A Day at the (Concrete) Races

Posted on 02/29/2012 by paulefallon

There are reality TV shows about Maine loggers and Bering Strait fisherman and wild men who sleep in camel carcasses.  Can a show about competitive construction be far behind?  Kim, the incredible volunteer from Ohio who is here for three months, staged the pilot at MoHI last week; a faceoff between the World Racers and the home team.

The World Race team is forty or so young men and women from all over the US who are on a yearlong journey around the world, doing service work for a month each in a dozen countries.  My son Andy and I built transitional houses with a team of seven World Racers back in 2010. This month an entire squad of 45 is staying at MoHI, dividing their time between hauling concrete at BLB and hauling concrete at MoHI and hauling backfill at MoHI and painting at the Mission House and repairing the chapel at Saint Etienne.  They sleep in tents scattered all over the compound, eat large vats of rice and are preternaturally cheerful.  This group came from the Dominican Republic and will move on to Romania, Moldavia, South Africa, Mozambique, India, Japan, the Phillipines and a few other places.  I think doing the World Race would be totally cool except for the, uh, Christian thing.  They quote line and verse with the same felicity I quote Simon and Garfunkel.

The Haitian team is twenty Haitian guys, age 20 to 50, masons and laborers, who have probably never been further than Port au Prince.  They show up every day before sunrise and if there is work, they put in a full day.  If not, they go home empty handed and fend as best they can.  They are incredibly strong, rarely drink water and often do not eat food until the day is done, at which time they too can eat large vats of rice.  They are also preternaturally cheerful, except for when they yell at each other, which they seem to relish because after each guy has berated all the others, they are even better friends than they were before. The Haitians are a smaller team, but they have the home field advantage.

Here are the rules.  There are two areas of concrete to pour; the foundation footings at the front of the building and the upper retaining wall at the back. The wall requires fifteen cubic yards of concrete; the footings are fourteen cubic yards.  The footings are 25 feet from the mixer; the retaining wall is 125 feet from the mixer, up a hill.  The retaining wall requires more careful placement in and around the reinforcing.  Oh, and the formwork on the retaining wall is not complete at the start of the race, so the footings crew gets a 45 minute head start.

The teams draw their lots, Haitians on the wall and World Racers on the footings.  Still, before the starting gun sounds, everyone agrees the balance is unfair, so the World Racers trade Kim to the Haitian team in exchange for two local masons.

If you guessed that the team with half as many people and more concrete to pour at a greater bucket distance trampled our earnest young missionaries, you would be right by a full cubic yard.  It is amazing to see these Haitians in action.  They are ready for prime time.  Look for them on a cable channel near you.

 

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Flurries of Snow Turning Over to Rain

Posted on 02/26/2012 by paulefallon

So far, the winter of 2012 is a non-event; the second warmest on record in Boston, with the least amount of snowfall ever.  Those flat chilly days that seemed to go on for months in February’s past are now just punctuation marks in a season that is surreally sunny and bright.  Last Friday nature delivered a true winter day.  The morning the sky was a helmet of battleship grey clamped down on the city.  Spits of icy snow dinged me as I cycled along the river to work.

Even on a dreary day my ride is pleasant, accented by three highlights along my journey.  The first is the borderline cruel satisfaction I get when I cross the Charles at the River Street Bridge and revel in the freedom of being a cyclist as I pass the drivers trapped in their steel and glass and traffic.  They look bored or frustrated, applying their make-up or fiddling with the radio, their bellies slumped into their laps, oblivious that I can observe so much of them.

The second satisfaction is riding the beneath the train bridge near BU.  The bike path shifts onto a boardwalk extending over the water.  The bridge is very low.  When I emerge from beneath the squeezed space, the broad basin shimmers in green ripples and the city skyline pops up before me.  It is a beautiful tableau.

Once I have emerged from under the bridge, my ride follows the river along Back Bay,  over the curvilinear Feidler foot bridge, along the Public Garden with Daniel Chester French’s luminescent statue of a winged angel, and diagonally across Boston Common.  There, on the low stone wall at the intersection of the Common’s two main paths, sits the Weatherman.

The Weatherman is a big guy with deep copper skin who sits with one leg straight out, a heavy parka wrapped around his chest, and a black Bruins skull cap.  He possesses a radio voice; a booming baritone that carries hundreds of feet across the still dry air.  His articulation is sharp, his cadence hypnotic.  I hear him before I see him, proclaiming from his perch the rudimentary facts required to survive the day.  “36 degrees this morning, going up to 43 this afternoon; flurries of snow turning over to rain.”

I nod as I approach him, but he has never acknowledged me in return.  He is the messenger to the people; he proclaims the news of the day. “MBTA strike averted; Obama visits Florida, Death toll in Syria on the rise.”  His headlines are decidedly mainstream. There is nothing subversive about the man except that his very presence is disquieting; the only sound among the scurry of people to work, a voice loud, confident, and assured.  Yet he is not going to work, he is already at work, fulfilling a calling that has been revealed only to him. Maybe he is homeless or psychotic or a babbling genius or maybe he is the John the Baptist of CNN.  I only know that his weather forecasts are accurate.

I coast towards the intersection where he sits, mindful of pedestrians with their heads buried against the chill.  They are not looking where they are going.  The Weatherman pauses.  He leans to the right and looks straight at me.  “Flurries of snow turning over to rain.”  His eyes are soft dark brown.  His words are like a fleece laid over me to ward off winter.  This is a matter of serious consequence to the man, this turn in the weather; the tragedy that the glittering specks of snow dancing against the featureless sky will deteriorate into a stream of rain and wash away winter’s brisk glory.

He looks at me as a father looks at his son, warning me of the worldly dangers, the treachery of flurries transforming into rain.  He wishes I would forego my foolishness, riding my bicycle in this weather, yet resigns to the inevitability that foolishness is the province of the young and I am going to ride my bike despite his dire and sincere warnings.

I ride past, my spirits buoyed, feeling kin to the Weatherman.  His phrase repeats in my head. “Flurries of snow turning over to rain.” How many ways could he have expressed that idea?  Snow this morning, rain this afternoon.  Flurries turn to rain.  Rain later. Snow will end, rain begins.  He didn’t use any of those prosaic phrases.  His mission may be to announce the news and weather, but there is a wordsmith in him, a poet.  Could there be a more beautiful phrase to announce winter’s impending demise?  Flurries of snow turning over to rain.

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Pedaling Principles Chapter 12 – Ohio, The Infrastructure of Our Lives

Posted on 02/26/2012 by paulefallon

I spent more time cycling in Ohio than in any other state.  Prior to this trip I had passed through Ohio many times; ten Interstates cross it borders so it is often on the way to somewhere else.  Yet I had never spent more than a roadside overnight there.  After more than a week rolling through the state I realized that Ohio is our entire country writ small. All the rhythms of our daily lives pulse here. Ohio has cities and suburbs, small towns and farms, dense ethnic neighborhoods and clusters of diversity, immense wealth, great poverty, horrific decline and tremendous opportunity. Ohio has Southern charm and Northern efficiency, and vice versa.  Every pattern of daily American life is represented in Ohio.  It is far from perfect, yet slivers of perfection can be found everywhere.

I enteredOhio over the Roebling Bridge from Coventry, KY to Cincinnati, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1867, only to be upstaged later by its more famous brother, the Brooklyn Bridge. Crossing the Roebling, Cincinnati spread out before me.  Paul Brown Stadium (Bengals) and the Great American Ball Park(Reds) flank downtown, twenty-first century sentinels of their city.  The river flowed beneath me; railroad tracks ran along the shore, Interstate 71 whirred past.  The dense grid of downtown streets gave rise to the neighborhoods crisscrossing the hills beyond.

Ohio has impressive infrastructure.  Saddled between the Ohio River and Lake Erie, the state has excellent water access for an inland locale. For the past 200 years most east/west traffic across America has passed through Ohio and Ohio created the backbone required to ensure that it remained the route of choice.  Around the 1820’s three different transportation modes attracted attention, though they became dominant in different eras.  Between 1811 and 1834 the federal government financed its first highway, The National Road, connecting Cumberland Gap, MD to Ohio.  At the same time railroads appeared as a potential means to cross the Alleghany Mountains, while canal systems were being developed to haul freight.  Canal technology was the first to be widely implemented and by 1832 Ohio completed a canal system that linked Lake Erie to the Ohio Riverand provided freight access across the state.  Since New York had opened the Erie Canal a few years earlier, goods from all over Ohio had ready transport to the Eastern seaboard and beyond during the period when all long distance travel occurred over water.  In the 1850’s the B&O railroad was the first to connect Ohio to the east coast, signaling the beginning of the age of trains. By the end of the Civil war, the canal system was virtually eclipsed by the railroads.  The railroads did more than transport local goods, they created junctions where towns developed and facilitated the modern concept of bringing raw materials from dispersed areas together to fabricate into finished goods. Ohio was an ideal location for such industry, as materials from all over the Great Lakes region could be transported to Ohio, turned into steel or other durables and then shipped east.  By 1910 there were over 9,600 miles of railroad track in Ohio and the Cleveland/Akron/Youngstown area was an industrial powerhouse.  But like the canals before them, the railroads peaked as cars and trucks ascended after World War II.  Once again, Ohio responded with vigor by laying infrastructure for the emerging means of transport. The National Road became US 40 and eventually was paralleled by I-70.   Today, Ohio has over 1,500 miles of Interstate highways with 21 different routes, the third densest concentration of Interstates of any state.

