Apt. 11D

Camden: The Most Beautiful City in All the Land

Yesterday, I learned that I have a whole lot of readers in South Jersey and Philadelphia, who have very strong feelings about Camden. I will never again malign the good city of Camden.  A letter from a regular reader:

Dear Dr. McKenna,

I must take issue with your description of one of my very favorite cities in NJ - no the world.  Camden is a fantastic and very under appreciated city.  The people are amazingly resilient and lovely.  The best pizza, lattes, and french fries can be found in Camden.  There's an outstanding state university and LOOK!  It's a GREAT city!

Retrofitting Suburbia

(via Matt Yglesias)

Matt adds, "One thing I wish she emphasized more, however, is the legal impediments to this kind of adaptation. I think a lot of people will look at her presentation and say “if transforming these uses is so great, why don’t developers/businessmen/’the market’ do it on their own.” And a big part of the answer is that the prevailing land use regulations don’t permit it."

So, Urban specialists and academics know how suburbia should be retrofitted, but localities aren't doing it. Why not? Why aren't we building more walkable downtowns and losing the empty parking lots?

It's a bigger problem than simply restrictive and outdating land use laws. Local planning boards and town councils aren't thinking long term. They just want more ratables. Unless there is a very organized and powerful group of local citizens who halt bad planning, town governments are going to let any asshole developer build ugly shopping centers or drive through Wendy's in order to bring in more tax money. Often the guys on the planning boards are the contractors that will later be hired to build the shopping center. There are mind boggling conflicts of interest going on.

Also, the people who serve on these planning boards aren't watching TED talks. Very often, local officials are small business owners in town or the guys who volunteer for everything. There is little long term planning.

Local politics slow down these efforts to redesign suburban down towns.

Taxes and Education in New Jersey

I have once again gotten into the fray of local politics.

By cutting off state funding to schools, Governor Christie has forced town councils around the state to make tough decisions. If one is looking for a positive side to this debacle, it has brought people to town council meetings and the voting booths in record numbers. It has forced political representatives to take sides, instead of making empty political gestures. That's all good.

However, it has also brought out all the underlying resentments and bitterness percolating under the surface. There's anger at state employees, including teachers, who appear to enjoy greater benefits and security than those in private sector. There's the seniors v. parent rumble, which ain't pretty. The seniors harken back to cost saving measures of the Great Depression, and the parents want to take back the town's Senior Van and movie night at the library. There are those who can afford a raise in taxes and those who can't; that division cuts across age lines.

This Tuesday, the Town Council held an open meeting to discuss the failed school budget. The town council wants the schools to cap teachers' pay and contribute towards their health insurance. The school districts says that they can't legally open up a contract, so any cuts would involve firing even more teachers and increasing class sizes to illegal levels.

I was uncharacteristically quiet. I wanted to hear the town officials and the other residents before opening my trap. The room was packed. I sat on the floor jammed up against the front desk. This morning, I sent a letter to the town council and had my say.

New York City in the 1970s

J. Pod has a lovely little essay about growing up in the Upper West Side during the 1970s. The politics is a la carte, so I think everyone will like it.

I live in a small city in the midst of a great city. It is the same one in which I grew up four decades ago, and its buildings and landmarks and topography are almost entirely unchanged. Usually the small cities in America that never change are the ones whose best days came half a century or more ago and are now literally rotting away before your eyes, their once-handsome houses mottling, their fences akimbo, their storefronts boarded, their grass untended, their gas stations abandoned on windblown corners. My small city could have been one of those static, increasingly impoverished, blighted places. Indeed, everything suggested it would be.

About that time, my dad was mugged while walking to his car on 135th Street. He managed to talk the guy out of taking his wedding ring. His car battery was routinely stolen, while he was teaching class, and then he would have to walk down the block to an autobody joint and buy his old battery back.

