friend of the built environment

This very misleading and dishonest article tries to tell us that we could be generating 1000% of our electrical needs with renewables. Nice try.

First we have to think of what we use electricity for: right now it doesn’t include things like charging a battery-powered auto fleet. It doesn’t include mining operations or steel furnace heating.

The question is, do we really have the silicon and rare earth metals required to build this kind of scale and capacity? How do we mine and manufacture the steel for the turbines and the lithium and strontium for the batteries without fossil fuel-powered earth movers, trucks, trains and barges? What if we converted our fossil-fueled auto fleet to electricity? What sort of additional generating capacity would we need and how would it affect these figures? How fast is the demand in these places growing and what will these figures look like 1, 10, 100 years from now at projected growth rates?

Being that Canadaian politics is one of my current obsessions, my podcast subscriptions are recently littered with the issue of public asset sales being an agenda item of both the federal and many provincial governments. This issue resonates with me to some degree because I’ve been intensively following the US banking crisis.

I see parallels here for one very specific reason: The decision to extend public institutional support to major banks in the US was essentially a nationalization of one of the primary jobs of those banks: their management of risk. They no longer have that task, regardless of what actually happens with their ownership structure going forward. The government has implied through its action that mismanagement of risk is something that will be back-stopped by taxpayers. But that guarantee comes with no preconditions on the ability of the private managers to withdraw equity and profit from their remaining successful market activities.

The primary criticism of the US government’s reaction to the banking crisis is that it extended moral hazard by providing this backstop without any regulatory reform — in other words that no banks were forced to become significantly governed by their new federal guarantors. This conundrum is something I see significantly affecting the idea of public asset divestiture as well.

Public assets, regardless of their function, are what they are for a reason. Either they are or were regarded as a strategic institution that should not be controlled by the private sector for security or regulatory reasons, or they were a failed private market institution that needed back-stopping by the public sector to remain available for civic use despite an inability of their managers to provide the service successfully (in terms of corporate profit and equity demands) in the market.

Whilst management incompetence can occasionally explain the reason for the latter, a far more common reason for nationalization or public acquisition of a private concern is that the service in question is incapable of providing the type of equity withdrawal or return-on-investment expected of many private sector indeavors. In some nations this is resolved by regulation. In others it’s resolved by nationalization — eliminate the profit/equity constraints on a business in order to retain a necessary civic service.

And thus any discussion of privatization or divestiture should be prefaced by a serious public debate which addresses these points: what was the reason this asset was a public asset in the first place? If it was security, why is the environment different now? If it was market failure, does the government thus intend to never again enter into this same sector?

For the latter, the parallels with the US banking crisis are monstrous. US banks are forever going to expect that mismanagement will not be fatal to their existence because the government has allowed them to continue to function in the market as private and profit-driven entities despite what would otherwise be mortal failures. If a now-viable and profitable bridge or railway is divested from the government (during a deflationary recession, no less — but that’s another issue), and a private concern begins typical corporate equity withdrawal, what is to prevent that concern from requiring renationalization years or decades down the road, when the private market decides it is no longer sufficiently profitable to provide the basic service that public ownership once guaranteed (assuming the service is still seen as a public necessity)?

Thus, divestiture should only occur if it’s a service the public no longer “expects”, or that is seen as strategically unnecessary within the polity. In a time of increasing energy costs and decreasing household wealth, privatizing public transportation and energy transmission systems seems like the heat of folly to me — especially at a time when economic stresses have driven down asset prices across the board (sell low!).

I just finished Margaret Atwood’s Payback. A great book, but the best part is Chapter 5, which almost stands on its own…

Spoilers ahead:

Read more »

Great new post from the Urbanophile:

What if instead of spending a huge amount of money to try to save one building, the city found a little bit of money to do basic maintenance to preserve the structural integrity of many buildings – and create a safe path through parts of them that tourists could walk through similar to how ancient ruins are displayed in Europe. Heck, don’t even clean the buildings up. That saves money and makes them even more impressive to visitors. This could preserve more structures for the long haul, and create a tourist attraction. The structures can always been renovated later when demand warrants.

An interesting perspective. It is quite an indictment of Americans’ sense of their own history, if you think about it. Italians and Greeks and Brits all preserve lots of buildings from their past. Many of them for current use even. And these are countries that have had thousands of years of destructive wars — surely America can manage to save a few structures for reuse as something other than parking lots.