Twenty-first centuryOhio is overflowing with infrastructure – it literally has more than we can use.  As a mature economy with slow population growth and declining industrial output, there are underutilized canals, railroads and even highways.  Ironically, this excess infrastructure is what prompted me to spend so much time in Ohio, as the state has repurposed many of its railroad rights-of-way and canal tow paths into bicycle trails. Ohio has the most extensive system of rail-to-trial routes in the country, and is creating a continuous bicycle trail from Cincinnati to Cleveland.  The Little Miami Trial, which follows the right-of-way of a railroad laid in the 1830’s, starts outside Cincinnati and extends 70 miles all the way to Springfield, with several branches to nearby towns. It is a beautiful ride, quiet and tree-lined, with trailheads every ten miles or so with restrooms and restaurants.  In creating this wonderful asset,Ohio has developed a cottage industry of bike enthusiasts; there are bicycles everywhere in southwest Ohio. Bicycle trails may not be the economic engine that railroads once were, but they are preferable to having the tracks sit idle.

Just as Ohio has too much transportation, it has too much physical infrastructure as well.  Though many cyclists steer around major cities, the architect in me likes to plow right through them, meandering in a general direction, soaking up their character.  On my day in Cincinnati I spent a few hours looping around the city; I did the same in Columbus and Cleveland.  Each represents the prevalent pattern of urban development and decay in America, wherein as we make more money, we move away from dense city neighborhoods to single family suburban neighborhoods and ultimately exurban acreages.  Large cities often have a concentration of wealth in their central core where affluent people with urban sensibilities congregate, but these areas are usually surrounded by a ‘donut hole’ of poverty.  Though there are exceptions, if you travel a half mile or so in any direction from the center of most large American cities, you will likely find yourself in a struggling neighborhood.

So it is in Cincinnati and Columbus, and certainly in Cleveland.  I am intrepid on my bicycle, though not blind to precaution when riding the rough parts of town. The inner ring of American cities fascinate me; the well-proportioned buildings that defy abuse; the urgent graffiti, the people loitering on front stoops and in front of corner stores who watch me pass.  I am an amusement in their day; they are a refreshing diversion after so many trees and cornfields.  At ten miles per hour I can discern transitions in the urban fabric.  How a railroad track differentiates an abandoned urban sector from one still holding on, how a boulevard can unite a neighborhood, while a hill can divide one.  I see how brick townhouses extend only as far as the old trolley lines, beyond that are wood frame buildings, spread apart.  I understand how institutions usually raise the bar of their surroundings, but wealthy neighborhoods are set some distance from the buzz of hospitals and universities.  Actually, really posh neighborhoods set themselves apart from everything.

Cincinnati has every representative neighborhood; from snazzy condos downtown to bohemian chic in Over the Rhine, from desolation in the West End, to institutional stability around the University, from gentrified graciousness in Oakley and Hyde Park to the historic sophistication of Mariemont just beyond the city limits.  Further out lie the suburban towns, with tract houses and highway exchanges and big box stores; development that reflects a ubiquitous American form more than any character inherent to Cincinnati.  The architect in me cringes at the lost opportunities of the inner city and the pastoral devastation of the highway development but the observant cyclist notes the preference for pushing out with new construction rather than bolstering what already exists. Cincinnati is not unique, this pattern repeats in city after city and as I pedal I have the luxury of time to ponder why.

What Americans buy with our affluence, is privacy.  A single family house is preferred over an apartment, our own yard is preferred over a community park, our own car is preferred over taking the bus, our own office is preferred over a shared cubicle.  We like space and we like to claim it for our own.  We want each of our young children to have their own bedroom, each of our grown children to have their own apartment, and our parents to spend their old age in assisted living rather than residing with us.

In 2008 the average size of a single family home in the US peaked at over 2,500 square feet.   This has slid back a bit, but is still more than twice the average size of a house built in 1950.  At the same time, our average household keeps shrinking.  From a whopping 4.9 people per household in 1900, families shrunk to 3.0 people in 1950 and today our average family size is 2.6 people, with an increasing number of people living alone. In a similar vein, more of us have our own cars and our cars are larger, our offices are larger; every aspect of our lives grows larger and more private.  There are indications that economic and sustainability trends may curb these appetites, but given our preference, we want our own space for working, living, and traveling, and we want a lot of it.

Since the checkered days of urban renewal, we have grappled with how to make the decaying cores of our cities viable.  Early efforts, which usually involved highway construction and isolated towers in plazas, created some of the dreariest spaces on earth.  By the 1980’s ‘new urbanism’ concepts championed high density, mixed use development with a greater degree of success.  Affluent young people flocked to New York and Chicago and Seattle, but what about the Cincinnati’s and Cleveland’s of our country?  They did not become magnets of urbanism.  In fact, with the industrial decline of the late twentieth century, the amount of underutilized area in Rust Belt cities grew faster than ever.  How do you draw people back into a city that so many have left, with a population already in decline?

As I made my way north and east through Ohio, people inquired where I was headed and they furrowed their brow when I said Cleveland. “Why would you go there?” Cleveland has a leprous reputation, even in Ohio. But I spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon rolling aimlessly though the ‘Mistake on theLake’; an afternoon that turned out to be one of the most memorable tours of my journey.

The day did not start off well.  I left Massillon in light rain and after a few miles along the Ohio and Erie Cana ltow path the hard pack turned muddy, so I switched to the road and made good time to the city.  I returned to the bike path outside of Cleveland but it ended abruptly and tossed me onto Independence Avenue.  I followed in the general direction of the city.  The surroundings became more industrial, huge metal structures with pipelines running overhead; train tracks below, railroad bridges above, conveyors at angles, cylindrical tanks pressing all around, and a highway hundreds of feet above, towering over all. The sky grew dark as the silhouettes of the skyscrapers loomed above the industrial foreground. Torrents of rain fell.  I took refuge under the highway overpass.  After fifteen minutes the storm passed, the sun sparkled off the roof of the factory sheds and I pedaled on.

It is not easy to bicycle into Cleveland.  Never was a city so chopped up by highways and tracks.  I angled west then east then west again until eventually I got to Euclid, which I rode to Public Square, saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the lakefront, and the humorous rubber stamp sculpture next to City Hall.  After lunch I headed into the neighborhoods to experience for myself the tragedy I had heard was Cleveland.  Block after block of vacant lots, burned and boarded up buildings, rows of warehouses with broken windows open to the weather; wide avenues without a single car; side streets with one or two occupied houses; Hispanics and Blacks passing Sunday afternoon on their porches.  Compared to its surroundings, shiny Euclid Avenue seemed a pointless sponge for public money with its fresh pavement and fancy bus stops and a smattering of new development near Cleveland Clinic.  All the expense seemed a feint gesture against the overwhelming decrepitude.

But the longer I rode, the more attuned I got to the fabric of the devastation. I noticed unusual development on the side streets; first buds in the snow.  Adjacent urban lots where three Victorians once stood were joined together to create one plot for a single family colonial, an urban garden here, a McMansion there, nestled among the burn outs.  I came to the intersection of Hough and East 66 Street and stopped short at the odd collection of uses.  One corner was a vacant lot, paved, with a Navy recruitment billboard.  The opposite corner contained a single story red brick building, tight to the street, abandoned.  The third corner was a vineyard. Yes, a vineyard with neat rows of grapevines and a small sign that announced, ‘Reimagining Cleveland.’  On the fourth corner stood a new house, 2,500 square feet or more, two stories with an oriel window over the front door and a two car garage.  A house just like the ones I had seen twenty miles back in the suburb of Brecksville. The lawn so green and the bushes so trim the owners must have a professional landscaper.  I stood at the corner dumbfounded by the contradictions. No urban planner would ever dream up such a mix of incompatible uses.  I stood in what was once a dense, bustling city, but the city had failed and in its stead stood a remnant of the city’s predecessor, the farm, a reminder of its bleak present, the vacant lot and empty building, and a tribute to its successor, the suburb.