Happy, Happy, Happy

In recent years, psychologists have published some interesting research on the science of happiness, which percolated down to popular books and blogs and became part of a cult of narcissism. The Times has an article on the latest pop book on happiness. The article is entitled "On Top of the Happiness Racket," and a racket it is.

Over the past few months, I've rearranged my life completely. After I get the kids on the school bus, I go to the gym and run two miles. Then I come home and plan out the day on the calendar. I use iCal and port everything to the iPhone. I shower and put on nice clothes. I do household chores and write. I'm going to sleep earlier and cooking more food. I drastically changed my life goals and lifestyle. I am probably doing a lot of the things that Rubin describes in her book.

There's also other stuff that Rubin prescribes in her book that would make me distinctly unhappy. She wants us all to do scrap booking. Scrap booking does not make me happy. I don't want to glue pictures of kitties in books. I do want to see Jeff Koons' new exhibit. That would make me happy. So, notions of happiness vary from person to person.

I do think that a lot of the happiness books and other lifestyle books about zen living and all that come out of our fucked up lifestyles, especially here in the New York city area.

This TED talk described certain cultures that produced people who live to an especially long age. The guy talked about people who lived simple lives, but did them well. They took pride in fishing or in raising children. They had lives full of movement and exercise. They had circles of family and friends that they saw regularly. They took time to eat well.

These people didn't need books on happiness. Their culture guided them to lives that not only kept them happy, but kept them healthy for a very long time.

Here, we work too many hours and are consumed with career success. We don't socialize enough. We don't spend enough time with our kids. We survive just by putting out one fire after another.

A friend just told me about a woman that she knew, an important professor at an Ivy League college, who chose to work through Thanksgiving, rather than eating turkey with her kids, because she couldn't spare the day off.

We also sit in front of a computer for too long. The TED guy talked about the importance of daily exercise. He doesn't mean the two-mile sprints at the gym followed by hours of sedentary computer time, which is what I do. He said that constant movement of gardening, walking to the supermarket, hauling laundry baskets up the stairs is what the healthy 100-year olds did. We're getting farther and farther away from that.

People need more than scrapbooking to keep them happy. They need jobs that really end at 5:00, so they can have time to glue kitties or whatever. They need low stress, flexible jobs that will pay them enough to afford housing and receive proper medical care. Quality education must exist in all towns regardless of the price of the homes.

Steve and I are back to fantasizing about getting a farm in upstate New York.

Farm Life

As I drove along Route 17 doing errands this afternoon, I came across two very different views of life on the farm. None of those views were visible outside the car window. Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey is mall heaven -- Nordstrom's, Macy's, Saks, Century 21, Target, 500 different GAP stores. Sure, the old timers still talk about the celery farms that used to cover Paramus before the highway and the malls, but that was ages ago.

I ran into Barnes and Noble to see if I could unload some old textbooks and stopped to check out a nice display of new cookbooks. Cookbooks have morphed from books with recipes for cooking stuff into lifestyle books. You buy them because you like the person who makes the food, not because you really want to cook any of their food.

Prominent on display was The Pioneer Woman cookbook. I've been reading about her book tour on her blog, so I was curious to see what the book was like. There were some very serviceable recipes for meatloaf and stuffed potato skins, but the book was mostly awesome pictures of her family and stories about how she met her husband. 

Her story is compelling. She rejects city life and builds a life on a farm with a dreamy man who wears chaps and not in an ironic way. After flipping through the pages for a few minutes, I was ready to homeschool and make meatloaf. No, really. I've been antsy to move further North for a while now. 

The nerdy clerk Barnes and Noble took one sniff at my outdated textbooks and refused to take them. Later, I did a drive-by at the town library. I left them outside the door in some shopping bags and ran away.