I tend to deride the “museum piece” preservation movement a la Old Salem as a bad thing. But that’s because that specific type of preservation is not based on practical current community needs. Maybe I’m just biased against current community needs associated with the low-value use of urban space for our hermit crab shells cars. Either way, my opinion is that historic preservation of a macro artifact is most valid when still in use — and demolition is not equal to reuse, even if you reuse the land for parking. As I’ve previously professed, buildings are environmental artifacts that current users of the environment should make use of before trying to add to the stock. And re-use is largely cheaper (when actual costs like net energy and lifetime return on investment are accounted for), assuming you make reuse based on current (as well as long-term prospective) community needs (something Old Salem and Williamsburg and the like do not do).

But when the opportunity for reuse is not present, and vacancy or disputed eventual use puts the structure at risk, archiving the structure as a “development bank” is a really grand idea. And in the meantime, we’re preserving something of our past; after all, the past continues to unfold every day — it did not stop in the late 1800s…

An interesting thing I observe every day is the declining horizon of basic business, social and personal decision-making. Something I hear time and again is “well you just can’t predict how things will be in X years — things change so fast” — a result of exponential changes to inputs as well as a “blinkers on” reaction to potential future shock.

This probably contributes significantly to the dearth of serious debate on the topic of sustainability today. It’s become almost an article of faith that serious planning beyond a 2-3-year horizon (conveniently in-synch with most world election cycles) is useless or unproductive; that true “planning” involves dealing with immediate “emergencies” and that a 50-year sustainability horizon that demands significant immediate change is unrealistic and undesirable.

I sometimes find it amusing that a society so dead-set against taxes, government and social support still expects a first-world level of service from any multi-user institution.

Today I spent an hour stuck on a train that was having electrical problems. Like true troopers, the staff provided incredible customer service and eventually decided to just pile us back in and head on despite no electricity or water pumps (meaning, ultimately, no bathrooms or ventilation). In the end, we passengers were on this trip with a destination in mind. The condition of the experience was secondary.

Alas, there is an increasing disparity in expectation among the population right now. Some people are convinced we live in a first-world nation with efficient services and well-allocated investment capital. Those people are probably among the wealthier citizens, and find little need to extend their experiences beyond the assets they themselves personally control (usually involving a triangular trade between suburban job, SUV and suburban mcmansion). These are the people who complain about allocating $15 billion to new rail rolling stock but look in dumb indifference when $500 billion is pledged to a financial services company on a Saturday morning by unelected officials with no public debate.

Others of us realize that we live in a nation which has underinvested in its capital stock for 50 years - in many cases deliberately destroying prior investments and committing what is essentially equity withdrawal from society. We make use of the services available to us but expect very little quality or quantity. We understand the experience may make us uncomfortable and cost us more time and money and stress than we originally bargained for. But we have no choice - we need to live our lives in the environment we find ourselves. We might complain, but that’s what people do when confronted with steady, consistent decline.

I’m learning to lose my sense of entitlement every day. I’m learning to accept the reality of social decline. I might feel frightened of the future when I encounter an entitled and irritated comrade, and wonder what sort of society to expect when they find their gas tanks empty and their fast food outlet closed. But then I hear the announcer on the intercom, thanking me for my patronage, asking my forgivance for what amounts to essentially insignificant inconveniences, and telling me they’ll get me where I need to go — they’ll do their job.

I can accept decline as a feature of my society if I can believe in the basic benevolence of my fellow human beings. Outwardly poor and inwardly rich is feasible. It doesn’t have to suck, even when it does.

Here’s to the crew of Train 715. You made my night.

Chris Briem and Mike Madison both have some interesting commentary on East Liberty. Some quotes that strike me:

Virtually all of the good news about contemporary East Liberty [...] conveys the impression that the area is being transformed into a generic upscale suburb, with the big box stores, higher end retailers, and chic restaurants preferred everywhere by real estate developers and middle-aged cupcake-eating hipsters.

And:

I suspect that one of the headlines will be that despite all those points of commercial success, East Liberty is going to rank near the top across the entire region in terms of sheer population loss over the decade.