The highest and best use theory of development would argue that single family houses and agriculture are inappropriate in a setting so rich in infrastructure; this corner warrants more than a single family house and a vineyard.  But realistically, without the house and the vineyard, the corner has nothing.  Cleveland is oozing infrastructure, it has streets and power and buildings and sewers to spare.  It’s hard to imagine when it might ever be used to capacity again.  It’s hard to pretend that the same old public outlays, like the Euclid Street busway, will make much of a dent in a city so far lost from our urban conceptions. Why are we spending money to develop buses in neighborhoods where few people live anymore, in a country where, given the choice, people prefer to drive their own car?  The corner of Hough and East 66th was repurposed with stuff that people actually want; a parcel of agrarian idealism and a suburban house.  I can’t help but think it’s better than letting the corner lay fallow.

Cleveland is an extreme example of urban decay (along with its sister city in decline,Detroit).  Since the river burned and the industry left and the affluent fled, there isn’t much left, so we might as well accept anyone’s conception of revitalization as valid.  But what about cities at the next scale down? What about the Massillon’s and the Mount Vernon’s, cities that still have downtowns and some commercial activity, but are being drained every day by the cluster of Wendy’s and Walmart’s along the highway, offering low prices, endless parking and drive through windows that downtown cannot provide?  How can we turn their core infrastructure into something vibrant and meaningful once more?  Do we value Millersburg and tiny Fredericksburg enough to make sure they don’t evaporate in a global economy?  Is economic viability the only reason for a town to exist?  Are there other reasons why towns deserve to survive?

I visited three small towns, each very different yet all near each other.  Xenia, Yellow Springs, and Cedarville have each created niches to help them not only survive, but thrive.

Xenia was a railroad town until the railroads went away. Now, it is the Mecca of bicycle trails. Four trails converge on Xenia, the former Depot is a cycling information station, cyclists eat at the cafes, sleep in the B&B’s and help bolster the local economy.  People drive to Xenia for the day, rent bikes and cruise the trails.  If a bike needs attention, there are cycle shops aplenty in Xenia.  It may not be the golden goose that four railroads use to be, but it is a defining character for the small town and provides enough boost over its agricultural and county seat functions to make a difference.

Yellow Springs thrives because of its unique identity.  It is a self-styled rural Berkeley, the counter culture center of Ohio and home to Antioch College.  Interesting thing about Yellow Springs is that, despite the turmoil at Antioch in recent years, including going bankrupt, closing and reformulating itself, the town continues to thrive.  The gestalt of Yellow Springs, which developed alongside the college, is no longer dependent on the college.  People come to Yellow Springs to visit or to live because of its singular identity.  I sat in a café on the main street, among many other cyclists, and enjoyed dinner chatting with an Air Force officer from Springfield who told me he comes to Yellow Springs on a regular basis to experience a different way of looking at the world. The town is not all that pretty, if there is a preservation standard for main street it is not well enforced, it has none of the preciousness of historically preserved places like New Harmony or Madison, IN.  Yet tiny Yellow Springs had more street life on a summer afternoon than any other town I visited on my trip.

About ten miles away from Yellow Springs by geography yet polar opposite in mind set is Cedarville, a straight-laced agricultural town that has the additional stabilizing influence of being the home to Cedarville University, a conservative Christian liberal arts university of 2,800 students.  The college provides the economic and cultural differentiation to turn an otherwise past tense agricultural town into a place with busy downtown stores, a lovely Inn, and lively energy.

Ohio is checkered with successes and failures of how our physical environment supports or detracts from our principle of establishing ‘a more perfect Union’. A summer afternoon in Yellow Springs is a bit of Nirvana, a Sunday afternoon in Cleveland is a pilgrimage through a wasteland. What are the parameters we can extract from the range of cities and small towns I witnessed throughout the state?

We have to acknowledge that we cannot sell people what they do not want to buy.  We live in a car-centric country that wants a lot of private space, and though priorities may be shifting for affluent urbanites, they still hold sway for most Americans.  As we consider how to use our excess infrastructure, highest and best use may not be the correct measure if it cannot produce what people want.  Better to have some use than no use.  Instead of turning a street of dilapidated row houses into apartments, are we better served turning them back into single family houses, and maybe removing a few from the center of the street to create parking or a garden?

Small and mid-size cities have to search for what differentiates them from their competition.  This means not only ‘how am I different from the next town’, but ‘how am I different from the big box stores on the highway’? The salient feature of every chain store is precisely that it is like every other one.  Predictability is what they sell.  A town must sell the converse – what makes it unique.  Every town has a character of its own from which to draw, or it can solicit resources to make it stand out.  In the past, towns sought industry, but new industry is in short supply, so now towns must try to find other drivers, usually services or attractions, to help them stand out.  It is the rare town that has enough history to make the past their differentiator.  A college is always a good bet, but there are other opportunities, such as services aimed towards seniors or veterans, teens or other specialty groups.  The government could support revitalization of downtowns large and small by putting a premium on adaptive reuse over new construction for a range of projects from specialty housing to offices to service centers.  The most successful solutions will be those that grow out of the unique characteristics of each town.

In addition, we need to establish revenue sharing schemes across city boundaries so that entire metropolitan areas support the central city upon which they depend.  When pockets of poverty congregate in cities they pull down property values and increase the need for services.  This leads to a downward spiral of tax revenue in relation to basic services required, which leads to a widening income / service gap between the city and its suburbs.  Everyone loses when a city falls into decline.  We need to acknowledge that and find ways to share the burden across the entire spectrum of those who benefit from cities.

Ohio is very neat and well-tended; the Germanic tendency for order prevails.  The people are warm and inquisitive, and if they realized the economic disconnect between how they live and the rest of the United States, they did not reveal it to me. Northeast Ohio is an odd mix of staunch blue collarism and teetering poverty. Pedaling along Lake Erie’s pristine vistas, one might expect to see mansions, or at least upper middle class houses, but in most areas the houses on the lake side were exactly like the ones across the street, as if it were luck of the draw whether your 1200 square foot starter ranch built in 1954 had a lake view or not.  Perhaps a view is immaterial when weighed against the values of the forty hour work week and weekends free for fishing and beer.  In many ways northeast Ohio is the urban equivalent of southernMissouri; with real estate signs that proclaim ‘$0 Down and $533 a month buys you this house’ instead of ones claiming salvation.  Of course in Cleveland even those signs don’t exist; property values are too low for realtors to even bother.  As an observer it appears that Ohio suffers from having too much of everything in terms of ‘stuff’ for any of it to hold its value.  Yet, the people shoulder on, cheerful and pleasant as their solid Midwestern reputations.

Cycling through Ohio was different from any state further west.  Over eight days, I never cycled through a native landscape.  Every inch of Ohio appears to be tended or shaped, and signs of industry are ever present.  There is beautiful farmland and acreages of trees, but there is also always a canal or a path or a vestige of man’s imprint, past or present. Even beautiful Headlands Beach State Park has a huge concrete aggregate facility right next door.  You look to the left over unobstructed Lake Erie, or look right and see industry in action.

I spent my last night in Ohio in Conneaut, the very northeast corner of the state, in a sweet motel overlooking the harbor.  The next morning I rode east on US 20 heading for Pennsylvania.  Leaving town, only miles from the Pennsylvania border, there was a new road being built with dozers and dump trucks clearing and filling.  A sign on the highway read ‘East Conneaut Industrial Park.’  I was hard pressed to see how Ohio needed any more industrial capacity given how much was abandoned.  But our human inclination is to do what we know how to do, which is not always the same as what we should do. In Ohio, people are much better at creating things new than figuring out how to reuse the discarded stuff around them.  In that respect, they are once again a true reflection of our country at large.

 

 

 

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Happy Birthday House

Posted on 02/18/2012 by paulefallon

Twenty years ago this week we bought the house where I live, a typically Cantabridgian, convoluted piece of real estate.  It is a single building with a mammoth party wall; three flats on one side and a three story ‘owner’s’ unit on the other.  The city used to consider it a single property until it got chopped in two, on paper at least, during the rent control wars of the early 1990’s.  The 115 year old Victorian has impressive stats; 5,000 square feet, 56 windows, 23 rooms, seven dormers, six bathrooms and just as many porches, five furnaces, five parking spaces, four water heaters, stoves, and refrigerators, three generous bay windows and one wicked cool turret.  In short, she is an alluring but very high maintenance lady.

 

My house is a member of family, but unlike the rest of us, she transcends generations.  She reminds me of my grandmother; they share the same period charm.  And of course she is a mother figure, sheltering and embracing.  Yet my house is also paternal; it is an abundant provider.  Twenty years of regular rent from the tenants have fulfilled many a vacation yearning over the years, put my children through college debt-free, and enabled me to hop off the money-for-work train to devote my energy to Haiti.  Yet the house is also like a child with its demanding need for attention and penchant for hitting me up for money when I least expect it. You never know precisely when a water heater will pop a leak, but if you bet on the first Saturday night of a three day weekend after the warranty has expired, you will always be in the money.   A few years ago I passed that dubious milestone of dumping more money into the house on repairs and renovations than I actually paid to buy it.  That’s when I realized how much a house is like raising children, an expensive but thoroughly satisfying long haul.