Next on the chore list was some shopping for the Thanksgiving pies. On the way to the supermarket, I listened to Patrick Carr on NPR discuss his new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America. It's a new sociology book about the emptying out of the farms. The young people are leaving in droves and in many towns, Carr said, it's just 70 year olds driving around 90 year olds. The plight of entire states like North Dakota and Montana was a big topic in my State and Local class. NPR doesn't have up the audio yet, but here's a video of him giving a talk elsewhere.

So, these very different stories have me very confused. I'm going to deal with this confusion by doing some intense shoe therapy at Nordstrom's this weekend.

Redesigning Cities

I've been reading great stuff lately on the politics of redesigning urban areas, but mostly these have been case studies of New Orleans. I have a huge weakness for New Urbanism and their plans to redesign the city. Check out the recent article in the Atlantic about the homes going up in New Orleans. Good for Brad Pitt.

Detroit has a whole different set of problems. They are dealing with a large geographic area that is losing population. They are knocking down crumbling building and not building anything in its place.

This phenomenon prompted someone to coin the term “urban prairie” to capture the idea of vast tracts of formerly urbanized land returning to nature.

(Via Loren on Facebook)

And check out these designs for green buildings in NYC. (Via Ann P on Facebook)

Gossip Girls

Yesterday, a text message was mistakenly sent to me by a neighbor griping about how I was home at lunch, while she had to work. (Watch that "reply all," people!) A few months ago, I heard that other moms were sneering at my academic job; I guess I shouldn't have graded blue books on the sidelines of soccer games.

All the gossip is partially a feature of suburban life. It's remarkable how closely a suburban town replicates the cliques of a high school cafeteria with the jocks at one table and the prom queens at another.

It's also remarkable that the gossip is primarily about my employment. One group is annoyed if I'm employed, and another group is annoyed if I'm not. Does this happen to men, too?

The European Life-Style

I have two quick posts this morning, but blogging will be spotty today. The mute kid puked when he got off the school bus this morning. The nurse put a "return to sender" stamp on his forehead, so he's watching Cartoon Network downstairs. Somehow I have to grade the blog projects while parenting. Le sigh.

OK, the first post of the day is a link to Russell Arben Fox's post about the life-changing experience of living in Germany. I've never lived in Europe, but I've bummed around there over the years with a backpack or stayed with my sister who lived in Spain. Like Russell, I love the walk-ability of Europe, the daily shopping for fresh produce, the slower pace of life, the great food, the bicycles, the small apartments, and the boisterous pubs and cafes. Not to mention the generous social welfare programs.

Russell identifies this lifestyle with conservatism. I'm not sure if any ideology can claim the rights to this lifestyle.

Why don't we have that here? I want everything from the cafes to the subsidized daycare.

In a comment in a previous post, Siobhan says that Americans have made a trade off between the big houses and lawns for that European experience.

While David Brooks wrote that maybe Americans do want a different lifestyle -- something with more community, but retains their cars and their backyards.

We need real urban planning to undo the bad decisions of the past sixty years that have given us suburban sprawl and shopping centers. Instead, we're held hostage by local interests who lack a central vision or plan and building decisions are based solely on what brings in ratables, what helps their friends, and what lowers taxes.

Cop Pay

The topic du jour around here is the pay scale for cops in Rockland County. The Clarkstown police chief makes over $300,000 per year.

According to one national ranking, Clarkstown, in Rockland County, is consistently among the safest towns in America with at least 75,000 people, based on its crime statistics. In 2007, it was the second safest, and in 2008, it was the sixth.But Clarkstown is also at the top of another category that Chief Peter T. Noonan is less thrilled to discuss: police pay.

In 2008, Chief Noonan, 56, made $332,529.88. He was not even the highest paid: One of his two captains earned $335,676, while working two days a week because of a disability and spending three days a week undergoing physical therapy. The other captain earned $311,369.

School teachers do really well there, too. Second grade teachers make more than college professors.

I'm in the wrong line of work.

This then led to griping about the pay of the local superintendent. He is in charge of two elementary schools and one middle school. He makes $200,000 per year.