44. Jacobs & George

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This and that

It's been a busy week. I've completed almost all the HOA errands and tasks I can do before the professional painting. And one day another owner was in residence so that helped with some tasks that I just can't quite do by myself -- which also led to socializing and too much wine in the evening.

Anyway, the laundry room is done, including the improvised door to block off the alcove, and I even hung a motion sensing light on the wall in there. I caulked and painted the improvised kick-plate with sweep on the back door and it looks pretty amazing, for our $6 investment. Tonight the last of the junk goes out for our free Bulk pick-up. 

It's too windy at the moment to touch-up the front iron work with black spray paint, but that's a small job I should be able to do tomorrow. I've finally been able to schedule a contractor to come by, just after Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, to take a look at the back yard. I think we have a decent shot at getting the yard and then the painting done before the end of October. I'm rambling.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

And speaking of HSB, we are just over a week away now. I was notified about a pre-event meeting to be held in the park a week from today. I've been sending out emails about this since last October so I really don't have anything more to add (and it's a long way to go just to see things I know too well and eat some pizza) but, I've been specifically invited so I guess I'm going to have to make the trek out there four days in a row rather than the three days I was expecting. 

It had better be decent pizza. (Hmmm... there's a cafe near there with very good fountain service. I could indulge in a pre-event milk shake before the ordeal begins.)

Jane Jacobs

In what I like to think of as "continuing education," one of my college professors sent me a link to a very interesting article about Jane Jacobs she knew I would want to see. I don't disagree with anything in the article -- though I'm tempted to launch a defense of Jacobs on a couple points -- but I think the piece is fair. I've commented on the dark side of citizen activism myself. 

Today there is a column in the San Francisco Chronicle about a development which is still in the early planning stages in Brisbane (an oddly charming small town on the Bay, just over our southern border). I'd link it but it's still behind a pay-wall -- maybe in a few days it will make it to SFGate. 

I say it's in the early planning stages but I've made extensive plans for that area for decades. The site was a rail yard along the tracks Caltrain uses when leaving or entering SF from the Peninsula. I watched them rip up the rails and tear down most of the structures back in the 1990s. I've envisioned a dense and diverse new neighborhood that incorporates most of Jacobs' rules while attempting to sneak around her view that big, starting-from-scratch plans like this never work. For example, a certain number of the small blocks, especially on the periphery, would not be fully developed at first. Some would be occupied by construction related businesses like lumber yards and specialty electrical and plumbing businesses, so that workers don't have to leave the site to get most of what they need. There would also be low rent spaces for cafe's or food trucks feeding those workers. Once the bulk of the project is built, these blocks would be filled in as a 2nd phase. 

But some blocks would be low-rise, high-concept mini-developments (tents and shipping containers and the like) with lower rental rates to spur economic activity as the site slowly fills in. These blocks, too, would probably be built up at a later date -- though perhaps not. 

At any rate, I imagined tens of thousands of new residents (if not tens of thousands of new residential units) with easy access to Caltrain and the Muni Metro T line. Brisbane has a very different idea.

Their idea, since they are very happy with the current small town feeling of the place, is that it will be a place for people to work or possibly shop but not live. They don't want any new housing. 

Now Jacobs was a big advocate of mixed use, so she wouldn't approve of this plan. But she is most famous for showing that the people, not big shots, should decide what is best for a neighborhood. Again, this is the dark side of that particular "Force." 

And you don't have to go to Brisbane to find that dark side in action. The New Yorker piece kept referring to the "San Francisco problem" (which I would rather call the "Aspen problem") meaning the destructive effect of high rents due to the unreasonable popularity of a place. This too is a result of "the people" taking charge of planning and limiting growth, of them saying, "We like it the way it is right now." 

It's always dangerous to make statements about something you know nothing about, but I would be very much surprised if there weren't a large number of people who came to regret the tattoos they were so eager to get while in their teens. I'm too cheap and pain-averse to ever even consider getting a tattoo, but if that weren't true, I could imagine myself in my late teens borrowing a nice image from William Blake, for example. I don't hate William Blake now, but I also don't recall the last time I owned anything that included images of his work. 

Cities are stuck with the zoning and other planning restrictions they've tattooed onto themselves by popular vote. And because people's identities are based on which side they were on for those battles, it's as hard to change those rules as it is to remove tattoos on skin. Harder really since in the case of a tattoo the owner just has to come to the decision that he's seen about all of that Blake image that they can stand and then come up with the cash to undo the deed. 

The other thing Gopnik didn't get into in The New Yorker piece is the Henry George/monopoly-on-land aspect of the "San Francisco problem." And he really should have since Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty with SF -- after a major recession -- in mind. (And Henry George is something else that New York and San Francisco have in common.)

Greed is where Henry George's economics and the dark side of Jane Jacobs' citizen activism overlap. The people of Brisbane don't want thousands of new people trying to park on their streets. And anyone who owns property in SF wants to maximize the rent they receive even if they aren't required to do so by a new mortgage and high property taxes. 

Henry George's property tax scheme would limit the increases in rents. (To a point. Building for greater density is always more expensive than building for lower density, so the resulting capital costs would still be passed along in the form of higher rents, but you would lose the speculative value of land and the personal greed portion of rents.)

Here we have yet another topic where I find myself imagining P.G. Wodehouse's Monty Bodkin alluding to "wheels within wheels." And now I want to re-read, not Jacobs or George but, "The Crime Wave at Blandings." Clearly there's a down side to having had an education that balanced philosophy with history and literature, with a bit of architecture thrown in. 

...and the Great Books

And this is a problem for any "Great Books" curriculum, because how can you include all these authors? Whenever I've sat down to assemble my personal essential books list, it quickly becomes absurd. I can limit Jane Jacobs to two titles and Henry George to one, but where do you stop with P.G. Wodehouse? 

While I want to also add a couple Barbara Tuchman titles and some Germaine Greer, I don't want to remove any Classics. And Proust is a waste of time unless you commit to reading him twice. (In my opinion.) And then there are the writers of the Annales School -- what would King George III (or Henry, Duke of Gloucester) have said about them? "Another damned fat book...? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Braudel?"

Next - 45. HOA & Greening