 

Houses are also like dogs; they reflect their owners.  Mine sits on a murky foundation and has the cracks to prove it, yet it has fundamentally good bones.  It contains an orderly arrangement of fixed rooms, yet has proven very adaptable to changing circumstances.  The layout that worked well for a young couple with small children and an architect running a business out of the attic adapted to a post-divorce depressed man with a pair of stranger housemates and more recently a contently single man and his friend, each with our own bed/office suite and plenty of space leftover for big dinners, billiard parties and the now college aged kids New Year’s Eve blasts.  Every few years’ life evolves and we shuffle who claims what space; so far the house has always provided a congenial balance. The latest evolution has my daughter living in one of the apartments next door; near but not actually here, which is pretty perfect for a 23 year old girl and her bachelor dad.

 

The size of my house borders on excessive, but I keep in check in two ways. First, there is nothing precious about the place.  We live here and it displays all the bumps and marks to prove it.  Second, I have always had housemates to help fill the volume.  In a world where almost half of urban dwellers are single person households, I have always enjoyed having others around.  There is so much space we all have our share of privacy.  Housemates help pay the mortgage, but more importantly they force a beneficial level of consideration; I can’t leave dirty dishes around or make too much noise or erupt in a raging funk with housemates around.  They are an important anecdote for my neurotic tendencies.

 

It is as difficult to imagine why I should stay in this house another twenty years as it is to understand why I have stayed so long, except that I am settled; I know the house’s foibles and I love its charms.  My house is meditative and peaceful; when the early morning sun slivers through the dining room windows and highlights the caramel trim on the baluster, it sets me in a contented state for the day.   The only thing I know for sure is that how I use the house in the future will be different from today.  Sometimes I fantasize about opening up the whole building up and having a bunch of my single friends move in so we can all grow old together, yet independent.  Other times I dream of handing the house down to my children.  I bought it from a woman who lived here for 72 years – my own children could trump that record.  Any parent savors the opportunity for such a substantial bequeath, but if they view the morning light on the old woodwork as a dust magnifier rather than a blessing on the day, they can sell it off to pursue their own dreams.

 

For that is why, despite the ups and down of the real estate market and the endless work our houses demand, we are a nation that values home ownership.  Owning our own home is not about shelter for tonight; it is the place where we dock our highest hopes and loftiest dreams.  It may or may not make us rich, but is makes us stable.  It is part of our identity, a part most recognize as good.  It is the stake in the ground that proclaims, “This is where I am from.  This is my home”.

 

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Pedaling Principles Chapter 11 – Kentucky, Addiction Leads Astray

Posted on 02/18/2012 by paulefallon

I didn’t give Kentucky its due on the trip, riding only about 45 miles from the bridge at Markland, IN to Covington.  Still, Kentucky felt different from any other state and my mind took particular turns while I was there. Unfortunately, so did my bike.

The corn that I saw everywhere in Illinois and Indiana disappeared in Kentucky.  Tobacco is king of the fields here.  For all of the problems that tobacco causes, it is a beautiful plant. Spread out over a field, the broad leaves catch sunlight in a distinctive way, creating variegated bands of succulent greens.  Tobacco is planted in wide, clear rows that created dazzling diagonal shadow lines as I wheeled past. The plants are shoulder high before harvest, and they sprout a delicate crown of seed atop their head.

Unfortunately, the benefits of tobacco end with its aesthetics. Yet Kentucky grows it, processes it, and sells it, and the people of Kentucky are big boosters of their own economy. According to the 2010 CDC State Highlights Report, more than 25% of the adults in Kentuckysmoke, ranking it the second highest rate of smoking in the country. When I stopped to photograph the beautiful Gallatin County Courthouse, I could not help notice how many people milling outside were smoking; everywhere I looked in KentuckyI saw smokers. All of this tobacco, in the ground and in the lungs, got me thinking about the challenges of addiction.  How much should we limit an individual’s choice to ingest substances we know are harmful?  Should we allow easier access to addictive substances to shatter their allure, or should we have stricter prohibitions?  How do we determine when a social habit becomes an addiction? At what point should society intervene in an addictive person’s life?

Let’s consider addictive substances in three broad categories, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs.  Our approach to tobacco and alcohol is, we can’t have any until a certain age, and then we can have unfettered access.  Our approach to drugs is, we can never have access, though medical marijuana is beginning to bend that prohibition.  Once citizens reach the legal age, we can buy tobacco and alcohol at will, and each is taxed quite a bit more than most other products.   In theory the taxes act as a deterrent to consumption and also provide revenue to offset the societal costs of these substances.  We do not allow commercial sales of drugs, buying and selling them is always a crime for both parties, and the entire economic burden of enforcing the legal and social costs of drug addiction is born without any revenue from the drugs themselves.

Of the three broad groups, tobacco causes the most deaths.  In fact, tobacco use is linked to 1 in 5 deaths in the United States (160 per 100,000), more than drugs, alcohol, HIV, suicide, murder and motor vehicle accidents combined.  Yet, when a person is over 21, they can buy and smoke as many cigarettes as they want.  Since about 20% of teenagers admit to smoking, it appears that even folks under 21 have little trouble obtaining cigarettes.  Alcoholism accounts for about 4.0 deaths per 100,000, and alcohol is easy to obtain over the age of 21, while drugs account for 1.6 deaths per 100,000 and are risky to obtain at any age.

The obvious question to these statistics is, if making drugs so hard to obtain helps push down the death rate, why don’t we make it harder to get tobacco and alcohol?   Or, the flip question is, if so many fewer people die from drugs than other abusive substances, why do we expend so many resources on the judicial and penal costs of drugs?

Tobacco and alcohol are entrenched in our social fabric; they are big businesses within our economy and these days few would argue to prohibit them.  We tried that with alcohol in the 1930’s to disastrous results.  Instead, over the past fifty years, we have eaten away at the demand for alcohol and tobacco through education and evolving norms that have shifted our perception of smoking and excessive drinking from acceptable and even cool, to unacceptable.  Smoker’s feel under assault, cessation programs abound, and as a result, smoking rates in this country have dropped by more than half since the Surgeon General’s report of 1964.  Still, the current rate of 20% adult smoker’s is not budging, and the pressure against smokers varies by state.  Not surprisingly, the CDC’s State Report on activities to curb smoking shows that Kentucky allocates fewer resources to help people quit than states with lower smoking rates.  Similarly, alcohol consumption is trending down, especially binge drinking, yet as just over 50% of Americans enjoying alcohol in moderation; there is no mandate to make drastic changes in how we handle alcohol.

Drugs are another matter.  Since drugs are illegal, they don’t count as business; there are no tax revenues to be garnered or lobbyists to contribute to reelection campaigns.  Of course, drugs are a huge underground business, but since they don’t contribute ‘above the line’ to our national economy, their economic value does not get counted the same way.

Regarding the flip question, we are not disposed to loosen the reins on drug access or penalties because we perceive tobacco and alcohol as victimless addictions, while we consider drugs addiction to have serious repercussions to others.  In our collective mind, a smoker is just hurting themselves and whoever is breathing downwind from him, while a drunk is pretty harmless as long she doesn’t get behind the wheel, but we think a drug addict is likely to rob and steal to get money for his habit and is capable of even more heinous crimes while under the influence.  Each of these scenarios is only partly right, yet they are powerful conceptions that guide our tobacco, alcohol and drug policies.

Substance abuse and addiction puts us right back to our first guiding principle, ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’. Whether someone abuses substances is a personal decision, and we lean towards allowing people maximum personal freedom.  Limitations on access are limitations on liberty.  But this bumps against the conundrum that one element of our triad is working against another, since the poison taken in the name of pursuing happiness almost always shortens life.

The libertarian notion that the individual can do whatever she likes runs into a number of obstacles when it comes to substance abuse.  These obstacles become the parameters that refine the overarching principle.  First, we need to acknowledge that substance abuse is almost always the symptom of something else.  Smoking, drinking, and drugs are manifestations of something gone wrong, whether social, psychological or physiological. From a Five Why’s perspective, substance abuse is not a root cause.  Second, we need to acknowledge that substance abuse is not a victimless condition; addiction detracts from our ability to be fully engaged and contribute to society at the highest level.  Third, we need to recognize that whenever substance abuse affects others, spouses, children, victims of abuse related accidents or crimes; the individual’s right to do as he pleases is superseded by society’s obligation to protect the affected.  Fourth, we need to acknowledge the true cost of addictive behaviors and lay that cost squarely on the abusers.  There is no reason why society should shoulder the burden of anyone who smokes or drinks or drugs himself beyond function.