Where those folks all went is part of a story we don’t talk about much.  When the Lower Hill District was demolished a half century ago, a big chuck of the population displaced wound up in East Liberty I am pretty sure, shunted into the large project housing that people also thought was a solution.  When that same group found themselves forced out of that housing now mostly demolished, it means we have repeatedly dislocated the same families over multiple generations.  For a city that prides itself on the continuity of its neighborhoods, and the good things that flow from that, it is worth keeping in mind that some folks have experienced the very opposite version of Pittsburgh.

Personally, I don’t know what I would do with East Liberty if I was in a decision-making position. Scorched Earth is a tough thing to deal with. If this were the 80s I would stop any plans to level and rebuild it for the second time. But since the leveling is almost complete and the rebuilding already underway, it’s a tough call for someone to try saying “stop now” — there’s so little left to save except the one-block heritage island on Penn. I would strongly argue that what will be there in 10 years time is qualitatively worse than what was there 10 years ago. I say that as someone who never lived there, but I would ask anyone using this against my reasoning to ask the opinion of those who did live there 10 years ago whether they prefer the place 10 years hence. Lucky for you, they’re hard to find.

I almost want a Hippocratic Oath for developers and city planners. First Do No Harm. Unfortunately, the Broken-Eggs-for-Omelettes philosophy still reigns supreme in that discipline.

A great bit from Wired (via The Vigorous North):

So what can we do? We should change our focus to the other side of the equation and curtail not the texting but the driving. This may sound a bit facetious, but I’m serious. When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?

[...] Texting while driving is, in essence, a wake-up call to America. It illustrates our real, and bigger, predicament: The country is currently better suited to cars than to communication. This is completely bonkers.

Of course, my own perspective on driving has been severely affected by living for many years in San Francisco without a car. I have also grown to rely pretty exclusively on mass transit modes as my method of long-distance travel. This has given me an immense appreciation in those rare instances that I so get behind the wheel of how much I’ve grown to depend on transit time as the time during which I “do stuff”. Stuff that I’m completely incapable of doing when commanding the cockpit of a car.

Of course, I will admit that I walk a lot. And I am guilty of Devicing Whilst Walking (I oppose the term “texting while xxxing” because I don’t really text all that much). But at least when I’m walking, partial inattention to my surroundings is far less likely to result in homicide.

Regarding my personal addendum to the last post: I noted that I feel re-use should be a foremost priority to sustainable urban planning.

This belief is based around the concept that titles this journal: the built environment. I feel that buildings are a part of the environment, not simply an asset class or capital type.

Without getting into philosophical discussions about whether we should rely on a complex society with deep financial markets and massive supplies of energy to permit disembodied real estate speculation, construction conglomerates, and an ad-driven car culture to make economic decisions about our environment (oops!), I’ll stick to this:

Generally, I think zoning and code revision can go a long way in saving our urban fabric. One reason replacement is so often considered more ‘cost effective’ than re-use is that modern building methods and craftsmanship produces a shoddier product using inferior materials and methods. Require better building quality and refurbishment looks more attractive.

Commercial and building codes right now favor greenfield construction because they assume customers will come by car, and they assume that buildings are machines for the use of their occupier, rather than a part of the environment that all citizens have to live with.

If the goal in assessing refurbishment vs replacement of a 150-year-old small-lot commercial brick building is whether to refurbish it and the ten buildings next to it into one unified Super Wal-Mart, the planners are missing the point. The scale between the two uses are incompatible — of course new construction will appear more economical.

If the question is whether to refurbish that building alone for solitary re-use, or replace it with something else that will last 150 years in similar usable form, the verdict would not so universally fall on the side of demolition. And even if it does, we’re in luck, because we’re only demolishing the one building, and if we’re managing our built environment well, the redundancy of quality, small-scale buildings around us will provide continuity and variety for generations.

Rick Cole, courtesy of the Urbanophile:

Sustainable urbanism doesn’t have to carry the weight of the overhead and egos of mega developers, starchitects, and all the myriad fixers — lobbyists, lawyers, flacks, event planners, consultants etc. — that live off their wake. It doesn’t put the public purse at risk on speculative real estate ventures. The public isn’t jolted with yet another over-the-top effort to shock and awe them with ever-larger and more lavish excess. Instead, sustainable urbanism thrives off both the synergy and the competition that comes from appropriately sized and scaled additions to the cityscape.

I would add, “And on making appropriate re-use of existing building stock as far as possible before adding to it.”