a pocket dictionary and it hurt enough to leave me tempted to give up and just look on line. This happens all the time to me now.

Just in case you still don't see my subtext here, let me bring it right out front. Courtesy of the last seven years of warfare by our citizens, we've now got hundred of thousands more Americans who are crippled. Millions by some definitions. And when you're dealing with those vets, try to remember what I wrote above.

Point one: Even if they tell you that they're okay, they're probably not "okay".

Point two: It's not for you to decide how they should cope. If they want your help, give it to them. But remember that they're adults and it's not up to you to decide for them how they're doing.

Point three: We'll be dealing with walking wounded for at least the next fifty years. "Normal" ain't normal anymore and never will be again. If you're still stupid enough to think that things like ADA requirements for buildings are foolishness then I hope that your legs break tomorrow and you have to climb fifteen flights of stairs without crutches. Every day. In the dark. While it's raining. And your ears are screwed up and you can't keep your balance.

My friend Sara refers to most people as "temporarily able-bodied" to keep the point in the foreground that today's aggressive yuppie running for the train and pushing everybody else out of the way may well be tomorrow's emergency room visitor. This applies to you, the reader.

Keep it in mind.

-Rustin