If substance abuse is not a root cause, than we need to approach substance abuse through education that aims at the root.  We have already seen great success in this approach by shifting the perception of cigarette smokers from glamorous to undesirable and in the process cutting cigarette smoking in half in fifty years.  Our educational initiatives should help people not only understand the biological and chemical effects of various substances, but also their emotional and psychological impact.  Some people will use this knowledge to modify behavior, but not everyone will.  Regardless, in a society where we will hold people responsible for their actions, society is obliged to help people make informed choices.

Any behavior that arises from the substance abuse that affects others should be curtailed.  We see many examples of this already in place; states with stringent drinking and driving laws and widespread prohibition of smoking in public places to reduce exposure to second hand smoke.  There are ways we could take these approaches further; ban drive-through liquor stores, tie car ignition to breathalyzer tests, ban smoking in homes with children, but each of these cuts deeper into our civil liberties.  The discussion of where the rights of the individual are trumped by the desire to protect the innocent must underpin any such decisions.

In The Price of Smoking, Frank Sloan argues that the real cost of a pack of cigarettes, including the personal, family and social costs, is about $40.  Other studies vary, but all agree that the real cost of smoking is much more than the taxes added to a pack of cigarettes.  With an average pack of cigarettes costing around five dollars in Kentucky, but over ten dollars in New York City, we are nowhere near recouping the costs of cigarette smoking from those who inhale them.  Cigarettes should cost more.  Alcohol too.

Any holistic view of how our society addresses substance abuse has to ask why do we treat drugs so differently from tobacco and alcohol?  We are making better progress reducing alcohol and tobacco demand and we are recouping at least some of the costs by having these substances integrated in our economy.  Wouldn’t we be better off to find some way to integrate drugs into our economy as well?  This would not be easy.  The system would have to be carefully regulated; the potential for corruption is great, and we run the risk that more readily available drugs would increase demand.  But given that our current approach to drugs, in which we harp on Mexico and other countries for creating supply instead of addressing our internal problem of demand, is not working.  Perhaps it is time to try something different.  We have a model for bringing a prohibited substance into our mainstream economy with fairly good success – we did it with alcohol after the fall of Prohibition.  If we believe individuals have the right to ingest harmful substances, our track record shows we do better as society structuring some form of legality to the substance and controlling it publicly, as we do with tobacco and alcohol, than we do covertly, as we try to do with drugs.

Our approach to abusive substances should be to educate people about their dangers, tax them to a level that reflects their true social costs, yet make them available in a regulated manner.  The same approach could apply to other forms of addictive behavior and the so called ‘victimless crimes’ of gambling, overeating, and prostitution as well.  None of these conditions are victimless, yet each will be easier to address if we are forthright in acknowledging that they exist, and determine how our society can offer individuals the right to participate in them while guarding the safety and well-being of those affected.  There is a reason why Nevada has the highest standards of health among prostitutes – it is legal and it is regulated.

If we consider the full spectrum of smoking, drinking, drug use, prostitution, gambling, or overeating, almost all of us are appalled by one or more of them, yet almost all of us participate in one or more of the others.  We have to recognize that these are human activities, they are going to transpire, and they will happen with more safety to the user and less collateral damage to others if we recognize them and permit them to occur in a sanctioned manner.

As my mind considered all the destructive behaviors that humans have concocted, I managed to take a right turn too soon and got lost along a lovely rural road of hills and large farms just south of Coventry.  I should have turned around as soon as I realized my mistake, but turning around is not in my DNA, and so I sallied forth with a general idea that I needed to go north and east.  That strategy works fine in a city with a grid, but is tricky on a winding road with the sun directly overhead. I noticed the mailbox numbers descending; I would eventually hit a cross road, though it turned out to be miles away.  It was hot. I needed lunch. I wondered if I should retrace, but the hills behind me were forbidding.  I kept forward and finally the country road dead ended into the frontage road of I-75. I traded shady swales for brutal concrete inclines as I made towards a water tower signed Walton.  I rocked my bike side to side as I climbed; my head light from the sun, my stomach needing food and my psyche needing bearing.  I stopped at the intersection and looked around.  I took a sip of water.  The knot of disorientation in my stomach craved satisfaction. This is how it feels to be adrift.  This is what it is like to grasp for something to ground you, to make the world around you align in some meaningful way. This is where some folks need a smoke, a drink, or a hit; a bag of chips or a roll of the dice.  This is where I needed a sign, which I found on the far side of the overpass, US 25 heading north.  I followed the sign, glad to have some bearing, but I did not feel fully confident again until three miles later, where I reconnected with the road I missed and knew where I was once more.

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The Case for Being an Architect

Posted on 02/11/2012 by paulefallon

In January the Georgetown University Center of Education and the Workforce reported that students with a Bachelor in Architecture have the highest unemployment rate among all college graduates, 13.9%.  The statistic went viral in architectural circles, recycling the same professional gloom that greeted me over thirty years ago, when I earned my M.Arch in the middle of the recession of 1981.  I rebuffed the many naysayers who warned me architecture would be a volatile career and went on to enjoy continuous, satisfying work for over thirty years; work that I believe has made a meaningful contribution to our world.

The ironic timing of the recent report is that in January I left my full time position at TRO JB in Boston to split my effort between philanthropic work and firm responsibilities.  This transition towards retirement provokes reflection and prompted me to consider the benefits of devoting my career to architecture.

Let’s start with the most obvious and superficial reason.  Being an architect is cool.  Architects thrive at the intersection of art and technology, we deal with the fantastic and the prosaic, we create things that are both monumental and useful.  The cocktail party response to learning I am an architect is always a ‘wow’ even though my specialty is designing hospitals and I wear rather ordinary glasses.  Architects exist on a high plateau in people’s imaginations, and there is a kick to being an architect that any insurance agent, accountant, you name it, would envy.

The cool factor, shallow though it is, reflects the truth that an architect’s daily work contains more variety and exercises a wider range of skills than most other jobs.   Our specialty is spatial conception, but we also do significant analysis, writing, presentation, and field work.  Under the broad description of being an architect I have been a draftsman, a detailer, a designer, a specification writer, a construction administrator, an engineering coordinator, a medical planner, a programmer, a strategic healthcare analyst, and a Lean process improvement facilitator.   I have made presentations to clients, regulatory agencies, citizen groups, and fellow architects.  I have had all kinds of initials after my name, AIA, CSI, LEED AP, EDAC, Certified Greenbelt, but each flowed logically through an integrated career.  We hear about burnout among teachers, nurses, and many other professionals.  Architects don’t burn out, we evolve.

Part of the variety to being an architect is rooted in our potential work settings.  I began my career in a two person storefront office in Oklahoma City. My first built design was an unglamorous generator building for an apartment complex, but within five years we had designed and built hundreds of units of affordable and special needs housing throughout the state.  When I moved to Massachusetts I opted for a large firm and found a niche in healthcare, where I have had a hand in over $2 billion in construction that includes three Greenfield replacement hospitals, many large additions, and dozens of renovations.  Still, when my children were young and I needed flexibility I hung out my own single for a few years and had a successful, if bipolar, practice of designing upscale residential and affordable housing projects.

The flexibility inherent in being an architect is one of its many positive attributes. My motto is, “I always have something to do today, but I don’t have anything I have to do today.”  We work on deadlines, but they are measured in weeks and months, rather than the fifteen minute appointment intervals my medical colleagues suffer through.  We do our work best when we can do it deliberately, with time to evaluate the merits of different options.  That is a luxury work places governed by a clock cannot afford.

After employment uncertainty, the second most common complaint about being an architect is the compensation.  Architects are among the lowest paid professionals, yet my response to this is, we earn enough.  Star designers and architect developers can earn big bucks, the rest of us make a reasonable living.  I work with a lot of doctors who earn $400,000 or more per year, and most nurses top one hundred grand, but their stress level is commensurate with their salaries.  I accept an architect’s relative salary among professionals because I appreciate the intangibles of a creative, flexible work environment.  Even on my most productive afternoon I am not pressed to churn through the work volume that an ED doctor or nurse encounters on a busy shift.

In the final analysis architecture is as much a calling as a profession.  When my grade school friends fantasized about being a fireman or a policeman or an astronaut, I was busy filling a binder with drawings of buildings.  Choice didn’t factor into becoming an architect, I never considered anything else.  It is in my genes, and no depth of recession or salary belly aching could dissuade me.  When my son was unhappy studying engineering at Cornell, I asked if he ever considered architecture.  He said, “I think I could do it, but I don’t have the fire in my belly; the lights in the architecture studios are always on, those guys are really into it.”

In some small way I am making the employment picture rosier for new architects; retiring from full time work may open opportunities for new talent.  But I am not really retiring; another advantage of architecture is that you can practice as long as your mind stays quick.  Rather I am going full circle, to work on smaller buildings and enjoy a larger hand in their completion.  An offer to help a medical group in Haiti design a clinic in 2007 has morphed into a strong commitment to that magical country.  I currently have two projects in construction there and decided to lend my hand in onsite supervision, adding expediting and project management to my repertoire of professional skills.

Ultimately the Georgetown article is not going to make much difference either way.  I have never met anyone who went into architecture for any reason other than love, and love of career is just as immune from rational analysis and any other form.  I applaud the twenty year old who reads that report and decides, ‘I don’t care, I’m am going to be an architect anyway.’  He or she is going to have as satisfying and exciting a career as their imagination will allow.

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Pedaling Principles Chapter 10 – Indiana, Education at a Crossroads

Posted on 02/11/2012 by paulefallon

New   Harmony, IN is an oasis of calm in a frenzied world.  Descending over the bridge from Illinoi sthe brilliant white contemporary visitor center designed by architect Richard Meier is an immediate cue that this is no ordinary town.  Harmony, IN was founded by Rappists in the early nineteenth century as part of George Rapp’s apocalyptic vision that his followers would create three model towns at ten year intervals in preparation for the Biblical Rapture.  His followers had already built and left Harmony, PA, devoted ten years to creating Harmony, IN as a model of industry and piety and then sold the entire town to utopian Robert Owen and naturalist William MacClure before returning to Pennsylvania to found their final community, Economy.  Despite completing the requirements of George Rapp’s prophesy, the Rapture failed to occur, the Rappists died out, and we are all still here today.

Meanwhile, Owen and MacClure renamed their town New Harmony, and imported a boatload (literally) of intellectuals to realize their more cerebral and secular vision of Utopia. New Harmony floundered as a social dream; there were too many lofty thinkers and not enough basic farmers. Owen left after two years, but the town persevered and in time made traction as a center of scientific study, particularly in the natural sciences. If New Harmony was never the most prosperous farming community inIndiana, it was certainly the most intellectual.

Today 800 people live in this pristine town, amidst many of the original Rappist buildings, a granary that housed natural science labs through most of the nineteenth century and the oldest library in the State of Indiana. Capitalizing on its history as a place where intellectual and spiritual forces come together, New Harmony has added a number of contemporary elements that complement its heritage, including a conference center, landscaped meditation gardens, an open air chapel designed by architect Philip Johnson, and Meier’s Athenaeum.  As an architect, I came to see the renowned buildings in New Harmony, but what captured my attention beyond the bricks and mortar and gleaming white metal was the intellectual curiosity that underpins the entire place.

The uncivil debates raging in Washington over our national debt seemed entirely removed from New Harmony’s thoughtful gentility.  Walking amidst the well-proportioned Rappist dwellings and manicured gardens on a succulent August day, observing the townspeople puttering about their errands on golf carts, the persistent question pulsing beneath the sublime calm and generosity is, why can’t everywhere be like this?  The answer lies in the roots of the place.  It was conceived with a different set of values from the world around it; a small group of like-minded people with a zealous work ethic yet scant interest in personal gain.  The Rappists succeeded in creating true harmony while they were here, a harmony so resilient that even as Owen’s Utopia failed and two centuries intervened, the initial intentions of the place endure.

New Harmony is so unique that it would be, well, utopian, to think that its essence could spread out over the entire country.  It was not a democracy.  George Rapp ruled, and even if the result was benevolent, it was still dictatorial.  However, it is useful to understand the salient traits that converged to create such harmony – industry, faith, thrift, celibacy, and education.  I’ve already discussed industry as a defining American characteristic and faith as I encountered it inMissouri.  I will focus on thrift later, and will abstain from giving any credence to celibacy, that peculiar trait of Roman Catholic priests and select nineteenth century American religions.  As I pedaled east out of the bucolic town, into equally inspirational farmland, I understood that the critical differentiator betweenNew Harmony and its surroundings was education.  Not just that people inNew Harmony had more educational opportunities than their neighbors, but how highly they valued education’s worth.

The new school year surrounded me wherever I went in Indiana.  I saw my first yellow buses carting rural children to class; the Evansville paper had a cover story about a snazzy new middle school, and Indiana University bumper stickers were ubiquitous.  The school year buzz was heightened by the package of educational reforms that Governor Mitch Daniels recently won – restrictions on collective bargaining, merit-based pay raises for teachers, expanding charter schools, and the most generous tuition voucher program in the nation.  The cumulative effect of these changes puts Indiana in the vanguard of making public schools competitive.  Proponents argue that competition will make public schools better; detractors counter that the changes will relegate public education to a bottom-tier dustbin, the last resort for students who cannot go elsewhere.  In late August of 2011 no one knew which side would prove correct; only time will tell the effects on the students of Indiana.

Primary and secondary education in Indiana is a big business.  There are 1.12 million children in school; just over one million are in the public system, spread among 354 districts; and 115,000 children attend 742 private schools. The public schools have more than 130,000 staff of which almost 60,000 are classroom teachers, which means that more than half the employees are not in the classroom.  (The source of this information, educationbug.org, does not provide staffing information on private schools.)  Since ten percent of Indiana children already go to private school, tuition vouchers for private school education will siphon some resources from the public system for students eligible for credits off the top.  But tuition vouchers also increase the likelihood that private school enrollment will grow, thus shifting more money away from the public system.  Expanded charter schools will increase the total number of schools at the public trough, which will divide up the education pie into more chunks.  Restrictions on collective bargaining will give public school teacher unions less clout, and merit-based pay raises will link teachers’ pay directly to their students’ performance.

What is prompting all this tinkering with our education system?  The answer is simple.  The system is failing.

For the past century the American public education system set the standard for the world.  As recently as 1900 only about 5% of Americans went to high school, but through the first half of the twentieth century a collaboration of events – our increasing affluence that allowed children to defer entering the workforce, the need for a better educated populace, the correlation between education and higher earnings, and the concept of ‘teenage’ as a specific phase of life, conspired to make high school the norm rather than the exception.  By 1950 80% of Americans graduated high school, and the term ‘drop-out’ became a derogatory for anyone who did not earn a high school diploma, even if she attended to her state’s minimum required age.  At the same time, thanks mainly to the G.I. Bill for World War II veterans, college became attainable to many.  By 1980 40% of American adults had two or four year college degrees.  We led the world in the number of college graduates; we were the best educated nation on the planet.

Unfortunately, we have not significantly budged that percentage of college graduates in thirty years, while other countries have forged ahead.  We are now ranked 12th in percent of population with college degrees among industrialized nations (Canada ranks first with 56%), while our high school graduation rate by 2010 had actually slipped to 75%, depressed in large part by graduation rates less than 65% for Black and Hispanic students.  At a time when brainpower is the dominant muscle in determining a country’s well-being, we have proportionately less brainpower than we did thirty years ago while the rest of the world is generating more and more.

Our response to this, as evidenced by the recent laws in Indiana, has been to blame the system without necessarily looking at root causes.  When we apply a guiding principles approach to designing a hospital with our clients, we often use Lean process improvement strategies to clarify our principles, establish parameters, and formulate success targets.  One key Lean technique is a root cause analysis known as the Five Why’s. We describe a problem and ask why it occurs.  The answer unveils a second why, and a third, and so on.  Usually, within five whys we arrive at a root cause.

Why is our educational system failing?  Our students are not acquiring the skills they need to succeed in the global marketplace.  Why?  Perhaps our standards are too lax, or our teaching methods are inappropriate, or our habit of passing students along creates lost learners.  Why?  Perhaps we are conflicted between the need for basic, testable skills and offering students’ variety and choice.  Perhaps it is because our educational system is so decentralized students across the US get very different opportunities.  Perhaps it is because students do not come to school prepared to learn.  Why?  Perhaps it is because our diversity obsessed culture cannot agree on a rudimentary knowledge base that all Americans should possess.  Perhaps it is because students arrive at school without a proper night’s sleep, good nourishment, and parental guidance for their school efforts.  Why?  Because, at the most fundamental level, too many citizens do not value education, for themselves or their children; we do not embrace it as the primary building block of a competitive and vibrant society.

Almost any education system can achieve good results teaching well nourished, well behaved, prepared and inquisitive students; vouchers and merit raises and charter schools are irrelevant if motivated, capable students line up at the door.  Similarly, a system that houses ill prepared and indifferent children from homes that do not instill a value of education will have poor outcomes.  As most of us know from the working world, a good attitude more than compensates for a limited skill set.  In the school setting where children are just developing their skills, a poor attitude is a non-starter.  So the most fundamental issue is, how do we create an environment where learning is valued by all?   In an ideal world, say, New Harmony Indiana in the 1840’s, human curiosity alone carried the day to encourage education.  The town was filled with people for whom learning in and of itself was one of life’s great satisfactions.  Unfortunately, we cannot depend on all people being so motivated, so we have to find ways to make education accessible and meaningful.

This begins with parents. It seems absurd to suggest we need to train mothers and fathers basic parental responsibilities, but we must acknowledge that twenty-first century America has a sizable portion of citizens who have grown up without witnessing any value to obtaining education, developing discipline, or establishing a work ethic. How can we fault young adults for not transmitting these essential values to their own children when they are foreign values to themselves?  We have a collective responsibility to help our youth become the best possible members of society they can.  Unfortunately, introducing a five year old from a household that does not foster learning into a classroom for six hours a day, five days a week is simply not enough time to provide the educational stimulus required to overcome his domestic disadvantages.

One encouraging possibility are the results of the KIPP-styled intensive education programs, where children spend ten to twelve hours a day at school, sometimes overnights, and Saturday sessions as well.  It is a total immersion into a world of learning, with the carrot that all students who graduate will get admitted to college with scholarship.  The MATCH Charter Public High School in Bostonhas been in operation since 2000, the student population is selected in a lottery from applications within the Boston Public Schools.  More than ninety percent of the students are minorities, more than three quarters live below the poverty line, yet they have 100% pass rate on the state exam to graduate high school and 99% of their students go to four year colleges, the vast majority of them on full scholarship.  I have great respect for the parents who release their children to these programs, because they tacitly admit, ‘I understand that education is important for my child, and I don’t know how to give it to her, so I am going to send her to this special place.’

Another program that is showing positive results with less intervention is the Kalamazoo Promise, in which a consortium of anonymous donors from Kalamazoo, MI pays four years of full time college tuition and fees to any Michigan state college or university to any student who graduates from the Kalamazoo Public Schools.  Since the program began in 2006, college attendance has risen, last year 95% of eligible graduates entered college.  Since students have up to ten years to use this benefit, the long term effects are not known, but they are trending positive.

These are only two examples of the myriad ways we could help instill higher value in education among all of our citizens.  To any who say that such programs are too expensive to apply across the board, the ancient adage of an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is apt.  We spend between $25,000 and $50,000 per year to house a person in prison in this country.  Costs vary by state and type of prison, but even the low end is much more than the cost to educate him at the MATCH Charter School.  The cost argument is a non-starter; study after study shows that education pays untold dividends in a person’s life while enhancing her ability to contribute to society.  The real issue is one of focus.  MATCH receives support from numerous corporations, uses a corps of recent college graduates as energetic teachers and has individual tutoring affiliations with Boston’s top universities.  Accessing those resources for every Boston Public School child, and not just the ones who win the lottery, would be a tall order.

But what could be applied in a wider context is the MATCH school’s guiding principle statement, “A culture of discipline and learning with rigorous academics,” and the demanding success targets that MATCH derives from these aspirations.  Students from MATCH do not all graduate and attend college simply because they put in six years at MATCH.  They graduate and attend college because MATCH has created an environment where learning is valued and enables each student the opportunity to develop the academic skills required to reach her highest potential.

While we need to raise everyone’s appreciation of education and support home environments that encourage success in school, we must also address the shortcomings of our system as it exists today.  Two camps have developed around issues of education.  I call one the big labor/big industry model.  It promotes the use of public money only for public schools, strong teacher unions, and limited parental choice. The other is the free market model with a mix of public schools, charter schools, tuition vouchers, weak unions (if unions at all) and maximum parental choice.  Stated this way most Americans would lean towards the free market model as the preferred option, it resonates with our guiding principle of ‘Life,Libertyand the Pursuit of Happiness.’   But when we try to maximize the benefit for the majority without causing undue harm to any individual, there is an inherent conflict between the two approaches.

In the ideal world, all students would go to public school, the public schools would engage and challenge children of all abilities and everyone would benefit from the inherent diversity.  Strong public schools are the best way to achieve the societal goal of quality education for all.  But that ideal world is not the current state at most public schools, where high achieving students are not fully stimulated, low achieving students flounder and the median results continue to decline.  Given this reality the best educational choice for many individuals is to opt for charter, private, or even home schooling.  As more students leave the public system, and in states like Indiana, take their public dollars with them, the public schools further deteriorate, exacerbating the downward spiral.  The current situation creates a disturbing polarity between the societal goal of quality education for all versus the individual objective of each family wanting the best possible education for their own child.  This conflict is not going to resolve any time soon, with the pendulum currently in full swing towards more individual choice.  The days when ninety percent of American school children attend the public school in their neighborhood are gone, probably for good.   Personal choice will continue to grow, in the public sphere through magnet programs, in the quasi-public world of charter schools, in private schools, and in increasing home schooling.  This is consistent with the individualism branded to our national character, yet it obstructs the broader goal of equal educational opportunity for all.

How can we work towards an education system that provides opportunity for the full range of student’s needs yet achieves the broad desire to educate everyone?

First, the teachers and their unions need to acknowledge the failures of the public system, the reality of increased choice, and work positively to make the transition.  An unappealing conflict within the teacher’s union (which is also found in nursing unions and other so-called professional unions) is that the definition of a professional is someone who acts on behalf of another, usually due to specialized expertise beyond the general population, while unions exist to improve the conditions of the worker.  Legally, professionals are treated differently from tradesmen or manufacturers due to the judgment required in the more complex fields in which they operate.  This conflict makes the term ‘professional union’ an oxymoron; one cannot simultaneously act to improve one’s own condition and act on behalf of another.  In the case of teacher unions, when they promote the needs of teachers by establishing maximum classroom hours, restrictions on after school work, or increased benefits; the rest of us view these parameters as gains accrued to the teachers at the expense of the children.  Teachers need to take a less union-focused and more professional view of their world to see how they can best support the children they are supposed to teach.  With regards to merit-based pay, there is not a doctor, attorney, architect, engineer, or accountant in this country who is compensated solely by their tenure on the job. Their maturity is valued, but their individual contributions also factor into their compensation. Teachers argue they cannot be responsible for the progress of children who get assigned to them at random and who they teach in the classroom for only one year.  The logical response to this is, ‘why not?’  The world is complex and every measure of merit has contributing factors, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot find ways to reward teachers on their success.  Other professions do it.  It is appropriate to introduce a level of competition among teaching, just as it is in any other work environment.  The teacher unions would be better served developing fair measures of merit rather than trying to block the issue.

Second, we need to accept competition as the byproduct of individual choice offered by charter schools and private schools with tuition vouchers.  Although our initial response to competition is always good, we must make sure that it occurs on a level playing field; charter and private schools must suffer the same rules as the public schools.  If schools can be selective as to which students they accept, based on academic ability, special needs, race or creed, then they are not a true equivalent to a public school.  It is not fair to allow high achieving students to transfer out of public schools, and take their monetary allocation with them, if the public schools are the only recourse for children with special needs or behavioral issues.  Students who present a larger drain on the total educational system must have the same access to charter and private schools as the students any school would love to cherry pick.  Schools that receive any public support, either directly or through vouchers, must be subject to whatever standards or tests a state requires.  If schools want the public money, they need to meet public standards.

Which brings up all the wasted discussion about standards and tests.  We need to have standards and we need to have tests.  Students who graduate from our system, whether public, charter or private, need to be able to speak and write coherent English, perform basic math, have a background in history and civics, been exposed to at least some literature, music and art, and have a basic understanding of health and wellness.  Call them standards if you like but if we graduate students who cannot function in our society, we have failed them.  As to tests, they are part of life and students need to learn how to take them and perform well on them. I have a niece who applied for a summer job at a Chili’s restaurant.  She had to take a multiple page test as part of the application process.  She passed.  If we graduate students who cannot pass the application test at Chili’s, what kind of future are we offering them?  I hear the arguments that teachers are being thwarted in their creativity by being relegated to teach to the test, and I find the arguments insufferable.  As an architect I must comply with certain standards and codes to design a building so it is fit for its intended use, structurally sound, and safe for its occupants in the event of emergency.  We meet all these requirements for every building, yet we never design two buildings exactly alike, as the dictates of the site, the budget, and the client’s desires demand unique solutions.  The standards we have to meet do not deny our creativity.  They challenge it.  In the same manner, educational standards establish the minimum of what a teacher has to teach, but the genius of great teachers is not in what they teach, but how they plant that material in young and malleable minds.

One afternoon I discovered a sweet little motel in Salem, IN so I stopped early.    Many of the vintage motels do not have Wi-Fi access, but most McDonald’s have free Wi-Fi, so for the cost of a soft drink or an ice cream cone, I can spend an hour or two on the Internet.  As I was checking email a small family sat down next to me; a stout grandmother with only eye teeth, her thin, frail husband and a skinny, bouncy little girl.  Once they unwrapped their food and counted out their change to determine if they could afford another portion of fries, the grandmother began quizzing the child on basic multiplication tables.  At some point, about 8 times 2, our eyes met, so I smiled and commented how nice it was to hear a family practicing math together.

Having created an opening, the grandmother and the girl were quick to jump into conversation with me.  Where was I from?  Where was my car?  Why was I in Salem?  My situation perplexed the young girl.  How do you get money? Where do you stay?  You stay in a motel EVERY night?  My itinerant life looked glamorous in her eyes.  I told the girl I had saved my money so I could take a vacation, which prompted a blank stare.  “Please excuse the child,” the grandmother explained,  “she don’t understand things like vacation and motels.  She doesn’t know words like ‘savings’.  She only understands that we don’t have any money.  We’re poor.”

The grandmother described the facts of their life without a whiff of judgment.  The girl leaned up against me and fingered my netbook.  She lacked impulse control or a sense of personal space.   We tested how far she could hold the wireless mouse away from my monitor and still move the cursor.  She was too precocious.  “Where are your children?  Who is taking care of them?”  Her grandmother shooed the girl off to refill her soda.  “I appreciate you being patient with her.  Most people aren’t.  She’s eleven, you know (she looked no more than seven); the schools put her in Special Ed all this time.  She’s not slow; she just didn’t talk until she was nine.  Now I drill her all I can to get her into a regular classroom.”

The girl returned with a fresh soda and soon after the family left.  The grandfather said not a word the entire time.  I wondered about this girl who did not talk until age nine, about her lack of mother, about her luck in having a caring grandmother, about the depth of poverty it takes to not even know what the word ‘vacation’ means.  The girl is going to need more than her grandmother will be able to give before she can ever find her full potential in life.

I only hope that as Indiana sorts out its options for charter schools and merit raises and tuition vouchers, this is the girl the policy makers keep in mind, making sure she does not get lost in the battles between the big labor / big industry education camp and the free market camp.  No school that is dependent on simplistic measures of success or cost conscious results is going to welcome such a challenging case. Yet, giving this underprivileged child every opportunity to succeed in life is exactly the point of the discussion.


 

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Haitian Breakfast

Posted on 02/09/2012 by paulefallon

Breakfast is not a big deal in Haiti. Although people are up at 5 or 6 am and busy about their work, no one seems to eat early in the day.  Since I am used to a hearty breakfast, I usually stow away a few pieces of bread from dinner because it is never clear what food may come my way before lunch.  Sometimes Gama gets food from the ladies who cook on site mid-morning.  He always shares, although it is hardly standard American fare.

“Mangoes for Breakfast!” Gama shakes a plastic bag full.  “So, do you want to eat mangoes Haitian way or American way?” He slides a five gallon bucket of water across the floor of the construction shack and dumps five mangoes to float in it.  “When in Rome,” I reply, but I get a quizzical look.  Idioms don’t translate.  “Haitian way.”  He smiles, straddles the bucket, picks a fat mango from the water and gnashes it with his teeth, peels away the skin and chomps down.

I peer into the water.  I am adventurous but not stupid.  I cannot put a mango washed with local water in my mouth.  “American way,” I shrug.  I pull a mango out and use my thumb to break through the soft peel.  “American way is with a knife,” Gama points out.   “You are doing Haitian way for Haitians’ with no teeth.”  It’s a good joke, but then again, maybe it is not.  People without teeth are a significant minority in Haiti.

The mango is sweet and pulpy, the juice gathers around my mouth.  It is the best I’ve ever eaten, but then again I am very hungry.

The next day we have goat head stew for breakfast.  The head is placed in a large kettle and boiled in a buttery sauce, think béarnaise without the flour.  Add chunks of yum, a papaya-like starch, and the obligatory onion.  When the head is tender it is cut into pieces and mixes with the broth and starch.  The skin turns deep grey and curls around the underlying muscle.

Goat head has a nice texture, but I did not find it as flavorful as the goat meat cubed into the evening stews or the char broiled chunks we sometimes get as a garnish to our rice and beans.  I suppose I am developing a sophisticated palate when it comes to goat.

 

 

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Images of the City Rebuilding

Posted on 02/08/2012 by paulefallon

For architects and urban planners of a certain age Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City is a formative book.  It forecast the end of Modernism, from Brasilia and Chandigarh’s gargantuism to the soulless banality of Pruitt-Igoe and Co-op City.  It was a scholarly analysis of the obvious, that people like variety and idiosyncrasy, that we understand our world through its hierarchy; that pattern and familiarity are essential backgrounds against which accents resonate.  The Image of the City established the terms landmark, node, link, and edge as the words we use to describe the urban environment to this day.

I think about these terms as I move through Grand Goave.  Grand Goave is a small city of 25,000 people.  It rests along the Bay of Gonave on the north coast of the Haiti’s western peninsula.  It has no zoning and not much government, yet the key elements of urban planning are evident.  There are two edges – the bay on the north and the river on the east.  Haiti National Route 2, which runs parallel to the coast, is the city’s main link.  It is the only blacktop road.  The market is along Route 2; that is where the tap-taps congregate (tap-taps are Haitian taxis) and Route 2 has the only bridge to Port-au-Prince.  The highway sits about half mile back from the sea; in between is a grid of streets, the arteries running between the highway and the bay, the tertiaries perpendicular to those.  South of Route 2 the land rises to mountains.  There are few roads in that direction and they are very steep, but there are many foot paths.  Since Haiti is not a country of robust institutions, Grand Goave is short of built landmarks, but the organization of the city is very clear.  Mountains to the south, bay to the north, urban grid on the flats and meandering paths in the hills.

On Saturday, for diversion, I walked from the BeLikeBrit orphanage site to the Mission of Hope School site along the mountain foot path instead of the steep road. I took photos of the city as it descends towards the sea. It has been two and a half years since I first came here, and the amount of physical change is phenomenal.  The city existed; the earthquake pulled it apart, and now it is being knit back together. It is not being rebuilt with a plan, yet the essential character of its urban space persists.

View of Grand Goave artery driving towards Route 2.  The main part of the city is hard surfaced and dusty.  Piles of masonry are everywhere. A year ago they were mostly rubble, now half the piles are rubble, the other half are new materials awaiting construction.

View across a valley and the bay.  The bright blue tarps are the walls of Samaritan’s Purse temporary houses.  The tarps are ubiquitous in the city and are used for all manner of covering. This blue has become the predominant color of the city.  The flats are to the left, the bay beyond, Port au Prince is beyond sight to the right.  The large tower in the middle is Digicel.  Digicel is the most advertised brand in Haiti.  Cell service is terrific.

This detail photo shows how a homestead that might evolve over years transforms much faster post-earthquake.  The blue house with the tin roof was built in August of 2010.  I know because my son Andy and I built it. I have a photo of him framing the roof.  In the ensuing eighteen months the owners have added a lean-to, a deck, and are now in the process of building a permanent concrete block house into the side of the hill.

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The Fool on the Hill

Posted on 02/04/2012 by paulefallon

When the Beatle’s The Fool on the Hill hit the airwaves in 1967 I was twelve years old, the perfect age to be captivated by a song that denounced conventional motivation.  I always thought I would love to be the guy whose ‘eyes in his head see the world spinning round’.  That is, if I wasn’t so busy.

Paul McCartney credits the song’s inspiration to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, but today, 44 years after the song’s debut, I discovered a true Fool on the Hill, a man who embodies the complimentary mystery, serenity, and inanity of the song.

A man sits outside the gate of the BLB orphanage, on a small bluff with his back to the sea.  A shred of blue tarp tied to a sapling and a few branches stuck in the ground provides shade.  He sits on a pile of rocks.  To his left the rocks are small boulders.  On his lap is a flat white stone.  In his right hand he holds a small mallet.  He picks up a boulder, taps it with his hammer into dozens of smaller pieces and slides the pieces down the pile on the right. He sits and hammers all day.  I never see him move from his position.  He must, because he is not there in the dark.  But all day long he sits and taps and breaks rocks.  I understand there is a market for his effort, that people buy his crushed rock to put in concrete.  No one will tell me the value of his work, but it cannot amount to much.

The man is deaf and dumb, which adds to his allure.  When someone lacks ordinary powers we ascribe to him an unknowable depth of other faculties.  He is serene in his posture; he appears at peace with his work, comfortable with his place in this world.  When I approach he waves, when I lift my camera he smiles as if to say, “People like to photograph me just being who I am.”

Of course this is all projection; the man has no opportunity to voice his thoughts.  Perhaps he is frustrated, a Stevens Hawkins genius trapped in an eternity of  rock tapping due to circumstances of birth and life beyond his control.  But somehow I doubt that.  To all the world he appears to be a man who knows his purpose and is neither haughty nor humbled by his station.  He is the man who taps rocks all day under a tarp, the fool on the hill.  The rest of us marvel at his tenacity, we thank god that we are not chained to his lot, yet we wonder if perhaps he doesn’t know more about life through his quiet work than we can ever know in our scurrying.

The Rock Tapper

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